The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Einstein: The Man and His Mind by Gary S. Berger, Michael DiRuggiero

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

Einstein: The Man and His Mind by Gary S. Berger, Michael DiRuggiero https://amzn.to/3NZcF5s An unprecedented visual biography of the iconic pioneer of modern physics, with signed photographs, letters, manuscripts and more A one-of-a-kind, hard-cover, 4.4 pound book with rarely-seen photos of Albert Einstein as well as of beautifully preserved letters, manuscripts, journals, and even equations written in Einstein's hand. Extraordinary among Einstein biographies, the book presents the holdings of an unparalleled private collection of Einstein memorabilia and helps place in historical context his ideas about time, gravity, quantum theory, and cosmology. With annotations and commentary by the collection owner, by a world-class rare book dealer, and by eminent physicist Hanoch Gutfreund of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, this book is fascinating reading for people interested in scientist biographies. It's also an exquisite photo research opportunity for scholars of the history and philosophy of physics.

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linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfoss. And over there on TikTok, chrisfoss1, we're trying to be cool. And it's not working because we're old. But we're trying to keep up, so check that out as well. He is the author of the newest book that just came out November 8th, 2022. Gary S. Berger is on the show with us today. His book is called Einstein, The Man and His Mind. He had both.

Clearly, I only have one, which is my man, but there's no mind. But we'll be talking about this amazing, beautiful book that he has put together, and we're going to have him brought right on the show. Garyary welcome the show how are you i'm great how are you chris i am excellent my friend welcome to the show congratulations on the new book give us a dot com where people can find you on the interweb which is in the sky well uh the book is uh described there's some photos, videos, and ways to see this book at the website Einstein-the-man-in-his-mind.net. There you go.

So what motivated you on to write this book? Is this your first book? What motivated you on to write this book? Well, I mean, collect the photographs in in it too, the visual aspect of it. What motivated me was I have thought about Albert Einstein for decades. When I was growing up, I heard a lot about him. I'm at the age where I was alive when he was

alive. And when I first heard about relativity in school, I really didn't understand what it was. And, you know, I kind of more or less forgot about it, but later in life, I, in reading, you know, about Einstein, I decided, hey, I really want to understand, you know, I'm not a mathematician, I'm not a physicist, but I want to understand why he's so famous. What did he actually do? And so, you know, over the course of about the last 25 to 30 years, I began collecting photographs and other documents, you know, by Einstein and studying them and, you know, trying to learn, reading, watching videos, you know, just trying to learn what I could. And then over these years, I realized, hey, I've got probably the largest private collection of original Einstein items anywhere. And I decided, hey, you know, I can share this with other people and let them see and learn from it as well. So that was the concept behind this book. To me, it's different from other books about Einstein because it is based on photographs and other images accompanied by a pretty concise text that explains, you know,

who he was and what his life was about from age 16 until his death at age 76. There you go. Yeah, it's in chronological order. It's basically, you know, I would describe it as a coffee table type of book because it's oversized. It's quite heavy, you know, in order to get the reproductions right. The weight of the paper and all of that, you know, was involved in the design. But I think anybody who's interested in even curious in any way about Einstein or his discoveries or really the way he thought that's what interested me how did he

come to these realizations that nobody had ever dreamed of before and that now you know we see uh in our current life i mean it brought us into the modern age of physics so that's that was kind of the motivation was to just share this information and um the enjoyment the real pleasure of getting to know him as an actual man uh and how his mind worked that's g that was what interested me the most there you go and it's a 4.4 pound book it's a giant tome very large and uh beautifully done uh you know it's it's visually uh epic to look at and uh it's quite interesting so i would give tell us a little bit about your biography your background and and what what brought you to this point or or some of your journey so we can get to know you a little better well my background uh i mean i'm a um i'm not a physicist or a historian.

I'm a doctor. And my previous work, I published quite a lot, but it was all in medicine. This is really the first time in my life that I really decided I wanted to write about this man that, to me, is one of the most incredible people who ever walked the earth. Again, I think what differentiates us from the other animals is our ability to think logically and also creatively. And he had this capacity far beyond, you know, most ordinary people.

Yeah. So, as I mentioned earlier, I think that when I was a teenager, I got to know a physicist who was a friend and a student of Einstein's. And so, you know, I always had this kind of curiosity about Einstein. You know, why? What was it? You know, I know he's a genius. He's known all over the world, but what was it that he actually did? And that's what got me started on this project of learning. There you go.

And so with these photographs, I mean, do you own the copyright to them? You, you've been collecting them over the years. I own a copyright to them? You've been collecting them over the years? I own a copyright to the book. The photographs, some of the photographs, the copyright is owned by the original photographer. We trace down for every image that we use in this book, you know, we trace down the ownership and, uh, but most of it, yeah,

I would say probably, uh, the majority of the, uh, photos in the book, uh, are mine in terms of copyright. There you go.

Uh, and, and there's a lot of other things that are in here, like his notes, uh, that are very detailed or, you know, things that he's thinking about,

things that kind of give you an insight to the glimpse of his mind. Tell us about some of those as well. So there's pictures of him and then pictures of his work. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website.

You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements, if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcast podcasting corporate stuff uh with over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as ceo and be sure to check out chris fos leadership institute.com now back to the show yeah actually i'll show you just you mentioned the size and weight of the book it's a big book it is quite large you can see it's beautiful though it had to be this way in order to be able to reproduce

you know like photographs as they were taken as you can see wow and even so uh with this size book there were a few of the photographs that we had that shrink in size, but everything else is true to actual size. So you can actually read his notes and the size that they would be and get a good, be able to kind of read it. Because, yeah, some of the notes and stuff, if you shrunk them down to a very small book, the handwriting and stuff that'sunk them down to very small book uh the handwriting and stuff that's on them would be probably harder to read yeah and you know we kind of intersperse yes but different things like uh we intersperse with um when i say we i my co-author was michael derugiero who owns the Manhattan Rare bookstore, and he helped me over the years assemble this collection.

But, you know, we kind of sprinkled in various anecdotes and little vignettes that make a point. For example, you know, talking about Einstein's creativity and the way he thought. One of the things he said was that if he were not a physicist, he would have been a musician. Oh, wow. And there's a picture of him in the book. Kind of in his study,

he looks like he's silently leading the orchestra as he's listening to music on a stereo and he said you know i think in music i live my daydreams in music really uh you know so it's kind of an interesting just a little one little point but i think that has to do with, again, you know, this idea of creativity. Another thing that's included in the book was his son, Hans Albert, describing that whenever Einstein kind of came up against a problem that he was stuck and couldn't make any headway, he would resort to playing his violin. And after that, you know, the problem would be solved. So he thought in this imaginative way. He created thought experiments, but he also, he had this relationship between his ideas and music. I mean, that's kind of an amazing thing.

Yeah, and it's an interesting balance to his mind and stuff and what went into it. You know, being able to look at the world in a different angle, I think that's why people, I mean, one of the reasons people respect something like him is his ability to look at the world in a different angle, I think that's why people, I mean, one of the reasons people respect something like him is his ability to look at the world through a different lens than what was accepted and see things and kind of see into the future and understand the world. And I think that's why people have always been so enthralled with him, really, when it comes down to it. So, yeah, there's another little passage in the book that's interesting with a picture of him in California. And he visited, he went to see the opening show of a movie of Charlie Chaplin. And Chaplin was there. He and Chaplin exchanged some words, you know, which have been quoted.

Chaplin saying, you know, or he said to Chaplin, you know, you're amazing. You don't say a word and the whole world understands you. And Chaplin's response was, ah, but your glory is even greater. The world doesn't understand a thing of what you say, yet they love you. So, you know, it kind of points out what Einstein wrote about was complex. And most people, even his peers, you know, the physicists of the day, really didn't understand all of it. So it took many years, you know, before he was given recognition. There's a description.

This is now one week before the centennial of his Nobel address. That's a whole interesting story in itself. Because he would think that he would have won the prize easily and for his theory of relativity, which is what his greatest contribution was, what he's most well known for. But, you know, that never happened. Wow. Yeah. So there's just a lot of he had a very dedicated life, you know, to his work and his thought and his imagination of what the world really, how the universe really was.

Do you think, what do you think are going to surprise some people in the book? Maybe things that haven't been seen before, maybe things that people are going to take away from the book and be like, wow, that was amazing. I didn't really know about that. I think one thing people will take away from this book is not just a, you know, understanding the essence of his scientific contributions,

but get an emotional response from looking at him as he develops in age through the years. When I look at some of these photographs, you can see his emotions coming through, his ability coming through his ability to focus. Many of the best photographs in my opinion in the book

were taken by photographers where they just were in his presence long enough where he began to ignore them and went on about, you know, pulled out his pad and pencil and started working on problems. And they took these candid photographs of him and you see the intensity of his concentration, this kind of far away look in his eye, like, you know, he's in another world and it's captured in these photographs and you see the emotional toil in his face over the years of war,

his dedication to pacifism, his changing his stance on that when he became a U.S. citizen and was concerned that the Nazis might develop an atomic bomb. He was instrumental in bringing to the attention of President Franklin Roosevelt the theoretical possibility that this could be done. And that was something that he regretted severely when the bomb was actually dropped. You see these things, I think, you know,

that's what comes across to me about this book that's different from any book that's ever been written before that I know of. And it's that you actually get to appreciate who, not only, you know, what he did, how he thought, but who he was as a person. There you go. Like, here's an example of this where it's,

here he is, there's some notations here where he's working on problems relating to understanding gravitational forces, gravitational forces, quantum theory, and the implications of general theory of relativity. I think one of his things is off. I see what the problem is here. No, I don't.

No, I don't. I'm not good with hunting. But you've got these beautiful papers, and so you can see, you know, I think the point of intrigue really is you can see his mind, you know, and he's working on this stuff, and the point of intrigue really is you can see his mind you know and he's he's working on this stuff and the simplicity of it is extraordinary and he's got these math equations there he's clearly using that i flunked in calculus and could never figure out so uh he's

definitely uh probably a grade or two ahead of me on that uh but no it did i know that there was uh we've had people on the show that uh you know talked about his love interests and relationships romances i know there's a lot of love letters that he wrote and he's very elegant and i think what's interesting about you know you talk about the emotion of the man you know i i would always have assumed that uh would be like, you know, this very logical guy, like, you know, I don't know, who's the Sherlock Holmes, you know, elementary, my dear, he was a human being. He wasn't perfect. He had personal issues like any of us do, but that did not detract from his ability to enter a mental state, I would say, where, you know, the rest

of the world kind of just disappeared. And he was in his own mind thinking about the problems. This is how he would actually came to be able to solve these physical problems, was to simplify them down into thought experiments. And there are a number of examples, you know, given in the book of those thought experiments and what they showed. And he was also, he was a very humble, unassuming person. He didn't spend, I don't think he spent any time in his life,

you know, trying to impress or please other people. He, as he aged, you know, he kind of simplified his life down to the point where we have a picture of him at his citizenship ceremony, you know, when he became a U.S. citizen. And the photographer took a picture kind of angling from the floor up that accentuates the fact that he wasn't wearing socks. You know, things like that were typical. He didn't bother cutting his hair.

That was a waste of time. You know, no need for barbers. One leather jacket solved the problem of, you know, clothing. This was his lifestyle. You know, he was basically a simple, humble person. clothing. This was his lifestyle. He was basically a simple, humble person. He was very dedicated to justice, but I would say most of, again, going back to what got me interested

I think was the science part of it, because, and this, I think, relates, you know, quite a bit to our current day, what he really was, was a seeker of truth. Really? You know, the idea that there are facts, there are universal truths, and that they really matter. And, you know, that's, to me, like one of the highest callings, you know, one can have is to be a seeker of truth. And that's, nothing deviated him from that and from expressing what he believed was to be true.

There you go. I mean, truth is always important because if you don't have truth, well, then you don't have anything really. I mean, when you think about it, right? Yeah. were people who had alternate facts. You know, when he was, when he departed Germany as the Second World War, you know, was beginning, he was able to get out of Germany before. And his, because he was a pacifist

and he rejected German citizenship and he spoke out against, you know, the warlike factions. There were something like, there was a group called the 100 scientists who all signed a proclamation, you know, stating that Einstein's theory of relativity, you know, wasn't true. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, and his comment was pretty simple when he said it would only take one, you know, to prove me wrong.

So, you know, having a hundred people saying something's not true doesn't make it not true. That's what I tell everybody when I'm trying to convince someone I'm right. So there you go. Well, it's a beautiful tome, and there's a lot of stuff in it. I think people are going to take away from it just some really great things. And any last thoughts or suggestions you want to make before we go out? Well, I just think, you know, if you're interested in Einstein, this is something that I think you'll enjoy.

It's not a book to be necessarily read from beginning to end. It's more one to browse through and think about, you know, as you look at the images, they say a picture is worth a thousand words. You know, what you take away is thinking about what that was, you know. So I think for somebody who's curious about Einstein, you know, this is a great introduction. There you go. There you go.

And, and the beautiful one as well. I mean, it makes a great, uh, not only read, but, uh,

and, and visual aspect, but you know, a great coffee table book. So if you want to, you know, impress everybody at how smart you are, you can be like,

Hey, check out what I got. Take a look at this. That's. You can be like, hey, check out what I got here. That's true. Einstein always is kind of synonymous with genius. If you say that you really understand Einstein, I guess you have to be

pretty smart. I'll go through his notes and I'll see if I can figure out his math and all that stuff. Good luck. I'll try and be like, what his math and all that. Good luck. I'll try and be like, uh, what's his face at Goodwill hunting, you know,

where he goes and solves the math. So there you go. Well, it's been wonderful to have you on the show, uh, Gary, we really appreciate it. Very insightful.

And what a wonderful story. Uh, give us your.com so that people can find you on the interwebs. Please. Uh, Einstein hyphen, the man and his mind. net there you go there you go uh so thanks uh for coming on the show we really appreciate it thanks man it's for tuning in go to goodreads.com fortress chris voss youtube.com fortress chris voss uh linkedin.com

fortress chris voss all those crazy places on the internet that we are at. Pick up the book. Order wherever fine books are sold. And, you know, share it with friends. You know, the more we know, the smarter we are. Einstein, The Man and His Mind came out November 8, 2022 by Gary S. Berger. And Michael, is it D. Ruggiero? D. Ruggiero. There we go. There we go. Anyway, thanks And Michael, is it D. Ruggiero? D. Ruggiero.

There we go. There we go. Anyway, thanks, guys, for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time. And that should have...