045: John List on the Voltage Effect & life at Uber, Lyft and Walmart
A Load of BS on Sport: The Behavioural Science Podcast with Daniel Ross and Liam Botham
English - September 01, 2022 10:00 - 52 minutes - 35.9 MBEntrepreneurship Business Education Self-Improvement entrepreneurship interviews business inspiration paths less trodden adventure creators technology investors Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
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 worldJohn’s journey from the White House, Uber, Lyft and now Walmart Chief EconomistBreaking out of silos to make deep cultural impactWorking with DARPA, moonshots and hiring the right teamHow John didn’t become a truckerWhat 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-negotiablesThinking on the margin vs. by the average: applying it in the real world beyond the university campusWhy Logan Green, CEO Lyft, a trained econ major, was leaving dollars on the floorWhy quitting is for winnersScaling culture: Uber vs LyftJohn’s hopes for the book: add science to scalingSubscribe for more here
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Podcast music: Tamsin Waley-Cohen's Mendelssohn's violin concerto