Speaker 1: Oh hey, guys, welcome to this spinoff episode of The
Speaker 1: Daily Zeitgeist. We're calling tentatively the Iconograph to show about icons.
Speaker 1: My name is Jack O'Brien. I co founded the website
Speaker 1: crack dot com, and for the past seven years I've
Speaker 1: co hosted a daily show with the comedian Miles Gray
Speaker 1: about the Zeitgeist. The News Ghost Spirit of the Times.
Speaker 1: We cover what's happening in our shared consciousness through the
Speaker 1: news and pop culture of today, and this spinoff version
Speaker 1: will cover the zeitgeist through the people and characters who
Speaker 1: don't make the news every day, but they exist in
Speaker 1: our movies and on our bumper stickers and T shirts
Speaker 1: and as reference points in our conversations. But yeah, one
Speaker 1: of my criteria for whether someone deserves a TDZ icon
Speaker 1: episode is whether you could dresses them for Halloween and
Speaker 1: people would get it. One of the recurring questions I
Speaker 1: want to ask in these episodes is if this icon
Speaker 1: existed today in our reality, how likely would they be
Speaker 1: to be on the Epstein flight logs, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: And in this episode we're talking about the stein Bert Einstein.
Speaker 1: We're starting with a big one, genius, visionary, silly billy
Speaker 1: rogue sex maniac. Next week, I think we have Erkele
Speaker 1: That should give you a sense of the scope of
Speaker 1: our inquiry here. But yeah, don't be fooled by the
Speaker 1: subject matter of our first episode. It's a very stupid show. Still.
Speaker 1: The format is simple. Each episode a different icon, Miles,
Speaker 1: a guest, and me talking geist through the lens of
Speaker 1: that icon. We will start with the stuff that is
Speaker 1: part of the iconic image we all have of Einstein.
Speaker 1: The picture of him sticking out his tongue, Where'd that
Speaker 1: come from? Why was he doing that? He equals mc squared?
Speaker 1: What that mean? The rumpled wild hair look, the myth
Speaker 1: that he was a slow child, the quotes and misquotes
Speaker 1: and made up quotes. And then we'll get into some
Speaker 1: really interesting stuff from his life that didn't make it
Speaker 1: into the myth that got rejected by the brand management
Speaker 1: team that is all of us, because it didn't match
Speaker 1: the image we wanted for Einstein. But we're hiring a
Speaker 1: researcher to help with each one of these episodes. This
Speaker 1: one was researched by Dave Ruse. Thank you, Dave, And yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll be back at the end to tell you some
Speaker 1: stuff I missed from my notes in my No No
Speaker 1: No notebook dump. But here I am talking to Miles
Speaker 1: and Michael Swain about Albert Einstein and plenty of other stuff.
Speaker 1: Hope you enjoy. I don't know if you know what
Speaker 1: we're doing today, Victor, but we're talking about a little
Speaker 1: guy by the name of Albert Einstein. Ever heard of them? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Walter math Owl's episode three. It just turns out. I'm
Speaker 1: really into that movie Episode four, Meg Ryan, episode five,
Speaker 1: Tim Robbin.
Speaker 2: Every time I think of Walter math Out, the image
Speaker 2: that pops into my head for some reason is him
Speaker 2: and Dennis the Menace with the chick lit Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know. Well yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Fucks up his dentures and brilliant idea to replace them
Speaker 2: with chick lit gum.
Speaker 3: That's his proactive idea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because he sucks up his dentures. Mister Wilson import
Speaker 1: or whatever. Oh yeah, mister Wilson has always taking important
Speaker 1: meetings the killer.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and then, uh, what's his face? Christopher Lloyd
Speaker 2: plays like a crazy drift in it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was born to play. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think a flame goes up his butt or something
Speaker 2: because he farts on a campfire.
Speaker 1: There's something with him farting in fire anyway, Einstein? Are
Speaker 1: we talking about CHRISTI?
Speaker 3: Yeah, Einstein.
Speaker 1: A lot of people don't know that Einstein died by
Speaker 1: farting on a campfire and the flame went off his
Speaker 1: butt and blew them up.
Speaker 3: The apple hit his head. This was what inspired.
Speaker 1: Beer blows his ass off.
Speaker 2: This is so funny. There's a you account called fart Share.
Speaker 1: This is how the Einstein episodes over the miles, linking
Speaker 1: up famous fart scenes. Dennis the Menace. All right here,
Speaker 1: we'll get into it. Hello the Internet, and welcome to
Speaker 1: this very special episode of Turnilley Zeitgeist. Oh, which we
Speaker 1: don't know what we're calling yet Iconograph. Maybe keep coming
Speaker 1: back to Iconograph. Will figure it out and start of
Speaker 1: looking at the zeitgeist through current events. We're looking at icons,
Speaker 1: powerful pop culture hork froxes that are basically the stars
Speaker 1: of our shared consciousness. I'm joined as always by my
Speaker 1: co host, mister Miles Grind. Are we doing a rake?
Speaker 4: Hi?
Speaker 1: Yes? Hi?
Speaker 2: It's interesting because I don't know what you're about to
Speaker 2: tell me, so it's hard coming in cold. That's the
Speaker 2: whole point here is I'm here to be dazzled by
Speaker 2: Sexy Facts.
Speaker 1: Sexy Facts and Dennis the Menace Fart Conversations. Yes, Miles,
Speaker 1: we're thrilled to be joined by the co host of
Speaker 1: my very first podcast, the Crack podcast from the early
Speaker 1: days of Cracked, back doing some very funny stuff at Cracked.
Speaker 1: Very talented writer who back in back in those days
Speaker 1: wrote one of my favorite science articles about like mind
Speaker 1: blowing science stuff. So I wanted to have him on
Speaker 1: here see if he could explain what any of this
Speaker 1: ship means. He's the creator of the Small Beans podcast network.
Speaker 1: It's Michael Swash.
Speaker 4: Might I pitch Iconic Class? Do people say icon class class?
Speaker 1: And you were going iconic Cast, but there's a Christian
Speaker 1: podcast called iconic Cast.
Speaker 4: To an icon speak of which we're going to hit.
Speaker 4: One of the very first sketch related things me and
Speaker 4: my primary partner over on my Small Beans comedy in print,
Speaker 4: Abe Everson, also a big director at Crack. One of
Speaker 4: the first things we ever did was like Jesus me,
Speaker 4: it's hitler thing, which caused Rob Shrub, successful Hollywood comedian
Speaker 4: Oh Yeah, to tell us to give up and quit.
Speaker 4: And we're to pursue comedy and I understand what he
Speaker 4: was really saying. Well, no, you shouldn't say that too
Speaker 4: a young creative, but I've always been interested ever since
Speaker 4: that horrible burn in my soul, in like your abe
Speaker 4: Lincoln's or the joke math around. Yeah, the things we
Speaker 4: put the most energy into. Yeah, I'm so powerful. And
Speaker 4: of course as you age, thanks to outlets like Cracked
Speaker 4: and now just broader internet culture, you find out so
Speaker 4: much of it as a package story as well, and
Speaker 4: it makes you reflect on, like.
Speaker 1: So what is my life?
Speaker 4: It's like an echo of an echo of a condensed,
Speaker 4: agreed upon retelling of a You know, we're not so
Speaker 4: out of the realm of myths as we think we are.
Speaker 3: We still basically live our lives by them.
Speaker 1: I realized as I was because I did read like
Speaker 1: a chunk of the Walter Isaacson Einstein biography or listened
Speaker 1: to it because I didn't want to own an Einstein biography,
Speaker 1: because the type of person who reads an Einstein biography
Speaker 1: makes my hand just do the jack off hand motion
Speaker 1: and like, oh, okay, oh you're reading Einstein's biography. Yeah
Speaker 1: you did. A smart guy. You think you're a smart guy. Huh,
Speaker 1: But Einstein is the example that got me thinking about
Speaker 1: icons and like their power and this like gravitational force
Speaker 1: that they exert on like meaning and ideas and just
Speaker 1: like the world inside our brains. But I think I
Speaker 1: was sitting behind a car in traffic in LA and
Speaker 1: there was a bumper sticker with an Einstein quote that
Speaker 1: he definitely didn't say. I was just like, God, many
Speaker 1: people really want like they just use him to be
Speaker 1: the guy who if he said that thing, like it
Speaker 1: becomes true mag.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, because I feel like, don't people always
Speaker 2: do the same, Like the definition of insanity is.
Speaker 1: The definition where it's like that's the big thing Stein,
Speaker 1: and You're like, the definition of insanity is doing the
Speaker 1: same thing twice and expecting different results, which, as I've
Speaker 1: said before, is actually a pretty good definition of the
Speaker 1: scientific method.
Speaker 4: And interestingly, I think Einstein, I would venture to guess
Speaker 4: Einstein might say that it's actually not possible to do
Speaker 4: the same thing twice.
Speaker 3: That's what's interesting about this.
Speaker 1: Which is why you do multiple requirements. We do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: God doesn't play dice as another one that gets used
Speaker 1: a lot. He was making a complex point about like
Speaker 1: quantum theory, and like his critical quant.
Speaker 4: Theory, particular interpretation of quantum theory the Copenhangen is.
Speaker 1: But also he's.
Speaker 4: Allowed to be wrong about other stuff or like he
Speaker 4: also one time said, oh fuck, I sat on my ball,
Speaker 4: Like you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: He said, I'm going to fucking marry my cousin. Was
Speaker 1: the thing that he said. That's at a certain point
Speaker 1: which we'll get into. But yeah, this dice thing, though,
Speaker 1: is used by people to be like, see, God has
Speaker 1: a plan. Einstein said that God doesn't play dice, and
Speaker 1: it's like, no, he was talking about quantum mechanics.
Speaker 4: Sex dice with the different sex ex SI side wouldn't
Speaker 4: do that.
Speaker 1: This only Einstein plays sex dice. This is my Einstein impression.
Speaker 1: God plays no sex dice, only Einstein. But I just
Speaker 1: want to start out talking about like the big things
Speaker 1: everybody knows about Einstein. I feel like one of them
Speaker 1: is the tongue photo. I've said that like one of
Speaker 1: the criteria for judging if someone's an icon is like
Speaker 1: could you dress up as them for Halloween? And like
Speaker 1: most people would be like, yeah, I know who you are.
Speaker 1: In Einstein's case, I think it would be a mix
Speaker 1: of people being like you're Einstein or or Mark Twain.
Speaker 1: I think another one is college dorm room posters, you know,
Speaker 1: and like the Einstein tongue photo, the one.
Speaker 2: It's like a yeah, it's it's the Bob Marley photo
Speaker 2: for someoneho's like a science major.
Speaker 1: Oh we'll get to Bob Marley eventually on this show.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so that that's a real photo. It was
Speaker 1: taken like on his seventy second birthday after a party,
Speaker 1: so it's I think fair to assume that he was
Speaker 1: a little bit fucked up. He was coming out of
Speaker 1: the party afterwards, and he was just getting in a car.
Speaker 1: A photographer named Arthur Sas swooped in, got the shot,
Speaker 1: and Einstein fucking loved it. He was like, yo, could
Speaker 1: I get like a thousand copies of that and just
Speaker 1: immediately started sending it to his friends of his tongue
Speaker 1: out photo. His tongue out photo. Yeah okay. That was
Speaker 1: like yeah, okay, good good friend. I'm glad.
Speaker 2: He got so excited that he wanted to share like
Speaker 2: a boomer does, like AI slop on Facebook.
Speaker 1: He was immediately spamming people with this photo. He was like,
Speaker 1: that is that's who I want to be. I think
Speaker 1: that's an that's an important part of his legacy. He's
Speaker 1: a bit of a silly billy. It's a bit of
Speaker 1: a loose cannon. But he said, this gesture you will
Speaker 1: like because it is aimed at all of humanity. The
Speaker 1: outstretched tongue reflect my political views. So a little fucking
Speaker 1: punk rhy dog.
Speaker 4: He was almost funny for a second, and he's like,
Speaker 4: let me explain the shit out of it.
Speaker 1: You'll explain.
Speaker 3: I know, here come those thousand words right now.
Speaker 1: I do feel like the look is important art, and
Speaker 1: then the funny thing is that so the tongue in
Speaker 1: many ways reflects I just stay in for humanity in
Speaker 1: the political spectrum. I do think the look is important.
Speaker 1: Like I think to get a icon the level of Einstein,
Speaker 1: you need to have a lot of different shit come together.
Speaker 1: And I think him looking like a rumpled genius with
Speaker 1: wild hair, like if he if he was like a
Speaker 1: fastidious man with like a comb over, like you know,
Speaker 1: like who is just like very well put together. It
Speaker 1: just like Woodruman or something. Yeah. Yeah, if you just
Speaker 1: look like Harry Truman, that's a great example. Like nobody
Speaker 1: knows what Harry Truman. Nobody thinks about Harry Trump.
Speaker 3: Thank very similarly.
Speaker 4: The reason it took us a while to get around
Speaker 4: to doing the big budget Oppenheimer is very similarly, you know,
Speaker 4: rubbed elbows, same rooms. Oppenheimer arguably responsible for the killingest
Speaker 4: thing anyone's ever done in the history of man. Certainly interesting.
Speaker 4: He doesn't really look or act super interesting, right, So
Speaker 4: we were like Einstein, Einstein, Einstein, Einstein.
Speaker 1: All right, let's do an Oppenheimer we have, let's get
Speaker 1: an Oppenheimer in here. Although I will say I think
Speaker 1: that I remember like certain reviews and I couldn't find
Speaker 1: them for this podcast, but certain reviews of the Oppenheimer
Speaker 1: movie being like really good, loved it. It's weird when
Speaker 1: Einstein shows up and you're like that, it's like a
Speaker 1: fictional character showing up in this movie that's supposed to
Speaker 1: be you know, it's like a muppet showing up. It's like,
Speaker 1: it's he's so iconic that it's just like, wait, why
Speaker 1: why is the guy from the picture with the tongue out?
Speaker 1: Why is he in this historical drama.
Speaker 4: I guess I'm too much of a physics nerd because
Speaker 4: one of my favorite forgotten shows is Manhattan, where one
Speaker 4: of the Wet Bandits Daniel Stern plays a brilliant physicist,
Speaker 4: which is amazing to me, just like not that he
Speaker 4: doesn't pull it off, but that's bizarre to me. Yeah,
Speaker 4: Manhattan has Einstein, you got Neils Bor, you got like
Speaker 4: you'd expect those people to show up. I would be
Speaker 4: surprised to find Stein didn't show up in the Oppenheimer movie.
Speaker 1: Frankly, Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's just I think the effect
Speaker 1: of it for some people who just know him from
Speaker 1: being like wow, okay Einstein.
Speaker 3: You could draw on and app him.
Speaker 2: He's you know, yeah, my knowled to Einstein is truly
Speaker 2: fucking well. What was the movie you just talking about
Speaker 2: with Tim Robbins. Yeah that was not Comedy Central all
Speaker 2: the time. I watched that many times. Uh, the photo
Speaker 2: equals MC squared everything else I have like the whatever.
Speaker 2: The distillation of Einstein is through culture that has really
Speaker 2: nothing to do with him as a person. So like
Speaker 2: when I saw him in Oppenheimer almost I was almost.
Speaker 1: Like, this is this true? That was the real guy?
Speaker 1: The guy was really he talked to Einstein. I thought
Speaker 1: he was like storyline.
Speaker 4: I got so not to put you on the spot
Speaker 4: at but I want to ask files, can.
Speaker 1: You say what he equals MC squared means? And an energy?
Speaker 1: Is it? Energy equals I don't.
Speaker 4: Even mean technically, but like I'm just wondering the thing
Speaker 4: that we all know.
Speaker 3: It by road or do you know?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, no, no, no, truly it's purely just
Speaker 2: the letters. Yeah, I know he's famous for he equals
Speaker 2: mass whatever the fuck squared. I'm also science is like
Speaker 2: the subject I know the least about. So yeah, it's
Speaker 2: truly limited to I could write it on a chalkboard.
Speaker 1: I don't know what it's.
Speaker 4: Appropriate, because I just show up when Jack tells me
Speaker 4: to and it's always worked out so far.
Speaker 1: I am yeah, because I so first of all, that
Speaker 1: is one of them, because I want to start with
Speaker 1: the things everybody knows, right, Like the picture I think
Speaker 1: is up there equals MC squared is the thing. When
Speaker 1: I asked my children before they left work for work today,
Speaker 1: I sent them out to the mines before they left
Speaker 1: for school today, I was like, do you know who
Speaker 1: Einstein is? They knew what he looked like, and they
Speaker 1: knew he equals MC squared, but they don't really know
Speaker 1: what that means. I read a chunk of his biography
Speaker 1: that was covered the portion where he comes up with it,
Speaker 1: and I think I kind of have vague sense, so
Speaker 1: let me try, okay, and then you tell me if
Speaker 1: it's wrong. It's that they were trying to like make
Speaker 1: a set like there was absolute space and there was
Speaker 1: absolute time, like everything up to that point was like,
Speaker 1: well you always have like you can measure everything against
Speaker 1: absolute time. And he figured out basically, the only absolute
Speaker 1: that really works is the speed of light, and like
Speaker 1: based on how fast light is moving, time actually is
Speaker 1: variable and space is actually like mass is actually variable,
Speaker 1: so like the only constant is the speed of light.
Speaker 1: But even that's like not totally constant. But that was
Speaker 1: kind of what I got. That like, once you look
Speaker 1: at things from the perspective of the speed of light,
Speaker 1: like everything else like can shift, including how fast time
Speaker 1: is moving, so there's like no absolute time. How'd I do?
Speaker 3: Pretty good?
Speaker 4: Can I just shout out things as a big fan
Speaker 4: of physics that make my brain explode? Like I know
Speaker 4: what's juicy? I won't bore you. He intuited several things that, like,
Speaker 4: to me, a guy read a lot just about what
Speaker 4: physics means, but I can't learn math no matter how
Speaker 4: hard I try, but read a lot of books of
Speaker 4: like appreciation of physics and cosmology.
Speaker 1: Equals mc squared.
Speaker 4: There's a few things he intuited, and he's become more
Speaker 4: like a Buddha figure to me because it's just amazing
Speaker 4: to think, or like Mary Shelley, who's like basically invented
Speaker 4: sci fi and horror when she thought of the idea
Speaker 4: of Frankenstein when she was eighteen. So it's like one
Speaker 4: of those moments where I'm like, I just can't believe
Speaker 4: a human thought of that. And one of the things
Speaker 4: is everything's relative, like you said, and like trippy examples
Speaker 4: are even if you were moving ninety nine point ninety
Speaker 4: nine nine percent the speed of light, if you shine
Speaker 4: a flashlight out and measured that light, it would be
Speaker 4: going relative to you the speed of light. I cannot
Speaker 4: catch up to it. Ever the end, or at least,
Speaker 4: we still don't understand anyway to breach that, or even
Speaker 4: that it could breach. Everything else would unravel if it breached.
Speaker 3: But you know so.
Speaker 4: And then the other thing that he really intuited the
Speaker 4: equals MC squared is is that energy equals which is
Speaker 4: crazy to me. And this is the part I don't get.
Speaker 4: Why would it be exactly equal to the speed of
Speaker 4: light squared? That makes it seem like God is real.
Speaker 4: But I don't understand the math of randomness. But my
Speaker 4: point is equals MC squared says energy converted by some
Speaker 4: amount equals matter. So Einstein also intuited that, which is
Speaker 4: what an a bomb proves, Right, this tiny piece of
Speaker 4: matter actually has this much energy in it.
Speaker 3: Motherfucker.
Speaker 4: Sorry, we are all made of stardust, as the Great
Speaker 4: Profit movie tells us, and.
Speaker 3: It's quite literal.
Speaker 1: But what was the one who connected everything?
Speaker 4: Is that the same stuff that is light is your
Speaker 4: physical body.
Speaker 1: That's the same stuff. And to think that someone figured.
Speaker 4: That out And then you're like, well, how so smart
Speaker 4: guy and he's like, here's proof and I don't know how,
Speaker 4: but all the other smart people who understand math when yes,
Speaker 4: holy cow, he's right.
Speaker 1: So reading exactly reading that, Like first half of the biography,
Speaker 1: like the thing that blew me away is like he's
Speaker 1: not the best at math. Nobody's like this guy's the
Speaker 1: best in math. He's like good at math. He's not
Speaker 1: the best at like experimental science. What he's the best
Speaker 1: at is like having high thoughts and then like really
Speaker 1: believing in this. Yeah, and he also just read everything
Speaker 1: that was out there.
Speaker 4: But it's like the one coming in and going time
Speaker 4: is light and you go, what are you talking about, bastard?
Speaker 1: He Yeah, he was basically reading all the science and
Speaker 1: then was able to like pull these different elements out
Speaker 1: and construct his theory out of that. I do have
Speaker 1: a loose theory that like some people are just always high,
Speaker 1: like that's just how their brain chemistry works, and like
Speaker 1: he is one of those people. Like the thing about
Speaker 1: him being like a rumple genius who like doesn't have time,
Speaker 1: like would show up with like one shoe off and
Speaker 1: like a his hand is not wrong, Like he was
Speaker 1: that guy. He never had like he would have He
Speaker 1: would go on a trip and then have to like
Speaker 1: mail home and be like, could you send my suitcase
Speaker 1: with this stuff in it? So he's just a space person.
Speaker 1: He was a space person like constantly. He would read
Speaker 1: physics constantly and also like play the violin and like
Speaker 1: he just like really liked to vibe the music and
Speaker 1: think high thoughts. Like essentially one of.
Speaker 4: The only fun facts I know about him is that
Speaker 4: they did dissect his brain, because why wouldn't you. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and he had a super thick corpus colossum, which is
Speaker 4: the two between the two hemispheres. So it's actually like
Speaker 4: he was the Michael Phelps by which I mean genetically
Speaker 4: predisposed to just be done right of imaginatively thinking about math.
Speaker 1: For people who don't know Michael Phelps is like if
Speaker 1: you saw him in person, you would be like, who
Speaker 1: is this human caricature? His arms and upper body is
Speaker 1: like massive, and then his legs are like tiny. Uh
Speaker 1: but yeah, and you I mean, and they've.
Speaker 4: Done studies showing his body like wicks away lactic acid.
Speaker 4: You know, yeah, that's what he called an outlier, Like.
Speaker 1: Shah, yeah, yeah right, yeah, he shouldn't have revealed himself.
Speaker 1: There going to dissect him at the Pentagon at some point.
Speaker 1: Right now, it.
Speaker 4: Seems to have had some physical brain structure advantages.
Speaker 1: He was like, I want to be cremated immediately because
Speaker 1: I don't want people to worship at my bones and
Speaker 1: I don't want them to like do weird shit to
Speaker 1: my brain. And they were like, sorry, asshole. And his
Speaker 1: brain is in Philadelphia, Like there are pieces of his
Speaker 1: brain at the Morbid Museum in Philadelphia. But yeah, to
Speaker 1: your point. Also, like I think one of the things
Speaker 1: that was a disconnect for me coming in versus now,
Speaker 1: like having done some research about him, is that the
Speaker 1: image I have is old guy sticking his tongue out.
Speaker 1: He wrote like the four scientific papers that invented modern
Speaker 1: physics in a single year when he was I think
Speaker 1: twenty six years old. Like he was young, and he
Speaker 1: was a patent clerk, which I also want to get into.
Speaker 1: He basically did the thing that a lot of people
Speaker 1: do when they come out of college and are like,
Speaker 1: I want to do a job that I can do
Speaker 1: while high. The reason he had that patent clerk job
Speaker 1: was because he couldn't get a job out of school
Speaker 1: because he was like a lazy student who didn't show
Speaker 1: up to class. The reason I didn't show up to
Speaker 1: classes because I was hung over. The reason he didn't
Speaker 1: show up to classes because like he thought his teachers
Speaker 1: were like teaching the wrong thing and was just like
Speaker 1: devouring science of his own interest, which I think is
Speaker 1: a big part of you know, having this high job
Speaker 1: instead of like working in a lab under a major
Speaker 1: scientist who would like tell him what direction to go in.
Speaker 1: I think allowed him to just like pull all the
Speaker 1: stuff and like follow his brain to this conclusion that
Speaker 1: was fucking mind blowing. H let's take a quick break.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 4: You just unlocked my memory of Oh yeah, that's the
Speaker 4: other way people use him double click him as an
Speaker 4: icon in life that I've encountered. Now that I'm older,
Speaker 4: I don't as much anymore because it's more.
Speaker 3: Happened growing up.
Speaker 4: But I used to frequently encounter the example, really slacking
Speaker 4: off kid, see average or whatever.
Speaker 1: Well, Einstein to see average. So so that's my next one.
Speaker 1: That's my next thing that I knew. So I knew
Speaker 1: the picture, I knew the image, I knew equals MC squared,
Speaker 1: and I knew that Einstein was a slow childs right,
Speaker 1: that's oh he was. That was the I remember learning
Speaker 1: that in like eighth grade because I sucked in math,
Speaker 1: and that was.
Speaker 3: The way they would inspire you.
Speaker 1: I remember the room I was in like when I
Speaker 1: learned that, because I was like, oh, hell yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a chance for there have hope. Yeah.
Speaker 2: That was like when I learned like Tiger Woods is
Speaker 2: black and Asian, and I went to a golf course
Speaker 2: I'm like, well, then here we go.
Speaker 1: And no kids sport I'm good at. But yeah, So
Speaker 1: the thing that I think most people say is that
Speaker 1: he was a late talker. Teachers dismissed him as slow.
Speaker 1: One of the only contemporary accounts we have of him
Speaker 1: as a baby was from his grandparents, who talked about
Speaker 1: him as a well behaved child full of funny ideas,
Speaker 1: Like when he was two and a half years old,
Speaker 1: he was introduced to his little sister and he said, yes,
Speaker 1: but where are the wheels, which was like, which was
Speaker 1: a bit about like he thought he thought it was
Speaker 1: going to be a toy or something. They were like,
Speaker 1: and so he's like already doing misguided bits. Yeah, two
Speaker 1: and a.
Speaker 3: Half which very like old comedy.
Speaker 4: Early.
Speaker 1: I know, they said he was a late talker, but
Speaker 1: there's a contemporary account of him like making a joke,
Speaker 1: like an interesting a comic joke at two and a.
Speaker 2: Half years That's what I'm saying, Like, how do you
Speaker 2: scare like if he because I you know, there are
Speaker 2: people that that's like a sign of potential, like you know,
Speaker 2: you have some kind of genius or something of late talker, right, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and all that kind of thing. There is some
Speaker 1: recollections from his parents that they were concerned. So one
Speaker 1: of the anecdotes from him as a child is that
Speaker 1: he would say the sentence that he was about to
Speaker 1: say quietly to himself before he would say it out loud,
Speaker 1: So he was like kind of weird. But he only
Speaker 1: spoken full sentences, which is like this sign of like
Speaker 1: the people I've met who like only speak in full
Speaker 1: sentences are usually like I'm like, oh, you're like on
Speaker 1: a different level of just like yeah, just like really smart.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that also gave us the good Fella's character
Speaker 1: Jimmy two times, who always says got to get the papers.
Speaker 1: You know, that is based on Einstein. But yeah, there's
Speaker 1: just like all these stories where it's like I don't
Speaker 1: really buy that. Like he was like got the best
Speaker 1: grades in his class, like in elementary school through high school,
Speaker 1: then he went to college and basically was like I'm
Speaker 1: doing my own thing on this, And that seems like
Speaker 1: where this whole idea comes from other than and I
Speaker 1: think this is another important part of like why he's
Speaker 1: such a massive icon is he was one of the
Speaker 1: people who said that like people thought he was dumb.
Speaker 1: He was like doing the Drake started from the bottom.
Speaker 1: Now we're here a thing like which when you think
Speaker 1: about I keep my brain when I'm thinking about like
Speaker 1: the biggest icons goes to Einstein and Michael Jordan, and
Speaker 1: like if you remember, like Michael Jordan constantly talks about
Speaker 1: how he got cut from his high school basketball team.
Speaker 1: Like that's not really true, he got he just like
Speaker 1: didn't make varsity when he was like a sophomore or something.
Speaker 1: But I think there's an element of like self mythologizing,
Speaker 1: like I think he was.
Speaker 3: You tend to do that it works, Like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I think it's that if you're this
Speaker 1: level of icon, you have to have all of it.
Speaker 1: You have to have like the amazing contributions. You have
Speaker 1: to have like a look or like something that like
Speaker 1: people can like hang their brain on. And then I
Speaker 1: think you also have to have a somewhat sense of
Speaker 1: like building your own methoce and like how that Yeah,
Speaker 1: like telling your story.
Speaker 4: Because I think a lot of stories I learned from
Speaker 4: my time I cracked about people where flies in the
Speaker 4: face of what the story is, like gond to your mother, Teresa, Right,
Speaker 4: it's like they're also master savvy, master marketers of their
Speaker 4: own brand, and you're like, well.
Speaker 3: Should they be right?
Speaker 4: Is that everything was clicking. We're building an empire of
Speaker 4: people love here.
Speaker 1: I'm doing miracles over here, man. Yeah. And then there's
Speaker 1: also just like stuff that like what once an image
Speaker 1: is so powerful, like just everything else gets like written
Speaker 1: out of it. Essentially. Other question I have, and this
Speaker 1: is just like a mystery that I'm curious to get
Speaker 1: your theories on, is I think that movies are kind
Speaker 1: of the ultimate icon factories, or like they they're the
Speaker 1: things that create meaning. They they create the official version
Speaker 1: in people's share consciousness of like how a historical event
Speaker 1: went down, who a historical figure was. And it's weird
Speaker 1: to me that he hasn't had a major movie made
Speaker 1: about him. There's the movie IQ, which is another thing
Speaker 1: that's like in my brain of Einstein, it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: yeah he was. He co starred with Meg Ryan in
Speaker 1: that movie, which posits the theory that Einstein's the ultimate
Speaker 1: wingman is essentially like, is she the Niece's his niece? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what I thought. I remember she's like uncle Albert,
Speaker 1: And I'm like, you know, what fucked me up about
Speaker 1: that movieh So I've talked before about this theory that
Speaker 1: William Goldman has that there are some actors that we
Speaker 1: can't accept any time except the present. His example was
Speaker 1: Michael Douglas, Like Michael Douglass needs to be in the
Speaker 1: eighties and like horny, And then they tried to put
Speaker 1: him in a movie William Goldman wrote called Ghosts in
Speaker 1: the Darkness and it didn't do well, even though it
Speaker 1: tested really well. And his theory was, like, people just
Speaker 1: can't have him be like a lion hunter from the past.
Speaker 1: So I Q I had just assumed that it took
Speaker 1: place in the present and that like Einstein, was like
Speaker 1: this mystical figure, because like, I can't put Meg Ryan
Speaker 1: in any other era like she needs she needs to
Speaker 1: be in the nineties, like she she needs to be
Speaker 1: in the present tense. I can't like make sense of her.
Speaker 1: And even like watching the first bit of it, I
Speaker 1: was like, she doesn't really it doesn't really work as
Speaker 1: well for some reason.
Speaker 3: That was a classic past though.
Speaker 1: Yeahthing slick yeah, yeah, get in here, slick in his hair. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I guess Meg Ryan has what they call now, they
Speaker 2: call that iPhone face.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so the face of someone who's seen it, but
Speaker 1: she has the face of somebody who's, uh, I don't know,
Speaker 1: logged onto and here or something. I guess my my question,
Speaker 1: and it's not as weird. What Like the more I
Speaker 1: thought about it, the more like there are scenes from
Speaker 1: his life that make an incredible like it's like very cinematic.
Speaker 1: First of all, the theory of relativity if you have
Speaker 1: the right filmmaker could like make that kind of make
Speaker 1: sense and like mind blowing. He was living by a
Speaker 1: train track with a famous clock next to it as
Speaker 1: he realized that like time is like and then used
Speaker 1: that to like make sense of all the things. So
Speaker 1: like it's it's the thing from the movie where you're
Speaker 1: like pooling things from around you and then like illustrating
Speaker 1: the shit. Like he literally had the like Agent Kuian
Speaker 1: at the end of Usual Suspects thing where he was
Speaker 1: like shaking time and then like he was also like
Speaker 1: at the patent office like working on like synchronizing clocks
Speaker 1: because that was like a big thing that needed to happen.
Speaker 1: There's also a story brand the editor points out of
Speaker 1: him watching a window fall and like that got him
Speaker 1: interested in gravity. That one's probably apocryphal because he wasn't
Speaker 1: a psychopath. He wasn't like, oh, I just watched the
Speaker 1: guy fall off a roof, and now I'm curious about
Speaker 1: they don't think that one actually happened. But like he
Speaker 1: has all these things that are like cinematic ingredients. He
Speaker 1: is a good movie character, Like he is this a
Speaker 1: fuddle mess who like plays instruments and is like charming.
Speaker 1: And by the way, just because we haven't tended to
Speaker 1: picture a guy fucking doesn't mean he wasn't fucking. He
Speaker 1: couldn't make a character in the movie. Like, I think
Speaker 1: you're right that he's kind of like Yoda in our
Speaker 1: mind now, But I mean.
Speaker 3: Well, he's grandpapcorn.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, he's Grandpa. I think he's like wise. But yeah,
Speaker 1: as Superducer Victor points out, Yoda fucks Like in my
Speaker 1: mind Yoda is.
Speaker 4: We're very open to a flashback where the grandpapcoor character
Speaker 4: is young and sexy now and we see them.
Speaker 1: Fuck we do that, right any many characters? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: But my theory on why there hasn't been the big
Speaker 1: Einstein movie is like, did you guys see Air, the
Speaker 1: movie about the invention of the first that band playing? Right?
Speaker 1: Different thing but basically the way they treat Jordan is
Speaker 1: as if he is. They just don't show his face.
Speaker 1: It's almost like the Old Testament. Yeah, it's like the
Speaker 1: Old Testament like treats God, where like if you look
Speaker 1: at his face that it will like melt or something created.
Speaker 3: George Stein.
Speaker 1: Like, I feel like if you made a movie about Einstein,
Speaker 1: I think there's a certain level of being so iconic
Speaker 1: that if you make the movie, it just feels like cheapened.
Speaker 1: And then like to your point, like the way he's
Speaker 1: been used is like as this like all knowing wizard
Speaker 1: of everything smart. He's like Yoda mixed with Ironman. And
Speaker 1: if you made a movie where he's not like literally
Speaker 1: conjuring the nuclear particles of physics with his hands, like
Speaker 1: you're not going to like match what's in people's mind. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think it's also because so many people know just
Speaker 2: enough about the dumb shit to give them the completely
Speaker 2: wrong idea about me. Is that a movie would completely
Speaker 2: go against all of that. Like, for example, I have
Speaker 2: like the most superficial idea of Einstein. If he showed
Speaker 2: me a trailer and he was like this complex person,
Speaker 2: I'd be like, bro, I don't want to see this. Yeah,
Speaker 2: like this guy is just the shorthand for me for
Speaker 2: genius stuff. So I guess in that sense, but I
Speaker 2: guess maybe that's why I need to know that he
Speaker 2: was horny. And then I'm like, okay, well now maybe
Speaker 2: there's something. There's another reason.
Speaker 4: Also interesting that our relationship, since we're talking zeitgeisten icons
Speaker 4: to the because it feels to me like he's specifically
Speaker 4: smart or intelligent, and like D and D players will
Speaker 4: know what I mean when I say someone else owns
Speaker 4: like wisdom or like Abe Lincoln has honesty or whatever,
Speaker 4: but like he owns smart and right, even though as
Speaker 4: we're describing, it's more that he was high galaxy brains,
Speaker 4: but he owns my whole life. He's owned like smart
Speaker 4: and right because he's smart. And what's interesting is actually,
Speaker 4: since I was a kid, we've changed our overall relationship
Speaker 4: with smart. We know disdain smart people and things for
Speaker 4: many of us don't think smart is bullshit and fake, right, right, guys, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: interesting when your brand is thousands of years long, as
Speaker 4: his will surely be. I always think of going back
Speaker 4: to Beethoven and telling him, you know, like you don't
Speaker 4: have to be a what mass food is, and then
Speaker 4: that this fried chicken place is beaming his jingle he
Speaker 4: wrote into space to sell fried chicken. Like anything like
Speaker 4: that is so trippy to me.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think the misquotes are a good example,
Speaker 1: a good way of illustrating what you're talking about, because yeah,
Speaker 1: like I've heard him misquoted by science people, religious people,
Speaker 1: people who hate making the same mistakes twice. I guess,
Speaker 1: like basketball fans, people who hate education, smart people, atheist democrats, Republicans,
Speaker 1: Like I don't think there's anyone else like that. I
Speaker 1: feel like there's nobody else who is just like it
Speaker 1: used as an authority on like fucking everything, like across
Speaker 1: the board. Everyone's just like, yeah, but that's Einstein, And
Speaker 1: if he said that, then we're right on this one.
Speaker 1: Mark another one up for the people who hate making
Speaker 1: the same mistake twice.
Speaker 4: But I think there's people who like these are the
Speaker 4: kinds of people that mostly get when the quote is misattributed.
Speaker 3: It's usually in the form of an image.
Speaker 4: Macro right, is what we're thinking about, like the Facebook's
Speaker 4: curly cue text and a black and white image of
Speaker 4: the person. And I feel like I'm I see a
Speaker 4: lot of Churchill's still gets play in this.
Speaker 1: Churchilli gets some play.
Speaker 4: Yeah for sure, where it's like it must be right
Speaker 4: because they said it, I'm trying to link into Lincoln.
Speaker 1: Is like, well, if he said it Mark Twain also,
Speaker 1: I said yeah, yeah, Twain gets that. See. And Einstein
Speaker 1: was in many ways cosplaying as Mark Twain, so he
Speaker 1: knew he was intentionally making himself iconic.
Speaker 4: Car but only on the liberal side. It's like if
Speaker 4: George Carlin said it, you're a fucking square if you
Speaker 4: don't vibe with that magic.
Speaker 1: And the Republicans just take Carling quotes and be like Einstein,
Speaker 1: Bill said that offhandedly to me or something. You never
Speaker 1: see a man taking a ship running at full speed Einstein, Einstein,
Speaker 1: I just some better quotes than the ones that are
Speaker 1: out there. Of God doesn't play dice. And the definition
Speaker 1: of stupidity is making the same mistake twice. When he
Speaker 1: was first struck by scientific wonder, so this is him
Speaker 1: seeing a needle respond to the invisible magnetic force in
Speaker 1: a compass, and it occurred to him that something deeply
Speaker 1: hidden had to be behind things. That's something that occurred
Speaker 1: when he was four five.
Speaker 4: Surely figured that one out, but he doesn't really exist
Speaker 4: stand in for he is going to the list for
Speaker 4: can't be wrong.
Speaker 3: Yeah, luck.
Speaker 1: And then like as he was taking the patent clerk job,
Speaker 1: he had like something dismissive to say. Somebody was like,
Speaker 1: this job's really boring, you don't want it, and he
Speaker 1: was like, some people think everything's boring. I'm never bored
Speaker 1: and like it just like his fascination with everything, It's
Speaker 1: not as pithy, but it like cuts to what I
Speaker 1: think is the takeaway from him is that he was
Speaker 1: just like constantly engaged, constantly like fascinated with everything around him,
Speaker 1: constantly like reading, learning. So Walter Isaacson like has this
Speaker 1: like Genius trilogy or whatever where he's like written about
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, and I think he has
Speaker 1: like a very American author like individualism point of view.
Speaker 1: But even like in his biography, like Einstein's constantly like
Speaker 1: making groups of friends around him who are like the
Speaker 1: people who are like minded and are curious about the
Speaker 1: same stuff, and so like he is like building this
Speaker 1: world of community, which I think gets written out of
Speaker 1: a lot of like how we think about him. Walter
Speaker 1: Isacson keeps being like he's this lone wolf, but like
Speaker 1: constantly when he's like coming to these conclusions, he's just
Speaker 1: like working with his smartest, craziest friends and like talking
Speaker 1: with them and like bouncing ideas off of them, and
Speaker 1: like talking into the early hours of the night and shit.
Speaker 4: Oh well, so the Newton quote, if I've seen farts
Speaker 4: because I stood on the shoulders of giants, I feel
Speaker 4: like it's going to come on. That's another thing, is
Speaker 4: like you can't just be good at marketing. If you're
Speaker 4: an icon, you definitely have to be comfortable with absorbing
Speaker 4: the credit of whole teams of people into your nstorical legacy,
Speaker 4: because no one actually does this stuff without bouncing it
Speaker 4: off their friends and stuff. But sorry, I just got
Speaker 4: to tell this one because maybe you can say whether
Speaker 4: it's true or false. But there's a phrase, if you're bored,
Speaker 4: then you're boring, you unlocked. Like a core childhood memory
Speaker 4: of the anecdote my dad would tell us about Einstein
Speaker 4: was that he thought of the theory of cosmological constant
Speaker 4: while looking at the clock on the wall in school,
Speaker 4: wishing that it would go faster so the day would
Speaker 4: end being bored, and then slowly musing on the idea
Speaker 4: that it's actually later than it looks like, because it
Speaker 4: takes some amount of time for the photons to reach
Speaker 4: your eye turn into a brain signal, and for me
Speaker 4: to know what time it is. And then he extrapolated
Speaker 4: that out to the general theory of relativity, probably totally
Speaker 4: like copping down the cherry tree just to store whole shit. No,
Speaker 4: he's so illustrational to me, just the illustration that that
Speaker 4: story gives of, Like the universe is it's a miracle,
Speaker 4: there's even anything versus nothing. There's no real reason to
Speaker 4: be bored per se.
Speaker 1: Right, he has said many things that was like, basically
Speaker 1: I was just constantly like I had the same questions
Speaker 1: as everyone else. I just stuck with them longer and
Speaker 1: like a lot of the questions that he ended up
Speaker 1: solving with his like Great series were things that first
Speaker 1: occurred to him when he was like twelve, Like he
Speaker 1: had this vision of himself riding a beam of light.
Speaker 1: I was like, what would the rest of the world
Speaker 1: looked like to me as I'm riding a beam of light?
Speaker 1: And he answered that a decade later after like getting
Speaker 1: his like while getting his doctorate, by the way. His
Speaker 1: PhD had nothing to do with his like big discoveries.
Speaker 1: It was just like a thing. He was like, Fuck,
Speaker 1: I need to get a PhD so people will start
Speaker 1: calling me doctor. It'll be good for the brand essentially. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so he got a PhD. His doctoral thesis was
Speaker 1: on viscosity and it ended up being something that like
Speaker 1: people used to this day, like engineers have used throughout
Speaker 1: the twentieth century. And it was just like kind of
Speaker 1: a thing. He tossed off, throw away PhD. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: I love that the whole slime industry is built on
Speaker 4: this paper.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I think they said dairy. It's like
Speaker 1: a lot of doors.
Speaker 4: You know who gets it, Ben Franklin and Ben Franklin,
Speaker 4: Edison where you go and he invented this and that
Speaker 4: and that and this and that and this and this
Speaker 4: and that, And you're.
Speaker 1: Like, yeah, are you sure?
Speaker 3: I don't.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back,
Speaker 1: and we're back. So I do want to get to
Speaker 1: the question that we want to ask of all of
Speaker 1: our icons. In a hypothetical universe where this person was
Speaker 1: existing in the modern news cycle, would he have been
Speaker 1: on the Epstein flight logs. Would would he have express.
Speaker 4: Taking credit for many who will remain faceless and absorbing
Speaker 4: their story into his own.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I will say, like a lot of the
Speaker 1: things people you know that if you dig a little
Speaker 1: bit deeper, people are like Einstein was kind of a freak.
Speaker 1: He married his cousin.
Speaker 3: Did you see that tongue out?
Speaker 1: That's not a political established sending a signal? Right there.
Speaker 3: We know he wasn't a groomer.
Speaker 1: We know that. So he married the only woman in
Speaker 1: his college physics program. They had two children, and then
Speaker 1: he divorced her and married his cousin.
Speaker 3: Was that after he became like a rock star.
Speaker 1: Yes, it was like, as he was becoming a rock star,
Speaker 1: he married his cousin.
Speaker 4: The archis of course classic that you get rich and
Speaker 4: famous and you trade up your spouse.
Speaker 3: But I love it, like just waiting for the clout
Speaker 3: to marry that hotcomer.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Also she should have known. She's like, I was the
Speaker 2: only woman in the class, and yeah, find you, let's go.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you'll keep my seat warm.
Speaker 1: This is a weird I looked up how common is
Speaker 1: it to marry your cousin? And you're googling that book? No,
Speaker 1: google a list. I google that every day just to
Speaker 1: see what the latest numbers are. To be fair, I've
Speaker 1: met your cousin. He's really yeah, he's the best. Uh.
Speaker 1: Slightly over ten percent of all marriages worldwide are estimated
Speaker 1: to be between second cousins or closer or closer damn
Speaker 1: second or closer? Was his second or second his was first?
Speaker 1: In like multiple places.
Speaker 3: It's like.
Speaker 1: It was a It was a real tangled web. The
Speaker 1: overall rate appears to be declining, says Wikipedia on the
Speaker 1: Wikipedia page cousin marriage.
Speaker 4: The guy had compiled that day, which is.
Speaker 1: Right, But I also think maybe not that uncommon at
Speaker 1: the time. I guess, because you know, it's ten percent
Speaker 1: now and it's declining.
Speaker 4: I'm trying to factor in people who get married without
Speaker 4: realizing that they're distant cousins. But I guess that wouldn't
Speaker 4: make it into this data set because now, no, right,
Speaker 4: so these are the people who are like, yes, sir.
Speaker 1: Yeah, goddamn right, I did Oh gross, second cousins. No,
Speaker 1: my first cousins.
Speaker 3: Provable cousin marriages.
Speaker 1: Wait, but did they have kids? They didn't have kids? Right,
Speaker 1: they didn't have kids. She already had daughters but there
Speaker 1: is like some question as to whether he as he
Speaker 1: was about to marry his cousin, started wondering if he
Speaker 1: should marry his cousin's daughter. But like, there's there's a
Speaker 1: smart have I mentioned that, very incredibly smart. He had
Speaker 1: affairs constantly, So this is this is one of those
Speaker 1: things where you're like, oh, you don't say uh. He
Speaker 1: had this theory on monogamy that it wasn't a natural
Speaker 1: state of man or a woman, and didn't feel particularly
Speaker 1: guilty about sleeping around. Also didn't seem to mind when
Speaker 1: like his wife had a relationship with somebody else. Was
Speaker 1: kind of just a freak like that, you know. So
Speaker 1: after general relativity was proven in nineteen nineteen, Einstein became
Speaker 1: an international celebrity. Women through themselves at him. One scientist
Speaker 1: friend said that I Einstein attracted women like a magnet
Speaker 1: attracts filings.
Speaker 3: Or like filings attracted.
Speaker 1: Elegant women would show up to show up at Einstein's
Speaker 1: house at night, whisk him away, and return him in
Speaker 1: the morning. Einstein didn't complain. So my theory is, and
Speaker 1: now I'm not going to say this with full confidence,
Speaker 1: I don't think Einstein would be on the flight logs
Speaker 1: for the same reason that like Mick Jagger wasn't you know,
Speaker 1: like they didn't necessarily need to be constantly having He
Speaker 1: didn't need help, You didn't need the help. Yeah, it's more.
Speaker 4: Like a Ben Franklin, where by all accounts you're like, yeah,
Speaker 4: he fucked around and everyone knew he fucked around, and
Speaker 4: he was like, I'm rich and famous, I'm going to
Speaker 4: fuck around. If you can't get with that Franklin baby,
Speaker 4: something a little better than being on the island. I
Speaker 4: don't think he'd be on the locks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think he's also I think also based on
Speaker 2: how Epstein was around scientist, he'd probably be like, Dude,
Speaker 2: I can't be around this fucking guy.
Speaker 1: He keeps telling me about fucking science. Yeah, any other
Speaker 1: things that you guys know about him before I get
Speaker 1: to like some of the stuff that gets written out
Speaker 1: of his story that I don't think has like made
Speaker 1: it into his iconography that I think is pretty cool
Speaker 1: and should be in the movie if we ever get it.
Speaker 1: No interrupting is my natural state.
Speaker 3: Ready to go?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I fucking rang the rag dry up top when
Speaker 1: I say yeah, all right, First of all, just a
Speaker 1: weird like nature nurture thing. He was born in Ulm, Germany,
Speaker 1: and in a very clever bit of German wordplay, Ulm's
Speaker 1: motto is omentuska, which it just means Olm people are mathematicians,
Speaker 1: so which you would be like, that's crazy, like is
Speaker 1: there something in the water. But he moved out of
Speaker 1: there pretty quickly, so his dad was like a mathematician.
Speaker 1: And so I don't know, on the on the shoulders
Speaker 1: of matimati kai maybe like the other thing, just the
Speaker 1: high job I think is incredibly important, like the fact
Speaker 1: that he was able to just work and like put
Speaker 1: all this shit together, like as he was like applying
Speaker 1: to all these academic positions where if he had gotten those,
Speaker 1: they would have had him working on whatever their priorities were.
Speaker 1: So I think just like this young genius who you know,
Speaker 1: was constantly smoking and just not able to keep track
Speaker 1: of anything, would make a pretty good movie. And then
Speaker 1: the other thing is that he was a democratic socialist
Speaker 1: his whole life, which I think just gets written out
Speaker 1: of it because you know, we don't like those in
Speaker 1: the mainstream and so like that's not a thing that
Speaker 1: people really think about. But he was first of all
Speaker 1: faced a bunch of anti Semitism. And that's like continued
Speaker 1: where people refer to like relativism as like a Jewish
Speaker 1: perspective and like a hallmark of like the Semitic wave.
Speaker 3: He squared, Yeah, what.
Speaker 1: The I hear that?
Speaker 2: The craziest shit to be, Like, I don't know, man, energy,
Speaker 2: Really you.
Speaker 1: Might say it like he might have had to get
Speaker 1: that high job because of anti Semitism. So I'm just saying, guys,
Speaker 1: don't knock it. No, I'm not saying that. But after
Speaker 1: his experience as a Jew and fascist Germany, he refused
Speaker 1: to stay silent when he saw injustices perpetrated In the
Speaker 1: United States, the treatment of black Americans was particularly appalling
Speaker 1: to Einstein. In nineteen thirty one, he published editorials criticizing
Speaker 1: the notorious Scottsboro Boys trial. In forty six, he told
Speaker 1: the graduating class of Lincoln University, which is the oldest
Speaker 1: historically black college in the US, the separation of colored
Speaker 1: people from white people in the United States is not
Speaker 1: a disease of colored people. It's a disease of white people.
Speaker 1: I don't tend to be quiet about it. Did he
Speaker 1: actually say that? Though? That is from a speech after
Speaker 1: he was famous, so Mark Twain, Yeah, that's right. And
Speaker 1: then Princeton was de facto segregated as a town, and
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty seven, Marion Anderson played a concert in
Speaker 1: Princeton was denied a room at the local inn, and
Speaker 1: he invited her to stay at his home and they
Speaker 1: became close friends. And then when W. E. B. Du
Speaker 1: Boys was put on trial as a foreign agent during
Speaker 1: the Red Scare of the fifties, he volunteered to testify
Speaker 1: as a character witness. And when the judge was like,
Speaker 1: fucking Einstein's going to testify, he dismissed the case. Oh
Speaker 1: that's amazing.
Speaker 4: Oh shit, fucking was already working for you, because that
Speaker 4: he knew. Because again, like one of the one I
Speaker 4: always think about is Bobby Fisher, who, if people don't know,
Speaker 4: was was the best chess player ever. And think of that,
Speaker 4: like if that's all you are, that's your that's your
Speaker 4: eye kinic thing. And there's this if you see him
Speaker 4: in documentaries, he's so narcissistic and so into himself, his
Speaker 4: own myth, and it's it's like, let's play badminton, mother,
Speaker 4: Like all you do is such a niche thing. You
Speaker 4: gotta calm him down, or that's why everyone needs humility, right,
Speaker 4: that's why there's no such thing as a trillionaire that
Speaker 4: deserves to be because life is short and there's no
Speaker 4: way you can master everything and accomplish everything. People who
Speaker 4: say they did are lying. So it's just like very
Speaker 4: funny to me that a judge would be like Einstein objected.
Speaker 3: I can't say you're wrong, Einstein.
Speaker 5: But it's just am I gonna say, it's so funny
Speaker 5: that they got Lostein?
Speaker 1: But my is so.
Speaker 2: That the myth is so large that in illegal proceeding,
Speaker 2: the judge is like, dude, exactly, the fact that you're
Speaker 2: even gonna pull up with Albert Einstein? That's yeah, man, maybe, yeah, fine,
Speaker 2: you're not a communist.
Speaker 3: Did you even see the car accident? Einstein?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 3: But accidents involved physics. That's true. That's fair, sir. I'm sorry, sir, sorry.
Speaker 1: Are you calling me a liar? No? God, Jesus Christ, dude,
Speaker 1: no never, never, never, You're right?
Speaker 3: Should I called Jesus Christ?
Speaker 1: You're a little girl. I actually have his number, just
Speaker 1: a complete idiot's idea of by.
Speaker 3: Know each other.
Speaker 1: He probably knows no him, he call Jesus on me
Speaker 1: as for how amara. So that's you know, how he
Speaker 1: felt about America, and like as for how America felt
Speaker 1: about him. So he and Elsa, his cousin wife, left
Speaker 1: Germany in nineteen thirty two came to America. Hitler was
Speaker 1: named chancellor in nineteen thirty three, so he got out
Speaker 1: just in time. There was opposition against welcoming Einstein as
Speaker 1: an American citizen. The American Legion and a group called
Speaker 1: the Women Patriot Corporation lodge complaints with the State Department,
Speaker 1: accusing Einstein of being a Communist. Not even Stalin himself
Speaker 1: was affiliated with so many communist groups, they said, and
Speaker 1: American religious leaders denounced his theories as atheistic and immoral.
Speaker 1: And then the FBI, who, as we know, always on
Speaker 1: the right side of things, the FBI immediately started keeping
Speaker 1: a file on Einstein and his subversive activities. When he
Speaker 1: died in nineteen fifty five, his FBI file was one thousand,
Speaker 1: four hundred and twenty seven pages long, and just what
Speaker 1: just a list of all these like women he was
Speaker 1: banging with something probably probably a lot of compromant.
Speaker 4: Hey, I think I figured out that gravity is, you know,
Speaker 4: emergent from the actual curvature space time. You can think
Speaker 4: of it as almost like a blanket with weighted balls
Speaker 4: on it. I'm watching you, Einstein.
Speaker 5: Sound communists about to knock that shit off signed guys
Speaker 5: to this guy.
Speaker 1: Watch knock that shit off, but which they investigated claims,
Speaker 1: including that he was a Russian spy when he lived
Speaker 1: in Berlin, that he was organizing a communist takeover of Hollywood.
Speaker 1: They were so worried about that one. He was working
Speaker 1: on a death ray, like truly like six year old shit.
Speaker 1: But I do think like the FBI really like, as
Speaker 1: we're working through different icons, like having a long FBI
Speaker 1: rap sheet is like kind of that that is a
Speaker 1: helpful right ingredient. He was Also he was a pacifist.
Speaker 1: He was really like, you know, I think the movie
Speaker 1: Oppenheimer does cover this part, so I'm not going to
Speaker 1: go too far into it. But he wrote a letter
Speaker 1: to a FDR being like, we think the Germans might
Speaker 1: be looking into using you know, this approach to an
Speaker 1: atomic weapon. So like they used that letter to justify
Speaker 1: the Manhattan Project and he felt really, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: fucked up about that for the rest of his life
Speaker 1: and called it the biggest mistake of his life and
Speaker 1: then like was really heavily involved and like anti nuclear
Speaker 1: proliferation throughout the course of his life. And then I
Speaker 1: will just say the image we associate him with is
Speaker 1: old Einstein. All the great theories came out from twenty
Speaker 1: six to like mid thirties, essentially, like I think a
Speaker 1: thing that you see with people who gained that much
Speaker 1: fame and attention, they're given power to, like, as we've seen,
Speaker 1: like be smart about everything, and like for the last
Speaker 1: part of his scientific career he was like kind of
Speaker 1: wrong about a lot of stuff. Like his early theories
Speaker 1: were incredible, but he was like kind of wrong about
Speaker 1: quantum stuff. But like it was that was stuff that
Speaker 1: like kind of came later. So I just like when.
Speaker 4: Seby lose him, you have your career and then you
Speaker 4: slowly fall out of and other people have to pick
Speaker 4: a the torch.
Speaker 3: He's just like anyone else in Marrigan.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's like ja rule. As you pointed out early on, Michael,
Speaker 1: like the thing that drove his theory was like kind
Speaker 1: of pooling all these things and being like a unified
Speaker 1: theory of the universe. And then along comes quantum mechanics
Speaker 1: and is like, actually this like behaves completely differently, and
Speaker 1: he was like, I don't know in my experience.
Speaker 4: Well that you don't know, And of course is like,
Speaker 4: well the professor from Futurama as a big one point,
Speaker 4: but it is true, is like, it's highly likely that
Speaker 4: we're not shaped right to fully comprehend everything about the
Speaker 4: universe because we wouldn't need to be to survive within
Speaker 4: its womb. Uh So it might literally be like certain things.
Speaker 4: It might be true that you can imagine things that
Speaker 4: can't exist. You can imagine time travel but it's not possible.
Speaker 4: Or you could imagine knowing everything, but that's not really
Speaker 4: a valid question.
Speaker 1: In a way that we'll never even be able to comprehend.
Speaker 3: Why what do you mean?
Speaker 4: It's not a bad question, it doesn't matter. It's all
Speaker 4: above your pay grade. Like I think the professor says
Speaker 4: something like science never ends. Yeah, whether that's good or bad,
Speaker 4: we're still very very far from well that's that what we're.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, yeah, yeah, closed. I will say he died.
Speaker 1: He died from a birthday order on April eighteenth, nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty five, at seventy six. And I'm just saying, if
Speaker 1: he was so smart about science, heart science.
Speaker 2: That's how you know he wouldn't be in the Epstein
Speaker 2: files because he would have lived a lot longer. Probably true,
Speaker 2: way too.
Speaker 1: Died way too young. Einstein was stabbed in the back
Speaker 1: to death. It was all a suicide that pierced with
Speaker 1: a dagger. On the levels of relative iconography, I'll say
Speaker 1: I think he's like near the top of the list. Tear, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think he's the I think he's really like I'll
Speaker 1: put it this way, Michael Jordan is the most iconic
Speaker 1: person of I think my lifetime as far as the
Speaker 1: like us shared consciousness goes. And there's an actor named
Speaker 1: Michael B. Jordan. He just added an initial and that
Speaker 1: was another.
Speaker 3: We were like, we'll take yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Albert Brooks had to change his whole lass name. His
Speaker 1: name was Albert Einstein. He changed it to Brooks because
Speaker 1: that's how powerful Albert Einstein is. Is that like you
Speaker 1: couldn't even couldn't be like Albert D. Einstein. People be like,
Speaker 1: what the fuck up? Yeah, piece of shit? Thank you
Speaker 1: guys for joining us. Oh yes, Michael sway, yeah, is
Speaker 1: there where can people find you? Follow you? All that
Speaker 1: good stuff?
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, okay, I wasn't sure if we were
Speaker 4: out out or I was plugging. So since I get
Speaker 4: a chance to plug, you catch me at an odd time. No,
Speaker 4: I don't work at cracked anymore. They laid me off again,
Speaker 4: and I was working for Microsoft Xbox writing much of
Speaker 4: their material that came to a conclusion as well. So
Speaker 4: I am quite happily full time, devoted to just my
Speaker 4: podcast network and raising my baby son and terrified about income.
Speaker 4: So if you want to go pay my podcast network,
Speaker 4: they delverate small Beans and we just patreon dot com
Speaker 4: slash small means you can find all the free stuff
Speaker 4: by just searching small Beans wherever you get podcasts. But
Speaker 4: we just launched our brand new Battlestar Galactica watch along series.
Speaker 4: That's me and Cody Johnson of Some More News watching
Speaker 4: every episode of Battlestar Galaxica in order. And I am
Speaker 4: the guy who is a huge treky but has never
Speaker 4: seen Battlestar od. He's the guy who's seen it one
Speaker 4: hundred times. It's his favorite show. And I don't know
Speaker 4: who's the Cylon, and I'm guessing in real time and
Speaker 4: all that kinds of stuff. It's really fun but we
Speaker 4: do tons of stuff, mostly deep readings of film, television,
Speaker 4: and video games.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. Yeah, it's a great it's a
Speaker 1: great network. Everybody should go.
Speaker 4: So sorry, sorry, because you guys got a great audience
Speaker 4: and people always roll through.
Speaker 1: So I did want to say.
Speaker 4: My very last video on Cracks that came out a
Speaker 4: couple months ago was a two hour, feature length, fully
Speaker 4: scripted crack style essay bit on the entire history of
Speaker 4: Groundskeeper Willie that involved me ingesting and cutting apart and
Speaker 4: reassembling all thirty two seasons of The Simpsons.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, it's one of the its.
Speaker 4: It's like a movie I made real and I already
Speaker 4: knew I was getting fired. I just did it for
Speaker 4: the fans to have something cool to go out on.
Speaker 4: So go check out my exhaustive two hour video about groundskeeper.
Speaker 1: Really, and I think we can all safely say fuck
Speaker 1: cracked again. Were glad to say that again? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it won't impact me financially. Well, that sounds amazing and
Speaker 1: everybody should go subscribe to small Beans, great network, so
Speaker 1: much funny content coming out over that.
Speaker 3: Whoever started it should be run out of town on
Speaker 3: a rail.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, ashole all right, that was fun. That was fun,
Speaker 1: you guys, Here is the stuff some things I missed.
Speaker 1: This is no, no, no, no, notebook don't that was perfect.
Speaker 1: We should just clip that and use that over and
Speaker 1: over again, maybe add some sound effects. We don't have
Speaker 1: sound drops just yet. We're remarkably ill prepared for this
Speaker 1: new version of this show. We don't even have a
Speaker 1: dang title. All right, here's some stuff I found interesting
Speaker 1: that I couldn't remember to bring up while talking to
Speaker 1: Michael and Miles. The definition of insanity line. We talked
Speaker 1: about that a lot, But the origin I think history
Speaker 1: dot Com I found the origin. So the line the
Speaker 1: definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and
Speaker 1: over again and expecting different results has also been wrongly
Speaker 1: attributed to Benjamin Franklin. So I think we talked about
Speaker 1: how there is just like a group of smart guy
Speaker 1: icons that we're just like, yeah, say he said it.
Speaker 1: But the ultimate quotable Einstein, an authoritative compilation of his
Speaker 1: most memorable utterances, identified the quote as a misattribution and
Speaker 1: mentioned its use in the nineteen eighty three novel Sudden
Speaker 1: Death by Rita may Brown. This is a sort of
Speaker 1: Roman novel about a professional tennis player, and for some
Speaker 1: reason they wanted to say Einstein said that thing. Also
Speaker 1: worth noting a paperback from the eighties. I think it
Speaker 1: was like a spy novel gave us the historic myth
Speaker 1: that ick bienign Berliner means I'm a donut. Those paperbacks
Speaker 1: were just making shit up in the eighties and we
Speaker 1: were gobbling it down. Just talking about Einstein's servant looks
Speaker 1: the sloppy genius vibe. Something I've noticed. My son plays
Speaker 1: a lot of chess, and like a lot of the
Speaker 1: big chess players have this like really messy chess hair,
Speaker 1: not chess hair, messy hair that is called chess hair.
Speaker 1: That I have to think if Einstein just had like
Speaker 1: a neatly cropped fade or like a butt cut, that
Speaker 1: that's what they'd be rocking Einstein, messy bitch. I don't
Speaker 1: have all the quotes, but all these scientists is one
Speaker 1: thing you get from the biography about him is like
Speaker 1: all these scientists were just constantly writing letters back and
Speaker 1: forth and just ethering each other all the time, and
Speaker 1: he was known to do that in a very friendly way.
Speaker 1: One o the things so instead of the he was
Speaker 1: a slow witted child anecdote that doesn't seem to be
Speaker 1: particularly true. One cool thing that I think we could
Speaker 1: take from his early life is that he was a
Speaker 1: huge sci fi reader. He devoured popular science writing of
Speaker 1: the late nineteenth century, so you know, nerd alert, but
Speaker 1: also just so much science fiction, which I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think that's a cool thing to tell kids who
Speaker 1: want to think I'm a little like Einstein in many ways.
Speaker 1: I think the image of him writing a Beam of Light.
Speaker 1: He said that he was at least partially inspired by
Speaker 1: science fiction writing because they knew that light had a
Speaker 1: speed and wrote some interesting thought experiments and stories about that,
Speaker 1: which also the importance of sci fi in leading to
Speaker 1: scientific discovery and like shaping scientific imagination and creative thinking.
Speaker 1: A little anecdote related to that, China believed so much
Speaker 1: in that idea that like that there was a point
Speaker 1: where they were like, we're not making as much scientific
Speaker 1: progress in our labs as we would like. And due
Speaker 1: to finding out that like a lot of these scientific
Speaker 1: geniuses were huge sci fi readers, they created a prize
Speaker 1: for like basically an X prize, but ours was for
Speaker 1: just like spaceflight. Theirs was for like trying to get
Speaker 1: sci fi writing going that famous book The Three Body
Speaker 1: Problem as a result of that effort. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: have to think anecdotes like Einstein was a sci fi nerd,
Speaker 1: probably helped that happen. And then speaking of China, I
Speaker 1: should say that and I learned this kind of after
Speaker 1: we started recording. Not uniformly great on the racism stuff.
Speaker 1: He was, you know, vocally against anti black in America,
Speaker 1: but in Hong Kong, Einstein wrote the following, even those
Speaker 1: reduced to working like horses never give the impression of
Speaker 1: conscious suffering. A peculiar herd like nation, often more like
Speaker 1: automatons than people. And then he further opined on the
Speaker 1: character of the people he saw in China. No Einstein
Speaker 1: stop opining. He said that people were industrious, filthy, and obtuse,
Speaker 1: and expressed disdain for the way the Chinese don't sit
Speaker 1: on benches, blah blah blah, just like a bunch of stupid,
Speaker 1: wrongheaded shit, which I think gets to the point we
Speaker 1: were talking about about sort of expertise drift where you're
Speaker 1: like told you're smart and write about everything, and then
Speaker 1: you start popping off about things like the essential character
Speaker 1: of some people. You saw out the window of a
Speaker 1: tour bus. We see it with actors who like look
Speaker 1: cool in movies and are like, I should be the
Speaker 1: lead singer of a band. And then lastly, a question
Speaker 1: that we didn't really get to, but I had this
Speaker 1: in my mind as I was heading into the episode,
Speaker 1: is like, why haven't there been more Einstein's? Like why
Speaker 1: where have all the Einstein's gone out? And like one
Speaker 1: theory is that I probably believe more than others is
Speaker 1: just like he is that dude, he like, you know,
Speaker 1: these geniuses happen once every hundred years, Galileo Newton, Einstein.
Speaker 1: And then partly I think he also had the trappings
Speaker 1: of an icon and was like willing to do the
Speaker 1: light self mythologizing that I talked about in the episode
Speaker 1: in the conversation. But then also if there is a reason,
Speaker 1: like if there is something different about our world that
Speaker 1: makes it not friendly to finding the Einsteins of our generation.
Speaker 1: I also am repeatedly struck, just in covering our zeitgeist,
Speaker 1: that it's pretty clear that we have less and less
Speaker 1: of a meritocracy than we have in the past, you know,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't perfect in Einstein's time. Einstein was pushed
Speaker 1: back by anti Semitism, failed to get hired, but you know,
Speaker 1: at the same time was able to not starve to
Speaker 1: death when he was failing to get the jobs that
Speaker 1: he wanted, and ultimately was able to make these amazing
Speaker 1: discoveries in spite of and because of those failures. But today,
Speaker 1: I think a lot of that creative genius and energy
Speaker 1: like gets subsumed by billionaires or brands that are trying
Speaker 1: to like take that spark and like monetize that and
Speaker 1: like take it for themselves. The thought occurred to me that,
Speaker 1: you know, one of the reasons that I think thinking
Speaker 1: about icons is interesting is that we are currently living
Speaker 1: in a world that is being misled by some very
Speaker 1: powerful icons of our time, and oftentimes they are you know,
Speaker 1: let's talk about Elon Musk. Like I think if you
Speaker 1: were like, who's our modern day Einstein, Like, up until
Speaker 1: a couple years ago, a lot of people would say
Speaker 1: Elon Musk, And I feel like, in our world, like
Speaker 1: the fact that he was born to parents who like
Speaker 1: owned ruby minds and like used his intellect to become
Speaker 1: the richest person in the world are things to take
Speaker 1: into account of. Like I think that there is a
Speaker 1: built in advantage to being extremely wealthy today and built
Speaker 1: in kind of disadvantage to not being extremely wealthy today
Speaker 1: that probably are not making us the most efficient Einstein
Speaker 1: finding machines. So I think the system isn't set up
Speaker 1: that well to find the next Einstein. I also think
Speaker 1: he might just be a singular genius. There might not
Speaker 1: be other Einstein's to find. All right, those are some
Speaker 1: of the things I wanted to hit at the end here.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed this episode. We should be making
Speaker 1: more of them, and we will talk to you probably
Speaker 1: this afternoon whatever the next episode of the Daily Zeicheist is.
Speaker 1: Until then, Bye bye,