John List on the Voltage Effect

Introducing John List

My guest today is sports nut, almost pro golfer but primarily Professor at the University of Chicago and Chief Economist at Walmart John List.

Just when you thought we were about to dive into the politics of diverging golf tours, instead we're going to turn our attention to ride hailing companies Uber and Lyft, where John was also Chief Economist. What was Travis Kalanick really like to work for?

John also recently published ‘The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale’ and so we're also discussing how to scale a business and we bring it to life with the story of the failed Jamie's Italian restaurant chain.

John's passion is using field experiments to explore economic questions and so our conversation is filled with great stories from John's time in the White House, to rideshare to groceries and even collaboration with DARPA.

Show notes

• When fieldwork is needed in scientific discovery to describe the real world

• John’s journey from the White House, Uber, Lyft and now Walmart Chief Economist

• Breaking out of silos to make deep cultural impact

• Working with DARPA, moonshots and hiring the right team

• How John didn’t become a trucker

• What interests John about the subject of scale?

• What is a voltage effect?

• The story of Jamie’s Italian and a failure to scale: negotiables and non-negotiables

• Thinking on the margin vs. by the average: applying it in the real world beyond the university campus

  • Why Logan Green, CEO Lyft, a trained econ major, was leaving dollars on the floor

• Why quitting is for winners

• Scaling culture: Uber vs Lyft

• John’s hopes for the book: add science to scaling

Next time on A Load of BS

I'm thrilled to announce my partnership with top BS consultancy BEworks. Over the coming weeks, we're going to explore together real life behaviorial science in the field to understand how today's practitioners are doing it, what the biggest problems to solve are, what we're getting wrong and where we're making strides.

It's time to move away from small nudges and think about impact at scale. First up, I'm going to be sharing the stage with BEworks CEO, the fabulous Wardah Malik to set the scene and get stuck into to some of these issues.

I hope you’ll join us!

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Till next time,

Daniel