Joe Rogan Experience #1320 - Eric Weinstein

... create, but without bullshit. It's very important when you recreate, you have no bullshit. So it's Eric Weinstein, not Weinstein.

Yeah, I think it was originally Weinstein.

Weinstein?

Shtein.

Oh, Weinstein. With-

Yeah.

... German.

Yeah, but, uh-

Ja.

It was, uh, we, we came from a, uh, town between Odesa and Kiev called Uman, and that's where the fam- the, the Weinstein family came from.

We talked about, uh, how many people mispronounce. The-

Yeah.

... Weinstein instead of Weinstein.

It's e- it's epidemic, and yet nobody ever says Albert Einstein.

Yes, that's-

Do they?

Yeah.

Strange, right?

That is a weird one. The Einstein is n- now, like, is there, is there a guy named Mike Ein- uh, like, "Oh, Mike Einstein." No, no, no. Einstein. Is there a guy like that?

You, you, do you remember the old, uh, what was it, Blazing Saddles, with, uh-

Sure, Mel Brooks.

Yeah, Mel Brooks and, uh, Harvey Korman's character-

Yeah.

... was Hedley Lamar, and everyone would call him Headie Lamar. And that was like the running joke in the picture.

(laughs) Oh, that's right. I fucking loved Mel Brooks movies.

Do you remember the Yiddish-speaking Indians? That, that had to be the best.

Oh, yeah, that's right. He had some great movies, man. Su- just fun fucking movies, man. Just silly, fun, outrageous movies.

Yeah, I mean, he was, he was transitional, right? I guess it was the Borscht Belt being updated for the modern era.

Yeah, into film. Yeah, but it was also, it was, you know, for the time, much more contemporary, but with that sort of Borscht Belt sort of shticky, sort of...

Right, in the writer's room, I guess from Sid Caesar's Show of Shows, was this legendary factory before Saturday Night Live for all of these kind of crazy talents behind the scenes. I think he came out of that with Carl Reiner.

Oh, that makes sense. He's... How old is Mel Brooks now?

I don't wanna ask the question because maybe something will happen.

I know, right? It's one of the... I think I saw recently that he turned 93, and I, I thought, "Shit, is he dead?" Like, Mel Bro-... you know-

You can't-

... because they were saying all these great things, Mel Brooks. I'm like, "Fuck, did we lose Mel Brooks?" But it's like one of those things where... is it... it's gonna happen. I mean, he's 93.

I know, but every time it does-

I know.

I mean, I guess, uh, who... Betty White is another one of these people.

Right.

Right? And so we need these very exotic links to our past, um, and they become more important as time goes on if they're still vital because, you know, we want desperately to be connected to something before, you know, our current era, given that I think a lot of us sort of don't believe in anything that happened before Google.