#215: J. Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves (The General and the Genius)

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one-time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets. They're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th.
The partnership between General Leslie Groves and the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer is one of the great stories of the Second World War. And it was as unexpected as it was successful.
There was little in either man's life before 1942 to suggest that the General and the physicist would ever meet, much less form a close working association to develop an atomic bomb.
They came from very different cultural and economic backgrounds.
Their careers alone would have kept them apart, had not the war thrown them together and changed their lives utterly.
In Robert Oppenheimer, Leslie Groves found the man to help him achieve fame and success through the creation of a secret weapon that could end America's greatest war.
Oppenheimer did that by recruiting scientists and engineers, inspiring them and under Groves supervision, leading them in creating the new bomb. In Groves, Robert Oppenheimer found the man who would reinvigorate his career and give direction to his life. Groves did that by giving him an unimaginably grand scientific and engineering task, along with virtually unlimited resources.
Hundreds of thousands of people in research laboratories and plants across the United States helped to create the atomic bomb, but the successful development of this weapon in record time is in no small part due to the complex, sometimes tense, but always productive partnership between Groves and Oppenheimer.
That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is The General and the Genius, Groves and Oppenheimer, the unlikely partnership that built the atom bomb, and it was written by James Kunetka.
So before I jump into the book, let me tell you how this connects with everything else that you and I have been learning and how I came to discover this book. So there is something that I discovered in reading a bunch of biographies of Steve Jobs, a trait that he had that I think is a good idea to copy. And that's to learn from every experience he had, figure out the underlying principle of that experience, and then apply that to his work. So for example, he's a young boy. His father was a meticulous craftsman. Steve saw his father build cabinets, build fences, and he would apply the same quality of wood and materials to the parts of the fence and the cabinet that no one would ever see as he did to the front. And the lesson he taught Steve is that you do a job to the highest level all the way through, not because the customer would see it, but because that way you know that you did your level best. Another example, Steve's taken a walk in Paris. He's in his mid-20s. He's walking with his mentor, his former boss, Nolan Bushnell, who's also the founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese. And Steve made the observation about the fact that Paris is one of the most unique cities in the entire world because of the uniformity of the architecture and design. Steve said that somebody could be dropped in anywhere in Paris, not be told where they are, and they would immediately know that they're in Paris. And Steve wanted to take the uniformity of the design of the architecture in Paris and apply that to the products that Apple would make, that they'd be so distinct that even if they didn't have the Apple logo on it, you would know exactly that it was an Apple device. And then finally, Steve leads us directly to J. Robert Oppenheimer. He talks about what he learned from reading about J. Robert Oppenheimer, how one of Oppenheimer's most important talents was recruiting the very best scientist and physicist for the Manhattan Project and leading an entire team of A players to accomplish something that's never been done before. And so Steve took that idea and he said when he went back to Apple, that what he learned from Oppenheimer was his goal. He even said that he wasn't as good at it as Oppenheimer was, but he said he was close.