Tim Scarfe: evaluation

Transcript context

…r time, was not a consequence of changes in technology or increase in capital expenditure or increase in labor that basically more people was working on the ships, but it was a function of experience. So how many ships your shipyard had already built. So that provides evidence of learning. Now, what happens is that that phenomena is true only at the level of individuals, teams, firms and so forth. And once you transition to the industry level, you get to Moore's curve which is very different, it's qualitative literature, it's exponential. And part of the book focused on explaining the connection between the 2. We we know from experience, right, that when we have experience, we get better at things. And we have this this weird, I don't know whether it's an illusion that all we need to do is just write down our understanding into into a wiki document. It's the same thing with what I do on MLST. So I I've I've tried to write down how I edit the videos and how I do the sound design and the video and so on. And it just became more and more and more content. I could probably write an encyclopedia about it at this point. And I realized at some point that a lot of it is tacit and it's very very difficult to transfer to any new staff that that come on. It it is simply just a function of experience. And this is really depressing to anyone who wants to start an enterprise or a business because the biggest problem is this knowledge transfer bottleneck. Are you saying that that cannot be overcome in any other way than just having lots of experience and lots of people working? No, I think experiential learning is important to transmit that tacit knowledge. And I think you have stories of people that have that intuition and that have been successful because they have developed careers following that intuition. 1 example that comes to mind, you know, is did you watch Arnold's documentary? Arnold Schwarzenegger had a fantastic documentary No, on no. A 3 part documentary that basically goes through his entire life. So the first part is about him as a bodybuilder, the second part as him as a movie actor, and the third part as a politician. And there's a constant in the documentary that says like, look, I wanted to become the best bodybuilder in the world. If you wanna become the best bodybuilder in the world, you have to be with the best. So I figured out that the best were in California, so I moved to California and I became the best. Then, you know, I wanted to become the best paid actor in the history of Hollywood. So you have to work with the best. So you know, like I I had money that I had saved from my bodybuilding activities, I had real estate that could keep me alive so I could, you know, be picky about the roles, and I wanted to work with the best. And eventually, 10 years later, he or 15 years later, he becomes the best paid actor in Hollywood and he accomplishes everything that he has set his mind to. But he's very conscious that the only way to do there is not by figuring it out on his own on a quiet room on the back of his house, it's by trying to make sure that he's with the best. And when it comes to politics, he was part of the Kennedy family. You know, he he marries Maria Shriver like early on and he learns from the Kennedys for you know, more than a decade before he decides to run for governor of California. So again, you know, you learn from the best. The example I have in the book is that of Samuel Slater, which is a local lad, know, and it's truly a hero. And this is a guy that is born in The Midlands at the time that The Midlands were the place that had for the first time figured out how to do water powered cotton spinning. That was a devilishly difficult technology. The first patents for water powered cotton spinning are from the 17 thirties. They tried to build a mill in Birmingham, it doesn't work. Another in Northampton, it doesn't work either. About 50 years have to pass after that for people like Arkwright and Strat to develop water power corner spinning in, you know, first in Cromford, which is a very small town but that had, you know, water power. And then eventually they created mills in Derby and Belper and so forth. Now, Samuel Slater, you know, is born at the time that these mills are first being erected. And he joins 1 of Stratz mills at the age of 14. He's very smart, becomes an overseer, and at the age of 21, he says, okay, know, I know this business and I know that I'm not gonna make it in this business because this technology is just spreading like wildfire.…

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