#165 William Shockley (Creator of the Electronic Age)

What I learned from reading Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age by Joel Shurkin. ---- [1:19] Why would a man as unquestionably brilliant as he knowingly and deliberately destroy himself? [5:04] Dear Jean: I am sorry that I feel I can no longer go on. Most of my life I have felt. that the world was not a pleasant place and that people were not a very admirable form of life. I find that I am particularly dissatisfied with myself and that most of my actions are the consequence of motives of which I am ashamed. Consequently, I must regard myself as less well suited than most to carry on with life and to develop the proper attitudes in our children. I hope you have better luck in the future. —Bill. He took out his revolver, put a bullet in one of the six chambers, put the gun to his head and pressed the trigger. Nothing happened. He put the gun away and wrote a second note. [13:36] “My elation with the group’s success was balanced by the frustration of not being one of the inventors. I experienced frustration that my personal efforts had not resulted in a significant inventive contribution of my own.” Apparently his involvement was too passive to provide Shockley with the credit he craved. [16:29] I am overwhelmed by an irresistible temptation to do my climbing by moonlight and unroped. This is contrary to all my rock climbing teaching and does not mean poor training but only a strong headedness. [24:21] The rise and fall of Bill Shockley’s company took less than a year and a half. It profoundly affected Shockley, but had even more impact on the world around him and on our lives today. In all of the history of business, the failure of Shockley Semiconductor is in a class by itself. [35:26] Shockley was often insulting, treating his employees the way he treated his sons, with no glimmer of sensitivity. His favorite crack, when he thought someone was wrong, was: ‘Are you sure you have a PhD?’ Worse of all, he could not keep himself from believing he was in competition with his employees. The very people he hired because they were so bright. He just didn’t want them to be as bright as he was. That his employees could come up with their own ideas did not register with him. [46:07] Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore decided it was time to go and set up their own company. They raised the capital, based entirely on Noyce’s reputation, with one telephone call to Arthur Rock. They called the new company Intel. They lived Bill Shockley’s fantasy. They directed the flow of the technology and made billions. [52:12] A genealogy of Silicon Valley showed that virtually every company in the valley could show a line leading directly to someone who worked at and eventually left Fairchild Semiconductor. Everyone from Fairchild originally came from Shockley Semiconductor. Shockley’s company was the seed of Silicon Valley. [1:00:48] They called his personality “reverse charisma.” [1:01:07] Alison read about her father’s death in the Washington Post. Emmy, obeying her husband’s last order, did not call her or Shockley’s sons. Emmy had her husband’s body cremated. She did not have a memorial service. It is not clear who would have come. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  I believe that William Shockley was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. He led the group at Bell Labs that created the seminal invention of the modern world, the transistor. Every home has thousands, or even millions, of transistors. World commerce totally depends on them, as do healthcare, culture, defense, transportation, and civilization in general. He was a key player in the development of the modern science of operations research. During the Second World War, he used statistics to show the Air Corps how to maximize its bombing efficiency and the Navy how to destroy more U-boats. His efforts won the National Medal of Merit, the highest possible civilian decoration.

• 0:44David Senra?

  He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He put the silicon in Silicon Valley, and his failed company was the grandfather of all Silicon Valley companies. He was a tenured professor at Stanford University, was happily married, and had all the money he needed to live happily, quietly, and well. He chose not to. He instead set himself up for public ridicule and squandered his public reputation. He lost all of his friends. His oldest friend became his most potent enemy. He became a notorious scientific pariah. I wanted to know how that could happen.

• 1:28David Senra?

  Why would a man as unquestionably brilliant as he knowingly and deliberately destroy himself? That was an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, the Creator of the Electronic Age, and is written by Joel Shurkin. So the name William Shockley is not going to be new for longtime listeners. Most recently, I'm back on Founder's Number 157 in the book The Innovators. He's in that book quite a bit, and I talked about him in the podcast. After that podcast came out, a listener sent me a message that said, "Hey, if you want to learn more about Shockley, there's actually a good biography on him." And he recommended reading this book. So that's how Shockley fits into, that's how I found the book and that's how he fits into everything else that we're studying on the podcast.

• 2:12David Senra?

  This is going to be, I think, the, different from every other episode that I've ever done, though. Because there's a lot, the reason so many great historical figures read biographies and chose to learn from biographies is because you pick up a lot of good ideas, but you also pick up a lot of bad ideas. So, good ideas to emulate and unwise ideas to avoid, right? This is going to be all about things that you want to avoid. So Shockley, a lot of people call him smart, but no one would call him wise. And so before I jump into the book, I want to read two quotes to you from another biography, not self-proclaimed biography, not, Charlie Munger, who is not only smart, but indeed wise. And it's going to set up, I think, why learning from other people's mistakes is so important.

• 2:55David Senra?

  So Charlie says, "When people tell me that they learn from experience, I tell them the trick is to learn from other people's experience." And the second quote I have for you, it comes, it's his response to the question of why isn't Berkshire easier to emulate? And we see Charlie's thinking here. He says, "We're talking about very simple ideas of just figuring out the standard stupidities and avoiding them. And I actually collect them. Some people collect stamps. I collect insanities and absurdities. This book that I hold in my hand is full of insanities and absurdities." Going back to Charlie. "And then I avoid them. And it's amazing how well it works, because I've gone by the examples of all these people that are more talented than I am. If I had sent out, set out to invent more quantum mechanics, I would have been an also-ran.

• 3:40David Senra?

  I just set out to avoid the standard stupidities, and I've done a lot better than many people who mastered quantum mechanics. It's a way for mediocre people to get ahead, and it is not much of a secret either. Just avoid all the standard stupidities. There are so many of them, and so many brilliant people do this." And so that's what we're going to do today by studying the life of William Shockley. So I want to start fast forward to where he's 33 years old. This is the most unexpected part of the book. The vast majority of the highlights that I have come from one chapter. And it tells in a year and a half, the rise and fall of Shockley's company. That is, there's just so many lessons in there for us to learn from.

• 4:24David Senra?

  But before I get there, I want to fast forward. He's 33 years old. He's married. I think he's got either two or three kids at this point. And he's, this is after he studied physics in college, works at Bell Labs. And then the government, the US government during World War II, took a lot of scientists from Bell Labs and applied and used them to solve problems of war. And so that's what Shockley's doing. And I'm going to talk a little bit about that before I get to the rise and fall of his company, which is the most fascinating part. But this is the most unexpected part of the book. And it gives you an insight into the peculiar pessimistic mind that Shockley had. So he's writing a note to his wife. His wife's name is Jean.

• 5:05David Senra?

  Dear Jean, I am sorry that I feel I can no longer go on. Most of my life, I have felt that the world was not a pleasant place and that people were not a very admirable form of life. I find that I am particularly dissatisfied with myself and that most of my actions are the consequences of motives of which I am ashamed. Most people do not feel this way, I am sure. Consequently, I must regard myself as less well suited than most to carry on with life and to develop the proper attitudes in our children. I see no reason to believe, other than that I shall continually become worse in these regards as time passes. I hope you have better luck in the future.

• 5:50David Senra?

  He took out his revolver, put a bullet in one of the six chambers, put the gun to his head and pressed the trigger. Nothing happened. He put the gun away and wrote a second note. Dear Gene, there was just one chance in six that the loaded chamber would be under the firing pin. There was some chance of a misfire even then. I am sorry that I am not sufficiently ingenious or painstaking to find a more practical and suitable means of solving our problems. He put the suicide note in an envelope, in a safe, in his home, along with other personal material that was found after his death. So that line from his first suicide note where he talks about the world's not a pleasant

• 6:35David Senra?

  place and that he does not like other people, that is the root cause of all the bad things that happened in Shockley's life and why he was unable to actually achieve the things that he set out to achieve. His inability to work with and relate and deal with people. Dealing with other people was his greatest weakness. And so I'm going to pick up what he was working on during WWII. And he says, "Part of his concentration was on his new role as an organization leader. The executive part of his job worried Shockley, who despite his excessive self-confidence, he thought he was smarter than everybody else." That's another thing where Munger talks about, "Hey, I try to destroy my best ideas." Shockley didn't. He would hold on to an idea. Because he came up with the idea, he thought it had to be great and he'd held on to it

• 7:17David Senra?

  even when evidence proved that it was wrong or he found contrary evidence. It did not get through his... He's the anti-Munger. And we're going to see, because this is going to be part of a two-part series that I'm doing on Bob Nois, who actually works for Shockley. And Bob Nois is the anti-Shockley. He does the reverse of everything Shockley does, and he actually lives the life that Shockley wanted to live by founding Intel and developing technology and building the company. That's what Shockley wanted to do but was unable to do, excuse me, because of this great weakness of dealing with other people. So it says, "The executive part of his job worried Shockley, who despite his excessive self-confidence, had never run an organization or led a team before. He was never burdened with self-awareness.

• 8:01David Senra?

  Largely deprived of peers during his childhood, he lacked experience with other people, particularly people unlike himself, especially those less bright, which was almost everyone. Worse, he did not realize the extent of this weakness and would pay dearly for that ignorance." So more about his work during the war and how his deficiencies, not only his interpersonal deficiencies, his deficiencies with dealing with other people, not only was it with coworkers, but it's also his friends and his family. So it says Shockley, like his mother, was quiet, self-contained, and physically unaffectionate to Gene or to his children. He spent most of his waking hours at a job that required his total attention, playing on a stage of

• 8:43David Senra?

  high historic drama where human lives in the millions, not to mention civilization, were at stake. He inhabited a world of nighttime flights in hunted planes painted black to avoid predators, of men who went to work with an excellent chance that they would die gory deaths before they returned. Then he came home, where changing a diaper was an event, to a companion whose conversation unavoidably was usually limited to ration stamps or whether they could afford to buy their daughter a new coat. Many men appreciated that kind of respite, grateful for the mundane, calming reminder of how life ought to be. Shockley could not. He had no patience for mediocrity.

• 9:27David Senra?

  So this is a summary of Shockley's work during the war and then a devastating personal tragedy. Much of the science and operations research in the US derives from Shockley's work for the military in the 1940s. He was, he doesn't deserve sole credit. There's a ton of scientists, obviously, that were very helpful in World War II. We covered a bunch of them. The most recent example, if you want to learn all about it, is that book, Tuxedo Park, about Alfred Loomis. That was fascinating. I think it's back in Founder's 140, somewhere in there. Continuous letters of praise for Shockley's war efforts poured into Bell Labs, along with a request that he remain as a part-time advisor to the Pentagon, which he kept for, I think, maybe his entire life. The military wanted him to continue his operations research, especially into the atomic bomb and rockets. Essentially, what

• 10:09David Senra?

  Shockley worked on was finding a way for the military to be more efficient, to make sure that the actions that they were actually doing aligned with their goal of winning the war and destroying as many enemy fighters and enemy planes and industry and all that. So he just made sure that they were, again, just more efficient. Bill Labs agreed, and Shockley worked for the Pentagon as a consultant for much of his life. Shockley's war efforts represent in some ways his finest moments. It was the last time his professional achievements were clear and unambiguous. So this is before he invents the transistor, or he's on the team that invents the transistor, before he wins a Nobel Prize. There's a lot of bizarre behavior by him, but also

• 10:51David Senra?

  a little ambiguity about who actually deserved credit for that invention. There is a lot of people that believe that two of his teammates were the ones that actually deserved the Nobel Prize. And we'll see the way he responds in just, again, not being able to deal with other people. Nothing else would ever be as completely satisfying, and his failures would be astonishing. On October 17, 1946, his 12-year-old daughter Allison and her father took the train to Washington, where Shockley was awarded the National Medal of Merit, the highest civilian medal honor. Shockley wrote to his mother that five major generals and a few brigadier generals showed up for the ceremony. He promised to send her a picture of the medal.

• 11:33David Senra?

  "Oh, yes," he said in one matter-of-fact paragraph between the description of the ceremony. "Jean lost the baby." Singular. In fact, Jean had been pregnant with twins. While Shockley and Allison were away, she had gone into premature labor and was rushed to the hospital. The doctor told her that she had miscarried one of the fetuses and the other was dead. "He had to extract the dead one immediately," he said, "and reach between her legs while she screamed." And the reason I included such a graphic devastating tragedy is because of his nonchalant, "oh, yeah, we lost the baby" attitude. He is one of the worst fathers I've ever come across, maybe the worst father. And this is how his family remembers. They remember

• 12:18David Senra?

  a very unhappy home life. Shockley's temper was back. He rarely showed it at work. Indeed, his colleagues couldn't remember temper as a notable part of his personality. He apparently saved it for home. His violence to his children was not measured or rational. He acted in rage. He was more psychologically than physically abusive, but he could become suddenly infuriated and strike out. So the author referenced in the introduction that he eventually alienates every friend and every coworker, everybody except his second wife. That includes his children. He does not have a relationship with his children. They wind up finding about his death when it's reported in the newspaper. So what I want to draw your attention to next is he's working on a team.

• 13:03David Senra?

  He's heading the team that's trying to develop the transistor. And two of the people he's working with are the ones, they get ideas from Shockley, but they're the ones doing the actual work. Okay, so when they figure out, oh, my God, we finally solved this problem, they call Shockley. And this is where we see that he's not happy with the group's success because he wasn't the person who did it. Another deficient personality trait. Shockley was quite excited by the telephone call. I don't know how to pronounce his name. I'm going to say Bratton. Bratton. Let's go Bratton. Bratton later remembered. Shockley didn't quite remember it that way. Frankly, Bardine and Bratton, point of contact transistor provoked conflicting emotions in me. My elation with the group's success

• 13:48David Senra?

  was balanced by the frustration of not being one of the inventors, he admitted. I experienced some frustration that my personal efforts, started more than eight years before, had not resulted in a significant inventive contribution of my own. Excuse me. The telephone call changed his life, challenging his balance, his ego, and his loyalties. Fred Seats, remember this guy's name. This is his oldest friend. Believed his personality then began a transformation, a narrowing, an intensifying, and an unbalancing. And it's not like he wasn't involved. He just wasn't the actual one that did it. So he says Shockley's role was more of that of a guiding consultant than an active participant. But he's still actually on the team.

• 14:33David Senra?

  Right? So he says Bell Labs worked very hard from the first moment to produce a mythology around the invention of the transistor that persists to this day. One of well-managed teamwork. That is simply not true. In fact, there was little evidence of closely directed teamwork in the invention. Management's greatest contribution was to stay out of the way. Shockley's contributions to the transistor were threefold. First, the work was based on many of his theories and completed by his people. Second, the breakthrough came from the failure of one of those theories. Third, he had a good sense to trust Bardin and Bratain. By every standard, this is the point I was trying to make. Again, he's not the one that actually did it, but it's not like you were not useful.

• 15:18David Senra?

  What is your problem here? By every standard, this constitutes a major contribution to the invention of the device. Apparently, his involvement was too passive to provide Shockley with the credit that he craved. So he starts lashing out his teammates, he starts pulling away. And this one sentence is what Bratain told him. He's like, "Hell, Shockley, there's enough glory in this for everybody." So it's not like his motives were hidden from other people. They clearly saw that his ego was bruised and that he was jealous because he wasn't the one that did it and he wanted to get all the credit himself. So even with his bizarre response and his deficient personality, the team writes him a letter, they're trying to keep the team together, right? So this is his response to them, to the team not wanting to break up.

• 16:03David Senra?

  And he writes a note that he never sends, so it's just a note to himself. And it says, "Shockley responded, but only to himself. In the envelope containing the note, Shockley attached a handwritten memo." And this is the way he's describing his mindset at the time, this is very bizarre. "I am overwhelmed by an irresistible temptation." Let me, I guess, before I read this to you, he would also, in his spare time, he was dedicated to rock climbing. So that's something he had a passion for, so he says. And he's going to use that as a metaphor to where he wants to go in his professional career. "I am overwhelmed by an irresistible temptation to do my climbing by moonlight and unroped. This is contrary to all my rock climbing teaching and does not mean poor training,

• 16:47David Senra?

  but only a strong headedness."

• 16:51David Senra?

  So the team winds up winning the Nobel Prize. He goes back to work for Bell Labs and he realizes, hey, I'm going to quit here and I'm going to start a company. And this is why he decides to move the company to be closer to his aging mother, who lives in Palo Alto. And this is why they said he puts the silicon in Silicon Valley. So it says, "A grand future was coming. Shockley, perhaps more than almost anyone else in the world, appreciated that future. Shockley also began to get a glimmer of the financial possibilities. A person could make a great deal of money if he could control, or at least direct the path that technology took. The word 'entrepreneurship' wasn't common in the early 1950s. Shockley was starting to understand it in a way few others did, and it began to prey

• 17:36David Senra?

  on his mind. He was also growing dissatisfied with his position at Bell Labs. Although management was bending backwards to keep him happy, they were not promoting him. You can't promote him because he can't deal with other people. The lab heads apparently knew his limitations as a manager, and other men, some hired after him, some of his friends, were moving up to higher, better-paying positions. The reason Shockley was not getting promoted himself unquestionably was his limited people skills. He had angered too many colleagues. He had the reputation of being uncaring, insensitive, and heartless, literally running a dozen men out of the labs when he decided they did not meet his exacting standards." And as we see here, his lack of people skills extended to his own family. "They were not particularly good parents," his daughter admits.

• 18:21David Senra?

  Her brothers emphatically agree. So he's dissatisfied with his home life, he's dissatisfied with his career trajectory at Bell Labs, so he's going to quit, start a company, and get divorced all at the same time. And he tells his wife that he's leaving her when she's recovering from cancer. While she was recovering from her cancer, he announced he was leaving. Forty years later, the men who were his friends then were still appalled and told the story with suppressed anger. One version claims he marched into Jean's hospital room to announce their separation. Clearly, he told her while she was still under treatment from her ghastly and frightening experience, when she was at her most vulnerable. He probably did not time it deliberately to inflict pain. More likely, he wasn't thinking about her at all."

• 19:06David Senra?

  So shortly after separating from his wife, he winds up meeting another woman. This is his second wife. This is going to be his only friend at the end of his life. The only one. So it says, and the reason I'm reading this part two is because in a letter that he's writing to her, you realize he knew what he was. He knew how he was. So he says, "He found himself opening his soul to her in a way unmatched in any of his other relationships, warning her of his dark side, admitting things he could never admit to anyone else." So I just want to read you a quote from the letter he's writing to his soon-to-be second wife.

• 19:46David Senra?

  "Just another warning that the deepest pessimism and general lack of admiration for the human race and myself are probably with me for keeps. I don't want you to get hurt by being too hopeful that you can do something about it." And that is a great distillation of a mindset that you must avoid, or you're going to have a... He suffers his whole life. He's a miserable person his entire life. And to me, I think Andrew Carnegie actually got it right. This idea that's like, "Oh, I'm pessimist, I'm down on myself, and nothing will ever change that." No, that's not true. And so this is what Andrew Carnegie said, "A sunny disposition is worth more than fortune. Young people

• 20:27David Senra?

  should know that it can be cultivated, that the mind, like the body, can be moved from the shade into sunshine." And what's really bizarre about this book is everybody talking about how smart he is, he's a genius, everything else, but he never understood that, hey, learning how to people's skills, how to deal with people, is something you can learn. You can change. And if you don't, it's going to stop you from accomplishing the goals if you need to collaborate and cooperate with other people, which is if you're building a company, obviously you do. So now we got to my favorite part of the book, and I'm going to quote heavily from this chapter. And the chapter's title is "Really Peculiar Ideas: How to Motivate People." Read that as really terrible, bad, stupid ideas. Here's an example. So at this point, he left Bell Labs.

• 21:11David Senra?

  He's setting up his own company. He's working as, there's like a division of another company says, "I'm gonna bankroll you." It's almost like if you have a startup inside a larger company, right? So that's what Shockley Semiconductor is. And he's, he's really famous. A lot of people know of him. They don't know him personally. So he's calling all these young physicists and PhDs from all over the country saying, "Hey, we're gonna, you know, invent, we're gonna set the path of new technology. I'm gonna build this giant company doing so. And it's gonna be built around transistors." At least that was his original idea. He winds up changing that. But in this book, excuse me, in this chapter, we're really gonna see that he's the anti-Bob Nois. And a lot of the things that, that Bob Nois succeeded in many ways by doing the opposite of what Shockley did. And he's gonna play a heavy role in here because one of the people, one of the young physicists

• 21:55David Senra?

  that Shockley recruits is Bob Nois. Okay, so it says, "Jim Gibbons walked into Shockley's office, sat across from him, and was ready when Shockley pulled out his stopwatch." This is Shockley's bizarre way to interview people. So this is Shockley speaking. "You have 127 players in a single tennis elimination match, Shockley said. How many matches does it take to determine a winner?" Click. So he ends the sentence, starts the stopwatch. "It was August 1957. Jim Gibbons was a young physicist. Like every other new employee, he had to take an intel, a little intelligence test. Shockley knew perfectly well that Gibbons had a PhD from Stanford, worked at Bell Labs, and won a scholarship to Cambridge University,

• 22:39David Senra?

  Cambridge University. A good sign he had something between his ears besides lint. But everyone coming to work for Shockley Semiconductor had to take a battery of tests. Shockley had great faith in this kind of testing, feeling increasingly that things like intelligence and creativity can be quantified. That the tests had no real scientific basis never seemed to bother him. Gibbons thought only for a few seconds and said, 'Well, it must be 126.'" Now here's the bizarre part. He got the answer right. Shockley's not happy. He gets mad. This is what I mean about he always has to be the smartest person. Shockley looked down at his stopwatch, his face reddening. "What?" "Well, it must be 126." "How did you do that?" Shockley asked, his agitation growing.

• 23:26David Senra?

  There's only one winner, and that means 126 people have to be eliminated. It takes a match to eliminate somebody, so there must be 126 matches, said Gibbons. Shockley pounded the table in fury. That's how I would do it. Have you heard this problem before? He demanded. No, sir, said the young scientist, confounded at Shockley's reaction. The Nobel laureate was coming unhinged. The thought that Gibbons might have been as smart as he was seemed to frighten him. And so that right there is a perfect example of the problem, the fatal flaw that he had at the very beginning of starting his company. I'm the smartest person here. All the good ideas come from me. So what is the point of recruiting what you're talking about, some of the smartest people in the country?

• 24:11David Senra?

  If you don't, like, what is the point? He's like, no, no, no. The way he ran his companies, the ideas come from me. You guys do the work, but I am the head genius and I will lead this company to success. Obviously, it doesn't happen. So it says, "The rise and fall of Bill Shockley's company took less than a year and a half. It profoundly affected Shockley, but it even had more impact on the world around him and on our lives today. In all of the history of business, the failure of Shockley's semiconductor is in a class by itself." So first starts out talking about, like, why was he able to recruit so many great people? Shockley's reputation as a physicist was unequaled, his knowledge of semiconductors unchallenged, and he was anxious to get rich in business. So he sets up, he announces a new company, he's gonna do a press conference, and says,

• 24:55David Senra?

  "Shockley held a news conference in San Francisco to make the official announcement of their plans. By now, several newspaper reporters were calling him the inventor of the transistor," ignoring that he had, that he was working on a team. "He predicted that transistor production would increase by 100 to 1,000-fold in the next five to 10 years, which turned out to be a major understatement. When reporters asked him why he was leaving Bell Labs, he said, 'You only live once. I would like to do something else for a change.'" He had already recruited three PhD physicists, and he had only begun the recruiting process. Shockley's genius for selecting scientific talent was at its height. That's something he actually did right. He was very good at identifying other talented people. Just once they started working together, they hated him. So that's the problem.

• 25:40David Senra?

  He could recruit you, but he just couldn't keep you. He traveled from one end of the country to the other and to Europe. He placed ads in publications such as Chemical and Engineering News and scoured other labs. He went to one meeting of the American Physical Society ostensibly to give a speech, but he actually, he told the audience that he was recruiting. One of these people that signed up was Gordon Moore. He's going to be one of the co-founders of Intel and also the creator of Moore's Law. So this is Gordon Moore signed up. So did the man who would become Moore's partner, the physicist Robert Noyce. Remember, I've considered this as a part one of a two-part series. And the second part is all about this biography that I'm currently reading about Robert Noyce.

• 26:22David Senra?

  Noyce was handsome, athletic, gregarious, and had a huge infectious smile that lit up a room as easily as it masked a truly remarkable brain. Shockley may have been brighter, Bob Noyce was surely wiser. Noyce had an aura about him. Shockley, like almost everyone who met Noyce, liked him immediately. "When he came out here to organize Shockley Labs, he whistled and I came," Noyce said. I think Shockley's about 20 years older than Noyce. Signing on, however, wasn't as easy as just showing up. Shockley by now was becoming as obsessed with social science as he was with transistors. Interesting enough, I think he was more obsessed with social science than anything else, and even more than transistors in his life. The last like 20 or 30 years of Shockley's life is what, that's what he worked on.

• 27:07David Senra?

  And that's where he basically alienated everybody around him. Although he would never seem to gather the same level of critical thought, meaning he was able to think critically about transistors, but not social science. He bought into a lot of nonsense. He required everyone he employed to go to New York and take a battery of tests from this firm. It's called McCurry and Hamstra.

• 27:28David Senra?

  So Moore and Neuss went off to New York. They spent a day associating words and interpreting inkblots. And McMurray and Hamstra mailed the results to Shockley. And this is going to give us an indication, like, how valuable was the time, all the money and time and resources you're dedicating to testing all these people? And we're going to see that based on the test results of Gordon Moore and Robert Neuss. With all the assurance of a fortune cookie, McMurray and Hamstra told Shockley that the two future founders of one of the most successful companies in history were very bright, but they would never make very good managers. Shockley hired a brilliant clutch of researchers, about a dozen bright, innovative men, exactly

• 28:10David Senra?

  the kind needed to dominate the semiconductor industry. He couldn't have chosen better. And things began to fall apart almost immediately. Two reasons, both traceable back to Shockley, led to the problems. One was a disastrous decision. For reasons he never explained, Shockley changed his mind. He was going to build silicon devices, but they would not be transistors. Shockley was determined to build what he's calling a four-layer diode. And so this is what I mean about, we're going to see Neuss does the exact opposite. And he's going to fight Shockley on this. He's like, no, no, this doesn't make any sense. We already have a good product. Why are you inventing a product that we're not even sure we can sell? And so what's the problem?

• 28:52David Senra?

  The ideal customer for a four-layer diode was Western Electric, which manufactured the equipment for the Bell system, the Bell Telephone System. AT&T operated a regulated monopoly at the time. They could design and build their own equipment, and it would be as big, and it could be as big as it turned out to be, cost whatever it cost. It did not need elegance or simplicity. Essentially, they've isolated themselves from any kind of market influence, right? So they're trying to invent inside of a vacuum, which normally doesn't work out well. The only criterion was that it worked. And since they had no competition, they could control the market for the equipment. They're still talking about AT&T at this point. AT&T never did anything on the cheap. Shockley spent most of his professional life at Bell Labs, working in that atmosphere. So this is the problem, too. At this point, Shockley's ideas on business are all theory.

• 29:37David Senra?

  But he spent his whole time working for either the government, the Defense Department, or Bell Labs, which had a legal monopoly at this point. He's never been exposed to the market at all. And he's trying to develop things with, just in theory, right? So it says the Shockley diode would have been perfect for the switching devices in the Bell system, he knew, and perhaps for the Pentagon. So he's talking about, okay, maybe I can design a product for the two places I worked. But unless he could prove they were robust to very high standards, even the Bell system wouldn't buy them. They were of very little use to anyone at that time, which is very bizarre because he just had this press conference talking about transistor growth. It's going to be a hundredfold, a thousandfold, winds up being much larger than that. So instead of going into a growing market, he's like, no, no, let me just invent something

• 30:21David Senra?

  that only two companies might actually buy. And I don't even know if I can actually produce the actual product, which he winds up not being able to produce it. So his company, just so you know, I'll tell you a front, never makes a dollar and goes out of business really fast. Nois believed that starting a company with the diode as the primary product was a mistake. The market was limited, and Shockley had no idea how to manufacture them reliably. A new company ought to make its first product something with a broad range of customers and uses, and something within its competence. That's Nois's argument. A new company could learn the culture of manufacturing that way. It would also generate sufficient cash flow to keep it healthy. Then, if it was determined useful, Shockley Semiconductor could invest in the Shockley diode.

• 31:06David Senra?

  The entire senior research staff agreed. But here's the problem. It doesn't matter what you guys think. I'm Shockley. I'm the genius. You guys are just doing the work. All the good ideas come from me. You're not as smart as I am. Why are you giving me feedback? I am a genius. Shockley would not budge. He ordered his staff to get to work designing and building the diodes. Nois argued against the decision. Intentions grew quickly. They did not ease when the company found it couldn't build diodes satisfactory. So they wind up being paper thin, and they break out as soon as they're made. Changing course at the direction of his employees was not how Shockley envisioned running a company. So, his employees clearly have the better idea. Shockley's saying, "No, no, I'm running the company." I'm not... Think about how crazy that sentence is. Changing... Wouldn't you rather just be right?

• 31:51David Senra?

  I don't care where the ideas come from. We're on a team. That's what a company is. It doesn't matter who comes... But this is the same... You see, the reason I spent so much time talking about his bizarre response to two people on his team inventing the transistor or completing the work that were based on a lot of his theories, didn't mean he didn't make contribution, but the fact is, it didn't come from him. So, it's not... This is not how I envisioned how things should be going. Doesn't matter that's how... That reality's not matching up with what's in my mind. I'm gonna go with what's in my mind. That is a very dangerous path to take. By the time... By this time, Shockley considered himself an expert at managing creative institutions and creative people. That's ridiculous. That is a ridiculous statement and ridiculous belief for him to have at this point in his career.

• 32:36David Senra?

  He had spent much of the last five years researching... Yes, you wrote papers about it. You theorized about it. You have no practical experience, dude. What are you doing? He spent much of his last five years researching such places as Bell Labs and Brookhaven National Laboratory for the Pentagon to learn how to nurture and encourage the best people. He wrote several papers on the subject. And this next sentence reveals another fatal flaw in his personality. He tries to distill human behavior down to numbers, to graphs. And humans are much more... It's this impossible task, which is much more complex than that. He... Shockley reduced the process, meaning the managing creative teams, down to logarithms and charts. He was...

• 33:20David Senra?

  This is so ridiculous. Again, he's founding a company, he's supposed to be building a product. What is he doing instead of that? He was working on several of these papers while his company was falling apart. His charts and logarithms did not tell him how to treat or lead the brilliant people he hired. Shockley firmly believed that scientific advancement was the result of a solitary genius, him, or a small group of geniuses who set the stage for an intelligent team of researchers below them to break the necessary ground. This is hilarious. This is a great summary of how Shockley thought about this. A kind of trickle-down creativity. He gave little credit to creativity from below.

• 34:02David Senra?

  The workers are supposed to take direction from above and then progress will ensue. He, of all people, should have known better. The invention of the transistor violated that model, but again, I think he just could not accept. They talked about his lack of self-awareness. The invention of the transistor violated that model. The men responsible worked for him without much direction. And if he had paid attention to history, he would have seen that most innovation comes from motivated individuals, not teams or hierarchical dictates. He had no idea how to manage. Now, that's a hell of a sentence. He had no idea how to manage, and yet, we just saw previously, he considered himself an expert on managing creative teams.

• 34:46David Senra?

  In reality, no idea. In his brain, the best there ever was. This book is worth buying just for this one chapter. If you just read this one chapter and absorb all the ideas and then avoid them, realize, hey, this guy made a litany of mistake after mistake after mistake. I gotta avoid that. It's worth the price of the book. He had some really peculiar ideas about how to motivate people, said Moore. First of all, he was extremely competitive and controversial. If there's two ways of stating things, one of which was controversial and one of which was straightforward, he'd pick the controversial one every time. He just thrived on stimulating controversy. That stimulated conflict, not originality.

• 35:27David Senra?

  He had trouble seeing people. Shockley was often insulting, treating his employees but the way he treated his sons, with no glimmer of sensitivity. His favorite crack, when he thought someone was wrong, was, "Are you sure you have a PhD?" A kind of insecurity had crept into a man formerly so sure of his own intellectual prowess. "The relationships were not good," Noiser called. "Many people threatened to quit." Worst of all, he could not keep himself from believing he was in a competition. Just as he had set himself up against Bratain and Bardine at Bell Labs, he now exhibited the same behavior against his own employees. The very people he hired because they were so bright. He just didn't want them to be as bright as he was.

• 36:09David Senra?

  That his employees could come up with their own ideas did not register with him. Meanwhile, Shockley Semiconductor wasn't doing very well. It had no product to sell and had virtually no income or customers. The chronology of the great mutiny is unclear, so this is where we get the traitorous eight, which is one of the most famous events in Silicon Valley history. This is what happened. So Beckman, Beckman is the guy that owns the company that's bankrolling. He's the owner of the main company that Shockley's like a subsidiary like inside of. And so Beckman was having some of his own problems. His earnings were down and so was his stock. One place spending the most on research proportionally was Shockley Semiconductor. So he's bankrolling all this.

• 36:53David Senra?

  They're trying to develop a product, but they're still on the stage where they don't have no product, so they have no revenue coming in. And so what Beckman is seeing from his vantage point is just money going out and nothing coming in, right? So he says, "Beckman flew to Palo Alto and called a meeting at the company with Shockley and his senior people and other senior people in the room. He explained to them that they needed to keep some eye on expenses." Bill Shockley responded with profound stupidity. "This is the guy that you are literally dependent on. He is paying all of your bills." And again, Shockley doesn't care. He's the lone genius, right? "He stood up and told Beckman in front of the other staff that he found what Beckman had said outrageous and unacceptable." Beck Arnold, calling him by his first name Arnold, he said, "If you don't like

• 37:35David Senra?

  what we're doing up here, I can take this group and get support anyplace else." Then he walked from the room, leaving behind an astonished senior staff and a humiliated benefactor. The next morning, eight or nine of the staff decided it was time to let Beckman know what was really happening in the company. He went to one of their houses and called Beckman. "That's not a serious threat," he told Beckman. Shockley couldn't take the group with him if he wants at this stage of the game, meaning we don't even like this guy. "Things aren't going well up there, are they?" Beckman asked. "No, they are really not." The message from the researchers was simple: Shockley had to go. They were prepared to quit otherwise. They worked out a compromise: Shockley would remain as a senior consultant, but not as a director.

• 38:19David Senra?

  Beckman would send up a professional manager from his company to manage Shockley Semiconductor, and the scientific and technical decisions would be made by a committee of researchers, headed largely by Noyce. Now, keep in mind, this is the group that eventually is going to leave. They're going to start another company called Fairchild Semiconductor, then they're going to leave that company a few years later and start Intel. So, these are extremely talented people that Beckman has working for him right now. But for some reason, he works out this compromise, "Okay, we're going to neutralize Shockley." Then he changes his mind. And once he changes his mind, they're going to dip out. Okay? So, it says Shockley would remain. I just read that part. The scientific-- no, read that part, too. Beckman decided it was time to tell Shockley. So, he meets Shockley for dinner. "I have bad news," he told Shockley. He then outlined what had been happening, that most of his PhDs were on the verge of

• 39:03David Senra?

  leaving, and that Shockley's management was the issue. This is hilarious. Shockley was stunned. Beckman told Shockley of the proposed compromise, essentially giving Shockley a way out of his dilemma. The compromise meant that Shockley would end up a consultant in his own laboratory. The next morning, Shockley went to the lab to confront the rebels. I had the privilege-- so, it's talking-- Gordon Moore is the first person he talks to. He says, "I had the privilege of informing him that, yeah, I was part of the group, and so essentially was everyone else on the senior staff." Shockley got up and left the office. This is a very common tactic of Shockley. When he hears something he doesn't like, just like he did with Beckman, and now he's doing with Moore, he'll do this with his wife, his children, all these other people.

• 39:48David Senra?

  He gets up and leaves like a child. Even Shockley knew that he had failed. That Shockley was surprised is itself surprising. The signs of trouble littered his diaries. Moore warned him of mental stagnation among the researchers. Nois told him that they were spending time on the wrong product. Nois winds up being correct because he built a giant business with the same product that Shockley invented. Yet he did not take any of it seriously. Beckman had a surprise for the rebels. He told the eight that he had decided Shockley would remain in control, but he hopes something could be worked out. Bad idea by Beckman. The rebels, who thought they had a deal, now found out they did not after all. Nois asked to speak to Shockley. Clearly, he and Nois disagreed on major policy issues. Nois told Shockley that the reason they went behind his back

• 40:33David Senra?

  was that they felt they couldn't talk to him. And so Nois decides, hey, I'm not even going to listen to this guy. Nois still convinced that Shockley was chasing the wrong technology. So Nois and his colleagues were working on manufacturing processes for silicon transistors in defiance of Shockley's orders. Essentially, Shockley's semiconductor had split in two with no one in charge. The situation was untenable for the rebels at Shockley's semiconductor. The Shockley family had a propensity for noting catastrophic events in as few words as possible. So in his diary in September 1957, he made the following entry in his notebook. Wednesday, September 18th. Group resigns.

• 41:16David Senra?

  It was the birth notice of Silicon Valley. And now we get into this greatest illustration of what I feel is the main point of the book, that if you just avoid, you do the opposite of what Shockley would do. It's the same thing what Munger was talking about. Just avoid the stupidities and you'll be way farther ahead than most people. And so they just start avoiding the stupidity of Shockley and building their own company. What happened to the eight is not a digression in the story of Bill Shockley. It is the key to understanding the rest of his life. They became known in the mythology of the valley as the traitorous eight. They decided they like working together and believe that Nois had a rational handle on how a semiconductor company ought to act at this stage of the industry. So next week, we're going to talk about this is today, this week, we're avoiding everything that Shockley does.

• 42:01David Senra?

  Next week, we're going to emulate a lot of, we're going to do the opposite. We're going to copy a lot of the good ideas that Bob Nois had. And this is not a new idea. Steve Jobs is all, you know, I've talked about it over and over again. If you read biography of Steve Jobs, Robert Nois plays a role because he was one of the main mentors of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was in his early twenties at the time, starting Apple. Nois at the time was in his 50s, already really successful, and he took Jobs under his wing. And so what Jobs did was learn from the feet of Bob Nois. We're going to do next week through his biography. Okay, so it says, um, they had decided they like working together and believe that Nois had a rational handle on how a semiconductor company ought to act at this stage of the industry. Two men, Bud Coyle and a young Harvard MBA, Arthur Rock. I've talked about Arthur Rock in a number of podcasts.

• 42:44David Senra?

  He was in number 157, The Innovators. He's also, I think in, I think it's number 110. It's on Henry Singleton. He funded, not only did he fund Apple, Intel, and Teledyne. So Arthur Rock's really interesting. I tried to find a biography on him. I couldn't find one, but if I, if you ever come across one, let me know because I'd love to read a biography of him. Arthur Rock flew to California and meet them. Rock and Coyle convinced them that instead of going to work for another company, they ought to form their own. So this is where he hooks them up with this guy named Sherman Fairchild. Again, another fascinating character. I can't find a biography on him either, unfortunately. And they start, they, they basically duplicate what Shockley did by having another company fund.

• 43:25David Senra?

  Then they're going to leave that company later, get funding from Arthur Rock just on Nois's reputation alone. I think they raised money like a day, like immediately. Everybody, I'm pretty sure everybody he called, so yeah, we're in. And that, that's going to be the beginning of Intel. Anyways, on October 4th, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world's first space satellite. So I always go back to that idea that Marc Andreessen has. It's rather counterintuitive and he says, what's most important, uh, what's the most important key to your success of starting a company? And I think it's, is it, is it the team? Is it the product or is it the market? And he says, most people pick the team or the product. And he's just, I'll push, I'll pick the market because in a great market, it pulls, a great market pulls the product out of you.

• 44:08David Senra?

  So Noyce had this idea years before, hey, we're building the wrong product Shockley, build a transistor. And now unbeknownst to him at the time, he's going to be incorrect. And part of this is because this market is going to develop overnight as a reaction to the Sputnik launch and it's going to pull the product out of them. Sputnik turned America's attention towards science and technology in a way that decades of nagging could not. More importantly, Congress insisted that the conquest of space should be a major government priority as a matter of national security. That, what does this mean? That meant that a lot of transistors were going to get sold. Shockley and his company were just as well positioned as Noyce and Moore at Fairchild. But Noyce was selling the right product and Shockley wasn't.

• 44:53David Senra?

  Noyce is going to accomplish all the dreams that Shockley had. And part of the reason he couldn't accomplish those dreams is because he thought he was the smartest person in the room and all good ideas originate from him. Nobody is that smart. Nobody. And the more you read these biographies, the more you study some of the smartest people in history. It's not that they have confidence in themselves, but they're full of doubt, meaning they understand that there's so much more to learn than any one person could ever learn. It's the, only the idiots think they have everything figured out. By December, a year and three months from the split, they had earnings of better than half a million dollars and were making a profit. Shockley Semiconductor had no reliable product and was still not earning money.

• 45:37David Senra?

  Several, the original eight, left either to form their own, they're talking about the traders eight, they were all at Fairchild. So I fast forwarded a little bit there on you. Several of the original eight left either to form their own companies or to start a new adventure. They became known as Fair Children, the companies. So they go out and they start, I think he traces it, I forgot what the exact number was. He traced like 65 or 70 different companies that had direct lineage from the traders eight, which was remarkable. By 1968, Noyce and Moore decided it was time to go and set up their own company for the thrill of it. They raised the capital, based entirely on Noyce's reputation with one telephone call to Arthur Rock. Arthur Rock's, you know, again, he invested in Henry Singleton, who may be the, you

• 46:21David Senra?

  know, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger says he has the single best record in American business history. If you've not listened to, I did two podcasts on him, one on the book, The Outsiders. Maybe like founders 98, someone, just you'll find it, you're smart enough. But if you have not, definitely founders number 110. I would listen to both of them. Because that's a hell of a statement from somebody that Munger and Buffett have studied maybe more different, more entrepreneurs and different businesses than almost anybody else alive, right? And for them to say, hey, this is the guy, this is the most impressive person, is a rather remarkable statement, in my opinion. But anyways, even after Arthur Rock invested in Henry Singleton, Apple, he said, the only investment he ever made

• 47:03David Senra?

  that he was sure was going to work out was Intel. So that gives you an idea of the importance and the impression that Bob Noes, Gordon Moore, and the rest of these people had on him. They called the new company Intel. They lived Bill Shockley's fantasy. They directed the flow of technology and made billions. And that sentence is just, to me, devastating. Because what is the point of learning these things, of reading books, of going out and getting experience, of working hard? It's to change. You're not supposed to be the same person at the beginning of this process, or excuse me, same person at the end of the process that you were at the beginning. And yet Shockley didn't, like, that's why I kind

• 47:43David Senra?

  of take issue with everybody calling him a genius and how smart he was. I don't know. He never learned, he had a one glaring weakness that he never even bothered to try to fix. You can learn how to not be a jerk, how to actually work with other people. And if you absolutely cannot do that, then hire somebody that has those skills. I think Rockefeller talks about, you know, I forgot the exact quote, but it's basically saying that, you know, people's skills is something you can buy. And I hire, like, I spent a lot of money hiring the best managers, because he understood that that building a company is having, is being on a team. And that means you have to be able to work well with others. Noisy's life and Gordon Moore's life is an illustration of, hey, I'm going to constantly

• 48:27David Senra?

  learn and I don't know where this knowledge is going to lead me. All I know is that I'm going to change as a result of that knowledge. Shockley made the fatal mistake that I already have it all figured out. And as a result, they lived Bill Shockley's fantasy. Shockley had a terrible life. Wait till I read some of the, just, he is, he is the best example, I think, I've ever come across as a person that you want to avoid. When I always say, hey, my blueprint for life, if, if you want to know who I'm trying to emulate, who I'm trying to learn from, because we all mimic and we all copy and every, everything that we take in is going to influence us. To think otherwise is a fundamental misunderstanding of what humans are, right? So if I know that I'm going to copy and I'm going to be inspired by other, by other people, then I want to pick, like, I want to make sure that I'm selecting

• 49:09David Senra?

  the very best people possible to, to influence me, right? And so I always say, hey, Ed Thorp, to me, he's the blueprint because he figured out, he didn't, he was very successful, he was smart, he lived an interesting life, but he was a good father, he had good relationships, took care of his health. He realized that living a great life is, is being balanced, right? And not over optimizing from one point, for one aspect here of your life at the detriment to others. Shockley's on the other end of the spectrum. He's, he's the life I want to avoid. I do not want his life. I don't want anything close to it. And I think a lot of people are, would, would arrive at that same conclusion if you, if you read this book or if you study his life. They lived Bill Shockley's fantasy. They directed the flow of technology and made billions. He had a goal, which is weird. Think about, go back

• 49:53David Senra?

  to World War II. His, his job was, we have a goal, can you make sure that the army is being most efficient, is, is taking the most efficient path to that goal, which he wound up solving. But he didn't apply this to his own life. I have a goal, am I taking the most efficient path to that goal? The answer, of course, is no. Maybe he realized it, maybe he didn't, but he never acted on it. It's very bizarre. What is also, I guess I'm running over my point here. What is also surprising is what, is that Shockley did not learn from his experience. He acknowledged that all the rebels had a deep respect for his scientific intelligence, but he concluded that he had spent too little time on human relations. This is, oh my goodness. I can't believe this guy. His impatience and irability were,

• 50:36David Senra?

  were communicated to his employees. And he knew this, right? So he says, "Problems are primarily interpersonal," he wrote in his journal. This is what he does. So everybody leaves, he's still got a company, he's got to restaff them.

• 50:48David Senra?

  Listen to this. Still, he came to the wrong conclusion. Obviously, he had hired the wrong people. So it's not me. It's never me. I'm never at fault here. It's I'm a genius and you... Oh, okay, so you don't respect my genius? You don't think we should build a diode? You're the problem. What he needed was a bright collection of scientists who knew how to take orders. Shockley was off to Europe. There, thanks to an educational system in which professors ruled classrooms like divine right monarchs, he found the kind of employee who would do as they were told. It never occurred to him that if a flock of wild geese are sent off in the wrong direction, it doesn't matter how close the formation is. If an idea came from below, it was rejected automatically.

• 51:33David Senra?

  And to acknowledge that Nois had been right would totally upset Shockley's theory of management.

• 51:40David Senra?

  By April 1960, Beckman had had enough of Shockley and bailed out. This is the end of his company. Now, think about that. I have a theory. I know everything about management. I put that theory into practice. Oh, okay. It didn't work out. So it's not that my theory is wrong, it's I had the wrong people. This is the exact opposite of what Munger said. Destroy your ideas. So if Munger says, "Destroy your ideas", Shockley says, "No, I'm a genius."

• 52:08David Senra?

  The company quickly disappeared, never having made a profit for anyone. And now the author does a great job of summarizing this section. "A genealogy of Silicon Valley showed that virtually every company in the valley could show a line leading directly to someone who worked at and eventually left Fairchild Semiconductor." Everyone from Fairchild originally came from Shockley Semiconductor. Shockley's company was the seed of Silicon Valley. Shockley earned none of the wealth. Shockley earned none of the credit.

• 52:44David Senra?

  So a large part of the rest of the book is Shockley gets into this idea that that white people are the smartest race. He tries to quantify intelligence. He has a winds up having and he alienates everybody with this. He gets in a devastating accident right after his company fails, a car accident. And he winds up, his wife is on crutches for like three years. He's on crutches for like a year. He's very like, and so everybody blames what comes next on that. On maybe, you know, maybe he hit his head, maybe something happened like, why did he spend the rest of his life antagonizing other people and talking about? He said, you know, if you want to make black people smarter, that you need to, he said,

• 53:26David Senra?

  for every like 1% of white ancestry that you can, you can induce into to black people, it makes them increases their IQ by like one percentage point. I mean, he's got some crazy, just batshit crazy ideas. But the problem with that, with blaming it on the car, on the car accident is when he was younger, when he was married, he winds up, his wife wants them to go to dinner with, I think, I can't remember, maybe she's from the Caribbean. I forgot who the person was, but he's 29 years old at the time. And in the letter that, or the journal entry, he talks about that he thought that, that white people were superior to other races. And so that's why even like, it got so bad that, you know, people stopped inviting him to give speeches.

• 54:10David Senra?

  And the whole time, he didn't take the response from other humans as, oh, maybe I'm wrong about this. He actually spent more of his time getting more and more press. And he liked the fact that he was almost like a troll, like a modern day internet troll. So I'm not gonna spend, but I'm not gonna, but I'm not gonna spend any time on that. I want to talk more about, again, what I think is the main lesson, like you gotta develop your people skills. And, you know, some people are more introverted. I'm definitely more introverted. It doesn't mean you can't learn how to deal with people. I always think about what that, that, that lesson that Jeff Bezos, you know, references. He was like nine or 10 years old at the time and his grandfather taught him. They're on like a, a road trip. His grandmother's in the front seat smoking cigarettes.

• 54:53David Senra?

  At the time, it came out, said, hey, you know, let's say every cigarette is whatever, takes seven minutes off your life or something like that. So Jeff Bezos did the calculation, how many cigarettes that his grandmother smokes. And so he does this calculation, jumps to the front and he's like, hey, you've taken nine years off your life. She starts crying. And he was surprised at that reaction. And Jeff's like, I thought I'd be, you know, people are like, oh, look how smart you did all the math. It's a big calculation. His grandfather pulls over and Jeff was scared. He's like, my grandfather was a very patient man. I spent, you know, every summer with him. He's a very wise man, but he never like admonished me and I didn't know what he was going to do. Was he gonna yell at me? Was he gonna smack me? And he just very calmly said, Jeff, one day you're gonna learn that it's harder to be kind than it is to be clever.

• 55:38David Senra?

  There's a lot of wisdom in that. There's a lot of clever people, but you get farther being kind. So let's go back to that lesson that Shockley never learned. He's a terrible person. He's unable to build relationships with other humans, let alone his own children. One day in 1964, Shockley came to New York and dropped in on his son Bill, suggesting the two should spend more time together. Bill had a copy of Mechanical Engineering magazine and assuming it would be something to engage his father, he brought it to Shockley's hotel room. They sat around the hotel room the first day discussing the devices in the magazine. They did it again the second day. By this time, Bill's head was swimming. He asked Shockley if he could take a break from physics and if they could take a break from physics and just go see a movie or have a beer or something.

• 56:23David Senra?

  "Teaching is what I do, and if you want to do it, I'll stick around," Shockley told his son. "If not, I'm going back to California." Shockley left the next day. Bill never saw his father again. Shockley was alive for another 25 years after this. A few years later, he invites this guy named Jensen over, who's doing a lot of work in the same area. He wants to use Jensen's work as a scientific way to prove that of his theories on the fact that whites are the most intelligent race. And we're gonna see more of deficient personality here. Shockley wanted to talk about Jensen's research and his interest in intelligence and sent Jensen some material to read beforehand. Jensen was busy and didn't have time to do more than look at it. Shockley began quizzing him over dinner about one of the papers he sent.

• 57:05David Senra?

  Jensen had to admit that he had not read the paper very carefully. "Is that how you people in behavior of science do your homework?" Shockley said. "No wonder you're in such a mess. I have better things to do than talk to you." He got up from the table and went into his study to work, leaving Jensen and his wife staring at each other. Jensen tells of another incident in which him, his wife, the Shockleys, and a friend from Berkeley and his wife were having dinner. Their friend had expressed an interest in meeting Shockley. During dinner, the friend had the temerity to contradict something Shockley had said, a minor point. With fire in his eyes, Shockley looked at him and said, "What field did you say you were in? What law of nature have you discovered?" So this is like a decade, maybe a decade and a half after his company failed.

• 57:50David Senra?

  That's exactly what he did with his employees. "How dare you contradict? I'm a genius and all good ideas come from me." He also, him and his wife had the bizarre, the bizarre habit of recording every single telephone conversation that they had. And I'm going to read you this section and I'll tell you the simple note and the way I would summarize this. "Every conversation was recorded. Every telephone conversation was then entered into a logbook in chronological order. What time, date, party on the phone, and brief description of the phone call. Every call, no matter how minor, was taped, indexed, and stored. Shockley took the same care with correspondence. Every piece of mail from the Shockleys or to them was saved in a color-coded folder.

• 58:35David Senra?

  Every piece. Every Christmas card. Every discussion over a bill with the cable company. Every letter. Every notice of a magazine subscription lapsing. Every receipt from Federal Express for packages coming or going was recorded. Every piece of paper was indexed and catalogued. The files still contain a note that Emmy, that's his second wife, sent to General Foods about a Jell-O recipe." And when I read that section, I just jotted in a little note to myself. "There is no joy in his life." I mentioned earlier how he's constantly wanted to, for the rest of his life, he's cultivated press attention. He demanded credit, wanted his ideas spread wide and far. One of this, he says something terrible about his own family. I mean, who talks about their children this way in an interview?

• 59:20David Senra?

  "In terms of my own capacities, my children represent a very significant regression." He's saying this in public. "My first wife, their mother, had not as high an academic achievement standing as I had. So not only is he saying, hey, my kids are dumber than me, but it's my wife's fault because I had kids with somebody who was not as good in academics as I was." And just a few more things, a few more examples of, you'd have to categorize him as a broken, miserable person. "They had very few friends left. He had driven the rest away. 'The type of people I am drawn to are those who have similar views as my own,' he said. Yeah, that's a problem."

• 1:00:02David Senra?

  He made constant use of Stanford's two swimming pools, where he was famous for insisting that everyone in the pool was in a race with him, whether they knew it or not. Shockley saw anyone in the pool as competition. He would swim alongside them and started racing them, sometimes taunting them to challenge him. These are strangers. After a while, a few waited until he got out of the pool before getting in to avoid him. His wife is still alive after he dies, and she's working with the author. She lets him have access to Shockley's files. And so he asks her, "Did he ever, in the more than 30 years they were married, tell her he loved her?" "I remember vividly," she says, "March 7, 1984."

• 1:00:44David Senra?

  He told his wife that he loved her one time in 30 years of marriage. And somebody he worked with gives us a great description of his personality. They called his personality "reverse charisma." And I would say that's the opposite of Nois. The way people describe Nois is that he was charismatic. Again, he's the anti-Shockley. Or maybe Shockley's the anti-Nois. So he dies at 79 years old of prostate cancer, and I think this is the most succinct way to demonstrate that you failed at life. Alison read about her father's death in The Washington Post. "Emmy, obeying her husband's last order, did not call her our Shockley sons. Emmy had her husband's body cremated.

• 1:01:29David Senra?

  She did not have a memorial service. It's not clear who would have come." And that is where I'll leave it. To get the full story, you can buy the book, if you want to buy the book, using the link to the show notes, should be supporting the podcast at the same time. I would say just even if you're not interested in his early life, or anything else about Shockley, it's probably worth the price of admission just to read chapter nine, which is really peculiar ideas about how to motivate people. That's the chapter where it goes into great detail about the rise and fall of his company. And again, I think just learning, like Munger says, learning from the experience of others is the trick. All right, that's 165 books down, 1,000 to go. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll talk to you again soon.