The a16z Show - a16z Podcast: From Mind at Play to Making the Information Age

Episode Date: August 3, 2017

with Jimmy Soni, Rob Goodman, and Steven Sinofsky Modern technology owes much to the introduction of the binary digit or "bit", first proposed by Claude Shannon in "A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, a paper published in 1948. The bit would go on to transform analog to digital, making Shannon the father of the information age. His contemporaries (and collaborators) included Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, and other architects of the digital era.   In this podcast, moderated by a16z board partner Steven Sinofsky, the authors of the new book about Shannon, A Mind at Play -- Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman -- discuss the life and mind of the mathematician, engineer, and cryptographer from his roots as a precocious tinkerer in Gaylord, Michigan to the halls of MIT and Bell Labs. But this conversation is also, more broadly, about how genius and innovation happens... beginning with play. Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to the A16Z podcast. Today we're doing one of our book episodes, and we're talking about genius in the process of innovation through the life of Claude Shannon, the father of information theory. He was also an architect of the digital age, who, among other things, worked with Veneverbush and befriended Alan Turing. This conversation is moderated by A16Z board partner Stevensonovsky, with special guests Jimmy Sonny and Rob Goodman, authors of a new biography of Shannon Just Out, called A Mind That Play. Rob's voice is the first you'll hear right after Stevens. I want to start off by just setting some context. Back in, I think, around 1990, Scientific American said decades after this paper was published in 1948, that Shannon created, quote, the Magna Carta of the Information Age. What did they even mean by that? That's a pretty big statement.

Shannon's paper, a mathematical theory of communication, is something like a founding document. It laid out the principles that make the digital transmission of information possible. Shannon in this paper does things like introduce the concept of the bit, explain how you can quantify information. Explain how you can use digital codes to compress information and to send it with arbitrarily perfect accuracy. So all these things that are foundational to digital communications in the present, Shannon lays them out. And that's a magnacarta scale achievement. Let's kind of go back in time and go back to, you know, his earliest years. And he was born in 1916, more than 100 years ago.

He probably didn't have much in the way of electricity, of indoor plumbing, of all of those kind of things. It was very early in the 20th century and industrialization in the Midwest. What was he born into? So he was born in Upper Michigan, and his childhood is the childhood of a sort of boy tinkerer, right? He plays with broken radios and takes them apart and puts him back together. There was a line that all the broken radios and Gaylord passed through Claude Shannon's hands. He builds a makeshift elevator in the back of a barn with a friend. So Gaylord is his hometown.

Yeah. How big is that town? Two or three thousand people. Tiny. It was like a small village, but it had it because it was close to railroads, it had some commercial importance to the region. But his dad is a probate judge, mom is a teacher. And he is a boy who's constantly playing, building things, always trying to sort of figure out

how to rig things up. So he rigs up a barbed wire telegraph between his house and a friend's house. So he uses the barbed wire as the transmission wire. Yeah, exactly. Claude is a boy. I mean, he's just doing this for fun. So that's sort of the rough equivalent of, like, hacking away at a raspberry pie today. Basically, yes, basically. And then he's also, you know, he's like, he has inspiration from his family. His grandfather was an inventor. Actually, he had filed a patent to improve on the washing machine. And so he's inspired by that. And he's a distant cousin of Thomas Edison. So that's kind of in the family lore as well. But he has a very normal childhood. Compared to other geniuses, I mean, we are not talking about somebody whose parents are drilling him in the finer points of advanced mathematics at a young age, they allow him to play. They allow him to do his own, live his own life. But also compared to many of the other scientists that emerged in, that would also later become his, his contemporaries, he also didn't face like

oppression. Yeah, compared to all the people who made such a difference in technology in the 20th century, Claude Shannon had just a pretty idyllic childhood. And one of my favorite parts of researching this book was reading some newspaper headlines in this tiny town of Gaylord. Some of our favorites were meeting held to discuss artichokes, and Vern Matt's loses finger. So those are the kind of things that made the front page of the newspaper in Gaylord Michigan, and that's the kind of childhood Shannon had. One of the things that fascinates me about whenever I get to read about the inventors from that, that started in that era, is just how versatile they are. Like, it's, it's rather incredible that you could become essentially as expert as you can become in so many

different things. His mom is a musician, so he ends up playing the French horn and later picks up the jazz clarinet. He does reasonably well in school. It turns out that part of the reason he decided to go whole hog on mathematics is because his sister was good at math and there was a little bit of sibling rivalry. He finds his way to the University of Michigan and he comes at a really interesting time because the engineering school has just gone through this massive expansion. I find it relevant to what's going on today with the discussion about coding and the importance of sort of transforming education to the modern era. He seemed to be fortunate enough that the University of Michigan was busy transforming itself from sort of a normal, as you would,

like liberal arts school into like, hey, we need to be an engineering school. There's this quote from, I think, the dean of engineering who's almost excited because the engineering department is about to pass the liberal arts department registration. He says, by God, we'll pass them yet. So it's just this sort of idea that the economy is changing around the school. And the school is really investing a lot in its capital, both physical capital and human capital to keep up with that. What else happened to him at Michigan that was such an interesting part of his country? Yeah, he started publishing answers to these mathematical puzzles that came at the very back of academic journals. By the way, we actually published the puzzles in the book.

So for anybody who wants to try to solve what Claude Shannon was solving, you're welcome to try. Yeah, I'm good. Rob and I couldn't. But imagine that you're a college junior or senior. you're like picking up these academic journals, flipping to the back, looking at these puzzles, working out long solutions, sending them in for publication. What it suggested to us was, this was a guy who wasn't going to go back and run the family furniture business. He was actually going to try to make it as an academician and as somebody who was going to get some advanced

training. And it's a pretty incredible thing when you think about a kid like Claude Shannon with no particular means from a reasonably modest family, a small town, going to the University Michigan and managing you get two pieces published in these journals later, later in his collegiate career. That's a pretty extraordinary thing when you think about where he is coming from. Yeah. I mean, especially because most of the people reading those and answering them were probably on the East Coast at Harvard and MIT. And then also in Michigan, he was either being pulled to the mechanical world of farming or to the soon-to-be-created auto industry. Right. And he was someone who made a point of studying engineering and mathematics at the same time. And I think that was relatively

we're in double major in those two things. Shannon said he just did it because he was just a few courses away from getting double major, so why not? So he finished up at Michigan and then like did this awesome thing where he's just like, hey, I think I'm going to go to MIT. So again, it kind of testifies a little bit to Shannon's ambition. He sees this job application invitation on something aside of a postcard that's posted up in the engineering building at Michigan. And it says, come to MIT and work as a graduate student with Venever Bush and the differential analyzer, which is one of the leading computing machines of the day. It's an analog computer. So Shannon sends off his application. So it testifies, one, to the fact that he had this decent publication record for an undergrad,

but also to the fact that Veneva Bush, who was one of the great sort of scientific networkers and organizers in 20th century America, he had a real eye for talent. He was the first person really well up in the scientific hierarchy to spot Claude Shannon's talent and to sort of invite him into the big leagues, in a sense. So Bush wrote this very famous, this article called As We May Think, which is sort of the history of the iPhone or a tablet and the web and a whole bunch of other stuff all rolled into a single paper, which itself is phenomenal. Right.

But he does, so he ends up getting a job with Bush. I was fascinated by this description because it goes back to being talented in many things. Like Bush had this whole philosophy of engineering that was deeply, and he was running, he was like a dean at MIT. So he was in charge of a lot of stuff. And so he was, he didn't believe. in like the pure theory, but he also didn't believe

in sort of the pure mechanical. He had this bizarre view of, at the time, of like sort of, how do you think with your hands? Yeah, and he had a great example when he was constructing this differential analyzer.

He said he was working with a pretty not very well-schooled mechanic to actually build this thing. He said by the end of the process of putting the same together, this mechanic had pretty much learned the basic concept of calculus.

He didn't really get it on an intellectual level, but he knew it with his hands. He got it in his bones because Bush and the machines that he built were all about analog processes, about acting out differential equations, about thinking about how to make things through the act of building. Bush said that he was never really more than a second-rate mathematical brain, but he was a great builder and a great organizer,

and he was really someone who put those skills to use for doing math, for acting out math, and that was something that I think was really key to what made him such an important figure in the field of computing. I don't know that there's a figure in science at that time who was better as a mentor for Claude Shannon than Vannevar Bush. Just building on this. Bush was building essentially these analog purpose-built machines to solve problems. And it's really hard for us to wrap our heads around what was going on. But it was sort of like if you want to track the trajectory of a missile, then you build like a bunch of metal that operates in a certain way and you spin wheels and the answer to the missile's trajectory pops out the other end.

But if you wanted to then do some weather forecast, the machine was irrelevant. You'd have to completely rebuild it from scratch. So it really wasn't the most practical machine, but these are room-sized computers, huge. They call them fearsome things of gears and shafts. The problem solving that an analog computer was doing was actually replicating what the problem looked like and then figuring out the solution. So it did have to be rebuilt. It broke constantly.

It was really frustrating. People had to watch it 24 hours a day because the bad things would happen if you didn't. And like debugging it involved like, you know, filing more. of some part, like adding a tooth in a gear. And what I think is actually really neat in hindsight is Bush was attempting to push his students, including Shannon, to build like the general purpose version of this machine that could like solve any differential equation. And if you kind of do an analogy today, that's a lot like people saying, hey, let's go solve

general AI when all the grad students are using machine learning to pick out kitten videos. And so they understand how to use machine learning for kitten videos. But the idea of like, you know, figure out what videos to go find and look at and classify them and understand it just seems really far off. It gives much more optimism that general AI might be solved because if you were Vanvar Bush, you were just not getting closer to your general purpose differential engine until Shannon comes along. And the really interesting part about that is that when you set people onto these general problems, you can't necessarily predict where the solution is going to come from or what's going to be productive. So what Bush is interested in is configuring, like you said, a general purpose. analog computer that can reassemble itself on the fly and can use electrical relays to change the quantities of the various variables that it shafts and gears representing.

And Shannon takes this in a very different direction through his study of the electrical relays in the switching system when he realizes that this can really be combined with Boolean logic. And this is something that Chris Dixon wrote in his great article about Shannon in the Atlantic where he said that Shannon figured out how to map logic, Boolean logic, onto the physical world. and he did this because Bush sort of set him to deal with this problem in general computing. It turned out to be hugely productive because Shannon, along with Turing's paper in the same year, is really laying the foundations for all the digital computers that come afterwards.

Well, it sounds like also that that was another example of, you know, one person who was skilled in many disciplines applying the different disciplines across them. I mean, he understood Boolean logic, he understood math and calculus, and he was a tinkerer. And Andy had actually worked at the phone company as well, so we understood switches. He studies logic as an undergrad. He manages to work at the phone company. He gets Vaniever Bush as a mentor, and he works on the differential analyzer. There is a bit of this that you feel like is almost kismet.

And these things, logic and the switches and the analyzer, had been in the ether. It took Claude Shannon to fuse them together. So he comes up with this sort of breakthrough notion of bringing together, you know, logic gates, Boolean logic, circuits. And it seems as amazing as this was. It wasn't quite a leap to, like, the computer. It was recognized almost immediately as a really important piece of work. It won the Nobel Prize, which is different than the Nobel Prize.

We had to point that in the book, which is an award for engineering papers. So after he's done this amazing piece of work in the area of switching and logic, Bush says to him, why don't you go write your dissertation on theoretical genetics now? Because why not? Once you're Claude Shannon. So Claude Shannon says, okay, and he goes off and does it. And maybe it's possible that took him out of direct contact with that field, at least for a temporary amount of time. And then the war happens.

Yeah, it's really interesting because at this point, everyone is taken to focusing on the needs of the war, the war department, and he's decidedly apolitical and doesn't appear to be particularly religious or even dogmatic in anything other than his beliefs about math and engineering. Sorry, one other thing. He's very dogmatic about jazz music. Oh, okay. Aren't we all? How did that play in the environment he's in where, you know, people had fled from Europe because of the war? What was in his mind? Did he care about the repercussions of it? technology or did he put aside the beliefs? It absolutely played a role. So this is actually a very hard time in Claude Chan's life. It's the cusp of the American entry into World War II. He himself admits he doesn't want to do the draft. He's a frail guy. He likes to keep his own counsel. His first marriage is collapsing and he has gone from MIT to Princeton's Institute of Advanced Studies where he's on fellowship and he doesn't quite know what's going to come next. And there's the very real risk that he gets

drafted and sent overseas to fight. And what he has now, you know, over the course of his undergrad and his graduate studies, acquired some impressive mentors. Those mentors get him a wartime contract working at Bell Laboratories that spares him from the draft. More importantly, it puts him working on practical applications of mathematics and technology, and not just practical. We're talking the most practical. His first project is on fire control, which basically is how do you shoot things down from the sky? Yeah, it's like an anti-air. It's like the control unit for a really fast shooting anti-aircraft gun, not like fire or flames. But there's complicated mathematics that has to go into figuring out how you do that and do it

at scale. And it leads him to connect with many of the senior figures at Bell Laboratories who are so impressed by his work that they are then able to pull him into the laboratories permanently. The war is a, I mean, it changes the lives of everyone in that generation. For Claude Shannon, it leads him from fire control to cryptography, which is an important development. in his life. But I do think that in a way, without the war, I'm not sure that you get to the 1948 paper, you get to the theory of communication, because he could well have gone in a completely different direction. He was at Princeton, and it's like good grief. The guy's in his 20s, and he's hanging out with von Neumann, with Morris, with Einstein. We haven't filled our

favorite Einstein story. Claude Shannon is at the IAS in Princeton giving a lecture on something or brother, and halfway through the talk, Einstein, walks into the room, and he sits for a couple of seconds, and he leans over and whispers something to someone in the back row, and then he walks out again, and then Shannon immediately after the lecture is gone, like runs out the top, said, oh, my God, what does Einstein think about my lecture? He said, oh, he just wanted to know where the men's room was. Or the tea and cookies, apparently.

Or the tea and cookies. We've got two versions of the story. I like the men's room one better because it's just that extra level. And then crypto comes up. And so, you know, in hindsight, he seemed, again, fortuitously or by some higher power uniquely qualified to go after cryptography.

You know, the field was completely different when he started it. Back to analog, differential machines and stuff like that. In fact, he worked on one of the early real-time systems, you know, Sig Sallie, and that did not look like any computer that we ever would think of. What did he do to change

cryptography? So, there's a number of things. I think it's worth also being, you know, it's worth sort of level setting where he's at in his life. So he's just finished his graduate studies. His first marriage has collapsed. It was a really emotionally difficult event. He moves to the West Village in New York and he starts going to Bell Labs every day. Bell Labs has gone from, I think, 3,000 employees to 9,000 employees. And a lot of the employees in the office are wearing military uniforms. And so this is a really tense time.

There's a lot of work to be done. Basically, everybody is working a six or seven day work week just until the war ends. And into this mixed steps, Claude Shannon, with his knack for math, with his boyhood fascination with codes, and a kind of facility for code breaking and for code making. And that's what he does for a little while. He focuses on how the U.S. can better encrypt the messages that it's sending to the Brits. And he focuses on kind of understanding the fundamentals of cryptography. He writes a now-famous paper that is classified for years. I believe he's called a mathematical theory of cryptography

and he proves the existence of a one-time pad, the existence of an unbreakable code. One of the more interesting elements of this work is that it puts him in touch with Alan Turing. In what is probably, honestly, my favorite chapter in the book,

he and Alan Turing are having tea every day. Alan Turing is a little older than him at this point. Yeah, but Alan, so Alan Turing's on a billet from the British government to make sure that what the U.S. is doing in terms of the messages

it's sending is secure. the Brits were very suspicious that the U.S. just wasn't going to get it right. And so Alan Turing's at Bell Labs and Claude Chan's at Bell Labs and these sort of two giants of computing meet and these are guys who don't make new friends easily become friendly and have tea every day.

It's just an incredible story. It's amazing to me that all of this is happening at what is effectively a corporate lab. And it is. It's actually a testament to Bell Laboratories that somebody like Shannon is, A, invited to be there in the first place because it's not like he has a specific job title.

He joins the mathematical research group, and they basically go around cherry-picking the problems that they would like to solve, and they don't have to do anything they don't want to do. Well, they're the phone company. It's true. It helps to have a government monopoly, a government-back monopoly. But the truth is that he has this extraordinary mentor and the head of that department in Thornton Frye, who realizes that there are a bunch of academic mathematicians who don't want to stay in academia, and you don't really know what to do with them. and he sort of says, well, if you invite them in and attach them to engineers, attach them to physicists, they can help. They can sort of amplify and help solve problems. And so Claude Shannon is one of these sort of flexible problem solvers. So Bell brings people like him in. The second thing that Bell does, it's like, you know, companies have newsletters today, they have blogs today. Bell is publishing a full

academic trial for most of the 20th century. And these are rigorous papers distributed around the country. University researchers read them. And it really is a hall mark of that that era that someone like Claude Shannon who, you know, by day is working on cryptography on the coloration of wires for the phone service is also in a place where he can write a 77 page paper that, you know, developed an entire field from scratch. So now we're post-war and we're back to Shannon going on to solve even bigger problems. And the notion of communication comes up and it's, at this point it was still rather primitive. I think like the idea of like, wow, the signal doesn't make it from point.

Point A to point B means, like, increase the amplifier, make it louder. And if we all know from the dinner table, screaming, doesn't make your point get across. But even the very notions of signal noise, all of these haven't really been formed yet. Right. The solution to noise, the solution to a noisy channel or distortion was just to talk louder, brute forcing the problem. And Shannon discusses ways to get around that by talking smarter and encode. But this breakthrough seems, it's not like others because, you know, the problem goes back to the 1890s and the telegraph. and he himself had sort of been

formulating it over this 10-year journey of thinking about it. Yeah, he actually wrote a note to Vinever Bush first suggesting that he was working on this, the theory that all messages or all communications were

essentially the same. This is 10 years before he ever publishes the paper. It is kind of interesting to think of this idea like marinating in his brain as he's traveling through different parts of his life. The other important point is that he It takes 10 years for these things to crystallize. We tend to want very quick reactions to things.

We think the moment our tweet goes up, if it doesn't get responded to, oh God, what have I done? For Claude Chen, and this was 10 years, often working at night and on the weekends, thinking, pondering, writing things down, scribbling, and then eventually coming back and dropping a theory that when it was announced,

people said it came like a bomb. Yeah, that's actually, to me, it's just very refreshing to hear. Like there's a moment, but it also took many, many years. Sometimes history has a tendency to tell everything. Like it happened on Tuesday and then the paper book is published. But what was the big assumption that he made in his theory of communication that really sort of changed everybody's mind? I'd say there are a few things.

A lot of the history of information up to Shannon was this question of abstraction. How can we get away from the meaning that any message has and think about messages in a more objective way? How can you measure the information content from message? and Shannon's predecessors, people like Nyquist and Hartley, who had been sort of groping to a solution to this problem, as had many others in the field. But it's Shannon who really comes up with the final formulation of how do you quantify information?

What does it even mean to say how much information is in a book? How much information is it a song? How much information is in a video or so on? And what Shannon does in introducing the bit, which he starts off calling the binary digit before one of his colleagues comes up with bit as a good abbreviation, what Shannon does is he talks about how we can think about information as a resolved uncertainty, and how we can think about information probabilistically,

and how we can use these tools to actually calculate information in a really objective way. And once we do that, once we can actually do hard science with our messages, that enormously simplifies the problems of compression and accurate communication. But this first step, getting past that semantic level and getting to the objective quality of information, I think that's a key in the whole paper. You know, we do look back and go like the bit came out of the paper. At the time, was that viewed as sort of a key innovation? Or when people had the elevator conversation about the paper, what was the elevator

conversation? That he had set some outer limits for what engineers would try to do, that the paper was a model of clarity and concision, that he had explained all possible forms of communication in a sort of single diagram, and that he had done it all without anyone knowing, that he had no collaborators of any kind, and that it was published in two sections within the Bell Technical Journal,

the Bell Systems Technical Journal. What we take from the paper only starts to matter in the 80s. And so at the time, this was still a discussion very much in theory, but the power and force of his theory was immediately seen. One of the things that I loved that I didn't know

was the first two papers were called a mathematical theory of communication. And then when he went to write his own book, he changed it to the mathematical theory of communication. What actually transpired in the interim there? One, he must have gotten some pretty good feedback on it. This isn't just a theory, it is the theory that he had stumbled on the big one. The other thing is the, I think also the intervention of Warren Weaver, who comes on as Shannon's co-author for the book, who is sort of a science popularizer. And he's also someone who's very, like Bush, he probably doesn't describe himself as having a first-rate scientific mind, but he's someone who loves literature. He collects translations of Alice in Wonderland. He supposedly can identify wine varietals by tasting. So he's just a sort of Renaissance man.

And he comes on encouraging Shannon to take this to press and writing a section of the book that's sort of a layperson's explanation of what information theory is. People think that Weaver in some ways as a co-originator of the theory. And he was always in a hurry to downplay that and to say, no, I just was the popularizer. One of the things is interesting, too, is that, you know, he's 32 when he writes the paper in 1948. But all along, people like Weaver played an important role in helping him, like, basically finish his work. He was very careful about the people that he let into his orbit. So part of that is just he was a natural introvert and he kind of kept his own, he sort of kept to himself. But his friends were just brilliant people. In 1948, after the paper is published, probably the most significant person in Shannon's life enters his life. That is Betty Moore, who is actually her title is computer. She is a computer at Bell Labs. And what that meant was that she was helping engineers do math. She herself was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate. of what is in Douglas Women's College, what is now Rutgers. She's got a lot of talent. She publishes herself. She's a musician. And Shannon, shy though he is, like starts talking to her.

They start dating. And they're a match right away. People just understand that when they're together, there's a different kind of connection. And they connect interpersonally, but they also connect mathematically. She does help him complete his work. Shannon was the kind of person who would see solutions in his head. And so he would think about problems and then see the end state. And he wasn't actually that interested in explaining to other people how he got to that end state. And I guess when you're as smart as Claude Shannon, you're kind of allowed to get away with that. But Betty Shannon understood that in order for Claude Shannon to have the kind of impact he was going to have, the work would need to get finished. So she would actually sit with him.

A lot of his earliest papers are in her handwriting. And she would do the math, do the intervening math. She would challenge him. She would include historical references, literary references in papers. and she never got any credit for this. And hopefully our work starts to restore that a bit. But Betty Shannon is one half of what I think of as one of the great creative partnerships of the 20th century. Yeah, I think that's just a fantastic point.

It's certainly part of the times we know the same thing about Pierre and Marie Curie and the same thing about Einstein and Malava and so on. Amazing foundation gets laid. And this career, he won many awards that he'd ever seem to seek out. in his later years, he ended up meeting like many of the progeny of the computing era. At one point, he ends up meeting Steve Jobs. How did that come about? So this is a story that was relayed to us by Claude Shannon's daughter.

And it's an extraordinary moment. Both Steve Jobs and Claude are the recipients of honorary degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. When is this? I believe it's the 1980s. After the ceremony's over, the people are sort of milling about the quad. And if you can imagine, Claude Shannon at this point by the 80s, because his work has started to actually be implemented, I mean, he's won a national medal, he's a revered figure. So there's a crowd around him. People want to shake his hand. People want to sort of be around him. And Steve Jobs is well-known,

but not as well-known as he is now. And so Steve Jobs actually has to, he goes into this throng of people and elbows his way into this audience with Claude Shannon. And he has to try to meet Claude, not the other way around. So he gets up to him and he shakes his hand. And he says, you know, Dr. Shannon's a real honor to meet you. You know, my name is Steve Jobs. I work at Apple Computer. And Shannon looks at him and says, oh, that's great, Steve.

It's nice to meet you. What do you at Apple? And it's just incredible moment. Steve Jobs actually sends the Shannon's. He assembles an Apple II and sends it to Claude. So they have one of the only Apple twos, I guess, that was assembled by Steve Jobs himself. And it's a real point of pride later for them. It's a kind of funny moment in computing history that these two giants met.

I really wanted to pull a couple of quotes about him from the book because I found them just so telling. And also, help us to reflect on our own culture. You know, one person said he never argued his ideas. If people didn't believe in them, he just ignored those people. So that has that sort of Silicon Valley feel to it. Right. As Jimmy was saying, that Shannon was the sort of person who was really occupied with doing interesting things, whether it was tinkering in his workshop or thinking through interesting

math problems. And if you weren't going to support that, he would very politely excuse himself and he'd go back to his office and work on whatever he was working on, or he'd start unicycling down the hallway to get away from you. Yeah, I love the unicycling only because that seems to have roots in PC era as well. Claude Shannon, to my mind, one of the most interesting things about him is he just spends his entire life pursuing the problems that interest him most. And then the moment that he's taking them, as far as he'd like to take them, he goes on and chases a different problem. So it's interesting, right, because he could have continued to trade on information theory for decades. He had the opportunity to be a scientific celebrity. He was in, he was profiled

in Vogue magazine. I mean, he had a dapper suit and everything, the cigarette, the whole deal. And he just, he sort of walks off the stage, but pursues artificial intelligence, then pursues robotics, goes and builds a chess playing machine, builds an artificially intelligent mouse that can navigate a maze. What I find inspiring about him is this is someone who had lucrative, prestigious options, and almost always went for the problem that interested in most. Well, I really want to thank you so much for joining us. And so this was Jimmy Sonny and Rob Goodman, co-authors of Mind at Play, How Claude Shannon invented The Information Age. Thank you very much for being here. Thanks. This is great. Yeah, thank you for having us.