[Recording Start]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them” – Albert Einstein

Rick Rosner: Are you sure he said that? Probably he said that. Einstein; he kind of paid a certain amount of attention to his public persona, so he was pretty good at coming up with little quotes. Do I buy that one? I don’t know. He’s basically saying it takes different thinking to solve problems and I don’t know if that’s really what solves problems.  I’m thinking of horseshit which was the one of the major pollutants in cities at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th century. One of your jobs is shoveling horseshit, so you know and you deal with 36 horses and New York City in 1908, Manhattan, I would guess had more than a 100,000 horses and they were all just shitting. How much shit does a horse do in a day? 

All right, so I’m going to guess the horseshit was 10 pounds in a day, so that’s a million pounds of shit in Manhattan every day just in the street. So that was a huge problem and it really didn’t take different thinking to remove that as a huge issue, it took the invention of the automobile which is kind of different thinking but it wasn’t different thinking about horseshit, it was just a change in condition that cars replaced horses. And so the horseshit problem went away. I guess you could look up when the horse population of the United States peaked and it would have to be right before the automobiles came in, so the early 20^th century. And now horses are mostly a luxury. 

[Recording End]

Authors

Rick Rosner

American Television Writer

http://www.rickrosner.org

Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Founder, In-Sight Publishing

In-Sight Publishing

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