#95 Claude Shannon

What I learned from reading A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman ---- [0:25] Claude Shannon trained a powerful intellect on topics of deep interest, and continued to do so beyond the point of short term practicality [5:50] Insulated from opinion of all kinds [9:09] A simple way to describe the impact of information theory [10:39] Resourceful at a young age [11:50] An ordinary childhood [12:41] Follow your natural drift [14:40] Too many facts; too few principles [16:10] His indecisive nature inadvertently helps him [17:00] An important turning point in Shannon’s life [18:30] Vannevar Bush: The first person to see Claude Shannon for who he was [21:00] The results of Claude Shannon’s thesis [23:20] How Claude Shannon worked in his 20s [25:30] The main takeaway from the book: The world isn’t there to be used, but to be played with, manipulated by hand and mind [30:00] Succeeding with no prior knowledge in the specific field [31:20] Working on what naturally interests you is time well spent [32:45] Working at Bell Labs / The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation [36:49] Fire Control / What he worked on during the war [38:15] Claude Shannon’s work on cryptography [40:05] Take many different ideas from unrelated fields [43:35] Leaving Bell Labs for MIT [48:52] Claude Shannon on investing [1:01:15] Shannon’s design for his own funeral ---- 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?

  There is value in rethinking Claude Shannon, but not in the way we'd imagine. Consider him not only as a distant forefather of the digital era, but as one of the great creative generalists of the 20th century. Not solely as someone who laid the foundation of the information age, but as someone who trained a powerful intellect on topics of deep interest and continued to do so beyond the point of short-term practicality. What can we learn from that, Claude Shannon? For one thing, Shannon's body of work is a useful corrective to our era of unprecedented specialization. His work is wide-ranging in the best sense, and perhaps more than any 20th-century intellect of comparable stature,

• 0:44David Senra?

  he resists easy categorization. Was he a mathematician? Yes. Was he an engineer? Yes. Was he a juggler, unicyclist, machinist, futurist, and gambler? Yes. Shannon never acknowledged the contradictions in his fields of interests. He simply went wherever his curiosity led him. So it was entirely consistent for him to jump from information theory to artificial intelligence, to chess, to juggling, to gambling. It simply didn't occur to him that investing his talents in a single field made any sense at all. There were links from field to field, of course, and it goes without saying that Shannon understood

• 1:27David Senra?

  the bridges between his work in information theory and his work on robotics and investing and computer chess. Few have had a better intuitive sense of how the information revolution would fundamentally alter our world in all its aspects. But that sense led Shannon to choose exploration rather than specialization. This indifference to seeming contradictions extended to the way he lived his life. He had the options of worldwide fame, yet he preferred to remain largely anonymous. He wrote path-breaking papers, then unsatisfied with their present state, postponed them indefinitely in favor of more pressing curiosities.

• 2:10David Senra?

  He made himself wealthy by studying markets and the potential of startups, yet he lived with conspicuous modesty. He reached the heights of the ivory tower with all the laurels and professional chairs to prove it, but felt no shame playing games built for children and writing poems on juggling. He was passionately curious, but also, at times, unapologetically lazy. He was among the most productive, honored minds of his era, and yet he gave the appearance that he would chuck it all overboard for the chance to tinker in his gadget room.

• 2:48David Senra?

  Okay, so that's an excerpt from the book, and probably the best few paragraph summary I've found of the life of Claude Shannon. But that comes from the book that I read this week and the one I'm going to talk to you about today, which is "A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age", and it was written by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. So let me go ahead and jump into the book. I don't want to waste any more time. I want to connect this book to the ones, the series I've been doing, going back to Founders, number 88, which started with the Warren Buffett shareholder letters, right? So last week, or two weeks ago, I talked about Ed Thorp. The week before that, I talked about Claude Shannon and Ed Thorp working together. So anything I've covered in the past podcasts, I'm going to try not to cover here, okay?

• 3:32David Senra?

  But I do want to link this one where, when this book came out, because this book's, this is different than usually, I do fairly older books. This is a relatively new book. I think it was published in 2017. When it came out, Ed Thorp, who's still alive, tweeted the following recommendation for this book, and I just want to read it to you real quick. He says, "Claude Shannon was to information and communication what Newton was to physics. By following his curiosity through the playground of science, he discovered mathematical laws that govern our digital age. The Shannon I worked with comes alive in these pages." Okay. And then also, before I jump back into the book, I want, some people are like, "Well, this is founders. Claude Shannon is not really, he didn't, he never founded

• 4:13David Senra?

  a company." Yes, that's true, but he was an investor, to the point where he has, he has a quote in the book where he says, "I make my money on the stock market. I don't make it by proving theorems." So even if he didn't start a company, I do consider investors entrepreneurs. He thinks like an entrepreneur, and I think that is, it's an analogy, it's worth our, like, the way his mind works is valuable for entrepreneurs to understand. So that's why I'm doing a podcast on him. Other than that, he's just a fascinating person, and a lot of us are building companies on top of, you know, the technologies that he helped pioneer. So it's very important. And I, like I covered, when I covered Fortune's Formula, Claude Shannon had one of the best investing records of all time. I think they

• 4:58David Senra?

  compared like 1,025 different investment managers. You know, this is professional managers doing it full-time, hundreds of researchers, they have all kinds of resources, and Shannon's investment returns were better than all than one. And he did it part-time with his wife on an Apple II computer. So that kind of gives you the person we're dealing with here. And I'll talk a little bit more about how he thought about that later on the podcast. First, this podcast may seem like a little bit of like a bunch of non-sequiturs. It's just, there's no easy way to summarize Claude Shannon. So I lean heavily, when I finished reading the book, what I realized is like, we really have to understand him

• 5:40David Senra?

  as a person. And then I feel like the authors did a fantastic job of explaining him as a person. Then, his ideas and his approach to life completely makes sense and it clicks. So I want to start just talking a little bit about his personality. And these are just random quotes I found scattered throughout the book that I collected in one area. So he says, He was a man immune to scientific fashion and insulated from opinion of all kinds, on all subjects, even himself, but especially himself. A man of closed doors and long silences, who thought his best thoughts in Spartan bachelor apartments and empty office buildings. That's actually a really important point. Just like when I talked about last week with Henry Singleton, they have the ability

• 6:23David Senra?

  to eliminate all distractions. They're completely comfortable just being alone with their own thoughts, coming up with their own reasoning, and then just believing in that reasoning. And I think that's especially hard. I'm speaking from my own personal experience, especially hard in today's age, where we have access to all kinds of different, interesting information. And sometimes it's good to just close that off and just be alone with your thoughts for a long period of time. He never argued his ideas. If people didn't believe in them, he ignored those people. He could neither explain himself to others, nor cared to. In his work life, he preferred solitude and kept his professional associations to a minimum. That might be linked to his ability to avoid distractions.

• 7:07David Senra?

  He was terribly, terribly secretive. He was not someone who would listen to other people about what to work on. Now, here's a little short story that gives you further insight into his personality. It says, "Having completed his path-breaking work by the age of 22, he might have spent his remaining decades as a scientific celebrity. Instead, he spent them tinkering. He was super famous, maybe not to the general population, but maybe, yeah, maybe even to the general population, when he was alive, though. He was covered in all kinds of magazines, he was offered all kinds of jobs, speeches that he declined, he met with presidents and was honored. He had just a roomful of awards that he didn't really care about. So that's what I mean by celebrity.

• 7:52David Senra?

  So he might have spent his time, remaining decades as a scientific celebrity. Instead, he spent them tinkering. An electronic maze-solving mouse, an erector-set turtle that walked his house, the first plan for a chess-playing computer, a distant ancestor of IPM's Deep Blue, the first-ever wearable computer, a calculator that operated in Roman numerals, a fleet of customized unicycles, years devoted to the scientific study of jungling."

• 8:21David Senra?

  Rarely has a thinker who devoted his life to the study of communication been so uncommunicative. A man almost entirely written out of history defined by self-promoters, his was a life spent in the pursuit of curious, serious play. That's why the book is called A Mind at Play. It might be one of the, if not the main takeaway from the book, one of the main takeaways from the book. The fact that a life well-lived is one spent doing exactly what you want to do for its own sake. He was that rare scientific genius who was just as content rigging up a juggling robot or a flame-throwing trumpet as he was pioneering digital circuits. It is another great lesson, something I need to apply because sometimes

• 9:05David Senra?

  I take life a little too serious and you have to remember to enjoy it. He says, "He worked with levity and played with gravity. He never acknowledged a distinction between the two." That's just a fantastic sentence. So, he's obviously really famous, or best well-known as the father of and the creator of information theory. Information theory to me is really hard to describe. I've read about, a bunch about it. I still don't understand it. I'm going to give you three different descriptions here that hopefully like fill in the gaps. And by filling in the gaps, you understand why he's so important. So, there's just one sentence summary in the book. It says, "All the advanced signal processing that enables us to send high-speed data was done as an outgrowth of Claude Shannon's work on information theory." This is more of a technical definition.

• 9:49David Senra?

  It says, "Information theory studies the quantification, storage, and communication of information. The field is at the intersection," this is one of the craziest sentences, "the field is at the intersections of mathematics, statistics, computer science, physics, neurobiology, information engineering, and electrical engineering. The theory has also found practical applications in other areas." There's like a huge list, I'm just going to name some of them, including statistical inference, or inference, sorry, natural language processing, cryptography, neurobiology, human vision, and the evolution and function of molecular codes. It's one of the most cited papers of all time. And I'm just going to leave this section with the way Claude Shannon described it.

• 10:31David Senra?

  He, one thing, another thing I learned from him is that he had a unbelievable belief and talent to getting to like the simplicity, like the heart of simplicity of an issue. So this is, you'll see this, he says Claude Shannon described it, meaning information theory, as a technical tool for communication engineers. All right, so I want to go a little bit into his young, into his early life. He's really resourceful, like almost every single, not almost, every single person I've covered on this podcast has that trait. They are resourceful. So he's resourceful at a young age. Talks about, he grew up in this tiny, tiny town in Michigan, and it says, giving a description of the scenery, he says, "Barbed wire runs along the roads and between the pastures,

• 11:16David Senra?

  and Claude Shannon walks the fences, one half-mile stretch of fence especially." This is, this is his one half-mile stretch of fence outside of his house. "Claude's stretch is electric. He charged it himself. He hooked up dry cell batteries at each end and spliced spare wire into any gaps to run the current unbroken." He's like eight or nine, maybe 10 years old, he's doing this. "Insulation was anything at hand: leather straps, glass bottlenecks, corn cobs, inner tube pieces. Keypads," now, why is he doing this? "Keypads at each end, one at his house and the other at his friend's house, half a mile away, made it a private barbed-wire telegraph."

• 12:00David Senra?

  One thing to note is, you know, he didn't, there's a lot of people that, that go on to achieve great things and they have a lot of adversity, usually just crazy things happen to them. Shannon had a pretty ordinary childhood, so the authors are going to talk about that here. He says, "Biographies of geniuses often open as stories of overzealous parenting. We think of Beethoven's father beating his son into the shape of a prodigy, or John Stuart Mill's father drilling his son in Greek at the age of three, or Norbert Wiener's father declaring to the world that he could turn anything, even a broomstick, into a genius with enough time and discipline. Compared to those childhoods, Shannon's was ordinary. There was no indication of overbearing parental pressure.

• 12:44David Senra?

  And if he showed any early signs of genius, they were not memorable enough to have been written down."

• 12:51David Senra?

  Something else I learned from Claude Shannon, and I'm going to put it in the words of Charlie Munger, is the value in following your natural drift. So let me just read this part from the book, and then I'll explain how it relates to Munger's opinion on this. He says, reflecting on his education with the benefit of hindsight, Shannon would say that his interest in mathematics had a simple source. It just came easily to him. This is a direct quote from Shannon. He says, "I think one tends to get into work that you find easy for yourself." And that's a reoccurring theme throughout the book. And it reminds me of when Charlie Munger gave a commencement address. So he went to law school. By some accounts, he was one of the smartest people that ever went to Harvard Law School. And yet, he didn't work as an attorney. And so he's giving a commencement address to law graduates at USC about a decade back.

• 13:36David Senra?

  And he says something really interesting. So he says, he was given this advice, and he says, "Charlie tells the story of a friend who worked at a law firm. He knew too much, and it showed. He was told by his bosses, 'Your duty is to behave in such a way that the client thinks he's the smartest person in the world. Then you make your senior partner think he's the smartest person in the world, and then so on and so forth.'" Right? So basically, don't shine too bright. Give the credit to other people of your ideas. Knowing Charlie Munger, there's just zero chance he's going to do that. He says, "I didn't do this. I always obeyed the drift of my nature. If other people didn't like it, well, I don't need to be adored by everybody." That sentence could easily have been said by Claude Shannon. He was pretty indifferent.

• 14:21David Senra?

  He's just going to do what he naturally wanted to do, and if he didn't like it, too bad. I also think that's probably a key in getting to the end of your life and being satisfied. I think when you study the regrets of people near the end of their life, they're saying, "You know, I let other people's opinion influence my decisions too much." And by that time, it's too late, unfortunately. Another insight into the personality and mind of Claude Shannon, which might seem...

• 14:51David Senra?

  Like, might not, it might not make any sense the first time you hear this, but he was not, he would reject certain fields of study if it had too many facts and not enough principles. So Shannon, like Munger, loved to build models and he liked to take, Munger would say, you know, why am I just going to master the best ideas in my field? I'd rather look in other fields and see what the other people have mastered and then combine the two. Shannon very much did the same thing. And so here's Shannon on the fact that he didn't like fields where there's too many facts. He says, "He loved science but disliked facts." Or rather, "He disliked the kinds of facts that you couldn't bring under a rule and abstract his way out of. Chemistry in particular tested his patience. He says, "It always seemed a little dull to me.

• 15:34David Senra?

  Too many isolated facts and too few general principles for my taste." Something else to know about Claude Shannon is, you know, everybody has people they look up to. Claude Shannon was no different. The person he idolized the most was Thomas Edison, which kind of makes Shannon's lifelong desire to spend most of his time tinkering, makes a lot of sense because Edison was known for that as well. Shannon was also very indecisive. And, you know, sometimes that's portrayed as like a negative trait. I definitely feel I'm indecisive at times and I don't like that. Shannon winds up inadvertently helping him later in life. So at this, the part I'm about to read to you, he's in college at the University of

• 16:15David Senra?

  Michigan and he can't decide whether he wants to major in mathematics or engineering, so he just does both. And he says, "By the time Shannon began his dual degrees in mathematics and engineering, a generation later, the two curriculum had largely merged into one. That appealed to Shannon, who admitted that his choice of a dual degree wasn't part of a grand design for his career. It was simply adolescent indecision. I wasn't really quite sure what I liked best," he recalled. Shannon's variety of indecision, which he never entirely outgrew, no, that's for sure, would prove crucial to his later work. Someone content to build things might have been happy with a single degree in engineering. Someone drawn more to theory might have been satisfied with studying math alone.

• 16:56David Senra?

  Shannon, mathematically and mechanically inclined, could not make up his mind, but the result left him trained in two fields that would prove essential to his later success." So this winds up directly leading to one of the most, I'm going to tell you about one, I would say, I'm going to say it's the most important point in Shannon's life. And let me just get to it right now. So he's in dual, not only is he, he's about to complete both degrees, but he's doing a lot of work in his own time. And he starts publishing papers and that gets him, winds up leading to a job, which, which is what I consider the most important turning point in Shannon's life. It says, "His first publications tell us something about his growing ambition.

• 17:39David Senra?

  Taking time out from the usual burdens of classes and college life to study these problems, work out the answers and prepare them for publication suggests that he already envisioned something other for himself than the family furniture business. His something other would begin with a typed postcard tacked to an engineering bulletin board. It was an invitation to come east and help build a mechanical brain. Shannon noticed it in the spring of 1936, that's where we were in the story, just as he was considering what was to come after his undergraduate days was over. So he didn't know what he was going to do. Lucky, he sees this job offer and says, this is the job. To become a master's student and assistant on the differential analyzer at MIT.

• 18:21David Senra?

  It was tailor-made for a young man who could find equal joy in equations and construction, thinking and building. Also, somebody that would be comfortable just sitting in a room by himself with a machine. I pushed hard for that job and I got it. That was one of the luckiest things of my life, Shannon later said. Luck may have played a role, but the application's acceptance was also a testament to the keen eye of a figure who would shape the rest of Shannon's life and the course of American science." So this is where we're introduced, the person that built the differential analyzer, right? One of the most important figures in American history and the lifelong mentor for Shannon, Vannevar Bush. Now, I didn't know who this guy was.

• 19:06David Senra?

  So you might be asking, who is Van Bush? I'm just going to give you, he's also, when you realize, after I read this to you, realize he's, he has to be a future episode of Founders. Who is Van Bush? Van Bush is a man who would preside over a custom-made brain the size of a room. He'd counsel presidents. He'd direct the nation's scientists through World War II. He was called the man who may win or lose the war and the general of physics. And least and not least among these accomplishments would be this. He'd be the first to see Claude Shannon for who he was. He's also the co-founder of Raytheon, which is a gigantic defense contractor that still exists to this day. I just looked it up.

• 19:47David Senra?

  I think they were doing like 20 to 30 billion in revenue as of 2018. So I mentioned the word differential analyzer, which is what Shannon's going to be working on. You probably want to know what that is. It was a brain the size of a room, a metal calculus machine that could whir away at a problem for days and nights on end before ground to a halt. One problem, which measured the effects of the Earth's magnetic field on cosmic rays, took 30 weeks of spinning gears. But when it was done, the differential analyzer had solved by brute force equations so complex that even trying to attack them with human brain power would have been pointless.

• 20:28David Senra?

  Another way to think about that is this was a computer before the digital revolution. It was analog computers, like a crass way of describing it. There's actually pictures in the book of it. I'm kind of embarrassed by my initial thought when I looked at it. Looks like a really long, like, you ever seen a foosball table? It looks like one that's the size of a room with a bunch of cabinets on the side. I was kind of embarrassed. That's the first thought that popped to my mind. Okay. So around this time, this work on the differential analyzer is what causes him to write the paper, which becomes the foundation for information theory. And this is kind of the result of this time in his life.

• 21:08David Senra?

  And I'm giving like a very, very brief, like, this is not at all a complete thought here. It's very brief. So you kind of understand I can move the story along. So he says, "Here was Shannon shut in a room with a machine built to automate thought." Okay, so this is an experience, experience he's going through as a byproduct of his day job and how it relates to own thoughts and ideas that eventually turn into information theory. "In the midst of his work, he came to understand that he knew another way of automating thought." Remember, he reasons by analogy a lot. That's how he thought. And then he would think in abstractions. "One that would ultimately prove far more powerful than the analog machine." So he's essentially turning analog computations to digital computation. Okay? Logic, and this is another idea from Shannon

• 21:53David Senra?

  that I'd never even thought about. Listen to this part. "Logic, just like a machine, was a tool for democratizing force. Built with enough precision and skill, it could multiply the power of the gifted and the average alike." So we understand this idea of the bicycle, the computer being a bicycle for the mind, right? Popularized by Steve Jobs back in the 1970s. I never thought of logic, which Shannon's point is like the underlying result of what you're building computation on, even if it didn't have a machine. Getting your thought process and your brain used to

• 22:33David Senra?

  using logic as a tool, and that being analogous to a machine that could democratize force, meaning that if you have somebody that's not adept at using logic and they're able to be trained to, that actually winds up multiplying the power of their skills. It's like adding leverage to it. It's very interesting. I had never thought about that before, so I wanted to include that part. Maybe it makes sense to you, too. "Less than a decade after Shannon's paper, the great analog machine," this is the result of his thesis, by the way, "the differential analyzer was effectively obsolete, replaced by digital computers that could do its work literally a thousand times faster, answering questions in real time. The medium was now vacuum tubes.

• 23:17David Senra?

  These are early computers, not switches. But the design was a direct descendant of Shannon's discovery." Okay, so that's the results of his work, but I thought it was very interesting. Actually, I want to tell you how he worked in this process. So this is especially how he worked in his 20s. He was a tinkerer to the end of his life, and he worked with his hands long after he had any need to. But unlike other tinkers, he had a way of getting behind things. He loved the objects under his hand, right up to the point when he abstracted his way past them. Switches weren't just switches, remember his time working with the differential analyzer, but a metaphor for math. There had been legions of jugglers and unicycle riders in the world,

• 24:01David Senra?

  but few were as compelled as Shannon would be to fit those activities into equations. Most important of all, he would abstract his way past all human communication to the structure and form that every message holds in common. In all these endeavors, he was distinguished less by quantitative horsepower than by his mastery of model making, the reduction of big problems to their essential core. And I think this is why entrepreneurs should actually study Claude Shannon, because that's what you're trying to do. If you're building a business, you're engaged in a complex adaptive system. It's very difficult, very complex, it's unpredictable. And the reason a lot of people that have in the past have founded companies recommend that if you're going to build a business,

• 24:45David Senra?

  like to understand the benefits of building models inside your head is because it helps do what Shannon's doing here in other domains. It's reducing big problems to their essential core. Shannon's work at 21 was a window of all the work he had left. In his 20s, his most productive years, he took his abstractions to the point of deep withdrawal and almost crippling shyness. And in this deep withdrawal is when he writes the paper that that information theory is based on. It's called a mathematical theory on communication or of communication. And then the very next year, it's changed to the mathematical theory of communication. And what was interesting about that is he just kind of, he had given small hints of what he was working on.

• 25:28David Senra?

  But in the book, they just talk about like, he just basically dropped the paper, publishes it in a technical journal. And people are like, whoa, what the hell, where did this come from? It came out of nowhere. All right, so the note I left myself is this might be the main takeaway from the book. And it's the last sentence I'm going to read to you. So it says, "What's your secret to remaining so carefree?" An interviewer asked Shannon towards the end of his life. Shannon answered, "I do what comes naturally, and usefulness is not my main goal." That's a very interesting sentence, right? "I keep asking myself, how would you do this? Is it possible to make a machine do that? Can you prove this theorem?" So he just like, it comes from curiosity, right? And this is the main point.

• 26:10David Senra?

  "For an abstracted man at his most content, the world isn't there to be used, but to be played with, manipulated by hand and mind."

• 26:23David Senra?

  I love that idea.

• 26:27David Senra?

  There's another interesting thing. So while he's in school, Shannon learns how to fly, right? Wants to become a pilot. Then the flight instructor, this is one of the craziest things in the book. The flight instructor tries to get him to stop because they didn't. He thought Shannon was a genius and didn't want Shannon to die. So he writes a letter. The flight instructor writes a letter to the president at MIT. And he says, I'm convinced that Shannon is not only unusual, but is in fact a near genius of most unusual promise. With the president's permission, he would ban Shannon from the cockpit. Such a life wasn't worth risking in a crash. And the president sent a letter, a letter back that was more level headed. He said, somehow I doubt the advisability of urging a young man

• 27:09David Senra?

  to refrain from flying or arbitrary to take away the opportunity, to take this opportunity away from him on the grounds of his being intellectually superior. I don't, I doubt whether it'd be good for his development. So he's, he's allowed to fly. I just thought it was funny. But the flight instructor is not the only one to think of Shannon as like a universal genius, right? Van Bush thinks about this and he, remember I mentioned earlier, he has a huge influence on, on Shannon's life. Says, Bush believed Shannon to be an almost universal genius whose talents might be channeled in any direction. And Shannon had a lot of respect for Van Bush. So he kind of ignored everybody else to some degree, but he listened to, and especially when he was a young man, basically followed what Bush thought he should do.

• 27:53David Senra?

  And the reason I included that one sentence is because he shows that, that ability when he starts studying stock market. So if you remember Fortune formula, he said, okay, let, he, he just got done saying, he just, he does things for curiosity's sake. So he thought, well, here's an idea. If you present the problem, here's a problem I have. How can I make the most amount of money in the shortest amount of time? And that is what, that one prompt sent Shannon out into figuring out. So he realized, okay, well, the stock market, that might be a mathematical problem. He winds up studying that. So to, to Bush's point where it's like almost universal genius, like, I don't think you have to be a genius to do this stuff. I mean, I'm not Shannon, I definitely think it was. But I think that this also applies to everybody.

• 28:38David Senra?

  You might not be able to master a bunch of different domains. But if you're really curious and driven, you can learn anything that you want to. And Shannon proved that. Like, the idea of referencing what I just told you before, like, later in his life, he doesn't do this till way later, he gets interested in the stock market and companies and creating wealth. And he winds up doing it part-time better than the vast majority of people that do it full-time. It's really interesting.

• 29:02David Senra?

  So I'm going to continue this whole Bush and Shannon thought here for a few minutes because there's a lot of interesting questions that are unanswered for me. And so this section I'm going to read to you is like, my note of myself is like, I wonder if Shannon was influenced by Bush's thought here, or did he already lean this way? And this is the idea that Shannon rejected, just like Bush did, specialization. It was a matter of deep conviction for Bush that specialization was the death of genius. This has also been a theme in the last few people that I've talked about on the podcast, whether it's Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Ed Thorp, Henry Singleton. They were not specialists. They applied their talents in many different domains, just like Claude Shannon does. And so now this is Bush quote on this.

• 29:47David Senra?

  He says, "In these days, when there's a tendency to specialize so closely," he also didn't specialize, if you look at his wide, his various accomplishments. "It is well for us to be reminded that the possibilities of being at once broad and deep did not pass with DaVinci or Benjamin Franklin." It's like, those aren't the, you know, they have, DaVinci and Franklin had a bunch of different interests and they were able to master it. Like, why can't we? Like, let's not over-specialize, is what Bush is saying. And certainly Shannon's life is like an illustration of that. So I don't know if Shannon came up with that on his own, or if he may have been influenced by thinking of Bush. Now- I want to talk to you about this part in Shannon's life, which is weird. Shannon spent many years studying genetics. And that's because Bush wanted Shannon to study genetics.

• 30:32David Senra?

  And this is the result. It says, "The project had been Bush's initiative and the hypothesis was his hypothesis. The subject, a 23-year-old genius, working in a scientific field in which he has no training, in which he did not even know what the word meant, what the words meant. He didn't know any of the vocabulary in genetics. He had to learn that, can produce original findings in less than one year. Conclusion: Confirmed mostly." So he sets him out to study genetics, like, "Hey, just tell me what you can learn about this and do you have any unique insights?" And Shannon winds up publishing several papers and he actually does lead, he did have contributions for any short time studying genetics. So that's what Bush wanted to see.

• 31:16David Senra?

  It's like, okay, this guy can, if I direct his talents on any problem, he's going to be able to figure it out. And the reason I bring this up is because you see this in entrepreneurship a lot. Someone succeeding in starting a business with no prior knowledge in that specific field. So there's some lessons there for us. This next section, let me just read this to you. "Shannon would be adamant on the point for the rest of his life that after the effort of discovery, which he's doing for his own sake, the effort of communication, which is the sake of others, was secondary by far. Once he had solved a problem to his own satisfaction, and after that, as far as he was concerned, it was enough." Shannon explained later. "After I had found the answers, it was always painful to write them up or publish them."

• 32:01David Senra?

  But in his, what he's working at Bell Labs, working at MIT, that's how you get a claim. Shannon didn't care about a claim. I mean, he got it anyways, but he didn't go out and seek it. So lesson I took away from this was like, working on what naturally interests you is time well spent. And I think if you can align your work with your interests, you're just going to get more out of life. And I think like, the whole point is Shannon enjoyed his life. Like, he did go through, I'm gonna talk about like, he had a dark depressive period of time, so it's not like his life was free from struggle. But other than that, like, he just, he enjoyed his time here. And I think so few people get to the end of their life actually enjoying it. So, it's something that I was constantly reminded when I was reading this book. Oh, Shannon's Productivity Hack, these are just gonna be some, I have some random ideas

• 32:46David Senra?

  in here I'm gonna share with you. This is one of them. This is a quote from him. "I've been working on three different ideas simultaneously, and strangely enough, it seems a more productive method than sticking to one problem." After graduate work, he goes to work at Bell Labs. I might do a, there's a book on Bell Labs, I think it's called Idea Factory, that might, I might turn that into, I might read the book and discuss it on Founders. Because there's just so many people that came out of there. And here's a description of Bell Labs, and you'll see why I think it might be worth us, worth our time to study and learn about. "He was headed to what was perhaps the world's foremost technology company, and the home," so he graduates from MIT, and now he's gonna go to work at Bell Labs. "the home of the best communication lines in America.

• 33:30David Senra?

  The goal of Bell Labs wasn't simply clearer and faster phone calls. The Labs were tasked with dreaming up the future in which every form of communication would be a machine-aided endeavor." Isn't it interesting that that's actually the world we live in now? Like, they were successful in that. "In the span of a few decades, Bell researchers engineered the first-ever long-distance phone call, synchronized the sounds and images in movies, and demonstrated some of the earliest fax and television systems. During the war, they improved radar, sonar, and the bazooka. And they created a secure phone line connecting Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill." That's Sig Sali, and that's what Shannon worked on too, I'll talk about that in a little bit. "They would invent touch-tone dialing and the solar battery cell.

• 34:13David Senra?

  And they would pioneer the communication satellite and the transistor, which is the foundation of modern electronics." And this is what Shannon liked. He worked at Bell Labs for 15 years. And this is part of the reason why. "I had the freedom to do anything I wanted from almost the day I started. They never told me what to work on." So if you, we always think about this question, like, there's a lot of different reasons people wanna build their own business to become entrepreneurs. And in my experience, I think, a lot of people think it's for money, some people think it's for fame, which is weird because most entrepreneurs are, 99.99% of them are anonymous. So I definitely disagree with that. But I think that if you had to isolate one reason, it's that, it's freedom. You can also say another word is like control of your own life.

• 34:57David Senra?

  Like, most people that do this is like they want the freedom to choose what they work on. They want the freedom to like say when they work. They don't want other people telling them what to do. Shannon hated, and that's his entire life, and you'll see that in some other decisions he makes in his life, is optimizing for freedom. Around this time, he's in the age where he could get drafted, and that terrified him. He was a level 10 introvert. So if 1 is a super extrovert and 10 is a super introvert, I would put Shannon on level 10. You'll see this here, and this is also how he got out of the draft. This is him talking. He says, "If you can make yourself more useful somewhere else, you won't get into the army. That seemed to me a wise move." A friend noted that Shannon, an introvert, worried not only about the dangers of overseas

• 35:42David Senra?

  deployment, but also the close quarters of army life. I think he did the work with that fear in mind, that he might have to go into the army, which means being with lots of people, being around lots of people, which he couldn't stand. He was phobic about crowds and people he didn't know. He would, like any mathematician of his generation, put his mind, rather than his body, to work on the country's behalf. You see this later on in his life. He eventually leaves Bell Labs and goes to become a professor at MIT, and yet, he's rarely there. He does most of his work at home. They say like, he's a very nice person, but he'll never engage in conversation. You get to come to him and start a conversation, and he'll reciprocate, he'll talk to you. But other than that, he preferred solitude.

• 36:27David Senra?

  And his main collaborator in his life was his second wife. All right, so how did he put his mind to work for the country during World War II? They had a bunch of hard problems to solve. Remember, it was unclear. If you study World War II, like, you know, the Nazis were just kind of running roughshod over everybody, dominating everybody. And so there was a lot of like, activity before America officially declared for the war was largely trying to prepare for what they saw as like, a very formidable adversary. And so one of the things that he helped contribute to was this idea of fire control. And so let me tell you what fire control is. He says, "Fire control was essentially the study of hitting moving targets.

• 37:12David Senra?

  The targets were anything and everything the enemy could hurl through the air to cause damage. Planes, rockets, ballistics. They essentially turned this into a math problem." So he says, "Imagine a gun firing a single shot at a target. Now imagine that the gun is the size of a two-story house, that it's placed on a moving Navy ship in the middle of an ocean, and it's trying to shoot down an enemy fighter moving at 350 miles per hour." That was a rough description of the challenge of fire control. Now, what's interesting to this, he does a lot of great work for the war, but he's doing this while he's broken personally. He gets divorced, and he's going through a very dark and depressive time in his life.

• 37:52David Senra?

  He says, "The accounts of that time depict a man on edge, and understandably so. The pressure of the war, combined with the collapse of his marriage, had left Shannon shattered. It looked like he might be, he might completely crack up nervously and emotionally." This is also, he's being forced to work on teams, which he doesn't like. He says, "This is, the whole atmosphere left a bitter taste in his mouth. The secrecy, the intensity, the drudgery, the obligatory teamwork, all of it seemed to have gotten to him in a deeply personal way." In addition to fire control, he's, he made a lot of advancements in cryptography, which is what Six Alley was. It's the first, winds up being the first way to securely place a call across the Atlantic Ocean.

• 38:35David Senra?

  And during this time, I'm not going to talk about it today, but in the book, he strikes up a friendship with Alan Turing as well. So it talks about, "Cryptography was the war's white noise. It was ubiquitous, and yet only those paying closest attention could pick it up." It was one of the least understood components of the war machine compared to, say, the nuclear bomb, which is a visible, white-hot expression of the power of physics. The products of cryptographic analysts, excuse me, were arcane and mysterious and kept classified for a generation or more. So that's what he's working on. I talked a little bit about Six Sally on the podcast I did on Fortune's Formula. I'm not gonna

• 39:17David Senra?

  try not to repeat myself here, but it says Six Sally looked like a character. This is what it actually physically looks like. "It was a caricature of a mid-century computer. It occupied an entire room, demanded round-the-clock air conditioning, and produced small outputs for the enormous inputs it required. None of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was, for the first time, secret speech could cross the Atlantic." So that's where before, there's been many times where the Germans were able to tap into conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt and then get strategic valuable information that helped them on the battlefield. So Shannon played a role. It was like 30-something other people working on the project, but he played a role in stopping that.

• 39:58David Senra?

  Now, the reason I bring up his time in cryptography is because he has a reoccurring theme here that I think it's important for us to understand. He's able to take many different ideas from unrelated fields and see how they can relate. And he seems to do this over and over and over again. And essentially, all the experiences and stuff he studies, like, nothing is wasted. He uses them. He breaks them into analogies and bits and reconstitutes them later on in life, which I think is fascinating. "Shannon's cryptographic work was released into the dark of the intelligence apparatus, a world of classifications and secrecy, where the work's reception was concealed even from

• 40:37David Senra?

  its author. Of this world, Shannon would say, they are not a very talkative bunch. You could say that they are the most secretive bunch of people in the world." Now, so that's interesting, but this is the most important part. He says, "The work's true importance in the end was not in the creation of an invisible code, but rather the way its suppressed insights ultimately resurfaced at the heart of Shannon's revolutionary theory of information." And he says on this, "It was a great flow of ideas from one to the other, back and forth." So that was the main benefit he got from working on that.

• 41:18David Senra?

  So, well, let me just read this. So now this is really about the important, like, you know, everybody's going to be influenced by somebody, right? So Shannon was influenced by this person named Ralph Hartley. And it says, "Reading the work of Ralph Hartley, Shannon said, was an important influence on my life, not simply in the research of his studies. Shannon spent much of his life working with the conceptual tools that Hartley built. And for the better part of his life, much of his public identity, Claude Shannon, father of information theory, was bound up in having been the one who extended Hartley's idea far beyond what Hartley or anyone else could have imagined." So what does that mean? It means that Claude Shannon didn't invent information theory from whole cloth. He extended the work of the people that inspired him before.

• 42:03David Senra?

  Now, we've seen this a lot. We just saw this last week. Like, I'm thinking all these ideas that I'm reading from Warren Buffett come from Warren Buffett, then you realize, oh, my God, he got these ideas from Henry Singleton. Same thing. I thought all these, I'm reading all these biographies on Steve Jobs, like, wow, that's a good idea. Then I read a biography of Edwin Land, I'm like, oh, wait, Jobs got that from Land. And then same thing, I learned from Jeff Bezos, and then I realized, oh, he got that idea from Sam Walton and Jim Sinigal. So the point is, they all take ideas from the past and extend them in the future. And then by doing that, you get different results. So I think it's a really interesting point. This is another reminder to follow your natural drift. Shannon made a principle of indifference. It was central to a career in which he chases instincts, often at the expense of more prestigious

• 42:46David Senra?

  or more financially valuable options. This is something we saw Ed Thorp do as well. He's just like, I turned down business opportunities I was certain to make a lot of money on because, one, I already had more money I could spend, and, two, I valued other things in life, like spending time with family and learning. So we're seeing the same thing with Shannon here. "Unlike many scientists who parlayed successful research careers into lives as public intellectuals, he did not seem to consider using his growing standing within the world of science as an opportunity to expand his network outside of it. If anything, he closed himself off further, ignoring letters, colleagues, and projects, and spending his time and attention absorbed by the puzzles that interested him the most." This is him following his natural drift. He was just literally following his natural curiosity. And then he says something, this throwaway quote, which I think is one of the most important

• 43:30David Senra?

  quotes in the entire book. He says, I think the history of science has shown that valuable consequences often proliferate from simple curiosity. I love that sentence. So skipping ahead in the story, he winds up leaving Bell Labs for MIT. And so this is also an understanding of like, why, why would he do that? And he's got a couple of good advice, like things that we could take away from our own lives here. When an offer came to be a professor at MIT, it was hard to decline. For, for all the pull of university life, Shannon struggled with his choice. He's got two great options. Stay in rural New Jersey at Bell Labs or go move to Massachusetts and work at MIT. Bell Labs had been his professional home for more than 15 years.

• 44:15David Senra?

  It had been the site of his most productive years as a researcher and thinker. It had afforded him unheard of intellectual freedom and supported him. Bell Labs' somewhat remote location in New Jersey was a complicating factor in its own right. So he's talking about there's, there's a good to that, but also a negative. He's going to tell us why, why that's the case here. "The essential seclusion and isolation of Bell Labs had both advantages and disadvantages." That's a direct quote from Shannon. "It eliminates a good many time wasting visitors, but at the same time prevents many interesting contacts." She's going back and forth, making this decision. He continues, "Foreign visitors often spend a day at Bell Labs, but they spend six months at MIT. This gives me opportunities for real interchanges of ideas.

• 44:58David Senra?

  In the end, the general freedom in academic life, in my view, is one of the most important features." See him optimizing for freedom again? "The long vacations are exceedingly attractive and is also the general feeling of freedom in the hours of work." There was also one decisive factor pulling Shannon to MIT. A certain restlessness on Shannon's part after spending more than a decade and a half in a single institution. This is what I mean. I think this is actually really important. "Having spent 15 years at Bell Labs," Shannon writes, "I felt myself getting a little stale and unproductive, and a change of scene and of colleagues is very stimulating." That's why you might, if you're feeling that you're in a stale environment with the ideas or maybe just your personal dissatisfaction, like you might want to change things up,

• 45:41David Senra?

  like your physical, like where you physically are has an impact on that. And this is the impact. The change of scenery worked. Now we start to see his mind in full bloom. What resulted were some of Shannon's most creative and whimsical endeavors. There was the trumpet that shot fire out of its bell when played. The handmade unicycles in every permutation. A unicycle with no seat, a unicycle with no pedals, a unicycle built for two. There was the chairlift that took surprise guests down from the house's porch to the edge of the lake. This is all the stuff he's building. A machine that solved Rubik's cubes. Chess-playing machines. Handmade robots, big and small. Shannon's mind, it seemed, was finally free to bring its most outline-ish ideas to mechanical life.

• 46:28David Senra?

  And this is another thing, I think, a lesson we need to apply in our own lives. His activities were autotelic. And the definition of autotelic is an activity or creative work having an end or purpose of itself. And the reason I know that word is because I originally started this podcast. It wasn't called Founder's Podcast. If you look at the description, like the link when you share it from like Apple Podcasts, in the Apple Podcast directory, it's, the name of the podcast was autotelic first. Because at the time, I had a newsletter that dealt with book recommendations and stuff. I was learning from books, it's kind of like an early, like predecessor to what I'm doing now. And I started, some of the early, some of the people listening to Founders now were on that list.

• 47:13David Senra?

  So I jump-started this podcast because I already had, you know, several thousands of people on that list. Said, hey, I'm gonna start doing a podcast where I talk about books I read and like what I learned from them. And I was doing just books from, it wasn't just biographies at the time. So I really liked the idea of like having something in your life. And hopefully, it's the work you're doing too. I mean, that's like the perfect, like, that'd be like the best option. But just understanding, like, there's certain things you're doing in your life that you just do. To do it, like you're not, you might not be doing it for money, right? You're just, because you enjoy doing them. And so Shannon has that, and he talks about it. He says, "Looking back, Shannon summed it all up as happily pointless.

• 47:57David Senra?

  I've always pursued my interests without much regard to financial value or value to the world. I spend lots of time on totally useless things." Tellingly, he made no distinction between his interest in information and his interest in unicycles. They were all moves in the same game." I think that's more of how we actually experience life. Like, we don't have these hard separations from a lot of things in life. Because I don't think that's how we experience it. We just, it's just one vast experience over however long you have on this earth. And same person that could be, like in Shannon's case, like he, doesn't mean he was an unserious person, like, he made very important breakthroughs, scientific breakthroughs, but at the same

• 48:42David Senra?

  time, he saw no difference between, he did that because it interested him. Just like, looking at the act of juggling as a mathematical problem interested him. Just like when he went to Las Vegas with Ed Thorp to try, with the first handmade computer, because it just interested him. Could I build a computer that beats roulette? So again, I think that's like the main takeaway from Shannon, and like, hopefully, the influence he has on all of us moving forward. Now, I'm going to talk a little bit about, this is his daughter on the family hobby of investing. So, he was one of the most successful investors ever, but he's also unserious about it, in the sense that he thought it was fun, like, it was playful, it was a problem he had to solve, it was curious, he was drawn to it. It says, "In the 1960s and 70s, Betty and Claude did play the markets obsessively. The process became a family affair."

• 49:25David Senra?

  This is her, um, his daughter Peggy talking. "Much of the conversation around the home would be of the stock market. Much of my parents' focus was on what the market was doing. They taught me to read the Wall Street Journal and the stocks very early. It was a great way to engage kids. They eventually set up a small personal computer to carry the quotes during the day, and then check again at the end of the day. So there were computer printouts floating around the house with stock quotes on them." And again, tying this all together, "His interest in money resembled his other passions." That's what I mean, there's like no separation. "He was not out to accrue wealth for wealth's shakes, nor," but he did die a very wealthy man, "nor did he have any burning desire to own the finer things in life. But money created markets and math puzzles, problems that could be analyzed and interpreted

• 50:10David Senra?

  and even played out." Now, one of these investments is Teledyne, which I covered last week. And if you haven't listened to it, please listen to it. Warren Buffett says that Henry Singleton, the founder of Teledyne, has the single best record in all of American business. Think about how all the different companies that have been built in America in the last, let's say, 150 years. That's a hell of a statement. Teledyne grew to become a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, and Henry Singleton's a hell of a person. Shannon made the investment simply because I had a good opinion of him. They knew each other. His investment in Teledyne achieved an annual compound return of 27% over 25 years. So that's just, Charlie Munger talks about that return. He calls it utterly ridiculous.

• 50:52David Senra?

  If you invested a dollar with, let's say you invested a million dollars with Henry Singleton when he first started his career, 30 years later, he'd return $180 million to you. Their kernel of interest in the market, meaning Claude and his wife, Betty, their kernel of interest in the market grew into a consuming hobby. The two of them began devouring books on trading, contemplating various market philosophies, and graphing possible scenarios for stocks. They studied many of history's most successful investors, including Bernard Baruch, Hetty Green, and Benjamin Gran. They read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and studied Von Neumann's and Oscar Morgenstern's work on game theory. If you really think about it, we're doing something very similar here, but for entrepreneurs.

• 51:36David Senra?

  But a lot of people thought, like, so Shannon, his most attended lecture ever was when he started talking about the stock market. Everybody's like, oh, this is a mathematical genius. He must have has this algorithm, and he can predict everything. No, that's, he realized you couldn't do that. And so this is his approach, which I found fascinating. "Complicated formulas mattered a great deal less," Shannon argued, "than a company's people and the product." He went on. "A lot of people look at the stock price when they should be looking at the basic earnings of the basic company and its earnings. There are many problems concerned with the prediction of stochastic processes. For examples, the earnings of companies." What he's talking about is that this is far too complex. "My general feelings is that it's easier to choose companies which are going to succeed

• 52:21David Senra?

  than to predict short-term variations, things that will last only weeks or months, which they worry about down on Wall Street." There is a lot more randomness there and things happen which you cannot predict, which cause people to sell or buy a lot of stock. It was his view that market timing and tricky mathematics were no match for a solid company with strong growth prospects and sound leadership. And this is also something that we've heard a lot the last few weeks from Buffett and Munger. I think they would agree with his statement there. Something I also want to bring to your attention that I don't think I've done a good job of like, understanding that he, his goal was to like, break everything down to its most simplest form, right?

• 53:03David Senra?

  So this is Ed Thorp, talking about on how Shannon dealt with problems. And it says, this is a direct quote from Thorp, "Shannon seemed to think with ideas more than with words or formulas. A new problem was like a sculptor's block of stone, and Shannon's ideas chiseled away the obstacles until an approximate solution emerged, like an image, which he proceeded to refine as desired with more ideas." When I read that, I thought about the famous quote by Michelangelo, when somebody asked him like, "How are you creating these sculptures?" And Michelangelo says, "The sculpture is already complete within the marble block before I start my work. It is already there. I just have to chisel away at all the superfluous material."

• 53:47David Senra?

  I think that's probably an idea that can be applied to building a business, to chiseling away, like, removing everything that's not essential. It's very hard. When I think about all the products and services you encounter, it's very, very, very rare that we're able to successfully do that. But I think it's powerful when you see it. I already said this before, but apparently, I leave this note to myself a lot in the book. "What motivated Shannon is if you can find a way for your work to overlap with your natural inclination or your natural drift, you'll live a good life." So Shannon's talking to us here. He says, "I don't think I was ever motivated by the notion of winning prizes, although I have a couple of dozen of them in that other room. I was more motivated by curiosity, never by the desire for financial gain." But he winds up achieving both, right?

• 54:31David Senra?

  Isn't that interesting that like, some people think like, chasing money, you'll get it? But there's a lot of examples when you chase what you're naturally curious about, the money comes later. "I just wondered how things are put together, of are what the laws or rules govern a situation, or if there are theorems about what one can or can't do, mainly because I just wanted to know myself."

• 54:53David Senra?

  This is one of the... So later in his life, he just stopped. Like, he'd get honored so much, he wouldn't show up to accept awards. He didn't like traveling. But there were some times where he could accept an award and his family wanted to see. So in this case, like, he winds up accepting this award and going to Japan just because his family wanted to see Japan. But this section isn't really about that too much. It's about this idea that I always reference, that books are the original links. And so I just ordered some books on this person I'd never heard of before, and eventually, you know, we'll learn from them in future episodes. But it said, "Claude had been selected as the first ever winner of the Kyoto Prize in basic science, an award endowed by the billionaire Kazuo Inamori."

• 55:36David Senra?

  So, sorry if you're listening to this in Japan and I'm butchering this. I can't even pronounce normal words in English, so don't take offense, please. "Inamori was a Japanese applied chemist who founded the multinational Kyocera and later rescued Japan's airlines from bankruptcy. He was an engineer by training, a Zen Buddhist by choice, and a business turnaround artist by reputation. He was also a student of management philosophy, which along with his Buddhism, might explain why the Kyoto Prize's founding letter reads like a curious mix of spiritual texts and a shareholder update." So this is why I put it in here, because it's hilarious to me. And this is reading directly from that founding letter.

• 56:20David Senra?

  "After a quarter of a century of relentless and painstaking effort, Kyocera's annual sales have, by the grace of God, grown to 230 billion yen, with pre-tax profits of 53 billion yen. I have decided on this occasion to create the Kyoto Prize. Those worthy of the Kyoto Prize will be people who have, as have we at Kyocera, worked humbly and devotedly, sparing no effort to seek perfection in their chosen professions." They will be individuals who are sensitive to their own human fallibility and who thereby hold a deep rooted reverence for excellence. So he's written a punch of books, some of them like I can't even find they're not in print, but I just ordered two of them. So

• 57:02David Senra?

  hopefully they're interesting. Interesting to me, though, was during this acceptance speech in Japan, he talks about how he just has this random thought about how history should be taught. He says, I don't know how history is taught here in Japan, but in the United States, in my college days, most of the time was spent on the study of political leaders and wars, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler. I think this is totally wrong. The important people and events of history are the thinkers and innovators, the Darwins, Newtons, and Beethoven, whose work continues to grow influence in a positive fashion. He continues, one category of innovation he singled out for special mention, the discoveries of science. These are all going to be future Founders episodes, by the way, is a quote

• 57:46David Senra?

  from Shannon, "are wonderful achievements in themselves, but would not affect the life of the common man without the intermediate efforts of engineers and inventors, people," and he's going to mention the people he admires, "people like Edison, Bell, and Marconi." Actually, just ordered a book on Marconi. That's like 826 pages. So I don't know what I just, what I just got myself into. And I've done one podcast, I think it's episode number two on Edison, but I will read other books on him in the future. And I haven't covered Alexander Graham Bell yet, but I will. This gives you an idea of more of his personality. And this is really on his, you can see why he's kind of an introvert. This is, and why he had a strong distaste for war. This is Shannon on the human species.

• 58:31David Senra?

  "These goals," meaning computing and automation and AI and robotics, "these goals," he said only half jokingly, "could mark the beginning of a phase out of the stupid, entropy increasing, and militant human race." Yikes. "In favor of a more logical, energy conserving, and friendly species, the computer." So he's saying, these are, they're kind of mirror images of themselves, those three traits, right? He considers a lot of humanity to be stupid. So he'd prefer a more logical, that's the other side of that. Entropy increasing, he would like energy conserving. And militant, instead of militant, he would like friendly. It would be amazing if our species was friendly to everybody, isn't it?

• 59:14David Senra?

  Completely different world than we live in now. The end, towards the end of the book, unfortunately Shannon gets Alzheimer's disease and it's it's actually really hard to read about because you have this wonderful playful mind and like, you know, starts to not recognize his own children and just winds up dying in an assisted living facility not far from his house just because he's falling down and just it's it was really, really sad. So I'm not going to include any of that and I don't want to remember him that way because I got to the end of the book and I was like, I always talk about this idea, like when you read a great book like this, right? You get to the end and there's like, I don't have a word for it. I've used the word like bittersweet,

• 59:56David Senra?

  which I don't think is necessarily all the way accurate, but like you have like a melancholic feel, like you're very happy, you're very happy that you read the book, but you're sad that it's over. And especially like the vast majority of people I cover on this podcast is like, they're already dead, like their life is done. There's nothing further that's going to happen. And the finale evolves, like it's a, it's a pleasant and at the same time uncomfortable emotional experience that I want more of. That's one of the, and anybody who's read great books knows what exactly what I'm talking about. And I think part of it stems from like, you spend a great deal of time, you know, like if you're going to read a book, this book I think was like 300 pages to me, that's like a 10 hour read.

• 1:00:40David Senra?

  And it just, there's just, you have like an emotional release, for lack of a better word, at the end. And when I'm sitting here going over like what I wanted to talk to you about today, I was like, I don't want to end on that, man. That's like, it just, it's, you know, he becomes an extremely likable character over the entire book and then he dies in like a devastating way. And it's just like, it's, it's unpleasant. It's like heartbreaking, but also like you're heartbroken that that happened, but you're also very happy that you, somebody took the time to write these words down. And like you know, now like you know about this, the life of this person, you know? I don't know, I find that fascinating. Maybe that's why I like reading biography so much. But anyways, I want to end here.

• 1:01:26David Senra?

  And it's, it's his idea for his funeral, which you're gonna see is not bleak. And it shows you like why, I keep referencing it over and over again. Why is this book called A Mind at Play? Because that's how he approached life, man. And I want that trait for myself. Like, I want, I even thought about that since I read the book this week where like I had something like, you know, if you, you have things that annoy you during the week, you're like, I was having some like slight annoyance. I'm like, this is not like, enjoy life, man. This is all gonna be over. Everything around you is temporary. Like, don't let these little things bother you. Like, just enjoy. The fact I'm alive, I'm surrounded by loved ones. Like, I'm so far in like good health. Like, just don't let these little things ruin your, this, this journey, this experience that we call life.

• 1:02:09David Senra?

  So, give you an idea of how Claude Shannon did that. You're gonna, this is the most unique idea. He had an idea, he had a very specific idea. Unfortunately, his funeral doesn't wind up being like this, but this is the way he wanted it. And I think this is a good way to like, close the time that we have together, talking about Claude Shannon. Shannon had his, had set his mind to the question of this funeral and imagined something very different. For him, it was an occasion that called for humor, not grief. In a rough sketch, he outlined a grand procession, a Macy-style parade to amuse and to delight, and to sum up the life of Claude Shannon. The clarinetist, Pete Fountain, would lead the way.

• 1:02:53David Senra?

  Jazz combo in tow. So, remember, I'm gonna explain this to you. Think of, use that visualization in your mind while I'm speaking of a Macy-style parade. This is his, this is his funeral procession. So, we got clarinets, Pete Fountain would lead the way. He's up front, he's got a jazz combo in tow behind him. Next in line, six unicycling pallbearers somehow balancing Sharon, Shannon's coffin. Behind them would come the grieving widow, then a juggling octet and a juggling octopetal machine. Next would be the three black chess pieces bearing hundred-dollar bills, and then three rich men from the West, California tech investors following the money.

• 1:03:35David Senra?

  They would march in front of a chess float, atop which British chess master David Levy would square off in a live chess match against a computer. Then you'd have scientists and mathematicians, four cats trained by the Skinner methods, the mouse group, a phalanx of joggers, because he took up jogging later on in his life as one of his passions, and a 417 instrument band would bring up the rear.

• 1:04:05David Senra?

  I just love that part, and I think that's like a great parting way to think about Claude Shannon. So I'm going to leave the story here. If you want the full story, I'd recommend buying the book. Not only are you supporting yourself, because how many times do you read a great book and wind up regretting that? Very few. You're supporting the authors who spent years working, so we can actually learn, and their work serves as the foundation of the discussions we have every week. And you can also support the podcast if you use the link that's in the show notes. Amazon will send me a small percentage of sale, no additional cost to you. So if you do buy a book, you're supporting the author, yourself, and me simultaneously, and it's the same price as if you just bought the book elsewhere.

• 1:04:48David Senra?

  You could also go to amazon.com/shop/founderspodcast, and you'll see not only this book, but all the 90-something other ones. It's like a visual representation of the podcast. Or you can go to founderspodcast.com, and I have a link there that has a collection of all the books, too. It doesn't matter to me which link you use. If you do use one of those three links, then you're obviously helping this podcast survive and thrive. All right, I've spoken enough. Thank you very much for listening. Please do tell your friends about this podcast, and I will be back next week with another biography of an entrepreneur.