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