I'm Cal Newport, and this is, In Depth, a semi-regular series in which I talk to interesting people about the quest to cultivate a deep life.
Today's episode is brought to you by our presenting sponsor, Done Daily.
I'm a huge fan of this product because it provides you with both a system and daily coaching to implement the type of productivity ideas I often talk about.
I'll tell you more about that later.
For now, I want to talk about today's guest, which is Dr. Brian Keating.
Now, Keating is a big shot scientist.
He's currently the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics at the University of California, San Diego.
He's also the Principal Investigator of the Simons Observatory.
He wrote this cool book back in 2018 that was called Losing the Nobel Prize.
It's a book about the research he was doing.
They were measuring... the signature of the spark that started the big bang.
And they have this really exciting signal and people were all whispering in their ears like you're going to win the Nobel for this.
This is a big deal.
And they found an artifact in the data that sort of ruined it.
And so he wrote a book about that, about thinking you're about to win the Nobel Prize and not.
And it's a cool reflection about science at the highest levels, the reality of ambition.
Anyways, interesting guy.
Now, if this name sounds familiar to you, it's because, in addition to his science, Brian is also a prolific public expounder of astronomy and cosmology and physics.
He has a podcast called into the impossible that has on some of the highest level science guests you're going to find, and they have deep conversations.
It's a really cool show.
He also occasionally slums it and has on people like yours truly.
You should check out that episode, though.
It's a good one.
He's also a regular guest explaining things like physics and cosmology on some of the world's biggest podcast.
You might have seen him chatting about this stuff with joe rogan or andrew huberman recently.
He Does all the big shows.
But the reason why I had him here on the best show of all my own was to talk about his latest book How to Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner.
It's a book that's based on interviews with real Nobel laureates, where he asks them about their own thoughts on things like focus and distraction and what it takes to produce work that really matters.
Clearly this is right up my alley.
These are exactly, I gave that book a cool blurb.
These are exactly the type of ideas that my book deep work was eventually based on.
So we get into that, but because I can't help myself, we talk about a lot of other things as well.
Like Brian's unusual path into academia, which has a twist to it that I still can't believe.
You'll see I'm kind of incredulous in the interview.
We talk about like how the best scientists do what they do.
We talk about why neither Brian nor I went to our graduation ceremony or hooding ceremonies after we earned our doctorate.
Like what the psychology was behind that.
And we both get into our plans for like, hey, what are we going to do next?
We're both full professors.
There's no more promotions to get.
We both have large platforms and do a lot of public facing stuff.
Like what are our elective plans?
And so we get into a lot.
I do a little psychoanalyzing.
I don't know.
It's a great episode.
Anyways, you're going to like it.
This guy lives a deep life.
He has information for you about living a deep life yourself.
I had a good time.
I think you will too.
So let's jump right into my conversation with Brian Keating.
Brian, it's good to see you.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here with a fellow professor.
It feels like we should have a faculty meeting at some point during this conversation.
Well, to make you comfortable, I will simulate a faculty meeting by picking on a very small point about how you run your day and then harping on it for 20 minutes in a way that makes it seem like you just took away the voting rights of half the population.
Because that's what will make people feel like we actually have a faculty meeting here.
We're going to blow little logistics way out of proportion.
Low stakes, high conflict.
Yeah, now I mean, the proximate reason you're on is you know, recently the second book in your Into the Impossible book series came out.
It's called How to Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner.
Clearly, this is in my wheelhouse, right?
I mean it's the intersection of science and deep work and how to produce good things with your mind.
But...
I also use that as an excuse to get you on here, because I have so many things I want to talk to you about.
I think your life is interesting.
I think your path is interesting.
I think your thoughts about what you're doing now is interesting.
So, if you'll indulge me, I want to do what I do with a lot of my guests and actually take my readers a little bit through your life and try to extract some lessons from it.
Until we get to some of your more recent work.
So hopefully you're ready for that.
Here's where I want to start.
I think people are interested in academic paths, serious academic paths, as just a particular deep life that people take.
And I like to unpack that a little bit.
When in your early academic journey did you have that moment of I think I'm going to make a run at being a professor?
It was very late.
It was probably mid 20s, late 20s after getting my Ph.D.
I always thought, you know, being so I'm an astronomer, I'm a cosmologist.
And that means I study the early universe, where it came from, what's happening to it.
Is it going to end?
You know, should we keep paying our taxes? et cetera, et cetera.
But I never thought you could get paid to do this, Cal.
I never thought you could get paid.
And really 90 of the professionally employed astronomers are professors effectively or aspire to be professors someday.
So I never thought you could get paid to be an astronomer, which is what I love to do, which is what would get me into that coveted flow state as a kid, just using a telescope on a dark night before iPhones and stuff, and just sketching into a logbook or whatever.
But I thought like, yeah, someone's going to pay me to do that.
Like they're going to pay me to be an ice cream taster or, you know, ride the roller coaster at Six Flags.
I never thought it was possible.
I never entered my realm, which is really weird because my father was a very famous math professor.
I didn't grow up with him.
My parents were divorced when I was young.
He split, moved to the West Coast.
I stayed with my mom and was adopted by my stepfather.
And he was not a professor.
Smart, smart man.
But he and my mom never really mentioned that, oh, this could be a particular avenue for a career.
But you're going through a doctoral program not thinking about yet professorship.
So what were you thinking?
I had no idea.
I just was, you know, used to being in school and I loved learning.
I love scholarship.
You know, I always was a scholar.
I mean, I was always intellectually curious about so many different things and I was doing proper kind of scientific, you know, research with a telescope and hypotheses and doing all that stuff that they teach you but you never use.
But I was doing it for fun, you know, trying to figure out how far away is, you know, is Proxima Centauri.
You know, can I see it from, you know, Northern Westchester County.
And it was just, you know, very curious to me and I had to teach myself trigonometry, et cetera.
I wasn't really put along the advanced math track again, ironically for the son of a math professor at Cornell and one of the founders of SUNY Stony Brook.
But I never really came to my attention that you could actually do this, let alone that it would be something that I would be doing.
I've been in school, I joke now, this is my 49th grade.
I've been in school continuously for 49 years.
So I never really thought that was a possibility.
And then when I did feel like it was a possibility, it was only during my second postdoc.
It really I didn't think- So you're doing postdocs.
Yeah.
Even without it.
By the way, you're ruining all the advice I give to my listeners, because the one thing I come back to again and again is don't go to grad school without a plan.
It's not a place to, so you did the opposite and it was fantastically successful for you.
So-
Everyone in the audience, Brian is a bit of an exception.
Survivorship bias alert.
Survivorship bias alert.
Exactly.
So you're in your second postdoc.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So then how does tenure line academia enter your world?
So I had been fired from my first postdoc at Stanford because I was sort of equally – so I should say what a postdoc is.
If people don't know.
So in the hard sciences and in computer science, I'm sure it could be similar.
But in the hard sciences physics math chemistry, et cetera You typically have this waylay station between graduate school, when somebody pays you and tells you what to do or at least gives you the rough parameters of what's acceptable for a thesis project.
And you don't have to really come up with original topics, but you must solve things that are original and for the first time ever done.
So it's very challenging to be a student.
But it's not just like most people think.
Oh, grad student, that's just like really hard homework problems in undergrad.
No, it's totally different.
It's very little coursework, actually.
That always surprises people.
Yeah, it's extremely different.
Uh, but your, you know, goal is to start learning how to do research.
Like when I got my pilot's license, which was also as a graduate student the day I got it, you know, the flight instructor told me this is like, this is not graduation.
Like you're not done.
Like this is, if anything.
It's the beginning and you're at your most dangerous.
You know the valley of death is is right after you get your pilot's license, until you have about 800 hours of total accumulated flight time.
So as a grad student you're kind of in that purgatory and over, you know, 400 years, since you know the tradition of really master and student and apprentice, et cetera.
They've developed this tool that kind of is a station between graduate student and professor potentially, and that's called a postdoc.
So postdoctoral, meaning after your PhD, you can be a scholar.
Get a fellowship, scholarship, or just work for an employer.
But during that time your goal is to sort of establish your own ability to create new, novel research programs, with the intent that you're going to sort of prove out your ability to get to that next level, which is to be perhaps a faculty advisor, when you would have again the opportunity to then mentor graduate students and postdocs and teach undergraduates.
So all these things put together this postdoc.
But in a way, it was sort of the most free time I ever had.
Free meaning freeing, not like, oh, I have all this time to scroll.
It gave me so much liberation that now I had the horsepower intellectually from my PhD program I knew what were the interesting topics in the field.
And I could actually accomplish and follow through them with enough perseverance.
So at Stanford, where I was hired right out of Brown, I started to work and think oh, I love this new idea.
I have this new idea that you could actually measure what happened at the moment the Big Bang occurred.
And this just kind of blew me away.
And so I stopped researching early galaxies that my advisor was paying me to do.
And so she wisely, she fired me, but she did me the solid of introducing me to her PhD, her postdoctoral advisor at Caltech.
His name is Andrew Lang.
And I went to, he offered me a job and I accepted that.
So I did two postdocs, and it was only during that second postdoc, when I could implement the experiment that I had invented as a wayward postdoc, as a frivolous postdoc, that we implemented it and built this instrument.
And then that led to me getting an offer at institutions to be a professor.
Yeah, I think people don't always recognize in the experimental sciences, often what you're part of, what you're hiring, is an instrument, an experiment.
It's I am a mass.
I built this thing or I worked under an advisor who built this thing and now I know how to do it.
She's not available, but I am that it's not.
I think people often think about all of academia in the model they had for going to college, which was hey, are you smart?
Do you have promise?
Like, are you?
Let's put you in a competition with everyone else, and are you the smartest, most interesting person, who's great?
We want to hire you as a professor.
That's what I call it.
I call it the academic hunger games.
It starts.
I was in high school, right.
And it never stops.
I mean, it doesn't stop with Nobel laureates, Cal.
It's insane.
The Hunger Games, the zero-sum game.
And the reason that's so pernicious is that it's antithetical to science, right?
You don't win science.
There's not like a zero, oh, like, yeah, I won science.
No, even when you win a Nobel Prize these Nobel Prize winners that I know, they all have things like the imposter syndrome.
They're not good enough.
They don't deserve it.
And so exactly like you say, it's just like throw them in a room and see who comes out.
Though I feel like some of the computer scientists I knew at MIT felt like they deserved it.
There's a few that have a pretty high self-regard.
They're like, I deserve it.
What took you so long?
Exactly.
That's fascinating.
So here's like a psychoanalyze.
You can tell me if this is right or wrong.
Do you think the fact that you didn't see yourself as competing in those games actually helped you stumble into something that ironically, made you more successful in those games?
In other words, you weren't anxious about I need to become a professor.
Oh my god, am I doing the right things?
Am I publishing the right papers?
Am I winning the right mentor?
You were just like hey, school is great, this is fun.
Oh, I can build stuff now.
This seems like a cool problem and somehow that was a benefit.
Yeah, I think that Dr Newport is in session.
I think that's exactly spot on.
I had the safety net.
I knew I'd always land on my feet.
I had real jobs.
I was a short order cook.
I worked as a dishwasher.
I moved furniture.
I always had a job.
I haven't stopped working since I was 12 and I had a lot of real quote unquote jobs.
I don't consider what we do as manual labor, but it's certainly real work.
It's just of a different kind.
It's a deeper intellectual, more a scholastic way.
So I knew I was good at that.
I knew I was a scholar and that academia is meant for scholarship, at least the good kind of academia.
We can argue about some of those other departments.
But the point that I always felt was I'm going to end up on my feet.
I know I'm not going to make that much money anyway.
Spoiler alert, I'm at a public university.
And I always have been in public universities.
But I always felt like this was my kind of path.
I would try it.
If it didn't work out, I knew I'd succeed somewhere else.
I had job offers to work for NASA.
One thing I should say is that right after as a junior, the NSF runs a program called Research Experiences for Undergraduates, REU program, or they did until earlier this year, maybe.
Sure.
I think they're coming back.
I think they're coming back.
Yeah, hopefully they'll come back.
So I did that and I was at the College of William & Mary, not too far from you, but in Virginia.
And I worked for NASA, NASA Langley.
We were developing ways to do non-destructive evaluation.
You know, when you go on an airplane, Cal people don't realize that you go on an airplane.
You see the rivets, you know, on the airplane skin.
And people are like, oh, the rivets hold the plane together.
It must be like, they're just like screws.
No, no, no, it's actually, there's glue inside.
Like 99 of the adhesion comes from a glue surface you can't see and the rivets just hold the skin of the aluminum in place until the glue or the carbon fiber can set.
And so most people.
So we were working on this procedure to use invisible radiation, basically to do what's called non-destructive evaluation, and make sure that the airplane wouldn't crack and come apart, as some have unfortunately, in the many years.
So at the end of the year...
At the end of the summer rather, I was offered a job and it was going to be full-time civil service position for NASA for the rest of my life.
And I love NASA.
I knew all the astronauts' names.
I wanted to be a space shuttle pilot.
That's why I got my pilot's license.
But I knew one thing about myself that if I stopped after senior year graduation, I would never go back.
And I see academia as a ratchet.
And sometimes it's – I mean you can turn a ratchet backwards.
It's very difficult.
But in other words, if you stopped going along that path, it's very hard to go back the other way.
Whereas it's very easy.
If you want to leave academia right now, Cal, you could do it in a heartbeat.
But try somebody in your cohort at MIT or whatever coming back and doing what you do.
It's functionally impossible.
Yeah, I think people don't realize that that the academic path – well, as you said, Hunger Games, it's incredibly competitive.
Right.
And there's one spot we're going to get 300 applicants from top schools.
It's, you know, I think sometimes people have this vision of academia.
It's like, oh, it's like they'll say, oh, you decided to teach.
And it's like, yeah, it's like a job.
Like, hey, we go teach.
You can get a teacher job or come back to a teacher job.
It's like, no, no, no.
It's better to think about like the MBA or something like that.
Exactly.
Yeah.
You're not.
If you leave, you're on the trajectory to be enough of a star to try to catch the attention of some scout.
You can't go leave and play football for a couple of years and come back.
They have enough young players.
So once you after that second postdoc experiments working well, you get your first tenure line position assistant professorship position.
How did you get tenure?
I mean, what was that?
What were you working on?
Were you stressed?
Were you, was it easy?
Like, what was that experience like for you?
Yeah, again, I was never stressed.
I never tied, you know, kind of my self-worth to, My identity is scholar.
My identity is scientist.
Now it's a lot more things, parent, husband, whatever, international criminal.
But my identity was never like, oh, my job is my profession.
And it still isn't.
I get very disillusioned many times with academia, as I'm sure all of us do.
But I never worried about tenure.
First of all, at the University of California, the tenure rate's like 90%.
I've been here 21 years.
We've had one case where it was questionable.
Like, would this person get tenure?
And that's like probably 80 faculty cases that I've been in.
So...
I knew practically speaking I'd probably get it.
I'd have to really mess up.
But I was also very ambitious.
I wanted to write books and I wanted to do more speaking and things along the lines.
Similar trajectory to what you did but a little older than you.
I got there first, but you did it better.
But one more point I want to make that you hinted at, about the postdoc, this weird kind of ambiguous state, Schrodinger state between student and teacher, and that's that there's a difference between the NBA or the MLB right.
So MLB has like a single A ball, double A ball, triple A ball, like that, right?
This is probably a better analogy, yeah.
But the difference is that it's actually pretty easy to get a postdoc.
At least it is in my field.
We're way kind of a seller's market.
If you're a good PhD from a decent program, there's so many professors that are going to want to hire you.
And it's almost like shooting fish in the barrel.
But then it becomes even almost harder to break from, say, AAA ball.
Imagine like it was easy to get into – no, it's really freaking hard to get into AAA baseball right?
Or single A baseball.
Even that.
But we make it like, oh, it's just like the stepping stone.
No, it's not.
It's really unlikely that you'll make it.
We had 400 applications for one job last year. here at UCSD.
It's just incredibly, and all these people could be, and they're all better than I was.
So like I'm not gonna give up my thing, but they're all you know.
They've done 80 times more.
You know papers.
I had one experiment that I created And it was basically my idea that we could build an instrument with a small telescope.
Small meaning affordable, kind of logistically easy to support at the South Pole, Antarctica.
So we built this telescope at the South Pole based on this idea that I had, inspired by this kind of arms race that astronomers have, which is called aperture fever.
As soon as you get a little telescope, you want to get a bigger telescope.
You want to get a bigger telescope.
This I had since I was a kid.
And it's addictive because, you know, you can go up to the James Webb Space Telescope.
Like there's no stopping the size of your telescope and the cost of your telescope.
But I invented a small telescope, which would be very inexpensive.
The cost of a telescope scales as the volume sort of the aperture cubed, whereas the actual collecting area is just the aperture squared and the resolution is just the aperture.
So it's a very steep penalty to build a big telescope, meaning that if I devised a cheaper telescope that could do all the work of a telescope 10 times bigger, it could be a thousand times less expensive.
And that made it more appealing at the time when I applied for funding.
My first funding agent was the Caltech President's Fund, which was David Baltimore, who won the Nobel Prize in in medicine and physiology.
And uh, he gave us my my advisor and me a million dollar seed fund to start this off.
And then we built this instrument and then we put it down at the south pole right when i started at ucsd.
So i knew we would just about be getting data.
You know the six-year period to get tenure.
I asked for accelerated tenure, just whatever.
Might as well get that extra 500 bucks a month.
You know salary?
I did the same.
I get it.
Yeah, we say it's not about the salary, it's about like i want to get it over with pride, etc.
But then our university I don't know about yours, but our university does like really dumb things where they say like if you want to get a promotion you have to go out and get an offer from somewhere else.
Like if I wanted to get you know George, if I said look, I want to get a promotion, they would say great, you know, you can get it in the next three years, or you can go out and get a job offer from Stanford or you know wherever, and then we'll match that offer.
It's so foolish.
But, you know, this is the crazy economics of academia that people don't really understand.
So I was never really worried about tenure again.
And once I got it, nothing really changed.
I just kept doing the stuff that I'm doing.
And my telescopes have gotten bigger and more expensive ever since.
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So thanks, guys.
Now let's get back to my discussion with Dr. Brian Keating.
And then you ended up with work that was Nobel caliber.
And we know this because you wrote a fantastic book Losing the Nobel about both working on a project of that scale and scope and the psychology of what happens when you come close and then don't quite get that prize, and what that tells you.
A couple of questions about that.
But first, if we're just trying to deconstruct what's required in your field.
There's lots of people who fall off at the grad school level, who get to a postdoc but never get a position there.
Get to, you know, assistant track but never go anywhere from there.
And I should, by the way, qualify your remark about the 80% tenure.
It is true that a lot of universities have high tenure rates, but what that hides is because universities are very good at steering you out of there much earlier.
Yeah, it is unlikely for you to go up, for by the time they let you go up for tenure, they know like you probably will get this.
And what's not captured in those statistics is that people where it just doesn't click.
Your research doesn't click.
You're not producing interesting stuff.
Your H-index isn't there.
And you sort of self this may be a bad use of the term you sort of self-deport from academia, I guess, right.
You're like, okay, I need to, this isn't working out.
Of course, I'm not going to go up for tenure or whatever.
But anyway, so people fall off there as well.
What is the core, what is your advice?
Like hardcore ambitious advice, I want to be a star cosmologist, experimental physicist, astronomer.
What is it?
What are the things that matter?
What doesn't?
What are the myths?
What are the realities?
What's like the hardcore technical advice for the aspiring young scientist?
I think the number one thing is to focus, you know, to cultivate the rare and valuable skills that make you unique, rather than trying to be the kind of Renaissance man you know, who can quote Hungarian, you know literature and can also, you know, build a barometer system that works at 50 millikelvin.
The curse of Oppenheimer, right?
Like I need to read.
I need to be able to read like ancient verdict script and quote the Margadita and like be a great violin player or whatever.
It's like, no, no, no, that's don't do that.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So it's just like, again, let's keep using our favorite baseball analogy.
It's like you could be a great shortstop, you know, but you shouldn't also try to be, you know, a great.
You know a great right fielder.
OK, you could do it.
You have athletic potential ability, that you have horsepower to do it.
So for me, it was cultivating just this relentless curiosity about one subject which, as you know, like yes, i'm a cosmologist, so i'm just an expert in cosmology, but along the lines of cosmology there's, you know chemistry, there's thermodynamics, there's quantum mechanics, there's nuclear physics, particle physics, there's all the branches of physics, i joke except for biophysics, although it may be the case that biology came to earth in via a meteorite which, it reminds me, you can get a meteorite if you have a edu email address.
This is clear emphasizing.
Make that offer a little bit clearer because this is cool.
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Okay, so I don't have, you know, as many books as Cal and I don't have all the cool stuff that Cal does, but I do have meteorites, and these are meteorites that are actually the villain uh, you know, of my first book.
These are.
The reason that my team did not win a nobel prize is because microscopic versions of these meteorites masqueraded as a signal we were attempting to confirm, right?
So the most dangerous phrase is is in science, is eureka, i have found it, you know like, because that means you were looking for something and you found.
Okay, you might have found it, but you might be subject to confirmation, a signal that, if you confirmed, would have been a huge deal.
Yes, exactly right.
So the signal was the spark that ignited the Big Bang.
So we know the Big Bang occurred.
We know that the universe is expanding, getting bigger every day and it's getting bigger at a faster rate every day.
So if you wind the movie back in reverse, you come to a time when all the matter in the universe, all the galaxies, all the particles, everything in the universe, was all in one place effectively.
That's essentially what Lemaitre and others did. and Gamow and others coined as the Big Bang.
So the Big Bang, the instant.
But we don't know what caused that massive explosion, if you like, to take place.
So the theory behind that is called inflation, postulated by MIT professor Alan Guth 45 years ago now.
And it has yet to be confirmed or really proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
And we claimed in 2014 that we did discover the spark that ignited this inflation by way of detection of what's called gravitational radiation or gravity waves.
And spoiler alert.
We had to retract it after being on the front page of the New York Times and everybody whispering that we'd win Nobel Prizes.
And so we had to retract that.
But the reason we thought we saw it is that gravitational waves and these micrometeorites, they both make this pattern in the cosmos that we could be misinterpreted, without additional data, as the spark that ignited the Big Bang.
And you got the additional data and it was not what you hoped.
But now you have meteorite pieces to give.
We have meteorites.
So if you go to my website briankeatingcom, slash edu, if you have a edu email address and you live in the USA, you're guaranteed to win one of these beauties.
So these are 4.5 billion years old.
They're older than the Earth cow.
So this is some of the material of which the Earth formed out of in the proto-solar system nebular cloud.
And some of this material is very exotic, highly magnetic.
And some of it is very similar to the iron molecules in the hemoglobin molecule that's in your blood.
And that's because your blood also came from the raw materials from our early solar system.
So this meteorite you'll get at my website.
If you don't have a .edu email address, I do send them out on occasion as well, but guaranteed.
Because I want to support the younger version of ourselves.
So you were kind enough to blurb my latest book, Focus Like a Nobel Prize, my fourth book.
And I won't read it, but you do give the most delightful blurb.
I'll read it.
It's short.
Do you mind if I read your own writing, Kyle?
I love hearing my words read.
So how do you win a Nobel Prize?
Focus on what matters and avoid what does not.
Keating makes a compelling case that the habits of the world's best scientists hold great value for the rest of us.
Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author.
And what's so interesting about this blurb?
I should contrast that with the blurb on my first edition of the.
So I should say the books are written by me with the help of, so far, 22 Nobel Prizes.
I think I've interviewed more...
Nobel Prize winners than anyone on earth.
And that's from my podcast Into the Impossible.
And every time I interview a cohort of nine, I release a book.
Nine is my favorite number.
I was born on September 9th, nine, nine.
The book came out on nine, nine.
And this is the second book so far.
So you're working on the third.
So now it's 18 people.
So the first book I had our mutual friend, James Altucher, Right, the forward two.
But also Barry Barish, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, for detecting gravitational waves that were actually there, unlike the ones I claimed that we detected.
Okay, so why do I bring this up?
So he wrote the forward, Barry Barish.
He's a LIGO Caltech professor, worked with Kip Thorne, who's behind the movie interstellar, all the graphics and that uh, incredible intellect, who i also interviewed in this book, and uh, he wrote the fourth.
So i said well, for my second book i'm going to get another nobel prize winner to endorse and put a blurb on the front cover of the book.
So i asked professor donna strickland and she's a professor at the university of waterloo in canada i asked her yeah, she did an interview with me about two years ago.
Now she's in the book.
She's one of my featured, you know, favorite authors or favorite contributors in the book And I asked her to write the forward and like two weeks went by and I didn't hear from her.
And she wrote back literally – her assistant wrote back.
Professor Keating, Donna Strickland is very honored that you would ask her.
But she's in a period – she's focusing on deep work.
Basically that she's focused on deep work.
Yeah.
And I thought this – I wish I had that before I wrote the book or before – you have to finalize the book before it's printed.
But that would have made it in the book as an example of these laureates applying these tools, tactics and tricks and hacks and habits, but also just lifestyle that you have cultivated and you have spoken about.
And now I get to kind of share their stories with the world.
Long-winded way of saying this was, you know, kind of uh not not really aligned, by the way with me being a professor, like when i wrote my first book, my i asked my department chair you know who's the son of a nobel prize winner uh, who invented the laser?
I said you know, can i get some time off or some sabbatical?
And he said no, the only thing we will.
We won't punish you for writing a book, but in science they don't.
We don't write books.
Yeah, people don't understand this, but they're like oh, Georgetown must have been happy to promote you because of your books.
I said they could care less, because it's not like there's a guy at your university like the president, who's like, do I like Brian?
Do we want to promote him?
No, it's confidential letters from top professors in your particular academic niche giving an honest appraisal of your academic contributions.
They don't care that you wrote a book.
That's not what they're asked to do.
They look at your published research and said, is this person, basically they rank you.
What level school is your work?
I mean, we're on the other side of this now as full professors.
Basically, it's people who are ranking the candidates of like yeah, this is someone who would get tenure here here, but not there.
You could just put exactly – it's like batting average.
They stick with the MLB or whatever.
So just like you're not going to get a hitting title because of your work you do in the field.
No one cares.
It's really like what did you publish?
How exclusive are the places?
How many people cited it?
What do the other expert scholars think?
So yeah, they don't punish you.
They don't mind.
They're confused by it.
My doctoral advisor didn't know I was writing books until she saw one of the MIT co-op.
Like, oh, are you writing books?
As long as it's not getting in the way of doing your work.
But it's really the same as being like, I'm a pretty good triathlete runner.
They're like, oh, that's great.
Like, cool.
That's a cool thing about you.
It has nothing to do with your job.
But okay, let's stick with this focus thing though, right?
Okay, because like...
As you said, focus matter for what you did.
It mattered for the Nobel Prize winners you interviewed.
One of the things I took out of the book is you might think, when you see that title, that you're going to hear a lot of stories.
That's about these Nobel Prize winners talking about how they can summon an intensity like a laser beam that they can bore right through.
It's not what a lot of these stories are about.
Focus.
They're talking about as much what they choose not to do as they are about.
Oh, how do I actually concentrate in the moment?
Talk to me about that.
Like am I picking that up right?
Did you pick up that somewhere?
Like what's going on here with focus as activity selection as much as it is cognitive activity?
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
So Donna Strickland, again the woman – and, by the way, she's only one of four women who have ever won the physics Nobel Prize in 124 years.
So it was pretty hard to get her to sit down and focus on it, but she did.
And ironically yeah, her invention was for basically the science behind the tools, technology behind LASIK surgery.
So what is LASIK?
LASIK is actually adjusting the focus of your eye by cutting away the corneal material that actually does most of the focusing.
You think the lens in your eye does it.
Actually, most of the focusing is done by the cornea and the lens is the only adjustable part.
The cornea is the rough kind of order of magnitude focusing that occurs first.
So she invented, with her advisor and her colleagues, the LASIK.
You know it's called chirp pulse amplification.
That takes an enormous amount of laser energy, but you don't just blast into somebody's eye.
You know, if someone told somebody you know 50 years ago, we're going to take lasers, blast it in your eye, you're going to pay us a thousand bucks and you're going to be super happy, you know, people would be rightfully kind of confused about that.
But She knew how to focus not only in intensity, like a magnifying glass and an army man or an ant if you're evil but how to focus in frequency space.
They found that what they had to do was make this chirp.
So if you ever hear a bird chirping, it's not a sine wave.
It's actually a burst, and it's very sharp, and then it decays really quickly.
So it's like, cheep, cheep.
So if you look at the frequency spectrum, it's also the frequency content.
The Fourier analysis of it shows that it's a compressed, focused amount of frequency.
So she had it in real space, in the position on her cornea, plus the frequency, and she found she could get the amplification necessary to blast just the tissue in and not destroy the retina and leave you blind.
It's incredible what she did.
So what else does she do?
Well, she also thinks a lot about how to cultivate the next generation of scholars.
And how do you actually cultivate somebody who's going to be a future Nobel laureate or just a productive contributor in science?
So science education, as you and I know, I joke that we have the second oldest profession, right?
I mean, we're basically doing with this guy.
So I love finger puppets, Cal, as you know from being on the podcast way back when.
This is Galileo.
If you're listening, I have a finger puppet of Galileo.
He's holding his telescope, which he didn't invent, but he did improve 10X from what the Dutchman named Hans Lippershey had done beforehand.
So what did Galileo do to pay the rent?
He was a professor.
But not only that, Cal, I don't know about you, but he had his students live with him.
I don't know how Mrs. Newport would feel about that, but certainly Mrs. Keating wouldn't like that.
So we don't have any borders here, but that's how he paid the dues basically, until he started writing a book.
Called the Sidereus Nuncius and then later the Dialogue.
And that then made him wealthy, you know, somewhat wealthy.
He was never super wealthy.
But his job teaching was, you know, here I have this real innovation, Cal.
It's called, you know, chalk.
And it was.
You know, it's basically a guy with a rock in one hand riding on a big giant piece of black rock, right.
And so now we do very, very far advanced.
He couldn't even recognize PowerPoint, I'm sure.
Right.
That's exactly the same thing.
But Donna Strickland is thinking about how do we change education so that we cultivate the skills that are necessary?
What other countries are doing things better?
She's in Canada, but she's thinking about education more globally.
And it's just fascinating to see how that's become almost like her hobby.
Now there are laureates I interviewed in the book who have actual hobbies.
Now you know that.
Would you know that I would count as a hobby?
I don't really feel like I would spend my pastime.
You know, if I could watch the Padres, you know, or I could watch, you know, learn about education for the next cohort.
I don't have her kind of, you know, charitable nature maybe.
But Brian Schmidt, for example, who co-discovered the fact that the universe is not only expanding, but it's accelerating at an increasing rate and someday may either rip apart or end in a heat death of the cosmos.
He discovered that using supernovae.
He grows wine.
He grows grapes for wine, and he's an expert vintner.
And he's just obsessed with it.
But what does he do?
I asked him, like, how do you find the time?
Because he's the provost of this Australian university.
He's still a research scientist.
Nobel laureates get asked to do speaking gigs even worse than you do.
And he's growing one.
He's like, I basically have a calendar that's my to-do list.
So what do you call that?
Time boxing.
So they're using these tools.
The funny thing is that they didn't know they were using these tools that you've been talking about.
You know, and the other person who blurbed the book Ali Abdaal has been working about on for a long time, and Sahil Bloom and Nir Eyal.
All these guys use these tools, but I've realized the Nobel Prize winners don't know it, Cal.
So all the more so.
How does a freshman, how does a grad student?
How does a postdoc?
How does an assistant professor?
How are they gonna learn these tools?
And so I basically wanted to write this as a self-help book.
I mean, it's one of the things that happens to me when I talk to business audiences, because a lot of my writing it's like hey, here's what's going wrong in the world of work because of technology and here's what you should do to get around it.
But most of my ideas that I'm bringing to that world it's come out of how do you succeed in academia?
I mean, I wrote a New Yorker essay about this last year called How I Learned to Concentrate.
And it was –.
I traced, like every major idea I'm known for in my books, to that five-year period as a graduate student at MIT.
You go to the business world like you're a wizard.
Where did you even come up with these ideas?
But you talk to the Turing Prize winners I worked with or the Nobel Prize winners you work with.
They're like, well, that's the only way.
To do anything significant is like you got to be very careful and picky about what you choose to work on.
Problem selection matters.
And then that needs to get like the bulk of your focus.
That's what matters.
And then other stuff fits in the time you have.
And if it all doesn't fit, then you got to drop some things.
But like, at the core of what you're doing is, once you found the right project is like that's what matters.
That's where all your value comes from.
Basic idea if you're a Nobel Prize winner.
But if you're a business executive...
You don't know this.
You're thinking like answering emails is important and being communicative and being busy is important.
So like to what degree do you think these ideas expand?
I mean I think the academia produced them because it makes sense.
This was the world where we first began thinking about how to use the brain to create value.
And now 2,000 years later, most of our economy is based around using your brain to create value.
So like we have a head start on thinking about this.
How far does it expand?
I mean who –
Who could profit from these ideas?
How broad can we go?
I think you can.
Some of the challenge that we have is that – I joke that, like everybody is above average in academia, which is part of the reason that many academicians suffer from the imposter syndrome.
I mean.
Barry Barish told me that he felt the imposter syndrome after winning the Nobel Prize worse than before he won the Nobel Prize.
I said, Barry, how can that possibly be?
And he said, well, when you win a Nobel Prize, you go to Stockholm.
You have to dress in this white tie, white tails.
You eat this reindeer dinner.
You meet the king and queen of Sweden.
And you get this giant, you know, Flavor Flav-like medallion.
And you get a million dollars plus, you know, potentially.
And so they want to make sure you're not going to come back and say hey, you know where's my money.
You know, where's my medal?
Where's my reindeer?
Right?
And so they make you sign this ledger.
And in the ledger are all the names of everyone who's ever won the Nobel Prize in your field.
So Barry's a super curious guy.
He turns it back.
He sees Feynman.
He goes back.
Marie Curie.
He turns it back.
He sees Fermi.
All these just like titans.
And then he sees Albert Einstein.
And he's like, I don't belong in the same breath as Albert Einstein, let alone the same book.
Finger puppet here.
And so I'm not worthy.
And I said, Barry, I got to tell you some good news.
Einstein had the imposter syndrome.
He's like, what are you talking about?
I said he felt that Isaac Newton was the greatest contributor, not only to science but to Western civilization.
And he's like, ah, it's amazing.
And I said, but that's not all.
Because Isaac Newton had the imposter syndrome too.
And he was like, oh, you've got to be kidding me.
And I said, no, he failed to live up to his idol's expectations.
And his idol, Barry asked, who's his idol?
I said, Jesus Christ.
Newton so wanted to emulate Christ, he couldn't create miracles.
But he spent most of his writing on religion and alchemy and almost, you know, side projects.
His side quest was calculus, gravitation, and optics.
But he died a virgin.
He said, that was the only way I could imitate God.
Now, his personality probably helped with that, because he's kind of a schmuck, as many people described him.
But I think that they – so to be at this level, Cal, as you know, like when you walk down the hallway too, it's hard to be – like you're simultaneously extremely competent to get to this level.
But you're surrounded by so many people that are also extremely competent.
It's like if you're so good that they can't ignore you, right?
But everyone is so good that they can't ignore you.
You get ignored.
And I think that's a weird emotion, because we all do have a – to be a good scientist, you have to be humble against Mother Nature, who will always crush the hell out of you, squash your dreams and leave you groping and groveling for relief.
But you also have to be – have a little chutzpah.
You have to be a little bit arrogant that you can take on these problems that have crushed, killed and defeated people who came before you.
The whole point of that story about –
Einstein, Newton, Jesus.
It's like if Einstein was right, I wouldn't have a job.
Like, okay, just look up what Einstein said.
But if he thought Newton was right, he wouldn't have created general relativity.
So you have to have that balance of swagger but also humility.
I like the swagger point and balance it with humility.
But I mean, it just reminds me this was something that really confused my wife but I think would not confuse you which was I didn't go to any of my graduation ceremonies.
I didn't go to my master's degree.
I didn't go to my doctoral degree.
I didn't do the hooding or whatever.
And my mindset was very much like If I feel like that's something that's an accomplishment to celebrate, then I'm not going to make it as an academic.
This had to have been easy.
Sorry to interrupt, but in high school, people would say, this is the best time of your life.
And I said, this is the best time of my life.
I hope it's not true.
But you're 100%.
I never went to my hooding ceremonies.
I never did that.
I was like, no, I'm on to the next thing.
Not a shiny object, but just, like, I'm done.
Like, I got to keep going.
Yeah, the monster minds would not have.
It was the monster minds of the.
You know, World War II, era of physics.
I mean yeah, sure they got their doctorate at some point, like en route to like they had things to do.
And so that was very much, yeah, my mindset.
My college graduation, I completely didn't care about.
Even though I was graduating...
I think I was like top five in my class, right?
Like I didn't find college that hard.
I was like this I can't celebrate this because this is the easiest thing I've done that I'm gonna do on the route, like what I wanna do.
Like everyone graduates college that you go to college.
That's not competitive or...
Yeah, you go to a doctoral program.
Yeah, I didn't get kicked out of the doctoral program.
Fine.
But like what matters is like, can you get the tenure track job?
Like, so you can't, you know, you can't celebrate that.
Like now with my own students, like, oh, this is so great.
And I love the pomp and the circumstance and I wear the wizard robes.
But what is it for you now?
I mean, look, let me turn the psychology back on you now.
So now that you've done...
I mean your career is just, I mean from Dartmouth MIT Georgia, and all the stuff you do in the public mind which, by the way, I feel like you fulfill what I always joke with my colleagues about but they never do.
Very few of them do it that are real professors, is that you have to give back to the public.
You have to communicate in a language that they understand because they pay your salary.
And if you don't, eventually, I mean, you're at a private institution.
Just because it's private, there's tons of public money that flow through there.
Same with every institution, especially, you know, public institutions.
But let me ask you, you know, what is your next thing?
What is the thing that you would say now?
Like, OK, forget about like your full professor or your, you know, you do.
I think you're a department chair or whatever you're doing.
What is the next thing?
What is the thing that you're going to like kind of the hooding that you're ignoring now?
Like, what is the next thing that you're now going to focus on, say, that will give you that sense?
Or maybe there's not one.
How do you feel about that?
Well, so here's the thing about Georgetown, like why I'm still there and why that's working.
Is they, in the 20th century, played this big role in the creation of bioethics as a field?
They created this thing called the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and all the big ideas about what do we do now that we're growing like technology to manipulate DNA and these other types of issues?
How do we deal about this ethically?
They are at the forefront.
They said, look, we've got a big medical school, but we're Jesuit.
We have these values.
They kind of define bioethics.
Georgetown had this idea of like we should do the same with technology.
We should be the institution that's trying to figure out how do we grapple with new technologies?
What are the ethical concerns?
In part, because our law school has probably the largest technology law faculty of anywhere.
We're very policy focused.
We're in Washington, D.C.
We have a lot of institutes that deal with these sort of things.
There's That's what we're going to do.
And I basically said, well, that's kind of what I'm doing.
And my public facing stuff is starting with deep work.
All of my books, I can really, they're technology stories.
They're all about, it's technology doing something, causing problems, how do we react to it?
Deep work is about what happened to knowledge work after it fell into a constant trap of technological distractions.
What do we do about that?
A World Without Email was about the same thing.
Digital minimalism was about our phones.
Slow productivity is actually about how knowledge work broke.
Because we had this productivity heuristic that didn't work in an age of fine granularity, work demonstrations because of technology.
That's what I do.
I said, well, good.
That's what I want to do now.
Let me help you do that.
Let me help.
This is a good thing for an institution like Georgetown to be ahead of.
So I was one of the original faculty founding faculty members of the Center for Digital Ethics there, which is their sort of institute on campus that draws just from actual tenure line faculty from different disciplines.
And I helped create and direct a new major computer science, ethics and society, which is the first major in the country to actually fully integrate computer science and ethics.
There are majors that are like CS plus ethics, where it's like yeah, you're a CS major and you have to take three ethics courses.
No no, Georgetown.
We're hiring people, myself included, computer scientists, who teach courses in this computer science, courses that are built around ethical concerns.
It's not take algorithms with this guy and then go take ethics and the philosophy part.
So anyways, like that's what I'm doing.
It's been scary, Brian.
Here's the scary part about it is to do that.
You kind of have to say So for now I'm not doing the math papers.
The thing that I had been doing and was trained to do since I was, you know whatever.
It was 21 years old.
So that's the interesting part is, you know, I'm a full professor.
There's no more promotion to get.
There's no letters to be written about me from faculty in the computer science.
So there's no one I have to worry about.
And so I made that switch about a year or two ago and I'm kind of in the middle of it.
And one of the things I did in the switch this might be interesting to you is I've started saying I have a quote unquote studio day.
And I don't, this is the day where I'm not, I'm definitely not on campus.
I don't do meetings that day.
I'm in my studio.
I'm podcasting and I'm working on my newsletter because that reaches you, know it's going to be read or downloaded eight plus million times a year.
And it's about technology and it matters.
And that's part of my job now.
And so far I've gotten away with saying that, you know, but it's different.
It's different.
So I've gone from juggling two worlds to be like this is sort of my new, this is my world.
Now is is public-facing.
Like how do we, if we don't understand technology and how it affects us and what we can do about it, we're in trouble.
So I don't know.
It's an interesting shift.
I think that's great.
I mean, I think it's kind of some things that you echo and I try to tie into in the book as well.
You know, the fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence.
We have this tendency in the West, and maybe in general, to venerate youth, and you know the sheer horsepower of their minds and the proofs that you could do when you were 21, and also writing books and also.
It's different than what you do now.
I'm sure you can still do it and you still have wisdom.
But I'm coming to be a little bit more optimistic, not to get all David Brooks Second Mountain or Arthur C Brooks, his namesake as well, kind of the – kind of challenges of grappling with your youth being over in that chapter, that season of your life of fluid intelligence.
But actually, with these little digital devices, I just don't feel like there's going to be as much of an emphasis on the fluid intelligence.
I mean, when I have a digital assistant always on, I have this thing with a pendant, I have my phone, I have my whatever.
Those are incredible force multipliers, but they don't have any wisdom whatsoever.
You know, if i ask chat gp, i asked it what.
What books has brian keating written?
You know, it's the new googling yourself and it's like he wrote losing the nobel prize into the impossible and a brief history of time and i'm I'm like.
Well, I wish I had the book sales numbers of that.
It's like almost the Bible book sale numbers.
But no.
So I think like we – and you're a lot younger than me.
But still, the fact is that I think there's going to be a commodification of the fluid intelligence and a real kind of premium put on crystallized intelligence.
And what you're doing seems to align perfectly, at least, with that hypothesis, that you're now leveraging all this experience, this recognition that yeah, we never teach our students ethics.
I've never once had a class.
And I talk about it in this book.
There's two chapters where I kind of give Keating's rules for life, survival, and academia.
And one of them is just like, well, why is it that a medical student gets an ethics class?
Why is it that a business student gets an ethics class?
Why is it that a law school student gets an ethics class?
Why don't scientists?
Oh, you don't need it?
Oh, come on.
You're telling me, like some, you know p-hacking.
You know which?
I talked to one of the fathers of the p-hacking identification, Guido Imbens.
You know, he in this book talks about how rampant, how destructive it is, not just for economics, which he won the prize in, but for society.
Like the fabric of society, could be torn asunder by what you and I do as scientists and how we teach.
And we don't teach some ethics.
So I think it's a beautiful thing.
But I think it's one that an AI wouldn't have come up with.
But you're going to ironically use it and the applications of it in the AI era.
And that shows how crystallized intelligence, in my opinion, is going to be the new hot commodity.
I'm curious how you think about it in your own career, right?
I mean you're a – distinguished professor so now it's people don't know these rankings but even as full professors there's these honorifics and levels you can get and this is like a university level professor you really don't go higher than that um and you have a very popular podcast and you're you're a good popularizer right because you go on the other like mega shows you know i mean you've been on huberman you've been on rogan like so you reach big audiences check off deep life More importantly, my show, which between me and Andrew Huberman, by the way, we have millions of downloads.
So that's why I like to see it.
So how do you think about your career now?
Yeah, I mean I'm definitely getting a lot more fulfillment.
When I look at my most highly cited paper, it's got 2,000 citations now.
And then I look at one episode of my – if I only get 2,000 views of an episode, I get disappointed.
It's just whatever.
It's gamified of course.
I think now I have at least one more book in me.
If I keep interviewing Nobel Prize winners, I'll put out –
Oops, I'll let my camera just click down.
Just as you said, I've got this popular podcast, my camera.
First time on a camera, Brian?
Come on.
The buttery bokeh.
I got to get that in there to match you, my friend.
So the focus on kind of the next stage is another – I think I want to write one more – popular science book, and this one's going to be about.
You've heard about string theory obviously, as sort of a potential theory of everything, but what a lot of people don't know is that string theory is not only unproven there's literally no evidence in support of it as we speak but it may be permanently shrouded in the mystery of being what's called unfalsifiable.
So Karl Popper had this notion that science should be not provable, because you can't prove that there's not a purple unicorn on Jupiter's North Pole in every case.
But you can falsify different claims.
So string theory might not be falsifiable, but there's an equal and kind of almost opposite candidate theory of everything that which just so happens to possibly imprint the signal that some people have claimed might have tentative hints for already.
And I want to explain that signal, and I want to explain the science of what's called the Simons Observatory, which is the project that I'm the PI of right now in Chile.
It's a $200 million project.
400 people on it and it's a massive telescope at 18 000 feet above sea level in the volcanic, out of common desert of chile and um.
I want to explain how how how it could possibly be discovered, because one of the consequences of this is that we may be able to discover why time has an arrow, why does it flow in this one direction and why do we always seem to not have enough of it?
You should write that book.
I think that's right.
Now, I don't know how you're going to write it when you have to be a PI on the Simon's Observatory.
See, I react to having too much to do by doing less.
You react to it by somehow just making it all work.
And so I don't know what your magic is there.
But that is impressive.
I mean, how do you make that work?
Because you still do the hard parts of being an academic.
And you write the books and you do the podcast.
Yeah well, I think you know for me, if it's not like, if I'm my free time Cal, I have a telescope.
I use my telescope.
I take astronomical images.
And it just so happens that some of the things that I can do as a hobby and my kids are into it, you know purely by coincidence.
I never, you know, force them to do it.
So I get to spend time with my kids, you know, learning and studying and building, like this massive new telescope in the mountains of San Diego now.
Uh, it's just super fun.
And I, I just loved, you know, if I retired, I'd still be teaching.
I'd still be, you know, building, tinkering.
I'd still be, you know, going to travel and, and I love speaking and I do those kinds of things.
So for me, it's like, you know, it, it, it fills me up with, with, you know, gratitude.
I think that's the most important thing in life.
If you're not grateful, you're not a happy person.
If you're not a happy person, it's hard to be a good person.
So for me it's like – the other thing I should say, and that we touched upon in your interview on my channel, was the concept of a sabbatical.
So Judaism is a big part of my life, and one of the attributes of Judaism is the seven-day cycle, of which you have to – I tell my students, you cannot work seven days a week.
You probably have to work six days a week.
You probably do while you're young and you've got that fluid intelligence pumping away through you and all those great traits.
But you are forbidden to work seven days a week if you're in my lab.
And they all know it.
They know I don't work on holidays and Saturdays.
I don't work on Sundays either, by the way.
But that's the thing.
If I didn't have that rejuvenation each week, you're probably right.
I probably couldn't do most of what I do.
But I get a reset.
It's like a sabbatical literally every week.
And as long as I keep having the strength and health, I'll continue to do it because it makes me fundamentally full of joy to do and be able and get paid a little bit to do what I do for what I would do for free, as I said at the beginning.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And what people often also get about these sort of academic positions you're in charge often, right.
So it is really different than being a PI on something.
There's a lot to do, but you're in charge of it.
Like, here's how we're doing.
There's a lot of autonomy in academia.
Whereas in a corporate job, it's I'm on these projects, which means I have to be on email all the time.
People can summon me to meetings.
It's like constantly jumping through what other people need.
It's the...
I should say though, that you know just.
I mean, I love that romantic vision, but you'd be surprised how much you know like.
Well, there's this Chilean law that prevents people that work 16 hours a week from working.
You know 17.
It's mind numbing.
And that's where the podcast is the relief valve for me, because I say, like I have all these telecoms and I try to use your rules Cal, please you know my rabbi forgive me for the sins that I make against you.
But the problem is, there are conversations that you and I have to have if we want to keep up what we're doing.
But then there are conversations I want to have.
And the podcast gives me that the access to people like you, to people like the Nobel Prize winners.
I talked to Terry Tao, my first Fields medalist.
I'm going to have another one on.
It's just incredible, Cal.
I mean I'm trying to put together this university that I wish I had For people like me and you and your listeners, because there's so much cool stuff in the world and there's so much evil awful, horrible news, mostly in politics.
And what we do gives us a true safe space, not intellectually safe.
I mean it should challenge you, but it gives you that safe space to think like God.
No one looks up at that asteroid over there, a comet or, or looks up and sees a constellation.
I hate that republican constellation.
That's so.
We have that safe space, should cultivate it.
We need more of it and that lets the soul breathe and i think that's what we're missing.
So i'm really jazzed about podcasting as well, and i don't do it for the money.
I mean i lose money on it.
Probably i lose money on some of the books i write uh, if you pay me by the hour but um, but ultimately it gives me a great source of joy, fulfillment and ultimately that's the currency of life.
Right, Well put and well said.
We're going to wrap it, but before we do, I want to give two endorsements for Brian to my audience here.
One, listen to the podcast.
Listen to Into the Impossible.
Not just because especially the science talk is interesting, but because it will give you a repeated exposure to life of the mind.
And I think that's something that we really downplay right now what it actually is like to use the brain to create value.
It's a slow process.
It's a fulfilling process.
It's a life-affirming process.
And it's the opposite of AI-supported adult social media slop.
It puts you in a different mindset about human potentiality and makes you think about this other stuff as man.
That kind of feels like a waste.
And then my second endorsement is uh, read the latest book, how to focus like a nobel prize winner, because i you could think of that as like the source notes for deep work.
Like deep work is talking to a non-academic crowd.
Hey, focus is important.
Here's how you do it.
All of my inspiration came from academia right, because that's where i was, where.
This is not a crazy idea.
You know deep work in academia.
People like yeah, of course, like this is, This is what we do.
So if you want sort of the source material right, like the source inspiration for a book like that, here we got nine Nobel laureates talking about exactly how they do this and why they do this.
And so you don't have to be interested in winning the top prize in that field in order to get wisdom.
So anyways, Brian, I love what you do.
Always a pleasure to talk.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Thank you, my friend.
And thanks for the blurb on the book.
It's very meaningful to be connected with you.
And I'll just echo that.
The deep life, that's the rarest commodity, the one that only human beings can do, right?
So take advantage of it.
And I really just so appreciate you.
Thank you, Cal.
All right.
Thanks, Brian.
All right.
So there you go.
That was my conversation with Brian Keating.
I love geeking out with other academics.
You know, it's not...
It's not as removed from your life as you might think.
As I talked about with Brian, so many of the ideas that I now talk about to the world of knowledge work, ideas about focus and distraction and deep work and diligence and not taking on too many projects and workload management.
Like a lot of these ideas, the seed for them came out of my experiences in academia.
Because it's the one place where the stakes are so high and the intellectual demands are so strict that you have to really care about these things like focus.
You have to really care about these things like workload.
So the seeds were planted there that I have then helped us sow in much broader types of fields, if we'll stick with that metaphor.
So that's why I like geeking out on these things.
But Brian's just a really cool guy.
He's really smart, by the way.
He's a very well-known cosmologist.
And he's done some really good work.
He's modest, but he's done some really good work.
If you have a .edu email address, pick him up on that offer.
Go to his website.
I think it's briankeating.com.
Google his name.
And if you sign up for his newsletter he's honest about this with a edu address he's going to send you space dust.
I mean, I don't know where he has all the space dust from.
I don't want to say that he definitely has a connection to aliens, but like he probably does.
But anyways, you can get some space.
I thought that was really cool.
Great discussion.
Check out the book, How to Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner.
You'll love it.
My blurb is honest.
Check it out.
Hope you enjoyed the conversation.
Hopefully we have some more of these coming up.
I don't do them every week, but we've got some ideas.
So if you like them, let us know.
We'll be back with another in-depth episode at some point in the near future.
But the normal Monday episodes of the Deep Questions podcast, they'll always be there for you.
So at the very least, you'll hear from me Monday.
Thank you for listening.
Talk to you next time.
Hi, it's Cal here.
One more thing before you go.
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