#428 How Claude Shannon Worked

0:00 The great insights don't spring from curiosity alone. But from dissatisfaction. Not the depressive kind of dissatisfaction, but rather a constructive dissatisfaction. Or a slight irritation when things don't look quite right. A genius is simply someone who

0:16 Who is usefully irritated. A genius must delight in finding solutions. Genius must derive joy from applications of intellect. Claude Shannon once said, I get a big kick out of seeing a clever way of doing some engineering problem. A clever design for a circuit, which uses a very small amount of equipment and gets a great deal of results out of it.

0:37 For Shannon, there was no substitute. For the pleasure of seeing net Results. So how would such a person go about solving a problem? Shannon proposed six strategies.

0:49 Strategy number one. You might, he said, start by simplifying. Almost every problem that you come across is befuddled with all kinds of extraneous data of one sort or another. And if you can bring this problem down into the main issues. You can see more clearly what you're trying to do.

1:07 Simplification Is an art form in and of itself. It requires a knack. For exercising everything. From a problem.

1:15 Except what makes it interesting. Number two. Encircle your problem with existing answers to similar questions. And then deduce what it is that the answers have in common. You'll need a vocabulary of questions already answered.

1:32 You can call this ingenious incrementalism. As Shannon put it. It seems to be much easier to make two small jumps than one big jump in any kind of mental thinking. Number three. Restate

1:45 The question. Change the words. Change the viewpoint. break loose from certain mental blocks which are holding you in certain ways of looking at a problem. Do not become trapped.

1:56 by the sunk cost. the work that you've already put in. There's a reason after all why someone who is quite green to a problem will sometimes solve it on their first attempt. They are unconstrained by the biases that build up over time. Number four.

2:11 Break an overwhelming problem into small pieces. Many proofs in mathematics have been actually found by extremely roundabout processes. Shannon pointed out that a man often starts out and proves many great results, which don't seem to be leading anywhere. And then eventually ends up at the back door on the solution of his given problem. Number five, invert.

2:33 If you can't use your premises to prove your conclusion Just imagine that the conclusion is already true and see what happens. Try proving the premises and Instead. And number six.

2:45 Take time and see how far it will stretch. Someone always comes along and starts generalizing it. So why not do it? Yourself. That is an excerpt from one of my favorite chapters in the book that I'm gonna talk to you about today. That chapter is called Constructive Dissatisfaction. The book that I'm gonna talk to you about today is a Mind at Play, How Claude Shanid Invented the Information Age, and it was written by Jimmy Sony and Rob Goodman.

3:11 So even though Claude Shannon is one of the most important people to ever live in history. Many people don't know his name. I've been telling friends uh this week uh the book that I'm reading. And then like who's Claude Shannon? And the thing that resonated the most is like, Well, Claude Shannon Is the reason that Anthropic called Claude Claude.

3:27 And so I actually broke down This book and my notes on the book in the way that Claude Shannon would break down a problem. So I've essentially simplified what I think are the most important lessons, and then extracted them out of the book and then organized them. uh in a way I think it's just gonna be really interesting for you and I to go over. So one I wanna start is I'm not gonna go over like

3:47 even though it's a biography of Shannon is w and it's wonderfully written. I'm just I'm not even gonna talk about really much of about his personal life. Or his child or anything else. There's just a certain way and an indifference to the outside world that I find very intriguing by Shannon. Uh you and I have talked about this maximum over and over again, that you mute the world and then build your own.

4:07 Well, Clannon muted the world. built his own and then in turn by doing that built So I wanna start with just I give you an outline of this very unusual personality he had. Uh he says,

4:20 And there's a bunch of descriptions all throughout the book about how how he was, how he approached Life, how you push work that I thought was interesting. Uh, here's a few. He was a man immune to scientific fashion and insulated from opinions of all kinds. On all subjects. A man of closed doors and long silences.

4:37 Who thought his best thoughts in Spartan apartments and empty office buildings. He was a man almost entirely written out of a history that's defined by self promoters. His was a life spent in the pursuit of Of curious Serious

4:50 play the a mind at play. That idea is so important. That's it, the the book is perfectly titled. So this idea is like, hey, I'm spending my entire life just following my natural curiosity, my natural drift. I'm only gonna work on things that I'm more interested in. I don't care what other people think. That is, I think, one of the main takeaways from this book. His life was spent in pursuit of curious, serious play. He was that rare scientific genius who was just as content Rigging up a juggling robot. or flame throwing trumpet, both inventions and actually things that he made, as he was pioneering digital circuits.

5:20 He worked with levity and played with gravity. He never acknowledged a distinction between the two. Rarely has a thinker. who devoted his life to the study of communication Bin so uncommunicative. And so what they're talking about is the fact that he is the person that wrote that came up with information theory. The book goes into great detail about how important it is. There's different ways to describe it.

5:42 In many cases, it's very confusing. This is just a very simple way to describe the impact of the theory that Claude Shiny came up with. All the advanced signal processing that enables us to send high speed data. was done as an outgrowth of Claude Shannon's work on information theory. There's a great quote at the beginning of the book. It says geniuses are the luckiest of mortals.

6:02 Because what they do Is the same as what they w most want to do. That is exactly a great description of Shannon.

6:11 What he did was just what he was most interested in doing. And it goes back to what they were saying in that uh some of the ideas he had in how to solve problems that six step uh you know, framework on how to solve problems. That the genius must div delight. In finding solutions.

6:26 You could think about Shannon and his he did a lot of theoretical work, but he was most interested in intellect and intelligence that could be applied. In fact, He talks a lot about, you know, he's saying this back in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties, nineteen fifties, that it is inevitable that we will build machines that can think And that will be smarter than us. Uh

6:44 I think it's obvious already obvious. He made no distinction between work and play. And so later in his life he was he gave a series of interviews, and there's a bunch of great quotes from those interviews in the book. And this is one of the ones I found most fascinating. What's your secret in remaining so carefully? And Shannon replied, I do what comes naturally. And usefulness is not my main goal.

7:04 I keep asking myself, how would you do this? Is it possible to make a machine to do this? Can I prove this theorem? The w and the way to think about what he what he's talking about is like he didn't look at The world isn't there to be used. But to be played with.

7:17 And to be manipulated by hand and mind. He loved working with his hands, in fact. He has all there's all kinds of stories in the book. And some of these I'll t I'll talk to you about, where he's just making he just loved to make little machines, little gadgets, anywhere from unicycles to chess playing. Uh robots. Uh, he never this is some of my favorite parts uh about his personality. I read this book for the first time, I think like six years ago. I think originally it was like episode number ninety five of Founders.

7:42 And some of these uh lines are sometimes I've never forgotten. He never argued his ideas. If people didn't believe in them, he ignored those people. Shannon could neither explain himself to others nor cared to. He preferred solitude and kept his professional associations to a minimum. He was terribly, terribly

8:01 Secretive. He was not someone who would listen to other people about what to work on. Few of his papers. We're co-authored. Before we get back into this, I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world. And one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking

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9:06 Run their business on ramp, I run my business on ramp, and you should too. Go to ramp dot com today. To learn how to help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. Shannon made a principle of indifference. It was central to a career in which he chased his instincts. Often at the expense

9:26 Of more prestigious Options. That is exactly he was chasing his instincts. when he wrote the paper on information theory. This is why it's so important. And then once it once the paper's published. It starts to oh gradually over time it starts to build up like

9:39 Huge following. He becomes the scientific celebrity. Uh you know, he's offered You sent carte blanche at Bell Labs. You know, you can come to MIT, you can do basically do whatever you want. We just want to be associated with you. Very similar to l to what happened with Einstein later in his life. And in fact it it says that uh Shannon is to communications as Einstein is to physics.

9:59 But Shann didn't give a shit about any of that. So he says, unlike many scientists who parlayed successful research careers into lives as public intellectuals, he did not seem to consider using his growing standing as an opportunity to expand his network outside of it. If anything. He closed himself off

10:15 Further. Ignoring letters. colleagues and projects and spending his time and attention absorbed by puzzles that interested him the most is what he was just saying. He's like, Well Usefulness was my goal. I just f I find myself curious about something and was like, Oh, can I

10:28 Can I solve this problem? Can I prove this theorem? Can I build a machine that does all this? That's he's just he was

10:37 And then you you might w wonder, it's like okay, well, you know, he could have made a lot more money, he could have been c he he was awarded a lot of awards, but he never like chased them. He could have been, you know, out there speaking all the time. uh increasing his public profile. And so like why like what was it why is this person so different? Like why is he acting so differently than others who were in a similar position? And the answer that you obviously arrive at after you read the book is like, Oh, he's just following his natural curiosity and everything he does.

11:04 And this is what he says, I think that history of science has shown that valuable consequences often proliferate. From simple Curiosity. goes back to the importance of following your natural drift. Shannon would say that his interest in mathematics, even any of the interest in mathematics from a young age,

11:19 has a very simple source. It just came easily to him. And he says I think one tends to get into work That you find easy for yourself. And then

11:29 What you realize you can also tell, like, okay, you can tell a lot about a person by what they choose to work on, but you can also tell a lot about a person by what they choose not to do. And he w he started studying chemistry. He's like, Oh, this isn't I don't like this subject. Because it has too many facts and too So he says he disliked the kind of facts that he couldn't bring under a rule and abstract his way out of.

11:50 He says chemistry. always seemed dull to me. There's too many isolated facts and too few general principles for my taste. Now as he gets to he's it's e uh the end of high school. He's going to college.

12:03 Trying to figure out what to study. And something that he'll be described by His entire life from when he was a younger kid to even uh later on when you know, uh unfortunately he he winds up getting Alzheimer's. and passing away, but even later uh in later age that he was just extremely indecisive. He liked working on multiple things at one time. He was a natural born tinkerer. He was never just focused on one thing, even when he was writing his papers and in uh even when he was at his most productive when he was you know his early twenties, uh early to late twenties.

12:32 But this indecisive nature inadvertently it's gonna help him later in life because You know, when he's a teenager's like, What the hell am I gonna study? And he's like, Well I like mathematics, but I like engineering too. And he talks about later on that he actually thinks like

12:45 Engineers are some of the most important people in the world, which I'll get to. Uh he gives a great talk about that. But So this idea is like, well, I'm so indecisive, I can't figure out what I should study.

12:55 uh winds up happening later on. So he says, why? Because a generation later, this two curriculum that he's studying in college, mathematics and engineering, are kind of merging into one. And so uh this is the reason this dual degree uh appealed to him and why he was drawn to both mathematics and engineering. And he says, uh he admitted that his choice of a dual degree wasn't part of a grand design for his career. It was simply adolescent indecision. I wasn't really quite sure what I like best. Those studies gave him his first taste of communication engineering, which he found especially to his liking. Why? Because it blended practice and theory. So did he his entire life. That's just his personality, this blend of practice and theory.

13:31 Shannon's variety of indecision, which he neverly entirely outgrew, would prove crucial to his later work. This is why it's important. Someone content to build things might have been happy with a single degree in engineering. Someone drawn more to theory might have been satisfied with studying math alone. Shannon, mathematically and mechanically inclined, could not make up his mind. But the result left him trained in two fields that would prove essential to his later successes. And so after he's done with school, right w right when he's done with his undergraduate degrees.

13:59 One of the most important things to ever happen in Claude Shannon's life is Is he sees a job opening. Okay. Typed up on a postcard. posted to an engineering bulletin board. And it's saying come to MIT

14:13 and run what at the time is going to be the largest analog computer in the world. And I will tell you why it's not only running the analog the largest analog computer in the world at the time, it's going to be really important to his future uh innovations. and the the foundation of information theory, what he derives from that, but more importantly, it puts him in touch with his mentor, which I'll get to in one second. So it says it was an invitation to help build a mechanical brain. Shannon noticed it in the spring of nineteen thirty six. The job was to be a master student and assistant on the differential analyzer at MIT. And it was tailor made for a young man who could find equal joy in equations and construction, which we you and I just talked about.

14:50 Thinking and building. This is what Shannon said about this. I push hard for that job and I got it. That was one of the lucky stings of my life. Luck may have played a role, but the application's acceptance was also a testament to the keen eye of

15:05 Who would shape the rest of Шанан's life. And The course of American science. Van Ever. Bush.

15:13 Okay, so Van Ever Bush is one of the most important people in American history, if you read a book about Anybody doing important science and engineering in the United States in nineteen thirties, nineteen forties, nineteen fifties. Van Ever Bush will probably pop up as some supporting character. If you want more details about him, I've done two episodes on him. It was episode two seventy, two seventy one, but this book also gives you insight and a little overview into some of his accomplishments. But I would say

15:37 most important thing in terms of uh the relation to the story you and I are going over right now is he's the first person to actually see Claude Shannon for what he was, which is a near universal genius. Uh So says uh Van Ever Bush would preside over a custom made brain the size of a room. He'd counsel presidents, he'd direct the nation's scientists during World War Two. He was called the man who may win or lose the war and the general of physics. He was the first person to see Claude Shannon for who he was. Bush believed Shannon to be an almost universal genius whose talents might be channeled into any direction and the Also speaks to Clane's intelligence that This

16:11 winds up being his mentor, but he also heeds most of the advice and accepts the direction of Van Ever Bush, especially when he was a young man. Uh then they talk about This is what Bush is hiring a young Claude Channel to do, which is like I want you to run this differential analyzer. So I do think there's some fantastic uh images online about just You know, it's just essentially this brain the size of a room if you want to go look at it. But this is a description of it. One of the world's first large scale analog computers.

16:36 The differential analyzer was a brain the size of a room, a metal calculus machine that could whir away at a problem for days and nights on end before it ground to a halt. One problem which measured the effects of the Earth's magnetic field on cosmic rays took thirty weeks. Of spinning gears. But when it was done, it's not a little bit more.

16:54 The differential analyzer had solved by brute force. Equations so complex that even trying to attack them with human brain power Would have been pointless. Indeed. Bush's lab now owned the m

17:07 This is fantastic. Bush's lab now owned the computational power to turn from the problems of industry to some of the fundamental designs of c physics. This was the computer before the digital Revolution. And so

17:20 Essentially Bush. locked Claude Shannon in a room with this machine that is built to automate Thought. And it is built in the name of industry and efficiency to remove the art from math.

17:32 And in the midst of his work, he came to understand that he knew another way of automating thought. One that would ultimately prove far more powerful than the analog machine. So this again goes back to his work on information theory, which we'll get to in a minute. During this. Claude comes up with a very interesting insight. He says логік, just like a machine, was a tool for democratizing force.

17:52 built with enough precision and skill, it could multiply the power of the gifted and the average alike. I don't think I've ever heard it described that way. It's very interesting. And then the book does a great job of describing this transition from which you know Claude Channel obviously played a huge role. in bringing about this transition from analog computers to digital ones less than a decade after Shannon's paper, The Great Analog Machine. Was effectively obsolete, replaced by digital computers that could do that same work literally a thousand times faster.

18:20 Answering questions in real time, driven by thousands of logic gates. The design of these computers was a direct descendant of Shannon's Discovery. And then Van Ever Bush makes a few interesting observations about Shannon here. And I think it was really interesting.

18:34 He says that Shannon was distinguished less by quantitative horsepower than by his mastery of model making, that his main skill was the reduction of big problems to their essential core. And so again, that's why you could have this universal genius. He did not want actually Vanny Verbush, and he's about to talk about this right now, he was anti specialization. And so

18:55 Uh Shannon in that direction. He had him go down different fields of science, and in many cases he wanted Shannon's insights. On A field of science that Shannon previously knew nothing about. One of Van Ever Bush's deepest convictions. was that specialization is the death of genius. And he has a great quote about this. He says In these days when there's a tendency to specialize so closely,

19:17 It is well for us to be reminded that the possibilities of being at once both broad and deep Did not pass with Leonardo da Vinci or Benjamin. Franklin. And so let's get into how Bush applies this idea to Shannon. He's like, Hey Claude, do you know anything about genetics? And Claude knows nothing about genetics. So okay, I want you to go study this.

19:35 And he winds up Going down the path. Uh it w it was actually hilarious. I'm gonna give you just a summary'cause it th there's a lot more detail in the book. But this is Vanny Verbush's s s uh summary of just Pointing this universal genius.

19:49 at a field of study he knew nothing about. The project had been Bush's initiative and the hypothesis was his. This is the hypothesis. The subject. This twenty three year old genius working in a scientific field In which he had no training and he didn't even know what the words meant.

20:04 Can the scientific Can the scientific genius Produce original findings in less than one year. Conclusion. Confirmed. Yeah.

20:13 And then something else that's hilarious. Uh, so not only is is Van Ever Bush realizing, you know, the genius of Claude Shannon. was obvious to everybody around him, to the point where while he's in Uh college. Cla Shina gets interested in learning how to fly.

20:27 And his flight instructor's like, Oh wait, no flying's way too dangerous. We cannot risk this guy's mind. And so the flight instructor actually writes a letter. To the president of MIT, and this is what he says. I am convinced that Shannon is not only unusual, but is in fact a near genius of most unusual promise. And he's essentially saying Uh

20:47 With your permission, I will ban Shannon from the cockpit because such a life wasn't worth risking in a crash. The president of MIT writes back a few days later. And it's very level headed reply. He was somehow I doubt the advisability of urging a young man to refrain from flying or arbitrarily to take the opportunity away from him. On the ground of his being intellectually superior. I doubt whether it would be good for the development of his own character and personality and so it says Shannon was allowed to continue.

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23:15 Four slash Founders. So After He go after he finished graduate school.

23:21 he's trying to figure out what to work on. He decides to go work for Bell Labs. There is a great book on this that I will eventually do an episode on. It's called Idea Factory. Uh, but this th this book has a great overview of just how important it was that Shannon chose to go down this path and how it's going to lead to his work on information theory. Says he was headed to what was perhaps the world's foremost technology company. Remember, at this time, phone companies. It's the most complicated communication network in the world. And they're complete and utter monopolies. And so they just shoot off cash and then they took a bunch of that cash. They actually, you know a few weeks ago when you and I were talking about the founder of Honda?

23:53 He had that ri original insight. He actually thought that research uh and development departments were so important that they had to be spun out completely and had a different set of in incentives. They can't just be inside of your company. Bell Labs was spun out of the uh phone company too. So there's a lot of thinking and similarities and thinking between spinning out R D between what happened is happening here in the story and what the founder of Honda was doing in Japan as well. So uh Shen is headed to the world's most foremost technology company and it's the home of the best communications mines in America. The goal of Bell Labs wasn't simply clearer and faster phone calls. The labs were tasked with dreaming up a future in which every form of communication would be machine aided.

24:30 Right place. Right time. Right set of skills. right person. This is exactly the perfect place for Claude Shannon. So

24:38 The amount of innovation that comes out of Bell Labs is insane. Uh. Let me just read this paragraph to you. In the span of a few decades, Bell researchers engineered the first ever long distance phone call. They synchronized the sounds and images in movies and demonstrated some of the earliest facts in television systems. During World War II, they improved radar, sonar, and the bazooka, and they created a secure phone line connecting Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. They would invent touch tone dialing and a solar battery cell. And they would also pioneer the communication satellite. And in 1947, Bell researchers also created the transistor, the foundation of modern electronics. And so this is why Shannon said he wanted to work at Bell Labs. I had the freedom to do anything I wanted from almost the day I started. They never told me what to work on.

25:21 He also had no responsibilities other than to tinker and to think. And to publish papers and to do science. See why is this important? Because Shannon was allergic to administrative work and bureaucracies of almost every

25:33 Kind. He has a very deep, he's like a level 10 introvert, which we'll get to in a moment, but he's he he's naturally a loner. He long solitudes. Spartan apartments. Empty offices. This is what he Like that where he does his best work. His freedom from obligation played into his lifelong tendency to isolate himself.

25:52 Most days were spent shut indoors. alternating between his notepad and the clarinet. And back again. So he the I I already mentioned it a few times and he's gonna mention it a few more times that he loved working

26:04 Uh back and forth. on multiple things at one time. Again, there's no separation between you know, work and play. So he might be thinking about You know, how can we Uh he did a lot of work in cryptography or how can we, you know, improve the telephone network.

26:17 And he'd think about that for a little bit and then he'd put his pad down. And he would listen to jazz or he'd play his clarinet or he'd juggle or he'd ride his unicycle. And then you go back and forth, back and forth. Like this is essentially the you know, his entire day and how he lives his life. Um, then it goes back into oh, it says it right here. He was right actually writing this letter to Van Ever Bush. And he talked about, you know, some essentially what we'd call the city is like his productivity hack.

26:40 Uh he says I've been working on three different ideas simultaneously and strangely enough it seems a more productive method than sticking to one. Problem. This is Uh early nineteen forties. He's

26:52 You know, in his twenties. And so he's gonna be drafted into the war. Uh Terrified him. you know, you could think, okay, my terrified him'cause he was you worried about dying. Obviously he didn't want to do that.

27:03 But what was interesting is i your description of his introvert nature. It's like wait a minute, I'm gonna have to live in barracks, I'm gonna be in the army, I'm gonna have all these strangers around me. Freaked him out. So he wanted to find a way to to To use his mind. to serve the country not as body. So says Shannon worried not only about the dangers of an overseas deployment, but also the close quarters of army life. I think he did the work with the fear that he might have to go into the army, which means being with lots of people around, which he couldn't stand. He could not stand being in groups. He was phobic about crowds and people he didn't know.

27:33 He would put his mind rather than his body to work on the country's behalf. So this not only Shannon, but almost everybody at Bell Labs has now transitioned into doing work for the war. And One of the things is interesting is like nothing really go when you study Shannon, nothing that he works on ever goes to waste. He'll find other ways to essentially make it an abstraction or an analogy and use it in his later work. And So this description of what he's actually working on

27:57 uh it's called fire control, which I'll read you in one second, actually plays a role into h him, uh, because he's writing the the paper on information there. I think it takes him like eight years on and off. So he's doing a bunch of this these things at the same time, and then he'll draw these analogies. So Uh one analogy he drew was from fire control. So this is what fi fire control is. Fire control was essentially a study of hitting moving targets. The targets were anything and everything the enemy could hurl through the air to cause damage. Planes, rockets, ballistics.

28:23 So imagine a gun firing a single shot at a target, okay. Now imagine that gun is the size of a two story house. and it's placed on a moving Navy ship in the middle of the ocean, and that it's trying to shoot down an enemy fighter moving at three hundred and fifty miles per hour. This is the math he's got to figure out. That's a rough description of the challenge of fire control. goes back to this idea that he's always finding analogies. There are surprisingly close and valid analogies between fire control prediction problem and certain basic problems in communications engineering.

28:53 At the most basic level, the speed and quality of information was vital to both phone systems and fire control systems. A phone call reaching its attendant recipient was a struggle against noise. An anti aircraft missile hitting its target. Presented the same conceptual challenge. This is what he said. He's like, he's just a man of abstractions. He's like, Oh, I'm actually working on the same problem. You might think.

29:16 And many people again, that I think that's part of his genius, that wouldn't even see the similarities between these two problems. And to him, everything was the same. He says both required high level statistical inference. Both presented the challenge of building machines to accurately translate math into action. Uh, then it goes into s some of the other things that uh his colleagues at Bell Labs were working on

29:35 Uh, some of the questions the scientists have built up is how to tackle for the war effort. And they they're working six days a week on this. And so again, the army and the government's giving them all these problems here, can find solutions to these questions. How many tons of explosive force must a bomb release to create a certain amount of damage? In what sorts of formations should bombers fly? Should an airplane be heavily armored or should it be stripped of defenses so it can fly faster?

29:57 At what depths should an anti submarine weapon drop from an airplane explode? How many anti aircraft guns should be placed around a critical target? In short, what the government is trying to figure out is precisely how should these new weapons be used to produce the greatest military Payoff. Now

30:13 He's doing this because obviously They're compelled to. Uh, he doesn't want to, you know, physically serve in the war. But he hated it. So this is his reaction to all this war work. The whole atmosphere left a bitter taste. The secrecy.

30:25 The intensity. The drudgery. The obligatory teamwork. It goes back to So Th I don't know if you you caught on that.

30:34 One sentence I said earlier. that very few of his papers were co authored. He does not like working on teams. He likes working by himself, alone. And so he's like, I'm being compelled to work on a team. I hate this. And it winds up getting to him, he has you know, he's also going through a divorce at time. So he kinda has like this uh, you know, temporary b breakdown. Now

30:53 Another thing that they have him working on Yeah, during the war is cryptography. They're trying to figure out how can we s down not only do we want to be able to send secure communications, you know, across long distances. But we also want to hack into

31:06 You know, the Germans and Japanese doing the same thing. We want to find out, we want to find their secrets and make sure they don't find ours. And so Shannon is tasked with checking the algorithm so it allows the messages to be securely reproduced on the receiving end. The work gave him a window into the world of encoded speech. Transmission of information and cryptography, a synthesis that at that moment in history may not have taken place anywhere other than at Bell Labs, as Shannon observed. Not a lot of laboratories had voice encoding devices for scrambling speech. And so this is when Claude Shannon meets Alan Turing.

31:39 who's also working on very similar things, and they wind up getting along so well, they met daily in the Bell Labs cafeteria and they'd have tea. And later in life. Shen is being interviewed and he was being asked all these questions. She's like, Well with your own passion for You know, cryptographic puzzles. Why didn't you probe

31:55 Turing. You know, deeper and further. And Shannon's response was simple and to the point, Well, in the wartime, you didn't ask too many questions. And but he did talk about some of the stuff that Alan Turing and him would talk about. Remember, this is happening in nineteen forty, so it's pretty wild because now we are literally living in the future that These two guys envisioned.

32:12 Help Division Two. And we're essentially, you know, having these daily uh you know talk conversations about. And he says we would talk about the notion of building comput. And so Shann was obsessed with artificial intelligence.

32:26 He says we had dreams. Turning on it, you used to talk about the possibility of stimulating the human brain. Could we really get a computer which would be the equivalent of the human brain or even a lot better? We both thought that this would be possible in not very long time. In ten or fifteen years. Such was not the case. And so in this book, there's a lot of quotes.

32:45 From Shannon. About his deep desire. to invent And to have artificial intelligence, to have AI. In fact, he called it his fondest dream. He says my fondest dream is to someday build a machine that thinks, learns, communicates.

32:58 and manipulates its environment in a fairly sophisticated way. Goes on over and over again. There's multiple quotes throughout the book like this. I believe we are going to invent machines which are smarter than we are. We talk about the fact that when he would we'd discuss this, you know, it had to seem like Crazy talk, especially back then.

33:14 He says that he was adamant and he thought the people that w thought he was wrong were actually the ones that were incorrect. The thought that a machine could never exceed its creator was just foolish logic. He called it wrong. And incorrect. Logic. Now Shannon.

33:30 winds up meeting, you know, all the other great minds of his uh time. He met John Von Newman. He said uh Shannon called John Von Newman the smartest person. Uh that he ever met? Later in life, uh when he he was asked a lot of the questions, like, you know, they were all these scientists were advising the CIA, the defense department, the NSA, and Shannon was very reluctant to talk about that, even decades later.

33:53 But this surprising story will give you an idea of the type of classified work that Shana was involved in, because John Van Newman was uh involved in as well. One of Shannon's fellow NSA scientific advisors, John von Neumann, was watched around the clock by uniform military personnel when he was on his deathbed. Impressive though Von Neumann's mind may have been, it wasn't immune to From I wasn't immune from infiltration.

34:14 Or so the government feared. And what better time to infiltrate it and grab the precious state secrets it held than when it was in a medically induced Hey, so so important. that they was guarded.

34:25 Round the clock. on his deathbed because they did not want anybody hacking his brain. So There is. I don't know.

34:33 I bet you fifty to a hundred pages of this book about information theory. I think for our purposes I'm just gonna give you a really simple overview'cause I think you more important than that is the way he approaches his work, I think that that's what you and I are most interested in. But I do think, you know, there's a couple of paragraphs that give you uh I think a simplified version of uh an un a simplified understanding rather of information theory.

34:54 So information existed before Shannon just as objects had inertia before Newton. But before Shannon, there was precious little stents of information as an idea, as a measurable quantity. An object fitted out for hard science. Before Shannon information was a telegram, a photograph, a paragraph, a song. After Shannon. Information was entirely abstracted into bits. Information theory was summed up by his recognition that all information

35:18 No matter the source, the sender, the recipient, or the meaning, Could be efficiently represented by sequence of bits. He felt that bits was information's fundamental. Unit. So he writes his paper. Like I said, uh I think it's published in nineteen forty eight.

35:34 So his paper is going to introduce many of the concepts that underpin the modern digital world, the w the world that we inhabit. The fact that most of our probably most of our communications is digital today. And Shannon's work is widely regarded as one of the most influential scientific papers of the twentieth century and laid theoretical foundation for things like the internet, data compression, error correcting codes, digital telecommunications, modern computing, and much of today's AI infrastructure. Now there's a couple interesting descriptions in the book of him writing the paper. Again, it ca this plays out over many, many years. Napkins decorate the table.

36:06 Strands of thought and stray sections of equations accumulate around him. He writes a neat script on line paper, but the raw materials everywhere. Eight years like this, scribbling, refining, crossing out. Staring into a thicket of equations, knowing that at the end of all this effort, they may reveal nothing. There are breaks from music and cigarettes. and bleary eyed walks to work in the morning.

36:28 But mostly it's this ceaseless drilling again alone. At night by himself. Back to the desk, where he senses perhaps that he is on to something significant, something even more fundamental. But what? And then he talks about there there was many flashes of intuition that his work was not linear.

36:44 Uh ideas w came when they came and he had no control over it. One night I remember I woke up in the middle of the night and had an idea and stayed up all night working on that. And one of the most remarkable things about Shannon is he publishes the paper, he knows it's good. He never doubts that his work is good. And even to the point where, you know, he kind of was like he trusted he he trusts his judgment so much that when he says like, you know, if you want to argue ideas like I I'm not even gonna argue with you. But Once it comes out.

37:07 Then we see again, he goes back to his personality. He's like He wants to do great work, but he's doing great work because it's sh he's just curious about it. He's not doing it. If you go back to what Munger says about the importance of having an inner clock. Buffett calls it an inner scorecard. Just like man, I'm just doing what I want to do, regardless of what's going on outside in the outside world. And we see this because says having completed his his path breaking work by the age of thirty two, he might have spent his remaining decades as a scientific celebrity. Instead, he spent all his time tinkering.

37:33 So he'd build He's a funny dude too. He built an electronic maze solving mouse. He had a chest for he's these are all things he built with his hands, by the way. Uh he built a chess playing computer. Uh he built the first ever wearable computer.

37:46 Uh He created a calculator that operated in Roman numerals. He had a fleet of customized unicycles. He spent years devoted to the scientific study of juggling. And his whole point is that working on what nationally interests you.

38:01 Is time well spent. Shannon would be adamant on this point. After the effort of discovery. The effort of communication was secondary by far. He had solved a problem to his own satisfaction, and that, as far as he was concerned, was

38:13 Was enough. Shannon explains this viewpoint later on. After I'd found the answers, it was always painful to write them up or to publish them. Again, this is why it's so important. the writing up and the publishing is actually how you get the acclaim. He was just interested in solving the puzzle. So

38:29 Winds up. And now I I he's you know a scientific celebrity. Bell Labs does not want to lose him. Essentially just do whatever you want, Shannon. You're you're on the payroll, you can do whatever you know, you can work from home, you can come in, you can do neither or both. He still decides to wind up leaving because uh he's getting poached by by MIT. And he talks about one of the reasons. There's two really two two main reasons that he winds up doing this. And what's funny is even after Can you leave Bill Labs?

38:55 uh they thought he was so important and he was so disinterested in money. For money sake, that bell ups kept him on the payroll. So he winds up getting paid from MIT and Bell Labs. Uh, and so he he now at this point in the book, he's talking about why he leaves Bell Labs and decides to go to MIT. The general freedom in academic life is one of its most important features.

39:13 There was a certain restlessness on Shannon's part after spending more than a decade and a half in a single institution. Having spent fifteen years at Bell Labs, I felt myself getting a little stale and unproductive. And a change of scene and colleagues is very stimulating. And so then I love this paragraph which describes the result of that very important decision saying, Hey, I had fifteen years here, I love to hear

39:35 But I need a change of scenery. Need to change a place. Any change of colleagues. And so it says once he got to MIT, what result were some of Shannon's most creative and whimsical endeavors. There was a trumpet that shot fire when played.

39:47 Handmade unicycles. There was a chair left that took guests down from the porch to the edge of the lake. A machine that saw Rubik's cubes. More chess playing machines, more handmade robots. Shannon's mind, it seems, was finally free to bring its most outlandish ideas to mechanical life. He loved building machines. What I would describe the activities that he's doing now, and you know, especially now at this point in the story,

40:09 before uh earlier in life as well. His activities were autotelic. So autotelic I it's one of my favorite words. In fact, the or I I've told you this before, but in case you remember, the original name of this podcast that I started ten years ago Next month. was autotelic. Why was that such an important name?

40:26 Uh autotelic is an activity done for the sake of itself. I was saying with the title of the podcast that I never thought anybody was gonna listen to, by the way, I'm going to podcast even if no one listens to it. I just feel compelled to do it. I love it, I'm obsessed with it. You see the exact same idea here. All of his ideas. All of his activities. They're just autotelic. Mm.

40:46 Shannon summed all of his work up. The work that he's doing now. As happily pointless. I've always pursued my interest without much regard to financial value or value to the world. I've spent lots of time on totally useless things. He made no distinction between his interest in information and his interest in unicycles. They were all moves in the same Game. This is just and this is just

41:07 Great writing here. What other people called hobbies is He thought of as experiments. Exercises in the practice of simplification. models that filed a problem down to its

41:19 Barest, interesting form. He was so convinced Of a machine enabled future. And so eager to explore its boundaries. that he was willing to tolerate a degree of ridicule to bring it to pass.

41:32 He was preoccupied with quote The possible capabilities and applications of large scale electronic computers. At a time when nothing like Uh considered in the light of that future.

41:47 Which is our present. His machines were not hobbies. They were proofs. That is great, great writing. Here's another great quote. From Shannon, a very small percentage of the population produces the greatest proportion of the mo most important ideas. There are some people, if you shoot one idea into their brain,

42:04 You will get half an idea out. There are other people. Who produced two ideas For each idea sent. In

42:12 Now Another thing, we go back to puzzles. He really give a shit about money, but he was very rich. How do you get very rich? Because he just started getting obsessed with stocks and stock market. He's like, Oh, this is just another. Puzzle. And they wind up making Uh the I w there's there's this documentary.

42:28 And No disrespect to documentary makers, but everybody's like, You gotta watch this documentary. It's called The Bit Player. And I think I watched it before. We watch it again to prep for this episode. Not good. But it but if you if you want to maybe watch on one five, I don't know, or maybe two X. Maybe gives you an insight, you're probably just better off with just

42:46 listening to the audio book of this book or maybe listening to his podcast again again. But w one of the interesting things about documentary was they interview his kids. You know, Shannon's now passed on. I think he died in two thousand one. But they talk about the fact that They made investing a family hobby. And I thought that was interesting. And so his wife, Betty, says Betty and Claude did play the markets obsessively. The process became a family affair. And so this is what his daughter Peggy w talk about this. Much of the conversation around the home would be about the stock market. Because much of my parents' focus was what was on what what the market was doing. They taught me to read the Wall Street Journal and stocks and they taught me about stocks very early. You'd come down and open the newspaper and they'd have me read because at that time their eyesight my eyesight was better than theirs. And it was a way for them to engage their kids. Then eventually they set up a small personal computer to carry out the quotes

43:30 during the day and then check again at the end of the day. So there were computer printouts floating around around the house with stock quotes on them. Now there's a couple crazy stories. And again, this is one of my favorite parts of reading out his biographies is like you the the higher you go, the the world gets smaller and smaller. And so, you know, he's work he's Talking to John Van Newman, he's meeting Albert Einstein, he's

43:49 Having tea with Alan Turing. In in a twist of fate and just remarkable is the fact that Henry Singleton. Who again, if you just go back and listen to Buff and Munger, Buff and Munger talk about Henry Singleton. Henry Singleton built a conglomerate. Before Buffett and Munger did.

44:03 And they took a lot of ideas from Singleton. ideas that I thought were buff and mungers they actually learned from singleton. Mungers said that that singleton was the single smartest person that he ever met in life. Buffett said that it was a crime. That business schools did not study this guy.

44:17 Claude Shannon and Henry Singleton wind up being meeting in college. He was a friend in college. Uh The the the conglomerate that Singleton builds is called Teledyne. Claw Chin is going to be on the board of it.

44:28 Okay. And he uh Shannon does something really smart. And he makes a large investment into Teledyne. And that investment winds up compounding it gave'em a compound data return of twenty percent. Twenty so sorry.

44:41 Twenty seven percent. Over twenty five years. And as Shannon retold the story. He made the investment simply because I had a good opinion of him. And there's all these stories in the book where you know, singleton benefits from the when he he's doing a series of acquisitions.

44:56 You know, being able to bounce those ideas off of Uh Claude Shannon. So I'm gonna go there's another book I read a long time ago called called Fortune's Formula. that I think actually has a better description of

45:07 Just how remarkable Shannon was at investing. and you know turning the the uh uh uh trying to solve the puzzle of the stock market. I'm gonna read a quote uh paragraph from there, uh from that book in one second too. But I just want to give you an overview of why he's doing this. Again, it just it was just another puzzle. Shin's interest in money resembled his other passions. He was not out to accrue wealth for wealth's sake, nor did he have any burning desire to own the finer things in life, but money created markets and math puzzles for Problems that could be analyzed. And interpreted.

45:35 and played out. So then let me read just how good he was at this. This is a paragraph from Fortune's Formula in nineteen eighty six. Barns ran an article ranking the recent performance of seventy seven money managers. Claude Shannon, though not mentioned in the article, had done better than all but three of the pros.

45:53 The Barron's money managers are mostly firms with up to a hundred people. Shannon worked with his wife and an Apple II computer. Barron's reported on the recent performance of one thousand and twenty six funds. Shannon achieved a higher return than one thousand and twenty five of them. Overth

46:11 This is incredible over thirty years. From the late nineteen fifties through nineteen eighty six. Shannon's returns on his stock portfolio was twenty eight percent. A year. Another legendary person.

46:24 That Shannon uh winds up meeting this is a young Ed Thorpe. Ed Thorpe and Claude Shannon wind up building the world's first wearable computer. They're trying to solve the Shannon was obsessed with trying to solve uh gambling. Uh Thorpe wrote the book on how to count cards at Black Jats. Th Thorpe's still alive. It's episode two twenty two, uh one of the best audiobographies I've ever read. It's called A Man for All Markets. If you want to learn more about Thorpe. But Thorpe.

46:47 Uh he's all in this book, but I thought This w this one description of Thorpe on how Shannon dealt with problems was very fascinating. And he says Shannon seemed to think with ideas more than with words or formulas. A new problem was like a sculptor's block of stone. And Shannon's ideas chiseled away the obstacles. Until an approximate solution emerged like an image.

47:09 Which he proceeded to refine. As desired with more ideas. Remind me this great quote from Michelangelo when he was saying that he ha how he carved the statue of David. He says, I simply removed everything. That was not David. Back to following his curiosity.

47:24 He says I don't think I was ever motivated by the notions of winning prizes, although I've have a couple dozen of them in the other room. I was more motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together, or what laws or rules govern a situation. Or if there are theorems about one. What one can or cannot do.

47:43 Mainly because I just wanted to know. Myself. And it goes back to that one of my favorite quotes of him, he says, I think the history of science has shown that valuable consequences often prolifer proliferate From simple curiosity. Later in his life, you know, he he would pick You know, the he'd be invited all over the world to travel and to speak.

48:02 Many times they wanted to give'em a ward. You know, y didn't really he just like being home. He liked eating the same thing all the time, he like just being in his his g uh you know room building gadgets. But he did go and and uh accept this prize in Japan, which I thought was very interesting, and he talked about the fact that he actually thinks that the in at least the United States that were actually teaching history incorrect. And it's just w the wrong way to go about it.

48:24 And he's got some really interesting insights about how he thinks history should be taught, but also tells you a lot about what he admired and what he thought were valuable. And he says uh most of the time was spent on the study of political leaders and wars, the Caesars and the Napoleons and the Hitlers. I think this is totally wrong. The important people and events of history are the thinkers and innovators, the Darwins, the Newtons, the Beethovens, whose work continues to grow influence in a positive way. Fashion. Talked about we need in the same com in the same talk.

48:50 He says we need to encourage we need more engineers. We need to encourage people to go into engineering. He thinks they're some of the most important people to ever exist. One category of innovation he signal out for special mention, the discoveries of science are wonderful achievements in themselves, but would not affect the life of the common man without the intermediate efforts of engineers and inventors. People like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham. Bell. And then in a cruel twist of fate. Somebody who was born with one of the most gifted minds.

49:17 that has ever graced the the planet. uh unfortunately the last like decade of his life slowly starts to degrade uh winds up having old timers, winds up having to put into, you know, full time care. But before he died. He outlined what he wanted his funeral to be.

49:33 And I think Again, this gives you great insight into just a very unique personality. This person that was obsessed with play and following his own curiosity. And so this is Claude Shannon's idea for his own funeral. Shannon had set to his mind the question of his funeral. and imagine something very different.

49:48 For him, it was an occasion that called for humor, not grief. He outlined a grand procession, a Macy style parade to amuse and delight and to sum up the life of Claude Shen. The parade would be led by somebody playing a clarinet. Behind them would be a jazz combo. Next in line would be six unicycling pall bears.

50:08 Somehow balancing Shannon's coffin. Behind them would come the grieving widow. Then a juggling octet. And then a juggling machine. Next would come three black chess pieces bearing a hundred dollar bills.

50:21 And then three rich men from the West. California tech investors. Following the money. They would march in front of a chess float. Atop that float would be British chess master David Levy, who would be squaring off an alive chess match against a computer.

50:37 Then to the scientists and mathematicians, a phalanx of joggers, and a four hundred and seventeen instrument band. Would bring up The rear. And that

50:48 Is how Claude Shannon Wanted to be remembered. That is where I will leave it for the full story, highly recommend. Reading the book. That is four hundred and twenty eight books down.

50:58 One thousand to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.

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