I got to interview Albert Einstein. It was insane. Here's how it all went down.

First, let me tell you, as a blogger and podcaster I have a fairly high success rate for getting interviews with all kinds of interesting people. As you know, interviews with experts make for compelling content.

Booking time with Einstein was a bit tricky, though. He's a big shot. I figured some of the usual preparatory tactics (commenting on his blog, tweeting, book reviews, etc.) wouldn't work.

We're talking about a Nobel Prize winner here. What are the chances he'd discover me via social media?

Sometimes I introduce myself to these industry celebs at conferences, but it seems Albert's never gone to an online marketing event and is never going to. The word is he's mostly into science. I don't think I can handle one of those types of shows.

The biggest problem is... Einstein is dead.

Since I had no strategy for landing the Einstein interview, I decided to just place a call to his people. Tough task. At Einstein.biz, they do have a contact form, but it has just two fields and one of those irritating CAPTCHA forms. There's no process whatsoever for requesting interviews. Physicists are evasive suckers.

When I finally did get in touch with his people, they insisted Albert was completely unavailable for interviews. I tried my best to be polite and pushy at the same time, but to no avail. They told me he was dead.

Imagine my embarrassment.

I get my news mostly from Twitter these days and thought I was fairly in the know. I had read about the passing of Neil Armstrong and the confession of Lance Armstrong, but had never seen a single tweet about Einstein's death. It turns out he is indeed deceased, which explains a lot.

But one can dream.

For reasons that should now be obvious, I gave up.

My pursuit of the late great Albert Einstein was on my mind when I went to bed that night. And the craziest thing happened. We met.

In my dream, I wandered into a watering hole called "The Photo Electric Effect," and there he was—the genius, nursing a Guinness.

The stool next to him was vacant, so I sat down, ordered the house special martini, "The Manhattan Project," and we started shooting the breeze. We talked a bit about this and that—hairstyles, Mozart, the Yankees... I'll spare you the details.

But somewhere in the vicinity of our second or third round, we got into the "so what do you do?" conversation. He started in about quantum physics, but quickly sensed I had no idea what he was talking about, so we moved on to my profession.

Here's how my conversation with Albert Einstein went.

ALBERT
Online marketing? Could you show me what you mean by that?

[Barry takes out his Galaxy Note II smartphone.]

BARRY
Sure. You see here on my phone, we're looking at the Web. Brands build a home on it called a website. They publish stuff on it. Quite a few have hired me to create the content and try to get people to discover it, experience it, and share it.

ALBERT
For what purpose?

BARRY
Marketing, basically. The more a brand can earn the awareness and affection of the consumer, the more likely they'll be able to sell them their stuff.

[Albert took a few notes, with a notebook—the paper kind.]

ALBERT
And there are a lot of these websites?

BARRY
Hundreds of millions—with billions of pages.

ALBERT
It's hard to stand out then, yes?

[Clearly, the man is a fast study.]

BARRY
Very.