Icon Deep Dive #1: Albert Einstein

Hello, The Internet!™, and welcome to this spinoff episode of The Daily Zeitgeist we’re calling The Iconograph: a show about icons.

In our inaugural episode, Miles and Jack are joined by writer/comedian/podcaster Michael Swaim to talk about the Stein...

Burt Einstein. 

We’re starting with a big one... Genius, visionary, silly billy, rogue, sex maniac?

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Oh hey, guys, welcome to this spinoff episode of The
Daily Zeitgeist. We're calling tentatively the Iconograph to show about icons.
My name is Jack O'Brien. I co founded the website
crack dot com, and for the past seven years I've
co hosted a daily show with the comedian Miles Gray
about the Zeitgeist. The News Ghost Spirit of the Times.

(00:22):
We cover what's happening in our shared consciousness through the
news and pop culture of today, and this spinoff version
will cover the zeitgeist through the people and characters who
don't make the news every day, but they exist in
our movies and on our bumper stickers and T shirts

(00:43):
and as reference points in our conversations. But yeah, one
of my criteria for whether someone deserves a TDZ icon
episode is whether you could dresses them for Halloween and
people would get it. One of the recurring questions I
want to ask in these episodes is if this icon
existed today in our reality, how likely would they be

(01:04):
to be on the Epstein flight logs, that sort of thing.
And in this episode we're talking about the stein Bert Einstein.
We're starting with a big one, genius, visionary, silly billy
rogue sex maniac. Next week, I think we have Erkele
That should give you a sense of the scope of
our inquiry here. But yeah, don't be fooled by the

(01:25):
subject matter of our first episode. It's a very stupid show. Still.
The format is simple. Each episode a different icon, Miles,
a guest, and me talking geist through the lens of
that icon. We will start with the stuff that is
part of the iconic image we all have of Einstein.
The picture of him sticking out his tongue, Where'd that
come from? Why was he doing that? He equals mc squared?

(01:48):
What that mean? The rumpled wild hair look, the myth
that he was a slow child, the quotes and misquotes
and made up quotes. And then we'll get into some
really interesting stuff from his life that didn't make it
into the myth that got rejected by the brand management
team that is all of us, because it didn't match

(02:10):
the image we wanted for Einstein. But we're hiring a
researcher to help with each one of these episodes. This
one was researched by Dave Ruse. Thank you, Dave, And yeah,
I'll be back at the end to tell you some
stuff I missed from my notes in my No No
No notebook dump. But here I am talking to Miles
and Michael Swain about Albert Einstein and plenty of other stuff.

(02:35):
Hope you enjoy. I don't know if you know what
we're doing today, Victor, but we're talking about a little
guy by the name of Albert Einstein. Ever heard of them? Yeah,
Walter math Owl's episode three. It just turns out. I'm
really into that movie Episode four, Meg Ryan, episode five,

(02:56):
Tim Robbin.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
Every time I think of Walter math Out, the image
that pops into my head for some reason is him
and Dennis the Menace with the chick lit Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:04):
Yeah, I don't know. Well yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
Fucks up his dentures and brilliant idea to replace them
with chick lit gum.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
That's his proactive idea.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
Yeah, because he sucks up his dentures. Mister Wilson import
or whatever. Oh yeah, mister Wilson has always taking important
meetings the killer.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
Oh yeah, and then, uh, what's his face? Christopher Lloyd
plays like a crazy drift in it.

Speaker 1 (03:28):
Yeah, he was born to play. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
I think a flame goes up his butt or something
because he farts on a campfire.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
There's something with him farting in fire anyway, Einstein? Are
we talking about CHRISTI?

Speaker 3 (03:41):
Yeah, Einstein.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
A lot of people don't know that Einstein died by
farting on a campfire and the flame went off his
butt and blew them up.

Speaker 3 (03:48):
The apple hit his head. This was what inspired.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
Beer blows his ass off.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
This is so funny. There's a you account called fart Share.

Speaker 1 (04:05):
This is how the Einstein episodes over the miles, linking
up famous fart scenes. Dennis the Menace. All right here,
we'll get into it. Hello the Internet, and welcome to
this very special episode of Turnilley Zeitgeist. Oh, which we
don't know what we're calling yet Iconograph. Maybe keep coming

(04:26):
back to Iconograph. Will figure it out and start of
looking at the zeitgeist through current events. We're looking at icons,
powerful pop culture hork froxes that are basically the stars
of our shared consciousness. I'm joined as always by my
co host, mister Miles Grind. Are we doing a rake?

Speaker 4 (04:44):
Hi?

Speaker 1 (04:44):
Yes? Hi?

Speaker 2 (04:45):
It's interesting because I don't know what you're about to
tell me, so it's hard coming in cold. That's the
whole point here is I'm here to be dazzled by
Sexy Facts.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
Sexy Facts and Dennis the Menace Fart Conversations. Yes, Miles,
we're thrilled to be joined by the co host of
my very first podcast, the Crack podcast from the early
days of Cracked, back doing some very funny stuff at Cracked.
Very talented writer who back in back in those days
wrote one of my favorite science articles about like mind

(05:18):
blowing science stuff. So I wanted to have him on
here see if he could explain what any of this
ship means. He's the creator of the Small Beans podcast network.
It's Michael Swash.

Speaker 4 (05:30):
Might I pitch Iconic Class? Do people say icon class class?

Speaker 1 (05:35):
And you were going iconic Cast, but there's a Christian
podcast called iconic Cast.

Speaker 4 (05:43):
To an icon speak of which we're going to hit.
One of the very first sketch related things me and
my primary partner over on my Small Beans comedy in print,
Abe Everson, also a big director at Crack. One of
the first things we ever did was like Jesus me,
it's hitler thing, which caused Rob Shrub, successful Hollywood comedian

(06:04):
Oh Yeah, to tell us to give up and quit.
And we're to pursue comedy and I understand what he
was really saying. Well, no, you shouldn't say that too
a young creative, but I've always been interested ever since
that horrible burn in my soul, in like your abe
Lincoln's or the joke math around. Yeah, the things we
put the most energy into. Yeah, I'm so powerful. And

(06:28):
of course as you age, thanks to outlets like Cracked
and now just broader internet culture, you find out so
much of it as a package story as well, and
it makes you reflect on, like.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
So what is my life?

Speaker 4 (06:42):
It's like an echo of an echo of a condensed,
agreed upon retelling of a You know, we're not so
out of the realm of myths as we think we are.

Speaker 3 (06:52):
We still basically live our lives by them.

Speaker 1 (06:54):
I realized as I was because I did read like
a chunk of the Walter Isaacson Einstein biography or listened
to it because I didn't want to own an Einstein biography,
because the type of person who reads an Einstein biography
makes my hand just do the jack off hand motion
and like, oh, okay, oh you're reading Einstein's biography. Yeah

(07:15):
you did. A smart guy. You think you're a smart guy. Huh,
But Einstein is the example that got me thinking about
icons and like their power and this like gravitational force
that they exert on like meaning and ideas and just
like the world inside our brains. But I think I
was sitting behind a car in traffic in LA and

(07:37):
there was a bumper sticker with an Einstein quote that
he definitely didn't say. I was just like, God, many
people really want like they just use him to be
the guy who if he said that thing, like it
becomes true mag.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because I feel like, don't people always
do the same, Like the definition of insanity is.

Speaker 1 (07:58):
The definition where it's like that's the big thing Stein,
and You're like, the definition of insanity is doing the
same thing twice and expecting different results, which, as I've
said before, is actually a pretty good definition of the
scientific method.

Speaker 4 (08:13):
And interestingly, I think Einstein, I would venture to guess
Einstein might say that it's actually not possible to do
the same thing twice.

Speaker 3 (08:21):
That's what's interesting about this.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
Which is why you do multiple requirements. We do. Yeah,
God doesn't play dice as another one that gets used
a lot. He was making a complex point about like
quantum theory, and like his critical quant.

Speaker 4 (08:35):
Theory, particular interpretation of quantum theory the Copenhangen is.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
But also he's.

Speaker 4 (08:40):
Allowed to be wrong about other stuff or like he
also one time said, oh fuck, I sat on my ball,
Like you know what I mean.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
He said, I'm going to fucking marry my cousin. Was
the thing that he said. That's at a certain point
which we'll get into. But yeah, this dice thing, though,
is used by people to be like, see, God has
a plan. Einstein said that God doesn't play dice, and
it's like, no, he was talking about quantum mechanics.

Speaker 4 (09:08):
Sex dice with the different sex ex SI side wouldn't
do that.

Speaker 1 (09:12):
This only Einstein plays sex dice. This is my Einstein impression.
God plays no sex dice, only Einstein. But I just
want to start out talking about like the big things
everybody knows about Einstein. I feel like one of them

(09:35):
is the tongue photo. I've said that like one of
the criteria for judging if someone's an icon is like
could you dress up as them for Halloween? And like
most people would be like, yeah, I know who you are.
In Einstein's case, I think it would be a mix
of people being like you're Einstein or or Mark Twain.
I think another one is college dorm room posters, you know,

(09:57):
and like the Einstein tongue photo, the one.

Speaker 2 (10:01):
It's like a yeah, it's it's the Bob Marley photo
for someoneho's like a science major.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
Oh we'll get to Bob Marley eventually on this show.
But yeah, so that that's a real photo. It was
taken like on his seventy second birthday after a party,
so it's I think fair to assume that he was
a little bit fucked up. He was coming out of
the party afterwards, and he was just getting in a car.

(10:26):
A photographer named Arthur Sas swooped in, got the shot,
and Einstein fucking loved it. He was like, yo, could
I get like a thousand copies of that and just
immediately started sending it to his friends of his tongue
out photo. His tongue out photo. Yeah okay. That was
like yeah, okay, good good friend. I'm glad.

Speaker 2 (10:45):
He got so excited that he wanted to share like
a boomer does, like AI slop on Facebook.

Speaker 1 (10:51):
He was immediately spamming people with this photo. He was like,
that is that's who I want to be. I think
that's an that's an important part of his legacy. He's
a bit of a silly billy. It's a bit of
a loose cannon. But he said, this gesture you will
like because it is aimed at all of humanity. The
outstretched tongue reflect my political views. So a little fucking

(11:14):
punk rhy dog.

Speaker 4 (11:16):
He was almost funny for a second, and he's like,
let me explain the shit out of it.

Speaker 1 (11:22):
You'll explain.

Speaker 3 (11:24):
I know, here come those thousand words right now.

Speaker 1 (11:31):
I do feel like the look is important art, and
then the funny thing is that so the tongue in
many ways reflects I just stay in for humanity in
the political spectrum. I do think the look is important.
Like I think to get a icon the level of Einstein,
you need to have a lot of different shit come together.

(11:54):
And I think him looking like a rumpled genius with
wild hair, like if he if he was like a
fastidious man with like a comb over, like you know,
like who is just like very well put together. It
just like Woodruman or something. Yeah. Yeah, if you just
look like Harry Truman, that's a great example. Like nobody
knows what Harry Truman. Nobody thinks about Harry Trump.

Speaker 3 (12:17):
Thank very similarly.

Speaker 4 (12:18):
The reason it took us a while to get around
to doing the big budget Oppenheimer is very similarly, you know,
rubbed elbows, same rooms. Oppenheimer arguably responsible for the killingest
thing anyone's ever done in the history of man. Certainly interesting.
He doesn't really look or act super interesting, right, So

(12:38):
we were like Einstein, Einstein, Einstein, Einstein.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
All right, let's do an Oppenheimer we have, let's get
an Oppenheimer in here. Although I will say I think
that I remember like certain reviews and I couldn't find
them for this podcast, but certain reviews of the Oppenheimer
movie being like really good, loved it. It's weird when
Einstein shows up and you're like that, it's like a
fictional character showing up in this movie that's supposed to

(13:03):
be you know, it's like a muppet showing up. It's like,
it's he's so iconic that it's just like, wait, why
why is the guy from the picture with the tongue out?
Why is he in this historical drama.

Speaker 4 (13:21):
I guess I'm too much of a physics nerd because
one of my favorite forgotten shows is Manhattan, where one
of the Wet Bandits Daniel Stern plays a brilliant physicist,
which is amazing to me, just like not that he
doesn't pull it off, but that's bizarre to me. Yeah,
Manhattan has Einstein, you got Neils Bor, you got like
you'd expect those people to show up. I would be

(13:42):
surprised to find Stein didn't show up in the Oppenheimer movie.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
Frankly, Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's just I think the effect
of it for some people who just know him from
being like wow, okay Einstein.

Speaker 3 (13:56):
You could draw on and app him.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
He's you know, yeah, my knowled to Einstein is truly
fucking well. What was the movie you just talking about
with Tim Robbins. Yeah that was not Comedy Central all
the time. I watched that many times. Uh, the photo
equals MC squared everything else I have like the whatever.
The distillation of Einstein is through culture that has really

(14:19):
nothing to do with him as a person. So like
when I saw him in Oppenheimer almost I was almost.

Speaker 1 (14:24):
Like, this is this true? That was the real guy?
The guy was really he talked to Einstein. I thought
he was like storyline.

Speaker 4 (14:34):
I got so not to put you on the spot
at but I want to ask files, can.

Speaker 1 (14:39):
You say what he equals MC squared means? And an energy?
Is it? Energy equals I don't.

Speaker 4 (14:46):
Even mean technically, but like I'm just wondering the thing
that we all know.

Speaker 3 (14:51):
It by road or do you know?

Speaker 2 (14:52):
Oh yeah, no, no, no, no, truly it's purely just
the letters. Yeah, I know he's famous for he equals
mass whatever the fuck squared. I'm also science is like
the subject I know the least about. So yeah, it's
truly limited to I could write it on a chalkboard.

Speaker 1 (15:09):
I don't know what it's.

Speaker 4 (15:10):
Appropriate, because I just show up when Jack tells me
to and it's always worked out so far.

Speaker 1 (15:15):
I am yeah, because I so first of all, that
is one of them, because I want to start with
the things everybody knows, right, Like the picture I think
is up there equals MC squared is the thing. When
I asked my children before they left work for work today,
I sent them out to the mines before they left
for school today, I was like, do you know who

(15:36):
Einstein is? They knew what he looked like, and they
knew he equals MC squared, but they don't really know
what that means. I read a chunk of his biography
that was covered the portion where he comes up with it,
and I think I kind of have vague sense, so
let me try, okay, and then you tell me if

(15:57):
it's wrong. It's that they were trying to like make
a set like there was absolute space and there was
absolute time, like everything up to that point was like,
well you always have like you can measure everything against
absolute time. And he figured out basically, the only absolute
that really works is the speed of light, and like

(16:19):
based on how fast light is moving, time actually is
variable and space is actually like mass is actually variable,
so like the only constant is the speed of light.
But even that's like not totally constant. But that was
kind of what I got. That like, once you look
at things from the perspective of the speed of light,

(16:41):
like everything else like can shift, including how fast time
is moving, so there's like no absolute time. How'd I do?

Speaker 3 (16:49):
Pretty good?

Speaker 4 (16:50):
Can I just shout out things as a big fan
of physics that make my brain explode? Like I know
what's juicy? I won't bore you. He intuited several things that, like,
to me, a guy read a lot just about what
physics means, but I can't learn math no matter how
hard I try, but read a lot of books of
like appreciation of physics and cosmology.

Speaker 1 (17:10):
Equals mc squared.

Speaker 4 (17:11):
There's a few things he intuited, and he's become more
like a Buddha figure to me because it's just amazing
to think, or like Mary Shelley, who's like basically invented
sci fi and horror when she thought of the idea
of Frankenstein when she was eighteen. So it's like one
of those moments where I'm like, I just can't believe
a human thought of that. And one of the things
is everything's relative, like you said, and like trippy examples

(17:33):
are even if you were moving ninety nine point ninety
nine nine percent the speed of light, if you shine
a flashlight out and measured that light, it would be
going relative to you the speed of light. I cannot
catch up to it. Ever the end, or at least,
we still don't understand anyway to breach that, or even
that it could breach. Everything else would unravel if it breached.

Speaker 3 (17:54):
But you know so.

Speaker 4 (17:56):
And then the other thing that he really intuited the
equals MC squared is is that energy equals which is
crazy to me. And this is the part I don't get.
Why would it be exactly equal to the speed of
light squared? That makes it seem like God is real.
But I don't understand the math of randomness. But my
point is equals MC squared says energy converted by some

(18:17):
amount equals matter. So Einstein also intuited that, which is
what an a bomb proves, Right, this tiny piece of
matter actually has this much energy in it.

Speaker 3 (18:29):
Motherfucker.

Speaker 4 (18:30):
Sorry, we are all made of stardust, as the Great
Profit movie tells us, and.

Speaker 3 (18:37):
It's quite literal.

Speaker 1 (18:39):
But what was the one who connected everything?

Speaker 4 (18:42):
Is that the same stuff that is light is your
physical body.

Speaker 1 (18:47):
That's the same stuff. And to think that someone figured.

Speaker 4 (18:51):
That out And then you're like, well, how so smart
guy and he's like, here's proof and I don't know how,
but all the other smart people who understand math when yes,
holy cow, he's right.

Speaker 1 (19:03):
So reading exactly reading that, Like first half of the biography,
like the thing that blew me away is like he's
not the best at math. Nobody's like this guy's the
best in math. He's like good at math. He's not
the best at like experimental science. What he's the best
at is like having high thoughts and then like really

(19:23):
believing in this. Yeah, and he also just read everything
that was out there.

Speaker 4 (19:29):
But it's like the one coming in and going time
is light and you go, what are you talking about, bastard?

Speaker 1 (19:35):
He Yeah, he was basically reading all the science and
then was able to like pull these different elements out
and construct his theory out of that. I do have
a loose theory that like some people are just always high,
like that's just how their brain chemistry works, and like
he is one of those people. Like the thing about
him being like a rumple genius who like doesn't have time,

(19:56):
like would show up with like one shoe off and
like a his hand is not wrong, Like he was
that guy. He never had like he would have He
would go on a trip and then have to like
mail home and be like, could you send my suitcase
with this stuff in it? So he's just a space person.
He was a space person like constantly. He would read

(20:16):
physics constantly and also like play the violin and like
he just like really liked to vibe the music and
think high thoughts. Like essentially one of.

Speaker 4 (20:26):
The only fun facts I know about him is that
they did dissect his brain, because why wouldn't you. Yeah,
and he had a super thick corpus colossum, which is
the two between the two hemispheres. So it's actually like
he was the Michael Phelps by which I mean genetically
predisposed to just be done right of imaginatively thinking about math.

Speaker 1 (20:46):
For people who don't know Michael Phelps is like if
you saw him in person, you would be like, who
is this human caricature? His arms and upper body is
like massive, and then his legs are like tiny. Uh
but yeah, and you I mean, and they've.

Speaker 4 (21:00):
Done studies showing his body like wicks away lactic acid.
You know, yeah, that's what he called an outlier, Like.

Speaker 1 (21:06):
Shah, yeah, yeah right, yeah, he shouldn't have revealed himself.
There going to dissect him at the Pentagon at some point.
Right now, it.

Speaker 4 (21:13):
Seems to have had some physical brain structure advantages.

Speaker 1 (21:16):
He was like, I want to be cremated immediately because
I don't want people to worship at my bones and
I don't want them to like do weird shit to
my brain. And they were like, sorry, asshole. And his
brain is in Philadelphia, Like there are pieces of his
brain at the Morbid Museum in Philadelphia. But yeah, to
your point. Also, like I think one of the things
that was a disconnect for me coming in versus now,

(21:36):
like having done some research about him, is that the
image I have is old guy sticking his tongue out.
He wrote like the four scientific papers that invented modern
physics in a single year when he was I think
twenty six years old. Like he was young, and he
was a patent clerk, which I also want to get into.

(21:58):
He basically did the thing that a lot of people
do when they come out of college and are like,
I want to do a job that I can do
while high. The reason he had that patent clerk job
was because he couldn't get a job out of school
because he was like a lazy student who didn't show
up to class. The reason I didn't show up to
classes because I was hung over. The reason he didn't
show up to classes because like he thought his teachers

(22:19):
were like teaching the wrong thing and was just like
devouring science of his own interest, which I think is
a big part of you know, having this high job
instead of like working in a lab under a major
scientist who would like tell him what direction to go in.
I think allowed him to just like pull all the
stuff and like follow his brain to this conclusion that

(22:39):
was fucking mind blowing. H let's take a quick break.
We'll be right back, and we're back.

Speaker 4 (22:55):
You just unlocked my memory of Oh yeah, that's the
other way people use him double click him as an
icon in life that I've encountered. Now that I'm older,
I don't as much anymore because it's more.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
Happened growing up.

Speaker 4 (23:07):
But I used to frequently encounter the example, really slacking
off kid, see average or whatever.

Speaker 1 (23:13):
Well, Einstein to see average. So so that's my next one.
That's my next thing that I knew. So I knew
the picture, I knew the image, I knew equals MC squared,
and I knew that Einstein was a slow childs right,
that's oh he was. That was the I remember learning
that in like eighth grade because I sucked in math,

(23:34):
and that was.

Speaker 3 (23:34):
The way they would inspire you.

Speaker 1 (23:35):
I remember the room I was in like when I
learned that, because I was like, oh, hell yeah, there's
a chance for there have hope. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
That was like when I learned like Tiger Woods is
black and Asian, and I went to a golf course
I'm like, well, then here we go.

Speaker 1 (23:51):
And no kids sport I'm good at. But yeah, So
the thing that I think most people say is that
he was a late talker. Teachers dismissed him as slow.
One of the only contemporary accounts we have of him
as a baby was from his grandparents, who talked about
him as a well behaved child full of funny ideas,

(24:13):
Like when he was two and a half years old,
he was introduced to his little sister and he said, yes,
but where are the wheels, which was like, which was
a bit about like he thought he thought it was
going to be a toy or something. They were like,
and so he's like already doing misguided bits. Yeah, two
and a.

Speaker 3 (24:30):
Half which very like old comedy.

Speaker 4 (24:33):
Early.

Speaker 1 (24:33):
I know, they said he was a late talker, but
there's a contemporary account of him like making a joke,
like an interesting a comic joke at two and a.

Speaker 2 (24:44):
Half years That's what I'm saying, Like, how do you
scare like if he because I you know, there are
people that that's like a sign of potential, like you know,
you have some kind of genius or something of late talker, right, yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:54):
Yeah, and all that kind of thing. There is some
recollections from his parents that they were concerned. So one
of the anecdotes from him as a child is that
he would say the sentence that he was about to
say quietly to himself before he would say it out loud,
So he was like kind of weird. But he only

(25:14):
spoken full sentences, which is like this sign of like
the people I've met who like only speak in full
sentences are usually like I'm like, oh, you're like on
a different level of just like yeah, just like really smart.
So yeah, that also gave us the good Fella's character
Jimmy two times, who always says got to get the papers.

(25:35):
You know, that is based on Einstein. But yeah, there's
just like all these stories where it's like I don't
really buy that. Like he was like got the best
grades in his class, like in elementary school through high school,
then he went to college and basically was like I'm
doing my own thing on this, And that seems like

(25:57):
where this whole idea comes from other than and I
think this is another important part of like why he's
such a massive icon is he was one of the
people who said that like people thought he was dumb.
He was like doing the Drake started from the bottom.
Now we're here a thing like which when you think
about I keep my brain when I'm thinking about like

(26:19):
the biggest icons goes to Einstein and Michael Jordan, and
like if you remember, like Michael Jordan constantly talks about
how he got cut from his high school basketball team.
Like that's not really true, he got he just like
didn't make varsity when he was like a sophomore or something.
But I think there's an element of like self mythologizing,

(26:40):
like I think he was.

Speaker 3 (26:42):
You tend to do that it works, Like.

Speaker 1 (26:44):
Yeah, I think I think it's that if you're this
level of icon, you have to have all of it.
You have to have like the amazing contributions. You have
to have like a look or like something that like
people can like hang their brain on. And then I
think you also have to have a somewhat sense of

(27:05):
like building your own methoce and like how that Yeah,
like telling your story.

Speaker 4 (27:10):
Because I think a lot of stories I learned from
my time I cracked about people where flies in the
face of what the story is, like gond to your mother, Teresa, Right,
it's like they're also master savvy, master marketers of their
own brand, and you're like, well.

Speaker 3 (27:24):
Should they be right?

Speaker 4 (27:26):
Is that everything was clicking. We're building an empire of
people love here.

Speaker 1 (27:31):
I'm doing miracles over here, man. Yeah. And then there's
also just like stuff that like what once an image
is so powerful, like just everything else gets like written
out of it. Essentially. Other question I have, and this
is just like a mystery that I'm curious to get
your theories on, is I think that movies are kind
of the ultimate icon factories, or like they they're the

(27:54):
things that create meaning. They they create the official version
in people's share consciousness of like how a historical event
went down, who a historical figure was. And it's weird
to me that he hasn't had a major movie made
about him. There's the movie IQ, which is another thing
that's like in my brain of Einstein, it's like, oh,

(28:16):
yeah he was. He co starred with Meg Ryan in
that movie, which posits the theory that Einstein's the ultimate
wingman is essentially like, is she the Niece's his niece? Yeah,
that's what I thought. I remember she's like uncle Albert,
And I'm like, you know, what fucked me up about
that movieh So I've talked before about this theory that
William Goldman has that there are some actors that we

(28:38):
can't accept any time except the present. His example was
Michael Douglas, Like Michael Douglass needs to be in the
eighties and like horny, And then they tried to put
him in a movie William Goldman wrote called Ghosts in
the Darkness and it didn't do well, even though it
tested really well. And his theory was, like, people just

(29:01):
can't have him be like a lion hunter from the past.
So I Q I had just assumed that it took
place in the present and that like Einstein, was like
this mystical figure, because like, I can't put Meg Ryan
in any other era like she needs she needs to
be in the nineties, like she she needs to be

(29:24):
in the present tense. I can't like make sense of her.
And even like watching the first bit of it, I
was like, she doesn't really it doesn't really work as
well for some reason.

Speaker 3 (29:34):
That was a classic past though.

Speaker 1 (29:36):
Yeahthing slick yeah, yeah, get in here, slick in his hair. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:49):
I guess Meg Ryan has what they call now, they
call that iPhone face.

Speaker 1 (29:53):
Yeah, so the face of someone who's seen it, but
she has the face of somebody who's, uh, I don't know,
logged onto and here or something. I guess my my question,
and it's not as weird. What Like the more I
thought about it, the more like there are scenes from
his life that make an incredible like it's like very cinematic.

(30:14):
First of all, the theory of relativity if you have
the right filmmaker could like make that kind of make
sense and like mind blowing. He was living by a
train track with a famous clock next to it as
he realized that like time is like and then used
that to like make sense of all the things. So
like it's it's the thing from the movie where you're

(30:34):
like pooling things from around you and then like illustrating
the shit. Like he literally had the like Agent Kuian
at the end of Usual Suspects thing where he was
like shaking time and then like he was also like
at the patent office like working on like synchronizing clocks
because that was like a big thing that needed to happen.

(30:54):
There's also a story brand the editor points out of
him watching a window fall and like that got him
interested in gravity. That one's probably apocryphal because he wasn't
a psychopath. He wasn't like, oh, I just watched the
guy fall off a roof, and now I'm curious about
they don't think that one actually happened. But like he

(31:14):
has all these things that are like cinematic ingredients. He
is a good movie character, Like he is this a
fuddle mess who like plays instruments and is like charming.
And by the way, just because we haven't tended to
picture a guy fucking doesn't mean he wasn't fucking. He
couldn't make a character in the movie. Like, I think

(31:35):
you're right that he's kind of like Yoda in our
mind now, But I mean.

Speaker 3 (31:40):
Well, he's grandpapcorn.

Speaker 1 (31:42):
Yeah, yeah, he's Grandpa. I think he's like wise. But yeah,
as Superducer Victor points out, Yoda fucks Like in my
mind Yoda is.

Speaker 4 (31:49):
We're very open to a flashback where the grandpapcoor character
is young and sexy now and we see them.

Speaker 1 (31:56):
Fuck we do that, right any many characters? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But my theory on why there hasn't been the big
Einstein movie is like, did you guys see Air, the
movie about the invention of the first that band playing? Right?
Different thing but basically the way they treat Jordan is

(32:17):
as if he is. They just don't show his face.
It's almost like the Old Testament. Yeah, it's like the
Old Testament like treats God, where like if you look
at his face that it will like melt or something created.

Speaker 3 (32:30):
George Stein.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
Like, I feel like if you made a movie about Einstein,
I think there's a certain level of being so iconic
that if you make the movie, it just feels like cheapened.
And then like to your point, like the way he's
been used is like as this like all knowing wizard
of everything smart. He's like Yoda mixed with Ironman. And

(32:55):
if you made a movie where he's not like literally
conjuring the nuclear particles of physics with his hands, like
you're not going to like match what's in people's mind. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:04):
I think it's also because so many people know just
enough about the dumb shit to give them the completely
wrong idea about me. Is that a movie would completely
go against all of that. Like, for example, I have
like the most superficial idea of Einstein. If he showed
me a trailer and he was like this complex person,
I'd be like, bro, I don't want to see this. Yeah,
like this guy is just the shorthand for me for

(33:26):
genius stuff. So I guess in that sense, but I
guess maybe that's why I need to know that he
was horny. And then I'm like, okay, well now maybe
there's something. There's another reason.

Speaker 4 (33:34):
Also interesting that our relationship, since we're talking zeitgeisten icons
to the because it feels to me like he's specifically
smart or intelligent, and like D and D players will
know what I mean when I say someone else owns
like wisdom or like Abe Lincoln has honesty or whatever,
but like he owns smart and right, even though as

(33:57):
we're describing, it's more that he was high galaxy brains,
but he owns my whole life. He's owned like smart
and right because he's smart. And what's interesting is actually,
since I was a kid, we've changed our overall relationship
with smart. We know disdain smart people and things for
many of us don't think smart is bullshit and fake, right, right, guys, Yeah, yeah,

(34:22):
interesting when your brand is thousands of years long, as
his will surely be. I always think of going back
to Beethoven and telling him, you know, like you don't
have to be a what mass food is, and then
that this fried chicken place is beaming his jingle he
wrote into space to sell fried chicken. Like anything like

(34:42):
that is so trippy to me.

Speaker 1 (34:44):
I mean, I think the misquotes are a good example,
a good way of illustrating what you're talking about, because yeah,
like I've heard him misquoted by science people, religious people,
people who hate making the same mistakes twice. I guess,
like basketball fans, people who hate education, smart people, atheist democrats, Republicans,

(35:04):
Like I don't think there's anyone else like that. I
feel like there's nobody else who is just like it
used as an authority on like fucking everything, like across
the board. Everyone's just like, yeah, but that's Einstein, And
if he said that, then we're right on this one.
Mark another one up for the people who hate making
the same mistake twice.

Speaker 4 (35:23):
But I think there's people who like these are the
kinds of people that mostly get when the quote is misattributed.

Speaker 3 (35:28):
It's usually in the form of an image.

Speaker 4 (35:30):
Macro right, is what we're thinking about, like the Facebook's
curly cue text and a black and white image of
the person. And I feel like I'm I see a
lot of Churchill's still gets play in this.

Speaker 1 (35:41):
Churchilli gets some play.

Speaker 4 (35:42):
Yeah for sure, where it's like it must be right
because they said it, I'm trying to link into Lincoln.

Speaker 1 (35:48):
Is like, well, if he said it Mark Twain also,
I said yeah, yeah, Twain gets that. See. And Einstein
was in many ways cosplaying as Mark Twain, so he
knew he was intentionally making himself iconic.

Speaker 4 (36:01):
Car but only on the liberal side. It's like if
George Carlin said it, you're a fucking square if you
don't vibe with that magic.

Speaker 1 (36:09):
And the Republicans just take Carling quotes and be like Einstein,
Bill said that offhandedly to me or something. You never
see a man taking a ship running at full speed Einstein, Einstein,
I just some better quotes than the ones that are

(36:30):
out there. Of God doesn't play dice. And the definition
of stupidity is making the same mistake twice. When he
was first struck by scientific wonder, so this is him
seeing a needle respond to the invisible magnetic force in
a compass, and it occurred to him that something deeply
hidden had to be behind things. That's something that occurred
when he was four five.

Speaker 4 (36:53):
Surely figured that one out, but he doesn't really exist
stand in for he is going to the list for
can't be wrong.

Speaker 3 (37:01):
Yeah, luck.

Speaker 1 (37:03):
And then like as he was taking the patent clerk job,
he had like something dismissive to say. Somebody was like,
this job's really boring, you don't want it, and he
was like, some people think everything's boring. I'm never bored
and like it just like his fascination with everything, It's
not as pithy, but it like cuts to what I
think is the takeaway from him is that he was

(37:23):
just like constantly engaged, constantly like fascinated with everything around him,
constantly like reading, learning. So Walter Isaacson like has this
like Genius trilogy or whatever where he's like written about
Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, and I think he has
like a very American author like individualism point of view.
But even like in his biography, like Einstein's constantly like

(37:47):
making groups of friends around him who are like the
people who are like minded and are curious about the
same stuff, and so like he is like building this
world of community, which I think gets written out of
a lot of like how we think about him. Walter
Isacson keeps being like he's this lone wolf, but like
constantly when he's like coming to these conclusions, he's just

(38:10):
like working with his smartest, craziest friends and like talking
with them and like bouncing ideas off of them, and
like talking into the early hours of the night and shit.

Speaker 4 (38:19):
Oh well, so the Newton quote, if I've seen farts
because I stood on the shoulders of giants, I feel
like it's going to come on. That's another thing, is
like you can't just be good at marketing. If you're
an icon, you definitely have to be comfortable with absorbing
the credit of whole teams of people into your nstorical legacy,
because no one actually does this stuff without bouncing it
off their friends and stuff. But sorry, I just got

(38:40):
to tell this one because maybe you can say whether
it's true or false. But there's a phrase, if you're bored,
then you're boring, you unlocked. Like a core childhood memory
of the anecdote my dad would tell us about Einstein
was that he thought of the theory of cosmological constant
while looking at the clock on the wall in school,
wishing that it would go faster so the day would

(39:02):
end being bored, and then slowly musing on the idea
that it's actually later than it looks like, because it
takes some amount of time for the photons to reach
your eye turn into a brain signal, and for me
to know what time it is. And then he extrapolated
that out to the general theory of relativity, probably totally
like copping down the cherry tree just to store whole shit. No,

(39:22):
he's so illustrational to me, just the illustration that that
story gives of, Like the universe is it's a miracle,
there's even anything versus nothing. There's no real reason to
be bored per se.

Speaker 1 (39:36):
Right, he has said many things that was like, basically
I was just constantly like I had the same questions
as everyone else. I just stuck with them longer and
like a lot of the questions that he ended up
solving with his like Great series were things that first
occurred to him when he was like twelve, Like he
had this vision of himself riding a beam of light.

(39:58):
I was like, what would the rest of the world
looked like to me as I'm riding a beam of light?
And he answered that a decade later after like getting
his like while getting his doctorate, by the way. His
PhD had nothing to do with his like big discoveries.
It was just like a thing. He was like, Fuck,
I need to get a PhD so people will start
calling me doctor. It'll be good for the brand essentially. Uh.

(40:20):
And so he got a PhD. His doctoral thesis was
on viscosity and it ended up being something that like
people used to this day, like engineers have used throughout
the twentieth century. And it was just like kind of
a thing. He tossed off, throw away PhD. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 (40:37):
I love that the whole slime industry is built on
this paper.

Speaker 1 (40:43):
Yeah, I think I think they said dairy. It's like
a lot of doors.

Speaker 4 (40:49):
You know who gets it, Ben Franklin and Ben Franklin,
Edison where you go and he invented this and that
and that and this and that and this and this
and that, And you're.

Speaker 1 (40:59):
Like, yeah, are you sure?

Speaker 3 (41:00):
I don't.

Speaker 1 (41:02):
Right, Yeah, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back,
and we're back. So I do want to get to
the question that we want to ask of all of
our icons. In a hypothetical universe where this person was

(41:25):
existing in the modern news cycle, would he have been
on the Epstein flight logs. Would would he have express.

Speaker 4 (41:38):
Taking credit for many who will remain faceless and absorbing
their story into his own.

Speaker 1 (41:44):
Yeah, so I will say, like a lot of the
things people you know that if you dig a little
bit deeper, people are like Einstein was kind of a freak.
He married his cousin.

Speaker 3 (41:53):
Did you see that tongue out?

Speaker 1 (41:55):
That's not a political established sending a signal? Right there.

Speaker 3 (42:00):
We know he wasn't a groomer.

Speaker 1 (42:08):
We know that. So he married the only woman in
his college physics program. They had two children, and then
he divorced her and married his cousin.

Speaker 3 (42:18):
Was that after he became like a rock star.

Speaker 1 (42:21):
Yes, it was like, as he was becoming a rock star,
he married his cousin.

Speaker 4 (42:24):
The archis of course classic that you get rich and
famous and you trade up your spouse.

Speaker 3 (42:30):
But I love it, like just waiting for the clout
to marry that hotcomer.

Speaker 1 (42:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:34):
Also she should have known. She's like, I was the
only woman in the class, and yeah, find you, let's go.

Speaker 3 (42:43):
Yeah, you'll keep my seat warm.

Speaker 1 (42:45):
This is a weird I looked up how common is
it to marry your cousin? And you're googling that book? No,
google a list. I google that every day just to
see what the latest numbers are. To be fair, I've
met your cousin. He's really yeah, he's the best. Uh.
Slightly over ten percent of all marriages worldwide are estimated

(43:07):
to be between second cousins or closer or closer damn
second or closer? Was his second or second his was first?
In like multiple places.

Speaker 3 (43:18):
It's like.

Speaker 1 (43:20):
It was a It was a real tangled web. The
overall rate appears to be declining, says Wikipedia on the
Wikipedia page cousin marriage.

Speaker 4 (43:28):
The guy had compiled that day, which is.

Speaker 1 (43:32):
Right, But I also think maybe not that uncommon at
the time. I guess, because you know, it's ten percent
now and it's declining.

Speaker 4 (43:43):
I'm trying to factor in people who get married without
realizing that they're distant cousins. But I guess that wouldn't
make it into this data set because now, no, right,
so these are the people who are like, yes, sir.

Speaker 1 (43:54):
Yeah, goddamn right, I did Oh gross, second cousins. No,
my first cousins.

Speaker 3 (44:01):
Provable cousin marriages.

Speaker 1 (44:03):
Wait, but did they have kids? They didn't have kids? Right,
they didn't have kids. She already had daughters but there
is like some question as to whether he as he
was about to marry his cousin, started wondering if he
should marry his cousin's daughter. But like, there's there's a
smart have I mentioned that, very incredibly smart. He had

(44:27):
affairs constantly, So this is this is one of those
things where you're like, oh, you don't say uh. He
had this theory on monogamy that it wasn't a natural
state of man or a woman, and didn't feel particularly
guilty about sleeping around. Also didn't seem to mind when
like his wife had a relationship with somebody else. Was

(44:49):
kind of just a freak like that, you know. So
after general relativity was proven in nineteen nineteen, Einstein became
an international celebrity. Women through themselves at him. One scientist
friend said that I Einstein attracted women like a magnet
attracts filings.

Speaker 3 (45:06):
Or like filings attracted.

Speaker 1 (45:09):
Elegant women would show up to show up at Einstein's
house at night, whisk him away, and return him in
the morning. Einstein didn't complain. So my theory is, and
now I'm not going to say this with full confidence,
I don't think Einstein would be on the flight logs
for the same reason that like Mick Jagger wasn't you know,
like they didn't necessarily need to be constantly having He

(45:35):
didn't need help, You didn't need the help. Yeah, it's more.

Speaker 4 (45:38):
Like a Ben Franklin, where by all accounts you're like, yeah,
he fucked around and everyone knew he fucked around, and
he was like, I'm rich and famous, I'm going to
fuck around. If you can't get with that Franklin baby,
something a little better than being on the island. I
don't think he'd be on the locks.

Speaker 2 (45:55):
Yeah, I think he's also I think also based on
how Epstein was around scientist, he'd probably be like, Dude,
I can't be around this fucking guy.

Speaker 1 (46:03):
He keeps telling me about fucking science. Yeah, any other
things that you guys know about him before I get
to like some of the stuff that gets written out
of his story that I don't think has like made
it into his iconography that I think is pretty cool
and should be in the movie if we ever get it.
No interrupting is my natural state.

Speaker 3 (46:25):
Ready to go?

Speaker 1 (46:26):
Yeah, I fucking rang the rag dry up top when
I say yeah, all right, First of all, just a
weird like nature nurture thing. He was born in Ulm, Germany,
and in a very clever bit of German wordplay, Ulm's
motto is omentuska, which it just means Olm people are mathematicians,

(46:51):
so which you would be like, that's crazy, like is
there something in the water. But he moved out of
there pretty quickly, so his dad was like a mathematician.
And so I don't know, on the on the shoulders
of matimati kai maybe like the other thing, just the
high job I think is incredibly important, like the fact

(47:12):
that he was able to just work and like put
all this shit together, like as he was like applying
to all these academic positions where if he had gotten those,
they would have had him working on whatever their priorities were.
So I think just like this young genius who you know,
was constantly smoking and just not able to keep track

(47:35):
of anything, would make a pretty good movie. And then
the other thing is that he was a democratic socialist
his whole life, which I think just gets written out
of it because you know, we don't like those in
the mainstream and so like that's not a thing that
people really think about. But he was first of all
faced a bunch of anti Semitism. And that's like continued

(47:57):
where people refer to like relativism as like a Jewish
perspective and like a hallmark of like the Semitic wave.

Speaker 3 (48:09):
He squared, Yeah, what.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
The I hear that?

Speaker 2 (48:15):
The craziest shit to be, Like, I don't know, man, energy,
Really you.

Speaker 1 (48:21):
Might say it like he might have had to get
that high job because of anti Semitism. So I'm just saying, guys,
don't knock it. No, I'm not saying that. But after
his experience as a Jew and fascist Germany, he refused
to stay silent when he saw injustices perpetrated In the
United States, the treatment of black Americans was particularly appalling
to Einstein. In nineteen thirty one, he published editorials criticizing

(48:42):
the notorious Scottsboro Boys trial. In forty six, he told
the graduating class of Lincoln University, which is the oldest
historically black college in the US, the separation of colored
people from white people in the United States is not
a disease of colored people. It's a disease of white people.
I don't tend to be quiet about it. Did he
actually say that? Though? That is from a speech after

(49:05):
he was famous, so Mark Twain, Yeah, that's right. And
then Princeton was de facto segregated as a town, and
in nineteen thirty seven, Marion Anderson played a concert in
Princeton was denied a room at the local inn, and
he invited her to stay at his home and they
became close friends. And then when W. E. B. Du

(49:26):
Boys was put on trial as a foreign agent during
the Red Scare of the fifties, he volunteered to testify
as a character witness. And when the judge was like,
fucking Einstein's going to testify, he dismissed the case. Oh
that's amazing.

Speaker 4 (49:42):
Oh shit, fucking was already working for you, because that
he knew. Because again, like one of the one I
always think about is Bobby Fisher, who, if people don't know,
was was the best chess player ever. And think of that,
like if that's all you are, that's your that's your
eye kinic thing. And there's this if you see him

(50:02):
in documentaries, he's so narcissistic and so into himself, his
own myth, and it's it's like, let's play badminton, mother,
Like all you do is such a niche thing. You
gotta calm him down, or that's why everyone needs humility, right,
that's why there's no such thing as a trillionaire that
deserves to be because life is short and there's no

(50:24):
way you can master everything and accomplish everything. People who
say they did are lying. So it's just like very
funny to me that a judge would be like Einstein objected.

Speaker 3 (50:35):
I can't say you're wrong, Einstein.

Speaker 5 (50:38):
But it's just am I gonna say, it's so funny
that they got Lostein?

Speaker 1 (50:46):
But my is so.

Speaker 2 (50:50):
That the myth is so large that in illegal proceeding,
the judge is like, dude, exactly, the fact that you're
even gonna pull up with Albert Einstein? That's yeah, man, maybe, yeah, fine,
you're not a communist.

Speaker 3 (51:06):
Did you even see the car accident? Einstein?

Speaker 5 (51:08):
No?

Speaker 3 (51:08):
But accidents involved physics. That's true. That's fair, sir. I'm sorry, sir, sorry.

Speaker 1 (51:13):
Are you calling me a liar? No? God, Jesus Christ, dude,
no never, never, never, You're right?

Speaker 3 (51:19):
Should I called Jesus Christ?

Speaker 1 (51:21):
You're a little girl. I actually have his number, just
a complete idiot's idea of by.

Speaker 3 (51:29):
Know each other.

Speaker 1 (51:30):
He probably knows no him, he call Jesus on me
as for how amara. So that's you know, how he
felt about America, and like as for how America felt
about him. So he and Elsa, his cousin wife, left
Germany in nineteen thirty two came to America. Hitler was
named chancellor in nineteen thirty three, so he got out
just in time. There was opposition against welcoming Einstein as

(51:51):
an American citizen. The American Legion and a group called
the Women Patriot Corporation lodge complaints with the State Department,
accusing Einstein of being a Communist. Not even Stalin himself
was affiliated with so many communist groups, they said, and
American religious leaders denounced his theories as atheistic and immoral.

(52:11):
And then the FBI, who, as we know, always on
the right side of things, the FBI immediately started keeping
a file on Einstein and his subversive activities. When he
died in nineteen fifty five, his FBI file was one thousand,
four hundred and twenty seven pages long, and just what
just a list of all these like women he was
banging with something probably probably a lot of compromant.

Speaker 4 (52:35):
Hey, I think I figured out that gravity is, you know,
emergent from the actual curvature space time. You can think
of it as almost like a blanket with weighted balls
on it. I'm watching you, Einstein.

Speaker 5 (52:49):
Sound communists about to knock that shit off signed guys
to this guy.

Speaker 1 (53:00):
Watch knock that shit off, but which they investigated claims,
including that he was a Russian spy when he lived
in Berlin, that he was organizing a communist takeover of Hollywood.
They were so worried about that one. He was working
on a death ray, like truly like six year old shit.
But I do think like the FBI really like, as

(53:21):
we're working through different icons, like having a long FBI
rap sheet is like kind of that that is a
helpful right ingredient. He was Also he was a pacifist.
He was really like, you know, I think the movie
Oppenheimer does cover this part, so I'm not going to
go too far into it. But he wrote a letter
to a FDR being like, we think the Germans might

(53:42):
be looking into using you know, this approach to an
atomic weapon. So like they used that letter to justify
the Manhattan Project and he felt really, uh, you know,
fucked up about that for the rest of his life
and called it the biggest mistake of his life and
then like was really heavily involved and like anti nuclear
proliferation throughout the course of his life. And then I

(54:04):
will just say the image we associate him with is
old Einstein. All the great theories came out from twenty
six to like mid thirties, essentially, like I think a
thing that you see with people who gained that much
fame and attention, they're given power to, like, as we've seen,
like be smart about everything, and like for the last

(54:26):
part of his scientific career he was like kind of
wrong about a lot of stuff. Like his early theories
were incredible, but he was like kind of wrong about
quantum stuff. But like it was that was stuff that
like kind of came later. So I just like when.

Speaker 4 (54:41):
Seby lose him, you have your career and then you
slowly fall out of and other people have to pick
a the torch.

Speaker 3 (54:47):
He's just like anyone else in Marrigan.

Speaker 1 (54:49):
Yeah, he's like ja rule. As you pointed out early on, Michael,
like the thing that drove his theory was like kind
of pooling all these things and being like a unified
theory of the universe. And then along comes quantum mechanics
and is like, actually this like behaves completely differently, and
he was like, I don't know in my experience.

Speaker 4 (55:11):
Well that you don't know, And of course is like,
well the professor from Futurama as a big one point,
but it is true, is like, it's highly likely that
we're not shaped right to fully comprehend everything about the
universe because we wouldn't need to be to survive within
its womb. Uh So it might literally be like certain things.

(55:34):
It might be true that you can imagine things that
can't exist. You can imagine time travel but it's not possible.
Or you could imagine knowing everything, but that's not really
a valid question.

Speaker 1 (55:44):
In a way that we'll never even be able to comprehend.

Speaker 3 (55:47):
Why what do you mean?

Speaker 4 (55:48):
It's not a bad question, it doesn't matter. It's all
above your pay grade. Like I think the professor says
something like science never ends. Yeah, whether that's good or bad,
we're still very very far from well that's that what we're.

Speaker 1 (56:02):
Yeah right, yeah, yeah, closed. I will say he died.
He died from a birthday order on April eighteenth, nineteen
fifty five, at seventy six. And I'm just saying, if
he was so smart about science, heart science.

Speaker 2 (56:18):
That's how you know he wouldn't be in the Epstein
files because he would have lived a lot longer. Probably true,
way too.

Speaker 1 (56:24):
Died way too young. Einstein was stabbed in the back
to death. It was all a suicide that pierced with
a dagger. On the levels of relative iconography, I'll say
I think he's like near the top of the list. Tear, Yeah, yeah,
I think he's the I think he's really like I'll

(56:44):
put it this way, Michael Jordan is the most iconic
person of I think my lifetime as far as the
like us shared consciousness goes. And there's an actor named
Michael B. Jordan. He just added an initial and that
was another.

Speaker 3 (57:00):
We were like, we'll take yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:04):
Albert Brooks had to change his whole lass name. His
name was Albert Einstein. He changed it to Brooks because
that's how powerful Albert Einstein is. Is that like you
couldn't even couldn't be like Albert D. Einstein. People be like,
what the fuck up? Yeah, piece of shit? Thank you
guys for joining us. Oh yes, Michael sway, yeah, is

(57:26):
there where can people find you? Follow you? All that
good stuff?

Speaker 4 (57:30):
Oh my gosh, okay, I wasn't sure if we were
out out or I was plugging. So since I get
a chance to plug, you catch me at an odd time. No,
I don't work at cracked anymore. They laid me off again,
and I was working for Microsoft Xbox writing much of
their material that came to a conclusion as well. So
I am quite happily full time, devoted to just my

(57:53):
podcast network and raising my baby son and terrified about income.
So if you want to go pay my podcast network,
they delverate small Beans and we just patreon dot com
slash small means you can find all the free stuff
by just searching small Beans wherever you get podcasts. But
we just launched our brand new Battlestar Galactica watch along series.

(58:15):
That's me and Cody Johnson of Some More News watching
every episode of Battlestar Galaxica in order. And I am
the guy who is a huge treky but has never
seen Battlestar od. He's the guy who's seen it one
hundred times. It's his favorite show. And I don't know
who's the Cylon, and I'm guessing in real time and
all that kinds of stuff. It's really fun but we

(58:37):
do tons of stuff, mostly deep readings of film, television,
and video games.

Speaker 1 (58:44):
Yeah, there you go. Yeah, it's a great it's a
great network. Everybody should go.

Speaker 4 (58:48):
So sorry, sorry, because you guys got a great audience
and people always roll through.

Speaker 1 (58:52):
So I did want to say.

Speaker 4 (58:53):
My very last video on Cracks that came out a
couple months ago was a two hour, feature length, fully
scripted crack style essay bit on the entire history of
Groundskeeper Willie that involved me ingesting and cutting apart and
reassembling all thirty two seasons of The Simpsons.

Speaker 3 (59:11):
Oh my god, it's one of the its.

Speaker 4 (59:14):
It's like a movie I made real and I already
knew I was getting fired. I just did it for
the fans to have something cool to go out on.
So go check out my exhaustive two hour video about groundskeeper.

Speaker 1 (59:25):
Really, and I think we can all safely say fuck
cracked again. Were glad to say that again? Yeah? Yeah,
it won't impact me financially. Well, that sounds amazing and
everybody should go subscribe to small Beans, great network, so
much funny content coming out over that.

Speaker 3 (59:41):
Whoever started it should be run out of town on
a rail.

Speaker 1 (59:44):
Absolutely, ashole all right, that was fun. That was fun,
you guys, Here is the stuff some things I missed.
This is no, no, no, no, notebook don't that was perfect.
We should just clip that and use that over and
over again, maybe add some sound effects. We don't have

(01:00:05):
sound drops just yet. We're remarkably ill prepared for this
new version of this show. We don't even have a
dang title. All right, here's some stuff I found interesting
that I couldn't remember to bring up while talking to
Michael and Miles. The definition of insanity line. We talked
about that a lot, But the origin I think history

(01:00:25):
dot Com I found the origin. So the line the
definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and
over again and expecting different results has also been wrongly
attributed to Benjamin Franklin. So I think we talked about
how there is just like a group of smart guy
icons that we're just like, yeah, say he said it.
But the ultimate quotable Einstein, an authoritative compilation of his

(01:00:48):
most memorable utterances, identified the quote as a misattribution and
mentioned its use in the nineteen eighty three novel Sudden
Death by Rita may Brown. This is a sort of
Roman novel about a professional tennis player, and for some
reason they wanted to say Einstein said that thing. Also
worth noting a paperback from the eighties. I think it

(01:01:11):
was like a spy novel gave us the historic myth
that ick bienign Berliner means I'm a donut. Those paperbacks
were just making shit up in the eighties and we
were gobbling it down. Just talking about Einstein's servant looks
the sloppy genius vibe. Something I've noticed. My son plays

(01:01:32):
a lot of chess, and like a lot of the
big chess players have this like really messy chess hair,
not chess hair, messy hair that is called chess hair.
That I have to think if Einstein just had like
a neatly cropped fade or like a butt cut, that
that's what they'd be rocking Einstein, messy bitch. I don't

(01:01:53):
have all the quotes, but all these scientists is one
thing you get from the biography about him is like
all these scientists were just constantly writing letters back and
forth and just ethering each other all the time, and
he was known to do that in a very friendly way.
One o the things so instead of the he was
a slow witted child anecdote that doesn't seem to be

(01:02:15):
particularly true. One cool thing that I think we could
take from his early life is that he was a
huge sci fi reader. He devoured popular science writing of
the late nineteenth century, so you know, nerd alert, but
also just so much science fiction, which I don't know.
I think that's a cool thing to tell kids who

(01:02:36):
want to think I'm a little like Einstein in many ways.
I think the image of him writing a Beam of Light.
He said that he was at least partially inspired by
science fiction writing because they knew that light had a
speed and wrote some interesting thought experiments and stories about that,
which also the importance of sci fi in leading to

(01:03:00):
scientific discovery and like shaping scientific imagination and creative thinking.
A little anecdote related to that, China believed so much
in that idea that like that there was a point
where they were like, we're not making as much scientific
progress in our labs as we would like. And due
to finding out that like a lot of these scientific

(01:03:22):
geniuses were huge sci fi readers, they created a prize
for like basically an X prize, but ours was for
just like spaceflight. Theirs was for like trying to get
sci fi writing going that famous book The Three Body
Problem as a result of that effort. But yeah, I
have to think anecdotes like Einstein was a sci fi nerd,

(01:03:43):
probably helped that happen. And then speaking of China, I
should say that and I learned this kind of after
we started recording. Not uniformly great on the racism stuff.
He was, you know, vocally against anti black in America,
but in Hong Kong, Einstein wrote the following, even those

(01:04:05):
reduced to working like horses never give the impression of
conscious suffering. A peculiar herd like nation, often more like
automatons than people. And then he further opined on the
character of the people he saw in China. No Einstein
stop opining. He said that people were industrious, filthy, and obtuse,
and expressed disdain for the way the Chinese don't sit

(01:04:28):
on benches, blah blah blah, just like a bunch of stupid,
wrongheaded shit, which I think gets to the point we
were talking about about sort of expertise drift where you're
like told you're smart and write about everything, and then
you start popping off about things like the essential character
of some people. You saw out the window of a

(01:04:49):
tour bus. We see it with actors who like look
cool in movies and are like, I should be the
lead singer of a band. And then lastly, a question
that we didn't really get to, but I had this
in my mind as I was heading into the episode,
is like, why haven't there been more Einstein's? Like why

(01:05:11):
where have all the Einstein's gone out? And like one
theory is that I probably believe more than others is
just like he is that dude, he like, you know,
these geniuses happen once every hundred years, Galileo Newton, Einstein.
And then partly I think he also had the trappings

(01:05:35):
of an icon and was like willing to do the
light self mythologizing that I talked about in the episode
in the conversation. But then also if there is a reason,
like if there is something different about our world that
makes it not friendly to finding the Einsteins of our generation.

(01:05:58):
I also am repeatedly struck, just in covering our zeitgeist,
that it's pretty clear that we have less and less
of a meritocracy than we have in the past, you know,
and it wasn't perfect in Einstein's time. Einstein was pushed
back by anti Semitism, failed to get hired, but you know,
at the same time was able to not starve to

(01:06:20):
death when he was failing to get the jobs that
he wanted, and ultimately was able to make these amazing
discoveries in spite of and because of those failures. But today,
I think a lot of that creative genius and energy
like gets subsumed by billionaires or brands that are trying
to like take that spark and like monetize that and

(01:06:42):
like take it for themselves. The thought occurred to me that,
you know, one of the reasons that I think thinking
about icons is interesting is that we are currently living
in a world that is being misled by some very
powerful icons of our time, and oftentimes they are you know,
let's talk about Elon Musk. Like I think if you

(01:07:04):
were like, who's our modern day Einstein, Like, up until
a couple years ago, a lot of people would say
Elon Musk, And I feel like, in our world, like
the fact that he was born to parents who like
owned ruby minds and like used his intellect to become
the richest person in the world are things to take
into account of. Like I think that there is a

(01:07:26):
built in advantage to being extremely wealthy today and built
in kind of disadvantage to not being extremely wealthy today
that probably are not making us the most efficient Einstein
finding machines. So I think the system isn't set up
that well to find the next Einstein. I also think

(01:07:47):
he might just be a singular genius. There might not
be other Einstein's to find. All right, those are some
of the things I wanted to hit at the end here.
I hope you enjoyed this episode. We should be making
more of them, and we will talk to you probably
this afternoon whatever the next episode of the Daily Zeicheist is.
Until then, Bye bye,