The Daily Zeitgeist - Icon Deep Dive #1: Albert Einstein 

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

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.

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She said, Johnny. The kids didn't come home last night. Along the central Texas plains, teens are dying. Suicides that don't make sense. Strange accidents and brutal murders. In what seems to be, a plot ripped straight out of breaking bad drugs alcohol trafficking of people there are people out there that absolutely know what happened listen to paper ghosts the texas teen murders on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts oh hey guys welcome to this spinoff episode of the daily zeitgeist we're calling tentatively the iconograph to show about icons my name's 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.

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 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 dress as 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 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 Urkel. That should give

you a sense of the scope of our inquiry here. But yeah, don't be fooled by the 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? E equals MC squared? 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 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, no, notebook dump. But here I am talking to Miles and Michael Swain about Albert Einstein and plenty of other stuff. 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 Mathau is episode three. It just turns out I'm really into that movie. Episode four, Meg Ryan. Episode five, Tim Robb. Every time I think of Walter Mathel, the image that pops into my head for some reason is him and Dennis the menace with the chicklet dentures. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I don't know why. I never see that. Yeah, it fucks up his dentures and brilliant idea to replace them with chicklet gum. That's his proactive idea. Yeah, because he fucks up his dentures, Mr. Wilson. Or an important meeting or whatever.

Oh, yeah. Mr. Wilson was always taking important meetings. Yeah, was a fucking killer. Oh, yeah, and then what's his face? Christopher Lloyd plays like a crazy drifter in it. Yeah, he did. The role he was born to play. Yeah.

I think a flame goes up his butt or something. because he farts on a campfire. There's something with him farting and fire. Einstein or are we talking about Christopher? Yeah, yeah. A lot of people don't know that Einstein died by farting on a campfire. The flame went up his butt and blew him up. You know, he had the apple that hit his head.

This was what inspired. He's like, holding mine beer. Holden mine beer. Holtz my lager blows his ass up. This is so funny. There's a YouTube account called Fart Share. Fart Share. This is how the Einstein episodes

Open Miles Licking 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 DERDAILY Zeitgeist. Oh.

Which we don't know what we're calling yet. Iconograph, maybe. Keep coming back to iconograph. We'll figure it out. Instead of looking at the Zykeyes through current events, we're looking at icons, powerful pop culture,

forkses that are basically the stars of our shared consciousness. I'm joined as always by my co-host, Mr. Miles Gray! Are we doing a right? Hi. Yes. It's interesting because I don't know what you're about to tell me. So it's hard

for me to... That's the whole point here is I'm here to be dazzled by sexy facts. Sexy facts and Dennis the Menace fart conversations. Yes, yes, 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, a very talented writer who back in those days wrote one of my favorite science articles about like mind-blowing science stuff. So I wanted to have them on here. See if he could explain what any of this shit means. He's the creator of the Small Beans podcast network. It's Michael Swain. Swing!

Might I pitch iconoclass? Do people say iconoclast? We were going iconic cast, but there's a Christian podcast called Iconicast. Why don't they do that? What are they going to do? Are they going to do? Speaking of which, I mean, I assume you're going to hit. One of the very first sketch related things, me and my primary partner over on my small beans comedy and print, Abe Epperson, also a big director of crack.

One of the first things we ever did was like a Jesus meets Hitler thing, which caused Rob Schrob, successful Hollywood comedian to tell us to give up and quit and we're happy and not to pursue comedy. And I understand what he was really saying, well, no, you shouldn't say that to 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 I'm so powerful. Right. And of course, as you age, thanks to outlets like Cracked and now, now just broader internet culture. You find out so much of it

is a package story as well. Yeah, for sure. And it makes you reflect on like, so what is my life? 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. Yeah. They still basically live our lives by them. 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, I could do know. 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 it was sitting behind a car in traffic in L.A. And there was a bumper sticker with an Einstein quote that he definitely didn't say. I was just like, God, man. People really want, like, they just use him to be the guy who, if he said that thing, like it becomes true.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I feel like don't people always do the same, like the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over? Or it's like, that's the big one. 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. 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. That's what's so interesting about physics. Which is why you do multiple experiments.

God doesn't play dice is another one that gets used a lot. he was making a complex point about like quantum theory and like his whether he was back to your particular interpretation of quantum theory the Copenhagen but also he's allowed to be wrong about other stuff or like he also one time said ow fuck I sat on my balls like you know what I mean he said I'm going to fucking marry my cousin was the thing that he said at a certain point um which we'll get into but yeah the the dice thing that 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, essentially. You know those sex dice with the different sex acts on each side. He's like, God wouldn't do that. His, must. Only Einstein play a sex dice. This is my Einstein impression. God plays no sex dice.

Only Einstein. They're 20-sided. But I just want to start out talking about, like, the big things. everybody knows about Einstein. I feel like one of them 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 your Einstein or your Mark Twain. I think another one is college dorm room posters, you know?

And like the Einstein tongue photo is the one. It's like the, yeah, it's, the Bob Marley photo for someone was like a science major.

Oh, we'll get to Bob Marley eventually on this show. But yeah, so that's a real photo. It was taken, like on his 72nd 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, a photographer named Arthur Sass 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. Oh, okay. That was like, yeah, okay. Good for it. I'm glad he got so excited that he wanted to share like a boomer does like AI slop on Facebook. We're like, see this? You see this? 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 canon. But he said, this gesture you will like, because it is aimed at all of humanity, the outstretched tongue reflect my political views. So, little fucking punk rock dog. He was almost funny for a second. Yeah. And he's like, let me explain the shit out of this. He'll be charming. I know. The pictures worth a thousand words. And here come those thousand words right now.

I do feel like the look is important. And then the funny thing is that so the tongue in many ways reflects. I just stand 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. And I think him looking like a rumpled genius with wild hair, Like, if he was, like, a fastidious man with, like, a comb over, like, you know, like, who was just, like, very well put together.

Like, Harry Truman or something? Yeah. Yeah. If he just looked like Harry Truman, that's a great example. Like, nobody knows what Harry Truman, nobody thinks about Harry Truman. I think very similarly, 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 we were like, Einstein, Einstein, Einstein, Einstein. All right, let's do an Oppenheimer. We have time. Let's get an Oppenheimer in here. Although, I will say, I remember 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 be, you know, it's like a Muppet showing up. It's just like he's so iconic that it's just like, wait, why is the guy from the, the picture with the tongue out? Why is he in this historical drama?

No, I thought that was allowed. 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. Manhattan has Einstein, you got Neil's bore, you got, like, you'd expect those people to show up. I would be surprised if Einstein didn't show up in the Oppenheimer movie, frankly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just, I think, the effect of it for some people who just know him from being like,

well okay Einstein and he's the only one you could draw on and happen he's the only one yeah I have my knowledge of Einstein is truly fucking well what was the movie you're just talking about with uh Tim Robbins no no Tim McHugh because I was on Comedy Central all the time

so I watched that many times the photo E equals MC squared everything else I have like the whatever the distillation of Einstein is through culture that has really nothing to do with him as a person yeah so like when I saw him in Oppenheim I was almost like, is this true?

That was a real guy? The guy was really, he talked to Einstein? Nah. I thought he was like, Bain, didn't, wasn't that from the Bain storyline? Yeah, right. I got so, not to put you on the spot at all, but I want to ask Files, can you say what he equals MC squared means in an intuitive way? Energy, is it energy?

Equals. I don't even mean technically, but like, I'm just wondering. Is it just like, we all know it by road, or do you know? Oh, yeah, no, no. truly it's purely just the letters like yeah i know he's famous for that so he equals mass whatever the fuck squared i'm like also science is like the subject i know the least about so yeah it's truly limited to i can write it on a chalkboard don't ask me shit after it because i just show up when jack tells me to and it's always worked out so far i am yeah because i so first of all that is

one of because i want to start with the things everybody knows right like the the the picture, I think, is up there. E equals MC squared is the thing when I asked my children before they left for work today. I sent him out to the minds. Before they left for school today, I was like, do you know who Einstein is? They knew what he looked like, and they knew E 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 the vague sense. So let me

try. Okay, and then you tell me if 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 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 that was kind of what I got that like once you look at things from the perspective of the speed of light, like everything else like can shift, including

how fast time is moving. So there's like no absolute time. How'd I do? Pretty good. 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 has 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.

E equals nc squared. 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 18. 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 are, even if you were moving 99.999% the speed of light, if you shined a flashlight out and measured that light, it would be going relative to you, the speed of light. You cannot catch up to it ever the end.

or at least we still don't understand any way to breach that or even that it could breach. Everything else would unravel if it breached. But, you know, so. And then the other thing that he really intuitive 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 seems 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 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, motherfucker. Sorry, we are all made of star dust as the great prophet Moby tells us. And it's quite literal. Like, he was the one who connected everything is that.

The same stuff that is light is your physical body. that's the same stuff and to think that someone figured that out and then then you're like well how's 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

went holy cow he's right so that's such an amazing reading exactly reading that like the 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 at 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 believing in that. He's like a prophet. And he also just read everything that was out there. But it's like someone coming in and going, time is light. And you go, what are you talking about, you bastard? Yeah. 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 rumpled genius who, like, doesn't have time, like, would show up with, like, one shoe off and, like, a sock on 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. he would read physics constantly and also like play the violin and like he just like really

like to vibe to music and think high thoughts like essentially one of 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 callosum which is the tube between the two hemispheres so it's actually like he was the Michael Phelps by which I mean genetically predisposed to just be dominant of imagining 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. But yeah, and you, I mean, well, and they've done studies showing his body like wicks away lactic acid in a way that's

what do you call it an outlier? Like it should. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, he shouldn't have revealed himself. They're going to dissect him at the Pentagon at some point. But similarly, Einstein seems to have had some physical. brain structure advantages. 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 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, 26 years old. Like he was young and he was a patent clerk, which I also want to get into. 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 class is because I was hung over. The reason

he didn't show up to classes because he thought his teachers were like teaching the wrong thing and was just like devouring science of his own interest, which I think is a big part of 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 was fucking mind-blown. Uh, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back. She said, Johnny. The kids didn't come home last night. Along the central Texas plains, teens are dying. Suicides that don't make sense. Strange accidents and brutal murders.

In what seems to be, a plot ripped straight out of Breaking Bad. Drugs, alcohol, trafficking of people. There are people out there that have been. I absolutely know what happened. Listen to Paper Ghosts, The Texas Teen Murders, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Robert Smith. This is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History

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chapter on the I Heart Radio Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast, episodes drop weekly. What up, y'all? It's your boy, Kevin on stage. I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Month, where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers,

creators, friends, people I admire who had massive success about their massive failure. What did they mess up on? What is their heartbreak? And what did they learn from it? I got judged horribly. The judges were like, you're trash.

I don't know how you got on the show. Boo, somebody had tomatoes. I'm kidding. But if they had tomatoes, they would have thrown the tomatoes. Let's be honest. We've all had those moments we'd rather forget. We bumped our head. We made a mistake.

The deal fell through. We're embarrassed. We failed. But this podcast is about that and how we made it through. So when they sat me down, they were kind of like, we got into the small talk, and they were just like, so what do you got? What? What ideas? And I was like, oh, no. What? Check out not my best moment with me, Kevin on stage on the Iheart radio app, Apple podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back. 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 happened growing up. But I used to frequently encounter the example, really slacking off kid, C average or whatever. Well, Einstein is C-Average, 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 child, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, he was? That was the, I remember learning that in, like, eighth grade because I sucked math. And it was the way they would inspire you.

I remember the room I was in, like, when I learned that because I was like, oh, hell yeah, man. There's a chance for me. Yeah. I 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. And nope. I need a fucking 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. 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 a bit about like he thought he thought it was going to be a toy or something. they were like and so he was like already doing misguided bits yeah yeah yeah yeah very like old comedy early i know right it's like an old comedy late speech they said he was a

late talker but there's a contemporary account of him like making a joke like an interesting an old comic joke at two and a half years old that's what i'm saying like how do you square like if you 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 yes late talker right yeah yeah and all that kind of thing There is some recollections from his parents that they were a little 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.

Yeah, yeah. But he only spoke in full sentences, which is like the 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 high intellect. Yeah, just like really smart. So, yeah, that also gave us the Goodfellow's character, Jimmy, two times, who always says, got to get the papers, 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 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 thing, like which when you think about I keep my brain when I'm thinking about like 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 he was a baby right but I think there's an element of like self-mythologizing like I think he was tend to do that it works like it has to be an ingredient 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, like, building your own mythos and, like, how that, yeah, like telling your story. 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, Gandhi or Mother Teresa. Right. It's like, they're also master savvy master marketers of their own brand. And you're like, well, should they be? Right.

But everything was clicking. We're building an empire of peace and love here. I'm doing fucking miracles over here, man. Yeah. And then there's also just like stuff that like 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're the things that

create meaning. They create the official version in people's shared 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, 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? What's her relationship? She'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 movie? And so I've talked before about this theory that William Goldman has that there are some actors

that we can't accept any time except the present. His example was Michael Douglas. Like, Michael Douglas needs to be in the 80s 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 can't have him be like a lion hunter from the past. So IQ, 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 90s.

Like, she needs to be 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. Timmer Robbins, a classic pasto. Yeah, he's a pasto. Big time pasto.

He's going to the 20s, 30s, anything. That'll slick back real. what they say when they're looking at oh yes it's like get in here slicking his hair yeah I guess Meg Ryan has what they call now they call that iPhone face yeah so the face of someone who's seen an I

but she has the face of somebody who's I don't know logged on to AOL instant message or something I guess 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 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 use that to like make sense of all the things so like it's it's the thing from the movie where you're like pooling things from around you and then like illustrating the shit like he literally had the like agent Cuyon at the end of usual suspects thing where he was like thinking about 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 there's also a story Brian the editor points out of him watching a window washer 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 has all these things that are, like, cinematic ingredients. He is a good movie character. Like, he is this befuddled 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 you're right that he's kind of, like, Yoda in our mind now. But, I mean... Well, he's grandpa. core. Yeah, yeah, he's grandpa. I think he's, like, wise.

But yeah, as producer Victor points out, Yoda fucks. Like, in my mind, Yoda is fucking. We're very open to a flashback where the grandpot core character is young and sexy now and we see them, fuck. We do that with many, many characters.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But my theory on, like, why there hasn't been the big Einstein movie is, like, did you guys see Air the movie about the invention of the first Air Jordan? No, I did see that band play. right great band great band different different thing but basically the way they treat jordan is as if he is

they just don't show his face it's almost like the old testament like vader and a yeah it's like the old testament like treats god where like if you look at his face it will like melt you or something free to george stein briner yeah exactly but 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 I, the way he's been used as like as this like all knowing wizard of everything smart. He's like Yoda mixed with Iron Man. And 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. I think it's also because so many people know just

enough about the dumb shit to give them the completely wrong idea about who he is, that a movie would completely go against all of that. Like if, for example, I have like the most superficial idea of Einstein. If you showed me a trailer and he was like this complex person, I'd be like, bro, I don't want to see this. Yeah, fuck that. Like, this guy is just the shorthand for me for 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. Also interesting that our relationship, since we're talking zeitgeist and icons, to the, because it feels to me like he's specifically smart or intelligent. And like D&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 even though as 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 now disdain smart people and things. Right, right, right. Right. Right.

And many of us don't think smart is bullshit and fake. Right, right. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. 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'd have to decide what fast food is.

And then that this fried chicken place. is beaming his jingle he wrote into space to sell fried chicken. Like anything like that is so trippy to me. 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, atheists, Democrats, Republicans. Like, I don't think there's anyone else like that.

I feel like there's nobody else who is just like 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. But, yeah. I think there's people who like, these are the kinds of people that mostly get when the quote is misattributed.

It's usually in the form of an image macro, right? Is what we're thinking about, like the Facebook's curly. You 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 arena. Churchill gets some play. FDR. Where it's like,

it must be right because they said it. I'm trying to. Lincoln too. Lincoln is like, well, he said it. Mark Twain also gets that. 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. I love writing the N-word down to. But only on the liberal side.

is like if George Carlin said it, you're a fucking square if you don't vibe with that logic, my friend. And the Republicans just take Carlin quotes and be like, Einstein. Yeah. Bill O'Reilly said that offhandedly to me. Right.

There's something you never see. A man taking a shit running at full speed. Einstein. Einstein. I just, some better quotes than the ones that are out there of God doesn't play dice and the definition of stupidity. He was making the same mistake twice.

When he was first struck by a 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 to him when he was four or five. Oh, you figured that one out? I sure like Holmes also, but he doesn't really exist. But he's a stand in for, he must be right. Oh, Sherlock's going to make the list for sure.

He can't be wrong. Yeah. Locke. 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, 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 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, 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 Isaacson keeps being like he's this lone wolf, but like constantly when he's like coming to these conclusions, he's just 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. Oh, well, the Newton quote, if I've seen far, it's because I stood on the shoulders of giants. I feel like it's going to come on. That's another thing. It's like you can't just be good in marketing. If you're an icon, you definitely have to be comfortable with absorbing the credit of whole teams of people into your own historical legacy because no one actually does this stuff

without bouncing it off their friends and stuff. But sorry, I just got 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 the cosmological constant while looking at the clock on the wall in school wishing that it would go faster. so the day would 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 chopping down the cherry tree,

just a story. Bullshit. No, I'm just so inspirational to me. Just the illustration that that story gives of like the universe is a miracle there's even anything versus nothing. There's no real reason to be bored per se. 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 theories were things that first occurred to him when he was like 12. Like he had this vision of himself riding a beam of light. I was like, what would the rest of the world look 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 start calling me doctor. It'll be good for the brand, essentially. And so he got a PhD. His doctoral thesis was on viscosity. And it ended up being something that like people use to this day. Like engineers have used throughout the 20th century and it was just like kind of a thing he tossed off. I was just like, yeah, throw away Ph.D. idea. Yeah, exactly. I love that. The whole slime industry is built on this paper. Yeah, I think they said dairy. It's like a lot of dairy. It was not milked before. You know who gets it? Ben Franklin and. Ben Franklin gets it a lot.

And obviously Edison. Where you go, and he invented this and that and that and this and that and this and that. And you're like, are you sure? Are you. I don't know. Yeah, I had a key on a kite or something, right? Yeah. Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back. She said, Johnny. The kids didn't come home last night.

Along the central Texas planes, teens are dying. Suicides that don't make sense. Strange accidents and brutal murders. In what seems to be, a plot ripped straight out of Breaking Bad. drugs, alcohol, trafficking of people. There are people out there that absolutely know what happened. Listen to Paper Ghosts, the Texas Teen Murders, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Robert Smith. This is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. and some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all. It's a very simple, elegant lesson.

Make something people want. First episode, How Southwest Airlines Use Cheap Seats and Free Whiskey to fight its way into the airline business. The Most Texas Story ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're going to have mavericks on the show. We're going to have plenty of robber barons. so many robber barons. And you know what? They're not all bad. And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments that

often get overlooked. Like Thomas Edison and the electric chair. Listen to business history on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. On this week's episode of the next chapter, I, D.D. Jakes, get to sit down with Oprah Winfrey, a media mogul for anthropists and global trailblazer. My life, although it may look like an anomaly, it has only been possible because I was obedient to the calls. This episode dies deep into how Oprah turned pain into purpose and what it really means to evolve with everybody watching.

Every decision I have ever made has come from sitting with the spirit and asking God, What would you have me do first? Whether you're rebuilding, reimagining, or just trying to hold it together, this one will speak directly to you. Listen to the next chapter on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast, episodes drop weekly. What up, y'all? It's your boy, Kevin on stage. I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Month, where I talk to artists. athletes, entertainers, creators, friends, people I admire who had massive success about their

massive failures. What did they mess up on? What is their heartbreak? And what did they learn from it? I got judged horribly. The judges were like, you're trash. I don't know how you got on the show. Boo, somebody had tomatoes. I'm kidding. But if they had tomatoes, they would have thrown the tomatoes. Let's be honest. We've all had those moments we'd rather forget. We bumped our head. We made a mistake. The deal fell through. We're embarrassed. We failed. But this podcast is about that and how we made it through. So when they sat me down, they were kind of like, we got into the small talk. And they were just like, so what do you got? What? What ideas? And I was like, oh, no. What? Check out not my best moment with me, Kevin on stage on the Iheart radio app,

Apple podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. 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 existing, in the modern news cycle, would he have been on the Epstein flight logs? Would he have flown on the Lillian Express? Taking credit for many who will remain faceless and absorbing their story into his own. Yeah. So I will say, like, a lot of the things people, you know, if you dig a little bit deeper, people are like, Einstein was kind of a freak. He married his cousin.

Do you see that tongue out? That's a thought on political establishment. He's just sending a signal right there. We know he wasn't a groomer. Ah? Dechevelled? Famously disheveled. 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. Sorry, was that after he became like a rock star? Yes. It was like as he was becoming a rock star.

He married his cousin. The arc is of course classic that you get rich and famous and you trade up your spouse, but I love he's like just waiting for the clout to marry that hot cousin. Also, she should have known. She's like, I was the only woman in the class. Right.

It's like, yeah, fine, you, let's go. Yeah. You'll keep my seat warm. This is a weird. I looked up how common is it to marry your cousin? And you were Googling that before. And now Google has me on a list. Yeah.

I Google that every day just to see what the latest numbers are. To be fair, I've met your cousin. He's really cute. Yeah, he's the best. Slightly over 10% of all marriages worldwide are estimated to be between second cousins or closer. Or closer. Damn.

Second or closer. Was his? Second, his was first in like multiple places. Les Cousins danger. Yeah, it was a real tangled web. The overall rate appears to be declining, says Wikipedia on the Wikipedia page, cousin marriage.

But the guy has compiled that date his parents were cousins. Yeah, don't read. Right. But I also think maybe not that uncommon at the time, I guess, because, you know, it's 10% now and it's declining. 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 no one would know. Right.

So these are the people who are like, yes, sir. I did married. God damn right. I did. Oh, gross. Second cousins? No, my first cousin. My first cousin.

My first cousin. Come on. These are provable cousin marriages. Wait, but did they have kids? They didn't have kids, right? They didn't have kids. She already had two daughters. Yeah.

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 no clear evidence on that. Have I mentioned that I'm very very smart. Incredibly smart. He had affairs constantly. So this is one of those things where you're like, oh, you don't say. He had this theory on monogamy. He had a theory on that too. It wasn't the 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 kind of just a freak like that, you know?

So, after general relativity was proven in 1919, Einstein became an international celebrity. Women threw themselves at him. One scientist friend said that Einstein attracted women like a magnet attracts filings. It's so specific. I love the... Or, like, filings attract women. In Berlin, 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 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. Oh, yeah. Constantly having. He didn't need help. He didn't need the help. Yeah.

it's more 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 gonna fuck around if you can't get with that I'm Ben Franklin baby so it's a little better than being on the island

I don't think he'd be on the logs yeah I'd be on the logs I think he's also I think also based on how Epstein was around scientists he'd probably be like dude I can't be around this fucking guy he keeps telling me about fucking science yeah any other things that you guys know about him before I get to

some of the stuff that gets written out of his story that I don't think has 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. Not having a thing ready to go. Yeah, I fucking rang the rag dry up top when I said it equals MC squared. Clearly, 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, Olm's motto is Umensis Mathematica, which it just means

Ulm people are mathematicians. 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 shoulders of Mathematicae, maybe. Like, the other thing, just the high job, I think, is incredibly important, like, the fact 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 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 where people refer to like relativism as like a Jewish perspective.

and like a hallmark of like the Semitic way of thinking. Equals MC squared. He was very Jewish to me. Yeah, what the fuck. You're saying that. It's the craziest shit to be like, I don't know, man.

Energy. Really? Yeah. We might even 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 injustice is perpetrated in the United States. The treatment of black Americans was particularly appalling to Einstein. In 1931, he published editorials criticizing the notorious Scottsboro Boys trial. In 46, he told the graduating class of Lincoln University, which is the oldest historically black college in the U.S. of 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 intend to be quiet about it. Did he actually say that, though? That is from a speech. after he was famous.

Mark Twain. That was Mark Twain. Yeah, that's right. And then Princeton was de facto segregated as a town. And in 1937, Marion Anderson played a concert in Princeton, but 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 Bois was put on trial as a foreign agent during the Red Scare of the 50s,

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 fucking amazing oh shit fucking that's the cloud already working for you because that seems

he knew because again one I always think about is Bobby Fisher who if people don't know was the best chess player ever and think of that like if that's all you are that's your that's your iconic thing and there's this if you see him in documentaries

he's so narcissistic and so into himself and his own myth and it's just it's like let's play badminton motherfucker like all you do is such a niche thing you got to calm 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 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 objective. I can't say what you're wrong, Einstein. But it's like, fucking morrow.

What fuck am I going to say? It's just so funny that the guy is so. But his myth is so. That the myth is so large that in a legal proceeding, the judge is like, dude. Exactly. The fact that you're even going to pull up with Albert Einstein, that's, yeah, man, maybe you, yeah, fine.

you're not a communist. I guess. Did you even see the car accident in the sign? No, but car accidents involve physics. That's true. That's fair, sir. I'm sorry, sir.

Sorry. Are you calling me a liar? No, God. Jesus Christ, dude. No, never, never. You're right. Should I call Jesus Christ?

You're a little girl, right? I actually have his number. Just a complete idiot's idea. All these people know each other. Fuck, he probably does know him. He's going to call, he's going to call Jesus. Jesus on me. As for how America, 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 1932, came to America. Hitler was named Chancellor in 1933. So he got out just in time. There was opposition against welcoming Einstein as an American citizen. The American Legion and a group called the Women Patriot Corporation lodged 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. 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 1955. His FBI file was 1,427 pages long. Wow. And it was just what,

just a list of all these like women he was banging or something like probably probably a lot of compromise 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 a number of that shit yeah i don't like sound communist This is a very atheistic to me. You better knock that shit off, Einstein. All right, send some guys to this guy. Watch this guy.

Knock that shit off. Better knock that. The fuck. 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. It's like truly like six-year-old shit.

But I do think, like, the FBI really, like, as we're working through different icons, like having a long FBI rap sheet is like kind of that is a helpful ingredient. He was also, he was a pacifist. He was real, 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 FDR being like, we think the Germans might 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, 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 in, like,

anti-nuclear proliferation throughout the course of his life. And then I will just say the image we associate him with is old Einstein. All his great theories came out from 26 to, like, mid-30s, essentially. Like, I think a thing that you see with people who gain 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 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, you win some, you lose some. You have a peak of your career. And then you slowly fall out of another people have to pick of the torch.

he's just like anyone else in that regard. Yeah, he's like jaw 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, it actually is all you don't know. And of course, it's like, well, the professor from.

Futurama sense, I think, at one point, but it is true as 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. So it might literally be like certain things, 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 in a way that we'll never even be able to comprehend what?

What do you mean? It's not a valid question. It doesn't matter. It's all above your pay grade. Right. I think the professor says, like, science never ends. Yeah. Whether that's good or bad. We're still very, very far from. Well, that's that with the science. We're all done. Yeah. We're nowhere here. I will say he died from a burst a order on April 18th, 195 at 76. And I'm just saying if he was so smart about science, why is he dead? heart science. That's how you know he wouldn't be in the Epstein files because he would have lived a lot longer, probably to be evil. That's true.

It was way too soon. Died way too young. Einstein was stabbed in the back to death, but it was called a suicide. That's how it was aorta. Yeah. It's pierced with a dagger. On the levels of relative iconography, I'll say I think he's like near the top of the list. S tier, yeah.

Yeah, I think he's the, I think he's really, like, I'll put it this way. Michael Jordan is the most iconic person of, I think, my lifetime as far as the, like, U.S. shared consciousness goes, and there's an actor named Michael B. Jordan. He just added an initial. And that was enough. And we were like, we'll take. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Albert Brooks had to change his whole ass 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? What the fuck? Yeah, you piece of shit. Thank you guys for joining us. Oh, yes. Michael Swain. Yeah.

Where can people find you, follow you, all that good stuff? 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 a bunch of their material. That came to a conclusion as well.

So I am quite happily full-time devoted to just my podcast network and raising my baby son and terrified about income. So if you want to go patronize my podcast network, it's over at SmallBeans and we just Patreon.com slash SmallBeans. 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 a long series. That's me and Cody Johnson of some more news watching every episode of Battlestar Galactica in order. And I am the guy who is a huge Trekkie but has never seen Battlestar. Cody's the guy who's seen it a hundred times. It's his favorite show.

And I don't know who's a Cylon and I'm guessing in real time and all that kinds of stuff. It's really fun. But we do tons of stuff. Mostly deep readings of film, television, and video games. there you go yeah it's a great it's a great network everybody should go subscribe sorry sorry because you guys got a great audience and people always roll through so i did want to say my very last video on cracks that came out a couple months ago was a two-hour feature length fully scripted cracked style essay vid on the entire history of groundskeeper willie that involved me ingesting

and cutting apart and reassembling all 32 seasons of the simpsons oh my god it's one of the It's like a movie. I made a movie. 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 Willie. And I think we can all safely say fuck cracked again. You're allowed 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 there. Whoever started it should be running. out of town on a round. Absolutely.

Asshole. All right. That was fun. That was fun, you guys. Here is the stuff, some things I miss. This is No, no, no, no, no. Notebook Dump. That was perfect. We should just clip that and use

that over and over again. Maybe I had some sound effects. We don't have sound drops just yet. We're remarkably ill-prepared for this new version of the 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.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. It 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 were just like, yeah, say he said it. But the ultimate quotable Einstein, an authoritative compilation of his most memorable utterances, identified the quote as a misattribution and mentioned its use in the 1983 novel Sudden Death by Rita May Brown. This is a sort of romance 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 80s, I think it was like a spy novel, gave us,

the historic myth that Iqbinine Berliner means I'm a donut. Those paperbacks were just making shit up in the 80s and we were gobbling it down. Just talking about Einstein's servant looks, the sloppy genius vibe. Something I've noticed, my son plays a lot of chess and like a lot of the big chess players have this like really messy chess hair, not chest 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 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 other things. So instead of the he was a slow-witted child anecdote that doesn't seem to be particularly true uh one 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 19th century so you know nerd alert but also just so much science fiction uh which i don't know i think that's a cool thing to tell kids who want to think i'm a little like Einstein in many ways. I think the image of him riding 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 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, 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 geniuses were huge sci-fi readers, they created a prize for, like, basically an X prize, but ours was for just, like, spaceflight. There's 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 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 racism in America. But in Hong Kong,

Einstein wrote, the following. Even those 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 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 tour bus. We see it with actors who 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 the in my mind as I was heading into the episode is like, why haven't there been more Einstein's? Like, why, where have all the Einstein's gone? Ah, ooh. 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 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 Einstein's of our generation. I also am repeatedly struck just in covering Arazitegeist 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 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, like, you know, 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 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 mines and like used his intellect to become the richest person in the world are like are things to take into account

of like I think that there is a 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 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 Zykeyes is. Until then, bye-bye.

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