#187 Albert Einstein

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one-time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories, and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets. They're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today, and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. Einstein had insisted that his ashes be scattered so that his final resting place would not become the subject of morbid veneration. But there was one part of his body that was not cremated. In a drama that would seem fake were it not so horrifying, Einstein's brain ended up being, for more than four decades, a wandering relic.
Hours after his death, a routine autopsy was performed by the pathologist at Princeton Hospital, Thomas Harvey. When he stitched the body back up, Harvey decided, without asking permission, to embalm Einstein's brain and keep it.
The next morning in a fifth grade class at Princeton School, the teacher asked her students what news they had heard. Einstein died, said one girl, eager to be the first to come up with that piece of information. But she quickly found herself topped by an unusually quiet boy who sat in the back of the class. My dad's got his brain, he said. Einstein's family was horrified. Harvey insisted that there may be scientific value to studying the brain. Einstein would have wanted that, he said. Einstein's son, unsure what legal and practical rights he now had in this matter, reluctantly went along.
Soon Harvey was besieged by those who wanted Einstein's brain or a piece of it.
He was summoned to Washington to meet officials of the US. Army's Pathology Unit, but despite their requests, he refused to show them his prized possession. Guarding it had become a mission.
Harvey decided to have friends at the University of Pennsylvania turn part of it into microscopic slides, and so he put Einstein's brain, now chopped into pieces, into two glass cookie jars and drove it there in the back of his Ford.
Over the years, in a bizarre process, Harvey would send off slides or chunks of the remaining brain to random researchers who struck his fancy.
In the meantime, he quit Princeton Hospital, left his wife, remarried a couple times, and moved around, often leaving no forwarding address, the remaining fragments of Einstein's brain always with him.
In 1998, after 43 years, as the wandering guardian of Einstein's brain, Thomas Harvey, by then 86, decided it was time to pass on the responsibility. So he called the person who currently held his old job as pathologist at Princeton Hospital and went by to drop it off.
Okay, so that was an excerpt from the epilogue of the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Einstein, His Life and Universe, and it was written by Walter Isaacson. Okay, so before we jump back into the book, I want to tell you how this fits into everything else that we've been talking about.
One thing that I read about Steve Jobs that I thought was really interesting was the fact that he would learn from every experience and then bring everything he learned from every experience back to Apple. And he said something about J. Robert Oppenheimer that I thought was really interesting, and I'm going to read directly from this, actually another book written by Isaacson, it's Steve Jobs' biography, and this is Steve Jobs talking. He says, At Pixar, it was a whole company of A players. So when I got back to Apple, that's what I decided to try to do. My role model was J. Robert Oppenheimer. I read about the type of people he sought for the Adam Baum project. I wasn't nearly as good as he was, but that's what I aspired to do.