Sources and Methods #45: Rowing with Bruce Smith
Bruce Smith 101:
Company website: Hydrow.com
Show Notes:
2:32 - If you play the piano, which I do, if like math, or you like repetitive motion, there’s something really really compelling about the rowing motion.
Within five years of arriving in Chicago, we’d built five boathouses.
4:00 - [What is the best way to get nothing done?] I have a tremendous nack for tanking things quickly, and it involves me telling them how great my idea is. I’m an expert on that. I still do it, despite having my head beat in a whole bunch of times. So, the best way to not get anything done is to not listen. It took me many, many many iterations to learn that the best way to get stuff done is to ask people questions about what they think about your idea. One or two sentences, and then ‘what do you think?’ is probably the best thing you can do.
Presenting the facts and skipping the discussion is probably the worst way to get anything done.
11:10 - I think that being a founder definitely requires some element of delusion and grandiosity. If you don’t have that, if you don’t believe on some level that you’re right about something, then you absolutely cannot be a founder. It’s just extremely stressful. You have to be willing to jump off a cliff without any kind of net. If there was a net there, than 18 people would’ve already jumped. So you really have to believe in something. To me, that’s the most valuable thing. And the people I like being around are people who believe in something to that degree. People that are actually willing to go to the edge.
There’s an upside and a downside. If you’re crazy enough to believe in something that, that often means that you do not see reality very well. I think that really great founders are people who can survive that cognitive dissonance between believing something that is not there yet and has no evidence, so they have faith in their ability to see something that other people can’t see. And then also the ability to take in the reality of the situation and understand that there are real gaps that you have to explain to people and walk them through. And be able to see the gaps in your own idea and your own faith. It’s a crazy tension.
15:52 - Joseph Conrad talked about The Work. Sailing a ship across the ocean is incredibly tedious, and likened it to a sewing machine, just keep working on the machine.
16:46 - That’s one of the things about success - you have the euphoria, you have the terror. But you also have to be able to grind. And rowers grind.
18:56 - Rowing brings people together. There’s really good brain science that shows that people who do things together, like synchronous motion, build trust.
19:35 - The more time you spend with your screen, the more time you spend isolated, the worse you feel. What’s the best thing that I could do as a human being to help other human beings feel better about themselves? That was the motivation for the company. If someone could tell me something else that would build more trust.
21:09 - I think a lot about the model of the tragedy of the commons. How do you get people to make decisions that are not in their personal best interest in the short run, but are in everybody’s - including their own - best interest in the long run? What I see developing in society is this horrible nexus of concerns, where the tragedy of the commons is actually coming to hit us in our daily lives, so we’re not able to make decisions in favor of the environment. We’re not able to make decisions in favor of public education. I think it’s because people feel more alienated and more separate from their fellow human beings. We have to do something.
I think it’s not just about the activity of the mind. It’s the mind-body connection.
25:41 - There are three kinds of competition: positive-sum, equal-sum, and negative-sum competition. In one kind of analysis, you could say that football or hockey or lacrosse are negative-sum competitions. Two teams enter the field - the only way for us to determine a winner is for one team to make the other team lose, and the team that wins has to physically hurt themselves to take that win.
With a positive-sum sport like rowing, or track and field, or swimming, you can put as many teams as you want on the field. In rowing, there are six lanes, so in the Olympics six teams go down the field. All six of those crews can have a personal record in the final race. One person still wins, but everyone has come to the table and may have produced their personal record. Everyone leaves with a better record.
That’s the kind of competition that we want to foster. Where people understand competition not as something that is negative and destructive, that involves taking something away from the other person or group, but something that lifts everybody up. By everybody bringing their best effort to the table, everybody gets better.
That was the competitive model before two world wars - rowing used to be the most popular sport in the United States. Tens of thousands of people would watch rowing races.
31:26 - This is really four different companies - the software, the hardware, the content, and the marketing, all have pretty different agendas and would like to spend our money differently. But it’s also a great moment for creativity. It is unbelievably satisfying to have all these facets of human life reflected in one place. We all come together and argue all day long in order to get to the end goal.
38:20 - I haven’t raised a single penny from a cold call. And I haven’t hired anybody without being introduced to them through an acquaintance for a friend. I call it the Quality Mafia. You find one really great person, and hold onto them like Grim Death, and give them whatever they need to come with you on your journey. And once you find that one great person, then they know about 20 or 30 really great people. And so you put out the call to those 20 or 30 people - “You need X? Oh, I know someone who used to do that.” And you keep being honest and open with people.
42:10 - Fast, Cheap, and Good. Pick two. We chose Fast and Good.
42:58 [On Workflow] - I use email. I star emails that need responses, and my goal is to keep the starred list around 10.
I have a huge amount of respect for work that happens face to face. If you’re working face to face with your direct reports, things go a lot better. I don’t know how that scales, but I think we can handle it for this type of company, we don’t anticipate growing beyond a few hundred people.
We use Slack internally, because that’s fun. I hate powerpoints, we only use them when absolutely necessary. The power of a clear, well-constructed sentence clarifies everyone’s thinking and ensures communication is rock solid.
I draw clear distinctions between kinds of meetings. There are Decision Meetings, and those should never take more than half an hour. If it’s more than half an hour, then you missed the point of the meeting. There’s not enough information, you’re chasing your tail, and you should not have that meeting.
If you don’t know what kind of decision you’re trying to make, you need a different kind of meeting. I call those Making Meetings. It’s not my idea. Basically, an hour is a minimum, and 2.5 to 3 hours if you’re mapping stuff out. Those are different things. If you confuse these two kinds of meetings, you waste everyone’s time.
I’m very skeptical of making very good decisions. Trying to make a decision is better than trying to make a really good decision.
48:54 [Advice on starting a company] Start early, do it often. It’s really really fun. Don’t try to make money, do something you believe in. The money part of it is so beyond irrelevant if you’re trying to effect some kind of positive change in the world. Then, once you get that straight, money will flow from an idea. If you don’t have a good idea, you won’t get any money, so don’t worry. Put emphasis on values and live those values.
That said, I love making money. Money is time, and money is freedom. It’s not like it’s not a goal, it’s a secondary goal. First goal: value. Second goal: money.
52:15 - I think a lot about Dostoevsky, and the University of Chicago, and people who were suffering after the war. Suffering a lot. If you work at the University of Chicago, you are surrounded by this violent, poor neighborhood. And yet, they produce the greatest number of Nobel Prize winners. You’re Fyodor Dostoevsky, and you can’t write what you want, but you create the greatest novels of all time, because you’re under this extreme pressure. Those are just two anecdotes and I have no idea if they hold over a broader spectrum. But it seems to me that creativity comes out of some level of discomfort. Cognitive dissonance, pain, and something that happens in peoples’ lives that produces creativity.
55:15 [On living a full life] - I will be completely didactic on this. If you want to be a complete human being, there are two things that you have to do. You have to read John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and a short biography of John Milton.
Then, you must read Anna Karenina. I read it every year. It is a complete compendium to all intellectual responses, human responses, emotional responses, to the existential challenges that we face as human beings. It’s a bit like the Bible - it is a complete story. It catalogues how you can respond to life.
Books Discussed in the show:
Sources and Methods #36: Thomas Nichols
Thomas Nichols 101:
Nichols on Twitter
Nichols on Facebook
Show notes:
4:30 - It’s an ironic paradox - there’s more information in the world than there’s ever been, but people are less informed.
4:46 - The hallmarks of expertise are not just the traditional markers that people often think of and they often reject by the way. When you say ‘expert’ people think ‘someone with credentials’ and then you get into all kinds of arguments about whether credentials really matter, whether smart people don’t need them, whether there are dumb people who have degrees on the wall, that’s just part of it.
I argue in the book that expertise is a complex of things: credentials, experience, longevity in the field, peer-review or affirmation by other people (and I don’t just mean academically). If you’re a master electrician, that’s determined by other electricians who decide to bestow that on you after examining you and watching you. As well as talent. It’s those things taken together that makes an expert, which is really more of an art rather a science. It’s the weighted outcome of all of those things together.
7:04 - We’ve had Know Nothing parties in the past. But what’s different about this time is how much it’s driven by narcissism. In previous eras I think you’d find some of this rift was between town and gown, educated and less educated, knowers and lay people - this was driven by class differences, regional differences. What’s striking to me now is it seems to be spread across classes, regions, genders, races, and at the root of it all is this notion that “I’m smart.” I’m smart enough to know that I’m smarter than my doctor.
And this is different than previous eras in American history.
10:32 - [Students] think of libraries as book warehouses. They don’t think of them as institutions full of professionals there to help them. And what they really don’t understand is that the books that are in a library are there because people who understand books and publishing have made a decision about what books should and should not be there. Whereas younger folks would argue that gatekeepers are just there to get in your way, they represent the establishment, they are part of the ‘publishing-knowledge-complex’ or something and that going on the Internet is a more liberating and freeing thing. That’s like saying that instead of getting your medications from a pharmacy, with a professional pharmacist, you should just walk down the street and talk to any unlicensed herbalist who happens to be sitting around.
Reference librarians in particular are my heroes.
17:09 - We’re going to get a very steep pyramid of knowledge. I think we’re seeing it already. We’ll get a small number of people at the top of the information heap who know how things work and how to make things work. And they will be disproportionately rewarded for it because those skills are rare. Beneath that are people are people who haven’t taken the time to figure out how things work, whether it’s technology or diplomacy or public policy or how a road gets paved… the more people who opt out of that, the more and more rewarded a small elite will be for knowing that stuff. And I think that’s already happening, and it leads to a great deal of resentment between laypeople and experts who then become well rewarded elites.
I tell people that this is not happening because elitists are keeping you down. It’s happening by default. When people say ‘it’s too complicated’ well the people who are involved, who take the time to learn these things, are well rewarded and compensated socially and materially for knowing things.
19:29 - When I teach classes on the Cold War, I always make my students watch a movie from about 40 years ago called Three Days of the Condor. And an intelligence spook says, “why do we have so much power” and the answer is “because when things go wrong, people are not going to want us to ask their permission. There’s just going to want us to get it for them.” I always found that a really chilling kind of expression of that kind of technocracy. And in the end, for all the complaining about elites and experts, people will expect, that when they turn on their tap, clean water comes out. That when they want to fill up their cars, gasoline comes out. That the Internet works. That the mail gets delivered. That packages can be sent.
This notion that ‘we’re just going to tear it all down and who needs elites’ - people rely on all this stuff every day. And I worry about experts simply turning to each other and saying ‘probably better not to ask anymore, probably better not to engage the public anymore, let’s just do the things we know need to be done.’ I think that’s far more of a danger, because I think we’re already in that situation, than rule by the mob because populism isn’t sustainable. It tends to be a temper tantrum that comes and goes as we’ve seen in American history. There are no really successful, sustained populist movements. While populism is good for venting anger, it’s really bad for the mail. I worry about both of those outcomes, because both are the separation of experts from lay people, where they simply stop talking to each other about how to create good public policy.
22:26 - This is why I argue at the end of the book for the need for experts to re-engage the public. Because it’s not fun. It’s not fun to engage with the public because you can’t tell them what they want to hear.
Dr. Nichols article: “The Death of Expertise” in the Federalist.
26:58 (On how to work on expertise daily) - Read a newspaper. A reputable national newspaper. And just read it. Start there. I think if people would go back to doing that, it would make us a different country. Find a source you disagree with and read that. Regularly read one newspaper or journal that you don’t agree with.
31:29 - People no longer have the patience to read a newspaper or to read a book. They want it digested, into searchable chunks. I think that’s killing people’s ability to think.
32:25 - Experts need to shout back at the mob. Experts need to stake that ground out again. Instead of constantly kowtowing to this populist notion that ‘we all have an opinion’ and ‘we should all be taken seriously’ I think experts need to reassert their expertise. And again, this is not going to be pleasant. This is not going to be fun.
Experts and academics also need to be better at policing each other about the kind of work we’re doing.
Everybody’s opinion is not equal.
41:07 (On Getting Onto Jeopardy): You can’t really study for it. The people that went to the jeopardy test with atlases and encyclopedias, almost all of them failed. The trick to jeopardy is understanding that 90% of the time the answer to the question is buried right there in the clue. And the other is that no matter how good you are, if you can’t master that little buzzer…
The idea that you need to be smart and study and pore over maps, those people rarely do well on Jeopardy. If people want to know what the experience is like, watch it at home while you’re standing up. A friend of mine give me that advice to prepare.
Remember, one of the great players, was Frank Spangenberg, a NYC Transit Cop. Being an expert on jeopardy is no help.
Book Recommendation:
I re-read The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis every year.