Chapter 7

The Capitalist Champion

T. J. Rodgers as Francisco d’Anconia, the modern Renaissance man and agent provocateur for capitalism

Francisco could do anything he undertook, he could do it better than anyone else, and he did it without effort. There was no boasting in his manner and consciousness, no thought of comparison. His attitude was not: “I can do it better than you,” but simply: “I can do it.” What he meant by doing was doing superlatively.

—Atlas Shrugged

Who is Francisco d’Anconia?

In Atlas Shrugged, Francisco d’Anconia is one of John Galt’s inner circle in organizing the “mind on strike”—persuading men of ability to walk away from an immoral collectivist economic and political system, thus hastening its collapse.

D’Anconia is one of the world’s wealthiest men, heir to a South American copper-mining business. From childhood he shows extraordinary ability in everything he undertakes, from athletics to academics to business. His ambition is to be worthy of his inheritance by expanding the already enormous d’Anconia Copper empire.

But when Galt persuades d’Anconia to help him with his strike, d’Anconia acts as an intellectual provocateur—brilliantly skewering collectivist politicians and businessmen, and inspiring beleaguered industrialists. In attempting to recruit the nation’s leading steel executive for Galt’s strike, d’Anconia delivers at a cocktail party an impromptu treatise on the meaning and morality of money that is Rand’s most sparklingly compelling writing on the virtues of capitalism.

“Is this the headquarters of a major chip maker in Silicon Valley or the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio?” we wondered to ourselves as we stood amid a shrine of Green Bay Packers memorabilia in the second-floor Lombardi Conference room on Champion Court in San Jose, California. In front of us, a 15-foot expanse of wall paid tribute to Packers greats through the ages, every inch covered with autographed 8 × 10 framed photos arranged neatly in alphabetical order with an engineer’s precision. Behind us, a plaque commemorating Bart Starr’s 35–10 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl I hung next to an engraved homage to the famed 1967 NFL Championship “Ice Bowl” game played against the Dallas Cowboys on rock-hard Lambeau Field during an arctic blast that had stadium thermometers registering 15 below zero. Toward the far window, a Packers lava lamp stood at one end of a vast conference table like a kitschy Buddha overlooking his reverent temple of green and gold.

Suddenly out of nowhere appeared a sandy-haired, compactly athletic figure dressed in a navy blue Dartmouth College jogging suit over a bright yellow T-shirt. He could have been the head coach coming in fresh off the practice field to do a pregame interview with ESPN. “Hi, I’m T. J. Rodgers,” he announced. “Let’s go to my office.”1

Dr. Thurman John Rodgers2—known universally as T.J.—commands a small but fertile plot of Silicon Valley’s vast technology landscape. The company he founded in 1982, Cypress Semiconductor, generates $268 million in cash flow on $850 million in revenues with 3,600 employees worldwide. While its $3.4 billion market cap seems small beside next-door giants like $115 billion Intel, Cypress is world leader in universal serial bus (USB) controllers and maintains a position at the vanguard of technological innovation with the world’s only programmable analog and digital embedded design platform, having sold nearly a billion units.

As if on cue, a muffled bark from the reception area prompted a quick explanation from T.J. “It’s my dog,” he said matter-of-factly. “His name is Dollar. He’s a Jack Russell.” Why the name? We free-associated to the fact that Ayn Rand wore a golden dollar sign pin on her lapel for decades, and that a golden dollar sign hung high above Galt’s Gulch, the hideaway portrayed in Atlas Shrugged as the safe haven for the country’s greatest industrialists, on strike against collectivism. That dollar sign in Galt’s Gulch was a gift of Francisco d’Anconia, the key character in Atlas Shrugged of whom T. J. Rodgers is a living embodiment.

D’Anconia was a superb industrialist—as is Rodgers, the founder and longtime CEO of a leading semiconductor manufacturer. D’Anconia was superb at everything he undertook, in a wide variety of fields—as is Rodgers, the double major in chemistry and physics who owns vineyards and makes sublime wine. And d’Anconia was a flamboyant and articulate agent provocateur for capitalism and liberty—as is Rodgers, a fearless and controversial critic of government regulation, corporate welfare, protectionism, and political correctness.

These attributes come together in Rodgers, as they do in d’Anconia, as an integrated whole. He runs his highly successful business in accordance with his philosophy, and his philosophy in turn is informed by the realities of his business, which itself is informed by the realities of the physics of silicon.

This integration is central to all of Rand’s greatest heroes. In Atlas Shrugged, d’Anconia and his two best friends, John Galt and Ragnar Danneskjöld, went to college together, where they all double-majored in physics and philosophy. As their teacher observed, “It is not a combination of interests one encounters nowadays.” But it made sense to d’Anconia. Planning a career in the copper business, he declared, “I’ll study electrical engineering, because power companies are the biggest customers of d’Anconia Copper.” For similarly practical career reasons, Rodgers would study the same thing; in fact, he earned a PhD in it. Francisco continued, “I’m going to study philosophy because I’ll need it to protect d’Anconia Copper.” For similarly practical reasons, Rodgers studies the philosophical underpinnings of capitalism, and devotes enormous energies to defending them and evangelizing for them.

This integration can be seen in the short list of Cypress Core Values on display in the headquarters building where Rodgers makes his office. They are an embodiment of Rodgers’s personal code.

Rodgers’s basic logical premise is the concept that, in his own words, “Freedom is good, period. End of discussion.” He doesn’t need economic arguments to accept freedom as a fundamental moral good, but he also recognizes that freedom and wealth go hand in hand. He cites empirical studies from the Fraser Institute showing a clear, direct, and universal correlation between objective measures of freedom and economic prosperity among the nations of the world. The freer you are, the wealthier you are as a society. Both are good things, and you can’t have the latter without the former. Many of his battles in the arena of public opinion have centered around the misguided notion that somehow money is inherently bad, money corrupts, and money is the root of all evil.

Wearing his signature wire-rimmed owl-round glasses, Rodgers slips easily into his chair—and the conversation. He weaves a complex verbal tapestry from threads of amusing anecdotes and hard facts peppered with mild profanities, including his catchphrase—“bullshit.” The experience is as entertaining as it is informative. Assertive but not bullying, persuasive without coming off as salesy, T. J. Rodgers glows with the gravitas found in those who are truly at ease in their own skin. When listening to Rodgers, you get the feeling he’s not trying to convince you of anything; he’s just calmly reciting the truth for those who choose to hear.

The Bad Boy of Silicon Valley

“If you look at second row up, second one from the right—‘The Bad Boy of Silicon Valley,’” begins Rodgers, pointing to an office wall with over a dozen framed magazine covers featuring him, “I got my picture on the cover of BusinessWeek for being the bad boy where I said we were losing to the Japanese because we had crappy quality and didn’t manage our companies as well, and it had nothing to do with government subsidies, and government subsidies will only make it worse.”

Subsidies, or what T.J. refers to as “corporate welfare,” are a hot-button annoyance for the 62-year-old CEO. He has testified before Congress against government protectionism and pork-barrel spending. He even wrote and published a “Declaration of Independence” from corporate welfare, decrying a government tax burden totaling 35 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and supporting major budget cuts, “even if it meant funding cuts for my own company.” The proclamation was signed by nearly 100 CEOs, including Jerry Sanders of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Wilf Corrigan of LSI Logic, and legendary venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.3

“You listen to the CEOs of the really big companies talk blather about free markets and you think okay, I’m CEO, they’re CEO, we’re brothers, we face the same challenges: government intervention, socialism, in addition to real competitors, and so we ought to be kindred spirits,” explains Rodgers. “And yet when you interact on certain things with those CEOs, you see horrible things happening. They’re trying to lock Honda out of the United States for chrissake, because they can’t make cars well enough. They’re going to Washington to get their fair share of the pork.”

Over the years Rodgers realized that the vast majority of his fellow CEOs traveled a distinctly different arc to achieve their positions of power. He has very little in common with them. Rodgers built his business through entrepreneurial effort, using his considerable mental power to dissect the very substance of nature down to the atomic structure of silicon itself and then used that knowledge to bring new value into physical creation.

Most other CEOs rose through the ranks of giant bureaucracies by playing politics, currying favor, building a power base, and not rocking the boat. “The statist businessman wins by using the state to gain competitive advantage,” Rodgers once wrote. “His perks—corporate jets, limos, lavish expense-account dinners—are the rewards for climbing the ladder.”4 Their primary focus is on holding on to the power and perks of office even at the expense of their own companies.

By contrast, Rodgers flies coach. He has no time for corporate power struggles. He’s focused on creating competitive products in the fast-changing world of high technology against a constantly changing field of hungry start-ups and international competitors. “They aren’t your buddies and they aren’t your kindred spirits,” Rodgers finally concluded about many of his fellow CEOs. “They have the same title as you and that’s it. And over the years, you find out that there are only a few real free-market capitalists who happen to be CEOs, very few.”

Perhaps the sharpest example for T.J., and the one that seems to rankle him the most, was the spawning of a consortium called SEMATECH (Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology). Billed as a “bold experiment in industry-government cooperation,”5 the very description sounds like socialist propaganda to Rodgers’s ears—pure anathema to his core beliefs in free-market competition.

In 1987, the U.S. semiconductor industry was facing tough competition from Japanese chip makers who, according to Rodgers, operated well-run companies in a benign corporate environment with a good tax policy. Instead of upping their game to compete head-on, 14 U.S. technology companies, including big names like Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, and Texas Instruments, formed SEMATECH and went crying to Washington for help against the supposedly unfair Japanese threat. After the heavyweight consortium played the national security card by claiming that our military would be detrimentally impacted if the U.S. semiconductor industry were harmed, the government eagerly ponied up $100 million a year in subsidies for the group.6

It was more than double Cypress Semiconductor’s revenues that year. Rodgers wanted nothing to do with it. He likened the group to “General Motors trying to become more efficient by having a centralized fin-design department.”7 His public denouncement and refusal to play along with industry leaders in their conspiracy to sucker the American people earned him an outsider’s reputation. Or as he puts it with an air of subdued pride, “Well, ‘bad boy’ of course is walking away from free government money.”

From the Gridiron to Silicon Valley

It’s hard to imagine a more genuine American success story. T.J.’s father was literally the son of a sharecropper who farmed cotton in Alabama during the Great Depression. He was in ninth grade before he got his first pair of shoes. He never graduated from high school. The day after Pearl Harbor he left the drudgery of the farm and signed up for World War II and was gone for five consecutive Christmases.

The Army saw fit to make T.J.’s dad a mechanic, and he fought under General Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific. He developed a lifelong hatred of the Japanese, which makes T.J.’s own opposition to government subsidies to fight Japanese competition all the more remarkable. “I remember my dad waking up with nightmares about World War II, as late as the 1960s,” recalls Rodgers. “John Kennedy was already president and my dad was still having bad dreams about World War II.”

T.J.’s mother graduated from the teaching program at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh and began her career in 1940. She and four other single teachers shared a room in a hotel in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. “My mother comes into the hotel and there’s this ‘cute lieutenant’ in the lobby who’s recruiting for World War II,” relates Rodgers. “So my mother starts flirting with the guy, and talks to him and fills out paperwork and stuff, so she has more face time with him. Then she gets a letter: ‘Thank you very much for enlisting. You will report to Truax Air Force base in Madison, Wisconsin.’”

The military tested her and found she had strong intellectual aptitude. With her college degree and teaching background, she was sent to St. Louis University to learn about electronics—the new technology of wireless communications and radar. She spent the rest of the war teaching radio electronics to military technicians.

T.J.’s parents met fortuitously at Camp McCoy in northern Wisconsin when they were both being processed out of the army after World War II. They settled back in Oshkosh, where T.J. grew up in the 1950s and 1960s surrounded by a culture of football—and the Packers were the only game in town.

It was T.J.’s mother who sparked his interest and passion for electronics. “When I was in third grade,” remembers Rodgers, “she brought out her books on vacuum tube oscillators and detectors, circuits, and other radios and got me interested in electronics, and that’s what I always wanted to do.”

He also credits his mother with instilling in him a logical temperament, although as a sort of antimodel. “My mother was smart—excellent verbal skills—and illogical,” recounts Rodgers. “If I argued, I’d either get an emotional, screaming response or I’d get some bullshit argument that was ridiculous, so my hackles go up with that kind of treatment.”

This is one Silicon Valley titan who was never a geek. T.J. was a high school football star who played in two championship games and was recruited to the Dartmouth gridiron for college. “In football, there’s none of the touchy-feely shit,” Rodgers explains about his passion for the game, smiling. “You’re down on your face in the mud. You know the guy you’re supposed to block for has been tackled. The guy who tackled him is laughing at you, and the coach says, ‘Pretty shitty job.’ . . . You know, I don’t know if you can start if you can’t turn that around.”

Despite a punishing athletic training schedule, he breezed through his chemistry courses, earning a major by his junior year. Then for good measure he tacked on a second major in physics because he was “bored with chemistry.” His last term, on what he calls a “lark,” he took an electrical engineering course.

“I got a physics degree. I got a chemistry degree. And this electrical engineering stuff has got to be bullshit,” he thought. “It wasn’t; it was hard,” he realized, which is just the kind of challenge that inspires a guy like Rodgers. “It was extremely interesting and it was a course using chips from Silicon Valley to make circuit boards that actually did stuff.” After building a light organ for his class project that flashed colored Christmas lights based on the various sound frequencies from his home hi-fi, he was hooked.

Graduating second in his class, “back in the days before everybody got A’s to make ’em feel good,” he was accepted in the graduate physics program at Stanford University prior to rediscovering his true passion for electronics. Switching majors at Stanford, as he would soon find out, was no small feat. At one point T.J. recalls being told by someone in the administration that “they were Stanford and I wasn’t, and you didn’t just move from one division to another. You’re accepted in physics and that was it.”

After a persistent networking effort and letter-writing campaign, luck would shine on the budding silicon scientist. The electrical engineering department had just purchased an expensive piece of chip-making equipment to grow semiconductor wafers using exotic gases. The problem was nobody in the double-E department knew anything about the sophisticated chemistry needed to operate the machine. Enter Rodgers, with not only a chemistry degree but a physics undergrad degree to boot. They hired him on the spot. He was in. “I paid my way through college running that machine for that laboratory,” he recalls fondly.

Rodgers earned his doctorate among the founding greats of twentieth-century technology. He took courses from William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, the device that replaced bulky vacuum tubes of his mother’s era and ushered in the microchip and computer revolution. He also studied under J. D. Meindl, who later won the 2006 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Medal of Honor for pioneering contributions to microelectronics.

It was a heady time to be in Silicon Valley pushing the bleeding edge of technology. The significance wasn’t lost on Rodgers. “We knew exactly what was happening,” he said about the emergence of microchip technology and integrated circuits. “We knew we were going to conquer the world; we knew it was the revolution.”

Rodgers wrote his doctoral dissertation on advanced integrated circuit technology for micro-power integrated circuits. His visionary work correctly predicted the physical needs of futuristic low-power-consumption integrated circuits decades before their modern use in products ranging from powerful, long-life cell phones to military guidance systems.

Planting the Seed of Cypress

With a crisp new Stanford PhD diploma and a fresh idea for a specialized microchip technology he had invented, the now Dr. Rodgers shunned an offer from Intel, opting instead for a role at smaller, more nimble Advanced Microsystems Inc. (AMI). The chip he invented there turned out to be a financial failure and he soon found himself on the street looking for work.

Once again he stiff-armed the giant Intel and took a job with W. J. (Jerry) Sanders at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) working on a memory chip similar to the one he had created at AMI. Rodgers learned a lot from Sanders about image, marketing, and competing in the rough-and-tumble world of Silicon Valley in the 1970s.8 He also thought he could do even better than AMD in the memory chip market by striking out on his own.

In 1983 Rodgers scored venture funding and founded Cypress Semiconductor, taking Sanders’s vice president of marketing, Lowell Turriff, with him. The move spawned a lawsuit from AMD and a bitter rivalry that lasted for years. The climate of the Valley in those days made it more like a medieval turf battle than a civilized game of country club tennis. Rodgers himself formed “raiding parties” to capture the top engineers from other companies for his own ranks.9 The competitive experience seems to have cemented his take-no-prisoners business value system and appreciation of hard work.

“All of a sudden, when you are in start-up, and your friends are going to get put on the street if you don’t make money and are able to pay them,” explains Rodgers about the uniquely entrepreneurial culture of the Valley. “You realize that making the money is good, proper, and moral, and it does good for people.”

He adds, “And you look at how hard it is to do that and how hard it is to compete as a start-up against a big, established company, or Japanese companies as a group, or today the Chinese companies as a group, and you all of a sudden realize that doing that is an accomplishment and it takes all of your skill and all of your energy, and it’s the right and proper thing to do.”

Despite charging hard for decades, Rodgers still maintains a passion and a work ethic not many match. Aside from a daily lunchtime run, he works every waking hour of the day. He tackles stacks of technical journals in the mornings, saying, “Transactions on Electron Devices is not something you read while you are having dinner or a glass of wine.” After a brutal day at the office managing his employees and solving problems, he lugs a Pepsi crate of paperwork home to complete in the evenings from a floating desk in his hot tub.

Like Francisco d’Anconia, Rodgers sees money as simply a benchmark, an indicator of value created, not an end to itself. “I like working— working (and learning) is what I like,” sums up T.J.’s primary motivation, like a true Rand hero. “It is the gratifying thing to me.

“All of a sudden you’ve got a huge manufacturing problem and the puzzle is multidimensional—extremely complicated—and therefore extremely interesting, and always changing,” Rodgers explains eagerly about his inner motivation and source of inherent drive. “What worked two years ago is now obsolete. Either you solve the new set of problems or you’re out of there; the whole Valley’s that way.”

His schedule doesn’t leave much time for philosophizing, and Rodgers claims to have never read Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead. Nevertheless, he’s an avid fan of Rand’s nonfiction work—and has quoted several of her more subtle economic and political ideas in his own writings. He even hired a Randian philosopher named Jason Alexander to conduct presentations on Objectivism to his executive staff. “I got almost all of my knowledge of Rand from him,” he relates.

In 1992, Rodgers wrote a book called No Excuses Management (Currency/Doubleday) in which he laid out his no-nonsense operating methods in a playbook for like-minded business leaders. His approach to employees seems to be like a hard-charging football coach—or maybe even a bit like a drill sergeant. There is no coddling. The measures of success are objective. Do your job. Solve problems. Understand and admit your mistakes. Rodgers clearly loves doing business, but with his team, it’s tough love.

“There are people in the world, those who have been through self-esteem stuff when they were kids and got wrecked that way,” sums up Rodgers’s perspective on the popular feel-good management culture. “They screw something up and it costs the company a million dollars because they didn’t care that much. Then they would like to hear, ‘I’m glad that you made that amount of progress, but, you know, we could really improve even further (like lose less than a million dollars) if we did this and that.’ I don’t do that. To me that’s a lie.”

Rodgers does tolerate mistakes from his troops; in fact, he welcomes them, saying, “If they don’t make mistakes, then we’re not pushing them, and if we’re not pushing them, we’re not going to be competitive.” What he won’t tolerate are excuses, ignorance, or apathy. “If a guy comes in and doesn’t know what’s going on, that’s bad. If he doesn’t care that he doesn’t know what’s going on, that’s real bad,” explains Rodgers. His solution? Displayed in a poster on the wall of his office is a horrifying image of a toothbrush—with stainless-steel bristles. “You bring out the stainless-steel brush and rough the guy up a little bit and if he goes away, congratulations—self-selection.”

Rodgers also instills a self-reinforcing culture intolerant of corporate politics. The admonition in Cypress’s values statement “We deplore politicians” isn’t a reference to public office holders, be they Democrats or Republicans; it’s about office politicians. “They try their little politics at lunch someday, and they get zapped,” T.J. explains of a typical misfit who somehow makes it past his arduous new-employee screening process. “Maybe they undermine somebody and they get zapped again, and then they realize that ‘my way of doing business—enhancing my reputation by undercutting others—is not in the interest of the company,’ and what happens is the troops eat them up. They go away.”

Yet despite his tough management style, Rodgers doesn’t see himself as an autocrat. Most of the company’s major decisions, from resource allocations to project priorities, are made by a group of talented executive vice presidents together in a room, with no back-room dealing allowed. “It’s not because I feel touchy-feely,” explains Rodgers, in a rational view of his own limitations. “It’s that I know that any time an organization gets bigger than a hundred, the leader can’t make all of the decisions. You just don’t know enough. Therefore, getting data from layers in the company and chewing on it and letting them think about it, talk to their guys and come back, that’s how you make decisions that work.”

Yes, there’s a pattern emerging here. In his own distinctive style, Rodgers is saying the same things about managing a business as John Allison of BB&T, the Rand-inspired executive we met in Chapter 3, “The Leader.” They both learned from Objectivism to be objective, that it’s reality that counts; lies and evasion aren’t tolerated. They’ve both learned that complex modern companies depend on the independent decision making of good people throughout the organization. But those people must be united by a robust philosophy that they explicitly agree to hold in common. Those who can’t or won’t subscribe to the philosophy have to go; the philosophy serves as a filter to select the best people, and to knit the best into a team.

Rodgers’s course at the helm of Cypress hasn’t always been a straight path upward. The semiconductor businesses is intensely cyclical, not only sensitive to overall economic conditions of growth and contraction, but subject to chip price swings driven by supply, demand, and the inexorable march of new technology under Moore’s law.

The dot-com bust and 9/11 attacks dealt Cypress a major loss of $3.28 per share in fiscal year 2002. Its stock plummeted over 90 percent from its all-time high. Then the Great Recession later in the decade sent profits down yet again. But Rodgers retrenched, cut costs, and focused on what he does best: the fundamentals. It’s like his beloved Packers—it’s all about blocking and tackling.

According to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, until just recently the board of directors received no cash compensation for serving the company. Rather, any financial incentives they received were in the form of long-term stock options effectively aligning their decision making to the enduring success of the company. Rodgers himself takes home less than $600,000 in salary—an amount that may seem large, but is modest in the rarefied atmosphere of today’s CEO pay—and he lives by his own rules of pay for performance. When the company is cutting costs to weather a downturn, Rodgers and his executive team share in the pain. According to the 2009 Cypress annual report, “Like all other employees, our executive officers were impacted by the Company-wide pay reduction implemented in the second quarter of 2009. As a result, the base salaries of our executive officers were reduced by between 9% and 11%.”10 Furthermore, neither Rodgers nor his executives received any new stock option grants in 2009.

Profits versus Political Correctness

Rodgers’s years of slugging it out against domestic and international competition alike also gave him a disdain for noneconomic standards of business success like artificially imposed diversity quotas or so-called social responsibility. In his view, these collectivist benchmarks are based on a faulty moral premise that ultimately does more harm than good for our society and the economy as a whole. “If you go out of college to some big corporation and the first lecture you get from the human resources group is why your company is good because they believe in corporate social responsibility,” Rodgers explains, “then all of sudden, you know, you never get put through the test of really making it on your own.”

His staunch defense of his business methods—finding the best talent regardless of appearance or background, competing to win rather than maneuvering to look good—has resulted in some now-legendary battles played out on the op-ed pages of our nation’s newspapers. Perhaps the most famous was his widely circulated 1996 response letter to a Franciscan nun, Sister Doris Gormley, who criticized Rodgers for the lack of racial and gender diversity on the Cypress board of directors.

Rodgers replied in his letter, which was picked up and reported in a page 1 article by the Wall Street Journal:

Choosing a Board of Directors based on race and gender is a lousy way to run a company. Cypress will never do it. Furthermore, we will never be pressured into it, because bowing to well-meaning, special-interest groups is an immoral way to run a company, given all the people it would hurt. We simply cannot allow arbitrary rules to be forced on us by organizations that lack business expertise. I would rather be labeled as a person who is unkind to religious groups than as a coward who harms his employees and investors by mindlessly following high-sounding but false standards of right and wrong.11

The resulting flood of responses was overwhelmingly positive. Ninety-six percent of Cypress shareholders wrote Rodgers in support. John Allison of BB&T got a similarly positive reaction when his bank announced it would not make loans to develop property acquired under eminent domain. “It seems the liberal-dominated media continue to push us further and further towards the society of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and your position stands out as one of the few against the downward slide,” wrote one individual investor from New Mexico.12

A U.S. Congressman from Washington State wrote, “Our educational system is failing in part because it avoids the need to educate young people that capitalism, profits, hard work, and achievement are not bad things.” Of the 27 lay Catholics who wrote in supported Rodgers’s position, one said, “The Sister Gormleys of the world are neglecting God’s work for dilettante socialism.”

More than half of all responses argued the philosophical point that capitalism is morally good. Even Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman sent Rodgers a note along with a copy of a New York Times piece he had written in 1970 titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” “He made every point I’d made, but 26 years earlier,” T.J. quipped. Milton Friedman has inspired many advocates of free markets; we’ll meet him again in Chapter 9, “The Economist of Liberty.”

The few negative responses were typically emotional—and anonymous—rants. One called Rodgers a “money-grubbing, narrow-minded elitist . . . desperately holding onto [his] white-male bastion of power.” One Washington resident wrote, “There are a number of educationally and professionally qualified women and minorities who can excel as board members of Cypress and other male/Anglo-Saxon-dominated companies.” The writer didn’t provide the names of those qualified women and minorities, nor did she seem to realize that only two of the five Cypress board members were, in fact, Anglo males.

The executive director of the Council of Institutional Investors wondered whether “CEOs who insist on board clones failed to play high school sports or other security-enhancing activities.” Apparently Rodgers’s two high school football championships and a college career playing for Dartmouth didn’t count. The most succinct feedback was submitted to the Cypress web site suggesting simply that T.J. should “pull his head out of his ass.”

The Conscience of the Nation

In 1999, one of T.J.’s directors called him to let him know that Jesse Jackson was coming to town. “He’s been to New York and called the stock brokerage and the investment banking industry racist,” remembers Rodgers. “Then he went to Detroit and called the car industry racist. So he is going to come here and call Silicon Valley racist . . . probably.”

“You’re not going to say anything, are you?” asked the director. “You understand this guy does this stuff for a living. He’s a low-life, but he is going to rip your ass and you’re going to embarrass the company, so why don’t you just keep your mouth shut?”

“Okay,” Rodgers replied. But in the end he just couldn’t hold himself back. After the nun incident, news outlets from the New York Times to the local television stations knew Rodgers was a reliable source for attention-grabbing sound bites on controversial issues. As Jackson ramped up his rhetoric in Silicon Valley, reporters began beating harder on T.J.’s door. He finally relented.

“Do you have a comment on Jesse Jackson?” asked a reporter from Fox News.

“I said, ‘Jesse Jackson reminds me of a seagull,’” Rodgers recounts. “‘He flies in, craps all over everything, and then flies out.’ And then the guy’s looking at me like his jaw drops and he goes, ‘Do you really want to say that?’ And I go ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well, okay.’ Then he didn’t ask me another question and he’s gone.”

After his Fox News television appearance, the San Jose Mercury News invited Rodgers to expand on his thoughts in a more reasoned article, which it published on March 14, 1999. The arguments read like one of Francisco d’Anconia’s expositions on the virtues of a free-market capitalist meritocracy.

My company, Cypress Semiconductor, has 35% minority employees—every one a shareholder. And at the top, four of our nine executive vice presidents, or 44 percent, are minorities. Cypress’ overall employment statistics are typical for Silicon Valley. I invite the Reverend Jackson to send me the resumes of those disenfranchised people who’ve received training from “the best universities.” With 115 open positions we could use them. We hire 500 people per year and still never fully meet our needs—just like other Silicon Valley companies.

. . . But why should Silicon Valley companies be forced to deal with Jackson? He is an economic train wreck who recently wrote, according to his Web site: “Deregulated capital markets, free trade, floating currencies—these are simply mechanisms, not measures of virtue.” And when the markets aren’t free anymore, who will determine what is virtuous—Jackson?

Compare the moral impact of the CEO who says or implies, “Many of you are here because of quotas,” to that of a CEO who says, “You are here because you are the best. Period.” We should not tolerate any degradation in one basic value that drives Silicon Valley meritocracy—despite Jackson’s criticism of it as “an oozing ideology that needs to be addressed.”13

“We only hire based on merit, period. And right now our company is 64 percent minority,” Rodgers reports dismissively—letting the oxymoron “64 percent minority” speak for itself. He’s also proud of standing up to Jackson and not cowering in fear from the deliberately charged words “minority” or “prejudice” that Jackson wields to slice his opponents. “Every other CEO just crawls under his desk and waits for it to go away,” says Rodgers of the typical corporate reaction when Jesse comes to town to spout off about racism.

Rather than take Rodgers up on his challenge to meet for an open debate, Jackson’s camp replied: “We can now officially describe Cypress Semiconductor as a white-supremacist hate group.”14 All we can say about that is that when we visited T.J. on Champion Court, we didn’t see any crosses burning outside Cypress’s headquarters.

Rodger’s in-your-face defense of his moral ground and living a life that simply honors the truth hasn’t been without consequences. “These are my lawsuits,” Rodgers says pointing to the opposite wall covered with over a dozen black-and-white documents. “I always frame them.” And he refuses to settle or be blackmailed into compromising his principles—no matter how drawn-out or expensive the ordeal.

Does he ever end up spending more to fight than to give in to the demands of his extortionists? “It happens all the time,” Rodgers says matter-of-factly. “The idea that that decision is a decision about return on investment is bullshit. . . . They’re calling you a scumbag and a crook, right? So how much money do you have to save to acknowledge that? Then of course it’s ‘without admitting guilt’? Bullshit. You gave them a check.”

The criticism doesn’t seem to faze him much. Not that Rodgers is an unfeeling automaton—in fact, he is an intensely emotional man. But he has a remarkable ability to take a step back from the initial gut reaction to view the situation, and himself, in an objective context. Fortune called him up a few years ago for a piece it was running on the world’s toughest boss. “Two or three years before, they had issued America’s toughest bosses and two of the people that I remember on the list were Jack Welch and Andy Grove,” recollects Rodgers. “They were basically good guys who ran great companies that were tough. . . . So I figured it would be the same thing.”

What it turned out to be—with Rodgers’s face on the cover in extreme close-up, seeming to glower at the reader—was what Rodgers calls a “hit piece on nasty prick bosses . . . and I got real pissed off,” he remembers at first. “Then I read it again and the quotes were right, and then I forgot about it. . . . I have this little byline that’s in my head: ‘Fortune magazine—yesterday’s news tomorrow.’ It’s like who gives a shit about Fortune magazine? Who cares?”

Silicon Always Tells the Truth

Business philosophy is one thing—and Rodgers is one hell of a philosopher. But remember, Francisco d’Anconia was a double major in philosophy and physics. And Rodgers is every bit the master of the physics of the business about which he philosophizes so brilliantly.

Listening to T.J. talk about silicon chips, it’s easy to be dumbfounded by the breadth and depth of his knowledge. Like a kindly college professor tutoring a couple of school kids, he whipped out a pen and a manila file folder, then illustrated for us the underlying physics of transistors and how they link together to form the ultrafast memory chips his company is famous for. Terms like P-N junction, tetrahedral bonding, and inversion layer conduction as a quantum-mechanical phenomenon rolled off his tongue like an ordinary Joe’s barber shop banter on baseball statistics.

Rodgers’s latest generation of technology, known as a programmable system on a chip (PSoC), is a world’s first. The design consists of configurable analog and digital peripheral functions, memory, and a microcontroller—essentially an entire computer—on a single chip. Engineers no longer have to hunt down, configure, physically connect, and test individual components to drive electronic products. Using PSoC, they simply drag and drop various modules on a computer-based graphical user interface, hit “go,” and the chip configures and programs itself to the designer’s specifications. Currently Rodgers’s PSoC technology is being used in products as diverse as computer printers, high-definition televisions (HDTVs), touch-screen cell phones, ad even washing machines and coffee makers.

“The big chip we’re just now starting to ramp up, it’s the size of my little fingernail, and I had 300 engineers working on it for three years,” he reveals proudly about his latest project. “When we slice the chip in half to look at a cross section, to look at the transistor profiles and see if the thing’s being done right, we literally can see atoms,” he said in amazement, laying out a couple of images labeled “High Resolution TEM SiO2.” And sure enough, the individual atoms were clearly visible stacked neatly in an organized matrix, “like a rack of pool balls.”

All that said, on another level brilliant physics and brilliant philosophy are two sides of the same enterprise. Physics taught T.J. what Aristotle taught Ayn Rand: that A is A, that existence exists, and any philosophy that says it doesn’t is a pack of lies. As T.J. puts it, “Silicon always tells the truth.”

How did T. J. Rodgers come to such confidently held beliefs, such strong bedrock principles? Was there a primary influence? An Objectivist mentor in college? A libertarian guru leading him through his formative years?

“The fact is there was no one person,” he responds thoughtfully. “I really believe it’s genetic; I really do. Part of it is the fact that I’m scientist and an engineer and, in that business, Maxwell’s equations don’t give a shit if you’re Republican or Democrat.”

He explains, “There are laws of physics and chemistry that allow you to understand and make respectively that chip and then electrical engineering, which allow you to assemble millions of things together and have them work right. And they are what they are. To say, you know, ‘It’s his fault,’ or ‘I didn’t get enough resources,’ or ‘If we only had a subsidy.’ All that stuff is just crap; it’s an excuse. Silicon always tells the truth.”

“Man can rearrange the materials that exist in reality, but he cannot violate their identity; he cannot escape the laws of nature,”15 wrote Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand’s designated intellectual heir. The political corollary, as Rand herself wrote, is that “To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.”16

In the Cypress boardroom hangs a reproduction of Raphael’s masterpiece, The School of Athens. Rodgers uses it as a metaphor for the concrete reality he so loves and admires. In the picture, Plato and Aristotle walk together in the center of the canvas under a marble archway surrounded by ancient scholars, including Pythagoras, Euclid, Socrates, and Ptolemy. An aged and wise-looking Plato points to the sky with one finger, symbolizing his Theory of Forms, which concludes that abstract ideas, not the material world, are the highest form of reality. Meanwhile a considerably younger-looking and robust Aristotle holds his right hand out facing down as if palming an invisible basketball, silently referencing his philosophy of empiricism, or truth through the study of objective reality.

“We talk about it all the time,” Rodgers says of the painting and underlying message. “We just deal with the laws of physics, and there is no interpretation; there are no politics; no crap. We have our own Aristotle built in, and he tells us if we’ve been competent or not and he always tells the truth; he’s perfect. One of our core values in the company is that silicon always tells the truth; we are Aristotle, real simple.”

Ayn Rand would be proud. She credited Aristotle, who laid out the rules of logic and reason, as the only philosopher from whom she ever learned anything. She considered Plato to be patient zero in a centuries-long epidemic of mysticism and collectivism.

What frustrates Rodgers is that when he takes even a tiny step back from the clean room of science, he starts to see the crazy illogic running unchecked through our social discourse today. “You hear that somehow by taxing ourselves with a carbon tax, we’re going to create green jobs . . . that global warming causes snowstorms . . . and how government spending creates wealth. It’s just absolute bullshit.”

It seems as though Rodgers vents his feelings so frequently to keep from blowing a boiler. His wife has become well practiced at talking him down after a particularly idiotic encounter outside of his corporate safe room. According to Rodgers, “She’ll say, ‘Remember, T.J., you don’t live in the real world. You live in a very special place. It’s very different from the real world.’ And I really do,” he concludes happily. “I really love my job.”

Money Is Not Evil

Rodgers supports philanthropy—as long as it’s by choice, not by force. “When good works cease to be voluntary and become compulsory, charity becomes confiscation and freedom becomes servitude,” he wrote in a New York Times response to Bill Clinton’s 1997 President’s Summit in Philadelphia (a gathering he termed the “wrecking crew”), concluding with what he says is his favorite quote: “Philanthropy is a byproduct of wealth, and wealth is best created in free markets whose workings embody a fundamental and true moral principle long forgotten in Washington. Let’s not let the crowd in Philadelphia con us into giving it more than the 40 percent of the economy it already controls.”17

In early 2010, Cypress and its sister company, SunPower, donated $1.1 million to the Second Harvest Food Bank to install a 322-kilowatt solar power system that is expected to save the nonprofit organization nearly $3 million in electricity costs. Because he’s still free to evaluate charities on their own merits, Rodgers gives based on free-market principles of who does the most good with the hard-earned money he donates. “Second Harvest Food Bank is one of the most efficient nonprofit organizations in the country, giving $0.95 out of every dollar it receives back to the community,” he said about his choice to fund the group. “Cypress is pleased to help reduce the organization’s operating expenses so that it can focus on what it does best—feeding the community.”

T.J. also goes on the speaking circuit, when invited, to help the younger generation of aspiring businesspeople. One of his favorite openers is to make the statement “Money can’t buy happiness” and then ask the students to react to it as true or false. “Who thinks that is true?” he asks, and 90 percent of the hands go up. Then he says, “Let me speak for a few minutes on variants of the question I just asked you. . . . Money can’t buy happiness. Money can never buy happiness for anybody. Money always buys happiness under every circumstance. In some occasions, money can buy happiness for some people. Money always buys happiness for everybody. Then I pause. Crank and wait and see.”

Then he does the poll again and the numbers go to 70 percent true. “Why did you change your vote?” Rodgers then asks of one of the switchers. Once they go through the logical permutations, reports Rodgers, they often reply, “It’s clear that at some time money can buy happiness for somebody. Therefore this categorical statement ‘money can’t buy happiness’ is not always true, and therefore, if it’s not always true, it’s not true.” Simple Boolean logic.

Then, to hammer home the point even deeper, T.J. tells a personal story and then repolls the class. “In 1996, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and in 1997, he was so messed up, he couldn’t stay in the house anymore,” Rodgers begins. “My mother couldn’t take care of him. So I flew from California to my home in Wisconsin. I went to the various homes that could take care of him. Some of them were awful. I found a very nice one. It was more expensive than the other ones. I put my dad in it and I just wrote the check to pay for the first quarter. And it was expensive, but I own a company in Silicon Valley and I had enough money that I could just write the check, and being able to take care of my family made me happier. Fact. True story. So now, let me ask you again. Money can’t buy happiness. True or false?”

Astonishingly, 15 percent or so of the students still stick to their guns, even when confronted with direct evidence and the fallacy of their illogical conclusion. “So now you have got the real hardcore communists,” T.J. chuckles. “Then you get into the real bullshit answers. I mean, it’s just insane. ‘I don’t really understand what happiness is.’ The professors hate it—absolutely hate it, because I am pointing out that money is not evil.”

T.J. admits, “After my third or fourth appearance at the Stanford Business School, I was never invited back to lecture again.” However, he’s done his little exercise all over the world. At the University of Hong Kong only two students raised their hands on the very first round. “Okay, well, I guess this drill is not going to work around here,” Rodgers said to himself. He reports, “At Santa Clara University—the Jesuit school—they were very good. Stanford Business School is one of the worst. You know, one time I was particularly rankled in this interaction with them and I said, ‘If you hate money so much, why are you going to business school?’”

Having never read Atlas Shrugged, T.J. may not know that this lecture on the nobility of money is a modern classroom version of a famous epic monologue by Francisco d’Anconia on the same subject, delivered at a cocktail party full of wealthy, guilt-ridden socialites. After one particularly obnoxious heiress declares that “money is the root of all evil,” d’Anconia begins, “Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. . . . Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?”

As T.J. might have put it in the same circumstances, “If you hate money so much, why are you going to cocktail parties with all these rich people?”

A Hero on Strike

In 2001 Rodgers helped out Stanford Business School buddy Richard Swanson with a $750,000 investment in his struggling solar cell company, SunPower. It may have seemed like an ironic choice for the financially scrupulous Rodgers: a chummy favor for a friend with a so-called green company in an industry unlikely to exist at all if not for government subsidies.

But the investment actually made quite a bit of sense. Rodgers believes that the market for alternative energy technology will grow in the coming decades, driven by the increasing market price of fossil fuel—government meddling or not. SunPower had technology that was one of the most efficient ways to generate electricity from sunlight on the planet.18 And the underlying science of photovoltaic cells isn’t all that different from memory chips. They both consist of silicon crystals manufactured with similar technology. In the case of solar cells, photons strike the silicon surface, displacing electrons and generating an electrical current under the same physical laws as other semiconductors.

By May 2002, Rodgers had convinced his Cypress board to buy a 44 percent stake in SunPower for $8.8 million.19 Eventually they invested $168 million in plant and equipment. SunPower went public in November 2005 at a price of $18 per share—for a total market capitalization of $1.5 billion.20 Rodgers was named chairman of the board. By the fall of 2010, SunPower earned nearly $2 billion in revenue.21

Then along came California Proposition 23, which, if passed, would block a proposed tax on carbon dioxide emissions—a law known as AB32. Carbon taxes would actually be a boon to companies like SunPower. With increased taxes on carbon emissions would come a greater financial incentive for businesses to buy solar panels—sort of a financial shock therapy to encourage clean energy alternatives. Proponents of the tax also talked high-handedly about green job creation.

It did not matter to Rodgers, who would personally stand to benefit from this government manipulation of the private markets. It was just plain wrong—for a number of reasons.

According to Rodgers, “The basic premise of AB32 fails a grade school math test.” By using numbers from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the California Business Roundtable, he discovered that reducing California’s tiny contribution to national carbon emissions would barely move the needle from 5.98 gigatons to 5.94 gigatons. For that relatively tiny reduction, 1.1 million Californians would lose their jobs due to the higher tax. “In other words, for almost an unmeasurable change, we’re showing ‘leadership,’” cracks Rodgers. “California, the ‘Green State.’ You know, the only thing we’ve got leadership on is unemployment. It just doesn’t work out for all this self-immolation.”

So he wrote an op-ed piece in support of Proposition 23 for the Wall Street Journal that was published on October 29, 2010, just before the vote.21 “I got a load of shit from SunPower. . . . They were writing me e-mails; it was clearly a lobbying effort by all but one of the directors—one was a capitalist—writing me these ‘What the hell are you doing?’ kind of things. And it’s real simple. I make shit and pay taxes. I don’t take other people’s taxes and declare it’s good because it’s good.”

At first Rodgers could tolerate a certain amount of government stimulus into the renewable energy sector to help burgeoning technologies get developed. He figured he could grit his teeth and get through the formative years of the industry, “especially if the company’s stated plan is to get through the period and get off the government teat.” But then SunPower continued deeper and deeper into becoming what he calls a “ward of the state.”

“They started supporting the laws that are clearly bad for where they live, clearly bad for the state that allowed them to have the free market to create their success, and they criticize the chairman of the company because all their little chicken-shit laws are getting passed to get their little chicken-shit subsidies,” Rodgers recalls, getting visibly riled and pausing for composure. “I went through a period of intense anger, which I never expressed, and then I just came in the next morning and said, ‘I’m out of here.’ I resigned. I resigned from the board of SunPower. So even companies that I am a significant contributor to their success, and I pick people that are good people, even then, when it comes to government pork—for me, today, versus saying what’s truthful and right—they’re whores.”

The Laboratory Vineyard

These days, Rodgers is just as likely to deploy his considerable talent, energy, and brainpower to making unique, stunning, and innovative contributions to another of his many interests: winemaking. “You know, I like making things,” Rodgers explains. “I have to make things, and when my job became sitting in a chair and talking to people I got vicarious enjoyment, because we are making things here and I was close to it, but I wasn’t making anything myself anymore. So now we make wine.”

He currently owns three small vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains that he uses like his own personal laboratory for the scientific exploration of viniculture. His methods are an extension of the style of his own mind—researching the core sciences developed over hundreds of years of trial and error in the old-world tradition, then melding that with new technology and empirical testing to yield astounding new results.

“Our winery business did 500,000 bucks last year, and within a couple of years we’ll cross the million-dollar mark,” he reports proudly. “We make a world-class pinot noir.” He named his winery Clos de la Tech.

On a 160-acre parcel he named Domaine Lois Louise, after his mother, Rodgers dug three giant caves tiered into the slope under the vineyard. “It turns out that in France in the old days pinot noir was made with a gravity flow process, meaning that they didn’t have pumps, and whenever you wanted to move wine from a place to another you had to use a siphon,” he explains. The caves are structured so the top of the third cave is lower than the floor of the middle cave. Wine flows by gravity through the process of fermentation, barrel aging, and finally bottling to be trucked off to market four years after harvest.

Rodgers, like Francisco d’Anconia, does everything to the max—and brilliantly. His fermenters are radio-controlled and monitored. He visits France to learn from masters like Aubert de Villaine, the owner of the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti. He grafts a variety of vines to rootstocks, matching them to meticulously documented growing conditions and micro climates on his slopes. Results are then recorded and analyzed to improve his growing methods even further. His French oak barrels are custom ordered from Francois Freres Tonnellerie, which according to T.J. is “the best Burgundy barrel maker. . . . I pay $1,000 for a barrel. You can buy an American barrel for $280.”

He personally designed a new type of tractor, perfect for navigating narrow vine rows on exceedingly steep slopes while remaining level in three dimensions through the use of hydraulically telescoping wheeled supports. The tractor is computer controlled and driven by a joystick like a video game. The invention won a gold medal from the European Intervitis Wine Fair for the most innovative new piece of farm equipment in 2001.

T.J. also created and patented a new grape press technology that is efficient and gentle, leaving the grape seeds uncracked to reduce unwanted tannins. The result approximates the ancient art of foot crushing using twenty-first-century technological efficiencies.

Even his failures are technological tours de force. He learned through extensive research that grapes exposed to partial sunlight produce superior wine due to a chemical they produce called quercetin, which acts like a natural sunscreen. But the heat of the sun negates the effect so that, typically, only the small portions of vines exposed to cool morning sun produce the vaunted grapes. T.J. set out to solve the problem by conducting an experiment he called “air-conditioning” a vineyard. He installed custom water misters on a control section of grapes and fitted individual clusters with thermistors to read the real-time temperatures of his subjects. He then linked up a wireless control system using his Cypress PSoC chip, which he custom programmed to monitor and cool the grapes with a series of radio-controlled water valves. In the end, the experiment was a technological marvel—but it didn’t make a better grape, or a better wine.

The labels of Rodgers’s wine bottles are the joint product of political meddling and technological breakthrough. “Very Burgundian,” he says proudly of the label. Of the stylish black and white 1940s portrait on it, Rodgers explains, “That’s my mother. That picture was taken in 1946; she’s actually holding a cigarette and I had to edit it out.” It seems that even in the wine business, Rodgers is bound to run into idiotic governmental regulations and obtuse bureaucracies. “It’s illegal to have a cigarette on a wine bottle,” Rodgers explains disgustedly. “Some genius passed a law that actually governs that.”

Embedded in a red wax seal above the cigarette-free mother rests a silvery mirrorlike square, smaller than a postage stamp. The back label explains, “The silicon chip on the crest of the bottle is a billion-transistor, 144-megabit Static Random Access Memory that can store and retrieve 100 books with 1,000 pages each in onethousandth of a second.”

His hassles with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) make him shake his head in frustration almost as much as the California town commissions and zoning boards. “They’re such a fucked-up organization that you never can deal with them; they don’t answer phones,” he says of the ATF when confronting the rolls of red tape standing between his wine and the commercial market. “You’re sitting in there trying to sell your wines and it’s going to take like nine months. They told us the last time we called them that they were very busy. The time from when they received our letter until they opened it was five months.”

Rodgers concludes, “Real people haven’t got time for some bullshit government job. It’s only the clowns that—you know, you check them out—they were the high school class president; that was their little bit of fame in high school and now they’re on the planning commission for some county in California.”

A Normal Man

We began our interview with Rodgers hoping to discover the recipe for how he became a success—how he could do so many things so well. After generously giving us more than four hours with him, it was clear that—like Francisco d’Anconia, and in fact like all Ayn Rand’s heroes—he simply likes “living on this earth.” This means he wants to spend every minute of his life making as much of his life as he can—without wasting a moment on any form of self-deception, and without expecting anyone else to do his living for him.

Hugh Akston, Rand’s great philosopher of reason from Atlas Shrugged, says it best. He says not to make the mistake of thinking that people like Francisco d’Anconia—and Rodgers—are “some sort of superhuman creatures. They’re something much greater and more astounding than that: they’re normal men—a thing the world has never seen—and their feat is that they managed to survive as such. It does take an exceptional mind, and a still more exceptional integrity, to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world’s doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries—to remain human, since the human is the rational.”