Jon: Welcome to Episode 178 of The Digital Life, a show about our insights into the future of design and technology. I'm your host, Jon Follett, and with me is founder and co-host, Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Greetings, listeners.

Jon: For the podcast this week, we're going to discuss innovation, game design and the mind of Albert Einstein. Dirk has been working with the Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to create a unique game that will allow players to use some of Einstein's insights in a playful and involved fashion that will be fun as well. Dirk, congrats on this latest game. What number is this, number 6 or 7 for you?

Dirk: Thanks. I have to be honest. I've lost count not because there are so many but just because that's how my mind works. It's less than 10, more than 5. It's somewhere in that range, yeah.

Jon: Right. Could you tell us how you began this work with the Einstein Archives because that's a pretty prestigious commission there?

Dirk: Yeah, yeah. I had the good fortune to work on a game called Tesla Versus Edison: War Of Currents that was published in 2015. As part of working with that, we were working with the folks at the Thomas Edison Foundation. They're represented by a company called Greenlight which manages rights for different celebrities and they were really impressed with the work that we did on Tesla Versus Edison. Coming out of that, they had some other opportunities that they wanted to offer, and one of them was to do something for the Albert Einstein people which was hugely humbling.

I'll just speak for myself. I won't speak for anyone else. If I think of the 10 people who are most important and most interesting in world history, for me, Albert Einstein is just clearly on that list as someone who revolutionized physics but also lived a really rich, interesting life which I was aware of before I did the research but was particularly aware of after. Yeah. It's just one of those things where life works this way so often where you do one thing and you do good work on it and then it leads to something else that you didn't expect, and very happily so in this case.

Jon: Yeah. It seems like you have a theme that pervades at least some of your games, which is science and technology and innovation, which of course is directly related to what we talk about on the show.

Dirk: That's true. Yeah. I mean, I enjoy expressing myself through invention and innovation, and so I take a great interest in those things. I also like history and like learning about that which came before and so a history of science, a history of invention, a history of business. Those just feel good and are sweet spots for me, so yeah, I've taken that channel and I'm running with it.

Jon: Along those lines, as you were doing this research into Einstein's life, what were some of the insights that you gained that either surprised you or you thought were particularly notable?

Dirk: Certainly lots of stuff. I'll start with the things that made him a great innovator because those are some of the things that I think are really applicable to our listeners maybe professionally as well as just from the standpoint of curiosity. There were a few things that enabled Dr. Einstein to literally revolutionize physics with the things that he did at the very beginning of the twentieth century. One of them is that he was rebellious by nature, so it's important to understand that the Newtonian Laws of physics had been ruling for over 200 years at that point, and were taken and accepted as correct. It's like, anything that you were doing in physics, anything, any further development or exploration you were doing took that as a granted and a given, and anything ...

That had to be respected in order for anything else you did to be the case. Einstein's personality was rebellious. He didn't get along with teachers. He got in trouble a lot. He famously didn't do well in certain subjects at school.