How Nobel Prize Winners Focus | Cal Newport + Brian Keating

00:00:00.720 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is In Depth, a semi-regular series in which I talk to interesting people

00:00:07.360 | about the quest to cultivate a deep life. Today's episode is brought to you by our presenting

00:00:12.960 | sponsor, Done Daily. I'm a huge fan of this product because it provides you with both a

00:00:17.860 | system and daily coaching to implement the type of productivity ideas I often talk about. I'll

00:00:24.440 | tell you more about that later. For now, I want to talk about today's guest, which is Dr. Brian

00:00:30.660 | Keating. Now, Keating is a big shot scientist. He's currently the Chancellor's Distinguished

00:00:35.620 | Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics at the University of California, San Diego. He's

00:00:39.740 | also the principal investigator of the Simons Observatory. He wrote this cool book back in

00:00:45.200 | 2018 that was called Losing the Nobel Prize. It's a book about the research he was doing. They were

00:00:51.940 | measuring the signature of the spark that started the Big Bang. They have this really exciting

00:01:00.300 | signal and people were all whispering in their ears like, "You're going to win the Nobel for

00:01:03.340 | this. This is a big deal." They found an artifact in the data that ruined it. He wrote a book

00:01:10.560 | about that, about thinking you're about to win the Nobel Prize and not. It's a cool reflection

00:01:14.820 | about science at the highest levels, the reality of ambition. Anyways, interesting guy. Now, if

00:01:20.660 | this name sounds familiar to you, it's because in addition to his science, Brian is also a prolific

00:01:27.140 | public expounder of astronomy and cosmology and physics. He has a podcast called Into the

00:01:33.560 | Impossible that has on some of the highest level science guests you're going to find. They have

00:01:38.980 | deep conversations. It's a really cool show. He also occasionally slums it and has on people

00:01:43.260 | like yours truly. You should check out that episode though. It's a good one. He's also a regular

00:01:47.380 | guest explaining things like physics and cosmology on some of the world's biggest podcasts.

00:01:51.380 | You might have seen him chatting about this stuff with Joe Rogan or Andrew Huberman recently. He

00:01:55.780 | does all the big shows. But the reason why I had him here on the best show of all my own was to talk

00:02:02.820 | about his latest book, How to Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner. It's a book that's based on interviews

00:02:08.660 | with real Nobel laureates where he asked them about their own thoughts on things like focus and

00:02:13.540 | distraction and what it takes to produce work that really matters. Clearly this is right up my alley.

00:02:18.900 | These are exactly, I gave that book a cool blurb. These are exactly the type of ideas that my book

00:02:23.300 | Deep Work was eventually based on. So we get into that, but because I can't help myself, we talk about

00:02:27.060 | a lot of other things as well. Like Brian's unusual path into academia, which has a twist to it that I still

00:02:33.940 | can't believe. You'll see I'm kind of incredulous in the interview. We talk about like how the best

00:02:39.300 | scientists do what they do. We talk about why neither Brian nor I went to our graduation ceremony or

00:02:44.100 | hooding ceremonies after we earned our doctorate, like what the psychology was behind that. And we both get

00:02:48.900 | into our plans for like, Hey, what are we going to do next? We're both full professors. There's no more

00:02:53.380 | promotions to get. We both have large platforms and do a lot of public facing stuff. Like what are our

00:02:58.980 | collective plans? So, and so we get into a lot and do a little psychoanalyzing. I don't know. It's a great

00:03:03.460 | episode. Anyways, you're going to like it. He, this guy lives a deep life. He has information for you about

00:03:10.020 | living a deep life yourself. I had a good time. I think you will too. So let's jump right into my conversation

00:03:14.820 | with Brian Keating. Brian, it's good to see you. Thanks for, thanks for coming on the show.

00:03:20.580 | Brian Keating: Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here with a fellow professor. It feels like

00:03:24.900 | we should have a faculty meeting at some point during this conversation.

00:03:27.540 | Brian Keating: Well, to make you comfortable, I will simulate a faculty meeting by picking on a very

00:03:33.540 | small point about how you run your day and then harping on it for 20 minutes in a way that makes

00:03:38.260 | it seem like you just took away the voting rights of half the population because that's what will make

00:03:42.740 | people feel like we actually have a faculty meeting here. Blow little logistics way out of proportion.

00:03:48.020 | Brian Keating: Low stakes, high conflict.

00:03:49.700 | Brian Keating: Yeah. Now, I mean, the proximate reason you're on

00:03:52.900 | is recently the second book in your Into the Impossible book series came out. It's called How to

00:03:58.980 | Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner. Clearly, this is in my wheelhouse, right? I mean, it's the intersection

00:04:04.500 | of science and deep work and how to produce good things with your mind. But I also use that as an

00:04:10.500 | excuse to get you on here because I have so many things I want to talk to you about. I think your life is

00:04:14.340 | interesting. I think your path is interesting. I think your thoughts about what you're doing now

00:04:18.020 | is interesting. So if you'll indulge me, I want to do what I do with a lot of my guests and actually

00:04:23.700 | take my readers a little bit through your life and try to extract some lessons from it until we get

00:04:28.740 | to some of your more recent work. So hopefully you're ready for that.

00:04:32.020 | Brian Keating: Yeah.

00:04:32.020 | Brian Keating:

00:04:33.020 | Brian Keating: Here's where I want to start. I think people are interested in academic paths,

00:04:37.340 | serious academic paths as just a particular deep life that people take. I like to unpack that a

00:04:42.380 | little bit. When in your early academic journey did you have that moment of, "I think I'm going to make

00:04:48.700 | a run at being a professor." Brian Keating:

00:04:50.940 | It was very late. It was probably mid-20s, late-20s after getting my PhD.

00:04:57.580 | I always thought being – so I'm an astronomer. I'm a cosmologist and that means I studied the early

00:05:03.580 | universe, where it came from, what's happening to it, is it going to end, should we keep paying our taxes,

00:05:09.020 | et cetera, et cetera. But I never thought you could get paid to do this, Cal. I never thought you could

00:05:13.900 | get paid – and really, 90 percent of the professionally employed astronomers are professors,

00:05:19.900 | effectively, or aspire to be professors someday. So I never thought you could get paid to be an

00:05:25.500 | astronomer, which is what I love to do, which is what would get me into that coveted flow state as a

00:05:30.940 | kid, just using a telescope on a dark night before iPhones and stuff and just sketching into a logbook

00:05:37.500 | or whatever. But I thought like, "Yeah, someone is going to pay me to do that. They're going to pay me to be an

00:05:41.980 | ice cream taster or ride the roller coaster at Six Flags." I never thought it was possible. I never

00:05:47.980 | entered my realm, which is really weird because my father was a very famous math professor. I didn't

00:05:53.900 | grow up with him. My parents were divorced when I was young. He split, moved to the West Coast. I stayed

00:05:58.300 | with my mom and was adopted by my stepfather. He was not a professor. Smart, smart man. But he and my

00:06:07.260 | mom never really mentioned that, "Oh, this could be a particular avenue for a career." But you were going

00:06:13.740 | through a doctoral program not thinking about yet professorship. What were you thinking?

00:06:18.380 | I had no idea. I just was used to being in school. I loved learning. I loved scholarship. I always

00:06:25.900 | was a scholar. I was always intellectually curious about so many different things and I was doing

00:06:30.700 | proper scientific research with a telescope and hypotheses and doing all that stuff that they teach

00:06:37.420 | you but you never use. But I was doing it for fun, trying to figure out how far away is Proxima Centauri.

00:06:43.340 | Can I see it from northern Westchester County? It was just very curious to me. I had to teach myself

00:06:49.740 | trigonometry, et cetera. I wasn't really put along the advanced math track. Again, ironically for the son

00:06:54.940 | of a math professor at Cornell and one of the founders of SUNY Stony Brook. But I never really came to my

00:07:02.860 | attention that you could actually do this, let alone that it would be something that I would be doing.

00:07:07.900 | I've been in school. I joke now, this is my 49th grade. I've been in school continuously for 49 years.

00:07:16.220 | So I never really thought that was a possibility. And then when I did feel like it was a possibility,

00:07:21.500 | it was only during my second postdoc. It really, I didn't think-

00:07:25.740 | So you're doing postdocs? Yeah.

00:07:27.820 | Even without it. By the way, you're ruining all the advice I give to my listeners. Because the one

00:07:32.540 | thing I come back to again and again is don't go to grad school without a plan. It's not a place to,

00:07:37.660 | so you did the opposite and it was fantastically successful for you. So everyone in the audience,

00:07:43.740 | Brian is a bit of an exception. Survivorship bias alert. Survivorship bias alert.

00:07:48.220 | Exactly. All right. So you're in your second postdoc. Yeah.

00:07:51.260 | Yeah. So then how does tenure line academia enter your world?

00:07:54.700 | So I had been fired from my first postdoc at Stanford because I was sort of equally,

00:08:03.180 | so I should say what a postdoc is that people don't know. So in the hard sciences and then,

00:08:07.580 | you know, computer science, I'm sure it could be similar. But in the hard sciences, you know,

00:08:11.820 | physics, math, chemistry, et cetera, you typically have this waylay station between graduate school

00:08:17.740 | when somebody pays you and tells you what to do or at least gives you the rough parameters of what's

00:08:22.940 | acceptable for a thesis project. And you don't have to really come up with original topics,

00:08:29.420 | but you must solve things that are original and for the first time ever done. So it's very

00:08:33.260 | challenging to be a student. But it's not just like most people think, you know, oh, grad student,

00:08:37.180 | that's just like really hard homework problems in undergrad. No, it's totally different. It's very,

00:08:42.540 | very little coursework, actually. That always surprises people.

00:08:44.860 | Yeah, it's extremely different and different. But your goal is to start learning how to do research.

00:08:51.340 | Like when I got my pilot's license, which was also as a graduate student, the day I got it,

00:08:55.980 | you know, the flight instructor told me, this is like, this is not graduation. Like,

00:09:01.340 | you're not done. Like this is, if anything, it's the beginning and you're at your most dangerous,

00:09:05.180 | you know, the valley of death is right after you get your pilot's license until you have about 800

00:09:09.260 | hours of total accumulated flight time. So as a grad student, you're kind of in that purgatory. And

00:09:13.660 | over, you know, 400 years since, you know, the tradition of, you know, really master and student

00:09:19.420 | and apprentice, et cetera, they've developed, you know, this tool that kind of is the station between

00:09:25.100 | graduate student and professor potentially. And that's called a postdoc. So postdoctoral,

00:09:29.420 | meaning after your PhD, you can be a scholar, get a fellowship, scholarship, or just work for

00:09:34.540 | an employer. But during that time, my, my, your goal is to sort of establish your own ability to

00:09:39.340 | create new novel research programs with the intent that you're going to sort of prove out your ability

00:09:45.020 | to get to that next level, which is to be perhaps a faculty advisor when you would have, again, the

00:09:51.100 | opportunity to then mentor graduate students and postdocs and teach undergraduates. So all these

00:09:55.980 | things put together this, this postdoc, but in a way it's, it was sort of the most free time I ever had.

00:10:00.700 | Yeah. The free meaning freeing, not like, oh, I have all this time to scroll, you know,

00:10:04.940 | it was, it was, it gave me so much liberation that now I had the horsepower intellectually from my PhD

00:10:11.420 | program. I knew what were the interesting topics in the field and I could actually accomplish and

00:10:17.340 | follow through them with, with enough perseverance. So at Stanford where I was hired right out of Brown,

00:10:23.900 | I started to work and think, oh, I love this new idea. I have this new idea that you could actually

00:10:28.860 | measure what happened at the moment the big bang occurred. And, and this just kind of blew me away.

00:10:35.580 | And so I stopped researching early galaxies that my advisor was paying me to do. And so she wisely,

00:10:41.900 | she fired me, but she did me the solid of introducing me to her PhD advice, her postdoctoral advisor at Cal

00:10:48.460 | Tech. His name is Andrew Lang. And I went to, he offered me a job and I accepted that. So I did two

00:10:54.140 | postdocs and it was only during that second postdoc when I could implement the experiment that I had

00:10:58.860 | invented as a wayward postdoc, as a, as a fruit, you know, frivolous postdoc that we implemented it

00:11:05.180 | and built this instrument. And then that led to me getting an offer of the institutions to be a professor.

00:11:10.460 | Yeah. I think people don't always recognize in the experimental sciences, often what you're

00:11:15.340 | part of what you're hiring is, uh, an instrument and experiment. It's, I, I am a mass. I built this

00:11:21.580 | thing or I worked under an advisor who built this thing and now I know how to do it. She's not available,

00:11:26.780 | but I am that it's, it's not, uh, I think people often think about all of academia in the model they

00:11:33.740 | had for going to college, which was, Hey, are you smart? Do you have promise? Like, are you,

00:11:39.660 | let's put you in a competition with everyone else? And are you the smartest,

00:11:43.420 | most interesting person? Who's, who's great. We want to hire you as a professor.

00:11:46.940 | That's what I call it. I call it the academic hunger games, you know, it starts in high school,

00:11:50.860 | right? And then it never stops. I mean, it doesn't stop with Nobel laureates, Cal. It's insane. The,

00:11:55.340 | the hunger games, the zero sum game. And, and the reason that's so, so pernicious is that

00:12:01.100 | it's antithetical to science, right? You don't win science. There's not like a zero. Oh,

00:12:05.500 | like, yeah, I won science. You know that even when you win a Nobel prize,

00:12:08.540 | these Nobel prize winners that I know, they all have things like the imposter syndrome.

00:12:12.700 | They're not good enough. They don't deserve it. And so it's exactly like you say, it's,

00:12:16.620 | it's just like, throw them in a room and see who comes out.

00:12:19.340 | No, I feel like some of the computer scientists I knew at MIT

00:12:22.220 | felt like they deserved it. There's a few that are pretty,

00:12:26.860 | they have a pretty high self-regard. They're like, I deserve it.

00:12:29.740 | What took you so long. Yeah, exactly. That's fascinating though. So here, here's like a psycho,

00:12:36.460 | I'm going to psychoanalyze you and you tell me if this is right or wrong.

00:12:38.780 | Do you think the fact that you didn't see yourself as competing in those games

00:12:43.740 | actually helped you stumble into something that ironically made you more successful in those games?

00:12:49.500 | In other words, you weren't anxious about, I need to become a professor. Oh my God, am I doing the

00:12:54.140 | right things? Am I publishing the right papers? Am I winning the right mentor? You were just like,

00:12:57.100 | hey, school is great. This is fun. Oh, I can build stuff now. This seems like a cool problem. And

00:13:02.140 | somehow that was a benefit. Yeah, I think that Dr. Newport is in session. I think that's exactly

00:13:12.380 | 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

00:13:18.860 | cook. I worked as a dishwasher. I moved furniture. I always had a job. I haven't stopped working since I was

00:13:24.060 | 12. And I had a lot of real quote unquote jobs. I don't consider what we do as manual labor,

00:13:29.500 | but it's certainly real work. It's just of a different kind. It's a deeper intellectual, more

00:13:34.380 | scholastic way. So I knew I was good at that. I knew I was a scholar and that academia is meant for

00:13:40.780 | scholarship, at least a good kind of academia. We can argue about some of those other departments,

00:13:45.740 | 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

00:13:51.340 | much money anyway. Spoiler alert, I'm at a public university and I always have been in public

00:13:57.500 | universities, but I always felt like this was my kind of path. I would try it. If it didn't work out,

00:14:04.860 | I knew I'd succeed somewhere else. I had job offers to work for NASA.

00:14:08.940 | One thing I should say is that right after, as a junior, the NSF runs a program called Research

00:14:14.140 | Experiences for Undergraduates, REU program, or they did until earlier this year, maybe.

00:14:18.620 | I think they're coming back.

00:14:20.300 | Yeah, hopefully they'll come back. So I did that and I was at the College of

00:14:23.260 | William & Mary, not too far from you, but in Virginia. And I worked for NASA, NASA Langley.

00:14:30.060 | We were developing ways to do non-destructive evaluation. You know, when you go on an airplane,

00:14:34.940 | Cal, people don't realize that you go on an airplane, you see the rivets, you know, on the airplane skin.

00:14:40.380 | And people are like, "Oh, the rivets hold the plane together. It must be like, they're just like

00:14:44.060 | screws." And no, no, it's actually, this is glue. Like 99% of the adhesion comes from a glue surface

00:14:50.060 | you can't see. And the rivets just hold the skin of the aluminum in place until the glue or the carbon

00:14:54.780 | fiber can set. And so most people, so we were working on this procedure to use invisible radiation,

00:15:00.780 | basically, to do what's called non-destructive evaluation and make sure that the airplane wouldn't

00:15:05.340 | crack and come apart, as some have, unfortunately, in the many years. So at the end of the, at the end

00:15:11.340 | of the year, I was, at the end of the summer rather, I was offered a job and like, it was going to be

00:15:15.980 | full-time civil service position for NASA for the rest of my life. And I love NASA. I knew all the

00:15:20.140 | astronauts' names. I wanted to be a space shuttle pilot. You know, that's why I got my pilot's license.

00:15:24.380 | But I knew one thing about myself, that if I stopped after senior year graduation, I would never go back.

00:15:32.060 | And I see academia as a ratchet. And sometimes it's, I mean, you can turn a ratchet backwards,

00:15:37.340 | you know, it's very difficult. But in other words, if you stopped going along that path, it's very hard

00:15:42.460 | to, to go back the other way. Whereas it's very easy, you know, if you want to leave academia right

00:15:47.260 | now, Cal, you could do it in a heartbeat, but try somebody in your cohort at MIT or whatever coming back

00:15:52.300 | and doing what you do. It's functionally impossible. So I think people, people don't realize that, that the,

00:15:57.580 | the academic path, well, as you said, the hunger games, it's incredibly competitive, right? It's,

00:16:01.740 | so if you leave and come back, like, but we have people who didn't leave, who are on their star

00:16:08.460 | trajectory. And there's one spot, we're going to get 300 applicants from top schools. It's, you know,

00:16:14.380 | I think sometimes people have this vision of academia. It's like, oh, it's like, they'll say,

00:16:18.460 | oh, you decided to teach. And it's like, yeah, it's like a job. Like, hey, go teach. You can,

00:16:22.780 | you know, get a teacher job or come back to a teacher job. It's like, no, no, no, it's better

00:16:26.140 | to think about like the NBA or something like that. I mean, you're not, if you leave the,

00:16:30.620 | you're on the trajectory to be enough of a star to try to catch the attention of some scout,

00:16:34.140 | you can't go leave and play football for a couple of years and come back. They have enough,

00:16:37.020 | they have enough young players. So once you, once you, after that second postdoc experiments,

00:16:41.420 | working well, you get your, your first tenure line position, assistant professorship position.

00:16:46.780 | How did you get tenure? I mean, what was that? What were you working on? Were you stressed?

00:16:50.540 | Were you, was it easy? Like, what was that experience like?

00:16:53.580 | Yeah. Again, I was never stressed. I never tied, you know, kind of my self-worth to

00:16:58.300 | my career. My identity is scholar. My identity is scientist. You know, now it's a lot more things,

00:17:05.020 | parent, you know, husband, whatever, you know, international criminal, but, but my identity was

00:17:10.540 | never like, oh, my job is my profession. And it still isn't like, I get very disillusioned.

00:17:16.460 | Many times, uh, with academia, as I'm sure all of us do. But, um, but I never, I never worried about

00:17:22.620 | tenure. First of all, the university of California, the tenure rates like 90%. I've been here 21 years.

00:17:27.980 | We've had one case where it was questionable. Like, did that, would this person get tenure? You know,

00:17:33.580 | and that's like probably 80 faculty cases that I've been, you know, so I knew practically speaking,

00:17:39.420 | I'd probably get it. You know, I have to really mess up, but I was also very ambitious. Like I wanted to,

00:17:44.380 | you know, write books and I wanted to, you know, uh, do, you know, more speaking and, and things

00:17:49.660 | along the lines, similar, you know, kind of trajectory to what you did, but a little, a little older than

00:17:53.900 | you. So, uh, I, I got there first, but you did it better. Uh, and, uh, but one more point I want to

00:17:59.580 | make that you, you hinted out about the postdoc, this weird kind of ambiguous state, Schrodinger state

00:18:05.340 | between student and, and teacher. And that's that there's a difference between the NBA or the MLB,

00:18:12.460 | right? So MLB has like a single a ball, double a ball, triple a ball like that. Right. And then the

00:18:18.140 | minor. It's probably a better analogy. Yeah. But, but, um, but the, the, the difference is that it's

00:18:22.940 | actually pretty easy to get a postdoc. At least it is in my field. We have, we're way, you know,

00:18:27.580 | kind of a, a seller's market. You know, if you're a good PhD from a decent program, there's so many

00:18:33.180 | professors that are going to want to hire you. And, and it's, it's almost like shooting fish in the

00:18:37.020 | barrel, but then it becomes even almost harder to break from say triple a ball, you know, imagine like

00:18:43.740 | it was easy to get into, no, it's really freaking hard to get into triple a baseball, right. Or single

00:18:48.780 | a baseball, you know, even that, but we make it like, oh, it's, it's just like the stepping stone. No,

00:18:54.140 | it's not. It's, it's really unlikely that you'll make it. Um, we had 400 applications for one job

00:18:59.580 | last year here at UCSD. Uh, it's just incredibly, and, and all these people could be, and, and they're

00:19:05.180 | all better than I was, you know, so like, I'm not going to give up my thing, but they're all, you know,

00:19:09.340 | they've done eight, 80 times more, you know, papers, their agent. I had one experiment that I created

00:19:15.180 | and it was, you know, basically my idea that we could build an instrument with a small telescope,

00:19:20.780 | small meaning affordable, you know, kind of logistically easy to support, uh, at the South

00:19:26.620 | pole Antarctica. So we built this telescope at the South pole based on this idea that I had inspired by

00:19:32.860 | this kind of arms race that astronomers have, which is that called aperture fever. As soon as you get a

00:19:37.980 | little telescope, you want to get a bigger telescope, you want to get a bigger telescope. And this I had

00:19:41.260 | since I was a kid and, uh, and it's addictive because you know, it's, it's, you can go up to infant,

00:19:46.700 | you can go up to the James Webb space telescope. Like there's no stopping the size of your telescope

00:19:50.700 | and the cost of your telescope, but I invented a small telescope, which would be very inexpensive.

00:19:55.260 | The cost of a telescope scales as the volume, sort of the aperture cubed. Um, whereas, you know,

00:20:00.380 | the actual collecting area is just the aperture squared and the resolution is just the aperture.

00:20:04.940 | So it's a very steep penalty to build a big telescope, meaning that if I devised a cheaper telescope

00:20:09.820 | that could do all the work of a telescope, 10 times bigger, it could be a thousand times less expensive.

00:20:15.020 | And that made it more appealing, uh, at the time when I applied for funding,

00:20:18.860 | my first funding agent was the Caltech president's, uh, fund, which was David Baltimore who won the

00:20:23.900 | Nobel prize in, in, uh, medicine and physiology. And, uh, he gave us my, my advisor and me,

00:20:30.140 | uh, a million dollar seed fund to start this off. And then we built this instrument and then we put it

00:20:34.540 | down at the South pole, right when I started at UCSD. So I knew we would just about be getting data,

00:20:40.060 | you know, the six year period to get tenure. I asked for accelerated tenure, just whatever,

00:20:45.180 | might as well get that extra 500 bucks a month, you know, salary boost.

00:20:48.540 | I did the same. I get it. Yeah. We say it's not about the salary. It's about like,

00:20:51.500 | I want to get it over with pride, et cetera. But then our university, I don't know about yours,

00:20:55.420 | but our university does like really dumb things where they say, like, if you want to get a promotion,

00:21:00.540 | you have to go out and get an offer from somewhere else. Like if I wanted to get, you know, George,

00:21:05.980 | well, if I, if I said, look, I want to get a promotion, uh, they would say, great, you know,

00:21:10.460 | you can get it next three years or you can go out and get a job offer from Stanford or, you know,

00:21:15.500 | wherever, and then we'll, we'll match that offer. It's so foolish, but you know, this is the crazy

00:21:20.620 | economics of academia that people don't really understand. So I was never really worried about

00:21:24.700 | tenure again. And once I got it, nothing really changed. I just, you know, kept doing the stuff that

00:21:29.660 | I'm doing and my telescopes have gotten bigger and more expensive ever since.

00:21:33.580 | All right. Let's take a, a quick break. Our only break from this conversation to talk about our

00:21:39.180 | presenting sponsor for today's episode, which is done daily. You've heard me talk about this on my show

00:21:45.100 | before. So I thought what we would do here is actually look at what they offer. I'm going to bring

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00:22:14.460 | together you'll cut through the distractions, face what's been holding you back and lock in the habits

00:22:18.380 | that turn someday into done. So it's an actual coach you work with to figure out how you're going to

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00:22:34.540 | who checks in with you every day to keep you on track, motivated, and focused. Your coach isn't

00:22:39.580 | just a taskmaster. They're your partner in progress. They'll help you reflect on what's working, help you

00:22:44.140 | adjust when things aren't and make sure you're always working forward. Look who's here, Jesse.

00:22:50.300 | Yeah, there's a picture of me. I think they pulled this from another ad. They're fans of mine. A lot

00:22:56.620 | of the ideas that their coaches build their work on with you comes from my type of stuff. So you'll get,

00:23:03.740 | if you like Cal Newport stuff and you need to get really serious about applying it, it's a cool model.

00:23:08.220 | Online coaches, they make you, if you're really important to get more done, this will get you there.

00:23:13.580 | All right. So that's done daily.com. Uh, I give it a thumbs up. Check out done daily.com. They are

00:23:20.220 | allowing us to present today's episode with only this one commercial break. So thanks guys. Now let's

00:23:25.100 | get back to my discussion with Dr. Brian Keating. And then you ended up with work that was Nobel caliber.

00:23:34.140 | And we know this because you, you wrote a fantastic book, losing the Nobel about

00:23:38.460 | the psychology, but working on a project of that scale and scope and the psychology of what happens

00:23:44.700 | when you come close and then don't quite get that, that prize and what that tells you. A couple of

00:23:50.220 | questions about that. But first, if we're just trying to deconstruct what's required in your field,

00:23:55.900 | there's lots of people who fall off at the grad school level, who get to a postdoc, but never get a

00:23:59.900 | position there, get to, you know, assistant track, but never go anywhere from there. And, and, and I

00:24:04.540 | should, by the way, qualify your remark about the 80% tenure. Uh, it is true that a lot of universities

00:24:09.820 | have high tenure rates, but what, what that hides is because universities are very good at steering you

00:24:16.140 | out of there much earlier. Yeah. It is unlikely for you to go up for, by the time they let you go up for

00:24:20.940 | tenure, they know like you've, you probably will get this. And what's not capped in those statistics is

00:24:26.380 | that people where it just doesn't click your research doesn't click. You're not producing

00:24:30.300 | interesting stuff. Your, your H index isn't there. And you sort of self, uh, this may be a bad use of

00:24:35.900 | the term. You sort of self-deport from academia, I guess. Right. You're like, okay, I need to,

00:24:38.860 | this isn't working out. Of course I'm not going to go up for tenure or whatever, but anyway, people,

00:24:41.900 | so people fall off there as well. What is the court? What is your advice? Um, like if like

00:24:47.820 | hardcore ambitious advice, I want to be a star, you know, cosmologist, you know, experimental

00:24:53.820 | physicist, astronomer, what is it? What are the things that matter? What doesn't? What are the

00:24:57.900 | myths? What are the realities? What's like the hardcore technical advice for the aspiring young

00:25:01.420 | scientist? I think the number one thing is, is to focus, you know, to cultivate the rare and valuable

00:25:07.100 | skills that make you unique rather than trying to be the kind of Renaissance man, you know, who can quote

00:25:12.700 | Hungarian, you know, literature and can also, you know, build a, a bellometer system that works at 50

00:25:18.780 | millikelvin. Yes. The curse of Oppenheimer, right? Like I need to read, I need to be able to read like

00:25:23.660 | ancient verdict script and like be a great violin player or whatever. It's like, no, no, no, that's

00:25:30.700 | don't do that. Exactly. Exactly. So it's just like, again, let's keep using our, our favorite, you know,

00:25:36.620 | baseball analogy. It's like, you could be a great shortstop, you know, but you shouldn't also try to be,

00:25:41.740 | you know, a great, you know, a great right fielder. Okay. You could do it. You have athletic

00:25:46.940 | ability that you have horsepower to do it. So for me, it was cultivating just this relentless

00:25:52.300 | curiosity about one subject, which as you know, like, yes, I'm a cosmologist. So I'm just an expert

00:25:58.300 | in cosmology, but along the lines of cosmology, there's, you know, chemistry, there's thermodynamics,

00:26:04.380 | there's quantum mechanics, there's nuclear physics, particle physics, there's all the branches of physics,

00:26:09.180 | physics, I joke, except for biophysics. Although it may be the case that biology came to earth

00:26:16.220 | via a meteorite, which reminds me, you can get a meteorite if you have a .edu email address.

00:26:21.340 | But this is clear emphasizing, make that offer a little bit clearer.

00:26:24.380 | Okay, we're going to do this product placement. Okay, so I don't have, you know,

00:26:27.660 | as many books as Cal and I don't have all the, all the cool stuff that Cal does, but, but I do have

00:26:32.700 | meteorites and these are meteorites that are actually the villain of, you know, of my first book. These are the

00:26:37.420 | the reason that my team did not win a Nobel Prize is because microscopic versions of these meteorites

00:26:43.260 | masqueraded as a signal we were attempting to confirm, right? So the most dangerous phrase is,

00:26:50.300 | is in science is Eureka. I have found it, you know, like, because that means you were looking for something

00:26:54.060 | and you found, okay, you might've found it, but you might be subject to confirmation by it. So anyway,

00:26:57.980 | that if you confirmed would have been a huge deal. Yes, exactly. Right. So the signal was the

00:27:02.460 | spark that ignited the big bang. So we know the big bang occurred.

00:27:05.900 | Uh, we know that the universe is expanding, getting bigger every day, and it's getting bigger

00:27:10.060 | at a faster rate every day. So if you move, you know, wind the movie back in reverse,

00:27:14.780 | you come to a time when all the matter in the universe, all the galaxies, all the particles,

00:27:18.620 | all the, everything in the universe was all in one place. Effectively, that's essentially what

00:27:22.620 | Lemaitre and others and, and Gamov and, and others coined as the big bang. So the big bang,

00:27:27.900 | the instant, but we don't know what caused that massive explosion, if you like, to take place. So the theory

00:27:33.180 | behind that is called inflation postulated by MIT professor Alan Guth, uh, 45 years ago now,

00:27:39.500 | and it has yet to be confirmed or really proven beyond a reasonable doubt. And we claimed in 2014

00:27:45.820 | that we did discover the spark that ignited this inflation by way of detection of what's called

00:27:50.220 | gravitational radiation or gravity waves. And, uh, spoiler alert, we had to retract it after being,

00:27:55.820 | you know, on the front page of the New York Times and everybody whispering that we'd win Nobel prizes.

00:28:00.380 | And so we had to retract that. But the reason we thought we saw it is that gravitational waves

00:28:05.740 | and these micrometeorites, they both make this pattern in the cosmos that we could be misinterpreted

00:28:12.220 | without additional data as the spark that ignited the big bang itself.

00:28:16.380 | And you got the additional data and it was not what you told, but now you have meteorite pieces.

00:28:20.940 | We have meteorites. So if you go to my website, brianking.com/edu, if you have a .edu email

00:28:26.620 | address and you live in the USA, you're guaranteed to win one of these beauties. So these are 4.5 billion

00:28:31.820 | years old. They're older than the earth cow. So this is some of the material of which the earth formed

00:28:37.580 | out of in the proto solar system nebular cloud. And some of this material is very exotic, highly magnetic,

00:28:43.980 | and some of it is very similar to the iron molecules in the hemoglobin molecule that's in your blood.

00:28:50.620 | And that's because your blood also came from the raw materials from our early solar system.

00:28:55.340 | So this meteorite you'll get at my website. If you don't have a .edu email address, I do send them

00:29:00.220 | out on occasion as well, but guaranteed, because I want to support the younger version of ourselves.

00:29:05.500 | So you were kind enough to blurb my latest book, Focus Like a Nobel Prize, my fourth book,

00:29:11.420 | and I won't read it, but you do give the most delightful blurb. I'll read it. It's short. Do you mind

00:29:18.300 | if I read your own writing, Cal? I love hearing my words read. So how do you win a Nobel Prize? Focus on

00:29:23.900 | what matters and avoid what does not. Keating makes a compelling case that the habits of the world's

00:29:28.860 | best scientists hold great value for the rest of us. Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author.

00:29:34.700 | And what's so interesting about this blurb, I should contrast that with the blurb on my first

00:29:40.380 | edition of the, so I should say, the books are written by me with the help of so far 22 Nobel Prize,

00:29:48.540 | I think I've interviewed more Nobel Prize winners than anyone on earth. And that's for my podcast,

00:29:53.260 | into the impossible. And every time I interview nine, a cohort of nine, I release a book. Nine is

00:29:57.260 | my favorite number. I was born on September 9th, 9/9. The book came out on 9/9. So, uh,

00:30:02.380 | and this is the second book so far. The second book so far. So now it's 18 people. So the first book,

00:30:07.500 | I had our mutual friend, James Altucher write the forward to, but also Barry Barish, winner of the

00:30:14.220 | Nobel Prize in physics for detecting gravitational waves. And that were actually there, unlike the ones I

00:30:19.580 | claimed that I did, we detected. Okay. So why do I bring this up? So he wrote the forward,

00:30:24.620 | Barry Barish. He's a LIGO Caltech professor at work with Kip Thorne, who's behind the movie Interstellar,

00:30:30.540 | all the graphics and that, uh, incredible intellect, who I also interviewed in this book. And, uh, he wrote

00:30:35.740 | the fourth. So I said, well, for my second book, I'm going to get another Nobel Prize winner to endorse

00:30:39.900 | and put a blurb on the front cover of the book. So I asked professor Donna Strickland and she's a

00:30:45.260 | professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada. I asked her, you know, she did an interview with me

00:30:50.940 | about two years ago now. She's in the book. She's one of my featured, you know, favorite authors or

00:30:55.020 | favorite contributors in the book. And I asked her, um, to write the forward. And like two weeks went by,

00:31:01.020 | I didn't hear from her. And she wrote back literally, uh, her, uh, her assistant wrote back.

00:31:07.020 | Professor Keating, uh, Donna Strickland is, uh, very honored that you would ask her. Um,

00:31:11.900 | but she's in a period she's focusing on deep work, basically that she's focused on deep work.

00:31:17.580 | Yeah. And I thought this, I wish I had that before I wrote the book or the, you know, you have to, uh,

00:31:23.020 | finalize the book before it's printed, but that would have made it in the book as an example of these

00:31:27.820 | laureates applying these tools, tactics and tricks and hacks and habits, but also just lifestyle that

00:31:33.820 | you have cultivated and you have spoken about. And now I get to, you know, kind of share their stories

00:31:37.980 | with the world. So long winded way of saying this was, you know, kind of, uh, not, not really aligned

00:31:43.580 | by the way, with me being a professor. Like when I wrote my first book, my, I asked my department chair,

00:31:48.940 | you know, who's the son of a Nobel prize winner, uh, who invented the laser. I said, you know,

00:31:53.580 | can I get some time off or some sabbatical? And he said, no, the only thing we will, we won't punish

00:31:59.420 | you for writing a book, but in science, they don't, we don't write books. Yeah. People don't understand

00:32:04.540 | this, but they're like, Oh, you must Georgetown must've been happy to promote you because of your

00:32:09.420 | books. I said, they could care less because it's not like there's a guy at your university,

00:32:14.940 | like the president who was like, do I like Brian? You know, do we want to promote them? No, it's,

00:32:19.740 | it's a confidential letters from top professors in your particular academic niche, giving an honest

00:32:26.860 | appraisal of your academic contributions. They don't care that you wrote a book. That's not what they're

00:32:32.460 | asked to do. They, they look at your published research and said, is this person, uh, basically,

00:32:37.740 | they rank you, what level school is your work? I mean, it's because, you know, we're on the other

00:32:42.620 | side of this now as, as you know, full professors, basically it's people who are ranking the candidates

00:32:47.980 | of like, yeah, this is someone who would get tenure here, here, but not there. Like you could just put

00:32:52.220 | exactly, you know, it's like batting average, they stick with the MLB or whatever. Uh, so just like,

00:32:57.580 | you know, you're not going to get a hitting title because of your, your work you do in the field.

00:33:01.420 | Like no one cares. Like, it's really like, what did you publish? How exclusive, you know, exclusive

00:33:06.220 | were the places? How many people cited it? What are like the other expert scholars think? So yeah,

00:33:10.540 | they don't punish you. Yeah. They don't, they don't mind. They're, they're confused by it. My,

00:33:14.940 | my, my doctoral advisor didn't know I was writing books. So she saw one of the MIT co-op, like,

00:33:18.940 | oh, are you writing books? Like what, as long as it's not getting in the way of doing your work,

00:33:22.060 | right there, you know, they're, but it's really the same as being like, I'm pretty good triathlete

00:33:27.100 | runner. They're like, oh, that's great. Like, cool. That's a cool thing about you. Has nothing to do

00:33:31.180 | with, with, with, with your job, but okay. Let's stick with this focus thing though. Right. Okay.

00:33:35.260 | Because like you said, focus matter for what you did. It mattered for the Nobel prize winners you

00:33:40.060 | interviewed. One of the things I took out of the book is you might think when you see that title,

00:33:44.940 | that you're going to hear a lot of stories. That's about these Nobel prize winners talking about

00:33:48.940 | how they can, you know, summon an intensity, like a laser beam that they can bore right through.

00:33:53.340 | It's not what a lot of these stories are about focus. They're talking about as much what they choose

00:33:59.820 | not to do as they are about, oh, how do I actually like concentrate, you know, in the moment?

00:34:05.180 | Talk to me about that. Like, am I picking that up? Right. Do you, do you pick up like that somewhere?

00:34:10.780 | Like what, what's going on here with focus as activity selection, as much as it is cognitive activity?

00:34:15.180 | Yeah, you're absolutely right. So Donna Strickland, again, the woman in, by the way,

00:34:18.860 | she's only one of four women who have ever won the physics Nobel prize in 124 years.

00:34:23.820 | So it was pretty hard to get, you know, to get her to sit down and focus on it, but she did.

00:34:29.740 | And ironically, yeah, her invention was for basically the science behind the tools,

00:34:34.380 | technology behind LASIK surgery. So late, what is LASIK? LASIK is actually adjusting the focus of

00:34:40.300 | your eye by cutting away the corneal material that actually does most of the focusing. You think the lens

00:34:47.180 | in your eye does it? Actually, most of the focusing is done by the cornea and the lens is the only

00:34:50.940 | adjustable part. The cornea is the rough kind of order of magnitude focusing that occurs first.

00:34:55.820 | So she invented with her advisor and her colleagues, the LASIK, you know, it's called chirp pulse

00:35:01.500 | amplification that takes an enormous amount of laser energy, but you don't want to blast into somebody's

00:35:06.060 | eye. You know, if someone told somebody, you know, 50 years ago, we're going to take lasers,

00:35:09.180 | blast it in your eye. You're going to pay us a thousand bucks and you're going to be super happy.

00:35:12.780 | You know, people would be rightfully kind of confused about that, but she knew how to focus

00:35:17.420 | not only in intensity, like a magnifying glass and an army man or an ant, if you're evil,

00:35:23.740 | but, but how to focus it in frequency space. They found that what they had to do is make this chirp.

00:35:28.700 | So if you ever hear a bird chirping, it's not a sine wave, it's actually a burst and then it's very

00:35:33.500 | sharp and then it decays really quickly. So it's like chip chip. Like, so if you look at the frequency

00:35:37.980 | spectrum, it's also the frequency content of the Fourier analysis of it shows that it's a compressed

00:35:43.740 | focused amount of frequency. So she had it in, in real space and in the position on your cornea,

00:35:49.580 | plus the frequency. And she found she could get the amplification necessary to blast just the tissue

00:35:55.180 | and not destroy the retina and leave you blind. It's incredible what she did. So, um, what else does she do?

00:36:00.860 | Well, she also thinks a lot about how to cultivate the next generation of scholars and how do you

00:36:07.580 | actually, you know, cultivate somebody who's going to be on a future Nobel laureate or just to be a

00:36:13.100 | productive contributor in science. So science education, as you and I know, I joke that we have the,

00:36:18.620 | the second oldest profession, right? I mean, we're, we're basically doing with this guy. So I love finger

00:36:23.500 | puppets, Cal, as you know, from being on the podcast way back when, uh, this Galileo, if you're, if you're

00:36:28.700 | listening, I have a finger puppet of Galileo, he's holding his telescope, which he didn't invent,

00:36:33.180 | but, uh, he did improve 10 X from what the, uh, the Dutchman named Hans Lippershey had done beforehand.

00:36:39.500 | So what did Galileo do to pay the rent? He was a professor, but not only that, Cal, I don't know

00:36:44.220 | about you, but he had his students live with him. I don't know how Mrs. Newport would feel about that,

00:36:49.180 | but, uh, certainly Mrs. Keating wouldn't like that. So, uh, so we don't have any borders here, but that's

00:36:53.740 | how he paid the dues basically until he started writing a book called the Sidereus Nuncius.

00:36:58.540 | And then later the dialogue and that then made him wealth, you know, somewhat wealthy,

00:37:02.940 | not, not, he was never super wealthy, but his job teaching was, you know, here,

00:37:06.540 | I have this real innovation, Cal. It's, it's called, you know, chalk. And it was, you know,

00:37:11.260 | it's basically one, a guy with a rock in one hand riding on a big giant piece of black rock.

00:37:16.380 | Right. And so now we do very, very far advantage. He couldn't even recognize PowerPoint. I'm sure.

00:37:22.220 | That's exactly the same thing. But Donna Strickland is thinking about how do we change, you know,

00:37:27.260 | education so that we cultivate the skills that are necessary. What other countries are doing

00:37:31.820 | things better? You know, she's in Canada, uh, but she's, you know, she's thinking about education

00:37:35.820 | more globally. Um, and, and it's just fascinating to see how that's become almost like her hobby.

00:37:43.100 | Now there are, there are, there are laureates I interviewed in the book who have actual hobbies,

00:37:46.940 | you know, that would, uh, you know, that I would count as a hobby. I don't really feel like

00:37:51.500 | I would spend my past time, you know, if I could watch the Padres, you know, or I could watch,

00:37:56.220 | you know, uh, learn about education for the next cohort, I don't have her kind of, um, you know,

00:38:01.180 | charitable nature maybe. But, um, but Brian Schmidt, for example, who, uh, co-discovered the fact that

00:38:07.180 | the universe is not only expanding, but it's accelerating at an increasing rate and someday may

00:38:13.820 | either rip apart or end in a heat death of the cosmos. Uh, he discovered that, uh, using supernovae.

00:38:20.140 | He grows wine. He, he grows grapes for wine and he's an expert vintner and that's, he's just obsessed

00:38:26.540 | with it. But what does he do? I asked him like, how do you find the time? Cause he's the provost of this

00:38:30.540 | Australian university. He's still a research scientist. Nobel laureates get asked to do,

00:38:34.860 | you know, speaking gigs, you know, even worse than you do. And he's growing one. He's like, I basically

00:38:40.140 | have a calendar. That's my to-do list. So what do you call that? Time boxing. So they're using these

00:38:45.820 | tools. The funny thing is that they didn't know they were using these tools that you've been talking

00:38:49.660 | about, you know, and the other person who blurbed the book, Ali Abdaal has been working about, uh,

00:38:54.060 | on for a long time and Sahil Bloom and, and Nir Eyal, all these guys use these tools, but I've realized

00:38:59.900 | academic, the Nobel prize winners don't know at Cal. So all the more so, how does a freshman,

00:39:04.700 | how does a grad student, how's a postdoc, how's an assistant professor, how are they going to learn

00:39:08.380 | these tools? And then so I basically wanted to write this as a self-help book.

00:39:11.900 | I mean, it's one of the things that happens to me when I talk to business audiences. Cause you know,

00:39:16.860 | a lot of my writing, it's like, Hey, here's what's going wrong in the world of work because of

00:39:20.300 | technology. And you know, here's what you should do to get around it. But most of my ideas that I'm

00:39:24.700 | bringing in that world, it's come out of how do you succeed in academia? I mean, I wrote a New Yorker

00:39:29.500 | essay about this last year called how I learned to concentrate. And it was, I traced like every major idea I'm

00:39:34.380 | known for in my books to a five year period as a graduate student at, at MIT, you go to the business

00:39:40.220 | world, like you're a wizard. Where did you even come up with these ideas? But you talk to the Turing

00:39:45.260 | prize winners I worked with or the Nobel prize winners you work with. They're like, well, that's the

00:39:48.620 | only way to do anything significant is like, you got to be very careful and picky about what you choose to

00:39:55.500 | work on. Problem selection matters. And then that needs to get like the bulk of your focus. That's what

00:40:00.780 | matters. And then other stuff fits in the time you have. And if it all doesn't fit, then you got to

00:40:05.020 | drop some things. But like at the core of what you're doing is once you found the right project

00:40:08.380 | is like, that's, that's what matters. That's where all your value comes from. Basic idea, if you're a

00:40:13.100 | Nobel prize winner, but if you're a business executive, you don't know this, you're thinking

00:40:17.500 | like, well, but answering emails is important and being commutative and being busy is important.

00:40:21.900 | So like to what degree do you think these ideas expand? I mean, I think the academia produced them

00:40:28.140 | because it makes sense. This was the world where we first began thinking about how to use the brain to

00:40:32.140 | create value. And now 2000 years later, most of our economy is based around using your brain to create

00:40:36.860 | value. So like we have a head start on thinking about this. How far does it expand? I mean, who, who,

00:40:42.220 | who could profit from these ideas? How broad can we go?

00:40:46.260 | I think you can. Some of the challenge that we have is that, you know, I joke that like everybody's

00:40:52.860 | above average in academia, which is part of the reason that many academicians suffer from the

00:40:58.060 | imposter syndrome. I mean, Barry Barish told me that he felt the imposter syndrome after winning the Nobel

00:41:04.220 | Prize worse than before he won the Nobel Prize. I said, Barry, how can that possibly be? And he said,

00:41:09.900 | well, when you win a Nobel Prize, you go to Stockholm, you have to dress in this white tie, white tails,

00:41:15.980 | you eat this reindeer dinner, you meet the king and queen of, of Sweden, and you get this giant,

00:41:22.140 | you know, flavor, flave, like medallion, and you get a million dollars plus, you know, potentially.

00:41:27.020 | And so they want to make sure you're not going to come back and say, hey, you know, where's my money?

00:41:31.500 | You know, where's my medal? Where's my reindeer? And so they make you sign this ledger. And in the

00:41:36.300 | ledger, all the names of everyone who's ever won the Nobel Prize in your field. So Barry's a super

00:41:40.940 | curious guy. So he turns it back, he sees Feynman, you know, he goes back, Marie Curie, he turns it

00:41:46.620 | back, he sees, you know, Fermi, all these just like Titans. And then he sees Albert Einstein.

00:41:52.060 | And he's like, I don't belong in the same breath as Albert Einstein, let alone the same book,

00:41:58.300 | you know, finger puppet here. And so how I'm not worthy. And I said, Barry, I got to tell you some

00:42:03.340 | good news. Like Einstein had the imposter syndrome. He's like, what are you talking about? I said,

00:42:07.580 | he felt that Isaac Newton was the greatest contributor, not only to science, but to Western

00:42:12.540 | civilization. And he's like, ah, it's amazing. And I said, but that's not all. Because Isaac Newton had the

00:42:18.380 | imposter syndrome too. And he was like, oh, you got to be kidding me. That's not it. And I said,

00:42:22.940 | no, he failed to live up to his idol's expectations. And his idol, Barry asked, who's his idol? I said,

00:42:28.140 | Jesus Christ. Newton so wanted to emulate Christ, he couldn't create miracles. But he spent most of

00:42:33.500 | his writing on religion and alchemy and almost, you know, side pro, yes, his side quest was calculus,

00:42:39.660 | gravitation and optics. But he died a virgin. He said, that was the only way I could imitate.

00:42:45.260 | Now his personality probably helped with that because he was kind of a, a schmuck as, as many

00:42:49.580 | people described him. But, uh, but I think that they, you know, so to, to be at this level,

00:42:54.620 | Cal, as you know, like when you walk down the hallway, you know, too, it's, it's hard to be like,

00:43:00.060 | you're simultaneously extremely competent to get to this level, but you're surrounded by so many people

00:43:06.620 | that are also extremely competent. It's like, if, if you're so good that they can't ignore you,

00:43:10.940 | right. But everyone's so good that they can't ignore you. You get ignored. And, and I think

00:43:15.420 | that's a weird emotion because we all do have a, you know, you have to be a good scientist. You have

00:43:20.460 | to be humble against mother nature who always crush the hell out of you, squash your dreams and, and

00:43:25.580 | leave you, you know, groping and groveling for, for, for relief. But you also have to be, have a little

00:43:30.700 | chutzpah. You have to be a little bit arrogant that you can take on these problems that have crushed,

00:43:34.380 | killed and defeated people who came before you. You know, the whole point of that story about

00:43:39.100 | Einstein, Newton, Jesus, you know, it's like, if Einstein was right, you know, I wouldn't have a job

00:43:45.180 | like, okay, you just look up what Einstein said, or, you know, but if he thought Newton was right,

00:43:48.780 | he wouldn't have created general relativity. So I have that balance of, of swagger, but also humility.

00:43:54.860 | I like the swagger point, um, and balance it with humility. But I mean, it just reminds me,

00:44:00.700 | this was something that, that really confused my wife, but I think would not confuse you,

00:44:04.220 | which was, I didn't go to any of my graduation ceremonies as I, you know, I didn't go to my

00:44:11.740 | master's degree. I didn't go to my doctoral degree. I didn't do the hooding or whatever. And my mindset

00:44:16.060 | was very much like, if I feel like that's something that's an accomplishment to celebrate,

00:44:20.700 | then I'm not going to make it as an academic, right? Exactly. Oh, it's so funny you say that.

00:44:24.780 | Because when people tell me, sorry to interrupt, but in high school, people say like,

00:44:28.460 | this is the best time of your life. And I said, this is the best time of my life. Like I hope,

00:44:32.940 | I hope it's, you know, not true. I will, but you're a hundred percent. I never went to my hooding

00:44:37.020 | ceremonies. I never did that. I was like, like, no, I'm onto the next thing, not a shiny object,

00:44:42.700 | but just like, I'm, I'm done. Like, I got to keep going. Sorry. Yeah. The monster minds would not

00:44:48.860 | have cared. It was the monster minds of the, you know, World War II era physics. I mean,

00:44:52.780 | yeah, sure. They got their doctorate at some point, like on route to like, they had things to do. And

00:44:57.900 | so that was very much, yeah, my, my mindset, my college graduation, I completely didn't care about,

00:45:01.740 | even though I was graduating. Um, I think I was like top five in my class, right? Like I didn't find

00:45:07.180 | college that hard. Uh, I was like this, I can't celebrate this because this is the, the easiest thing

00:45:13.500 | I've done that I'm going to do on the route to like what I want to do. Like everyone graduates

00:45:17.420 | college that you go to college where that's not, that's not competitive or yeah, you go to a doctoral

00:45:21.420 | program. Yeah. I didn't get kicked out of the doctoral program. Fine. But like, what matters

00:45:24.460 | is like, can you get the tenure track job? Like, so you can't, you know, you can't celebrate those.

00:45:28.780 | Like now with my own students, like, oh, this is so great. And I love the pomp and the circumstance.

00:45:32.700 | And I wear the wizard robes, but, but what is it for you now? I mean, look, let's, let me turn the

00:45:37.260 | psychology back on you now. So now that you've done, you know, I mean, your, your career is just,

00:45:42.060 | I mean, from Dartmouth, MIT, Georgia, I mean, you, and all the stuff you do in the public mind,

00:45:46.940 | which by the way, I feel like you fulfill what I always joke with my colleagues about,

00:45:51.660 | but they never do. Very few of them do it that are real professors is that you have to give back

00:45:56.300 | to the public. You have to communicate in a language that they understand because they pay your salary.

00:46:00.700 | And if you don't eventually, I mean, you're at a, at a private institution. I, you know, they,

00:46:06.540 | just because it's private, there's tons of public money that flow through there. Same with every

00:46:10.380 | institution, especially, you know, public institutions. But let me ask you, you know,

00:46:14.540 | what is your next thing? What is the thing that you would say now? Like, okay, forget about like your

00:46:19.820 | full professor, your, you know, you do, I think you were department, you know, chair, whatever you're

00:46:23.980 | doing. What is the next thing? What is the thing that you're going to like, kind of the hooding that

00:46:28.220 | you're ignoring now? Like, what is the next thing that you're now going to focus on, say, that will give you

00:46:33.100 | that sense? Or maybe there's not one. How do you feel about that? Well, so here's the thing about

00:46:37.020 | Georgetown, like why, why I'm still there and why that's working is they in the 20th century played

00:46:43.340 | this big role in the creation of bioethics as a field. They created this thing called the Kennedy

00:46:48.140 | Institute of Ethics and all the big ideas about what do we do now that we're growing like technology

00:46:53.340 | to manipulate DNA and these other types of issues? How do we deal about this ethically? They are at the

00:46:57.580 | forefront. They said, look, we've got a big medical school, but we're Jesuit. We have these values.

00:47:01.500 | They kind of define bioethics. Georgetown had this idea of like, we should do the same with technology.

00:47:05.900 | Like we should be the institution that's trying to figure out like, how do we grapple with new

00:47:09.340 | technologies? What are the ethical concerns? In part, because our law school has probably the largest

00:47:15.740 | technology law faculty of anywhere. We're in, we're very policy focused. We're in Washington, D.C.

00:47:23.180 | We, you know, we have a lot of institutes that like deal with these sort of things. So that's what we're

00:47:26.460 | going to do. And I basically said, well, that's kind of what I'm doing. And my, my public facing

00:47:30.380 | stuff is starting with deep work. All of my books, I can really, they're, they're technology stories.

00:47:34.780 | They're all about, um, it's technology, doing something, causing problems. How do we react to

00:47:39.900 | it? Deep work is about what happened to knowledge work after it fell into a constant trap of technological

00:47:45.100 | distractions. What do we do about that? A world without email was about the same thing. Digital

00:47:48.700 | minimalism was about our phones. Slow productivity is actually about how knowledge work broke because we had this

00:47:54.060 | productivity heuristic that didn't work in an age of fine granularity work demonstration because of

00:47:59.820 | technology. Um, like that's, that's what I do. I said, well, good. That's what I want to do now. Um,

00:48:04.540 | let me help you do that. Let me help. Like, this is a good thing for an institution like Georgetown to be ahead

00:48:09.660 | of. So, uh, I was one of the original faculty, founding faculty members of the Center for Digital

00:48:14.940 | Ethics there, which is their sort of institute on campus that draws just from actual tenure line faculty

00:48:20.380 | from different disciplines. And I helped create and direct a new major computer science, ethics,

00:48:26.860 | and society, which is the first major in the country to actually fully integrate computer science and

00:48:31.260 | ethics. There, there are majors that are like CS plus ethics where it's like, yeah, you're a CS major and

00:48:36.220 | you have to take three ethics courses. No, no. Georgetown, we're hiring people, myself included,

00:48:40.860 | computer scientists who teach courses in this computer science courses that are built around ethical concerns.

00:48:48.700 | It's not take algorithms with this guy and then go take ethics and the philosophy part. So anyways, like,

00:48:54.140 | 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,

00:49:01.100 | so for now, I'm not doing the math papers. Like the thing that I had been doing and was trained to do since I was, you know,

00:49:08.220 | whatever it was, 21 years old. So that's the interesting part is, you know, I'm a full professor.

00:49:14.540 | There's no more promotion to get. There's no, there's no letters to be written about me from faculty in the

00:49:19.500 | computer science. So there's no one I have to worry about. And so I made that switch about a year or two

00:49:23.900 | ago and I'm kind of in the middle of it. And one of the things I did in the switch, this might be

00:49:27.500 | interesting to you is I've started saying I have a quote unquote studio day and I'm, I don't,

00:49:33.740 | this is the day where I'm not, I'm definitely not on campus. I don't do meetings that day. I'm

00:49:37.260 | in my studio, I'm podcasting and I'm working on my newsletter because that reaches, you know, it's

00:49:43.020 | going to be read or downloaded eight plus million times a year and it's about technology and it matters.

00:49:48.220 | And that's part of my job now. And so far I've gotten away with saying that, you know,

00:49:51.820 | but it's different. It's different. So I've gone from juggling two worlds to be like, this is sort

00:49:57.420 | of my new, this is my world now is, is public facing. Like how do we, if we don't understand

00:50:02.460 | technology and how it affects us and what we can do about it, we're in trouble. So I don't know.

00:50:08.380 | It's an interesting, interesting shift. I think it's great. I mean, I think it's,

00:50:10.940 | you know, kind of some things that you echo and I, I try to tie into in the book as well,

00:50:15.260 | you know, the fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence. And we have this

00:50:18.460 | tendency in the West and maybe in general to venerate youth and, you know, the sheer horsepower

00:50:23.580 | of their minds and the proofs that you could do when you were 21 and also writing books and also,

00:50:29.340 | you know, it's different than what you do now. Um, I'm sure you can still do it and you still

00:50:33.500 | have wisdom and stuff, but I'm coming to be a little bit more optimistic, not to get all

00:50:37.820 | David Brooks, you know, second mountain or Arthur C. Brooks, his, his, uh, namesake as well,

00:50:43.260 | you know, kind of the, the, the, the, the kind of challenges of, of grappling with your youth being

00:50:49.580 | over in that, that chapter, that season of your life of, of fluid intel. But actually with these little,

00:50:55.500 | you know, digital devices and, and, you know, I, I just don't feel like there's going to be as much

00:51:02.380 | of an emphasis on the fluid intelligence. I mean, when I have a digital assistant always on,

00:51:07.260 | I have this thing with a pendant, I have my phone, I have my, you know, whatever.

00:51:10.700 | Um, those are incredible force multipliers, but they don't have any wisdom whatsoever. You know,

00:51:17.020 | if I ask chat GP, I asked it, what did, what books has Brian Keating written? You know,

00:51:21.020 | it's the new Googling yourself. And it's like, he wrote losing the Nobel prize into the impossible

00:51:25.420 | and a brief history of time. And I'm like, well, you know, I wish, I wish I had the book sales,

00:51:29.500 | you know, numbers of that, you know, it's like almost the Bible book sale numbers. Um, but, but no. So, so I think like we, and I'm, you know,

00:51:36.700 | you're a lot younger than me, but, but still the, the fact is that I think there's going to be a

00:51:41.500 | commodification of, of the fluid intelligence and a real kind of premium put on crystallized intelligence.

00:51:48.140 | And what you're doing seems to align perfectly, at least with that hypothesis, that you're now

00:51:52.780 | leveraging all this experience, this recognition that, yeah, we never teach our students ethics.

00:51:57.740 | I've never once had a class. And I talk about it in this book. There's a, two chapters where I kind

00:52:02.300 | of give, you know, Keating's rules for life survival and academia. And, and one of them is just like,

00:52:07.260 | well, why is it that, you know, that a medical student gets an ethics class? Why is it that a business

00:52:12.780 | student gets an, why is it that a law school student gets a business, gets an ethics class?

00:52:17.500 | Why don't scientists, oh, you don't need it. Oh, come on. You're telling me like some, some, you know,

00:52:22.460 | P hacking, you know, which I talked to, one of the fathers of the P hacking identification, Guido

00:52:27.180 | Inbens, you know, he, he, in this book talks about how rampant, how, how destructive it is, not just for

00:52:32.620 | 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 them

00:52:42.380 | ethics. So I think it's a beautiful thing, but I think it's one that, uh, an AI wouldn't have come

00:52:47.260 | up with, but you're going to ironically use it and the applications of it in the AI era. And that shows

00:52:53.020 | how crystallized intelligence, in my opinion, is going to be the new, you know, hot commodity.

00:52:57.500 | I mean, how do you, I'm curious how you think about it in your own career, right? I mean, you're, you're a

00:53:01.500 | distinguished professor. So now it's, people don't know these rankings, but even as full professors,

00:53:07.180 | there's these honorifics and levels you can get. And this is like a university level professor. You really don't go

00:53:12.060 | higher than that. Um, and you have a very popular podcast and you're, you're a good popularizer,

00:53:18.140 | right? Because you go on the other, like mega shows, you know, I mean, you've been on Huberman,

00:53:22.140 | you've been on Rogan, like, so you reach big audiences, more importantly, my show, which, uh,

00:53:29.100 | between me and Andrew Huberman, by the way, we have millions of downloads. So that's why I like to see it.

00:53:34.060 | Um, so how do you think about your career now? Yeah. I mean, I'm definitely getting a lot more

00:53:39.420 | fulfillment. You know, when I look at my most highly cited paper, it's got, you know, 2000 citations

00:53:44.540 | now. And, uh, and then I look at, you know, one episode of my, you know, if I only get 2000,

00:53:50.140 | you know, views of an episode, I get disappointed and yeah, it's just whatever. Uh, it's gamified of

00:53:55.660 | course. Um, I think now I, I have at least one more book in me, you know, if I keep interviewing Nobel

00:54:00.860 | prize winners, I'll put out, oops, my camera just clinked out. Just as you said, you know,

00:54:06.140 | I've got this popular podcast, my, my camera, uh, I've got the lead there. First time on a camera,

00:54:11.020 | Brian, come on. The buttery, the buttery bokeh. I got to get that in there to match you, my friend.

00:54:15.820 | So, uh, the, the focus on, you know, kind of the next stage is another, I think I want to write one more

00:54:23.500 | popular science book. And this one's going to be about, you've heard about string theory obviously

00:54:28.860 | as a sort of a potential theory of everything. But what a lot of people don't know is that string

00:54:33.420 | theory is not only unproven, there's literally no evidence in support of it as we speak, but it may be

00:54:41.820 | permanently shrouded in the mystery of being what's called unfalsifiable. So Karl Popper had this notion

00:54:48.540 | that science should be not provable because you can't prove that there's not a purple unicorn on,

00:54:53.100 | on Jupiter's north pole or in every, you know, in every case, but you can falsify different claims.

00:54:57.340 | So string theory might not be falsifiable, but there's an equal and kind of almost opposite

00:55:02.860 | candidate theory of everything, which just so happens to possibly imprint the signal

00:55:08.700 | that some people have claimed have, might have tentative hints for already. And I want to explain

00:55:13.420 | that signal and I want to explain the science of what's called the Simons Observatory, which is

00:55:17.980 | the project that I'm the PI of right now in Chile. It's a $200 million project,

00:55:22.220 | 400 people on it. And it's a massive telescope at 18,000 feet above sea level in the

00:55:27.420 | volcanic out of common desert of Chile. And, um, I want to explain how, how, how it could possibly

00:55:32.860 | be discovered because one of the consequences of this is that we may be able to discover why time

00:55:38.940 | has an arrow. Why does it flow in this one direction and why do we always seem to not have enough of it?

00:55:44.780 | I, you should write that book. Uh, I think that's right now. I don't know how you're going to write

00:55:49.820 | it when you have to be a PI on the Simons Observatory. You see, see, I react to having too much to do by

00:55:56.380 | doing less. Uh, you react to it by somehow just making it all work. And so I don't know, I don't

00:56:01.900 | know what your, what your magic is there. Uh, but that, that is impressive. I mean, how do you make that work?

00:56:07.340 | Uh, because you're still, you still do like the hard parts of being an academic and you write the

00:56:13.180 | books and you do the podcast. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, for me, if it's not like, if I'm my free

00:56:19.660 | time, Cal, I have a telescope. I, I use my telescope. I, I take astronomical images and it just so happens

00:56:26.780 | that some of the things that I can do as a hobby and my kids are into it, you know, purely by coincidence,

00:56:32.940 | I never, you know, forced them to do it. Uh, so I get to spend time with my kids, you know,

00:56:37.100 | learning and studying and building like this massive new telescope in the mountains of San Diego. Now,

00:56:41.980 | uh, it's just super fun. And I, I just loved, you know, if I retired, I'd still be teaching,

00:56:47.660 | I'd still be, you know, building tinkering. I'd still be, you know, going to travel and, and I love

00:56:52.620 | speaking and, um, uh, I do those kinds of things. So for me, it's like, you know, it, it, it fills me up

00:56:58.860 | with, with, you know, gratitude. And I think that's the most important thing in life. If you're not

00:57:03.260 | grateful, you're not a happy person. If you're not a happy person, it's hard to be a good person.

00:57:07.420 | So for me, it's, it's like, you know, uh, the other thing I should say, and that we touched upon it in

00:57:11.740 | your interview on my channel was the concept of a sabbatical. So Judaism is a big part of my life. And,

00:57:18.380 | and one of the attributes of Judaism is the seven day, you know, cycle of which you have to, you,

00:57:24.380 | I tell my students, you cannot work seven days a week. You probably have to work six days a week.

00:57:28.940 | You probably do while you're young and you've got that, that fluid intelligence pumping away through

00:57:34.220 | you. And that those, those, all those great traits, but you don't, if you are forbidden to work seven

00:57:39.500 | days a week, if you're in my lab and they all know it, they know I don't work on holidays and we end

00:57:43.740 | Saturdays. I don't work on Sundays either, by the way. But, um, but that, that's the thing you need to

00:57:48.460 | have. If I, if I didn't have that rejuvenation each week, I, you're probably right. I probably

00:57:52.300 | couldn't do, you know, most of what I do, but I get a reset. It's like a sabbatical, literally every

00:57:57.340 | week. And, um, and you know, as long as I keep having the strength and health, I'll continue to

00:58:02.140 | do it. Cause it makes me fundamentally full of joy to do and be able and get paid, you know, a little

00:58:07.100 | bit to do what I do for, for what I would do for free. As I said at the beginning, yeah. And what people

00:58:12.220 | often also get about these sort of academic positions, you're in charge often, right? So it is really

00:58:17.020 | different than being a PI on something. There's a lot to do, but you're in charge of it. Like,

00:58:22.140 | here's how we're doing. There's a lot of autonomy in academia. Whereas in a corporate job, it's,

00:58:27.580 | I'm on these projects, which means I have to be on email all the time. People can summon me to meetings.

00:58:32.460 | It's like constantly jumping through what other people need. It's the, I, I should say though,

00:58:37.660 | that, you know, just, I mean, I love that romantic vision, but you'd be surprised how much,

00:58:41.340 | you know, like while there's this Chilean law that prevents people that work 16 hours a week from

00:58:47.500 | working, you know, 17, it's, it's mind numbing. And, and that's where the podcast is the relief

00:58:53.340 | valve for me, because I say like, I have all these telecoms and I try to use your rules, Cal, please,

00:58:58.300 | you know, my rabbi, you know, forgive me for the sins that I make against you. But, but the problem is,

00:59:03.100 | you know, I have to, there are conversations that you and I have to have, if we want to, you know, keep,

00:59:08.300 | keep up the, you know, keep up the, the, the, you know, what we're doing, but then there are

00:59:12.460 | conversations I want to have. And the podcast gives me that to access to people like you,

00:59:16.860 | to people like the Nobel prize winners. I talked to Terry Tao, my first fields medalist. I'm going to

00:59:21.660 | have another one on. It's just incredible, Cal. I mean, I'm trying to put together this university

00:59:26.060 | that I wish I had, you know, for people like me and you and your listeners, because, you know,

00:59:31.740 | there's so much cool stuff in the, in the world. And there's so much evil, awful, horrible news,

00:59:37.260 | mostly in politics and, and, and, and what we do gives us a true safe space, not intellectually

00:59:44.060 | safe. I mean, it should challenge you, but it gives you that safe space to think like,

00:59:48.060 | God, you know, no one looks up at that asteroid over there or a comet or, or looks up and sees

00:59:52.780 | a constellation. I hate that Republican constellation. That's so, you know, so we have that safe space,

00:59:58.220 | we should cultivate it. We need more of it. And that lets the soul breathe. And I think

01:00:02.380 | that's what we're missing. So I'm, I'm really jazzed about podcasting as well. And I don't do

01:00:07.100 | it for the money. I mean, I lose money on it. Probably lose money on, on some of the books I

01:00:11.020 | write, uh, if you pay me by the hour, but, um, but ultimately it gives me a great source of, of joy,

01:00:15.900 | fulfillment. And ultimately that's the currency of life, right?

01:00:18.860 | Well put and well said. Um, we're going to wrap it, but before we do,

01:00:24.540 | I want to give two record endorsements for Brian to my audience here. Um, one, listen to the podcast,

01:00:31.740 | right? Listen to into the impossible, not just because, especially the science talk is interesting,

01:00:37.660 | but because it will give you a repeated exposure to life of the mind. And I think that's something

01:00:45.500 | that we really downplay right now, uh, what it actually is like to use the brain to create value.

01:00:50.540 | It's a slow process. It's a fulfilling process. It's a life affirming process. And it's the opposite

01:00:54.780 | of, you know, AI supported adult social media slop. It is just, it puts you in a different mindset

01:01:01.100 | about human potentiality and makes you think about this other stuff as man, that kind of feels like

01:01:07.500 | a waste. And then my second endorsement is, uh, read the latest book, how to focus like a Nobel

01:01:13.740 | prize winner, because I, you could think of that as like the source notes for deep work. Like deep work

01:01:18.220 | is talking to a non-academic crowd. Hey, focus is important. Here's how you do it. All of my inspiration

01:01:24.300 | came from academia, right? Because that's where I was, where this is not a crazy idea, you know,

01:01:28.460 | deep work in academia. People like, yeah, of course, like this is, this is what we do.

01:01:32.700 | So if you want sort of the source material, right? Like the source inspiration for a book like that,

01:01:37.580 | here we've got nine Nobel laureates talking about exactly how they do this and why they do this. And

01:01:43.340 | so you don't, you don't have to be interested in winning the top prize in that field in order to get

01:01:48.700 | wisdom. So anyways, Ryan, I love what you do. Always a pleasure to talk. Uh, thanks for coming on the show.

01:01:54.540 | Thank you, my friend. And thanks for the blurb on the book. It's a very meaningful to be connected

01:01:59.740 | with you. And I'll just echo that the deep life that's the rarest commit commodity, the one that

01:02:05.100 | only human beings can do. Right. So take advantage of it. And, uh, really, uh, just so appreciate you.

01:02:10.540 | Thank you, Cal. All right. So there you go. That was my conversation with Brian Keating. I love geeking

01:02:16.620 | out with other academics. You know, it's not, it's not as, uh, removed from your life as you might

01:02:23.740 | think. As I talked about with Brian, so many of the ideas that I now talk about to the world and

01:02:29.740 | knowledge work ideas about focus and distraction and deep work and what a diligence and not taking

01:02:35.260 | on too many work projects and workload management. Like a lot of these ideas, the seed for them came

01:02:40.620 | out of my, uh, experiences in academia because it's the one place where the stakes are so high

01:02:46.620 | and the intellectual demands are so strict that you have to really care about these things like focus.

01:02:52.380 | You have to really care about these things like workload. So the seeds were planted there that I,

01:02:56.380 | I've then helped to sow in much broader types of fields. If we'll stick with that metaphor.

01:03:01.580 | So that's why I like geeking out on these things, but Brian's just a really cool guy. He's really smart,

01:03:05.740 | by the way. He's a very well-known cosmologist and he's done some really good work. He's modest,

01:03:10.940 | but he's done some really good work. Um, if you have a .edu email address, pick him up on that offer,

01:03:17.900 | go to his website. I think it's briankeating.com. Google his name. And if you sign up for his newsletter,

01:03:24.300 | he's honest about this with a .edu address, he's going to send you space dust. I mean, I don't know

01:03:30.220 | where he has all this space dust from. I don't want to say that he definitely has a connection to aliens,

01:03:35.900 | but like he probably does, but anyways, you can get some space. I thought that was really cool.

01:03:39.100 | Great discussion. Check out the book, how to focus like a Nobel prize winner. You'll love it. My blurb

01:03:44.300 | is honest. Check it out. Hope you enjoyed the conversation. Um, hopefully we have some more

01:03:48.860 | of these coming up. I don't do them every week, but we've got some ideas. So if you like them,

01:03:52.220 | let us know. We'll be back with another in-depth episode at some point in the near future, but the

01:03:56.300 | normal Monday episodes of the deep questions podcast, they'll always be there for you. So at the very

01:04:00.540 | least you'll hear from me Monday. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.

01:04:04.220 | Hey, if you liked this video, I think you'll really like this one as well. Check it out.

How Nobel Prize Winners Focus | Cal Newport + Brian Keating

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