Pythagoras

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Hello and welcome.

Citation Needed.

Podcasts where you choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts because this is the internet, and that's how it works now.

I'm Cecil, and I'll be running this geometry lesson, but I'll need my ratios.

So I present my sine, cosine, and tangent, Heath, Noah, and Tom.

Trig warning.

I really feel like Heath is my cosine and I'm the sign, but okay, I'll get with them.

Did I have something of a tangent fetish?

I really get off on it.

Jesus Christ.

And all right, now I demand to be the tangent.

That was the best joke I'm going to write all day, so

I'm just done.

That's it.

Also, the guy that got his mom to write a note so he didn't have to participate in math, our cast's whole ratio, Eli.

I'm here for the shimmer and the shine, not my mind, Cecil.

Not my mind.

Patrons, you allow us

to spend hours struggling to come up with philosophy and math jokes.

Sorry.

So maybe this week, consider adding a bit in for overtime.

Just saying.

And if you're not a patron and you like the show, consider becoming one.

we'll tell you how to do that at the end of the show and with that out of the way tell us eli what person place thing concept phenomenon or event will we be talking about today we'll be talking about pythagoras okay no why are we talking about pythagoras because he he's one of those historical figures that i find exactly one wikipedia article's worth of interesting Perfect.

Right.

So he's this guy who's often portrayed today as a fart-obsessed lunatic hiding in a cave from the number 11 and shit.

But according to no lesser source than Bertrand Russell, he's the most important philosopher in the history of Western thought.

And it's that contradiction that fascinates me a little.

Okay, no offense, Noah, but it's pretty easy to be the most important philosopher when meat turns into flies was the standard at the time.

No, that's true.

That's fair.

Okay, but Eli, based on the popularity now of Jordan Peterson, I'm not sure this is a great look how far we've come.

That's fair.

All right.

Do we know where Jordan Peterson thinks that flies come from?

We don't.

We don't.

I bet he cries when he talks about it, though.

I think they come from the loose handfuls of meat that he was eating as an entire diet.

It's just Jungian flies, just archetypally flying around.

All right.

So the first thing you have to know here is that everything about Pythagoras is conjecture.

According to German scholar Walter Burgert, quote,

there is not a single detail in the life of Pythagoras that stands uncontradicted, end quote.

Burkert then goes on to claim that a plausible account of his life can be reconstructed, but given that he then went on to try to reconstruct a plausible account of his life, does call his motivations into question and saying that.

But the end result of all of this ambiguity is that even the section headings on his Wikipedia article are stuff like reputed travels and alleged Greek teachers.

So be prepared for a lot of bet hedging over the course of this episode.

But in my defense, my source is a Wikipedia article that is filled with gems like this one.

Quote: Herodotus of Halicarnassus states that Pythagoras taught his followers how to attain immortality.

The accuracy of the works of Herodotus is controversial.

Immortality citation-needed essay.

Yes, right, right.

To be clear, Herodotus carried the title Father of Lies for almost 2,000 years until Eli wrested it from his fucking hands with a citation-needed essay about Finland.

Okay, fun fact.

My favorite Herodotus story is when an actual historian named Thucydides criticized him for lying.

His response in writing was almost exactly, you're just jealous that the stuff I make up is better than the truth.

And I have never felt so seen or represented in this world.

This is why we lost the election.

Look, all that matters to me right now is that Eli tells us his second favorite Herodotus story.

Right, yeah.

Now, there are a couple of reasons for the lack of concrete details.

The first is that there are...

Stars are the story.

Stars this total nobody.

You wouldn't have heard of it.

Now, there are a couple of reasons for the lack of concrete details.

The first is that there are no surviving writings of Pythagoras.

Thanks, Alexandria.

Yeah, goddamn, we shouldn't have entrusted you with all that shit.

Now, everything we know about him comes from somebody else, and most of it comes from people who weren't born until he was long dead.

Okay.

Hold on.

You guys think he might be the son of God?

There's no way of knowing for sure.

And when it comes to the actual contemporaneous stuff, a lot of that comes from either people who hated him or people who worshipped him.

I think he's the son of God.

Yeah, right.

Point is neither of those are known for being great sources in terms of objectivity.

But there's another problem that exacerbates all of that shit.

So you know how today, if people want to make their shower thoughts seem profound, they attribute them to Einstein or Confucius?

Well, Pythagoras served the same function for ancient Romans, which makes it crazy difficult to pin down with any accuracy any single thing that Pythagoras thought, said, or discovered.

I like the memes that they attribute to Sam Elliott.

It's like, hey, man, he's a voice actor for the beef industry, not some fucking rugged cowboy guru.

What the fuck, man?

Yeah, man.

And we do this shit all the time, despite Einstein himself saying that the definition of insanity is do the same thing

over and over again and expecting a different result.

A phrase which he definitely said and which was definitely not coined by a mystery novelist named Rita in 1983.

So, okay, so for example, if you know nothing else about Pythagoras, you probably know him from the Pythagorean theorem.

In a right-angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.

Or, because what citation-needed essay is complete without a mathematical formula, a squared plus b squared equals c squared.

But Babylonian and Indian cultures had known that shit for centuries before Pythagoras was born, and it's not even clear that he was the first to introduce it to the Greeks.

In fact, it's entirely possible that Pythagoras didn't know much at all about math, but his reputation as the numbers guy sort of acted like a historical vacuum sucking up posthumous credit for all the math stuff that was known at the time.

Okay, I was promised by so many teachers that I was going to be constantly dealing with partially unknown right triangles.

Not happening enough.

Solving them was going to be the only way to get out of the quicksand.

All right.

Heath, I have seen you break out a compass at multiple games of crocodile.

So that's fair.

Most of those weren't for right triangles, but yes.

So now most of the sources can at least agree that Pythagoras was born on the Greek island of Samos in the Aegean Sea.

His father, Menasarchus of Samos, or not of Samos, was a gem engraver or a wealthy merchant.

And his mother may or may not have been named Pythias.

That's obviously one possibility of where his name comes from.

The other is the definitely false legend that Pythia, which is another term for the oracle of Delphi, prophesied to his mother that she would give birth to a son that would be supremely beautiful, wise, and beneficial to humankind.

Okay, this is making me begin to miss the misguided confidence of Eli's yick-yak pronouncements.

Right?

Yeah.

Now, for those of you who don't have an immediate map of the Aegean Sea in your head, I point out that Samos is, yeah, dumbasses fucking rubes.

Samos is way closer to Turkey than to Greece, right?

It was controlled by Greeks at the time, but culturally, it was that classic mix of East and West that Turkey is famous for.

So Pythagoras would have grown up kind of like in the conduit that brought Asian philosophy to Europe, or one of the main conduits that did that.

His early life also coincided with, according to the wiki, quote, the flowering of early Ionian natural philosophy, end quote.

Whatever the hell that means.

Yeah.

Pythagoras went through his Buddhism phase in undergrad.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

Now, speaking of his education,

Pythagoras studied under or with every well-known thinker of his time.

Or more likely, he just had a regular education that got the hell exaggerated out of it later.

But he's said to have studied in Egypt and to have learned the Egyptian language language directly from the Pharaoh, who apparently didn't have anything else going on at the time.

He was also the only foreigner ever granted the privilege of taking part in the worship of the Egyptian priests at Diaspolis.

Other sources disputed these claims, of course, but mostly to instead claim that he was educated by the Magi in Persia or even from Zoroaster himself.

He also learned arithmetic from the Phoenicians and astronomy from the Chaldeans because he switched nations to learn stuff the way we used to switch classrooms, I guess.

The Chaldeans had some weird numberless astronomy.

Well, yeah, until Pythagoras got there.

Yeah, he straightened him out.

He's like, hey, should we count the miles?

And they're like, get the fuck out.

I don't even understand what you're saying.

Now, there are even sources that have him going on to study under Jewish teachers, Indian sages, and Celtic druids.

But at least one author, Antonius Diogenes, rejects all of that and said that he had no teachers at all and that he learned all his doctrines on his own by interpreting dreams yeah yeah i dreamed i was naked at school but on the blackboard was this triangle right yeah right yeah

god damn i have never heard couldn't choose a major aggressively rebranded like this well you know what that's because dude that's because we did fictional biographies if we'd each done our own true last week yeah no but regardless of who taught him all the sources more or less agree that he spent the first 40 years of his life soaking up knowledge and renown but he wouldn't start his famous school until later Well, actually, because everything's contradicted, there's one source that said while he was still in Samos, he founded a school called the Semicircle, where all the great minds of Greece came to lecture.

But since there's only one source on that, and apparently that source was trying to claim that school was housed in a building in his hometown, a building that he may have even had a financial interest in, we can dismiss that one.

Come on.

Everybody else seems to agree that he really didn't get his thinking going until he moved to Croton.

Croton sounds like a bread-based transformer, right?

He's like a loaf of bread and then he just transforms into one cube.

So Croton is

an Italian city situated right near the ball of the boot's foot.

Weird.

But Italy or no, this was a Greek colony at the time.

Now, Pythagoras is said to have gone there when he was 40 years old, but the why of it is up in the air, of course.

Some sources say that he achieved so much renown in Samos that he had so many responsibilities because everybody trusted him and he didn't have any time left to think.

Others say that he moved in opposition to the tyrant that had taken over Samos by then.

But whatever the cause, he moved to Crotone and he quickly becomes

very influential.

And in the more fantastical accounts, he immediately turns the populace from their sinful and indulgent ways through the power of his oratory and the example of his asceticism.

Yeah, his first great speech, cut it out.

Seriously, guys, stop it.

Yep.

That was it.

Yeah, they actually didn't listen to him at first until he really really learned how to move his hands when he was talking, and then they just understood him perfectly.

But it's here that Pythagoras really started to make his mark on the history of thought.

Traditionally, he's the first person to refer to himself as a philosopher or lover of wisdom.

Yeah, from the Greek podkestos.

Influenceros.

Yes, yeah, exactly.

But until then, the term people would generally use would be sage, right?

But he was trying to be more humble, I guess.

And a lot of what he taught was abject lunacy.

We're going to talk a little more about that stuff later.

But the central core of his teaching was actually very brilliant.

We take it for granted now because it's just undeniably true at this point.

But the whole idea that the world would be governed by mathematical principles is actually a really bizarre concept when you try to think of it from...

like an outside, like outside of a world where it had already been proven.

Hey, hey, and what if, what if we invented a currency that was made out of mathematical principles?

And then those, and those solutions created a kind of like a digital coin to represent that solution, and that gets recorded in an indelible ledger.

And there's a finite number of these math problems we can solve.

So the coin themselves are intrinsically impervious to the rampant money printing that people who don't understand economics pretends causes inflation.

And then, and then what if we made those coins infinitely divisible?

So all the stuff I just said doesn't matter.

And also,

spoiler, it never did.

All right, let's not saddle Pythagoras with that.

Okay.

Also, you should have hodled, man.

Okay, so importantly, though, Pythagoras didn't just believe true things about numbers.

He also believed insane shit, and to a pretty substantial degree.

Again, with all the caveats of the sketchy sources still in place, legend has it that he once had a follower put to death for pointing out that the square root of two was an irrational number.

Hey, fucking shut that guy up.

I'm about to finish calculating the number.

I'm almost there.

Two.

Wait.

So he fucking kill that shit.

He's also said to be the inventor of that silly numerology thing where you assign each letter a number and you add up the values to see which words are then related.

He also had a passionate dislike of the number 17.

No, I get it because I feel that way about 27.

You know, it's like, oh, you're divisible by nine.

Fuck off.

No, you're not.

You're a cube, but that doesn't even make sense.

You're a chase.

You can't number

very clearly.

If you add up Trump's name doing the 1 through 26 A through Z thing, you get the number 88, which is exactly the speed in miles per hour you need to go back in time when America was great again.

And a Nazi thing.

Yeah, and a Nazi thing.

Yeah.

But okay, but Pythagoras's philosophy was in no way restricted to numerology.

That's probably what he's most well known for now.

But the school that he started in Croton was a lot more than just an arm of philosophy, it was a full-on commune based on asceticism, athleticism, irrational fear, vegetarianism, and math.

And that is where the weird shit happens.

That actually sounds pretty cool.

I guess.

Well, it sounds like the Nexium cult with less sexium.

So while we

would draw my first comment a little bit, get you ready for Kellogg Part 2.

We'll take a quick break for some apropo and nothing.

All right, everyone.

Settle down, settle down.

I know you're all upset about the accusations I've made against Herodotus, but I assure you, you, the real history can also be very fun.

Hell yeah, so.

All right, so, okay, so you guys know how he said that Xerxes had an army of five million men.

Yeah, Xerxes strides the world.

And they drink the river stride.

Right.

Yeah, it turns out the army only had between 100,000 and 300,000.

But that's not, that's nothing to sneeze at.

Lame, boo.

It's not.

It's.

Okay, let's see.

Okay, so Ethiopians do not live exclusively off dried fish.

They eat other stuff, too.

How did you think this was going to go?

Let's kick him.

I want to kick him.

I want to kick him.

Yeah.

I get it.

I get it.

Herodotus told some great stories, but the truth matters.

And we repeat this kind of shit.

We sound like a bunch of fucking idiots.

Okay.

I mean, the Amazons.

The big, like, muscle ladies who live by themselves and capture wandering men to use as their breeding stock.

Exactly.

Yes.

I mean, that's just silly.

I would like to continue believing in the Amazons.

Me, me too.

Yeah, I've added some details to the breeding practice.

You might want to look at it.

Maybe you're shooting a book nobody's going to read.

Okay.

Going for a wander.

This is why we lost the election.

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I'm Heath Enright.

And I am Senor Pets.

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What's that?

Parrangalorem.

Sorry.

Eloceano nos deleta, con nutrias que restador un vosques de algas costeras.

Elo ciano nos enseña que cara decision que tomamos dejaguella.

Elo ciano nos conecta.

Visita Monterey Bay Aquarium punto oy reje di agonal conecta.

So, Noah, I feel like we already have a math-based cult based on division running our country in 20 days.

So

let's try to make this one in the past funny, huh?

What do you say, Noah?

Let's make it funny.

Right, Right.

Yeah.

No, look, I'll admit up front that doing a comedy show based on the life and times of a philosopher is tricky, especially a math philosopher.

And I will commend my co-host for managing so ably so far.

But now we have to dive into philosophy.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

So now this is going to be the philosophy part is going to be all the more difficult because A, math isn't funny, as Heath has just demonstrated.

And B,

I don't actually understand it enough to actually explain it in any meaningful way.

Wikipedia article, that's all I did.

That's kind of the theme here.

So, in an effort to mitigate the first problem and obfuscate the second one, I want to start with the fart stuff.

Yes.

Thank you.

I want to start with the fart stuff was the follow-up song.

I won't do that by meatloaf.

So, okay.

So, Pythagoras was a firm believer that bodily excretions were bad.

They cost you strength and power and all that stuff.

Now, he presumably managed to make his piece with numbers one and two,

but all the other stuff had to be avoided at all costs.

Critically, that included orgasms for the penist.

And I guess like squirters probably too, he had an issue with.

He cautioned his students only to have sex, quote, whenever you are willing to be weaker than yourself, end quote.

But then that's just

how strong I am.

Exactly.

Right.

I can't be weaker than me.

We're stronger.

The whole point of the me thing is pretty much that I am locked in.

Yes, right.

Yes.

Is everyone picturing Tom making that argument to Pythagoras while slowjerking it?

That's what I'm picturing.

Now I am.

Well, obviously.

Yeah.

No, so I should point out, Pythagoras felt like being weaker than himself more than never because he did have four kids.

or three kids or one kid, but he had more than zero kids.

My wife said it's actually a disease, technically.

My wife said it's a disease.

She also said, please don't touch me.

She's just joking around that.

We joke.

She likes me.

Now, of course, but semen was not the only bodily emission that he was concerned with.

He was also quite concerned with fart, which, unlike semen, served no purpose whatsoever.

For that reason, he told his students to avoid flatulent foods at all costs, especially beans, which he considered to be evil.

Or, and again, everything in the dude's life is contradicted at some point or another, he considered them to house the souls of the dead.

So that brings us around to metempsychosis, which was central to Pythagorean teachings.

Now, this is the idea that the soul is immortal and that after death, it's transferred into a new body.

Please say it's done through farting.

Please.

Please say it's done through beans.

So maybe like that it escapes when you fart.

I don't know.

So Pythagoras is said to have had at least five past lives that he could remember in detail.

And like pretty much everybody who ever said that, most of those lives were famous, or at least like famous adjacent, right?

Like the claim that he was a minor character from the Iliad in a previous moment.

Why would you make yourself a minor character in your lie?

Like people are going to check that shit?

Yeah.

Just lie better.

For real.

Like, I'm a minor character in my own life most of the time.

If I'm writing fiction, I'm getting a bigger dick and a better job.

Are you kidding me?

So now, if you're thinking at this point, doesn't the concept of reincarnation predate Pythagoras by quite a bit?

Give yourself a point for realizing what purpose he serves in the history of Western thought, right?

Because reincarnation is kind of like the Pythagorean theorem here.

It's a concept from the vaguely defined East that makes its way into Western thought and therefore needs a Western origin for later racist academics trying to draw the widest possible line through the history of knowing shit.

Right.

You'll also see him listed as the first guy to teach that the Earth was spherical, the first guy to divide it into five climatic climatic zones, and the first guy to realize that the morning and evening stars were the same object.

Again, all of these discoveries were known in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and India long before Pythagoras came around.

Okay, I think I get it.

This is one of those like old school SAT questions.

Discovery is to appropriation as Pythagoras is to theorems.

Close, yeah.

Like that.

But that's not to say that he didn't do anything revolutionary in his lifetime.

His notoriety attests to the fact that he did, or that he was so good at self-promotion that it's literally indistinguishable from great.

Hey, hey, hey, Noah, quit stepping on my Thomas Edison essay.

He was a mysterious figure, even in his own time.

A lot of stories about him involve him going into caves and basements for prolonged periods to either be alone with his wisdom or commune with beasts of the underworld, depending on the ulterior motives of your source.

Quit stepping on my Aaron Rodgers essay, man.

Thank you.

And so apparently when you joined his school, you didn't get to actually meet him for five years.

And during those inaugural five years, students had to remain silent.

After that, they were permitted to listen to him give speeches, but only from behind a curtain.

I guess if you wanted to reach the seeing his actual lips move level, you had to agree to a whole bunch of onerous and lifelong restrictions.

The first five years, you had to sit in a cave with a fire and you can only watch the shadow tell you stuff about the world.

That's the whole thing.

Okay, but see, so they could resell their cave clothes when they were done to Plato's Closet.

Now, no surprise.

There's a great clothes called Plato's Closet.

I've seen a few of those.

Why?

I have no idea.

Why is it called Plato's Closet?

It was called to lead up to that joke.

That's it.

Yeah, it's just.

They were setting Tom up.

That made no sense.

What's Plato's Closet?

It's like a used clothing store.

There's a chain across the country, but Plato is very specifically known.

for young boys and a metaphor about not knowing the truth.

Nothing about used clothing.

I'm very confused.

I mean, there's a story

called Banana Republic.

Okay, so like, I don't know.

Maybe they're delivered in soap crates.

Banana.

Like some minions.

So no surprise, there is a great deal of disagreement on what the restrictions for his school actually were.

Some rules survive.

For example, Pythagoreans are forbidden from breaking bread, poking fires with swords, picking up crumbs, or putting the left sandal on before the right.

Now, it's entirely possible that those prohibitions came from misunderstood aphorisms, right?

Like you can see how don't poke a fire with a sword could just be like a don't kick the hornet's nest kind of saying, right, that has nothing to do with actual hornet's nests.

But given how fucking weird Pythagoras appears to have been, it's also entirely plausible that he did think putting your left shoe on first was a sin.

Okay, I've been doing pant legs at the same time recently, and it's

like I mean like a box chip.

I just bring him up like,

yeah, yeah.

This is what happens when you live alone for 30 years, people.

You come up with a system a system

now of course given his combination of notoriety and reclusiveness legends sprung up about him even before he was dead supposedly a priest of apollo once gave him a magic arrow that allowed him to fly over great distances in short times I don't know why an arrow like I guess he rode the arrow I don't know um but this is apparently how he was spotted in two cities at the same moment once now according to Aristotle he had a golden thigh which he showed off during the Olympic games Just during the Olympic Games?

You would think it would be a little more often.

Yeah.

I would show it off all the time if I had a golden thigh.

Getting me?

Obviously.

Now,

seeing this, I wrestled CM Punk once.

When he crossed the river Kosas, several witnesses heard the river greet him by name.

He once convinced a bull not to eat fava beans, and he persuaded a particularly destructive bear to give up its pernicious ways.

Now, Mr.

Bear, you have to calm down.

The ladies have to pick one of us to be alone in the forest with, okay?

Now, so a lot of the stories about Pythagoras have him talking with animals or having some special relationship with nature.

And that probably stems from the fact that among the very many things he's considered to be the father of is vegetarianism.

There's a famous speech that Ovid gives him in Metamorphosis where he argues for vegetarianism that was wildly influential on like future herbivores or whatever.

The extent to which Pythagoras himself was actually a vegetarian is, of course, disputed.

There are some sources that say he ate meat all the time, some sources that say he would eat meat from a sacrifice.

And there's also a story where a venomous snake bit him and he bit it back and killed it.

Well, I don't know if that counts as not being a vegetarian.

It's insane, but I don't think it's a meal choice.

Well, it depends on whether you swallow, right?

Because you don't have to swallow.

But it's pretty clear that

you play with it and let it drip down your

skull.

That's my dirty boy.

Cecil's going to cut that.

Eli is slow jerking right now.

He's slow jerking Pythagoras, which makes it even more uncomfortable.

But it's pretty clear that giving up meat in all or most of its forms was one of the prerequisites for joining the Pythagorean school.

So that's why they wouldn't let you talk for the first five years.

So Pythagoreans also said that music cleansed the soul in the same way that medicine cleansed the body.

The brown note.

Thank you.

I don't think you liked that at all.

But their takeaway was that deploying the correct music at the correct time was like a spiritual cheat code.

For example, there's an anecdote where Pythagoras comes across two drunken youths that were trying to break into the home of a virtuous woman.

So he quickly sang a very solemn tune and their, quote, raging willfulness end quote was quelled.

Okay, the song about not robbing the unvirtuous woman was a little weird.

It wasn't as catchy, but

that's cool.

He also claimed that the planets and the stars moved according to a mathematical harmony in order to produce an inaudible symphony.

Okay, sorry, real quick.

I feel like if you know an anti-rape song, you just

play that shit on repeat, no?

Yeah, have a lot of fun.

You just sing that everywhere that you are.

Yeah.

Someone who doesn't want to fuck you.

And look, so a lot of this is bullshit.

No.

But a lot of it also was probably never said nor suggested by Pythagoras.

But it was all attributed to him.

And it influences people, like, for example, Johannes Kepler.

who was looking for Pythagoras's inaudible symphony when he discovered the laws of planetary motion.

And Isaac Newton, who attributed the discovery of the laws of universal gravitation gravitation to Pythagoras, in what might have been the only known historical example of Isaac Newton ever giving anyone credit for anything.

Yes, thank you.

Team Leibniz agrees.

Obviously, obviously, invented calculus.

Well, as Sir Isaac Newton said, we are standing on the shoulders of giants.

You are.

I'm the giant.

Get off my shoulders.

Also,

that's not my quote either.

That was originally

Bernard de Chartres or whatever the fuck, but still get down.

I'm getting a little cramped in the traps up there.

Now, Pythagoras' death is shrouded in just as much mystery as every other damn thing about the guy.

We know he was still alive in 510 BCE, which would have put him at about 60 years old.

In that year, Croton won a decisive military victory against a neighboring colony called Sybaris.

Wait, wait.

The sexy hotels with the pools in suite?

Oh, well, that actually would change the story quite a bit.

Yeah.

So after the victory, a bunch of prominent citizens of Croton proposed a democratic constitution for the defeated colony.

The Pythagoreans rejected that constitution, and that created a wedge between the school and the larger society, which led to an anti-Pythagorean rebellion, which led to the building where the Pythagoreans gathered being set on fire.

It's probably just rowdy students sliding years of pent-up flatulence on fire.

Hey, Pythagoras, what's the hypotenuse of the fire that's burning you right now?

Too slow.

Fuck you.

Yeah, right.

So so pretty much all

so it pretty much all the sources agree on that part to the point that you could pretty much accept that as historical fact and and my guess is that pythagoras died in that fire but history can't abide a boring death for such a legendary figure so a bunch of different stories see him surviving the fire only to die a few hours or a few days later So with one story, he leads a small contingent to safety and they hide in a temple and then they die of starvation after 40 days with no food.

There's another story where his loyal students laid down on the fire, sacrificing themselves so he could walk to safety.

In this version, he manages to get out, but he felt so bad about the way that he did it that he committed suicide the following day.

Kind of undoing our whole thing, teach.

Just let you know.

Yeah, right, honestly.

But of course, the most famous story of Pythagoras' death.

has him escaping the fire and he's running from the angry mob that had come for him.

And he's not far ahead, but he's far enough ahead that he could make it out alive.

But just as he pushes through the forest into this large clearing that he's going to, it's going to take him to safety, he realizes that the clearing is actually a field full of fava beans.

Thwarted.

And he can't bear to walk on the fava beans for either reincarnation or fart reasons, depending on your source.

And so he willingly gives up his life to the mob rather than defile himself with bean proximity.

Cool.

If you had to summarize summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be?

He was probably lying about the square of the hypotenuse, dude.

We haven't checked all the triangles.

There's some we haven't checked.

You ready for the quiz?

Sure, why not?

All right, Noah, I think we can all agree that Pythagoras's most important contribution is to stuff we learned in school, but then we forgot.

There are some other Greek philosophers with that honor.

A.

Mitochondrius,

the powerhouse of the cell.

B.

Calculatorus, who was the first to assure his students they wouldn't be walking around with a calculator in their pocket when they grew up.

I still have my TI-82.

Wikimedia, the first instructor to forbid her students from using online encyclopedias because anybody can edit those things.

Or D,

I didn't like the giver, and I think it's a weird book to have kids read.

All right, secret answer: E, all of the philosophers of all time.

That is correct.

All right.

Noah just dropped the idea in the second to last paragraph that Pythagoras' silent student saved his life from a fire by lying down.

How would that save you from a fire?

A,

it wouldn't.

B, seriously, how would that work?

C, fires aren't puddles.

D.

Still, it's a pretty good flex.

Secret answer E,

there are quite a few questionable moments within this biography.

They know I'm going to run over you.

That won't help at all.

It's like when you put a towel down at the beach, like,

yeah, right, right.

Yeah, you uchi dude.

Well, they all, they would throw themselves down, and for just a second, before they caught on fire, you have to do that.

All right, yeah, yeah.

You have to time it really well.

Oh, and you know what, how I feel stupid.

This is still they all fall like dominoes, right?

If one of them knocks over the other one, and you're not going to be able to do it.

Maybe they're standing like a cheerleading tower and you just push them over.

Or he rolls inside them like a big ball.

There, see?

You guys, I wasn't.

We figured it out.

I was

like, the body's 75% walking out.

So that'll put it right now.

You're basically.

All right, make a pyramid.

The hypotenuse is along the ground.

Okay, Noah.

Noah, what was the film adaptation of this purported mathematician's life called a

the long goodbye nomial b phenomenal life of pythagoras

so stupid that's great so good it's so stupid uh c angles with dirty faces or d

making mr right triangle

oh i love the reference to making mr right holy shit did you have to reach deep in for that but I think the correct answer is: A, the long good binomial.

That's amazing.

Absolutely correct.

All right, Noah, one more for you.

When Pythagoras let himself get killed by that mob because of Bean Pobia or whatever, the angry mob obviously did some thematic wordplay at that point when he died.

So what was this one?

A

only the good die mung.

Rest in peace.

This doesn't work quite as well.

It's not bad.

C,

dead of mommy.

D,

farting is such sweet sorrow.

Doesn't really work at the point of the thing in the quote.

Whatever.

It's fine.

Farting, parting.

Or E,

silent but deadly.

Oh, fuck.

We have to end.

If we can end on a fart joke, we have to end on a fart joke.

So I think it is E, silent but deadly.

Oh, no.

It was actually somehow Tom Wins or something.

Oh, really?

Tom wins.

Unusual.

Yeah, sure.

All right.

This says I want an essay from Eli.

Why would you say that?

It's my ears.

What on earth would you say?

Why would you say that?

Thomas Edison shall be redeemed.

All right.

So, Noah, you got that one right?

Good work.

Tom, Eli, Heath, and Noah.

I'm Cecil.

Thank you for hanging out with us today.

We'll be back next week.

And by then, Eli will be an expert.

No, he won't, on something else.

Between now and then, listen to our other shows.

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