John List
speaker
84 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
John List’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Because in the past, it was move fast and break things, throw spaghetti against the wall, whatever sticks, cook it, fake it till you make it. And what I'm adding here is we need science to figure out which ideas are truly scalable.
Hey, thanks for having me.
So I started an early childhood program in Chicago Heights, whereby I had teachers teach three, four, and five-year-olds. And those three, four, and five-year-olds learned a lot within six or 12 months. Now, the problem with that program is when I try to scale it, when I originally did the program, I hired 30 really good teachers.
But when I scale it up, I might have to hire 30,000 really good teachers. So that's a very difficult chore compared to when I hired 30. So that idea is not very scalable. What I should make sure to do in the original study is to have teachers who I can hire at scale and make sure my program works with those kinds of teachers. That's one way to think about scalability.
would still work that's scalable i think that's right but it's also true that unique humans themselves don't scale and the reason why is because they're unique for a reason and it's difficult to teach other people to be unique so in a way if one of the important elements of your idea is something that you just can't get at scale It will never scale.
So let's take ourselves back to the polio vaccination and let's think what Jonas Salk did. What Jonas Salk did is he had an idea about a vaccination that could handle polio. So what he did is he tested it out on his own children to start. And then he tested again to make sure that the original results were not a false positive.
So he first of all figured out this thing works by testing and retesting. Then what he did is he tried it out on a lot of different kinds of children. So he found out what is the slice of the pie that my idea can work for? That was step two. And in step two, he found, wow, it works for all children. Then after he found out that it worked on all children, he went to step three.
And that's how do we actually get it in people's arms? But the brilliance behind the polio vaccination is that we leverage the healthcare system And what we essentially have done is after you have a child, as those listeners know, if you've had kids, baby comes out, gets whisked away and tested and get some vaccinations.
You bring your baby back in six months, it gets more vaccinations, 12 months more, 18 months, a few more. So the polio vaccination is given in a natural way. Step four in my reasoning is, well, does your idea have spillover effects? And in this case, the idea of a polio vaccination has great spillover effects because once you get the vaccination, you can't pass along polio to other children.
So that's really good. And then the fifth hurdle that you have to jump over is how much does it actually cost you to provide it and get it in people's arms? And again, with the polio vaccination, the true expense came in the R and D of the actual product. And because we leverage the healthcare system, It's now a pretty inexpensive way to give to people.
So really the polio vaccination passes over these five hurdles of an idea that is perfectly scalable. And in a way it's worked brilliantly. And these features are what is really elemental signatures of ideas that scale.
The DARE program was a social inoculation program that people basically said, don't use drugs. That original idea came from an experiment in Honolulu, Hawaii with 1,777 high schoolers that sent a signal that the idea works. But in the end, it was just a false positive. We ended up trying it in LA and we tried it in other cities and we tested it in those other cities and it didn't work.
We then went back to Honolulu and tried it there and it doesn't work. So we know that because of science.
Well, it's changed. So the DARE program representatives read my book and they reached out to me after they read the book and they said, we don't like chapter one, basically. And I said, is chapter one incorrect? And they said, no, but the DARE program has pivoted and they've moved to a new type of program that they argue now works.
So I haven't looked at the new program, but I told them I will look at the new program. And if there's voltage there, then in the next edition, I'll make sure to talk about the new program as well. So I'm talking about the program in the 80s that was simply a false positive.
The idea is not just about... growing really, really large and taking over the world. The idea is figuring out how big your idea can be. And then you have to determine whether you're happy with that. So think about my brother and dad and grandpa, one man, one truck, one good life. They realize their secret sauce is their charisma.
And they realize that they can have a really good life with one truck and them driving it. They realize that that's the extent that they want to scale. And they realize that their idea is not scalable. So they have to decide, is that the life that I want? Or should I try something new? And they're happy with that scalable idea.
So what I'm trying to make the point about is to be scalable, you have to have certain features. But if you don't have all of those features, you still might want to do the idea if that's good enough for you. And there are a lot of ideas that can't take over the world. But there are a lot of ideas that have scaled.
And you think about various products and ideas that work, they have the five features that I talk about. Ideas that might only have two or three of the features might scale, but the 10th is much smaller. So the idea is understand what are the signatures of ideas
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