Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - How I Lost the Nobel Prize and What I Learned from the Experience w/ Jordan Harbinger

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

What’s it like to almost win and then lose the Nobel Prize?  In 2014, using the BICEP2 telescope, we believed we had caught a glimpse of the spark that ignited the universe. Millions watched our announcement live from Harvard, sparking rumors of a Nobel Prize. But were we truly seeing the cosmic prologue, or were we deceived by a galactic mirage? I had the pleasure of discussing BICEP2's discovery, the intense scientific drama that followed, and what I learned from the whole experience with Jordan Harbinger on his show. Enjoy!  — Key Takeaways:  00:00 Intro 01:47 The discovery that almost won me the Nobel Prize 03:30 Why I didn’t end up getting the Nobel Prize 10:41 Everything wrong with the Nobel Prize  16:36 Ethical wills 24:02 Deprogramming yourself 37:20 Reframing losses  46:37 Outro — Additional resources:  ➡️ Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show: 💻 Website: https://www.jordanharbinger.com/ — ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To come so close and not win after all the blood, sweat, and tears and travel and people that I knew and loved and lost, over the decade it took to make these measurements, it was quite crushing. But ultimately, I came to see it as sort of a journey of introspection. Why did I care so much to win this prize? Was it just for my father's, you know, kind of accolades and adoration? Was it for something inside of me, a need that I had to be, you know, held up in this esteem? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors out. Brian, thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks, Jordan. It's a real pleasure to be here. Yeah, you sound like you meant that. Yeah, it's true. It's only taking me a couple of years. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Now, the book is losing the Nobel Prize, which is kind of an interesting angle,

because normally you'd think, well, we have Nobel laureates coming on. And you're like a Nobel Un laureate? Is that the honor that we're talking about here? Honorable mention, our dishonorable mention. Yeah, well, actually, you know, the book started off with a title losing the Nobel Prize, sort of as a double entendre, as our French listeners might say. And that's that, you know, I knew personally, for reasons we can get into, that I had created a Nobel-worthy experiment,

and we had made an announcement that was covered all around the world, but I knew instantly that I would not be one of the ones winning the Nobel Prize, even though it was instantly talked about and wrapped tones as being Nobel worthy. And the other meaning of it came later as I wrote the book, which is that the Nobel Prize needs to be done away with, at least it's negative aspects that we can get into, and therefore it needs to be lost in its current form and kind of revived in a better form. First of all, what was your, can you give us like the 30 second overview of what was Nobel worthy?

Because I think a lot of people are kind of like, well, what did you lose for? What was it that you lost? Yeah. So I'm a cosmologist. You ever heard of that book, Everything I Needed to Know, I learned in kindergarten. I'm planning on a book. Everything I ever needed to know, I learned in advanced general relativity. It's hard to give it a 30-second overview, but I will.

I'll do my best. And that's that I'm a cosmologist, which doesn't mean I do hair and makeup, but instead means that I study the birth of the early universe. And actually, cosmology and cosmetology share that same prefix, cosmos, because it means beautiful in Greek, which is kind of beautiful, if you think about it itself, that the face that the universe presents us, gives us an opportunity to understand our own origins. And since I was a young kid, I had two really overarching desires. One was to understand the universe as much as I could before I left this mortal coil, and two, to win a Nobel Prize. And they kind of intersected in this

experiment called Bicep that I invented, along with some collaborators at Caltech and elsewhere, and that we eventually took down to the very bottom of the world, to the South Pole Antarctica, where it observed for many years, and finally did discover. the very thing I wanted to discover, or so we thought. And that was the birth pangs of the Big Bang. And you can think of the Big Bang as this explosive expansion, if you like, although it's not technically correct, of all matter, all space, and perhaps the beginning of time itself. And so what we thought we witnessed was the origin of time. And it's just so fascinating to think that a little idea that I came up with as a, you know, 20-something, 30-something-year-old young scientist would have such

implications for not only science, but philosophy, even theology. I mean, who hasn't thought about the universe and where we all come from when you look up on a dark starry night? Sure. And then you lost it. Why? It's all rigged. That's right. Yeah, they certainly don't have any compunction, you know, awarding it to white men as such as myself. But the Nobel Prize is given out, according to Alfred Nobel's will. So Alfred Nobel was kind of the Steve Jobs of the 1800s. He was one of the wealthiest and most successful inventors in history. And he invented a little substance that we came to call dynamite. And dynamite was incredibly profitable and was also used for warfare in addition to, you know, constructing and demolition. And so he sort of invented this prize with an aim

of recognizing the world's best scientist and those that contributed to world peace, which is kind of ironic. It is ironic. I invented dynamite. You know what? Let's name the peace prize after me. This This is never going to get misused. Actually, he was impelled to create this prize because he was walking around Paris one day, and he came upon a newspaper that said, Alfred Nobel, the merchant of death is dead. And that was kind of odd, you know, as Mark Twain said, reports of my death are slightly exaggerated. It was actually his older brother who died, but he kind of got this George Bailey. You remember a wonderful life.

He got to see what life would be like without him after he's gone, and it wasn't pretty. and they were kind of gleefully celebrating his death in this Parisian newspaper obituary. So he resolved then to redeem the Nobel name and in so doing created the Nobel Prize. And it was meant to recognize the greatest and most beneficial invention or discovery that occurred that was created by a single person in the preceding year. And so we have come very far from what Alfred Nobel originally wanted, but our discovery was really one for the ages if it had held up. The reason that it wasn't a ordered to us, no member of my team won it, so we all lost it in a certain sense, is because we were trying to study the origin of the very largest thing that possibly exists, namely the universe. And in so doing, we were spoiled and actually ruined. Our results weren't wrong. We didn't make a blunder. But it turned out we were kind of tripped up by the smallest substance in the universe, namely dust. And so I know you've got a young child at home. I have several at home. And dust is ubiquitous for people in life. We see dust everywhere. You did an episode once about sand. Well,

sand is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, in the universe and the cosmos is basically littered. It's a filthy, filthy universe that we inhabit. And that's mostly due to stars that used to exist that blew up. And so we knew that these stars would blow up and they would litter the interstellar medium of our galaxy with dust. And we tried to get rid of it. But the only team that held the key to the dust's reality or lack there of was being maintained and kept close to the vest by our arch nemesis, a satellite experiment located a million miles from Earth that held the key to really confirming or disconforming what we were going to claim and what we did at Harvard University on St. Patrick's Day 2014, which is the claim that we had discovered the origin of the universe

via this inflationary epoch that scientists had pursued for literally 20 years at that point. So you ended up not winning the Nobel Prize and then you decided, screw it, I'm going to market this into a book. I mean, I'm trying to sort of follow your thought process here from, okay, I didn't win this. Look, real talk, were you super crushed at that point? Because you thought, I'm going to win this Nobel Prize. I'm going to go down in history and there was nothing. There was a kind of a whiplash of emotions, that's for sure. And it, you know, people talk about you just have sour grapes, kidding.

You know, you would have happily accepted it, even though, you know, a lot of the book, well, I shouldn't say a lot. The book is a memoir. It's an autobiography of a scientist at a young age trying to achieve the highest heights in his field. And for us, that's unquestionably the Nobel Prize. There's no greater accolade. I claim in all of society. I mean, it's not like newspapers ask, you know, some Hollywood star, you know, who he or she should vote for in the presidential election. They're all too happy to give their opinions. But they'll publish 70 Nobel laureates say that you should vote for, you know, choose your candidate there. But in this case, for what I wanted to do, it was first and foremost to really understand how the early universe behave because I thought that there could be no greater mystery than that. I knew concomitant with that could come the Nobel Prize. And I have to say it was a huge motivation for me, Jordan. I grew up with a very difficult but ultimately a loving father. And he was a great scientist. He was a mathematician. He was a scientist. And he had become a full professor. So I'm only a full professor for a few years now at age, you know, my late 40s. But he was a full professor at Cornell University when he was 27 years old. Oh, wow. And he and I were really competitive,

you know, as you might have been competitive with your dad, you know, throwing a football around the yard and, you know, like the great Santini, you know, kind of wrestling or whatever. He was like that with intellectual jousting. And so I knew the only way to kind of overcome his shadow or get out from under his shadow would be to do something he never did, which is win a Nobel Prize. So for many years, I thought that was sort of not only a nice kind of accompaniment to understanding how the universe worked, but it became like, you know, winning an Oscar or winning best podcast of the year, it became a goal into itself. And when I fell short of it, two things happened. One, I had to deal with this crushing blow, as you say, to come so close and not win after all the blood, sweat,

and tears and travel and people that I knew and loved and lost over the decade it took to make these measurements. And then to be shut out of the credit for doing, in part, the creation of the experiment that ultimately led to these results, along with colleagues, it was quite crushing, but ultimately I came to see it as sort of a journey of introspection. Why did I care so much to win this prize? Was it just for my father's kind of accolades and adoration? Was it for something inside of me, a need that I had to be held up in this esteem? I mean, it's like having the one million Instagram followers for scientists. It's even more. I mean, there are fewer people currently alive that hold the Nobel Prize in physics than, you know, have been in the

space station in the last couple of years or that live at the South Pole currently in the middle of winter there. So, you know, thinking about why I wanted to do it, it caused a deep kind of introspective glance into what drives a scientist. And not all my colleagues are like me. I don't want to say that, but there are a lot. I was told when I was hired, you know, basically to get tenure, to get, you know, the highest levels of academia, you have to be on the short list of Nobel Prize winners. I'm still told that by people that the research I'm doing is great. I'm still have a chance to win the Nobel Prize. And I say, that would be pretty ironic at this point after all the criticism I make in the book. They might give it to you

just to be like, now let's watch them meet these words. I don't know. Do you think it's increased your chances or decreased your chances, honestly? Well, I had a book critic write that there was a wonderful book. She hated my conclusions and she disagreed with them vehemently, but she said, who knows, he's such a good writer, he might win the Nobel Prize in literature. And then I pointed out it was canceled last year due to an egregious alleged sex scandal that rocked the Nobel Academy. So I don't know if I want to win it that badly, the Nobel Prize in Literature. I do say, you know, as a joke, you know, if you want to see if I'm sincere about the reforms that I propose for society's greatest accolade, just get them to award it to me. And if I don't turn it down, I'm a freaking

hypocrite. Yeah, that's a good plan, because either you are a credible writer or you are a Nobel prize winning physicist. So heads I win, tails you lose. Yes. 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 oceanfront 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. Exactly. Exactly. Well, there's got to be some pretty intense criticisms of this if you wrote a whole whole book about it. And I want to get into that a little because I think a lot of us do put the same types of criticisms onto ourselves. And this was illustrated even more severely by the suicide of someone close to you. Do you want to tell us about that? Yeah. Unfortunately, the scientific world that we now inhabit has become really competitive and really challenging. It's always been

competitive and it needs to be competitive. I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson spoke about this on your show not too long ago. That scientist is it inherently an adversarial, you know, kind of occupation, kind of like lawyers, you know, you have two lawyers going at it to try to get the truth and you hope there's a kernel in there, of course, you know, $450 an hour to find it out. For scientists, you know, we don't get paid, right, as much as lawyers or doctors or whatever, and I'm not going to make an argument here or there. But what we do rely on very much so is funding for our research. And that's very hard to come by nowadays.

And in science, you're almost always only as good as your last experiment, your last theory, or last paper, kind of like, you know, movies. You're only as good as your last movie. Most actors and actresses find that to be true. And so for me, when I was a young postdoc, which is the position that you inhabit, kind of an academic purgatory after graduate school, after getting my PhD at Brown, I moved to Stanford, we're close to where you are. And I started a postdoc with a hot shot young professor at Stanford, and I just couldn't deal with it. I didn't like working on someone else's projects. I wanted to come up with my own ideas. I've been trained to do that. And luckily, she fired me. I say that truthfully. she did fire me, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me moving out of there because she actually connected me to a man named Andrew Lang, who is a professor at California Institute of Technology, which is not a technical college. It's also known as Caltech. It's one of the preeminent schools for studying the hard sciences that has ever existed. And Andrew was a full professor there, and he was an incredible friend and a mentor and a father figure. I mean, he would literally

give me advice about dating and women and family matters. And he was there when my, you know, my own father passed away. He was a wonderful person, and he was incredibly charitable and gracious with his time. And he was the one more than any other person who believed in this idea for an experiment at the South Pole to journey back to the beginning of time that I ended up calling bicep. And because of his belief in it, and because of the backing and the pole that he had and his charisma, which is very rare trait for a scientist. You know, they say, how do you know if a scientist is extroverted? Have you ever heard this joke, Jordan? No, no. You can tell if a scientist is

extrovertive, he looks at your shoes when he's talking to you instead of his own. Instead of his own, yeah. Yeah. So Andrew, but he was like, what's that guy? John Hamm, you know, he was like one of these madmen actor, good looks, tall, extremely successful, happy family life, three kids. And he had it all, or so I thought. And it turned out that, you know, soon after deploying this instrument to the South Pole, he had gone to help deploy it, he ended up in January of 2010, so just about 10 years ago, he took his own life. And the way that he did it and the way that we found out about it in the community, it was such a gut punch that this man who was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize many times because of experiments that he had done prior to my joining his laboratory. And that was like joining, you know,

be like joining this franchise team and the franchise player takes his own life. And we'll never know exactly why he did that. I kind of had this ode to him in the book. He was like that guy also named Keating and it's the Dead Poet Society movie by Robin Williams. He was like a Robin Williams or somebody like that, charismatic, and yet he must have had these demons that he was dealing with. And dealing with that at the highest levels of science and being perhaps overlooked for awards that he deserved, by my estimation, everyone that I know, will never know for sure why he took his own life. But in an ironic sort of twist, his wife, Francis Arnold, she won the Nobel Prize last year. And this is eight years after he took his own life.

It's just so devastating when you look back on how many people, the outpouring of emotion, And I had wished that he had done, as Alfred Nobel had done, which is to leave, you know, what's what I call an ethical will, which is just so heart-wrenching that he's no longer here to celebrate in all the good things that have happened in my life and all the academics that he had produced. I want not to say sired, but he didn't. There is almost like a paternal relationship that he had with hundreds of scientists. And so it was truly devastating and to deal with that and to make matters worse, in 2019, I got the news that. that an economist had committed suicide, a man by the name of Whitesman. He left a note, and according to some of his friends, he said that he had believed that he would win the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics, but it was not to be. The prize went to two other people, and this was crushing to him. And, you know, we don't know for sure again why he committed suicide, but the Nobel Prize is held in such high esteem that it's almost, and this is part of my mission in the book, as I came through to write the book, I wanted to take the clothes off the

emperor or show that the emperor is naked, that this, you know, kind of sacrificing yourself. And again, I'm not ascribing motives to either two of these gentlemen, one of whom I knew well, why they committed suicide. We'll probably never know exactly why. But for me, if there are people out there that sort of have this affinity for accolades in any field, it could be Oscars, it could be the Nobel Prize, it could be Grams, it could be podcasts of the year, that you should not let these kind of external validation have any say unto your own perception of self-worth. And unfortunately, so often today it does. I get tons of emails from people that have read the book. I got an email from somebody in Pakistan last week. Some guy, a Muslim friend, is reading this New York Jews book, literally halfway around the

world and saying that he's experienced these problems as an academic in Pakistan. It's just phenomenal. And so if I can help one person really deal with this notion of what it means to liberate yourself from idols as I have in the form of the Nobel Prize, then I'll feel like it's been worth it. Tell us about this ethical will. This sounds like something that a lot of us should probably do at some point. Yeah, so when Alfred Nobel saw this obituary, this upstepperous obituary claiming to be his, he began to really reevaluate his life. Now, he was never married, despite certain urban legends about it, him being married,

but he had never been married. He never had children. And instead, what he ended up leaving for the world was the Nobel Prizes. And he did so with this kind of heterogeneous structure. In other words, he left money as part of the will, but he also had a differing component. This other side to it was that the Nobel Prize was to be awarded only to those persons who had conferred the greatest benefit to mankind. And you're a lawyer, and I know you've probably had, you know, wills and state law at some point in your law career. I don't know about you,

but if I wrote a will and then the will wasn't carried out, I would want to have somebody, you know, kind of prosecute against our on my behalf. And so I envision myself. in that role as sort of suing the executors who are the Nobel Prize Committee. And again, it's not about sour grapes. It's about this huge influence that the Nobel Prize casts over the world and not just the world of science, as I said. And people say, well, you didn't win it, so you can't criticize it. I'm like, yeah, you know, I didn't win the presidency either, so I guess I can't criticize the president. You know, it's not a prerequisite. In fact, if you only did that, no one would ever criticize Hollywood, Harvey Weinstein would still be held up, you know, with his Academy Awards and

and his credibility. But of course, you don't have to have won it. And in fact, you could have lost it. And in other words, to see it from the outside, I think is really important. And part of my ethical will is this book. And an ethical will has this dual purpose. It's to communicate to people, usually your children, but in my case, I feel like it's my academic children. I've had 16 graduate students over the years. And I do feel like their family to me. They're some of the closest people in my life. We share their highs and their lows together. And I feel like the ethical will that I wanted to leave to them is the meaning of why we do science. It can't just be that you do science for accolades, certainly. Everybody, you know, should agree to that. But it also shouldn't

be that you're isolated and that you're not sharing the wisdom that comes with your discovery. So I'll take a step back. Science, the word science means knowledge. It doesn't say anything about wisdom. And to me, that means you must get your wisdom outside of such scientific pursuits. And no more would I expect to, you know, Stephen Hawking wrote one of the greatest books in science ever written, a brief history of time, but there's nothing in there about the meaning of time or the meaning of life and how to spend your time. And I feel like you can only get that outside of the lab. You can have great relationships and so forth. So I give, you know, some examples that I've encountered and including one of whom you had on your show, Kobe Bryant. He wrote a book

called the Mamba mentality, which is not only about basketball. It's also about his mind and his courage and his will. That is invaluable to his kids. Imagine for second, Jordan, somebody comes to you completely legitimately and says, Jordan, I found this book. And it's written by your great, great, great grandmother living, I don't know, Eastern Europe somewhere probably or wherever. How much did you pay for that book? And it's her diary. It's kind of her treatise on how her life was experienced in the first person. You would, I hope you would pay a lot for that. I know I would. Let me just say it like that. And so you don't even have to do that if you leave a legacy in these forms. And luckily, there are many examples of that. Victor Frankel, who I know your listeners

would be familiar with. You know, he wrote this incredible book, a man's search for meaning, and it really is also a diary. I mean, he talks about his experiences in the concentration camps and how it was perceived by him and how he developed a whole new branch of thinking in psychology. He was a psychologist before and after the war. And Frank, who didn't survive the war, she left this diary. It's also an ethical will. And when you see things left in that format, it's for posterity. These are the things that matter. You know, there's a famous essay. It was actually inspired by a famous rabbi named Rabbi Soloveitchik, and he talked about different virtues. And you think about what you put on your resume versus what will be said about you at your funeral. So

eulogy virtues versus a resume virtues. And it's kind of the two sides to mankind. We have that side, where we have to work, we have to do things, got to go law school, and whatever our business may be. And then there are the things that matter much more than that. No one ever says at a funeral, well, he was really impressive because he went to Harvard or Brown or wherever. Nobody does that. It's very rare. And the Nobel Prize is sort of unique in that people will in their obituary cite that so-and-so was a Nobel Prize winner, or sometimes so-and-so lost the Nobel Prize and was denied it. And I think that's very interesting how people have melded these two virtues, the resume virtues, with the ethical virtues, with the eulogy virtues. And I urge people to spend at least a fraction

of the time that you spend on your resume thinking about your eulogy and what will be said about you. And you can do that in writing online. You can write it out by hand, put it somewhere safe, for your kids or for your future kids or whatever to have a recollection of what it was like for you to go through life up to this point what was it like as a kid what was it like in your greatest challenges how looking back through the lens of history which i talk a lot about in the book do you perceive your life's events unfolding if not according to some plan if that's too you know woo-woo for you at least that things unfolded in just such a way that it left the following lessons that you want to be remembered by as your eternal legacy and you know

God forbid it should be used before your time, but you can keep adding to it. And there's actually online tools we can probably put links to in the show notes of where you can do it and what questions to ask yourself so that you too can leave this legacy behind and continue to update it because it's not only a legacy for your kids. It's also a legacy to yourself. And it teaches you what matters most in your life. Now, we'll put some info in the worksheet here on how to do this because I think this is a worthy exercise for people to do. And I don't want to spend, you know, half the show with a how-to on doing the ethical will, but it makes sense. Do you think people need to be a certain age to do this?

Like, does it make sense to do it in your 20s and then again in your 30s, or should you just wait till you're 50? Because what if you get hit by a beer chart, you know? That's right. That's true. I can't say that it's ever a bad time. You know, like they say, the best time to plant a tree is five years ago, but the second best time is now.

You know, I'm glad I started doing like five-minute journal, which I think I found out about from your show a long time ago. Yeah, I do it every day. But it's not the same. It's not really the same as this document, because that's kind of like your day. and I love reading it from a few years ago, and I thank you for exposing me to that. But by the same token, this is a little bit different. This is kind of like your core values. There's some things that will never change, right? Your upbringing, where your parents came from. And it should be written in a way that somebody else could read it. And it's not like, here's where I give my money. I mean, that's for you and your lawyers to talk about. But it should be what are the ethical values that you want to communicate. Who were you? Have you ever sat down and had the honest conversation with yourself of what matters most to you? I think putting that down, it's certainly one. to do that as often as you feel like that has changed. I know it changed dramatically for me, and you can probably validate this as well after I had kids, after I got married. Big life events

should be the trigger or maybe do it every year on January 1st, something where there's a new beginning and you have a new chapter. You have a new vision of reality that has caused you to acquire that which science is not, which, as I said, is wisdom. And so when you have these wisdom moments, these wisdom breakthroughs, it's training you to then record those and how you have grown as a human being because no one's going to really care about the CV virtues, the resume virtues. I'm sorry to say, that's not how you're going to be remembered. Speaking of resume virtues, you and I talked pre-show about finding out what so-called idols we worship and then smashing those. Give us a little overview of that because a lot of people do

chase, I mean, of course, it's like cliche that people chase money and fame. We were just talking about that pre-show with all these sort of like Instagram or YouTuber type people, and for that matter, any celebrity, but people chase Nobel prizes, people chase making partner, people chase Oscars, people chase accolades about their frickin' podcast for some delusional reason. You know, how are those limiting us and what do we do with that? Or is that just a fact of life that's unavoidable? So is there a way that you can be desensitized? I think that there is. I think there's a way to basically deprogram yourself from worrying about so much how you are perceived. And I feel like the natural way to do that is to really not to live so much for the

appreciation of other people. Like I like to think, how would I impress myself? So my father has passed away. You know, my mother, thank goodness, is still very much alive and my brothers, etc. But there came upon a time when I felt like I was enough. Like I could be comfortable with who I was that I didn't have to go after these external accolades. And people don't really believe me when I say that. They're just like, as I said, you know, you have sour grapes, you that's the only reason you wrote this. If you would want it, you would have gladly accepted it. I can honestly say that I wouldn't, that I mean, would I accept it, would I not? But that I do not worship it anymore. I came to see it as sort of, there's a lesson in the Old Testament. Again,

I'm not going to get too biblical on people. I don't think that's super interesting. But there's a famous incident of the golden calf where, you know, Moses goes up on the mountain, doesn't come down you know, it's a couple hours late. And literally, the Jews start melting down gold and making an idol and then worshipping it. Like after seeing God, after being liberated from Egypt, all these good, you know, huge things, miracles. And I realized, I just thought that was kind of stupid. Like, aren't Jews supposed to be smart? Like, what's wrong with these guys? You know, like, how can they do that? But I realized, you know, in going back to it, especially when I had the occasion to have a visit from a Nobel Prize winner named Duncan Haldane. So I should also add the point that it's a little bit different than

just me losing the Nobel Prize myself. You can agree or disagree. But I was also asked to nominate the winners of the Nobel Prize, the year I was potentially could have been in the running to win it. So in other words, I was asked by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences to nominate the people that actually deserved it. So it would kind of be like me going, you know, in your show. Like, Jordan, I'd love to come on your show. Can you connect me to Rogan, please? You know, no offense, but I'd rather go, you know, it's like kind of insulting, humiliating, or whatever. But I actually took it upon myself to act very seriously and say, you know, how would I approach this as an executor of Alfred Nobel's will? And in so doing, I realized

what had happened to the Nobel Prize was really done in a way to sort of accentuate it as a modern-day idol for scientists, which is a little bit ironic because scientists are mostly atheists or agnostic, if they're anything. Very few of them are actually practicing religious adherents. And so this is sort of a kosher. It's sort of an acceptable thing to venerate. And you can almost not even read a book about science without hearing, I don't care if it's Richard Dawkins or Neil deGrasse Tyson. They talk about the Nobel. It'll just go into, come into play. Now, this is a prize, again, that's awarded by 400, mostly men in Sweden. And it's not like there's some law of physics that determines who should win the Nobel Prize. And I didn't know that until I knew it wasn't a law of physics, but I didn't know how narrow this was, how myopic the vision of the Nobel Prize is being carried out today and how different it has become from what Alfred Nobel left in his will. And I also want to say to you, like, there's a big, you know, it's called a mitzvah, it's a good thing to do. But one of the biggest things in my religion is to take care of somebody's wishes after they die. And the reason is it's something done completely altruistically.

You can never be repaid, right? The person's dead. You know, Homer Simpson once said, you know, like, I'll take care of your funeral if you take care of mine. Like, it doesn't work that way. And in this case, I felt like, well, what else could be done for this guy who wanted to do something very specific, give it to a single person from the preceding year who had the greatest benefit to mankind and how far we've strayed from that. So I realized at that point, it really wasn't worth worshiping anymore. And I also feel that that could be true of almost any accolade. Look, in any zero-sum game, which is a competition where only one person can win and then other or a team can win, like the World Series, I mean, you know, there's as many second place runners up of the World Series as

there are winners of the World Series and Oscars, et cetera. So is it really that bad to be second? No. In fact, the law of averages says that you will actually be more likely to not get into the promised land, not get to your personal goal because there's only one, right? So if there's only one winner, then the majority of people selected at random will be losers of that particular accolades. So why be upset about that? Instead, use it as an opportunity to grow and look for the idols in your field. And as I said, I'm curious how you felt when you won Apple's best podcast of 2018. But you didn't win in 2019, right? And how did that feel? Because you got better. Right. The show's a lot better now. Truthfully, I won most downloaded new show, so that was a different award because years ago,

having never won anything from Apple or never won any like real award for podcasting, at first I was like, oh, this kind of sucks. Like my show's really good. At least I think so and so does the audience. What's the deal? And then I started asking about how these awards are given because I was curious. It was like maybe I can sort of tailor what I'm doing to the people giving the awards. But what I found was that, you know, after putting a few whiskeys and a few of the right people, that, A lot of these awards, especially stuff that's from these major platforms, there's like one guy who just, he gets an email and he's like, hey, our best of 2019 is due. And the guy's like, oh, crap, what have I been listening to in the past couple weeks?

Oh, this is good. That's good. Oh, let me look at the most downloaded. Oh, yeah, that one's pretty good too. Oh, this guy's hilarious. And I loved Lord of the Rings. Okay, I'm done. Let's go eat lunch.

Like, there's not an academy. There's not this selection process. And even in some of the awards where there is an academy, a lot of the people in the are people who've been doing XYZ for a long time, and they're the only ones that get to vote. So it's more a measure of, am I friends with these seven guys who won a podcast award in the last seven years, and are they going to vote me in?

And I am friends with a lot of those guys, so I asked some of those guys about it, and they were like, dude, you don't need our award. You know, you could add all our shows together and they don't equal the size of yours. Like, this is an award for kind of hobbyists. And they're like, anyway, I love your show. I listen to it all the time.

And that for me made me feel really good, because I realized, wait a minute, do I care what seven randos think or 12? Or do I care what like the two or 400? Or 400. There are hundreds of thousands of people listening to this show and they email me all the time. Why the hell would I chase some people that may or may not listen that, you know, I drink beer with twice a year when I go to podcasting events that are perfectly nice people? I don't really care. It doesn't do anything.

It doesn't do anything for my business. And when I got Best of 2018 or Most Downloaded New Show, I realized, well, that's cool. but the audience did that for me. So it doesn't really matter. So when I didn't win most downloaded new show in 2019 because you literally can't because it's not a new show anymore, I realized not only does this not matter,

but the other categories in which I can win are even less relevant than most downloaded new show. So it matters even less. And I think if someone said, hey, we chose you as our favorite podcast for this company, I would say, is it going to get more people listening to the show?

and in 99% of cases, it is not going to do that. Now, look, if Spotify says, we're going to feature you on the front page for a month because we chose your show, that could be game-changing for the show, just as a Nobel Prize could probably be game-changing for you getting funding for whatever later on.

But real talk, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter for me, I should say. But I had to go through that process slowly because it was like, well, that's a bunch of crap. Why don't I ever win anything? And then I realized, do I care? Did I even know this existed before I won it last time? No.

In which case, does it really matter to the majority of people? No. I don't really care that much about it if it's not going to do anything for the business. And I'm not going, oh, it's an old boys network, screw it. It's all rigged. I don't have sour grapes about it at all. And when other people win the awards, it's liberating to be genuinely happy for them, especially if they're really happy about it.

I've got a buddy who runs a show called Darknet Diaries, and he's like just killing it. It shows wildfire. He's grown to like the size of our show. almost in like the last like two years and he tells stories about hacking and stuff and it's just he just caught fire caught lightning in a bottle and it's a good show i'm not pissed off about it which surprised even me so i guess that's kind of where we're at with it but it's a nice place to be but it doesn't happen overnight yeah exactly and and would you believe the same exact thing everything you said could be said replace podcast with the Nobel Prize it's literally assigned by one single

small Scandinavian country, and it's taken on this outsized importance. And the reason for that is because I believe in contended in the book, people love to worship things. They love to have these, you know, like in Jack Nicholson says in a few good men, you know, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. Like in order to settle an argument, all you have to say is a Nobel Prize laureate said, the following, et cetera, and that settles things. Now, it's a little less cut and dry in the case of entertainment, et cetera. Albert Einstein, how many Nobel prizes do you think he won? He won one. And legitimately, he could have won seven or eight. I mean, just according to, like, how many brilliant discoveries and creations he had.

Now, why didn't he? Because there's some unwritten forces and things that are non-scientific at work. In fact, there's only one human being in the history of the planet that won more than one Nobel Prize in physics. And that's for this obscure kind of things in the physics of what are called semiconductors and superconductors. Now, should he be exceptionally proud? I mean, you look at Oscars. I think Rita Hayworth won, like, four Oscars or whatever. But like these are the selected, at least by this one governing body completely subjectively, as the greatest intellects of the world.

And yet they only win one or they don't win again. I was wondering if you ever run into Leonardo DiCaprio at any party and be like, hey, man, you've gotten snubbed more than me. Like, that's kind of cool. Good for you. Because didn't he not win an Oscar for, I don't know, forever and then finally got one like last year? That's right. Yeah. But, you know, the same thing applies to the Oscars, you know, except the Oscars have more.

more kind of benefit to people that don't win. In fact, if you're nominated for the Nobel Prize, no one will ever know who I nominated for 50 years. No one will ever know who else in the might have nominated me for 50 years. It's kept sealed longer than the JFK assassination files are kept secret. Now, why is that? Because they're a monopoly, like the Oscars. I mean, there are other awards. There are other things. I mean, Apple's a pretty big thing for podcasters. You know, maybe there's one. There's a duopoly or whatever. But the Nobel Prize is the most closely guarded, you know, privately held monopoly in the world because that's their raison. to Etra is to really have this outsized, in my opinion, kind of reason for people to worship and look

up to scientists. Now, are there good aspects of that? Yeah, you hope that science is used accrues to the benefit of mankind. But in a lot of cases, I think it does fill this vacuum that is much inherent in human beings today as it was 3,000 years ago. The idea to worship something, as I say, you know, we don't worship this statue of ball, but we do worship Nobel. Can you nominate anyone for a Nobel Prize? So you cannot. You have to be invited, or there's an old boys network and to very, very minor extent, old girls. There's only three women in 118 years that I've won the Nobel Prize in physics, if you can believe that. I can definitely believe that, yes. So I cover these slights and one of them who was eligible, so one of them who won

it was one of the founders of my university's physics department, Maria Mayer. And when she won, the headline in the local San Diego newspaper said, La Jolla Housewife wins Nobel Prize. Oh my gosh. And last year, as I said, my late colleague, Andrew Lang, my men, mentor, his wife when she won it, the front page of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory ran a headline. Caltech mom wins Nobel Prize. A son is a JPL flight tech. They didn't even mention her name in the headline. That's insane. That's like saying the wife of the late wins Nobel Prize. Right, Angela Merkel. She's the husband of Merkel, whatever. Yeah, Johnny Merkel. Well, probably not. Probably more like York Merkel, but you know, whatever. That to me is, I mean, that's part for the course.

We don't have to go down that road. I don't think that's going to surprise anyone that there's only been three women that's one in 118 years. I don't think it's going to, it's unlikely to even out anytime soon. So putting it on a pedestal, I think, is a dangerous game. And I do hope that, you know, one outcome of the book is people will check their own biases for what they themselves are slaving to. And yeah, this cliche is money, of course. It's a little bit less tangible. Because, you know, it's always good to make more money, right? But then what are you costing? Like, we were talking before the show about, you know, if you have to travel somewhere, I mean, you're actually taking that from your kid, right? If you're going somewhere, if it was

phrased another way to you, Jordan, how much do I have to pay you to get away from your daughter? Like, you would be like, you have to pay me a lot of freaking money. Yeah. And yet we sell ourselves, we prostitute ourselves to much, much lower remuneration than even just simple cash, right? Because time is not fungible. You can't get it back. And that's the basis of the ethical will. And that's the basis of the realization that I come to in this memoir, losing the Nobel Prize. No, it's true. It's peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless.

My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. True, a lot of my, well, of course, all my interviews are remote now,

and I fly sometimes to do it. but before I was trying to do every interview in person. And then when we had Jaden, who is my son, for those of you who have been under, oh, it's fine. It's a unisex name. I gave them the same problem that I have as a Jordan. That's right. But now you're right.

It's phrased differently. Now I'm really enjoying, hey, I don't have to fly to, like, a suburb of Chicago to interview a random scientist. They don't really care. And we can do this via squadcast.fm, for those of you that are wondering would I use to record remotely. And I've got video and I can see everybody. And, you know, it's fine.

And yes, it's a bummer because we can't go and grab a bite to eat afterwards, but you know what? I didn't have to spend a day on an airplane, asleep at a hotel, hire a video crew, miss all this time with my family and spend all that money in order to get what, like a wide shot of us in the same room? Who cares, man, you know? Over a dill pickle, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. A freaking lunch at the Carnegie Deli that got cold while we were talking. Like, it just doesn't even make any sense. I'd love to hear what you think about reframing these losses or these life events, you know, getting

fired losing the Nobel Prize that once appeared disastrous but later led to great happiness. We talked about this beforehand and this is something that came out of this mess for you and I know certainly came out of me having to restart my show over. It's funny because I'll get email where people going, it sounds like sour grapes or you say it's the best thing that ever happened to you. And I'm like, ah, I see a man who has never experienced true hardship and turned it around because all the emails that are in my inbox from other people that have been through some ish, they're like, you get it now, Jordan, I'm proud of you. And then other people who've kind of never been through it

are like, oh, it sounds like you're just sort of like making up some BS about how it's fine now. But it really was the best thing that ever could have happened to me. And it sucked at the time. And I've done episodes on uncertainty and things like that. But I look at it now and I'm like, I don't have ties with negative people. I don't have to deal with the fallout from that stuff anymore. I can do whatever I want from the show.

I'm not in the business of selling live events, which, I mean, now especially, is a death sentence to your business. So I wasn't going to be able to leave on my own. So I had to get quote unquote fired, even though I, you know, technically, voluntarily left the company. Yeah. But like you went through this as well and now you realize, oh, I don't have attachment to this stuff. That's more liberating than you would have gotten had you won, honestly. Yeah.

It must be like coming out of the closet must feel to our LGBT friends. Exactly. I always think that there is no success that comes without having failed. I mean, how many kids go from Little League, you know, winning every single game up until the World Series. None. None have ever done that in history, right? Never lost a game. I mean, it's impossible. Don't forget. If you strike out, you know, six times out of ten and you get a hit, four times out of ten, you're like one of the best hitters who ever lived in baseball, and there's other analogies. That's the only sport I know, really. But because it has the most

physics in it. But the truth is, no success comes without having failed. And if you let failure kind of crush you, instead of seeing it as sort of a vitamin and a growth hormone, for intellectual growth, for emotional growth, and for wisdom. There is no wisdom that you can acquire. If you always win, I often feel this way. My kids are losing at some sport. I'd almost rather them that they lose. At first, I don't want them to lose something really painful,

but losing a game and getting disappointed and having to work it out and hash it out with their teammates, as we had to do, it led to the greatest growth. And there are some scientists who are comfortable with that and move on their way, and there are some that don't. But for me, it was the cultivation of humility that I think made me into a better person, and that's why I wouldn't trade it. I got fired from Stanford.

It's one of the best, if not the best, you know, place to study physics, to do physics. I got fired. I mean, canned. I'd never been fired from anything. I was, you know, like the academic golden boy. And here I was, my first real job out of graduate school. And it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I never would have met my mentor, Andrew Lang.

I never would have been taken under his wing. I would have never have the opportunity to create this experiment called Bicep. I would never have gotten the job that I have at UC San Diego. I never would have met my wife and I would never would have had my kids. I mean, yes, some people will say, oh, you would have met some other woman and had some other life and whatever. Yes, that's true, perhaps, but the counterfactual, it's impossible to know that. And I know you were talking about you were in Hollywood.

And Hollywood, you know, you felt like it sucked and there are all these fakers and whatever. But look, you met your wife and then you had your son. There's a famous quote from Soron Kirkagard that I end the book with. The book is about astronomy. And astronomy is interesting in that. It's the only science that we can't do an experiment on. You know, my friends in the biology department, they can take a frog or a fruit fly or something, you know, irradiate the fruit fly, you know, and then see how it behaves compared to some

control subject. That's the basis of the scientific method. Well, try going to, you know, Saturn and changing the temperature of the rings and seeing what that does to the surface of the planet. You know, you can't do an experiment in astronomy. You have to wait for stuff to come to you. We have to be patient as astronomers. The only things we get are some meteorites, and I'd love to give away some meteorites to

your listeners at some point, or waves of light and heat that originated, perhaps, in my case, from the origin of the universe itself, which itself is concomitant with the origin of time. I mean, have you ever thought about the origin of time? How does time progress before there is a notion, an entity called time? And I get paid to do that. I wouldn't have if I didn't suffer these failures. So look back and count your blessings, and that, in turn, will develop both humility and an appreciation. And the quote from Kirkagard I didn't get to is appropriate for scientists

because our astronomers in particular. He said, life can only be lived going forward, but it can only be understood looking backwards. And that's the theme of the ethical will. You're looking back, and it doesn't have to be the very end of your life like Alfred Nobel. It can be right now. It should be right now. Don't delay. Don't tarry. Thank God, Kobe wrote his book before he died. And thank God, Victor Frankel and Anne Frank and others wrote their books. Do it yourself too. And that will help you see that this thing, if you don't believe in a grand plan for your life, that's totally fine, but see how your life has blessed you to be at the state of wisdom, integrity, and knowledge that you have at this very moment. We'll throw a lot of how to in the worksheets as well about how to learn

from your losses, because if you don't learn from losses, you're a loser, as you phrased it in the book, which I really love. And if you do learn lessons from survivorship, even if what you're quote-unquote surviving is the loss of the Nobel Prize, you develop that humility instead of humiliation, as you said, which I think is brilliantly put. The recipe for that will be in the worksheets. But I know in the last couple of minutes here, tell us about these meteorites that you're given out. They look really cool, actually. Yeah, so I got to become friends with Ryan Holiday, at least, you know, friends on the internet. And he has this wonderful treatise on stoicism, many, many books on it. But one thing he has on his website are these coins, these kind of coins you

can buy. And they say, memory morti, which means in Latin, remember you're going to die. It's a little little depressing, but in actuality, the very dust that bedeviled our experiments hope to glimpse the origin of time itself, that was obscured by these tiny little fragments that themselves were created in the bowels of exploding suns that lived billions of years ago in our local neighborhood in the galaxy. And they lived out their life, they died, and they produced a lot of metals and other elements, including iron. And thank goodness they did for two reasons. One, the core of the earth is made of iron. So without this star giving its life in a fiery supernova explosion 4.5 billion years ago, we wouldn't have a planet, a rocky planet to live upon. And many astronomers

think that's a prerequisite for life. We won't get into that. The other thing is that some of the iron percolates to the crust of the surface of the earth and eventually made its way into food, that eventually made its way into your mother, into our bloodstream, and eventually made its way into your bloodstream in the placenta. And so you actually have flowing through your veins, star dust. And Carl Sagan put it poetically, we are star dust. And that golden star dust that exists within our blood is also similar to meteorites. And so I'd like people to kind of get in touch and subscribe to my podcast, my YouTube channel, my Twitter, et cetera. And I'm going to give away 10 fragments of the 4.3 billion-year-old supernova that created the Earth and the hemoglobin,

iron in the hemoglobin molecule in your blood, to 10 of your listeners. Unfortunately, I can only send it out in the USA. We're not allowed to ship elsewhere. You can't export media rights? No, actually, UCSD will not allow me to export it out of the country. Yes, I can send it to Alaska. Why? They want to see like material safety data sheets and so forth. I probably, you know, could go to that trouble, but that plus the postage would

probably bankrupt me. I'm just a state employee after all, Georgia. Fair enough. Fair enough. What do people have to do to get these space rocks? So if you would go to my website, which is Brian Keating.com, you'll be asked to sign up for my mailing list. In the list, you'll be asked to leave your name, so please put your first name.

And then as your last name, put Harbinger. So I'll know it came from Jordan, not that you have such a huge family. And then when you sign up for that on my website, also sign up for my YouTube channel, which is Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube. And then just take a screen capture of that, send it to me through the website, through the Brian Keating.com mailing list, and you'll be entered into a drawing to win 10 of these space rocks that fell to Earth tens of thousands of years ago that came from these stars that blew up billions of years ago and have this special kinship between the blood

in our veins and the life of the cosmos. So normally I don't allow people to do anything like this on the show, but I like you and let's be honest, space rocks are pretty freaking cool, so I'm making an exception. Most people are like, I'll send my free PDF and I'm like, let me stop you right there. I'm deleting that and shut your face. But yeah, space rocks winning. Brian, thank you so much, man. I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you, Jordan. Have a great day. life drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly big board buck slot machine by aristocrat gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamava's history. Club Serrano members can earn daily

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