Claude Shannon: The Story of How One Man Created the Information Age | Jimmy Soni
Hidden Forces
Demetri Kofinas
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 June 2018
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In Episode 47 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jimmy Soni about the father of Information Theory, Claude Shannon, and Shannon's foundational work, A Mathematical Theory of Communication.
The 20th century is known as the information age, and for a good reason. It is a period that is dominated by knowledge and data. It's an era in which the economy is no longer driven by traditional industries — such as construction, manufacturing, or agriculture — but by advanced information technologies that store, retrieve, transmit, and manipulate data.
This revolution finds its roots in Information Theory. And remarkably, it is a theory that was developed by one man: Claude Shannon.
Before Shannon, society had a rather immature understanding of what information was. Information was understood as something immaterial and intangible. It was not seen as something that could be touched or manipulated. It was assumed that the only way to send information (intelligence, as it was then referred to) across a greater distance was to "boost" the signal by using more power. This was a notoriously imperfect system, as it increased the amount of "noise" that was received and made the message more difficult to discern.
In his foundational work, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Shannon solved this issue and presented a completely new way of understanding information. He showed that information isn't insubstantial, but something that we can measure and manipulate — something that has physical characteristics and can be quantified. Shannon also created a diagram which showed that all information has certain, set components — such as a source, a transmitter, a recipient, and so on. As such, not only did he show that information is something that can be made material, through his work, Shannon proved that all information (be it a radio signal, a photo, or a song) can be governed through a set of common laws.
In short, he turned information into something that can be computed and reliably transmitted, laying the foundation for the digital revolution.
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | What's up everybody? |
| 0:09.0 | What's up everybody? |
| 0:10.0 | Welcome to this week's episode of Hidden Forces with me, |
| 0:13.8 | Demetricofinas. |
| 0:15.3 | Today I speak with Jimmy Sony, a New York-based author, editor, |
| 0:19.6 | and speech writer. |
| 0:20.9 | He's the co-author of Rome's Last Citizen, a biography of the ancient Roman Senator Cato, and a |
| 0:27.1 | minded play, a biography of the late mathematician, engineer, and father of information theory, Claude Shannon. |
| 0:35.2 | The latter won the Neumann Prize for the top book in the history of mathematics for 2017 and |
| 0:40.8 | was named one of the best books of the year by Nature and Bloomberg. |
| 0:45.0 | Jimmy has also served as an editor at the Washington Post, the New York Observer, and the Washington |
| 0:50.9 | Examiner. |
| 0:51.9 | Jimmy, welcome to Hidden Forces. Thank you for having me. |
| 0:54.8 | You wrote this book with Rob Goodman, right? You and Rob wrote one book before this. |
| 0:59.4 | How do you guys know each other? |
| 1:00.5 | So we were debate partners at Duke in college and we just became really good friends and we loved a lot of the same things a lot of the same authors the writers we both did a bit of speech writing in our past and when we did our first |
| 1:14.0 | book we were both you know early to mid-20s and we kind of figuring it out |
| 1:18.6 | still. That's remarkable man. Can I ask you something? How how do you get off? No, where do you get off? |
| 1:23.0 | No, seriously, where do you get off? |
| 1:25.0 | Like, where do you get the idea in your head? |
| 1:27.0 | First of all, what gives you the, colloquially speaking, the balls, to think that you can write a book at that |
| 1:31.8 | age is my first question. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Demetri Kofinas, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Demetri Kofinas and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.