Welcome to the A16Z podcast. Today we're doing one of our book episodes, and we're talking about genius and 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 Vanieverbush and befriended Alan Turing.

This conversation is moderated by A16Z board partner Steven Sinovsky, 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

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