YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert Frank

lines on the record: 89
first: 2016-05-13
most recent: 2016-05-13
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

“Have credentials all in line even to get into a good school now. It wasn't so much true when I was. But I think finding something that you like and you can get lost in would be the same advice I'd give to somebody almost at any age. So if you're a parent and you've got kids, kids don't like everything that they do And their reactions to the various activities that you urge them to try are instructive. So pay attention. Do they love something? Open some doors and see if you can get them more deeply involved in that thing that they love.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, most people, as I say in the book, tend to overlook the role of luck in their lives That hasn't been true of me, not so much because I think I'm more observant or perspicacious than the typical person. I think Luck has had a much more obvious Effect in my life. I would not advise anybody to organize his life the way I've done. I think I've stumbled into. A career that's been in so many ways just the right career for myself. I think. If you're more systematic about it, and today I probably wouldn't have succeeded. I think the doors start closing at younger ages now. You have to be.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exact advice, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's second in command. Said that if you want to get what you want, a good strategy is to try to deserve what you want. Makes sense. And getting really good at something, that's how you're most likely to get what you want.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be an organic process. And if you want to be a success, I think becoming developing deep expertise at something is the root to take in today's climate. We were talking about win or take all markets. Being the third best person that something isn't going to do much for you if you're the best at something though, even if it's something that not that many people care about, there's often a lucrative niche for you. At the very least, you're going to be doing something you like.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tell people to try to think of a time when they felt completely immersed in some activity, that the hours went by without them being conscious of time flying by at all. To try and find a career where you would be doing that activity much of the time. If you can find something that you can engage with at that level. You will become an expert at it because you'll care so much about it. It won't seem like you're working hard to become an expert.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody thinks it's giant. It's no big deal when you see it. At least that was my reaction. And his too. And so he saw that there were two. Leonardo canvases in the very next gallery nobody seemed to be crowding around to look at them, but there were 300 people elbowing one other side to see the Mona Lisa. And so he did a little digging and he found that until 1911, nobody cared about the Mona Lisa. Then it got stolen, took two years for them to resolve the crime. They arrested the Italian custodian who stole it. Then again, the painting splashed across the newspapers all around the world, first time that had ever happened. And so now it's a symbol of Western culture. Qu”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a fabulous book. Is the Mona Lisa famous because it's a great painting? No, says Duncan, he says it's famous because it's famous.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you liked Tom Gilovich's book, it's sort of aimed at that same slice of the market for the intelligent, curious person. I mentioned Duncan Watts' book.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tom Shelling's book, which I didn't mention the title of, is Micromotives and Macro Behavior. An absolutely wonderful book. If you liked Grow.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right about what you know. That's what they tell authors. And I tell people I'm probably the luckiest person they know. Maybe that's not true. I'm certainly one of the luckiest.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're without oxygen, that causes damage, lots of problems for you. And for some reason, I escaped all that. And the reason had to have been that the ambulance came as quickly as it did, but that was the mystery. How did an ambulance come so fast when we were six miles out of town and the ambulances are dispatched away from the other side of Ithaca? And what I learned was that there had been two auto accidents close to the tennis center that had occurred before I collapsed. Two ambulances are well on their way to those accidents. One of them, the injuries aren't serious, so when the call comes to that one, they say divert to the tennis center, we got something more important for you, and they were there. And except for that, I'm a dead man.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I died on the tennis court 98% of the people who don't get immediate attention never revive. The 2%, the 2% who do make it, you don't want to see them.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he got a cough out of me after what seemed like forever. But then I went dead again, and he was about to give up hope when in through the doors of the tennis facility comes an EMT team. They cut my shirt off, they put the paddles on me. Rushed me to the hospital. They put me on a helicopter and fly me to a bigger hospital in Pennsylvania. They put me on ice overnight. Three days later I'm beginning to come out of the fog and I'm told by the medical people in Pennsylvania that I suffered sudden cardiac death.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He said one of his Israeli graduate students who'd been in the military had told him once that if he don't break the victim's breastbone, you weren't trying hard enough. So he, no, he didn't break my breastbone, I don't think. They never told me if he did.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You mentioned this. We were playing tennis one Saturday morning in the second set. We were seated on the bench during a changeover. He tells me this. I don't have any recollection of him. He says the next thing he knows I'm lying motionless on the court, no breath, no pulse He kneels to investigate, realizes this looks not quite right, and he yells out for somebody to call 911, and then he flips me over onto my back and starts pounding on my chest. You know, you've seen that many times in movies, so have I, so had he. He'd never been trained to do it. Just started passing.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Tom Gilovich is, in fact, a very close friend. We've been collaborators for decades. He saved my life once. Oh, really? Literally. Literally. Yeah. No, he and I play tennis regularly.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, which was so far in a way a better outcome for me professionally than what would have happened, which I also know a little bit about, I would have had a very different life. Quite fascinating. Except for that string of quite fortunate events.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, then there was a quick extension of the econometrica paper that I thought to write. I sent it out. It got accepted quickly. I wrote three more papers the next summer. I sent them out for review. They got accepted in quick succession by three of the top journals in economics. That never happens. All my other papers since then have gotten rejected at least once.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An edited volume, which hardly anyone reads and isn't really a good career move, but yeah, I was incredibly lucky to get that paper accepted. And I had a string of papers that got accepted in quick succession with almost no delay. That's never happened to me since then. The later papers I've written, I'm sure we're at least as good as those early ones. But if I'd had the usual editorial delays even with them, I would have been fired the next opportunity.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wrote the paper, I was pretty pleased about it. I gave it to him, and then a day or two later he came to my office with a hangdog expression saying that the sponsor of the volume that the paper was to have appeared in had called him to say the volume had been canceled. It seemed like bad luck to me. I sent the paper out to a very selective journal just on LARC and it got accepted for publication, which was for me a way better outcome. A little bit of Lark too than if it had gone into a”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, he came as a visitor my fourth year when I was at Cornell. I'd written very little. I had various variables. Issues had sort of kept me from putting as much time and energy into my writing. So I was, you know, today they would fire somebody like me in year three. Then they kept me on just because I was a good teacher in a big class. It was hard to staff, but they would have fired me at next opportunity, I'm quite sure. But Ned took an interest in my work, we became friends, he offered to publish a paper, if I would write it for a volume he was editing, and nobody else had shown any interest in what I was doing up until then, so I happily agreed.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their shared interest is to figure out the most efficient way of resolving their conflict, and that sometimes leads to very counterintuitive conclusions about what ought to be done.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was also a Nobel laureate and wrote very little, actually, just a handful of articles, but one, I think, is the most widely quoted and cited article of all time in economics, the problem of social cost. And it's a way of thinking more clearly about What happens when somebody does something that has either negative or positive spillover effects on others? You make noise, it disturbs the neighbors, you drive a heavy car, you put others at greater risk of injury and death. It used to be that people thought about those kinds of issues in terms of perpetrators and victims. good guys and bad guys and his insight was that no these are people whose interests both legitimate are just in conflict with one another and”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that the two economists who have shaped my thinking personally the most by wide margin even one would be Tom Schelling. A Nobel laureate in nineteen eighty six, a longtime Harvard public policy school professor. I think he, more than anyone. Had written clearly about Why, what it makes sense for us individually to do may not make sense for us to do when we think about it from the perspective of the groups we belong to. So, all standing to get a better view. No one sees better than if everybody remain comfortably seated. That's kind of a trivial example of that sort. But that's been a big theme in my own thinking about. Behavior and social organization. The other economist who's had the most influence on me is Ronald Coase. Also, no, he was University of Chicago. Okay.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I wrote him back and I said, well, I agree, just telling them that they're lucky will. But there's an interesting twist if you'll ask a successful person, can you think of any examples of breaks you've enjoyed along the way? That completely disarms the anger and the defensiveness people seem to immediately light up. They think about what their past, if they think of an example of a break they had, they want to tell you about it right away. The more examples they can think of, the happier they seem to get. It's just a complete jiu-jitsu maneuver. It has a dramatically different effect on how they react to the idea that luck may have mattered in their lives. And so I wrote that up into a piece. With the title I like best of any piece I ever wrote, the title is Ask, Don't Tell. Ask people. Ask people about their lucky.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He had seen a piece that was excerpted from my book on Vox, Vox.com. And he was quick to identify all the lucky things that had benefited him in his life. But he was skeptical about my claim that telling rich people they'd been lucky would make them more willing to pay taxes. The claim in the book is that if you're more cognizant of having been lucky, then you are more generous for the next generation.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's interesting how you get people to think about the role of luck in their lives. And there was an article on Mother Jones by Kevin Drummond last week.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, if the small house gets small enough, they'll flip. But yeah, within a reasonable range, I think people. Judge correctly that they're probably going to be happier about their house if it's not a relatively inferior one in their local context.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into pockets that will result in spending that just bids up the context. Why would an executive be happier in a world where everyone had a 50,000 square foot mansion in that circle than in a world where the mansions were only 40,000 square feet?”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and collectively, we have some say over what the context is. Meaning, it's not in our interest to keep throwing tax cuts.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next 10th of a second. Yeah, once you're up to the Porsche 9 11, that's $150,000 car. You've got virtually every design feature that affects performance in any significant way. So if the Ferrari Berlinetta is a better car, some people will argue that it isn't, but if it is, it's at most just a hair's breadth better. And so you're not getting much in absolute terms. On a planet where the Porsche were the best car and we could hook into driver's brains how happy are they about their car, they'd be just as happy as the drivers on the other world where the Ferrari were the best car. And so it's the subjective sense that you're driving something special that people are really willing to pay for. If your car would get to 60 miles an hour in 1920, it would seem fast to you. Eventually if it got that.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, context, shapes our evaluations. You know, I lived in a two room house with no plumbing or electricity the two years I was a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Nepal. Not for one minute did that house seem in any way unsatisfactory but neither you nor I could live in that house here in the US without feeling ashamed of our circumstances your kids wouldn't want their friends to know where you lived so so context is clearly important as a as a for making evaluations How am I doing? You can't answer the question without a frame of reference. How am I doing relative to what? Relative to people like me here and now. How am I doing?”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They know it's called out. It's a stupid question. But if you ask somebody in, I don't know, Helsinki on a 60 degree day in March, they'll think you're stupid for asking. But the answer is the opposite. Still it's not cold out.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know we're creatures of our inheritance. Is it cold out? Well, if you ask somebody that in Miami where I grew up on a 60 degree day in November, then they're not.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Taxes should be voluntary like they are in Somalia. Do you want to move there? Nobody seems to be queuing up to move there. So if you don't have mandatory taxes, then you don't have a government. You don't have an army. You get invaded by some other country that has an army. Then you pay mandatory taxes to them. So the interesting questions are what should we tax? How much should we tax it? All those things are ripe for discussion, but we don't seem to have any ability to discuss something that has the word tax in it.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You hear people say without any self consciousness that taxation is theft and the presumption there seems to be, I earned it, it should be mine to keep. Every country in the world has mandatory taxation. What's the position here?”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, Barry, I have yet to meet anyone who says, oh, no, that's not right. I'd rather drive a Ferrari on roads riddled with foot deep potholes. Nobody says that”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a familiar point. No one hears about examples like that and say, oh, that's not the way the world is. Everybody knows that's the way the world works. So it's interesting that people resist the notion that framing effects and context matters as much as it does.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“76,000 in Manhattan, and it was 10,000 back in 1980. Why have they gone up so much? Because other people are spending more. And why is that? Because people at the top are spending more, and it trickles down, but they're not bad people. They just want to have a special occasion, and special is relative. If you spend way less than everybody else spends, then it seems like a kind of a two-bit wedding.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I'm not going to say he bought it, but he seemed willing to think about it. But if someone were willing to think about it, it's uncontroversial. The things that we care about are defined very heavily in relative terms. Everybody wants to have a special occasion for his daughter's wedding. What's special? It's a purely relative concept. People today are spending $30,000 on weddings on average in New York at 76,000.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a conversation with a colleague. He was afraid about the new taxes that were coming. I said, look, don't worry about them. People like us, it doesn't matter. He has a successful textbook. He's not going to spend everything he earns. I don't spend everything I earn. We have everything we need, right? What's at issue? Will we still be able to get... What we want if taxes go up, did yeah, that's what he was worried about. Well, what do people like us want? We've got everything we need. We want something special and you want to be able to have a special celebration when your daughter gets married. You want to have a house with a sweeping view of the lake, a choice slip at the marina, whatever it might be. There aren't enough of those things. You have to bid against other people like us to get them.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the Points I try to make in the book is that we haven't been investing for the future. The kids who are growing up today without a lot of money in their families or having a hard time getting through school, they're handicapped from a very early age in terms of the training they get. It would cost money to do something about that. But the point I try to make in the book is that those of us who have done well could easily supply the resources we need to do something about that without making any sacrifices that would be painful at all.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. What we should believe if we want to be effective psychologically confronting the world may not be a very accurate description of how the world works.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He continues building a successful society requires an equally deep conviction that no one's destiny is their own to write, balancing these seemingly contradictory ideas may be the most important social challenge of our time, and then he goes on to say nice things about the book.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the themes in the book is that false belief sometimes are adaptive for you. So when you're thinking about, is luck important in your life? Let me read Duncan Watts' blurb that he's a very distinguished sociologist. If your listeners don't know him, run out and buy his book. Everything is obvious once you know the answer. It's a terrific, terrific, informative book. He writes, building a successful life requires a deep conviction that you are the author of your own destiny. That's absolutely right, by the way. I think if you think, oh, I'm a cork in the river, woe is me, you're not going to attack your life in a very effective way.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, there's never a strategy that works well all the time. But with the bad luck side of that, if you attribute your failures to bad luck, then... You'll try something, you'll fail at it. Oh, I was unlucky. Then another opportunity comes along, and bad luck is not a persistent trait. You'll say, oh, So the person who has that asymmetric view about good luck and bad luck may actually do better over time than the person who's more realistic in his beliefs.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you could steer people to the studies that show that there's that asymmetry. I suspect few people would want to read them. And there's actually kind of a perverse adaptive quality to the asymmetry. So, for example, if you believe that when you succeed, it's because of your skill, not your luck. Then the next opportunity that comes along, you'll say to yourself, well, skill is a persistent trait. I had skill before I succeeded. There's no reason not to explore this opportunity. So that's good. You're more likely to take the action that would lead to success.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Speaker's Bureau requires a hefty non refundable fee up front deposit. And the Speaker's Bureau refused to refund the fee to the client even after it became clear that they hadn't meant to engage me. They said, well, he's willing to talk to you. prepared to send him. So I got a fat check for doing nothing that time”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably the best story in connection with people mistaking us for each other is an email I got from a friend in Houston. He had seen an announcement for a conference catering to high net worth individuals. And there was in the brochure for the conference a picture of me Picture just of me. I was going to be talking about high net worth strategies or this and that. That's not something he thought I would be likely to be doing. So he wrote back and asked me and I said, wow, if I'm speaking at that conference, this is the first I've heard about it. So I've made some inquiries. And it turned out that they had tried to book the other Robert Frank. They called the Speakers Bureau, who represents me and booked me instead by mistake.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even before he started writing for the Times, we were being confused for one another again and again. In fact, the Times published an article about how often people mistook one for the other back in 2007, I think it was.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source