London, summer 1936: Salvador Dalí arrived to lecture on modern art in a full deep-sea diving suit, holding a billiard cue and leading two Russian wolfhounds, and nearly suffocated on stage while the audience laughed, assuming it was performance. This episode strips away the spectacle to find the calculating man beneath: born in Catalonia in 1904, nine months after the death of an older brother whose name he was given, raised by a strict atheist lawyer father, and shattered at sixteen by his mother’s death.

We follow him to Madrid, where he befriended Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca while obsessively studying Velázquez and Vermeer at the Prado, building the classical mastery that made his hallucinations feel real. We unpack the paranoiac-critical method, his meeting with Gala in 1929 and her role as ruthless business architect, his violent disownment by his father, and the exile in a fisherman’s cabin at Port Lligat where he painted The Persistence of Memory in 1931. We cover the American media stunts including the Dream of Venus pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair, his refusal to take political sides during the Spanish Civil War even after Lorca’s execution, his 1934 trial and expulsion by the Surrealists, the controversial 1948 return to Franco’s Spain, and the nuclear mysticism phase where Freud gave way to quantum physics and floating crucifixes.

• How being a replacement child fueled a lifelong need to be impossible to ignore
• Why melting clocks were a response to Einstein’s relativity applied to psychology
• The castle at Púbol Gala forbade him to visit without written invitation
• Why atoms that never touch explain the segmented, floating forms of his late work
• His direct influence on Warhol and the modern concept of the artist as brand