Embedded - 221: Hiding in Plain Sight

Episode Date: November 2, 2017

Author Jimmy Soni (@jimmyasoni) spoke with us about his biography of Claude Shannon,  founder of information theory and digital circuit theory. A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. For an introduction to the book, read their post 10,000 Hours With Claude Shannon: How A Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives. Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner Mark Levinson’s Particle Fever is a documentary film about the Large Hadron Collider. He is also directing a film about Claude Shannon Scientific Aspects of Juggling by Claude Shannon

Welcome. You are listening to Embedded. I'm Elysia White alongside Christopher White. Do you know who Claude Shannon is? He's one of my heroes, the founder of information theory and digital circuit theory. He's amazing, but he's not as well known as Elon Musk or Nikola Tesla, because he's quieter and more mathy. And yet now he's got a shiny new biography written by our guest, Jimmy Soni. Hi, Jimmy. It's great to have you with us today. Hello, and thank you for having me on the show. Could you tell us a bit about your background? So I am an author and an editor, as well as a speechwriter, and currently live in Brooklyn, New York. I'm a dad to a lovely little two-year-old daughter, and I'm obviously recently the co-author

of a biography of Claude Shannon. But you're not an engineer. No, no, not an engineer. And don't play one on TV, though. My dad was an engineer. So, you know, I think it slipped into the bloodstream a little bit. But I am decidedly a word and sentence and paragraph person. So this book was a bit of a challenge and a stretch, but in a good way. Excellent. Okay, so we're going to ask you a lot about the book, but first we want to do lightning round, where we ask you short, somewhat random questions and would like short answers from you.

Are you ready? Sure. Favorite movie or book other than the one you just wrote, which you encountered for the first time in the last year. There was a great movie called Whiplash, which was about jazz drumming. And it had J.K. Simmons in it and won all kinds of accolades. I thought it was just great. Historical figure you'd like to meet in person for a beer. So this is a tough one because he didn't drink, but Teddy Roosevelt is someone who I would love to meet for a cup of coffee. And I say coffee specifically because legend has it that he was the one who came up with the line, good to the last drop, which is what I guess

Folgers used for their coffee. But I'd love to meet him and have a cup of coffee. Would you rather spend the day tomorrow learning or teaching? Learning. Do you think Claude Shannon was a time traveler from the future? No. All right. I'm sure you wrote this one, Alicia, but given the popularity of musicals right now, if this book is turned into a play,

what would be the title of the blockbuster song? Oh, that's a great question. Terrible question. Terrible question. Let's see. It would be A Bit for You and A Bit for Me. That's perfect. That's awesome.

Favorite wave? the kind I can stare at while safely sitting on the beach, uh, on a, on a towel and, and, you know, think about rather than be a part of, uh, what's a tip you think everyone should know? I think I heard this from Noah Kagan, who does a variety of things online, but if you set, at least on max, if you set the speed of your cursor to as fast as it can go for at least the first few days until you get used to it, it feels like you've given your computer like a shot of five-hour energy. I can't go back now. I mean, I can't go back to this mouse speed that's anything other than the fastest available. Ways to make you feel like your computer's going faster. Or you're running slower right okay last one this

one is uh even sillier than the musical question could you please say boolean algebra the way shannon would have boolean algebra that's a best guess by the way it seems it seems about right for for what i understand of shannon uh so give us give us a little bit of an insight into your work. It's called A Minded Play, but tell us what your goals were with writing this book. So the origin story is one of those kind of, almost all books, I think, have some element of serendipity in how they're created, at least the ones that I tend to enjoy. And with this one, I had been given a book called The Idea Factory by John Gertner. And it was a narrative history of Bell Labs. It's actually really an excellent book. So I'm reading the book and this figure, Claude Shannon, is obviously a

giant within that book. And so then I go on Amazon and I just assume there's going to be a biography of Claude Shannon. And there isn't, there are books about information theory. There are books about the concept of information, but nobody had done kind of the end to end biography. And so, you know, one thing led to another and, um, I just decided to do it and that's how it, that's how it came to be. And it turned out, he had an incredibly interesting life, a very rich and vibrant mind. And he lived a life that was somewhat under the radar, which is why I think there wasn't a biography in the first place. But that is how it came to be. And in terms of the title, part of the conceit of the book is that Claude Shannon was somebody who was theoretically very talented and came up with a number of concepts that

shaped the digital world we live in. At the same time, he was a juggler and a unicyclist, and he enjoyed chess, and he enjoyed stock picking and card games. And flamethrowers. Don't forget flamethrowers. Flamethrowing trumpets. He enjoyed art. We joke that he is Albert Einstein meets the Dos Equis guy, that he could have given anybody a run for their money in terms of being the most interesting man in the world. But I was stunned, just to go back, that nobody had taken this interesting life and put it on paper.

But some of that is because he was exceedingly shy. I mean, an introvert's introvert. Oh, yeah. He was someone who just preferred his own company, did most of his research alone. One of the scientists who knew him, who he spoke to, remarked on the fact that as a percentage, very few of Claude Shannon's papers were ever co-authored. So co-authoring is obviously a very common academic thing to do. And a very, very small sliver of Shannon's papers were ever co-authored. He kept mostly his own counsel. He didn't.

He found it a chore to go on the lecture circuit or go give talks or go to networking events would have been completely outside the scope of his interest. And even at Bell Labs, which had a famous culture of kind of being, of having open doors and a lot of collaboration and all that, his door was one of the few that remained closed for good chunks of time. And so he was an introvert's introvert. And he kind of, my feeling about him after having done this much work on his life is it never actually kind of crossed his mind to be anything else. Like the things that were in his head were all puzzles and problems that he was driven to because of private interests, things that just sort of cross his imagination. So he didn't,

he didn't really need to go out and seek out, you know, concepts or problems. They were just sort of that they were in front of him all the time. and he wasn't much keen to collaborate with people to solve them. And he didn't care much about the utility of his ideas. He liked the puzzles. He was in it for the intellectual stimulation more than the cash and fame. That's absolutely right, and it's a really wonderful way to put it. He was not the sort of person who was going to think about how to build a company around an idea and then take it public. For him, he would remark that he would just sort of see things, see problems,

and as he put it, kind of be irritated by the fact that there was a better way to do something or that something wasn't solved. And then he would have to go out and solve it. And so he had this instinct for finding certain problems and then just pursuing them as far as they would go. But then there might have been numerous opportunities for him to, you know, start companies or go and become wealthy and all the rest. Then he just moved on to the next challenge or problem. And there's a handful of famous examples of this, but he later in life focuses on everything from building a computer, building a wearable device that can beat roulette tables, give you a better than average set of odds against the roulette,

against the house at roulette to, you know, going and trying at Oxford to write a paper where you design a series of mirrors and pulleys and levers that takes the fact that you're driving on the right side of the, on what he puts it, the wrong side of the road. And it makes you feel like you're not. Uh, and it's you feel like you're not. And it's this elaborate thought experiment, right? But that's the same guy who was also doing, you know, cryptography and was also writing papers on information theory. And so you have in this person, somebody who, you know, you could think about him as either A, a sort of dilettante, but then B, you look at his kind of, then you look at his body of finished work and it's extraordinary. I think it is safe to say that he was not interested in becoming a

one trick pony. He wasn't interested in, you know, taking something and, you know, making it practically useful for people. He was interested in the problem or the nut to crack. And as soon as he got it, that was it. Now, his contraptions, his devices, his innovations became the sort of foundation for a lot of what we think of as very practically useful, frankly, stuff we can't live without. But in his day, he wasn't thinking about how am I going to take information theory and turn it into, you know, a better way to transmit wireless information. He was thinking much more about, well, I've figured out information theory, now it's time to go on and, oh, I don't know, figure out the stock market. So he was a wide ranging intellect in that sense. On the other hand, he had a degree in mathematics as well

as in electrical engineering. And to a large extent, he was applying some of the same mathematical ideas to different areas. The idea that you can formalize and simplify and use math concepts in different ways that previously had been more art than science. Absolutely. It's one of the real, I would say, I don't know if irony might be too strong a word, but there is a way in which Shannon combines mathematics and engineering at different stages in his life. And I think it speaks to two very important parts of his personality. The first is that he was

theoretically a very powerful thinker. He could get to the level of, you know, an Einstein and have no trouble kind of keeping up. So he understood what it meant to do that kind of what you might call abstract work. And he has an undergraduate degree in mathematics, as you mentioned, and he goes on to study mathematics at MIT as a graduate student. At the same time, he studies engineering, and he doesn't just study engineering. He comes from a place where the practical fruits of engineering matter a lot. The town he grew up in, Gaylord, Michigan, is a town that makes things. His dad himself is a furniture maker. That's one of the things that he does. He does many things, but among them, he builds furniture. He builds coffins. He builds all sorts of things. And Shannon too, as a child, is playing with broken radios. He's building barbed wire

telegraph machines to communicate with friends. He once builds an elevator in a barn with a friend of his. So he is himself kind of getting his hands dirty and he's very practical. And we like to think, and we sort of explain in the book, that these two things are not at odds with each other. In Shannon's life and work, the ability to take what is practical and drive some really powerful theoretical conclusions matters a lot. And the first place he makes his mark is in a paper in which he combines the idea of logic and logical operations with Boolean algebra. And he connects this with circuit design. And so he is able to use something that the mathematician George Boole had been thinking about in the 19th century and give engineers a way to more quickly and easily design circuits.

And it was Walter Isaacson who said that this idea, this paper, actually laid the foundation for all of digital computing. And it's an extraordinary achievement, and he is 21 when he does it. But just to get back to the point, he is not someone for whom, you know, theory and practice were at odds. They mixed and mingled in his work in some important ways. He was an engineer. But when we say engineering now, when we say electrical engineering, it's a very math-heavy discipline. I mean, you start with the math, and then you learn all the symbols, and you learn how it all goes together, and then you end with the math. It's just, to some extent, engineering degrees now are applied mathematics. But for Shannon and the engineers at that time, it wasn't like that, was it?

No, in fact, he grows, he comes of age at a time when, in order to understand the motions of waves, the University of Michigan has built essentially a fake ocean inside a building and, and has a, has boats on the ocean that are used to make measurements. Um, you know, he is seeing, uh, there's a, there's a sort of almost like what looks like a world's fair at the university of Michigan just before he gets there. And they're testing out everything from, you know, what happens when you put something in a deep freeze to, you know, how can you shatter glass with a piece of paper that's made to rotate very, very, very, very quickly. So he is very much in the world of engineering where engineering is still handwork with a little bit of headwork. Now that is starting to change. There is a more of a merger between the mathematics curriculum and the

engineering curriculum while he's at the University of Michigan. And so you're starting to see the first seeds of that. But he himself is a builder, and he goes to a school that still sees engineering as hard, practical building work. And so he's, you know, taking classes about how to build better bridges, and about how to, you know, not just think about it, but actually really be involved in the construction of it. And so it's actually an incredibly important thing because when asked later about why he got both a degree in engineering and in mathematics, Shannon, with characteristic kind of nonchalances. Well, it was really easy because there was just so much overlap between the two at the time that I could, you know, add a couple courses and get a dual degree. Uh, he, you know, his motives were very, they were very simple

motives and he kind of admits that he doesn't have any grand designs on his career when he's in his twenties. Um, but it is the case that I think he's one of the last, he's part of this generation of engineers who have one foot in the math, the kind of hard mathematics of something, and then one foot in the practical building of things. And the engineers then, when they talked about calculus, it wasn't differential equations like I do now with my computer. It was counting the area under a graph. I mean, that is how you did integration. It was the simplest method. Oh, that's absolutely right. I mean, they were thinking about as real world examples as you could get. And a lot of the things we discuss in the book are instances in which you might call them amateur engineers or

amateur mathematicians come to a lot of conclusions based on just phenomena they see in the world, right? And so there's a great example in the book, I think, of someone who he was working with, it was Shannon's mentor was working with a lawnmower and retrofitted this lawnmower to be able to calculate space and distance. And so there are all of these people who live at this intersection of practical sort of machine work and mathematics. Yes, and it's just amazing. But then with the digital circuits, it was trial and error. I mean, if you wanted to go from this analog computing to digital and you had these signals coming in, you just had to try all the options. It was a combinatorics problem that was just untenable. And then Shannon came in with his Boolean algebra applied to this, and like, poof, overnight, it was a nearly solved problem.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And, you know, I think your description is, I don't know that I can add anything necessarily to it. I mean, he comes in and he is, it is important to know where he's coming from, I think. So, he has by this point, you know, received his undergraduate degrees in mathematics and engineering. And as an undergrad, he spent some time learning about George Boole and about logic. So, you know, and or if then statements. So he's got that. He's got some undergraduate philosophy. He has spent some time working on the differential analyzer machine, which is one of the most advanced computing machines of its day. This is a room-sized

computer at MIT. And it has a series of switches that they don't so much solve problems as they represent problems physically and then come up with solutions. But he has seen what happens when a switch is open and what happens when a switch is closed. And what he realizes is, well, this could just as easily be kind of represented as a one or as a zero, open and closed. And he's also had a summer's work at the phone company where he realizes that their relay systems enable telephone calls to be exchanged and for these signals to be transmitted. And so he's seen that system too. So you have someone who is in a unique position, having studied George Boole and having seen how circuits and relays work, to realize that currently the work of circuit and relay design is incredibly

complex. And with just a little bit of thinking, you could simplify it and distill it down to its essence. And that's exactly what he does. And it's an extraordinary insight. He wins a major award for it. He actually wins a word that's called the Nobel prize. Uh, it's not the Nobel, not the big Nobel. It's the, the Nobel prize. I can pronounce Nobel prize. And, um, but he gets a certificate, he gets a write-up in the New York times. And he's immediately by that point marked out as somebody who's going to do a significant work. Um, He's a little gobsmacked when he wins. I'm actually certain that, I'm fairly certain that he didn't even nominate himself.

One of his mentors did. And he just sort of woke up one day and had won and he was kind of stunned. But it was an incredibly important piece of work. And again, he does it when he's 21. Which is, I mean, I did some cool stuff when I was 21, nothing like that, but I'm kind of glad because what do you do for an encore? It would have been so easy for him to sink into obscurity having been over flattered or having been pushed to the sidelines because he was a prodigy and then, you know, so many prodigies just flame out. Let me ask you a weird question that's been bubbling in my mind. So his contemporaries were like Turing.

You know, he was working at the same time that a great deal of important physics was being discovered and developed, quantum mechanics and that kind of thing, which led to semiconductors and all the things that make computers possible. What was so special about this time that there were all these figures like this? Is it just that there was a lot of stuff waiting to be discovered and that now there's people just like this, but it's so hard to learn everything that you have to learn to contribute? Do you have a sense of what was really special about this time that he lived in and so many other people lived in? It's a really great question. And I have to confess that I can offer an answer,

but my answer is going to be kind of somewhat of an educated guess based on the careful study of one person's life. Whereas, you know, historians of science may be in a position to give a more accurate answer. I would offer a few observations from the life of Claude Shannon that suggest, that argue for why computing might have made such leaps during this time and why there were so many bright minds about. One is that the war effort, you know, sort of starting in the 30s and then going on, leads to a lot of government investment in the practical fruits of scientific and mathematical labor, right? So I'm not saying anything new, but these are things, everything from the Manhattan Project to the cryptographic work that Claude Shannon did,

that was a very, very important part of what led to his information theory work, is bought and paid for by the government. And for an important reason, which is winning the war. And so that's one big thing. And I think it's easy to gloss over that. But we spend a good deal of time in our book talking about how the war affected the lives of mathematicians because it had a huge effect on these people. And an entire generation of mathematical and scientific minds are, you know, seconded into the war effort in various ways. Now, some of them, you know, they wear uniforms and they go off to overseas. Some of them, like Claude Shannon, end up working on war contracts for places like Bell Laboratories. So that's one really, really important thing.

The second is that there are big companies like Bell Laboratories where, outside of the war effort, there's significant practical engineering work being done to keep and build the phone system, right? And so a huge, there's a reason why, you know, Claude Shannon is at Bell Labs and why so many other talented minds spent time there. And it's because the phone system was basically, if you were an engineer, it was the biggest engineering problem you could try to solve. You know, and everything from how do you transmit a signal? How do you extend the quality of a phone call? How do you extend the length of a phone call? All these were questions and problems they needed answering. The final thing, and again, this is sort of somewhat of an educated guess, is that, you know, there were important antecedents for Claude Shannon's work. And all that the field didn't just emerge of signals transmission or coding or information theory, it didn't just emerge with Claude Shannon.

There were people who had thought about how do you transmit information, you know, going back into the sort of 1800s. And he drew on that work, but the technology had evolved from Morse code and Morse telephony to telephone calls to secure transmissions between Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And so in a way, it is the case that human beings push the technology along, but the technology also pushes human beings to think about what else they can do. And so a Claude Shannon born in 1850 may not have had the same technology available to him that would have led him to the development and cultivation of information theory, whereas a Claude Shannon, you know, born and coming of age in the early 20th century does. You've said information theory, I've said information theory i've said information theory can you explain what that is

sure um though again i i want to emphasize that i am you know a biographer not a uh not not an information theorist or an engineer but we had some very good people from both of those fields help us think through it information theory is the field that Claude Shannon is famous for developing. And the line is from one of his contemporaries or something like, it was one of those rare instances in which someone came to a field, solved all of the essential problems, and did it all in sort of one stroke. But the information theory field grows out of a two-part paper that Claude Shannon publishes in 1947. He publishes it in the Bell Systems Technical Journal, which is Bell Labs' technical journal. And he has been spending the last 10 years or so thinking about everything from cryptography to phone systems to, you know, how do you transmit Morse code to how do you shoot down missiles that are flying through the air that are trying to hit a Navy destroyer?

And I'm sorry, just to amend one thing, it's not 1947, it's 1948. So in late, late in that year, he publishes a twopart paper called A Mathematical Theory of Communication. And what he tries to get at is, among other things, what is information? How do we quantify information? How can you encode information? And how do you do that flawlessly? And this paper forms the basis for the field of information theory, which now has, you know, thousands of people who work in it. And it is regarded by people in that field and

outside of it as one of the more important moments in 20th century mathematics. Before Shannon, information was thought of as different things. So a song could be thought different from a letter, could be thought different from a poem, could be thought different from a telephone call. After Shannon, all of that can be turned into bits. It can be quantified. It can be dealt with in a mathematical way. And engineers now have the conceptual tools to think about information differently. And so there is a line that can be drawn between that

paper and your ability to use an iPhone to listen to this podcast, because the information that's being transmitted to you now is a series of bits. And the person who coined that word bit and gave us the ability to think about it was Claude Shannon. I think it's so amazing that they went from Morse code and having established that it is a relatively optimal way to encode the English language with the the e being one dot and letters we don't care about being four dashes and dots dots to an actual proof that it is this optimal and the maximal amount of information you can transmit at a time is this. And so you can start measuring how different coding schemes are optimal, how optimal they are, how much better they could be. And then you can start talking

about, well, if I'm going to accept some error and some loss, and then that changes these functions of how optimal it can be. It can be smaller if you're willing to accept some loss, like in JPEG encoding, or it can be longer if you want lossless and redundant for transmitting over noisy Wi-Fi. And these all come from the same paper, from the same guy thinking about telephones. Not only that, there's a relationship between all of that and physics and thermodynamics, which totally seemed random at the time, But it seemed like he was discovering fundamental things about the universe, which didn't just apply to telephone conversations, but also black holes and quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics

and all these things. It's totally incredible to me. How did we get from Morse code to black holes through information theory and entropy? It's just bogglesome. How quickly did people know that it was important yeah the way that um there's a couple couple good lines that testify to the same feeling of of you know awe that you guys have which is there was somebody who is a contemporary of his who said

after the information theory was published and after they you know it'd become a thing he said how someone could even come to believe something like this? I don't know. Right. That it was such a mental leap. Uh, and it was such an extraordinary mental leap that, that he just didn't know where it might've come from. Um, there's a, uh, there's a, a talk in which, um, a colleague of Shannon's who I think had the office next door to him, Richard Hamming talks about how Shannon. Right. Okay. Sure. Yeah, of course. Uh, yeah. You know, we say that name casually, but it is. Yeah. So he had the, he had the office next door. They were, they were, uh, contemporaries. And, um, I, I, you know, I, I kinda, it's one of those things that like,

I'll just read it because it's worth, you know, paying it. It's worth sort of getting the words in his words, not me paraphrasing. And he says, one of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can't, almost surely you are not going to. Courage is one of the things that Claude Shannon had supremely. You have only to think of his major theorem, and he's referring obviously to information theory. He wants to create a method of coding, but he doesn't know what to do, so he makes a random code. Then he is stuck, and then he asks the impossible question, what would the average random code do? He then proves that the average code is arbitrarily good, and that therefore, there must be at least one good code. Who but a man of infinite courage could have dared to think those thoughts? That is the characteristic of great scientists. They have courage. They will go forward under incredible circumstances. They think and continue to think. And it's a useful summary. It combines some elements that I'm not sure we tend to think

about, right? Like you don't, you tend to think of scientific discovery about the work, about sort of brute force, about rigor, about discipline. Courage is a more ethereal virtue, right? But that you might, that it might have been some elements of fearlessness that led Shannon to do this. I'm not as sure about Hamming's characterization. I'm, you know, Shannon was a frail guy and he was, he was not the most, he was not going to, you know, sort of figure out information theory and then jump into a boxing ring. But he, he was someone who had a great deal of confidence in his own intellect. You know, he had been thinking, started thinking about information theory in 1937. Those are the earliest notes we have between him and his advisor. So, 11 years passed before he

publishes the paper. And when he publishes it, he's spoken to almost no one about it. So, one contemporary said, you know, it arrived like a bomb. And so, in my mind, I'm not sure that expressly answers your question, but it does give you a flavor for the fact that even then, people knew that this was something extraordinary. And it takes only about a year for what he calls a mathematical theory of communication to become the mathematical theory of communication. And so there's a kind of gravity that happens because over the course of that year, once people go back and look at his work

and dive into it further, they realize, wow, he has actually done, he's done everything. This is all, it's all here. Now there are spinoffs. There are, there's, you know, papers that are written based on that paper, obviously, and a whole field develops from it.

But that's what, that's how it it arrives it lands people are impressed and about a year later uh he is it is the mathematical theory of communication but he's not the one the public knows he's not one of these scientists everybody knew about like einstein and oppenheimer he or t or touring well i don't think touring was known that well in his time was he anyway he wasn't known by the public he didn't get a lot of public facing credit most of the scientists of most of the mathematicians and engineers of his time knew who he was but he didn't go after public acclaim. Why not? Yeah, that's right. He, um, I like to think that even though he sort of designed the technology that underlies Instagram, like he would have been abhorred by selfies. He would have abhorred selfies. Um, now that's just a guess and, and all the rest. But so there are a couple of things.

The one is, you know, he does get a little bit of public attention in the 1950s. So he, you know, is profiled by Francis Bellow, who's writing for Fortune magazine. And he includes him on a list of kind of the 25 greatest scientists in the United States. He's recognized by President Kennedy, wins the National Medal of Science. Vogue magazine actually does a three-page spread on Claude Shannon, which is pretty great. I think that was 1953. But the truth is that when all this is happening, his reaction is, well, this is just a distraction from my work. I don't actually have any interest in fame. I don't want to be on television. I don't want to be a kind of public intellectual. And so he avoids it. Now, it's one thing to say that, it's another to do it. He does it. He

turns down invitations. He ignores invitations. He avoids the public in various ways. He's not interested in becoming a scientific celebrity. Others are. Einstein knew about his public profile and burnished it in different ways. Richard Feynman did the same thing. And Shannon is not at all interested in that. He's much more focused on finding a fresh problem to solve, a new engineering insight he can contribute, some interesting thing that he wants to build. So he spends a lot of time building machines. And so for him, the fame just held no appeal. And that can sound almost crazy to us because we live in an era in which you have to post about the birth of your children and turn that into a public event. You have to post about this and that and the other thing. But Shannon's reticence, I think, is a really useful corrective to oversharing. And he's much more focused on the work itself. And fame comes to him,

but it comes to him in those little bits and moments, and then he just lets it pass by. I think there's something endearing about that. I will also say that in addition to being just naturally reluctant of the press, he also, I don't think he saw how he could benefit from it. You know, there wasn't really anything that he wanted to do that he wasn't able to do. And so it wasn't as though he could have gotten something out of kind of becoming a celebrity intellectual that he didn't already have. So I think that's part of it as well. I mean, there's always the accolades you can go for, but it does mean time away from doing the things you enjoy, which is the math puzzles. Well, it depends on your goal too, because there's people like Hawking or Neil deGrasse Tyson who

consider themselves advocates for science and they have an agenda that's not purely technical. It's to, you know, expand interest in science. And I think that's a separate kind of thing than the kind of fame that I think Shannon was getting just kind of accidentally. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I think Shannon would have, he would have had a strong, I admire what, you know,

DeGrasse Tyson and others do in that spirit because I think they do a good job of reaching people like me who may not otherwise dive into astrophysics or, you know, pick up a book about information theory. So I think that popularizers of science, look, I'm obviously, this is, you know, with this book, this theory so i think that popularizers of science look i'm i'm obviously this is you know with this book this is part of what i hope to contribute is a popular

understanding of this very important scientist but for someone like shannon that is a nap i mean it's anathema he wouldn't have wanted to do it he was fine with people who did but he had just zero interest in doing it himself um he's not someone who wants to travel the country talking about how important information theory is. He's much more interested in advancing the field of information theory and, frankly, in going and doing that and going and trying some other things. So the whole notion of this kind of popular science piece would have really, he would have simply accepted it as a fact of life,

but he wasn't somebody who wanted to go out and try to influence the public in that way. This is one of the things I like about Shannon is that he was in it for the fun of the puzzles and the fun of solving and getting things done. And I just, it's one of the things I like. And I haven't finished your book. I have started it.

It's really good. But sometimes when I find out more about my hero's lives, especially the driven geniuses, I hear about things I don't like. And by the way, Feynman, I'm looking at you. Can you tell me now before I finish your book, was Shannon a jerk? No, you know, it's actually, it's simultaneously a great thing and a terrible thing that Shannon lived a fairly humdrum life. You know, there weren't big, you know, personal issues. He went through a depressive

phase and a kind of moody phase in his 20s and his first marriage ended. But apart from that, the drama in Shannon's life is in the discovery of ideas and in the inventing of things. The, he is not a jerk. He's actually regarded almost by everyone we talked to as a sort of universally well-liked person. Um, and for all of his fame, people talk about how down to earth he was and about how he was so quick to joke. Uh, and he really liked to poke fun at things and poke fun at himself and they would catch him unicycling down the halls of Bell labs and all the rest.

So, uh, no, uh, So no, he is not a jerk. He is someone who has the impatience of a genius. So there are people who, I wouldn't even call them complaints, I would just call them observations, who observed that at Bell Labs, he kept the company of people who could keep up with him. And there were only a couple of people who could. And so he becomes really close with people who could. And so, you know, he becomes really close with Barney Oliver, he becomes really close with John Pierce. And

these are the people who have his IQ points and can kind of, you know, move at that speed. And with everyone else, they can detect a little bit of, he didn't want to engage in small talk, he didn't want to hang around and just talk about the weather. He was much more comfortable sitting around with people like Alan Turing and Barney Oliver and John Pearson talking about the nature of computing or the structure of the mind. And so that's the one way in which there might have been the odd person out who said, oh, what a jerk. But it wasn't that he was mean-spirited.

It was that his brain just had this enormous processing power, and he wanted to find problems to solve. Yeah. And yes, I like that so much. Okay, I should ask you about the process of writing the book, because I do have some questions there, even though I also want to ask about everything else about Shannon. Were there things that you didn't put in the book that you found interesting? That's a great, it's a great question. The truth is that there's actually a lot on the cutting room floor, in part because when you go to the Library of Congress, the Shannon papers occupy 21 full boxes of papers. And there is no real rhyme or reason to a lot of them. There's a lot of correspondence with people and notes back and forth with luminaries like Carl Sagan. You know, there was a whole thing, we did put it in

the book, but could have gone into a much greater depth about his correspondence with L. Ron Hubbard. And there's some thoughts in the early writings of the Church of Scientology that include some of Shannon's work. You know, he, so there's a lot. I mean, we could have doubled or even tripled the length of the biography, but we needed to keep it readable. The one thing that we didn't include that was interesting was he actually had a chance encounter with Steve Jobs. And it was- That would have been a very different world. Yeah, it was.

And it was a world in which Steve Jobs was the one who wasn't quite the celebrity. He is now, you know, it was Claude Shannon who had sort of the crowd around him at this graduation ceremony where they were both getting honorary degrees. And Steve Jobs elbows his way into the audience because he knows who Shannon is and he extends a hand and says you know Dr. Shannon my name is um my name is Steve Jobs I work at Apple Computer and uh Claude Shannon looks at him and and says oh well it's very nice to meet you, Steve. What do you do at Apple? And it's an amazing moment where you, in addition to the moment of thinking about Alan Turing and Claude Shannon meeting, that is bookended with the meeting of Steve Jobs and Claude Shannon. And there's a certain poetry there. But it also speaks to the fact that,

you know, someone who is much more, was much more aggressively ambitious about his role in the computer age would have tried to go out and meet Steve Jobs and join the board of Apple and get stock and become a, et cetera, et cetera. This is just not what Shannon was interested in. Get a patent done, music and code. In fact, it wasve jobs who approached approached shannon um so in any case you know there's there's things like that that didn't make their way into the book in part just because you need to you know keep to a certain length and and readability and we wanted people to be able to travel through his ideas without getting too lost um but otherwise you know we just covered the person's life from end to end. How much of it was from documentary sources and how much of it was, how much interviews of people he knew did you, were you able to do?

We did a lot of interviewing. So we were really fortunate to get to interview his widow. She has since passed away, sadly. We interviewed a whole host of colleagues and friends. And it was actually some of the most enjoyable part of doing the work was just meeting these people who were just giants of science. People who had developed companies and done all kinds of breakthroughs. And almost every other person we meet would be known as one of the godfathers of the internet, which is just kind of crazy. But we would speak to them at length.

And so it was a lot of interviewing because we needed to get personal impressions of what he was like and why his work mattered and what these people thought of him, what it was like to be a graduate student of his. So that was a huge chunk of the work. And then obviously going through all of his papers, going through and visiting places that he had spent time in, meeting with professors who are contemporary scholars in information theory, looking at archival footage and documentary video and little things that Shannon did, all of that. And I don't know that I have an even split, but there was a fair number of just hours and hours and hours of talking to people and trying to track people down. We're fortunate in being one

of the last folks to speak to his widow. She gave us some good information that we couldn't have gotten otherwise. And then his daughter, Peggy, really opened up to us and gave us a window into what the Shannon family life was like. There is a documentary coming out next year that will do more of this and people will be able to see a lot of the folks we interviewed in the flesh. And Mark Levinson, who's the filmmaker behind Particle Fever, is actually doing the Shannon documentary. And so it'll be out early next year. It'll give people a sense of not just who Shannon is, but who this kind of cluster of great minds around him was. You mentioned these boxes of papers, and we already mentioned you don't have a deeply technical background. Did you read either his master's thesis or his later information theory papers?

We read both. Yeah. How was the math? I mean, I have been a little put off for some of the math in it. I remember having to read it in engineering classes, the information papers, and it was not easy. Yeah, it was obviously not. We had to have people explain those elements to us. But what we were trying to get at in the book was not, you know, the most

thorough or end-to-end academic explanation of everything that was going on. We were really trying to sort of take a step back and say, how did this fit into, how does someone come up with an insight like this? What is the insight? And then what does it mean for us and for the development of his life and his career and his thought process. And so we found the mathematical theory paper, the mathematical theory of communication to actually be extremely readable. It's one of the things that makes Shannon such an interesting figure is that even if you're not technically specialized, you can read that paper and make rough sense of it. And then you go and you read all the other papers around it, and it gives you a deeper sense of it. And then you talk to people who are in the field, and they help you get to it.

There are other papers he wrote that are, frankly, just much easier going. He wrote a paper about juggling that is fantastic. He wrote a paper about how to program a computer to play chess that's quite good. But in all of his papers, actually, you know, sure, the formulas may have been hard going for us, but everything in the preface and everything kind of where he's explaining things to you is very clear and is very simply put. And it is something that's a hallmark of his work that even non-experts can read his papers and find something in them. When you write a book about a scientist, you have to write about the science. How did you make that accessible? So we had good models. Well, I would say two things. One is we had a great editor at Simon & Schuster who is the editor behind books like Walter Isaacson's book on Einstein

and Steve Jobs and Ben Franklin. She's also the editor behind A Beautiful Mind. And A Beautiful Mind proved for us to be a very useful model in putting our book together because you don't have to be an economist to read that book and get a good sense of what game theory is, right? Sylvia Nasser, who's the author, goes into as much depth as is necessary for you to get the essential concepts to understand why what John Nash did in Game Theory later won him the Nobel 1948, we're going to pull you into the paper and explain where this fits into the sweep of the intellectual history and then pull you right back out, back into his life and into his wedding. And so that's how we tried to approach it, was giving people enough that they would have a sense of the ideas without getting bogged down or slowed down.

And it's not easy. And I imagine that there are some places in the book where we hit our mark in some places where we might've gone too far or done too little. But, um, our joke to ourselves was if the experts say we haven't done enough and more lay public readers say we did just a little bit too much, that's probably the sweet spot. That's probably where we need to be. I think it was Stephen Hawking in his brief history of time that said every equation decreases the reading audience by half. Yeah, we were very conscious of that as we were writing. And there are equations in the book because it would have been, it would have been dereliction not to put them in. But it's also the case that neither Rob nor I

are mathematicians or engineers. So in a way, that's the best position to be in if you're writing a book about Claude Shannon, because things that are alien to you are also going to be alien to the bulk of your audience. And so the fact is, a lot of us are just, you know, we're writing where our readers are sitting, which is, I don't know this stuff, so explain it to me. And Rob and I had to make sense of it in order to explain it to people. But that meant that in a way, we were at an advantage that an engineer or an electrical engineer might not have been in, which is they could have made unconscious assumptions about what people knew.

We couldn't assume anything because we didn't know anything. So it made it easy to be the guys explaining it. Your last book was about Marcus Cato, a Roman guy who opposed Julius Caesar, committed suicide, all historical and stuff. Well, there's the whole summary. There you go. Maybe I should have asked him to do the summary. Jimmy, would you like to give a summary of your previous book?

Sure. So the last book that Rob and I also worked on together was a biography of an ancient Roman senator whose name was Cato. People know the name Julius Caesar. Cato is Julius Caesar's arch nemesis for basically his entire public political life. Um, and, uh, it was a wonderful book to work on. It was another instance of just expecting that there would be a book and not finding one and wanting to go out and do it.

Um, and Cato is a, you know, completely different figure from a completely different time. Um, but it was, uh, a similar joy to do that work. It seems like such a big difference between a historical political figure to a relatively modern scientist. How did you decide these were areas you wanted to work on. I think both Rob and I are passionate about biography as a device for making sense of not just people's lives, that's obvious, but of historical movements and of intellectual movements. And so the common thread between the two books is that they're both biographies. And so they share that in common. There's also a way in which you have to, in both cases, understand the context of the times to make sense of the person. And so the joy in doing a book like this is, in the case of the ancient Roman stuff,

you know, understanding what life was like then, understanding what it would have been like to be a child back then, to come of age in a time of war and political chaos. In the case of Claude Shannon, you know, we had to read books about the 1930s and 40s and what mathematicians' lives were like when the war came. So, doing that is a lot of fun. It takes a lot of time. It's a lot of fun. And, you know, it can seem like it's like well how did you guys go from you know politics to to uh history of science um honestly part of it is it is as random as it seems we in both cases found a topic or an idea that hadn't been written about and just decided to go and write about it and so we were sort of scratching our own itch in both cases. And there

was no like kind of, well, now that we've done Roman history, we ought to do Greek history. And from there, we're going to do American, you know, it wasn't anything like that. It's much more about finding places where we felt like someone where there was some figure of consequence whose life deserved a much broader treatment than it had been given. Which of the books was easier to research and which was easier to write? I would say that the Cato book was much easier to write and research for a couple reasons. One is, you know, there was nothing, unless someone had done a big archaeological dig in Rome and found a bunch of new archival material that we didn't have, you sort of had a limited set of documents you could work with to retell the life of Cato. The other piece of it is that politics is a more natural

ground for both Rob and I having worked as speechwriters in the past. So it was just the language has been more familiar to us. So this was definitely a more challenging book, partly because the folks, many of the folks who were involved in Claude Shannon's life were still alive. So getting accurate portraits and getting accurate assessments of them meant tracking them down, getting them to agree to talk to us, talking to them, etc. And so this was a much longer book, a much more intense book to write. But both had their had their, you know, difficulties and their their joys. How long did it take you to write this book? Five years end to end. So, you know, roughly from sort of from my idea to finish. And, you know, there are periods where we're working really intensely, some periods

that weren't as intense, but yeah, about a half decade. If you, but this wasn't your only job during that time. You know, both Rob and I were doing a variety of different things. But we've, we, you know, if you're an author, a lot of authors, unless you're Walter Isaacson or Michael Lewis, and you've had a lot of success with your books, you will have to find a way to do books for a while anyway as an avocation and not a vocation. And obviously, you hope that changes. And you hope that all of the listeners of your podcast go out and buy a copy of Claude Shannon or a Mind at Play so that we can continue to write books. But I think there's no – I, in a way, like the fact that I have book writing and I do other things because I think I only have a certain amount of good writing time in me every day.

And once you hit that point, anything beyond that, you really are just spinning your wheels. What was it like? You've written two books with Rob now. How do you divide the work? Is there a natural division of labor? Do you say, okay, I'm doing this chapter, you do this next chapter? If you do it that way, you have to integrate your voice somehow. How does that end up working? Yeah, so we just with the with both books, we basically just divvied up chapters, and then we would write a draft, and then we would swap and give it to the other person, and they could add stuff, edit stuff, refine and make sure our voice was in line. Part of it is Rob and I have actually been friends for a lot longer than we were co authors, right? So we were friends from back in college, and just sort of fell into the work of writing together. And we just get along really well, which is, I would say,

a prerequisite if you're going to co-write with anybody. But it's a lot easier than people think. And frankly, it's a lot more fun than people think because you have someone who can bounce ideas off of you. You have someone who takes you out of your own head, who you can say, hey, what do you think about this? Should we make this into a scene or not? And so it's actually really great to co-author. I recommend it to people. chance to take a crack at it and then swap and refine and then just edit the whole book in a series of passes to make sure that it didn't sound like there were two separate books being written. It's also good for giving accountability. One of the hard things about writing is I'll work on it tomorrow. But if you know you have somebody else that you don't want to disappoint i mean i suppose your editor but

let's face it they're used to disappointment uh have writing with a partner seems like a really good way to just put words on a page was that true for you a thousand a thousand percent correct um the the kato book actually the way we got it done was, it wasn't even just about having a partner, it was that we set times when we were going to be physically in person together in the same place. And we did that from kind of after work from about 7pm to 11pm, sort of Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and then Saturday from noon to five. And we kept that schedule up for a year to a year and a half. That was in the heavy writing phase. And it forced us to be in a place with a person and you couldn't just flip on Netflix, you know, and watch, uh, and binge watch your favorite series. You had to sit at your computer and write. Um, so the accountability I think is incredibly important. And I will say

like writing writers have all sorts of things that they say about writing and about, um, I, I, and I, and I struggle with the same sort of challenges that I think most writers struggle with, but having the accountability of someone else and having someone, especially who's a friend who you don't want to let down is a powerful way to get the words onto the page. And your friendship survived. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. It actually, and we both became fathers during the course of writing the book. Um, so we, we didn't just evolve as, you know, second time authors. It was, uh, also an evolution into parenthood, which is kind of interesting in its own way. Um, but no, we, uh, we, we like to joke that it's, it's a sort of book marriage. Um, and then, and then we did not have a book divorce uh which is nice

how is the response to a mind to play been you know it's been a little um overwhelming actually in the sense that because rob and i weren't computer scientists or engineers or mathematicians we didn't i don't even think even after doing the book, we fully appreciated just how beloved a figure Shannon was. And these aren't our natural stomping grounds, right? Rob and I aren't going to hackathons or going to data science conferences or we're not in Silicon Valley. And so to see the response from everyone from the CTO of Amazon tweeting about the book, to venture capitalists in New York tweeting about the book, to being contacted by the MIT Technology Review, to being talked to by IEEE. There's been this

what we think is a latent demand for Shannon that was just going unfilled. And it's been really incredible. I mean, I think the book is in its third or fourth printing already, which is great. And I will say that that says less about Rob and I, and I think much more about the kind of consequential figure Shannon was. And it just goes to show that there are these people hiding in plain sight that, you know, deserve to have some explanation of how they came to the work they did or live the lives that they did. And the moment you put it out there, people respond. And so we've been really

thrilled by the response. And as I mentioned, I think there'll be a second wave as this documentary comes to life early next year. And I hope at some point that you all get the chance to, you know, talk to Mark or, or even have him on because he's, he's wonderful. And he's doing a really, really thorough job of getting the research and getting the life of Claude Shannon onto the screen. He was such an amazing person. And I love the fact that he said no to so much of the stuff that could have distracted him from getting all the things done. And I mean, he's self-distracted. He totally, he wrote papers about juggling. A part of me loves that as much as his ability to say no to fame and fortune, that he was willing to put his scientific mathematical mind towards silliness. His sense of humor isn't overblown, is it?

He really did find good evidence of the fact that he was a little bit of a jokester and liked puns. Oh, it was all over the place. He was, he was just really, so there was this moment where there's an overgrown tree on the Shannon property and it's just big and they've got to do something with it because it could cause damage if they don't take care of it. So the normal, you know, everyday person's reaction is we'll just have the tree cut down and then, you know, they'll take the wood away. Shannon has a crew come out and he has them take the tree and carve it into a flagpole.

And then at the very top, he has them carve a skull as the sort of top of the pole. So rather than just a normal end, it's got the skull at the top. And then they install the skull and crossbones flag, the Dolly Roger, onto this flagpole. This serves no other purpose other than to seemingly they sort of make shannon laugh um he has a a button installed in the kitchen i'm sorry no the buttons in the base buttons in his toy shop the end point of the button is in the kitchen and it's a it's a skull skull, it's a hand, it's a skull of a hand. And when you press the button, the finger curls and sort of makes like a come hither motion. Uh, and it's Shannon's indication that someone in that part of the house needs to come to his

part of the house. Uh, but it's his funny way of doing that. Um, you know, he loves juggling and he loves, um, he invents a game, a robot that'll solve Rubik's cubes. So there's all of these just moments of inventive, playful, you know, stuff in Shannon's life. And it's, it's a bit, it's you, you, you, you contrast that with then his like serious theoretical work. And it makes for somebody who is, is really one of a kind. Was there anything that surprised you about Shannon, something you didn't know going in? I didn't have a sense, and Rob didn't either, of how artistic and how kind of visual Shannon was.

So I knew how mathematical he was, but he is one of the few people I know whose work ends up both in the kind of halls of museums as well as in the pages of journals. He is someone who admired M.C. Escher. He had a sense for how to explain mathematical concepts and engineering concepts with visual devices. A lot of times, his devices weren't so much inventions for practical purpose. They were inventions to illustrate a point. So a good example is he builds a mouse that can solve a kind of electronic maze.

And partly the reason he's doing it is because it shows you that a machine can be made to think. It's an early example of artificial intelligence. But you can demonstrate that in a number of ways. What he chooses is a really familiar concept for everyone, a mouse trying to solve, trying to find a piece of cheese in a maze. And so it's this elegant way of explaining things. And he has this real flair for the visual, for the dramatic. And so it's one of the things his son mentioned, and it was not anything that we would have thought of initially, because you think of inventive mathematical people a certain way, but he was someone who had a real keen visual sense. And that's something that really surprised us as while we were doing our research. I like that. Christopher, do you have any more questions?

We probably should let Jimmy go soon. I don't. I think I asked everything in my bucket, but yeah, I have to read the book. Yeah, it's really good. Jimmy, do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? Curiosity, when taken past, I think, what we would all kind of consider normal, is a really powerful force. And I say that, and it sort of sounds like a simple thing to say, but Shannon was a really vivid living example of what happens when your curiosity can propel a career. A great example, it's better to just tell their story is this moment when a graduate student named Ed Thorpe visits Claude Shannon to get some advice on a paper he's submitting to an academic journal. And he talks with Shannon about the paper and Shannon has him make a small change in the paper's title. And he says it'll be accepted if he makes this change. then shannon asks him you know he's intrigued by this graduate student uh and shannon's a giant

a legend at this point so he sort of the graduate students obviously got some guts even being there shannon asks him so is there anything else you're working on and this graduate student at thorpe says well i've got this idea for a machine that I could wear that would allow me to get slightly better than house odds at roulette. And this like click Shannon into gear. They end up spending eight months working to build this machine together at Shannon's home. At one point, Ed Thorpe moves into Shannon's home for a period of two or three weeks just to continue the building and refining of the machine. Shannon spends at that time $1,500 to buy a regulation roulette table from a wholesale distributor of such things.

And they build this device. They take it to the casinos. They test it. I mean, they go farther and farther and farther. And all of this starts because Shannon has the question, what else are you working on? And then when the guy says, I've got this idea, Shannon doesn't just say, well, that's neat. It was nice to meet you.

He says, oh, that's, you know, he takes it to the next level and then a level beyond that and then a level beyond that. I don't think that I am, that I embrace that kind of curiosity as often as I should. But after doing the Shannon book, I will confess to Googling things and taking things maybe a step or two beyond where I might have before. And I think if your listeners take away anything from the biography, especially those who are non-technical, I hope what it illustrates is just how far you can go with that kind of questioning, with that kind of curiosity. Wow. Yes, I like that. Our guest has been Jimmy Soni, an author, editor, speechwriter, and partner at the Creative Advisory Brass Check. Ask for his latest book, A Mind at Play,

at your local bookstore. And remember, it makes a good gift. Thank you so much for being with us, Jimmy. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you also to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. And of course, thank you for listening. I have a quote to leave you with, and I don't know, maybe I've used this one before, but I really like it. It's from Albert Einstein. The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence.

One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Embedded is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive money from them. At this time, our sponsors are Logical Elegance and listeners like you.