YouSaid · the spoken record

John List

lines on the record: 137
first: 2022-01-26
most recent: 2022-01-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We did a deep dive into Uber wages across men and women. What we found is something really surprising. We found that men earned about seven percent more per hour than women as an Uber driver. And that really surprised us because wages aren't negotiable. All men and women have the same rate card. And what a rate card means is you're paid the same time and distance. And women receive more in tips than men receive. So we were really surprised and one reason why is because men strategically reject trips and women accept all trips. So a bad trip on Lyft or Uber, you're right. One type of bad trip is I have to drive a half hour to pick the person up. And then I only... Have a five minute trip.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Facebook, if only five people in the world have Facebook, it's pretty useless, right? It's not very valuable to me, but if every one of my friends and every one of their friends and every one of my family members is on Facebook, there's something called network externalities that is more and more people get it, Facebook becomes even more valuable. So you need to pinpoint, does your idea have these really cool network externalities in this case or at scale the good stuff becomes even better? These are things that I'm asking people to measure and take account of.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Guess what happens? They see tipping, they work more, but the market dynamics because everyone has tipping, they undo the tipping effect. In fact, more drivers are working, but they're driving around with an empty car more often because so many drivers are driving that the extra tip effect is exactly offset. So that's an unattended consequence now when we scaled it up, drivers don't make any more per hour with tipping. They exactly offset it and you didn't see that when only 5% of the drivers had tipping. That's an example of an unintended consequence that caused all the good stuff of tipping to go away. Now, on the other side, sometimes you have good stuff.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing that is invisible. To the entrepreneur, or invisible to the firm is an unintended consequence or what happens after I push my idea out there. Now one example of an unintended consequence is what happened to us at Uber. Remember, summer of 2017 we have this idea that we are going to add tipping to the Uber app. In doing so, we beta test it. What we find is we go to a market and we allow 5% of the drivers to be able to receive tips. Okay, so what happens? They receive tips, they work more, and they make more money per hour. So it looks great. 5% of the drivers have it, their wages go up, and their labor supply goes up. Win-win-win. Now, when you roll tipping out to every driver in that market,”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Free because they're going to come in anyway and your baby just gets that vaccination. So that's kind of a running example that is really useful to know because it checks all the boxes. And as you know, it's scaled with great brilliance.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jonah Sulk case, he's again got that in spades because the polio vaccination has these great externalities. Once you get it, you can't give polio to somebody else. The fifth vital sign is understand the supply side. And what that means is how much is it going to cost you to provide it? With medications, the first feature of a medication is most of our expenditures are up front. And then after you expand a bunch of money on R&D, you have what's called economies of scale to actually make the vaccination or make the pill, it's really, really cheap. But you also need to get into the people's arms. And that's where we're failing now with the COVID vaccinations is it costs a lot of money. Whereas in the sulk case, we've leveraged the healthcare system. So it's”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Any parent is always going to do well by their kid and make sure that they bring their kid to the doctor checkups. So it's not an extra cost and you just naturally get it. So now you've overcome a really hard problem about the situation here. Now, in Chicago Heights, the situation that I have is I hired 30 really good teachers. If I want to scale that thing up, I need to hire 30,000 good teachers. And if I have to do that all in the same input market, say I have to do that all around Chicago Heights, I'm screwed because I can't replicate the quality of the original 30 good teachers. That's what I mean by properties of the situation. The fourth vital sign is understand spillovers or understand unintended consequences.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your wife is healthy, the baby's healthy, and then the doctor is going to give you a playbook. And the playbook is going to say, we're going to give these vaccinations today. You're going to bring your baby back in six months. It's going to get a checkup and some new vaccinations. You're going to bring your baby back in 12 months. Same thing. 18 months, same thing. The polio vaccination occurs during that time period.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think about COVID. COVID vaccinations have worked, but it's really hard to get the shot in people's arms. So like a lot of medications, medication adherence matters and getting people to take the vaccination matters a lot. The medicine's good, according to science. Now, how do you get it in people's arms? That's where this COVID vaccination scheme that we're up to right now has failed. It hasn't been able to deliver. This is where Sulk is brilliant because what Sulk does is he leverages the healthcare system to deliver the vaccination. Okay, now how does he do that? Here's what happens. Tim, you don't have kids yet, but when you have kids, you're going to be in the delivery room. Kids going to come out. Everyone's going to be happy. You're going to make sure.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then he finds that he can replicate that result. So those original results were not a false positive. That's vital sign number one. Does your idea have voltage? So Sulk found that it does. It's not a false positive his initial result. Now what Jonas Sulk does is he tries it out on a lot of different kids. What he finds is it works for every kid. So now he knows that the audience, what I call know your audience or know your slice of the pie, he finds, wow, it works for all kids. That's vital sign number two. Understand how big of a piece of the pie you have or know your audience. And be true to yourself about measuring how big can this market be? Okay. Now, here is where Sulk enters sort of thin ice. And that's understand the situation in which your idea can work.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's talk about one of my favorite scientists, Jonas So Sulk is responsible for the polio vaccination. What sulk does is he first does like a lot of great scientists do, he tries it out on his own kids. He finds it works.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Link problem because it only works as long as each of the features is at a certain level. That's how I want you to think about the Anna K problem. Okay, so now once you determine, does your idea have these five vital signs?”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scaling is identical to that. The way I think about scaling is scalable ideas are all alike. Each unscalable idea is unscalable in its own way. So now you can say, well, what do you mean? And what I found is that there are five major reasons why ideas don't scale. And that's what I call the five vital signs in the book. Your idea is scalable if it doesn't have one of these flaws. You see, so it's a weakest link. When I say weakest link, think about airport security. The airplane is only as secure as the weakest link. Think about your automobile. The automobile will work, but it breaks if you have a flat tire or if a piston isn't firing. That's a weakest link.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can scale. It's like a best shot technology. Scaling is actually a weakest link problem. And what I mean by weakest link is, so go back to Tolstoy. Tolstoy starts Anna Karina, one of the best first lines ever in a novel. Happy families are all alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The typical policymaker argues two things. One, that the result in the petri dish won't scale. And what they really mean by that is that there will be a voltage effect. So what I mean by voltage effect is you have a great result in the petri dish, but when you scale it up, you turn that mountain into a molehill. Okay, so great result in the original research. Scale it up. You get nothing. That's the voltage effect. Okay. Now policymakers will say that truly scalable ideas need to have the silver bullet. Now, they're exactly wrong there. What I found in my research and what I talk about in the book is that the silver bullet is really like if you have this one great characteristic”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can, in a very fast way, find out, did that result in Seattle on green cars, you know, a bunch of people in Seattle love green cars if you're a lift consumer, but they really don't like it that much in Akron, right? So you can quickly find these things out and then you scale where you should scale and you try something new where you shouldn't be scaling. And I think that organizations, whether they're for-profit or nonprofit or governmental, these are unique opportunities that were just scratching the surface. And one of the external benefits, what economists call a positive externality, is that it's going to be a lot easier to replicate. And the firm has a really strong incentive to replicate because they don't want to waste a bunch of money.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anonymity or whether somebody's watching you or whether you have experience in doing something or whether people opt in or out of a market, people in a market tend to be the winners, the ones who you don't observe may have tried and they're gone. They're long gone. So there's selection into markets too. So in the field, you have not only the right people, but you also have the right set of circumstances. And what you're getting to is right, that when you can partner with a government, I work a lot with governments, I work a lot with firms, but when you can get big data quickly at scale,”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of the features of the extra lab world that might matter in decision making are set at different points of the dial in the lab. So the first obvious thing is the world is not filled by rich white kids who are in the lab doing the experiments at the fancy universities, right? The world is filled with truck drivers and all kinds of other people. That's where it starts, but it doesn't end there. Because remember”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tim, you're right. When you think about the credibility crisis or the replication crisis in science, it really goes along the lines of You had a camp of people do lab experiments and a lab experiment is you bring a group of sophomores into a classroom and you have them do a task that they typically don't do. And that's the experimental approach in psychology. And it was the experimental approach before I came into economics. It was largely do things in the lab. And what was difficult there is that if you wanted to generalize those results to the extra lab world”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Created science in the past, but we haven't created it in a way that is meant to scale. What we do is we say, I want to do a great idea in the petri dish. And then after I'm done with it, I move on to the next idea. I don't take seriously from the beginning that if I want to change the world, somebody's going to have to scale this. And I need to understand the features that are important when scaling in the Petri digital. So, all of that came together, and I said, look, we're going to change the world by understanding the science of using science.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Creating the early childhood program, working at Uber and now Lyft, all of these had features of scaling. And then when you come to the realization that you only make big change at scale, you start to say, why don't we have science around scaling? Why is it the case that people write a book that say something like move fast and break things or throw spaghetti at the wall? And if it sticks good or fake it till you make it, you know, you say, where's the science behind that? And there isn't any. My chore back then when I first started saying, I'm going to take scaling seriously is basically I want to do the science of using science.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It always fails to scale. Okay, so then the third part of this trifecta was my wife and I are sitting down the street from the Uber headquarters on Market Street. We're sitting in a cafe. And I'm telling my wife about the Chicago Heights project and how it's so frustrating. I'm telling her about all these people who always ask me, why aren't we making a dent in poverty or discrimination? And then I'm telling her about scaling at Uber. And she says, you know what? For the next part in your career, you should take on scaling. And I said, what the heck? Let's do it. I said, let's do it. And because all of these threads in my life, the White House.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I say, what do you mean silver bullet? What does that exactly mean? I've been doing social science research for 25 years, and I've never heard this argument that my idea won't scale because it doesn't have the silver bullet. And then they say, well, we just don't know about this, but every time an expert tells us they have a great idea.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Coupled with an experience that I had in Chicago Heights. So in Chicago Heights, I started a preschool from scratch with my friends Roland Fryer and Steve Levitt. Steve Levitt's freak economics author, Roland Fryer's famous economist at Harvard. We start a preschool for three, four, and five-year-olds, and it took a lot of shoe leather. And we end up running this for four years, and I'm on the ground day to day to day running it. And I get great results. And then I go to scale it, and I talk to policymakers, and they tell me, John, that's a great little study. It's not going to scale. And I ask them why. And they say it doesn't have the silver bullet.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know we should always, always, always evaluate how we want to spend our time because opportunity cost of time is very expensive. On the one hand, when I go and give lectures, a lot of the audience, especially the younger audience, will ask me a question along the lines of, you know, we've been fighting poverty for decades. We've been doing study after study after study to fight poverty. How come we're not making a dent in it? And you can substitute poverty out for discrimination, public education, what have you. And we haven't really made a deep impact, even though scientists have been working on this for a long time. Now, that”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it wasn't that I was very good, but I did a little theory of mind. I'm sure I got lucky a few times on the flop. Maybe on the river got lucky once or twice, but I ended up kind of retiring there. I was a little bit like Michael Jordan. Let's retire on top. So I got my Australian bracelet. And I haven't really played that much since. I just don't have time to play. It's an interesting game that I think people undervalue skill. I think poker is a lot more skill. Obviously, there's a ton of luck. I get that. But there's a lot more skill than people realize. It's really a great game, especially if you have a long time series of tournaments. The best end up winning. And I certainly wasn't the best. So I kind of retired after that bracelet.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saying, come on, John, we have to go. I end up making the final two. It was an Aussie woman and me. It was kind of an out-of-body experience, but I won the bracelet.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I'm out there, and there's a casino there, and it so happens at the conference is at the casino. So as the keynote speaker, I think it was a Friday night, they were going to take me out to dinner, whine and dying me. That's typically what you do with the keynote speaker. So around one o'clock that afternoon, I said, well, the dinner doesn't start till 8. I'm going to join this poker tournament. And thinking I'm going to be out, I won't make the next table, et cetera. It turns out that I get on this magnificent run. And I make the final table. And by this time, it's eight o'clock. So the conference organizers are standing around.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The whole world series was starting Philmouth was on, Ivy, these guys. And I ended up flying to a To give a keynote in a place called Alice Springs. It's way out in the boondocks of Australia. I don't know if you've ever been there.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a row, and what they'll do is they'll say heads, heads, tails, tails, heads. They'll have nearly exactly five heads and five tails over the ten, and they won't have enough runs. Because sometimes you have tailtail, tale, tale. But when a human mind creates it, they don't do enough runs and they do too close to 50-50. That's just how we're built. So you need an exogenous force to help you with things like that in poker or anything else.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then if you say it's, let's say 10% of the time, you then need to figure out which 10% of the time. Now, humans are terrible at that. Humans are terrible at doing something in a random way. So what I do when I play poker, I use a second hand in a clock to say, well, if I'm going to bluff 10% of the time, then I look at the second hand and say, if it's at a certain point in the clock, I'll bluff. And if it's not, I won't. And then that helps me because it's an exogenous machine that is not susceptible to my own biases. Because when you ask somebody to, for example, create a random sequence of coin flips, you can ask a really smart person to say, create 10 coin flips.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is this strong social norm that they will never tip? So that's called a constraint in a person's world. So I think the first step is to try to figure out what are the primitives of the person's decision making. And after you figure that out, you then say, well, what's my optimal action given that the person operates in this way? A lot of times it would be how much money do they have? Do they have the mental capacity to actually solve the problem that I'm giving them when I play poker? I think poker is a hard game because it's really hard to randomize. So if you're playing against really good players, you need to first of all decide what is the fraction of time that you're going to randomize. And then you need to do it. When I say randomize, I mean, what fraction of hands are you going to bluff?”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I would tell the listener is to start with what an economist calls the primitives of decision making. And what I mean by that is try to figure out what are the preferences of that other person? What are the beliefs of the other person? And what are the constraints of the other person? Because all choice will be governed by these three primitives. So for example, If I know that somebody adheres to the social norm of never-ever tipping, then if I'm trying to do something to get them to tip, if I put myself in their shoes, regardless of what I do, they're never going to tip. So I should not spend a lot of money trying to convince them or induce them to tip because what is governing their tipping behavior?”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get my kid to pay attention on the soccer field? Or how am I going to get my kid to pay attention in second grade math if they're really not interested at all because they're doing math at a seventh grade level? And that's you need to put yourself in the shoes of whether it's your student, your worker, your collaborator, your adversary, whomever. And you need to then backward induct and act in an optimal way. That's theory of mind.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now theory of mind ends up being super important for the abstract part of critical thinking because your next move needs to be in part determined by how you think that person will react. And if you can put yourself in the shoes, whether it's do I lower my price on Uber and how would Lyft respond? Or should I spend more money in ads if I'm United Airlines? How will Southwest respond, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? All of these kinds of examples. Now, theory of mind is how well do you put yourself in the shoes of another person and figure out then what your optimal action should be. Now you see, Tim, when you start having kids, you're going to have to use theory of mind to say, okay, how am I going to?”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really? Yeah, they messed up the Nash equilibrium. The reason why is because at least one of them should have gone for the blonde. So in equilibrium is given everyone else's choices, would I change my choice? And if you won't change your choice, that's in equilibrium. If you would change your choice, then that's not an equilibrium. Remember what happened in the bar scene? They all went for the brunets. Even though they all wanted the blonde. So that was like a definition of not an equilibrium. But anyway, we'll cut Ron Howard a break. Yeah, dude.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, there's a theory in economics called game theory. And game theory was started by really old mathematician who's now unfortunately dead named John Nash.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How you use data and how you gather data to make logical decisions, a lot of times people make fundamental errors when generating data. For example, if I really think Uber is a great idea early on, every data point that I get back that says it's a bad idea, I put on the sidelines. And every data point that comes to me that it's a great idea, I say that data is right. That's called confirmation bias. And it's one of the most important impediments to figuring out if your idea is good or not. Okay, so we have biases in how we generate, accumulate, and interpret data. That's one kind of critical thinking. The other kind of critical thinking is more abstract. And this is where theory of mind comes in. So theory of mind means how well do you put yourself in the shoes?”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Critical thinking is a bit like creativity. You know it when you see it. It's very hard to define what critical thinking means. Now, in my work, I've written a recent academic paper on critical thinking. I view it sort of in two camps. One camp is”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they're about maximizing their own incomes. So what happened to all this generosity and all of this social preference, I'm being nice to other people The market and the competition and the anonymity that I'm doing this and if nobody can detect me, I'm going to actually do it. So then I added a twist to that paper. What I did is I had them act in the marketplace and they did not know that they're part of an experiment. But now what they sell can be graded by a professional certifier. And there you find that they start to be nice again. So what's happening is that they care about their reputations. And whenever you can check them on their reputation, they're nice. Why? Because they care about the long run and they want repeat business. But when you can't check them on their reputation or you can't check the quality of the goods they sell, they outright screw people over.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they all were exactly like the literature in economics said they should be. They're all Homo would be nice to everyone rather than Homo economicus, right? So then what I did is I observed those same people In the marketplace, when they didn't know they were being observed, doing the exact same thing that I had them do in the experiment, guess what they do now? Totally screw the other guy over”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of research on something called social preferences. And what that means is we want to measure how much people care for other people. Okay, so clearly they do. Clearly giving to charitable causes is two and a half percent of GDP in America. So clearly people are giving to others. But the types of estimates that these studies were showing is that you'll give up half of your wealth to some anonymous stranger. And I started to wonder how far can you push these lab results if you go to a market where people are buying, selling and trading for their livelihood. So what I did was I set up an experiment where everyone in the experiment knew that they were taking part. In an experiment. Guess what happened? They all were really nice”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To buy, sell, and trade things like Hank Erin, Barry Bonds, or Ken Griffey Jr., whatever, baseball cards. And what I noticed was everything that was happening in that convention was not always in accord with economic theory. And I thought that what I was learning in the classroom could actually be tested at these baseball card conventions. So I started to do it in the early 90s. That's one of the very early work in economics that uses the world as the lab. And it's exploring things like why do people trade? Why don't people trade? Why do people negotiate the way they do? Why do dealers give women higher price offers than men? You know, discrimination, gender pay gap, etc., etc. So Along comes the early 2000s. And what I notice in economics is that there is an explosion.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the paper you bring up is actually near and dear to my heart because. You know, one reason why I got involved in economics to start was back in the day in the late 80s, I was a baseball card dealer. So what that meant was I went to the base.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, you're right, and I think that TK really got, and Logan Green does too, and John Zimmer now at Left, you know, we have great papers coming out of there too, but they totally get that we're not only here to change the face of transportation, but we also have another gem called big data and a lot of information that we can use and we can leverage to help some of societal's problems be attenuated. And that's the great thing I think about firms and corporations and organizations today when they're willing to do that, even though it's not in their financial best interest to do so.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we find is we can undo a lot of the bad stuff of the bad trips, but nearly every time you need that cash coupon. Words just don't matter, but a little bit of cash with the apology ends up undoing about a third of the bad stuff. So now we're talking tens of millions of dollars. And true to his word, TK could have said, look, that's a great trade secret. We don't want anyone else, including Lyft, to know about that. But TK let us write that up as a scientific paper. And now it's in an academic journal and we can all learn from it about the economics of apologies.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Revenue happened because of bad trips. Okay, so now I showed that bad trips cost Uber hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, what are you going to do about it? That's where the science comes in. So we ended up developing a scheme where we did various apologies within an hour of when a person had a bad trip. It's like one apology could be simply a basic apology in an email. Tim, we're sorry about your bad trip. We know we should be doing better. Please accept our apology. That's one treatment. But another treatment is the exact same apology with a $5 coupon that please take this $5 coupon for your next trip.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How much business does Uber lose from bad trips? Now here you don't want to do an experiment because I don't want to just give people bad trips on purpose. What I have to do is I need to find, for example, Tim, and then I need to find Tim's statistical twin in the data. And I need to find when Tim gets a bad trip, but at the exact same time and over the same route, when his statistical twin gets a good trip. And then I can look at in the future, say for the next 90 days, does Tim who got a bad trip spend less money than Tim's statistical twin? What happens is you do. In fact, millions and millions and millions of lost revenues.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Love So I said, you know what, TK, the worst part about the story is that I never received an apology. And he says, Well, John. Haven't gotten to that yet, and I said we have now. So what my team did is we explored in big, big data sets.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm like, no, what the blank is going on here? And the driver said, well, the app blinked. And Professor, you were so busy working. I didn't want to disturb you. I thought that you changed the destination because you forgot something at home. I said, no, take me back down to the conference. So, okay, so I get there. I run in. Everything turns out fine. That evening when I got home, I ended up walking out to our garage. That's separated from my home and my wife always knows when I go out to the garage, it means somebody's going to have hell to be paid. I call TK. And I say, hey, TK, let me tell you about what I think of your blankety blank app. And guess what, TK? I will never take an Uber again. I am just going to simply take a Lyft. I said, TK, you can call your chief economist a Lyft loyalist.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT