YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Thaler

lines on the record: 119
first: 2025-10-10
most recent: 2025-10-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“He's still at it. And so that's a fantastic place to learn about economics. It's four times a year. Typically there's a symposium on some topic. And it's a resource nobody knows about and is fantastic. Yeah, I mentioned Michael Lewis's book, The Undoing Project, and it's a great insight into Kanaman and Taversky. I think I'm not going to mention any other books because whichever one I mention, I will piss off 12 other people. So I'm good. I'll keep the friends I have.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, one thing I mentioned in passing, so for the students and just the general, I mentioned this journal, the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Most academic journals you can't get, that one is posted online. Anybody can read it. And if you're modestly interested in economics, it's a fantastic journal. There's a guy called Timothy Taylor who they hired brilliantly. call him the managing editor. I call him the writing editor. And he quickly adopted the strategy of taking your article and then just rewriting it. And he would say, you know, it's like in Microsoft Word with track changes, but the version you would get is the one his version. And you could restore, but we know status quo bias works.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So it's a. Essentially a little book tour, but no point in going to bookstores. I'd rather have three hundred young students minds to corrupt.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think Tried very hard to write it in a way it's not a thriller and it's not a self help book, but I don't think it's as hard as thinking fast and slow, which was Tough, I mean, it's a great but dense. And this book is much funnier than that. I think corrupting the youth is always on my mind. So I'm giving a series of talks at universities. So I have a trip next week, Cornell Penn, and Princeton. So your alma mater, I'll be there in Green Hall. I like interacting with the young people. I officially went Emeritus July 1. So I'm not teaching, but I still, you know, I divide my time between Chicago and Berkeley. I still like Going to workshops and interacting with my colleagues and having them sharpen me.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way we wrote it is, yeah, takeaway for humans and for economists. We don't say whether we think economists are not humans, but”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and you know, I think I took on this possibly wacky. To ask Rewriting a book I published in 1992 about those anomalies columns and part of that was there's something in psychology called the replication crisis that there are some experiments that just don't replicate and there are some people that have been proven just to have made stuff up and I wanted to see whether the stuff we had built everything on could stand scrutiny so I corrupted a young colleague of mine Alex Emis who just turned 40 and we took some of those old things two pieces I wrote with Danny and one with Amos and then some others and then gave it the hard look does this hold up Two out of sample. Is it true in the real world? And that's what keeps you thinking.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it's not like he was worried about no longer being the smartest guy in the room as much as he thought that he might be slipping and then who would, I mean, my intervention and my attempt at an intervention was to create a group of people he loved and trusted to say, all right When certain steps are there, we buy you the ticket, but he wanted to be the one who got to decide when that was going to be. And that was with all his facilities. And so that was it.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He wanted to be able to decide when he was going to do it, and his argument was, yes, he realizes that. It's premature, but it would be premature. Whenever he decided to do it, And so he's going to do it now. And I will say, like the last month of his life might have been his happiest. So maybe he got it exactly right. Went to Paris for two weeks with his partner and then his Israeli family, his daughter, lives in Tel Aviv. And she and her family came and spent a week with him in Paris, which is where he grew up as a kid. Then he went off to Switzerland. So I'm a greedy man. I would have liked a few mores, but I had 45 years, so that's pretty lucky.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, then a year later there was an article in The Wall Street Journal, I think writer shouldn't have included the letter he sent, the email he sent to friends. But anyway, I mean, Danny had great 90 years and he was great up until the end. And I would have liked a few more, but I respected the right to him to end the way I kept sending in emails saying, you know, tell me how the chocolates are in Switzerland. Didn't reply.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So no arguing, but we went out to dinner together. He did think the wine was good, but wasn't going to change his mind. And then the next day we spent just figuring out how to manage the next month or so. And our goal was that the obits weren't about the way he died.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or so arguing and I thought I was winning. And he said, okay, you're getting annoying. So I flew to New York. I was in California. I flew to New York, took him out for a good dinner, bought him a bottle of wine 1998 la Moulin that I thought this is worth living for. So that was my attempt. wasn't allowed to try and argue with him anymore.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He had been a friend and mentor. He was my best friend for. Yeah, he calls me one day and says, ah, that's it. And he had just turned 90. And, you know, one of his findings was that our memory of an experience is determined by two factors, the peak and the end. So you go to one of those meals at a three-star restaurant. What was the best thing? That's the peak. And how was it at the end? I think those restaurants don't get the end part right because they give you too much food. But anyway, Danny was concerned. He took this part seriously and he was mostly, he didn't want to lose control. At 90, I can tell you, he was still the smartest guy I knew. He had lost nothing. So we spent a week.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was the big idea from Kahneman and Tversky. And by the way, everybody knows Michael Lewis and Moneyball and many of his other books, like the Big Short, My Favorite Movie, people don't realize I have a cameo in that movie. It's not the one with Margot Ruby, but an amazing book, Michael wrote, was about condemnment diversky called The Undoing Project. And I kept telling him, you can't write a book about two psychologists talking to each other, but he's an amazing writer and it's an amazing story. Those two people who are two of the greatest 20th century scientists, I recommend that book. It's an easy read.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That yeah, and the systematic bias is like back to the availability we were talking about, right? So the fact that I can ask you a question or homicides Or suicides, which is more common, I can predict that. And that's a mistake. And it's not a random error. So it's not that people are dumb. You know, I don't really think people are dumb. I think the world is hard. But people deal with this hard world using shortcuts and so forth. And the shortcuts are useful. But not perfect, and they lead to predictable mistakes, like the sunk cost fallacy. The more you paid for the play you were going to go to, the The less willing you are to skip it, no matter how good the alternative is, a friend you haven't seen for twenty years calls and says, My flight got canceled, I'm in Chicago tonight for dinner.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then. It's like Amos is having him walk the ledge. And then pulls it out and says, so let me see if I can understand this. So basically, everybody you know you think is dumb. But the people in your models are all brilliant.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And certainly their students and their spouse and their dean And the president of the university and actually here, there's a funny story about Amos. Amos and I are at this conference. And there's an economist. At dinner, and he starts going into this rant about Amos had set him off and said, How's your wife's decision making? And the guy starts telling stories. And then Amos asks him about... The president of the university and the president at the time, I don't remember who it was. And we're getting like this half hour long. Rant about”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you give economists like a half a glass of wine, they'll admit even traditional economists that most of the people they know are idiots.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the early work was done jointly with Im Stversky. And I mean, they are the reason why you're talking to me. I had that list of weird behavior And I didn't know what to do with it. And then I went to a conference and one of their students, this is back in the 70s, one of their students was telling me about the work they were doing. And I went back home and read a bunch of their papers, which you had to do by going to the library and finding the psychology section in the library, which I had never been to. a big light bulb went on. And the light bulb was that it's the phrase systematic bias. So let me explain. To an economist, if people make a mistake, that's no big deal. Because fine, they'll admit, and in fact,”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it seems like so obvious. So they have this idea of availability. That you're going to think something is more likely if examples of it come to mind. So ask people, what's the ratio of homicides to suicides? And they think like two or three to one. Turns out there are twice as many suicides as homicides. But suicides are quiet. And I'm betting. You know more than one person, either directly or in your community who is a suicide victim and the chances are you don't know any homicide victims but nevertheless you might give that same answer and the obvious reason is that we read about homicides all the time and suicides are kind of quiet so the thing is their papers look too easy”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is the case that if the article is Too easy. We've mentioned my friends Connorman and Tversky were writing the psychology articles that inspired me a lot of people would look at those articles and say, you know, what's the big deal?”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, yes, you know, now there is something you can count, which is citations. Citation is if somebody else writes an article and cites your article, those are counted. And actually publications in this journal get a lot of citations because people read them because they're readable.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's kind of an old man thing to do to write stuff like that. And there was a colleague of mine at Cornell who I overheard telling somebody about this journal. Well, I don't know whether articles in that journal should count. And I'm thinking, where are they counting? Yeah, what are they counting?”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, a macroeconomics paper was not understandable to a labor economist or a finance professor. So they started this journal, and the idea was the articles would be written in a way that would be accessible to any economist or grad student or even advanced undergrad. My friend Halvarian, who was the chief economist at Google, he was an editor at this journal. And he and I were having lunch one day, and we got the idea They were going to have some regular features. And the idea was I would write a column in this journal on anomalies. So these were pokes. There was one on the endowment effect that we've talked about that buying and selling prices are different. There was one about the fact that stocks that have gone down a lot do better than ones that have gone up. A lot. So I started writing this when I was about 40”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alums in the best economics departments around the world, they're editing journals now. The new chairman of the Berkeley Economics Department was one of those. And I think it's still the truth that people my age, they never got convinced. And it's the 30 and 40 year olds. The other thing I did was... It was a new journal called the Journal of Economic Perspectives. And it tells you something about economics that this journal had to be created. Journal articles had gotten so arcane and technical that the papers were not understandable unless you were in the subfield.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they wanted to support behavioral economics when we were just getting started. And they gave us some money. And they said, you can do whatever you want with it. And what we decided to do is start a two-week summer camp. That's not the official name, but everybody refers to it as the summer camp. So it's two weeks. We got 30 grad students from around the world. Best students in the best departments. teach them about behavioral economics. There are graduates from that graduates. I mean, attendees”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always say that I never changed anybody's mind. What I was saying was heresy. It was the emperor who has no clothes. I'm thinking, you know, look, see that mole on his belly? You know, you can't see that. And you're talking about the three-piece suit, but sarcasm doesn't really convince people. So the strategy I adopted at some point, I mean, I had to write some papers, but the strategy I adopted to broaden the field I always say instead of changing people's minds, I would corrupt the youth. So one example of that is there's a foundation in New York called the Russell Sage Foundation.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, I was good at math, but not as good in math as the people who go to get PhDs in economics. And I was better at. Noticing the problems with economics Then you can think about it as you could be somebody who can draw perfectly. Or you can be somebody who thinks of a different way of drawing. And I was more that guy. So the only way I managed to succeed, even get a job as an economist and get tenure, much less get a Nobel Prize, which was certainly never on my radar when I was a young person, was to think of a different way of doing economics. And I more or less had to invent behavioral economics. To have a career. Otherwise, I would have done something else.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was not the best grad student in my class, and I wasn't in the best department. I mean, actually, I wasn't a great student in any way, but I certainly knew I was not the best grad student in my class.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and, you know, the mix of data scientists and some of them got their training in economics department. So exactly what they're training is, but there are people with the equivalent of PhDs in economics or computer science working at all these companies.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So that I think you're right that there's it's much easier to run experiments now. And of course companies are running these experiments every minute. The largest economics department in the world is now at Amazon. 100 PhDs in economics working at Amazon.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's kind of one of the lessons in this new book is all the stuff that we found in thought experiments and laboratories now because of big data, you can find in the real world. And like this paper, they had data from millions of shoppers at a large box chain store. And so they could show, not only are they upgrading the gas, which is stupid, but they're not upgrading the orange juice.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always say that's always my mental account. We would always do it anyway. Better olive oil. You know, instead of the store brand, so the bigger picture is”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No matter what the gasoline companies are telling you, more expensive gas isn't better for 90% of cars. But what they found was when the price went down, they would buy more expensive gas. Now, you know, you and I would say, if we're going to do some mental accounting with that, we say, all right. We could upgrade the wine”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's for gas. So they go, let's say they spend a hundred bucks a week at the gas tank. And now it's 50 bucks. So what do they do? Well, they start treating their car to occasional tanks of high test. Now that's really stupid. You know, your Prius, it's not going to do any better with premium gas. You know, it's made to run on regular.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can go from the lab and now to the field. So we were talking about mental accounting. Here's a funny mental accounting result. During the financial crisis, the price of gasoline fell. Like by 50%. So, what do people do? Now, remember, it's a financial crisis, right? So, people are tight for cash, but their gasoline budget. Is overflowing so.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the big thing, as you know, I took on a task kind of a weird task of taking a book I wrote in 1992 and taking on a young co-author and going back and saying, did we make all that up? How does it hold up? How does it hold up? And it holds up. And the kind of encouraging thing is.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You get to hear the next chapter. And it's like if you're binging, imagine to watch the next episode first, you have to run around the block. Temptation bundling, that's what you call it. That's it.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's pain. It's a little bit of pain. I have some young colleagues who wrote a paper called Paying Not to Go to the Gym. So yes, I do pilates. And if I make an appointment with my trainer, then I go. So there's a clever experiment by a young colleague of mine called Katie Milkman, who's big in this behavior change space. She ran an experiment with getting people to go to the gym where what she did was she gave them the hunger games audiobook. And they could only listen to it when they were on the treadmill. The idea is you pair something good with something that you don't want to do. So if you go, then you...”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Text me back and says LOL, this is just like in your book. If you send me a thousand dollars, I'm not going to spend it on baseball tickets. So just last week, I learned my lesson where David Byrne fans in my family. And David Byrne had a show in Providence where she was playing. I sent her the tickets. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No choice. They were free.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tell you a funny story my daughter lives in Rhode Island. There was a guy, a kid in the neighborhood, grew up to be a pitcher for the Mets. And he was pitching in some first round playoff game. And I noticed that. And I said, I think I can get you tickets to this game. Once you go, that'd be fun. She said, oh, that's great. That's great. So I'd look online at one of these ticket sites and tickets. This was first round. It wasn't that expensive, so three four hundred dollars. But then I wasn't sure which ones you would want and how to get them to her. So I say, okay, here's what I'll send you $1,000. You pick which tickets you want and take the rest to buy hot dogs. So she texted me. Now she has a choice.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And again, every economist teaches that. And this is the sort of discussion I used to have in the old days. I said, look, why do you have to teach people the sunk cost fallacy and then assume they already know it? You know, people would say, what do you mean? I can't waste that.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes. And now, you know, part of mental accounting, probably the biggest mental accounting thing is the so-called sunk cost fallacy. And the idea is if you paid for something, so we go out to dinner and we've bought some dessert and we realize, you know, God, we're really full. And neither of us need to weigh more. We'll just say that. We paid $30 for that dessert. Gotta eat it. We got to eat it, right? That's dumb.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, right? I mean, no, it can be helpful. So putting money into a children's education account That can be smart, and treating that as off limits. Some people have trouble spending too much. Most people have that problem. Some have the opposite problem. And so it's just like we were talking about you want to hide the booze and put the exercise equipment somewhere where it'll be easy to use. It's the same with the money. So you can have a fiction that that money”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would be like if you're in your restaurant, you have, well, I'm sure there was a beverage manager and that money is the same as the same money as all the other.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He ain't going away, yes. Now, of course, owns what does that mean? It's not that the money goes to him. He's the baggage guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I got to know the CEO of an airline. I won't mention which one. And I was trying to convince them before COVID that they should get rid of change fees. And I think I was also lobbying for getting baggage fees. And he told me, well, you know, there's a guy, they have a billion dollars a year in baggage fees. There's a guy who owns that.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So again, the standard theory is money has no labels. Now here's a kind of a policy version of this question. In the financial crisis, the Obama White House had to, there was going to be some tax refund to stimulate the economy. And the question was, should we give it in a lump Or should we spread it out? Now, the economists will say, does it matter? It's W. That's it, right?”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In economic theory, there's money. And it has no labels. There's just, you have wealth W, and then you figure out, and you just, it doesn't matter where it is or how you got it, or that's it. Now, humans Think about money as sort of coming in categories. And where You know, let's suppose. You take out a pair of jeans you haven't worn in a long time and you find $300 bills in there. You don't know exactly when you left them there. Oh, that feels like a windfall.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. There are examples of that. And again, you know, when I came from Cornell to Chicago, I came and gave a job talk, it's called, an interview, and you present a paper, and they were taking me to lunch. And we walk out the door, and there's literally a $20 bill lying on the, people think I'm making up the story because it's sort of an apocryphal economic story that economists look at that. It can't be real because otherwise somebody would have already picked it up. I picked it up. So economists, economics really, they think there aren't these $20 bills on the street. And they kind of are.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right. So if you look at a plot of three-point attempts over time, it's been going up. But very slowly. So I'm friends with Darryl Moray, who's the general manager of the 76ers. I always tease him that he got to be rich and famous because he was the first guy to calculate that 0.4 times 3 was greater than 0.5 times two. He's actually a really smart guy, but that's kind of true.”
2025-10-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #830: Nick Kokonas and Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Laureate — Realistic Economics, Avoiding The Winner’s Curse, Using Temptation Bundling, and Going Against the Establishment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT