#95 Claude Shannon

**David Senra** (0:00)
There is value in rethinking Claude Shannon, but not in the way we'd imagine. Consider him not only as a distant forefather of the digital era, but as one of the great creative generalists of the 20th century. Not solely as someone who laid the foundation of the information age, but as someone who trained a powerful intellect on topics of deep interest, and continued to do so beyond the point of short-term practicality.
What can we learn from that, Claude Shannon? For one thing, Shannon's body of work is a useful corrective to our era of unprecedented specialization.
His work is wide-ranging in the best sense, and perhaps more than any 20th century intellect of comparable stature, he resists easy categorization.
Was he a mathematician? Yes. Was he an engineer? Yes. Was he a juggler, unicyclist, machinist, futurist, and gambler? Yes.
Shannon never acknowledged the contradictions in his fields of interests. He simply went wherever his curiosity led him. So it was entirely consistent for him to jump from information theory to artificial intelligence, to chess, to juggling, to gambling. It simply didn't occur to him that investing his talents in a single field made any sense at all.
There were links from field to field, of course, and it goes without saying that Shannon understood the bridges between his work in information theory and his work on robotics and investing in computer chess. Few have had a better intuitive sense of how the information revolution would fundamentally alter our world in all its aspects.
But that sense led Shannon to choose exploration rather than specialization.
This indifference to seeming contradictions extended to the way he lived his life.
He had the options of worldwide fame, yet he preferred to remain largely anonymous.
He wrote path-breaking papers, then unsatisfied with their present state, postponed them indefinitely in favor of more pressing curiosities.
He made himself wealthy by studying markets and the potential of startups, yet he lived with conspicuous modesty. He reached the heights of the ivory tower with all the laurels and professional chairs to prove it, but felt no shame playing games built for children and writing poems on juggling. He was passionately curious, but also at times unapologetically lazy. He was among the most productive, honored minds of his era, and yet he gave the appearance that he would chuck it all overboard for the chance to tinker in his gadget room.
Okay, so that's an excerpt from the book, and probably the best few paragraph summary I've found of the life of Claude Shannon. But that comes from the book that I read this week and the one I'm going to talk to you about today, which is A Mind at Play, How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, and it was written by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. So let me go ahead and jump into the book. I don't want to waste any more time. I want to connect this book to the ones, the series I've been doing, going back to Founders number 88, which started with the Warren Buffett shareholder letters, right? So last week or two weeks ago, I talked about Ed Thorpe. The week before that, I talked about Claude Shannon and Ed Thorpe working together. So anything I've covered in the past podcast, I'm going to try not to cover here, okay? But I do want to link this one where, when this book came out, because this book's, this is different than usually, you know, I do fairly older books. This is a relatively new book. I think it was published in 2017 When it came out, Ed Thorpe, who's still alive, tweeted the following recommendation for this book, and I just want to read it to you real quick. He says, Claude Shannon was to information and communication what Newton was to physics. By following his curiosity through the playground of science, he discovered mathematical laws that govern our digital age. The Shannon I worked with comes alive in these pages.
And then also, before I jump back into the book, some people was like, well, this is founders, Claude Shannon's not really, he never founded a company. Yes, that's true. But he was an investor to the point where he has a quote in the book where he says, I make my money on the stock market. I don't make it by proving theorems.
So even if he didn't start a company, I do consider investors entrepreneurs. He thinks like an entrepreneur. And I think that is, it's an analogy, it's worth our, like the way his mind works is valuable for entrepreneurs to understand. So that's why I'm doing a podcast on him. Other than that, he's just a fascinating person. And a lot of us are building companies on top of, you know, the technologies that he helped pioneer. So it's very important. And like I covered on the, when I covered Fortune's Formula, Claude Shannon had one of the best investing records of all time. I think they compared like 1,025 different investment managers. You know, this is professional managers doing it full-time, hundreds of researchers, they have all kinds of resources. And Shannon's investment returns were better than all than one. And he did it part-time with his wife on an Apple II computer. So that kind of gives you the person we're dealing with here. And I'll talk a little bit more about how he thought about that later on the podcast. First, this podcast may seem like a little bit of like a bunch of non-sequiturs.