Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Brian Keating's Advice To The Graduates 2023 (#323)

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Please leave a rating and review: On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it’s here: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok On Audible it’s here https://tinyurl.com/wtpvej9v  Find other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You succeeded in these competitions, termed finite games by scientists who study them. There are winners and there are losers, admits and rejects. You got admitted, you made it, and then the battle began. You won. You succeeded and you thrived to get to graduation. But now the real game begins, and boy, is it a doozy. Congratulations, graduates. We at Into the Impossible celebrate you.

and as you look into the future, whether it be graduate school, professional school, or jumping into a job, here comes a wisdom drop. Your host, Professor Brian Keating, has some strong opinions and some advice that I wish I had. Please keep into the impossible in your feed by subscribing and following, and for some extra credit, jump over to our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating, that's DR Brian Keating, where you can see the video version of this and all the episodes mentioned. And please subscribe there too. If you like what Professor Keating has to say, please pass it on to a graduate you know.

And let us know what you think in the form of a review like this one from Audible. This podcast, with its questions and deep conversations, is a great contribution to helping us become more insightful, open-minded, consciously aware, and fundamentally better human beings. And now, your host, Brian Keating's graduation gift for 2023. sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the Bud Bay doors, please help. I was asked by the newspaper of record, the most important newspaper on Earth, the San Diego Union Tribune, for some pieces of sage advice that I could offer to graduate students and others. And that was involving the notion of what it's going to be like when they do graduate,

graduate and what they're going to move on into. And there's always a lot of pithy advice and there was some good advice from folks online in this article that's linked in the YouTube video description on my secondary channel, which is called Keating Clips. And there were tons of really good advice. There's advice from other teachers, the head of certain agency called manpower. probably get canceled, have to change that name, Manpower Incorporated, which is an employment agency, Phil Blair, offered some advice about career management.

And so I tried to write it for people that aren't necessarily going on to the business world that are going on to maybe graduate school, medical school, law school, and how can they succeed and how can they know what they really want to do? This is not exactly an easy thing to figure out. I remember when I started graduate school, 30 years ago, I can't believe it, I thought graduate school would just be like a harder version of undergraduate. You know, the homework problems would be harder. I'd have, you know, kind of more just brilliant colleagues surrounding me, and we'd be solving these homework problems and really not understanding as a senior in college at Case Western. Well, I'll be returning in a couple of months to give a collect an award for being an alumni of some renown, I suppose.

That'll be fun to be back in Cleveland, Ohio. Shout out to everybody out there. But there was some great advice. There was advice from Rear Admiral Roni Froman Blue, who was a really renowned person, a naval officer and the first woman to command the U.S. Navy's Southwest region. pretty cool. Mine was called, You Made It, Welcome to the Infinite Game. And I wanted to describe what's going to happen in the future, which is that I think people are going to become participants in a game

that's very, very unlike being an undergraduate. In fact, in the undergraduate, they're winners and losers, as we'll see. To get into school, just to get into college is incredible. And the battles get harder and harder. And what I want to convey is that the games that you're playing stop now from being what are called finite games like chess or poker. You know, there's one winner and all the rest are losers to an infinite game where the purpose of the game is to keep playing. And so I entitled it. I entitled it.

You made it welcome to the infinite game. And it says, it starts off this way. You're remarkable. That's clear. To get here, you battle throughout high. high school to attend college and be among the best scholars in the world. Then you continued the fight, pulling all-nighters, competing against the clock, and the dreaded grade curve, which my students know all about.

I have to curve a little bit, but it's gotten out of control. I said, you succeeded in these competitions, getting in, you know, the SATs, back in the day, ICTs. You succeeded in these competitions, termed finite games by scientists who study them. There are winners and there are losers, admits and rejects. You got admitted, you made it, and then the battle began. You won. You succeeded and you thrive to get to graduation.

Now that I'm talking to graduates of colleges primarily, although it's true for high school graduates as well that are becoming college graduates, but I was asked particularly about college graduation. So I say, but now the real game begins, and boy, is it a doozy. There are no rules. There is no end. There are no winners. There are no losers.

Now you are playing an infinite game. The object is to keep playing. And I say, my wish for you is that you'll never stop learning. For learning is the most beautiful form of play. And you could build on the skills that you've learned and continue to play. So I say ask questions, explore, and experiment. I was asked to keep this to under 200 words, which I don't. have to do now since this is my channel. But I really wanted to say that exploration and curiosity

is what got you into the position of being a scholar. Now you have your license, sort of like your driver's license. Now things can get really dangerous. Or you could build upon what you've learned, be, have a little bit of swagger, but not too much, and keep it going. Keep the education process going. When I learned how to fly a tiny little Cessna up back in 1995, the instructor turned to me and said, congratulations, you passed, your FAA mandated designated flight exam, and now your education begins. Same thing when I got out of graduate school. That's when the learning begins. So I said, most of all, never stop sharing what you learned with others. They're no longer your competition. They're your teammates in the infinite game of life. So life is an

infant game. No one gets out alive. No one has succeeded in passing through the final paywall at the end. Unlike this advertisement, there is, or this article that I was a part of, they took the paywall off so you can read it just fine. What's important to realize is that every step of education, the rules change. There's no real clear-cut path from an educational scenario like high school to college. It's totally radically different. There's no clear-cut path from college to graduate school, law school, medical school, business school, or the real world getting a job. And I was talking to a friend the other day who's kind of, he's sort of having a quarter life crisis, maybe, I would say, I won't say who it is, but he's expecting his first child.

And I said, you really can't appreciate what it. There's no way to extrapolate from what you've experienced, maybe even with your wife. And, you know, in past relationship, there's no way to extrapolate. that to the future of what it's going to be like in the next month or two once his first child arrives. There's no adiabatic transition. There's no pass-through where you can say, well, this is kind of like, you know, what was before. It's kind of like marriage, except it's different. There's a little person.

No, no, no, no, no. It's as radical a phase shift as the human being can understand and appreciate it. not just for the wife, who is going to be, you know, suffering most physically. You know, there's an old joke that I told my wife after our first child was born. And it goes like this. There's a husband and his wife's in labor for the first time of their first child. They go to the hospital. The doctor is working hard.

The nurses are working hard. The mother's in labor. A couple hours go by. The father's like, doesn't know what to expect. The parenting classes didn't say what happens. that my wife is in labor for 12 hours, 18 hours go by, 24 hours go by, 36 hours go by, and I think I cannot take it anymore. I'm out of here.

This is ridiculous. He can't, I can't stand it, I can't stand it, I'm going to just go nuts. He goes out, five minutes later, he gets a frantic call from the nurse. Come back in, come back in. Your wife delivered a baby. He runs back into the hospital, goes, runs up, looks at the doctor, looks at his wife. You can't really tell, I speak from experience, you can't really tell what the sex is of the baby when it's born.

You really have to be told. So he asked the doctor, what is it? What do we have? 36 hours of labor. What do we have? And the doctor says, congratulations.

You have a beautiful baby girl. He goes, oh, thank God. It's a girl. Oh, thank God. And the doctor's like, okay, you know, so wonderful that you're so happy you have a daughter. But I'm just curious. You know, some fathers are, you know, more excited to have a son.

You know, I don't know. What makes you so, so, um, it's just so grateful to have a daughter. He said, doctor, don't you see? If I had a son, someday he might have to go through what I just went through. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is. on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. So it's a little joke, but there's no way of explaining the minute after you have a baby to the person you are a minute before. And to some extent, you can't really understand what the real world, quote unquote, is like after graduating from a previous existence. The only thing you can know for sure is this is totally different. And you can, of course, benefit from the

experiences that you had in your previous, in your previous relationship, in your previous, in the previous way of life that you enjoyed before a baby, before graduation, etc. But there's no way to really understand what it's like until you go through it. So the question is, how do you go through it? How do you appreciate it? How do you, How do you take the time to really be mindful of how radical a shift that's been in your life, but also continuing to thrive and use the skills that you've built up? So my real advice, which I gave to one of my students came to my last office hours yesterday, and she was asking, you know, how could I prepare for graduate school or for my summer internship?

The professors that I'm talking to said, oh, just relax until you show up on, you know, first day of grad school or internship. and I kind of had some sympathy for that advice, although I didn't think it was great because at the, you know, at the bottom line, she was interested and exciting to take the initiative to do work before she shows up. So the professor of advisor to be should encourage that. She's not going to take off the whole summer and go surfing, as I did after I graduated, because I didn't want to go to graduate school burned out back then.

And I worked in a little restaurant on the eastern end of Long Island. called the Stephen Talk House, and that was super fun, and I met all sorts of cool people and celebrities and just normal fishermen and lobstermen and all sorts of the milieu from the eastern end of Long Island. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life, had nothing to do with the quote-unquote world that I'd be entering as a graduate student. I'm so thankful that I did it. I made so many friends and so many great acquaintances. Like I said, I met celebrities for what that's worth, Billy Joel, the bare naked ladies, the band from Saturday Night Live used to come out every Friday night and play, and I got a free concert and just living the dream out there after college, because I knew that wasn't going to be my dream when I was 50. When I was 50, I went to have a wife and kids and I have a maybe, I didn't know I could be a professor. So it's, it's quite obvious. I didn't know I could be a professor until basically the first times I went out an interview to be a professor. So it's totally normal to have complete ambiguity, uncertainty, fear, uncertainty, and doubt, fud, and there's

nothing wrong with that at all. But Thomas' own, he just finished his BSC in physics and is going to Cambridge. Wow, congratulations, great school. To do part three. After that, I want to do a PhD in theoretical cosmology. Any advice on how to help me where to decide to go to the U.S. or stay in the U.K. for my PhD? Oh, that's a great question.

So we have many, many foreign students here in the U.S. we typically have a different model where we don't accept people that have done master's. It's not common for someone to do a master's as a terminal degree and then come to, say, UCSD or any other schools that I'm familiar with in the U.S. Typically, you get your master's. It's kind of just like, congratulations, you have a master's degree. It doesn't mean much if you're continuing to a Ph.D. No one's going to say, well, you have a Ph.T., and we really want to hire you.

But your master's thesis was subs, you know, it's actually just maybe could just be an exam, could be that you passed a qualifying exam. It's usually not indicative of an actual completed self-contained project the way the PhD is. There are terminal masters. I usually advise students not to do them in America because you have to pay. Whereas if you're in the PhD program, you can always leave after you get a master's. No one has to know you start it off as a PhD student. But let us pay for you to go to grad.

graduate school, let us let some advisor of the school you get into pay, and you shouldn't be deceptive. If you're really thinking, I'm definitely not going to get a PhD, don't do it. But if worse comes to worse and you want to leave with just, quote unquote, just a master's, not pejoratively, just the fact that there are very few jobs that require a master's degree in physics that you can't do with a bachelor's degree only because it's a one or two-year degree. Unlike, say, computer science or almost any other field that's interesting, master's degrees

mean a lot in a lot of other fields, but not in physics as much. So apply for a PhD program. We have our applications, you know, periods kind of end in December in the U.S. And so it may not be possible for this upcoming, you know, season to do it. Or if we're starting in 2023 in the fall of 2023 in two months, basically it's probably impossible. But you could maybe perhaps transfer. The U.S. and the U.K. are very different systems. There is more of an emphasis here, I think, on experimental physics.

There's a lot more opportunities for experimental physics, say, here, at least in my field. But you're asking on a theoretical level, and that's probably indicative of the fact that there are more theoretical observational positions available in Europe and the UK in particular. So I would certainly apply to the U.S. Unless you have a direct relationship with some advisor, I would say it's more important who you work for than what you study. And it's even more important who you work for than where you go. You can get, I went to Brown University, which is one of the hardest institutions to get into as an undergraduate. I went there as a PhD. It was less challenging to get in, a higher acceptance rate.

I thought I wanted to do theoretical condensed matter physics, which is a very arcane subbrancho. I have done videos with Jorge Hirsch, recently, who is a theoretical condensed matter physicist, I'll do more, Felix Flickr, another one. But I wasn't really cut out to do it, perhaps. I didn't have the passion that I had for what I'm doing now, which is to be an astronomer, which is what I was doing when I was 13. When I was 13, I had a telescope, as I described in my first book, I had a small telescope. It was kind of like my laboratory. I was at a logbook.

I would take notes. I would sketch things. And I was not aware, but I was reproducing the work of this guy, Galileo, discovering the moons of Jupiter, the ears of Saturn, as he called them, the horns of Venus, as he called them, the craters on the moon. And you feel the exact same feeling that Galileo felt, which is unlike any other branch of science. You know, you can't say, condensed matter, you know, physicist, I'm going to just make a

high-temperature superconductor. And then I'll feel what it felt like in 1987 when this was first. It's very hard to do that, you know, as an amateur. It's very easy to do that with astronomy. You just connect your eye to a telescope and you'll feel the same exact emotions that the discoverer of these phenomena felt. Then you first look at the Andromeda Galaxy, all sorts of things. So it's just a fascinating thing. And it takes me back to what I love to do back when I was 12 or 13, which is advice from, I believe, Seth Godin, who's a past guest on the podcast.

He's a wonderful man, Mench, if there was everyone. And he's coming back on the podcast, talk about his new book called The Song of Success or something like. that. And yeah, really, I can't wait for that interview that I'll come out next month, hopefully, once I get them back on the podcast. So, Tomas, thank you very much. Congratulations. I would say, you know, don't rule out. They don't apply to like a million places if you think you're not going to go to UCSD. Don't waste your time applying and waste your money and waste your, the reviewers of these applications. It's very selective, most universities in the U.S. Most will. you know, look at foreign students from countries all around the world, but there may be, you know,

kind of a tie-in for the research that you're doing now in theoretical cosmology. You may find a target specific professors at UCSD or Princeton or Berkeley. And you may target them and ask, you know, say, this is based on what I've done so far. Another very common thing to do is to do a, is to do a you know kind of a deep dive into the faculty at these institutions and see who's doing stuff that's most closely related to what I'm doing.

And that can be really fun as well and you'll learn a lot from doing that. So, so great, Tamas, that is great. The one thing I would say not to do is never, you know, never email somebody, you know, that you're interested in getting a reply from

saying the following. Like, I will do anything that you want. Put me to work. I get that frequently. I actually got that three times this week from three different brilliant, incredible students. And I always say, you know, I respect you. And some of them I didn't know. I was giving a guest lecture and they came up and I'll do anything.

It's very flattering. It's also very, very challenging. When you tell somebody that, be my mentor, you're asking them to do an unpaid internship, you know, for you, basically, by you volunteering an unpaid internship for them, it's actually putting a workload on them. I always say, provide some value first. Look at the professors that you're interested in working with. Look at these other institutions. You don't only have to work for professors.

In fact, it's very hard. Professors have very busy summers. Most of us get, you know, either take time off or we don't get summer salary. We don't get paid. And then we do our writing and stuff that is separate from our university. We do get speaking tours or things like that. I'll be doing a little bit of that this summer. stay tuned for that.

And if you're in the UK, by the way, I am coming to London on 29th of June this month, just about three weeks from yesterday. And I'll be speaking at the Royal Institution. You can find out details about that at the Royal Institution. I'll put a link to my talk in the chat. I've already posted that to my newsletter, which you subscribe to on LinkedIn. Just look up my newsletter. It's called Open the Pod Bay Doors, kind of a play on Hal and Dave in 2001,

a space odyssey. When the pod gave the name for the iPod, that's where the name iPod came from, was from Open the Pod Bay Doors from Howe in 2001 Space Odyssey. And then the word podcast comes from the fact that these things were originally available, if you're listening to this, were originally available on audio on the iPod. So you'd have to download it and so forth. So podcast comes from the namesake of the institution I direct, the co-direct, associate direct, whatever, called the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination.

So that's kind of a cute little detail. But again, don't email people and say, I'll do anything for you. Provide some value. Do something for them. Do a deep dive in their research. I read your last three papers. I'm curious about this citation that you made to this, your colleague, your competitor. Here's what they're doing. I made a video. I did a deep dive into audio. I just listened to like a very, very thoughtful deep dive audio podcast of, and I won't say the podcast name, because it will reveal, you know, connections to the author of a book who's not quite ready to be, you know, making a public appearance. But suffice to say, the deep dive was so flattering. And it told the whole story of the book. It didn't give away like free

audiobook for sale, but it did a deep dive. And it was very thoughtfully done. I sent it to the author of the book, and he had no idea, he doesn't listen to podcast. And it was a very moving thing because I had read the book, and I know the person involved. So it was incredible. And this person did this podcast, not knowing that this person would ever even hear about it, the author of the book. And it provided a tremendous amount of value to the author of the book. So I think it was a wonderful thing. And he didn't do it because he wants to be an intern. He's a famous, famous, famous podcaster. You all know his name. But anyway, the point is, provide some value when you reach out. I did a video. Don't send me a paper. I got a paper yesterday.

75 pages of reading material. Can I help out? Can I promote? I said no, I can. I'm sorry. I have too many other things to do. If you're asking me to read a 75 page paper, you're asking me to put aside five hours of my time, take away five hours from my young daughter. And how much is that worth to me? It's certainly not worth, you know, free. And I'm not saying I would do it, you know, for millions of dollars, but the point is, you haven't shown any value. You're just asking me to do something for you. You're giving me a homework assignment. And I didn't say this to this young lady who came to my office hours yesterday.

You know who you are out there. And she can confirm that, I suppose, if she's on LinkedIn. But, or you too. But the point is, I wanted to provide value for her mentor. I'll never meet her mentor where she's going. And he's in a completely different field. But, like, do something. And I was surprised that he didn't ask her to do stuff and just said, well, have a good summer, you know, go surfing until you show up in a couple months in grad school or what have you.

So the point is try to make yourself useful. It's very hard to beat somebody who's useful, who's always being thoughtful and conscientious, reaching out and providing value before they make an ask. There's a book by Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary V's as, you know, it's called like Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook or something like that. Meaning, you give three, four, five things for free. You just do it. You don't expect anything. It's not transactional. And then you ask for something in return.

So, but by then you've established a relationship. And I think that's very important. You know, PhDs and so forth are really like relationships. They're really like apprenticeships. I'm reading a book by Robert Green called The 48 Laws, the Daily Laws. I forget which one it is. And he's a very interesting guy. So I'm accused him of Machia Valley.

He's not like that at all, I don't think. But he says never despise free. Never think that you are getting no value because you work for free. And again, I'm not doing this because I want to worry. I have a hire of a lot of graduate students, a lot of undergraduates that I pay very handsomely, postdocs and so forth that work with me, engineers. I have a huge budget that, you know, thank goodness is working well towards the delivery of the Simon's Observatory with my colleagues and friends. So this is not to save money. It's just to say that you want to be useful.

You want to do useful things. And sometimes to do that means you don't ask for something up front. You provide something up front. You want to write and make thumbnails for Lex Friedman or Brian Keating and make some. Eventually, I'll pay you. That's a very good example. Don't say, well, like, I'm not going to do it unless you pay me and, you know, here's my work. Because, again, it's a homework assignment for me.

I have to go out and see it's like this person any good. and well, this thumbnail is kind of good, but that one's pretty. No, just give it to me. We'll do an experiment. You put something, some skin in the game. I'll put some skin in the game. I'll spend my time. You spend your time.

It could be on YouTube. It could be in science. Make a JavaScript plot of like, you know, what are the recent papers, you know, that made citations to my recent paper on axions or something. Do something cool. Make an animation of something. Something I can use from a scientific paper that I've made. Those are like gold.

People love that. So if you make yourself useful, good things will come. And don't worry, don't despise the free apprenticeship as Robert Green says. Also, if they don't pay you, they can't really be considered your boss. Like, I've stopped taking a lot of advertising for these channels because I don't want to have a boss. Like, you know, Gavin Newsom is enough for me. Hi, Gavin. You know, I'd love to have you on the show.

But, you know, I don't need another job. And so by, you know, having advertisers, it's just a lot of work. You have to see if they're good. And then you have to see if their brand matches your kind of aesthetic. And then you have to deliver it and you have to have a script and you have to redo it. And it ends up being like a mini job. Yeah, you can get leaving some money on the table, I'm sure. That's not what's important.

I want to reach a million minds. Connect them together in a massive brain and do great things with that to inspire people to be curious about the universe. That's the why. That's what we're doing. Because the more STEM, knowledgeable, stem curious people there are, the better the world would be. It's just 100% clear to me. Carl Sagan said it best. We live in a scientific age in which very few people understand science.

And I'm trying to kind of, you know, very clumsily, very minuscule fashion, replicate what Carl's doing, communicating but also doing real science. They're great communicators. There are great scientists. there aren't as many people that are doing both. And I'm trying to do that to inspire these million brains to get a free education on my YouTube channel, basically putting it out, courtesy of these brilliant people I get to talk to.

I just had a conversation with Peter Diamandos. That'll be up on my channel on Sunday. And it was just great. Talk to one of the world's foremost experts in medicine, longevity, and what he calls these exponential technologies from artificial intelligence to life extension, all incredible things and his contacts, and networks and his BFF is Elon. It was great to talk to him.

It's super fun. And I got to deliver that. And thanks to him because he was my first major guest. I had Freeman Dyson on was my first guest on the podcast many years ago. But, you know, Peter was kind of the person who's creating incredible content and is really out there in the world. You know, Freeman was a 92-year-old man when I met him. I enjoyed, you know, four or five years getting to know him and having him over at my house and

his lovely wife and family. And it was just a real treat. And so, you know, Freeman kind of gave my intellectual start. And, you know, Peter was one of the first people responsible for stepping it into a podcast that could be sustainable to create content that would be actionable for people to take advantage of. So I hope you've enjoyed that. And I hope you will realize that life is an infinite game and that what's come before is merely the prologue, the past is the prologue, as they say. How can we really take advantage and move in

as Peter always likes to talk about the abundant future? And how can we get to a place of true abundance? I think that's going to come from educating a million minds. And Peter asked me, what would I do with a $10 million budget? And I said, Peter, you just cut my salary 90%. No, I'm joking. I said, basically what I'm trying to do is connect these million minds together to make this incredible global brain that is fascinated by science. Nothing against anything else, but science, astronomy, cosmology, engineering, mathematics, and physics. There's great people doing great work. I've had on my channel many times, Sabina Hassanfelder. She's going to come back in July for the paperback release of her most recent book, Exessential Physics.

Stay tuned for that. So that's sort of my advice to the graduates. Make yourself useful. Realize you're playing an infinite game. The people you're playing with are not your competition. They're your partners in the infinite game of life. So with that, my beloved audience and friends out there in the multiverse, I bid you a great rest of your day, rest of your weekend, and stay tuned to all the channels,

the various things, like, comment, subscribe. Stay tuned for more of this massive mission of playing. Playing to win, maybe. Just keep playing the infinite game of life. Thanks. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening. Keep in touch and inspired by signing up for Professor Keating's Monday magic email

at Brian Keating.com slash list. And if you have a dot edu domain, we'll send you an artifact older than the earth, forged in the fire of an exploding star in the form of an authentic meteorite fragment. Thanks to all our viewers and listeners for helping us blow past 100,000 subscriber mark on YouTube. Please keep it growing by following, subscribing, and sharing. And remember, always be curious. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goal. because we're built for what you're building.

Fit for your ambition for citizens backing.