Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Replay: University of Adversity with Brian Keating and Lance Essihos (#333)

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

Professor Brian Keating tells listeners: “If you go through life and you have this expectation that you are going to have the wind at your back. You are going to be much more disappointed than if you expect there to be adversity, headwinds, friction, and flux. Then you overcome it or maybe it is not even there.” How to engage passion in aspiring astronomers The emotion behind winning a Nobel Prize Coping with rejection and humiliation The importance of meditation Finding meaning in the unknown Lance W Essihos is the host of the University of Adversity Podcast. He created this podcast to help people learn from stories of adversity, which has ranked Top 50 on iTunes Worldwide and the Top #5 in Entrepreneur Magazine’s 20 Podcasts That Will Help You Grow in 2020 List. https://lanceessihos.com/ Please join my mailing list 👉 briankeating.com/list for your chance to win a real meteorite 💥! Join me and ⁦Lawrence Krauss for an Onstage Dialogue ⁦at the San Diego Air & Space Museum Tuesday, Oct 17, 2023 at 7:00 PM: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/live-onstage-dialogue-brian-keating-lawrence-m-krauss-tickets-699430514497 Support The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast by supporting our sponsors: Post your free listing at LinkedIn Jobs https://www.linkedin.com/impossible Thanks HelloFresh! Go to https://www.hellofresh.com/impossible and use code 50impossible for 50% off plus free shipping! As an Into The Impossible listener, you can get 15% off a MASTERCLASS annual membership masterclass.com/impossible 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  Become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I knew it was a story that needed to be told. It was such an exceptional thing where millions of people found out about it. Millions of people were talking about it. It was on CNN, NBC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, front pages. And then it was gone. And people don't really realize that, you know, maybe a quarter of everything that they read scientifically is wrong. You know, it's just the way science is. And even if it's right, it might be wrong eventually in the sense that, you know,

Isaac Newton came up with the theory of gravity and calculus, et cetera, that a lot. allowed basically the equations that govern how rockets go from Earth to the moon, more or less. But he was disproven by Einstein. It doesn't mean Newton was wrong. It just means Einstein had a more complete theory. So our job of scientists is to make our current theories and ideas out of date in our lifetimes, hopefully. And that's the process of being wrong, and that a scientist needs to comfort herself or himself in at all times. And you always checking your motivation.

Why am I doing this? Am I doing this for petty humanistic reasons of just wanting fame and fortune as a scientist? Am I really doing it for the right reason? Welcome to this replay edition of Into the Impossible, featuring your host, Brian Keating on The University of Adversity, hosted by Lance Esseos. In this interview, your host, Brian, discusses his book, losing the Nobel Prize. Professor Keating reveals how he reconciles science with his personal beliefs, about God and religion and his own approach to overcoming adversity.

If you love science and thinking about big questions, please keep into the impossible in your feeds by subscribing and following. Help us grow by paying it forward with a share to curious friends. Jump over to our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating, that's DR. Brian Keating, and subscribe there too. Let us know what you think of the show in the form of a review. Professor Keating reads them all, loves hearing from you. And now, your host, Brian Keating, being interviewed on the University of

Adversity by Lance Esseos, talking about his book, losing the Nobel Prize. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the five-bay doors, please, help. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of University of Diversity. I'm your host, Lance Esios. My next guest is an astrophysicist and a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, where he leads the AX Center for Experimental Cosmology. He is also a renowned public speaker, inventor, and bestselling author of losing the Nobel Prize, which is a story of cosmology, ambition, and the perils of science's highest honor. Now, there's not every day I get to speak to an astrophysicist and somebody who's been through an incredible amount in his life.

and I'm just super excited to highlight that even the smartest, most educated people still go through adversity and are able to show how they overcome it. So I'm really excited to dive into this. Brian Keating, welcome to the show, man. Thanks, Lance. It's a pleasure to be back on another university camp that's not my own. Yeah, it's awesome. I heard about your story and everything. And like we talked about before we went on, I listened to yours and Jeremy Slate's podcast,

and he connected us, which I'm super grateful for. I can't wait to dive into all that, but maybe let's just first take us back, take us on kind of tell us about your story, how you grew up and, you know, filling the gaps of how you got to where you are today. Yeah, I kind of, I like talking about my own Big Bang, you know, where I came from, the origin of my universe. And it really began, you know, in terms of what my career ended up being, I grew up in kind of, you know, lower middle class, Long Island, New York, and then moved up to Westchester County in my, when I was about seven or eight. And for a few years, I was just, you know, an average kid, normal kid.

And then around age 12 or so, I got bitten by the astronomy bug of all things. When all my other friends, you know, kind of more into sports and everything like that, I found myself more attracted to science and reading and learning and just kind of tapping into that wealth of knowledge that has come before all of us, right? me, Isaac Newton said he's seen so much farther than other people because he stood on the shoulders of giants. And for me, I got to stand on his shoulders and that of my other hero, which is a scientist by the name of Galileo. And I got to know Galileo after unwittingly rediscovering the amazing astronomical phenomena that he had witnessed in the 1609, 1610

timeframe back in northern Italy. And that was to look at the moon, to look at the rings of Saturn, and to look at the moons of Jupiter even through a tiny little telescope, just a couple inches across, a couple feet long. And that really kind of nucleated this love affair with the night sky, which I never thought would be a profitable career, not that it's all that profitable being a university, a state university employee, I have to say. But, you know, I do this job for free, as I always say,

but just don't tell Gavin Newsom, my new boss here in California. So, yeah, really, the bug bit when I was about 12 or 13 got a telescope and the adventure began. And like I said, I didn't think I could be an astronomer any more than you might think you could be a wizard, you know, just because you read a Harry Potter book. And no one would really pay you to be a wizard because you do it for free. And I feel the same way about astronomy. So it wasn't, you know, it's not the most lucrative profession, of course, but you get to meet some of the most brilliant, interesting, accomplished people in the world. and your job is basically to increase human knowledge and leave the planet a better place than when you found it.

Yeah, and I love to touch on that because as kids growing up, you know, we have this fascination with the stars and space and all this stuff. And, you know, some of us want to be astronauts, you know, but then in school we get told, oh, that's, that's, I don't know, why did we stop? Like, what was the reason why more of us didn't, right? Because it's such a fascinating thing, but it seems so impossible. Yeah, exactly. I mean, for me, those were twin passions I had. I grew up knowing it was around the time the first space shuttle was being launched in 1981 or so. And I was, you know, fourth, fifth grade when I started to learn about astronomy and that space shuttle was so cool, so fascinating. And I thought, well, I have two chances to maximize my probability of being an astronaut. One is to become a scientist and astronomer and the other is to become a pilot. And I actually realized both those dreams, you know, in my life of being a professional. astronomer and being a commercially rated pilot. And I think for me, it really came down to

kind of the odds and feeling like at the time of the astronaut program of my youth is very different though in the way it is now, where there isn't really a manned spaceflight program. And we're trying to rebuild that in America. So, you know, it's pretty expensive as Elon Musk is figuring out. And it's, you know, he almost went bankrupt at least once in this pursuit. And Who knows, I wish them well, but it's a very perilous endeavor to try to get a human being safely to space. I think the reason for that is a pretty simple one is that human beings, they get attached to other human beings. And when you see the loss of life, it does one or two things. Either it makes you cancel the program altogether, or it makes you build in risk tolerance that is basically completely impractical.

So to tolerate zero fatalities basically makes the space program almost. unfeasible and that's why it's just got exponentially expensive and difficult so humans you know they don't want to see this teacher that they came to fall in love with blow up and die and national TV and I remember when that happened in 1986 I was there in middle school or you know just starting high school at the time and that left a huge indelible impression upon me that it was risky but truth is if you go back to the early 1900s right after the Wright brothers you know and after the invention of the automobile, a lot of people died. And it just, we didn't have Twitter and, you know, YouTube and everything, like, televised this national tragedy. So I hope things turn around. I personally,

you know, I don't want to be the first customer on Richard Branson's Virgin Space Flight, commercial spaceflight. I might be the 100,000th, but that's okay because, you know, it's not, if you're not first, it doesn't mean all is lost. So, yeah, no, for sure. But how, how different is it now? Because this fascinates me. How different is it now with the technology we have at teaching these students as like, let's say, 15, 20 years ago where people can just Google or whatever? Like, how can you, how do you get across to these young minds and how do you keep them interested and how is technology affected that? Yeah, for me, it's really clipping, you know, kind of the bugs that they already have. So I got a bunch of kids.

and when I noticed that one's interested in, you know, one's interested in like volcanoes or another one's interested in the dinosaurs. And if you can think about ways to engage the latent passion that the kid already has, people cry about, oh, STEM, you know, people aren't getting into science, technology, engineering, and math, and it's so bad for our nation. And that's true, but the solution is it's not like a mystery of how to get kids engaged. I mean, look at any kid or when you were a kid and you built the model or you solved the Rubik's Cube or did whatever, you get a little taste of that thrill of that excitement. And that's

what science is. It's solving puzzles. It's not like every puzzle has to be the cure for cancer. And I think if you do that, it's kind of like magical thinking that, you know, it's just so impossible that you'll just give up. It's a fallacy. But if you say, well, science is really about a whole bunch of little puzzles. It's not about getting the whole crossword puzzle right, you know, and doing it in a fountain pen in one 10-minute block. But it's more like getting one clue or getting one word and getting it so that you are contributing to this chain of knowledge that goes back long before you were born and God willing will continue long into the future. Right. Yeah. It's such an interesting, such an interesting area that we,

I mean, there's so much out there to learn. And I just, I can't even fathom it. Like, it's unbelievable. So, okay, a lot of listeners have heard the word Nobel Prize, including myself. I'll admit, I heard it, I know, like over and over, but I didn't really understand what it was. Can you, for the people that don't really know, can you kind of elaborate on what it is and maybe what happened with you and how that affected your journey? Yeah. So, I mean, you know, in terms of the challenges and stresses I face as a kid, my parents are divorced, which is not super uncommon for a kid born in the 70s. growing up in the 80s, but my father was a scientist. He was a mathematician, physicist, type person. And I, you know, kind of wanted to throughout my life really, you know, do him one better. And it was hard because he was such a brilliant scientist and was so able and capable in many ways that I would,

it was inevitable that I might fall short and just living up to his legacy. But I knew that, you know, he never won a Nobel Prize. And I knew that if I did win a Nobel Prize, it would kind of be the ultimate demonstration and kind of ultimate in winning his affection or accolades, if you will. And that's kind of a small-minded way to look at it, but I'm just being honest, that's the way I was. And for a scientist, the Nobel Prize is kind of like the Super Bowl, the Olympics, and the Oscars all wrapped up into one. It's so far in a way, you know, there's many different levels of football or the Olympics or sports or movies give out tons and billions of awards every year. There's only one Nobel Prize. There's nothing remotely close to it in terms of the prestige and the effect that it has on scientists, but also on science itself.

So you notice that sometimes you get like a drama or type of Academy Award and just like year after year, the same types of movies like exposés or, you know, things about, well, this is like a forbidden love between, you know, it's formerly frowned upon in society or racial issues. And those movies will win again and again. the same thing happened in science. So if something wins a Nobel Prize, some discovery in astronomy or in physics wins a Nobel Prize, there'll be a lot of attention paid to that field that wasn't being paid before. It is the ultimate award in that it's only been given out 200 to 250 people in the entire world history in my field, fewer than 250 people. And currently, because most people who win it are so old by the time they win it, which was not what the original intention of the prize was, but nevertheless they win it in their 80s, that so few of them are alive, there's

actually more people that go into space every few years than are living Nobel Prize winners and physics. So what it is, is it was a prize endowed by Alfred Nobel, who's a Swedish inventor who created dynamite, so the actual explosive that is used around the world. And he wanted to give away a vast amount of his money and perhaps all of his money and he never had any children or he never had a spouse or lovers that we know about. So the prize was basically his last heir, his final heir, and he wrote a will by hand in clandestine fashion not too long after reading his own obituary. So imagine, you know, like I'm sure I've got some enemies out there and, you know, people, but, you know, if I ever read an obituary, Brian Keating, you know, the biggest

jerk in the world is dead, you know, and it was like a set. And it was like, a set. celebratory obituary, and of course he's reading it. So, you know, he must have thought to himself it's slightly exaggerated, right? You know, like Mark Twain used to say. But in reality, what happened was it was his older brother Ludwig who had died in Paris in 1888, but the Parisians thought it was Alfred. And they attributed him to the greatest, basically, mass murdering, war criminal who had ever lived. And that was because Italy, where he was living at the time in France were mortal enemies back in the late 1800s.

We think of them as really friendly, but, you know, basically Europe has been at war almost continually until this century. So Alfred wrote down this will after seeing what happened. He was kind of doing what like Ebenezer Scrooge got the chance to do, which is re-evaluate what the world really thought of him based upon an incorrect report of his demise. So it was a gift. It actually turned out to be a great gift to him. And in return, he endowed a prize that would be given out every year to a single person who had created the most beneficial work of science and chemistry in physics, in medicine, or had created the most peace on earth and fraternity amongst nations, as he said, and later 100 years almost after he died, they added a sixth prize, which is in medicine.

And the other prize that was out there is for literature, sorry, in economics. And the other prize that they have that he endowed was for literature. And these are great prizes given out every year. Huge, it's basically Sweden's biggest national holiday. People, you know, would die for this award and some have gone to jail for this award as a certain type of scandal going on right now in the Nobel Academy of Literature. And so it's taken on a life of its own. And it's really more from what he wanted.

He really wanted to, like, encourage scientists to make inventions as he was an inventor himself. and he want to give them money for doing so. And nowadays, we really don't have anything like it. And so it's really taken on a huge influence, both on the psyche of scientists like myself, who in some greedy fashion were really aspiring to win it and also do good science along the way. But knowing that the most tangible award,

you learn something for the first time, you figure out how the Big Bang happened in my case, that's really satisfying, but it doesn't come with a million dollar check. It doesn't come with a solid gold medal. It doesn't come with the kind of intellectual FU capital that comes along with the Nobel Prize. And so many, many people, many universities aspire to have their faculty and staff win this most prestigious award on Earth. Yeah.

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When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for this day. That's huge. And I mean, that's like you're doing like anything in life, right? In sports, in anything, you want to go for the best, the best trophy. Right? So when you went for that, And because a lot of people, what happened, if you had the chance and you lost it, a lot of people would, that would affect them and they'd crumble, right? Yeah. But you were able to go on to write a book about it. And obviously a lot of positive things came out of that failure, right?

Out of that. So maybe just elaborate on, you know, what you were thinking when it first happened. Like, oh, shit, like what's happened here? And then what actually evolved from that? Yeah, so what had happened was back, you know, I wanted to win a Nobel Prize, as I said, basically at any price. So I'd racked my brains really to find, to think of an idea that, if successful, would win a Nobel Prize. And some collaborators ended up coming up with an idea for an experiment, which we called Bicep, which is an acronym for background imaging of cosmic

extragalactic polarization. It's a mouthful. But anyway, it was because we were looking for a type of light signal that would be twisted and curled. I thought it was cute that the bicep does curls at the gym, so I'm told, you know, I don't go to the gym much, but nevertheless that this experiment could actually look back to the very beginning of time to see the oldest light in the universe and how it may have been perturbed in the first trillionth of a trillionth, of a second after the beginning of time itself.

So it would really be the earliest snapshot of reality of the universe that could ever possibly be taken. And I designed an experiment to do that. It had to be taken down, not based in San Diego where I live, but it had to be taken down to the very bottom of the planet, to the South Pole Antarctica, for technical reasons. Antarctica, and in particular, the South Pole, the middle of the continent of Antarctica,

is one of the premier sites on Earth to do astronomy of this kind, which is looking for heat left over from the Big Bang. And that was extremely remote, very difficult to get there, very foreboding thing to think about getting to. And planning the expedition that took our team and the instrument itself was basically almost as hard as building the instrument itself, which, by the way, had to operate at a temperature of minus 454 degrees Fahrenheit for years at a time without human intervention more, you know, on a daily basis. And so this is just an incredibly strenuous endeavor at the boundaries of the human. in capacity. And really, the success of it was hinging upon young people that are graduate students, getting their PhDs, working for, in some cases, the better part of a decade, on a single task

and a single project to reveal, in this case, the first snapshot of creation. We were ultimately successful, or so we thought. We captured an image that was broadcast live, the press conference that we had at Harvard University. And along the way, I had been written out of the leadership of the project as I described for reasons that I am very, you know, kind of mixed feelings about in the sense that it was a bittersweet thing to have created this experiment, which produced results that everybody agreed were Nobel worthy and perhaps in some opinions the greatest discovery of all time, but then having been left out of it when the time came to claim credit for it. So, you know, I was very, at first, as you say, you know, it was kind of humiliated when, you know, I was left out of the

project. And that was really when I got the idea for the title of the book, losing the Nobel Prize. There are books about winning the Nobel Prize, but I joke, it's kind of like a book about, you know, winning strategies for bingo or the lottery or an Oscar. You know, I mean, one per, you always hear the Oscar award winner get up and say, say, you too can, I'm living proof that a schoolboy from Iowa can win it. No, you can't win. You can't win it. I'm like, most people aren't going to win Oscars. Most people aren't going to win Nobel Prizes. Most people are going to win number one podcast. And how do you deal with those adversities as I talk about in the book, that's what defines your humanity, your humility, and reacting to things in a humble way and that being humiliated is a core

tenet of what I think is the only kind of extra power that I might have over other people. And for me, it was quite satisfying to write a non-scientific book, you know, a book about a scientific topic. But really, it's a memoir about being a scientist, doing things, and wrestling with ideas of faith and kind of justice and meaning and reveal the people what science is really like. And it's not this gilded image of these guys sitting around, you know, stroking their beard, just wondering about the most esoteric things in academia and in life. It's real people working real jobs with real human desires, foibles, and failures. And that's what I want to chronicle. Yeah. And dealing with that, was there much backlash from people? Were they hard on you for that?

Did you get a lot of haters for that? there were a couple different camps of people that read the book. There were some that said, this is so spot on. This is exactly what it's like to be a scientist. So cut throat, people, my department chair, my research advisor, my funding agency, they all want me to win the Nobel prize at all costs. And then there are people that said, oh, well, you just have sour grapes because you wanted to win it and you didn't win it and now you're dumping on the Nobel Prize. And honestly, I can understand that criticism for somebody that hasn't read the book. But once you read the book, I think people will understand that I have had a liberation. Actually, I was giving a

public lecture this morning, and somebody came up to me afterwards, and after hearing the story of the book, and, you know, a greatly condensed version of it. And he asked me after the book signing, you know, well, how did it feel to be, to write the book? Was it cathartic? And I said, yeah, it was kind of like, you know, only guessing, but, you know, what like the liberation feeling it might come feel like to come out of the closet or, you know, were you actually laid? bear the golden gods, the false idols of science and of this pursuit that scientists have, that they don't admit it. And just like you wouldn't say to somebody, oh, you're liberated from being in the closet. You wouldn't say, well, you just have sour grapes about having been

in the closet. No, you'd say, well, congratulations. Now you've been liberated from those feelings. And now you're able to live your truth and who you are. That's the way it feels. And so there are haters, but they haven't, you know, most of them haven't read the book. Some of the, you know, people in the book that might not be cast in the actual light that they feel they may have deserved or deserved better. I haven't had people say I'm wrong and made factual errors and things like that, gratifyingly. And, you know, won a lot of awards. And the thing that I was pointing out to someone recently is if I write a paper, a scientific journal article, which is like the only source of income, you know, quote unquote, unquote, for a scientist is how many times they're,

work gets cited by other scientists. So our metric of success is not, it's not like downloads or likes or whatever. It's, you know, we don't make money on our research in the pure sciences. It's how many times someone has read my papers and cited it? And they're Keating proved this thing. And so a really good paper might get cited 50 times. That's like a well-known paper over its entire lifetime for like 30 years after it's out. I've got, you know, a couple of papers that have a couple hundred citation. This book is, you know, when read like 12,500 people, you know, in multiple formats. And I would never reach that. And also the other opportunity is speaking and doing videos for other people and really getting the message out there that I

think is a universal message. It's how you handle adversity, which appeals to you, I'm sure, and how you don't let a failure like this define who you are in the sense that the lesson that you should take away should be real armor to girding you in the future. And so that you don't make mistakes again, but you do things smarter and you always checking your motivation. Why am I doing this? Am I doing this for petty humanistic reasons of just wanting fame and fortune as a scientist? Am I really doing it for the right reason? And in that sense, it's been incredibly liberating to me to write the book. And I don't know if I'm going to write another book, but the bottom line is this book has opened up then allowed me to open up in a way I'd never really thought possible.

Yeah, I mean, you took a negative situation, you turned into a positive one, right? You took a lemon and made lemonade from it. And a lot of people don't choose to take that route, though. A lot of people will go in self-pity and self-sabotage instead of saying, all right, how am I going to roll with this? How am I going to grow with this thing, right? Right. I knew it was a story that needed to be told.

It was such an exceptional thing where millions of people found out about it. Millions of people were talking about it. It was on CNN, NBC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, front pages, and then it was gone. And people don't really realize that, you know, maybe a quarter of everything that they read scientifically is wrong. You know, it's just the way science is. And even if it's right, it might be wrong eventually in the sense that, you know, Isaac Newton came up with the theory of gravity and calculus, et cetera, that allowed basically the equations that govern how rockets go from Earth to the moon. or less. But he was disproven by Einstein. It doesn't mean Newton was wrong. It just means Einstein had a more complete theory. So our job as scientists is to make our current theories and

ideas at a date in our lifetimes, hopefully, and that's the process of being wrong, and that a scientist needs to comfort herself or himself in at all times. It's an unusual circumstance to always be wrong, you know, although my wife will tell me I'm used to it. That goes into my next perfect question here. So there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there, including myself, including a lot of people who are, and I'm excited to ask you this question, what your perspective is. You know, law of attraction, quantum physics, all of that, more of like probably the Einstein sort of theory versus maybe the scientific side of things.

Can you maybe elaborate on, you know, your area of science versus stuff like quantum physics and what your opinion on it is? Maybe. Well, yeah, I mean, I think for certain things, it's okay to have an opinion about something that's not a fact of nature. You know, you can't have your own opinion about the theory of evolution, even though it's called a theory, or you can't have a theory about quantum physics or feeling about it or opinion about it. You might disagree with some fundamental interpretation,

but that's not the same as saying, I believe the earth is flat as a disturbing number of people now do. It's crazy. Yeah, I know. Yeah, so now, and then things like The Secret, which, you know, I only have passing familiarity with the law of attraction, so-called. It's interesting. Science is very much like small business men and women have to confront. In other words, I have a payroll.

I have employees. I have travel. I have receivables, you know, in terms of, like, people shipping me stuff. I have deliverables. I have all these different systems that have to be engineered properly, perfectly, to make these $100 million projects work. And it's a fortune 10,000 business or something. It's not Amazon, but it's not nothing either.

You know, 200 people work on this project with me. So the thing that, you know, I could say, I think the one thing that I have learned from entrepreneurs is not things like the law of attraction, which I personally, you know, I think that is something you could not believe in rather than quantum physics. If you don't believe in it, you know,

you might not build a very successful. Transmitter for your cell phone tower or something like that, but if you don't believe in the secret, that's a little bit different. And my standard for things like that is, you know, does it pass kind of double-blind testing? Now they've done all sorts of other studies. And now they can say the same about prayer, meditation. So I think that what is there that is actually relevant, I think, could be confusing, you know, correlation with causality. In other words, if I meditate every day, which, I'm the world's worst meditator. I'm like checking Twitter as a meditator.

It's terrible. It's a real disaster. But the fact of me trying to do it, even imperfectly, I think is important. Now, if you ask a physicist, does anything happen when you meditate? Well, no, but there might be other benefits, wellness, you know, self-care and things like that, maybe relaxation, stress avoidance, sleep quality improvement. So those are things that are correlated with the practice, but maybe they're not actually caused by me achieving a state of zen and bliss or whatever. So I don't believe in the,

I think the law of attraction hasn't been, hasn't passed, maybe hasn't been subjected to certain tests. There are, you know, things out there where people then say, well, you know, the law of attraction is mysterious and quantum mechanics is mysterious. So they must be related because everything that's mysterious is the same manifestation of two different things. I don't believe that that's the case. So for me, as a practicing scientist, that doesn't, appeal to me, but on the other hand, the lessons, you know, where you can learn something from, and I think that scientists don't obey the laws of business and of entrepreneuriality at their peril. In other words, if I don't read about the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, you know,

right now I'm reading Simon Sinek, start with Y. Great, great book. And he talks about why. And I thought, well, we have such a great why as scientific. It's like somebody asked me today, like, why is Why do the universe be, I mean, what could be a more important why question? Now, he's asking in that book, well, why do people tattoo Harley Davidson tattoos on their art? Yeah, it's a little bit different, you know. But in our case, you do see this animating impulse that drives people, and it's a search for meaning, which Victor Frankel said is the greatest desire drive there is, and man's search for meaning after eating, even more than, you know, having relationships.

So I think it's important that we scientists take lessons from business community in the sense, that we need to pay heed to the great giants that came before us in the same way we pay heed to people like Einstein, Newton, and Galileo. Yeah, I find it interesting because I like hearing the different perspectives, right? I mean, that's why it's so beautiful because everybody's got the perspectives. And yeah, I just wanted to know, because I mean, from actual having tangible evidence to like your feeling and how these things like meditation, and I'm glad you touched on that. And maybe it goes into my next question on you had talked about in another interview about your opinion personally with religion and how that's changed over the years.

And maybe can you talk about how that and maybe the evolution of like science that you have studied has helped you or maybe as you've learned more, that sort of area of life has grown a little bit and expanded. Yeah, I'm certainly happy to talk about that. I mean, I think for me, the feeling that I've developed over time is sort of trying to not see them as completely oppositional forces, that religion and science can coexist, and that they both revolve around this desire that human beings have uniquely, which is to find meaning and mysteries. So the existence of God or the lack of existence of God is a mystery, and we don't understand it. The laws of nature and the origin of the universe are also great mystery. Now, you could say, well, the law of quantum mechanics and laws of quantum mechanics is also a great mystery, as I said before, you can't make a logical syllogism between two things that are mysterious and call them the same. But in the case of, I always observed that in science, so I've colleagues that work down the hall for me, and they study, say, nuclear fusion, let's just say. They're talking about nuclear fusion and how you can combine two nuclei together and they'll liberate some energy and make a big...

Now, nobody sits there and talks about that and then says, well, let's see, what are the implications of nuclear fusion on the existence of God? But when we talk about the origin of the universe, that's something that these Bibles, Tauras, Talmuds, Korans, Bogbad Gitas, that they also comment on. So now when two things are commenting on the same thing, you know, if quantum mechanics talked about the secret, then you could talk about it. And you could subject it to the laws and tests and proofs. But in religion, you know, it's really this quest to understand our origin. That's what the commonality is. Now, you could take it further and say, well, you know, why do you believe in a specific type of religion versus another one?

I think that would be a theistic argument. That would be, you know, I think that a God exists and I'm going to act in ways in, you know, that accord with that belief. Or you could say, I know that God does not exist. I'm going to act in ways in accord with that. I personally think scientists, a natural state for a scientist myself, is to be what I call a practicing agnostic. So agnostic is someone who doesn't know, they're sure there's an answer, but they don't know what the answer is. So atheist says there is no God and acts according to that

supposition. A theist, you know, I'm sure you know, acts according to the supposition God does exist, but an agnostic who practices, in other words, if you don't practice, if you just say, I don't know if God exists, but I don't go to church. And just as Richard Dawkins also doesn't go to church, there's no functional distinguishing feature between you and an atheist. But if you actually are a member of an organization, even there's actually non-religious, you know, kind of spiritual or even non-religious secular entities. There's one called the Sunday Assembly.

I call it like an atheist church or secular church. And I go there and speak, even though I practice Judaism, and I don't obey every single principle of Judaism, but I have a practice that is in comports with that. On the other hand, you know, if I did nothing, then could I really say I'm engaging in the experiment as a scientist to really understand it? Or did I just stop thinking about it at age 13 when I had my bar mitzah, which actually I didn't have because I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church, which is part of my unique upbringing. but that might be for another podcast. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment

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celebrating its 40th anniversary, You in must be 21 to enter. Wow. So have you been to Israel? I have been there twice. I've spoken at a couple different universities there. Awesome place, man. I was there in October for a wedding for my girlfriend's friends got married there.

And wow. Blew my mind. Oh, wow. Yeah. It's the most different place on earth where an American can still feel kind of at home. You know, there's things are in English. People speak English. But it's exotic.

It's an exotic kind of second world country in a lot of ways. I was totally caught me off guard because I was thinking it was going to be really dangerous feel to it. Everyone's, oh, you've got to be careful. And you go there and it's honestly the nicest people, safe, the food's amazing. The wedding was like something I've never experienced in my life. It was unbelievable and like the nicest people. And it was just, it was an experience. And, man, I tell anybody you got to go Tel Aviv, Jerusalem.

such an awesome place. Yeah, it really is. It's totally, it'll change your life more than almost any other place on Earth. Yeah, for sure. What, um, if you could go back and give advice to a young Brian Keating, what would you say? I think I would say that the cause, you know, is greater than the individual and that really trying to understand things is greater than any accolade and an award that other people who are just human beings like yourself and they have the same foibles and fallacies. biases, prejudices, as you do, as I did, and just do it for the purity of the quest. There is a beauty in impurity. And I think for me, thinking about that and really just enjoying the ride scientifically,

not worrying about promotions, you know, and it was hard because money was always in short supply for me, and I had to secure a good career in order to support myself. And, you know, being a professor's, you know, one of the best jobs in the world from a certain perspective, not financially. I'm sure I can make more and other jobs, but for me, pursue it for the beauty of the quest to understand a little bit more about the universe than was known the day before you were born. That might be your purpose and why you were put here on earth. Yeah, it's amazing. And it's just only going to keep getting better and better, the more they, you know, discover and people like yourself, it's, it's amazing. And just learning from you

and just having the conversation with you is awesome. And people can learn so much from you. Where can everybody find you? Well, you can find me on the internet on Twitter at Dr. D.R. Brian Keating on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or whatever. YouTube. I got a YouTube channel there. But I want to, you know, because nobody goes to my website, right? I mean, I'm going to put a special gift to the first 10 listeners in the U.S. who subscribe to my mailing list from this podcast. So you go to Brian Keating.com and you sign up for my mailing list. And you put in the reason box or the memo box, message box, you put a University of Adversity

will be entered into a drawing to win a piece of space dust, which is another kind of silly way to call a meteorite. So I'm going to send somebody the first 10 people who are right in with that hashtag, University of Adversity, I will send you a genuine piece of 5 billion-year-old space junk. Man, that's awesome. Get your space dust, everybody. So yes. U.S. added all.

I'm not shipping it to the space station. So I'll have it all in the show notes, man. I really appreciate it. You know, these conversations, there's some real questions that I'm glad I addressed. And I'm sure that you must think this flat earth theory is just the most bogus thing. But one of the last questions, I have to bring it up because it's just,

it's such a crazy thing. And, you know, how crazy is this theory and how tired of it are you here? Oh, yeah. Well, luckily, I don't hear it. that often. But I actually flip it around because you're right. It is a really enervating. It pisses people off. But I actually turn around. I say, well, can you prove to me that the earth isn't flat? And nine out of ten, even scientists can't come up with like a really

quick way to show that the earth is not flat, that in a way that would convince someone with a, you know, high school education maybe. And then if they can't answer that, then one out of a hundred maybe can prove that the earth is not the center of the solar system. That is very challenging. And yet, just as I said before, Lance, you know, people have these biases that were so much better than people were hundreds of years ago, thousands of years. And 99% of people that I've met can't give me any evidence that the earth is not the center of the solar system. So, you know, it's important to really be humble about these things. But, yeah, I personally have not encountered many people like that. Maybe it's the crowd that I hang out with. But there's a

abundant evidence that the earth is actually round a spherical, compact surface topologically. Yeah, and I could just see, I mean, maybe you've noticed in the last 20 years or how however long you've been doing this, that do people kind of get stuck in their ways? Like, if something new comes up, it's like this in so many industries, right? Nobody wants to change their way of thinking about something. And do you find that challenging when you've been programmed as this is the way it is? and then all of a sudden some new theory comes in? I mean, how...

Yeah, that is... ...excepting, are you. Of science, you know, which you have to be, you know, as Carl Sagan said, you have to be keeping open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out. And, you know, kind of that is a skill

that you learn over time to be skeptical of almost everything you find out originally, you know, there's a good chance that it could be wrong. And so, and so to be very skeptical, except in the case of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

So the burden of proof, I would say is on the flat earthers, and they've never provided a shred of evidence in that example that you brought up before. But in science, that is the job of scientists, is to really confront evidence. And I've learned that the most important three words the scientists can say when they hear new results that are really impressive is interesting, if true. Awesome. All right. One more question, Brian. If I ask this to say everybody, this is the one staple. You could offer one piece of advice for somebody to overcome adversity, to go on to become successful in their life.

What would it be? Yeah, so I was thinking about that question all day, and it reminded me of a kind of commencement address I gave a couple of years ago. I was at this air and space museum in San Diego, and there are these kids who are interested in aerospace and going on to college. And the talk was called, reach for the heavens, but expect tail a headwinds, meaning that if you go through life and you have this expectation that you're going to have the wind at your back,

you're going to be much more disappointed than if you expect there to be adversity, headwinds, friction, and flux, and then you overcome it. Or maybe it's not even there. And so what you worried about won't even occur. So be prepared. Expect that there's always going to be resistance. Always is resistance. And the point I like to make is, you know, imagine if you're, imagine if you're flying in California from San Diego to San Francisco, and it's 500 miles away and you've got a 100 mile an hour tailwind going up there and then you turn around and you might get a 100 mile an hour headwind coming back.

You're actually going to spend more time in the headwinds. Think about it. If there's 500 mile an hour headwind and your plane goes 500 miles an hour, you're not going anywhere. So you're going to spend an infinite amount of time in the headwind. Enjoy the headwind. The headwind builds strength just like it does at the gym

when you have extra weight and friction. So enjoy the headwinds, expect them. And then you'll be happy that you're prepared if they happen. And if they don't happen, you already have overcome a lot more than most people can overcome. Awesome, man. I just want to say thank you so much for joining us. I'm sure we got so much value from this. I learned a lot and I really appreciate you taking the time to hang out with us today. That is my pleasure, Lance. Thank you so much. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Thanks for listening. Keep in touch, inspired and informed by signing up for Professor Keating's Monday magic email at Briankeeting.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 reach 150,000 subscribers on YouTube, and putting us into the top 1% of science podcasts. Please keep it growing by subscribing and sharing with friends. your reviews and suggestions. Follow Professor Keating on Twitter at DR Brian Keating, that's Dr. Brian Keating,

and remember to always be curious. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition.