The Sad Story of William James Sidis

advice and used the secret ingredient Coleman's mustard. Oh of course, friends who are weigh into Coleman's. By the way, it's really great in deviled eggs. I'm not kidding. I believe it. I'm sure if you're a mustard fan, it's the one to go to. Oh yeah, you hate mustard for remember the narrative I hate mustard And he refused to accept that. Yeah, yeah, it's just so bonkers that I can't wrap my head

around it, I guess is the problem. Speaking of narrative, this this story today is a bit of a cautionary tale on narratives. I think, oh, well, well put um and you know, we'll get into it here in a second. But it's the story of a of a young genius prodigy.

And in researching this there you know a lot of conflicting accounts about how his home life was and how his parents treated him, and uh, it's a story of media sensationalism, and it's a story of parents who were ahead of the curve in a lot of ways for the time. But also I don't know about victims, but also just sort of fell into the usual state of parenthood at the time, which is end of the very sort of beginning of the twenties and reso, it's not

like parenting then, let's that it's at its peak, you know. Yeah, no, And you can also say that his parents, conceivably and him went against the grain of normalcy and status quo, and that um, you know, the American public immedia kind of bristled at that, and that they were treated poorly for that. And so you know, do we how much do we need to question of what what is said about them from you know, journalism at the time, And it's a it's a big morass, basically, I think to

paraphrase what you're saying. It's a cautionary tale about making cautionary tales out of anything, right, Yeah, although I do think this is a cautionary tale. But okay, so we'll we'll we'll get to the end. Well, in the end, we'll reveal what you think it's a cautionary tale about. Yeah, and you know, well, let's just get into it. Let's let's talk about William James. Is it sidis or side it situs? Is it side ice? I don't think. So that's what you keep in your pocket for when you've

got some lukewarm soda. Well, just like everything else with this guy, heard a couple of different pronunciations on YouTube, so so I saw it's it spelled out a couple of different places that seem to know what they were talking about side us, Yeah, with the emphasis on the side. But I had not heard of him before, had you. Yeah.

I mean we did a chapter in our book on prodigies, and um, I he wasn't in the book, but I remember reading a little bit about him at the time, and I think just the whole idea of child prodigies really, um, it's super fascinating to me. So I would like to do one on Prodigies, maybe tackled. That would be maybe one of the first book chapters we retrofit as a podcast. Okay, cool, Yeah,

but yeah, they just have always fascinated me. And Billy was interesting in that a lot of times prodigies are prodigies in like a single discipline, not serily saying they're big dumb dumbs everywhere else, but there's like one major focus. But young Billy was a language prodigy, a math and science prodigy. He was just a well rounded kind of no a lot kid. Yeah, he really was, and he was.

He's very frequently lifted up as the prodigy, perhaps the most gifted child that has ever lived, certainly at least in the recorded history in the West, and maybe the smartest human. Yeah, it's entirely possible. Yeah it is. Which I think is another thing that will really come up in that Prodigies episode is you know exactly how do you how do you say who's the smartest and who's not?

Is it you know? Or i Q tests reliable? Which I think in addition to Prodigies, we need to do one just on i Q tests took Yeah, and I also want to go ahead and correct myself when I said he was well rounded, he was academically well round, did because as we will see, he was not very well rounded as a young child. Uh, and that was one of the major mistakes that his parents made, Yeah,

for sure. UM And one of the other things that he's also often kind of held out as an example of, is this this burning question that we still have today, is um, are gifted children the products of their environment? Like can you just take basically any child and make them a gifted prodigy? Um? Or is it you know, genetics? Is it really just you know, is that we're gifted apt apt you know, where like you're you're kind of born with this. You didn't do anything to earn it

or deserve it. You just it's just who you are. You're a gifted, intelligent person from a very early age. And we still haven't gotten to the bottom of that. But um and he actually he he kind of muddies that the answer to that question more than answers it at all, you know, because I mean, I definitely believe that you were born gifted, but then from the moment

you're born on everything else plays in. So he comes one of the reason I think he he muddies the The answer to that question is he comes from very intelligent stock. Both his mother and his father were extremely intelligent people, um, but they also were the kind of people who tried to educate him starting around age two, maybe even a little earlier. So he's an amalgamation of

those two things. Parents who were incredibly intelligent who would have ostensibly passed along some pretty smart jenes um, and parents who you know, made him produced an environment for him that made him into, you know, a prodigious learner. Yeah. So let's let's start with his folks. His dad, Boris.

They were both Russian immigrants, and his dad was put in jail and Russia before he managed to get out of there for apparently in a prison that was so small he couldn't even recline himself fully in sleep and to sleep in a little like fetal position, I think, And he was he was jailed for for teaching, and he he was teaching peasants. He didn't have permission. They didn't like that in Russia. He was let out after a couple of years on the condition that he didn't

teach other people how to read anymore. And supposedly didn't read himself, was under surveillance, but then got the heck out of there. Yeah, he was like, I see the writing on the wall. It's time for me to get out of here. I'm going to go to America. Because at the time, America was this shining beacon for immigrants saying come, We're a land of opportunity. We turned the

lights on in the Statue of Liberty. Tom Brocott did it himself and just like a motel six and um, it's uh, it's it's the doors are open basically, So he and Sarah um Billy's mom both took America up on that, although separately. They actually met in America, although they were both from the Ukraine, I believe, yeah, and Boris he he sort of bucked a lot of trends back then, and this was in the late eighteen hundreds. He was an atheist, um, which was you know, not

in fashion at the time. He later got into like he made a big name for himself in the early days of psychology and psychoanalysis, and he was an opponent of Freud, which was certainly rocked the boat at the time. And then he really despised traditional education and kind of all its forms and the way it was back then, particularly wrote memorization, it was he just hated it so much he saw zero value in it whatsoever. And so like that's kind of the basis of his concept of

educating not just children but anybody. It's figure out what the basics are, learned the basics, the fundamentals, and then use those to reason your way to answer basically any question that you possibly could have. And that that idea applies to everything from philosophy to math, to literature to history to language. That you can figure anything out if you understand just a few fundamentals of it. And so

that's what his big focus was on. That. Yes, Sarah, his mother, Um, she worked your way through college, paid for it herself. She worked as a nurse at night, went to medical school during the day. I believe was the first woman admitted to Boston medical school or medical college. And she never became a doctor, though she instead chose

to parent. And Um, they both worked their way to the I mean, by the time they came to the East Coast in the eighteen eighties, they both worked their way to the top of as high as you could get in academic achievement in the United States. I think Boris had his bachelor's and masters from Harvard in three years. And uh, yes, Sarah went to Boston. You and that they were both overachievers and obviously had a kid. I never really They had a daughter named Helena, but I

didn't see how much she achieved. I don't know either, although I saw that she and her brother shared a lot of similar interests, so they were close throughout his whole life. I'm sure she was pretty smart too, Yeah, I would guess so too. Dumb, No, for certainly not um. But but the the one of the things about Boris and Sarah's both of them. Everything you just described that they achieved in America, they did within ten years of arriving. And when they both arrived, neither one of them spoke

a word of English. They went from speaking no English to things like m d s and pH ds within ten years, so they made quite a splash. Um. And Boris himself enjoys kind of a separate fame from his son as well. He was a really well um respected, uh pioneer in psychology. I believe he was um instructed under William James, who was considered one of the two founders of psych pology, who basically believed that behavior human behavior um was a way that humans adapt to our environment.

And so if you could just kind of study the environment, study behavior, you can just kind of understand the world that much better. And that was his kind of foundation for psychology. And um Boris sitis was, you know, one of his proteges um and he uh, bores it is. Yeah, it does, um, But the uh man, you really threw me off with bores itis because now I can't stop thinking about what bores itis is. Enlarged foot. Sure, the bores ITAs like a big cartoony like keep on trucking

guy foot, but just one of them. And then now we can put it to bed, thank you, because I think it would have thrown off the whole rest of the episode if we hadn't just addressed it on his face, you know. So um he so Boris Um looked up to Williams so much he named his son after him. It's William James sitis Um. But so he was respected

in his in his own right as well. But it was it was Billy who became like far and away the most famous Situs, and it was largely because his parents really welcomed the spotlight and then realized far too late in Billy's life that that was not a good thing for a kid. Yeah, should we go over the you took up these from Sarah Situs is another condition? Um, you put ciitus on anything. Yeah, I guess you have to have two syllables like Josh sidis doesn't sound like it. No, Yeah,

you're absolutely right, Chuck situs. I guess it's like a it's something that ground beef can come down with or Jerry scitus. Yes, sure that has something to do with me. So it's me so overload like the blue man who took too much copper. This is um. You just turn you just start smelling like me, so it comes out

of your ears. Uh so should we I think before our break, maybe let's run over um what you dug up from Sarah Sitas is one know if this is from her book that she wrote later, but she kind of outlined her and they're parenting sort of checklist, which when you read it it does not seem like a parenting checklist from the early nineteen hundreds. No, it's super progressive, isn't it. It is in a lot of ways. Uh. Then I'll get to the part that they kind of

really forget at the end. But um, avoid punishment and always possible, not bad. Why because it's the first cause of fear. Pretty sensible. Sensible. Uh, try not to say don't to your children. Instead explain why what you say is so, that's awesome. That's a good one. A lot of these are still very valid. Um awakened curiosity for sure. Never failed to answer and never put off your child's questions. Probably the hardest thing to do as a parent, but

valid right because they come hard and fast. Uh. Never force your child to learn, nor judge their ability to learn by adult standards. Now, that's a big one for them that I wonder if they really abided by either that or they did abide by it and they were they were misinterpreted and miss labeled later on, you know. Um there's a few more here. Implant ideas at bedtime, just before sleep. I don't know about the science behind that,

but it sounds reasonable. Sure, Like when your child is going off to slumber land, you can introduce them to the concept that they'll die eventually one day and it really sticks in their head. Uh. Never lie to your child or use evasions if that's impossible, but sure, uh, refrain from showing him off. I think that's where they really dropped the ball. Yeah, that's almost revisionists to add that, because there's just no way that they knew that from

the get go. They just didn't follow it. They didn't even seem to consider following it. And I think they really grossly overestimated the warmth of the response the public would would greet young William with, yeah, and then the big one that I think it just wasn't a thing back then, So I'm going to give them a pass.

But we now know so much about social and what they call social emotional development and teaching and parenting, and it just didn't really exist back then, and and young Billy certainly didn't get any of that, so he writ he suffered for that reason. So they released this, and American parents responded by saying, we're tired just reading this list, right? Yeah? Uh so should we take that break so we can get some rest? All right, I gotta go put up this big foot. Let it relax for a little bit.

You have Boris itists. So it took we kind of went over um Boris and Sarah's list on you know, how to raise a child, and it kind of underscores this premise that was basically the entire premise of boris Is approach to childhood education was that if you, um, if you do this with a kid, if you if you say okay, you know the um, if you create curiosity and interest in a child and then nurture it with lots of books and like, you know, lectures and

whatever you can find to keep the kid's curiosity going and just feed seven. If they have a question or something like that, you just sit down with them and talk it out. That if you do this and you start a young enough age, you know, by the time your kid is you know, they should be at least as intelligent, if not more intelligent, than an average adult. And his premise was that you could do this with any kid, and that you kind of should do this

with any kid. And their proof of concept was their son Billy, who had a really impressive list of accomplishments to his credit by the time he was like eight, nine or ten. Right, Yeah, I mean, we'll go through some of these. I think some of these maybe take with a grain of salt, because records from the early nineteen hundreds are what they are, and his story has been sort of Um, I don't know the best word

is convoluted, exaggerated in place, maybe exaggerated in places. But I don't want to take anything away from because a lot of it checks out too. But let's just go go through him. Um. Supposedly, at eighteen months was reading the New York Times uh by three, New Latin by six, uh New Russian, French, German, Hebrew, Armenian, and Turkish. Was typing letters at three to Macy's about Christmas toys. Very cute, right.

I also saw that he taught himself to eat with a spoon by eight months old, through trial and error. All right, that's I've seen babies do that, an eight month old baby. Yeah, it's hard to remember, Okay, alright, what else? Maybe not? I don't know. It just seems like something that baby would be like, I don't know what, this would be more likely to go in their eye or their ear than there in their mouth. You know, I'm trying to remember. It's all a blur. Uh. Let

me see. He apparently graduated. I mean, he went through grade school and like no time, he entered the first grade and graduated in through primary school entirely in seven months. It was basically like Billy Madison, Yeah, which I've never seen, but I know the story. Between six an eight he

wrote at least four books. Uh. In At eight he passed the Harvard Medical School anatomy exam and then the entrance exam to M I T. And also at eight and then at his own language called in a book called The book was called Book of Vendorgood and the language was vendor Goood. Yeah, not like you know, just some gibberish or whatever. He took from like Latin and Greek and some of the Romance languages and figured out different ways to conjugate um words based on these this

language and like he created his own language. It wasn't just some lame thing where words were replaced with words and I think they were like eight cases something grammatical cases. Yeah. It was really impressive stuff. Um. And it was the kind of thing I saw somebody put it, like a linguistics professor would have been, you know, well received for having written a book where they debuted their own language. And this kid was doing it and you know before

he was ten. Yeah, so he's he's flying through school. Um, This is all going great as far as the plan that his parents had to raise a really, really smart kid. But a very bad thing happened as he was doing this, and the press noticed, Um, when you get into Harvard at nine years old. Um, they didn't let him untill he was eleven, but when you know, that's going to be a news story. And by nine when he when he entered Harvard as an eleven year old, it was

it was the full court press from the media. Apparently he would and this is before he went to Harvard. He would come home from elementary and high school and there would be like two photographers waiting outside his place, and one of them would hold him while the other one would take his picture, like physically hold him. Yeah, Like he had no saying this what he would be accosted. Yeah, so I hear this, and I think that's awful. The media is terrible. But I also I think, like, where

where where was his mom? Where was his dad? While these photographers are holding him out in the street. Well, you know, he's a free range kid, I guess in that respect, And that's pretty bad. That's definitely a very unpleasant thing from childhood, and even worse that would basically lay the groundwork for his relationship with the media from that point on, and they would just keep going after him.

Even after he'd been out of the limelight for decades, they would still they'd be like, whatever happened to that weirdo Billy Sitis and um they look him up and write an article on him, and it would he he was just as we'll see, he became a very private person. Was a huge invasion of his privacy. But that's where

the whole thing started. But one of the other reasons I think also that he was such a private person and that the media spotlight was even worse to him than it would have been for any other child his age is that you touched on it. I think earlier that his father is showed play like there was no

play involved. There was no socialization with his peers. There was no encouragement whatsoever for him to make friends, And I get the impression there was actually bit of a prohibition on him going out and making friends because his friends couldn't have possibly kept up with him, So how could he possibly be enriched by hanging out with other

eight year olds? And I think his family kind of acknowledged that later on that that was a huge misstep and if they didn't, the rest of the world has has admitted it for them, and they've they've been vilified in a lot of ways for doing that, and I think rightfully so like if they've if they've been vilified, not all of it can be justified, but there's a couple of things that you can be like, yes, that was a really bad thing to do with Billy, and it messed him up, and that was a big one

of them for sure. Uh. He when he got to Harvard, he started showing his um massive capacity for math and mathematical courses. He was designing his own log arrythmic tables. He gave his first lecture, uh, including to faculty when he was eleven years old, to the Harvard Mathematical Club about four dimensional bodies. And then you know, he sort of had apparently he had his little act down um

with the press. He would introduce himself and he would he would try and you know, I think he was described as precocious a lot, but it came across I mean, precocious is sort of a nice way of saying that he was rude to a lot of adults who he thought he was smarter than yes, and I don't think he was ever really taught any different by his parents.

The thing is, though, is like that's a really good anecdote and it does illustrate like what he was like at age eleven, granted, But the problem is is because you have so many, so few anecdotes about him, that it gives you the impression that he was a jerk. And I saw after he died, a friend of his road into a newspaper magazine and said, you know, a lot of these editorials about William Sidas are really misguided. And one of the things that you should know about

him is he looked down on no one. He was a kind, gentle person who looked down on no one else. And um, I really think that you gotta take that along with that anecdote about him, like you know, kind of talking down to some of the professors at Harvard during that lecture. Well he was, Okay, that's a much more succinct way of putting what I was what I was trying to get at. I guess there's a lot of eleven year old jerks, but the age out of it, hopefully, sure.

But that lecture, Chuck is it's a really pivotal moment in his life. For one, it basically said, hey, world, I am maybe the smartest person on the planet or whoever lived. Check it out. And then that brought all that media attention. But it also showed, like to the people who were paying attention and who knew what he was talking about, um, that that like this was a legit dude. This guy was going to contribute to who

knows how many different fields in his lifetime. And in fact, Norbert Weener, who became the father of side Ntis, who was a child prodigy himself, he was like fourteen I think at the time. He went to Harvard, starting the same year as William Sidis did. Yeah, that's that lecture. Yeah, there were some interesting stories about those two being there at the same time. Yeah, because they were definitely not

the same person. And though everybody lumped him together, you know, um, both being at Harvard and as like an eleven year old in the fourteen year old, but um, Norbert Wiener was at that lecture and he he noted that, like, this lecture is based on this guy's original thinking. This is not just a summation of a bunch of different work other people's work on bodies in the fourth dimension, like this is what this guy came up with about the fourth dimension and it all checks out, Like that's

impressive stuff. Yeah. There was an M. I. T. Physics professor named Daniel Comstock who said that, you know, he has a real intellect. He said, it is not automatic. He does not cram his head with facts. He reasons and there there's a difference. That's a different kind of intelligence than just you know, memorizing a lot of stuff. So you can be on Jeopardy, um, which is you know, another kind of intelligence, no shape. I mean, I would

love to go on Jeopardy and perform well. Um, but Comstock, oh, I would not do well, So I don't want to go. But do you think you'd freeze? I just I'm not Jeopardy material. I'm Jeopardy from the couch material. Yeah. Yeah. You could shout it out occasionally only when you're and you're right. Yeah, but I'm not good enough to be

on the show. Uh. Comstock went on to say, I believe he'll be a great mathematician, the leader in science in the future, the leader in that science in the future, and a lot of Hay has been made about i Q, not just for him but certainly for him, but just period. I mean, like you said, we should totally do one on i Q tests and whether it's even valid or not.

But he uh, retroactively they have UM basically said that they think he had an i Q of about two fifty three d um A of one thirty is considered very advanced. They have retroactively UM said that Einstein had about a one sixty da Vinci had about a one eighty. Newton may have been about a one ninety. So take

it for what it's worth. All this is just to say that Billy Sidis was, you know, super super smart by kind of any measure, and so so that Harvard lecture definitely brought the spotlight on him, not necessarily to UM, like an adoring spotlight. And then also at the same time, his father delivered a lecture that became a book, really kind of forty five page essay called Philistine and Genius, and it was basically where he lays out this idea

that any kid can be a prodigy. And and then ultimately we're doing our children disservice by being lazy and you know, just living with the status quo and not producing geniuses because we're just we're just not up to the task. And that was not very well received either. So everybody started to hate Boris because he was an outsider. He's a recent immigrant from Russia and he was Jewish, and he was basically telling America that its parenting skills

sucked um. And then at the same time, his son steps out or steps into the spotlight, is like the super brainiac, who's a proof of concept of all this. And so the attention that was lavished on both of them, on William for the rest of his life was you're a weirdo. We need to tear you down because if you if your father is correct, then we're all doing our kids at disservice. So there has to be something wrong with you or else we're the ones who are wrong.

And so the media and the American public basically started to delight in tearing William down every chance they got, and he really just tried to run from the spotlight as best he could. All right, so let's take a break and we'll come back and kind of pick up at Harvard, where this eleven year old was still studying right after this. All right, So Little Billies at Harvard.

His he was commuting, you know, with his parents, and then they decided that they were going to leave and go to New Hampshire and go into business, um, the mental health business. Basically boris open to sanatorium in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and they said, basically, you know, try out the dorm, let's see how it works. He moved into the dorm. It did not go well at all. Uh. He was bullied. He was the butt of jokes and pranks. Uh. He did not have interest in girls. They teased him

a lot about that. He eventually moved into a rooming house, uh, instead of the dorm. And even still he graduated Magna loud A at sixteen years old in nineteen fourteen and told reporters after he graduated, I want to live the perfect life. The only way to live the perfect life is to live it in seclusion. I've always hated crowds. He vowed to remained celibate, and you know, that's was kind of his life. He he I don't think he necessarily was that way by nature or yeah, by nature.

I think he was sort of forced into retreatment because of what happened to him with the press, and having no social skills because he was not socialized because of his parents. A lot of factors going into it, for sure. And on that celibate thing, like a lot of people made a lot of hey about that at the time

because he you know, revealed it publicly somehow. Um, he had taken a vow underneath the tree that he would remain celibate throughout his lifetime, which a lot of great thinkers have I think da Vinci did, and Newton did, and a bunch of others. Um, And he followed it in their footsteps. But he kept a picture of the tree that he kept he carried around with them to remind him like, oh, yeah, I'm celibate. Um. But the media again, they're like, oh, this is a great opportunity

to tear this guy down. He's a total weirdo. He's not interested in girls, he's not even interested in guys, He's interested in nobody. Let's let's make let's use that as evidence that this guy is out of his mind. And he did very very sad. Yeah. So he leaves Harvard and with that degree, and for a little while he teaches math at William marsh Rice Institute for advancement of letters, science and art. Eventually they just said, can we just call it Rice University? It would be much easier.

He arrived in December nineteen fifteen. He was seventeen years old. Um taught Euclidean geometry, non Euclidean geometry, and freshman math and didn't last long there either because he was younger than the people he was teaching and it was just really really tough. Um eventually went back to Harvard Law and left after three years without a degree, but with

good standing. Apparently. Yeah, so he got back. I guess when he was at Harvard Law it must have been Um that he, uh, he became interested in socialism, fervently interested.

He was described I think Chuck is a libertarian pacifist by a friend after he died, and that his whole thing like like, he was really passionate about trolley Carr transfers, about Northeastern Native American history, about a lot of varied stuff, but his great passion was the idea that every single person should be free to live their life as they see fit, and that the role of government, and you needed a strong government, was to protect that those individuals

rights from encroachment in that sense that that is what he cared about, and for a little while was directed towards socialism and communism. And he was actually arrested h and considered you know, unpatriotic and unamerican um at this one May day rally um and almost went to jail supposedly for assaulting an officer. Allo. Everybody says that didn't actually happen. Yeah, it was for writing two charges, writing and assaulting a cop, and it was all over the

newspapers because of who he is. I think a hundred and fourteen people were arrested, including a young lady named Martha Foley, who he actually fell in love with, so he he tested his celibacy with Martha, even though I think there I think it never grew beyond a close friendship. Isn't that right? Yeah? Well yeah, And I don't really understand what her her feelings were about. If she was just like, we're just friends. He was always in the friend zone with her, or she was like, you know,

you're actually not interested in me, will be friends? Who knows. But she went on to marry another man, um and uh, I get the impression that Bill was left to kind of um just pine for her while looking at the picture of the tree that he took them out. Um. So back to the arrest. He was released on five dollars bail um under the condition that he be released under his father's care um or both of his parents I guess at the sanitarium. So he gets shipped off

to New Hampshire. Um. He said in his own words, he was kidnapped by his parents by arrangement with the d A and was taken to the sanitarium operated by them and kept there a full year under various kinds of mental torture, consisting of being scolded and nagged at for an average of six to eight hours a day. UM. They said, they pumped him full of sleeping medicine, threatened to send him to uh just sort of a standard insane asylum, that's what they called him at the time.

And it just sounds like it sounds like things went really really bad between he and his parents at that point. Yeah, I think, UM, I don't really know what the relationship was like, but it seems to have finally fully deteriorated during that year. I don't think they ever spoke after that well, that his parents wanted to. They used to like UM try to track him down and they would find as whoever his friends were, and you know, try to get them to turn him over to them, because

you know, they're like, it's for his own good. He doesn't he's crazy or whatever. He UM that just you know is strange to him even further from them. But if if it wasn't deteriorating before, it was after that that year at the family sanitarium that or sanatorium that

he had to spend. Yeah, so he UM eventually has released after that year, I think he goes to California for about a year, then makes his way back east, and basically from this point forward he did I mean they called them uninspired jobs kind of mostly where I saw, I don't think he was doing the good well hunting thing UM been doing like custodia were. Mostly what I found is that he was doing UM work. I mean

they call them adding machines like accounting work. What they really were were sort of the first calculators, the UH comptometers and UM. Even then, apparently he would do work on two of them at once, one with his left hand, one with his right hand, and would do his eight hour work day and about an hour um, but would sort of move from job to job whenever you know, it says here, whenever people would recognize who he was. I think it was probably a little more nuanced than that.

I would guess, like when the press got ahold of it. Um. I don't think it's like if someone in his office realized who he was, he was like, I'm out of here. But he would kind of go from job to job. He said that the very side of a mathematical formula makes me physically ill. But here's the thing. He I think a lot of publications make it seem like he

was shunning smarts and doing anything worthwhile. But the entire time, he was just pumping out book uh, a lot of most of them not published, many of them under pseudonyms, but just writing about all kinds of stuff. He wrote that book on transfer tickets. Yeah, he did three pages on collecting transfer tickets. But he wrote a lot. Eventually.

He did write one book that became fairly well known, called The Animate and the Inanimates in Yeah, which is a super daring um premise, and that it talks about the origin of the universe. Uh. It describes things like dark matter. Um. It predicts um black holes, which a lot of people are like, this is years before black holes were discovered. Well, I think Einstein had predicted black holes in his theory of relativity like a full ten years before, five years before he was writing this. But

it's still super impressive. But the reason it's daring is because he is one of the few people to suggest, and you know, back up mathematically um or attempt to the the second law of thermodynamics that matter in the universe tends towards chaos and disorder and there will eventually be a total loss of energy because of that, that

it can be reversed. And his premise was that life itself is an example of reverse entropy, where you know, disordered atoms are put into very orderly, very efficient machines called organisms or life, which is pretty awesome. And that was just part of it. But that's what really made him like a kind of a pioneer, and that was

his big contribution. And I get the impression that this book that was published in UM is one of those things where I could see people going back in fifty years and somebody rediscovering his ideas and saying, oh my god, like you just advanced you know, quantum physics, by light by light years. It's just been kind of languishing until then,

you know, or here's the cure for cancer. Yeah maybe. Uh. This is a really sad though, because I think the narrative that at the time was that like, boy genius

goes bust because he's working these jobs. And by all accounts, you know, he lived the life he wanted to live, and he had he had I don't think like tons and tons of great friends, but he did have some very close friends who, like he said, described him as a as a good guy and kind of a could be, kind of a fun dude, and he wasn't completely maladjusted because of his childhood. And I think just wanted to

be left alone. Yeah. So that's why in seven that New Yorker article on him was just so devastating, was because he'd been trying so hard to be left alone. Like his one and only publicly received book had been published a full twelve years before he totally dropped out, and The New Yorker sent a woman reporter to to basically become his friend, under the guys of just being his friend and to gather information and then publish an article about him. You know, yeah, he said it was

humiliating and made him sound crazy. Um he sued now this way, I got really confused, and I don't know if he got to the bottom of it. He he did sue them for invasion of privacy and malicious libel um. And I saw all kinds of things from really good sources that the case was dismissed, that they basically and it's used in privacy law as saying, if you're a public figure, you're always a public figure. But I also saw that he did win some kind of settlement from them.

I think they were just multiple suits. Maybe yeah. I think that the privacy the invasion of privacy suit he lost and it was upheld on appeal to that um that like you said, once, your public figure, always a public figure. But I think that that um libel was what he might have gotten a settlement for because there was misreporting reported that he'd gone to Toughs, and I think that was Norbert Wiener who had gone to Toughs just a couple of technical things, nothing really really big time.

But he hated this this article so much. I get the impression he wasn't about to drop it. And the new Yorker settled out of court to settle it. Yeah, so this was nineteen thirty seven. Lawsuits followed and then very sadly that the sad end into this story is that in nineteen forty four, at the age of forty six, he was found dead by his landlady. Died of cerebral hemorrhage, the same thing that killed his father in nine. Mm hmm. Yeah.

And you I mean, you can get a really good impression of how he was treated by the media with just the title of the obituary they ran about him in Time magazine. Um, it was called prodigious failure. That was. That was the title of his obituary in Time back in nineteen Who lived his own life? Yeah? Exactly what what?

Why did he have to perform for you? And then over time, you know the idea that he was this great example of of what happens if you just give your kid too much attention and try to turn them into a um like a genius too young. This is what happens to him. They burn out and they end up running adding machines rather than doing anything useful. Um. That that was. That became that narrative that you have to look out for really interesting story. Yeah. So, um,

you got anything else about william Sitis? No, look forward to uh to a full sort of more robust episode on Prodigies for sure. Did you want did you when you mentioned Goodwill Hunting? Did you see too that that um that he was he in part inspired that movie? Oh? Really yeah, that's interesting to do that parallel, um. And then I want to give one shout out. So you know he gave that talk on um four dimensional bodies at Harvard when he was eleven. I was like, I

have no idea what that is. And I looked around and I found finally a really comprehensive, really understandable explainer on four dimensionals space. It's called what is four dimensional Space? Like? It's by J. D. Norton. And if you're all interested in figuring that out, I would strongly advise going to check that out. I wasn't talking to you. Yeah. Uh. Since since Chuck said, yeah, it's time for listener mail everybody, how about the apples? All right, I'm gonna call this

sort of a double metal email. UM. Quickly we got one from a gentleman named Kirk Brett Fold and White Rock BC to challenge me on saying Bruce uh, saying Bruce Dickinson was the metal god, the god of metal. On the Damascus Steel episode, he said, I think you'll find that Judas Priests Rob Halford is widely acknowledged to hold the title of metal god. Okay, uh And I wrote Kirk back and I said, well, it's subjective. And I like Iron Maiden more than I like Judas Priest. Uh. Yeah,

I do too. Yeah do you do? I'm with you you Oh yeah, yeah, like Juice Priest. But I really, I mean, I think Iron Maiden I just like him more. Yeah, me too. I think their songs more. Yeah, I think I could see where he's coming from. It's much more melodic and maybe in that sense a little less metal

than Judas Priest. Yeah maybe so. Uh. And then someone we gotta shout out Gunner who who took your side in the A C d C debate recently listened to to unrelated episodes, and in both episodes, Josh said he didn't like A C d C. So to you, Josh, I just want to say you're right. Finally, someone else thinks A C d C is overrated. They're just not that good. Although some of the early songs are written by the Flash and the Pan, and I love Flash in the Pan. A C G C, A C d

C just doesn't do it for me. And that's from Gunner and Gunner. I'm here to say that you were wrong. I thought it was subjective. Well, that's my whole point is I'm making fun of him saying right and wrong. Oh I see, I see you turned it all over on. So yeah, confused and check this out. We're talking, we're talking about metal, we're talking about hard rock, and we're getting emails from dudes named Kirk and Gunner. I mean, how perfect is that we should start that band that

we always heard Gunner and Flash in the Pan? Yeah? Have you heard of Flash in the Pan? I never had before. I hadn't, but I had to look that up to They were an AUSSI duo who produced uh some of the early A C d C stuff apparently, and then we're a band in their own right, so you gotta check them out too. Now, the A C D C and they wanted to produce the Spice Girls. They're two big successes, that's right, and we're gonna get that band with those guys. But I get to be

flashed this time. I'm not gonna be panned anymore. I'll be Pan then can I be Pan? But I'm gonna really play up that like super light pan flute kind of thing. That's my jam, and I'm going to address like, what's the half goat half man god Dionysus. No, it's oh gosh, I can't think it's I guess it wouldn't be Dionysus to be pan anyway, I'm gonna be like the Greek god Pan. Okay, that's my jam, and I'm flash. So I'll just go out there and open my overcoat

and no one will notice. Somebody will feel it. Yeah, well, I'm just leaving that one. Uh. If you wanna get in touch with Chuck and I, like Gunner and Kirk did our new pals, you can email us at stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows