Hal Varian
American economistWikipedia
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Search complete. 5 mentions across 5 episodes found for "Hal Varian".
Sep 16, 2026
Ben ZweigHOST
So so, you know, if companies, you know, offer gym membership or whatever it is, presumably they're doing that for some sort of reason.
Ben ZweigHOST
You know, I mean, they sure it'll attract people like I mean, you know, there's this example of I heard this story from Hal Varian, who was the chief economist at Google.
Ben ZweigHOST
where he basically said that, you know, it was because Steve Jobs was so, you know, anti-competitive in labor markets with Eric Schmidt at the time.
Ben ZweigHOST
And he said, like, you know, we have to cap our salary for entry-level engineers.
Ben ZweigHOST
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.
Ben ZweigHOST
I mean, I heard a story from I don't know if it's like apocryphal or a real story, but from from Hal Varian, who is chief economist at Google, where he said, you know, when when Google was in the early days competing for engineers with Apple and whoever.
Ben ZweigHOST
We know the story that there was collusion around wages for entry-level engineers, and Steve Jobs was the big bully here and basically didn't want anyone competing for wages, like basically price-setting wages.
Ben ZweigHOST
And Halvarian basically attributes the explosion in amenities from Google to a way to circumvent this kind of cartel, if you will.
Adam PosenGUEST
...
Adam PosenGUEST
the very famous MIT microeconomist, Hal Varian, became Google's first chief economist-
Joe WeisenthalHOST
Yeah
Adam PosenGUEST
... and brought with him and hired a bunch of really smart people.
Simon RogersGUEST
And then in the evening, they tend to be things that are much more kind of metaphysical, almost existential questions about, you know, what are we doing with our lives? So those rhythms are really interesting.
Simon RogersGUEST
And actually, that's kind of where trends comes from, because Hal Varian, who used to be Google's chief economist, wrote a paper about now casting using Google Trends.
Simon RogersGUEST
And he's actually one of the reasons trends exist, because he noticed there were patterns in the data.
Will HuttonHOST
Now casting?
Joseph KonstanGUEST
The first time it got together, as far as I know, and I don't think there was much of a community before that was in the spring of 1996. at what is sometimes called the Berkeley Collaborative Filtering Workshop.
Joseph KonstanGUEST
It was organized by Hal Varian, who is the Dean of the School of Information Management and Systems at Berkeley, and Paul Resnick.
Joseph KonstanGUEST
And it was supported by a company, Infonautics, which I honestly don't know if they still exist.
Joseph KonstanGUEST
But at the time, they were known for products geared at school students.