Einstein's General Relativity

At roughly 24:30 through his discourse, Zizek talks about Einstein developing his theory of General Relativity. Zizek explains that in his second step, Einstein postulates that matter is a manifestation of the curvature of space-time. It is not the other way around: Matter gives rise to space-time curvature. I have never heard of this before, and I found it rather surprising. Has anybody else heard this statement attributed to Einstein before? If so, are there any references to this on the web? How can all the intricacies of the matter contained in our planet Earth come to be from a simple gravitational well??