Founders

Claude Shannon changed your life and you probably don't even know it. Claude is the father of information theory. He transformed information into bits and created the intellectual foundation for computers, the Internet, digital media, high-speed communication, and Artificial Intelligence.

The way Claude Shannon worked is what interested me the most. He combined extraordinary abstract reasoning with an engineer’s instinct to build. He reduced complex problems to their essential structure. He connected ideas across mathematics, engineering, cryptography, artificial intelligence, investing, chess, juggling, and robotics. He treated every experience as material that he might later combine into a new insight.

He was also relentlessly independent, guided more by curiosity and freedom than recognition, money, or usefulness.

This episode is what I learned from rereading A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman.

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0:00 — "The great insights don't spring from curiosity alone, but from dissatisfaction... A genius is simply someone who is usefully irritated."

1:36 — "It seems to be much easier to make two small jumps than one big jump in any kind of mental thinking." — Shannon

4:41 — "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 curious, serious play."

5:20 — "He worked with levity and played with gravity. He never acknowledged a distinction between the two."

6:00 — "Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they do is the same as what they most want to do."

6:59 — "I do what comes naturally, and usefulness is not my main goal. I keep asking myself, 'How would you do this? Is it possible to make a machine to do this? Can I prove this theorem?'" — Shannon

11:50 — "Chemistry always seemed dull to me. There's too many isolated facts and too few general principles for my taste." — Shannon

19:09 — "Specialization is the death of genius." — Vannevar Bush

19:18 — "The possibilities of being at once both broad and deep did not pass with Leonardo da Vinci or Benjamin Franklin." — Vannevar Bush

25:13 — "I had the freedom to do anything I wanted from almost the day I started. They never told me what to work on." — Shannon on Bell Labs

26:41 — "I've been working on three different ideas simultaneously, and strangely enough, it seems a more productive method than sticking to one problem." — Shannon

32:55 — "My fondest dream is to someday build a machine that thinks, learns, communicates, and manipulates its environment in a fairly sophisticated way." — Shannon

35:05 — "Before Shannon, information was a telegram, a photograph, a paragraph, a song. After Shannon, information was entirely abstracted into bits."

38:04 — "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 enough."

40:55 — "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."

46:54 — "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." — Ed Thorp

47:19 — "I simply removed everything that was not David." — Michelangelo

47:25 — "I don't think I was ever motivated by the notions of winning prizes. I was more motivated by curiosity, never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together." — Shannon

47:49 — "I think the history of science has shown that valuable consequences often proliferate from simple curiosity." — Shannon

48:37 — "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 fashion." — Shannon

Raymond Plank founded Apache Corporation with just $250,000 in 1954. 50 years later his company was worth $50 billion.

This episode examines the life and entrepreneurial philosophy of Raymond Plank through his memoir A Small Difference

Rather than presenting a conventional history of Apache, this episode focuses on the lessons, maxims, and beliefs Plank accumulated over seven decades in business. Written when he was nearly 90, the memoir reads like a lifelong diary of how to think about opportunity, courage, cost control, resourcefulness, and adaptation.

Lots of wild stories in this one.

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Obsession is the engine of Nolan’s career. This episode examines Christopher Nolan’s life, working methods, and philosophy through The Nolan Variations by Tom Shone.

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This episode discusses Joseph Wechsberg’s 1966 book, The Merchant Bankers. Rather than recounting the histories of families like the Rothschilds, Barings, Hambros, Warburgs, and Lehman Brothers, I wanted to extract the principles they shared.

Merchant banking is fascinating. It's a very distinctive form of entrepreneurship. There is an old-school way of doing business that appeals to me.

The merchant bankers’ profiled in this book have a combination of:

personal honor

speed of action

clear thinking

independent judgment

seamless webs of deserved trust

discretion

and willingness to make unconventional decisions.

The founder of every merchant banking dynasty was a merchant before he was merchant banker. Once they discovered financing transactions was more profitable than physically trading goods, their real products became credit, judgment, information, advice, access, and—above all—trust.

Their greatest asset was not money. Their greatest asset was their reputation.

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What I learned from reading Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters (for the 3rd or 4th time)

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