Modern Wisdom - #051 - Dr Brian Keating - Losing The Nobel Prize

Episode Date: February 11, 2019

Brian Keating is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the Centre for Astrophysics & Space Sciences at University of California. How would it feel to almost receive the Nobel Prize and have it torn from your grasp? Today we're going to find out, albeit at Professor Keating's expense. Expect to learn what it takes to build a telescope that can detect the farthest regions of space in the Antarctic, what the Nobel Prize originally set out to achieve and how the politics of the physics community can often get in the way of progress. Extra Stuff: Brian's Website - https://briankeating.com/ Losing The Nobel Prize - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Losing-Nobel-Prize-Cosmology-Ambition/dp/1324000910/ Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, my guest this week is Professor Brian Keating and he almost won the Nobel Prize and today we're going to find out just what it feels like to lose it. It's a really cool story. He's set up the Bicep 2 telescope in Antarctica and it looked like him and his colleagues had made a unique discovery and there was a rollercoaster of what actually happened and some disputes about the data and what it showed there's politics from the Nobel Prize Association and I didn't understand what it was or how it works, how it's chosen and what the processes and the heritage of this particular organization, but we're going to find all of that out today. It's a very interesting story, albeit at the expense of Professor Keating. But if you enjoy this episode, go back and check out the ones with Sabina Hassenfelder and Professor Adam Frank. They're both fantastic physicists, and they have a lot to add to this discussion about the

politics of science. Obviously, if you love the episode, please share it. It makes me very happy, but for now, let's welcome Professor Keating. Oh yeah, PS. I've started to shorten down the intros to these podcasts because I respect your time and I found myself skipping through a lot of the introductions to podcasts that I listen to as well. In future, I'm going to endeavour to keep them around about one minute. I think this should be enough time to tell you about the guests and inform you of any upcoming announcements which are important, but if you feel like you need to know more or less, if you want me to chop it down even further and just say hi friends, then let me know at Chris Willx on all social media

Professor Brian Keating, how are you today? I'm fantastic Chris, thanks for having me on. It's an absolute pleasure. So what are we going to learn about today? Well, you know, I kind of saw that at your podcast, so I don't know how usual that is, but I heard my friend, Mario Livia, on your show about two months ago, a month and a half ago. And the interview that you did was phenomenal. And of course, he's such an engaging and are you, Dite, fellow, that I felt like it would be a good

opportunity for me to share some of the ideas that I've been thinking about in my work as a cosmonologist. As I point out, I don't do hair and nails, but a lot of people think I do until they meet me Nor do I tell horoscopes, but but instead what I look for is really the earliest evidence for the Beginning of the universe and what I thought is so interesting about the perspective that colleagues such as myself can provide in Contra distinction to those of, you know, these areodite-really folks you've had on like Mario, is that I'm an experimentalist. So an experimentalist as a cosmologist, it doesn't mean that we build universes. I've got a healthy

ego, but not quite that healthy, but to think that I could actually build a universe, but instead we build telescopes that will allow us hopefully to reveal the earliest evidence for what's known as the Big Bang and how we came to know what the universe is comprised of along the way may hopefully be revealed through the types of telescopes that my self and my colleagues built. And this is very different from those of the professions as practiced by your late countrymen and my distant late colleague, Stephen Hawking or Sir Roger Penrose, who recently visited me in San Diego and was part of our podcast that we run for the Arthur C. Clark Center here in San Diego.

And that was, that is, you know, just studying the universe from a purely theoretical point of view is absolutely necessary. And I always say, you know, some of my best friends are theoretical physicists. But in reality, we have learned much more about the universe from people that build instruments, whether it be Galileo or Newton, or people that are connected deeply to instrumentation, because there are very few theories in the world. If you think about it, they're philosophically, there can only be so many different descriptions of how

the actual world works, many fewer than how possible worlds could work. And I'll give you one example, and maybe we'll talk about that at greater length today for those in the audience who may have heard of something called the multiverse. This is a very controversial subject within physics and even philosophy. And it really revolves around the notion of whether our universe is alone. Whether ours is the only universe, both that exists now, or may have ever existed, or may will ever exist in a distant future. And that's quite an astounding thing to think about. It's motivated in some sense from the thought of people like Copernicus and Galileo, who show the Earth is just but one of many planets in the solar system. Now we know there's but one

of the Milky Way is but one of many galaxies in the universe. So perhaps it's natural to think maybe we're just not just the only universe in what's called the multiverse. So these are the kind of things we study, but in contrast to many other kind of more popular, maybe much smarter, contrast to many other, you know, kind of more popular, maybe much smarter, better speakers than I am. But these folks that study things from a purely theoretical perspective, it's just a different perspective, I thought it would be great for your audience to get a taste of. I couldn't agree more. How different is the, or how bipartisan is the world of physics when it comes to the experimentalists versus the theoretical lists?

Yeah, the theoreticians, that's right. Theoreticians, wow. Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, Republicans and Democrats are cool. Is that really what it's like? Corries and Leo, we've never done such a thing. No, it's much healthier than that. I would say it's like, it's much less of a rivalry than sports team. Is it like the offensive team and the defensive team of American football?

Yeah, except I wouldn't want to wager the theoreticians I know to be very good football. Anyway, you'll edit that out. I think that, no, I think I think Mario, I wouldn't back going up against Mario Livio. He seems like he's probably going a bit of a, a bit of a vicious streak too, and when he needs to get going, he's got a massive side. That's right. Indeed, yeah, there, there, there, there is a, I'd say a healthy rivalry as there should be.

So it used to be, I don't know how it is in the UK, whether you're football teams there, but in America, there used to be laws in unofficial laws within sports teams for our version of football, that if you were playing against, you know, an opposing team in an American football, you weren't allowed to socialize with them the night before the game, like they're anti-frateronization laws. Like, well, that's not really very friendly, you know, that's not very gently. But of course, you know, our version of football, yeah, we wear helmets and you guys in rugby and football golf, you know, kind of, you know, different that way. But there was a rivalry and you want to stoke that competition and that those juices because it was thought that competition would be compromised if they were too friendly.

And, you know, I just, you know, contrast that to the word fraternization, means fraternal. I have three brothers of my own, and I don't think we'd ever characterize our relationship, you know, as very, you know, friendly and a competition, even a physical one. So perhaps that's misnamed, but I think there should be a skepticism. It's very easy to write papers and conjecture marvelous things like wormholes and extra dimensions and the multiverse and things like that. It's easy in some sense. Of course, intellectually, it's very challenging to actually be able to back that up. But it's sort of when there's nothing, no skin in the game as Nicholas Taleb says, there's nothing really, they're not going to go out there and build the experiment to detect it. And that's very different than the way things used to be, right?

Galileo had an idea that falling masses, decelerate or accelerate towards the Earth at the same rate, regardless of their mass or composition. And he showed that. And he built an apparatus, allegedly the leaning tower of pizza, etc. But he did other things that we know are not apocryphal. A Newton built telescopes and he built, he built other apparatus. He was of course an alchemist. You know, he was actually involved in the day-to events of the world. But, and even Einstein had patents, which is quite amazing to think about. And, and, of course, you know, the great physicist of the 20th and 21st century. Many of them, you know, had equal facility with experiment and theory. And I think that's the nature of a well-rounded Renaissance man or woman

physicists that we should aspire to be capable of forays into both the purely abstruse theoretical domain. And what it actually takes to have a skin in the game to go out and measure it. And so I get that completely. Is it, it seems like the sky is the limit really, oh, actually, no, because that's probably a poor term to use in your field of work, right? But the something is the limit for theoretical physicists, as you've said, they can, if they can postulate it and back it up with an existing theory, which again can also be based on something which hasn't been shown to be true in experiment, but perhaps make sense mathematically given the constant that we know about the universe, etc., etc. that they can say it and put it forward and downstream from that there's actually no real implications other than, oh wow, you wrote a really cool theory about this particular thing. Let's run with it and see if anyone else fancies backing it up.

That's right, yeah exactly. So I kind of view in this, maybe you're Theory about this particular thing let's run with it and see if anyone else fancies back in it up That's right. Yeah exactly so it's I kind of you and this maybe your your listeners and maybe you'll appreciate the analogy It's kind of like I feel we as experimentalists are the bouncers in the nightclub of the universe and that we actually are the ones that that Squash and keep things out and keep the field honest in a sense. And it can also happen to us, as I described in my book, so my book is called Losing the Nobel Prize. And it's a story, it's really kind of like the dirty laundry or confidential kind of tell all about what it's like to be a professional scientist in this current era.

And that also means that sometimes you get swept up in sort of the pursuit of things that are non-scientific in nature, in that they may be related to benefiting your career, your pocketbook, or what have you. And this is a relatively new affliction. I don't think very many people in the olden days were concerned as much about fame and Very many people in the olden days were concerned as much about fame and Unfortunate in science and certainly true that you know Einstein didn't die a billionaire, right? I mean he has as ideas in some sense were Responsible for a lot of the technology from GPS to the laser and you know, he made some money But he wasn't born

But if you look at how much he could have contributed intellectually versus monetarily, it's vastly outweighed. So I think that it's important, as I say in my book, we can write a book about the multiverse or the wormhole or the black hole, but you can't really put it on the cover of the book, whereas every single book comes with a dust jacket, right? And what does it do? It's keep dust out. I mean, I always hated dust jackets and I always thought they were useless and they'd get in the way of the book.

But now I realize that they serve this vital purpose, which is to keep the dust out of the story. And the story in my case is intricately dependent on the role that dust in the cosmos, in this case plays. And so I say to my friend, try getting a wormhole jacket on the cover and I'll be very impressed.

I get that. So losing the Nobel Prize, tell us where does the book begin? What's the story? So it's really a three-part story. One part is a memoir of what it's like to be a cosmologist to work with some of the biggest minds, intellects, and egos in the world at the cutting edge of astronomical discovery. In this case, we built the telescope that we put at the very bottom of the world. At a location called the South Pole, which is the sort of central part of the Antarctic continent, reached for the second time in 1912 by one of your countrymen, Robert Falcon Scott. He famously arrived there just three weeks later than his Norwegian counterpart, Ronald Aminson. And that three week delay ended up costing him and five of his employees, if you will, their lives. And I draw some parallels between the quest to conquer

Antarctica and the South Pole in particular, and the quest to be the first in science to make a discovery, to make a discovery that is as as as important as is foundational and as is important career wise to its discoverers as the finding of the South Pole was or the landing on the moon in the 1960s was for America. So that's part one. What's it like to be a scientist at the bleeding edge of competition?

collaboration and and some cases controversy is there no second ferry is there not very many bits of low hanging fruit You've said it's kind of like a winner-take-all competition here, and you know if you want to be the first person to reach a pole in the world You've only got two choices, right? Like you're gonna, you, that's it. Once one's gone, there's only one left. Once that one's gone, you're fucked. So is it similarly, is it kind of needles in a haystack? So speak in terms of finding like the big winners? Well, you know, there's a famous quote by John Archibald Wheeler

who was, you know, Feynman, one of Feynman's advisors and so forth. But that was, you know, our job is to expand the island of knowledge into the sea of ignorance, something to that effect. But when you make an island bigger, you're also making the coastline between the border between ignorance and knowledge bigger and elongated as well. So I think that's sort of the job. It's harder and harder to find new frontiers, certainly true, but there's so many mysteries, there's so many things that are just staring us right in the face that we know nothing about that some have decried the stagnation in cosmology and physics in particular. And really this glorification of the past as a symptom of the relative backwater

stagnation that's occurring within physics today, namely that there haven't been, according to a German physicist to being a Hassenfeller, make a good guess someday for you as well. I've already heard of it. I've already heard of it. You have. I've already heard it. I was going to ask whether or not you'd heard it, but yeah, we heard a discussion. I was going to bring up, I was going to mention some of that'd heard it, but yeah, we had a discussion. I was gonna bring up,

I was gonna mention some of that with you as well. So we'll get into that in a second. What was the quote that you had from her? Well, it was really just the claim from her that there, there haven't been any developments in nearly 50 years that rival the developments of say the preceding 50 years in physics. And that is, you know,

and that is kind of depressing on one hand. But I know that she's a theoretician. She's not an experimentalist. and physics, and that is, you know, and that is kind of depressing on one hand. But I know that she's a theoretician, she's not an experimentalist, and that's why I think it's so exciting to be someone who can build, interact, and acquire data from these sentinels, whether they be located underground in space, at the South Pole, in the Otacomad desert, and Chile. I think it's the most exciting time in history from that perspective. So I don't disagree with her that she may have chosen poorly in her field choice. We have a friendly

rivalry. She's a wholesome, I love Savin. Yeah, she's a certain contrarian. And so what I really feel is that it couldn't be more stark, the contrast, and the kind of abulliance and excitement that I feel every day getting to do what I do, versus kind of the depression and solonness that I see for my theoretical colleagues. So I'm always trying to convert them, you know, get them there, get them there. Cross the aisle.

Yeah, exactly, get them on the other side of the team. I love it. So what's part two? Part two is really a story of how we came to know what we know about cosmology. So a history of the universe from the first telescope ever used in astronomy by Galileo up through the bicep2 telescope, which is a telescope that I conceived of and helped to build at the South Pole in Antarctica, that seemed to provide evidence for what was claimed to be the biggest discovery of all time, the day we made the announcement and certain to rack up numerous

Nobel prizes for those of us potentially who built the instrument and certainly for the theoreticians who made the predictions. And how did the, you know, the inflationary universe that I describe, how did that come to be and whether it's implications? As I said, the multiverse is a natural extension. It's a consequence, according to the founders of inflation. Without the inflationary universe, you know, being true, there would be no multiverse. And only if there is inflation can there be a multiverse in many of these theories.

And so it's incredibly high stakes for cosmology and for philosophy and all of physics that we get this right. And our experiment claimed evidence for this back in 2014 to global headlines and fanfare Nobel Prize whispers. We later had to retract that statement, that claim. And what that experience was like as a physicist and as a human being. I think, you know, when you interview these brilliant people, I think the layperson is most interested in what are they like as a person? Like, you know, what was Einstein like as a father? That's something that's always interesting to me. Like, what was, you know, fineman like as a friend? Those are more interesting. Like, I can learn learn the physics the physics is sort of immutable

It's it's it's it's it's it's possible to learn the physics out knowing the the personality behind it But that's why these biographies of Einstein and and Feynman that keep coming out It's like how many biographies can you have you know, it's like did you have a secret double? You have clones somewhere I think if anyone was gonna have a double or triple or quadruple life, it would be Richard Feynman. The discussion I had with Mario Livia, I think, as close as Mario Livia can have a man crush on someone, I think Richard Feynman just about might be it.

What's super interesting you said there, talking as a perfect representative of the lay person when it comes to physics. I hadn't taken a massive interest in Isaac Newton until I found out about all of his very strange quirks and beliefs and how he used to love to go to hangings and he kind of had a little bit of a sadistic side to him and he spent more than half his career trying to prove a bunch of theological stuff to be true. And I'm like, oh, I'm like, fuck gravity. I want to know about, I want to know about like his weird quirks. Right. You know, like, humanized. Yeah. Totally right. Did you, did you never hear what he claimed

as greatest accomplishment for the man who came up with calculus, the law of universal gray, that he died of virgin. That I remember hearing that he claims his grace because it was as close as he could get to emulating Jesus Christ. And it shows you the esteem with which he held. Now I'm not for, you know, deconstructing just to tear somebody down, you know, like George Washington wasn't great because he had slave. No, that's, although I do kind of deconstruct the Nobel institution in the book, and that's the third part of the book, as what does it mean? Because what ended up happening was, we made this announcement, I'd kind of been edged out in a dramatic series of events from the, basically, denied the paternity of the experiment

that I helped desire. So let's just roll back a tiny little bit. from the, you know, basically denied the paternity of the experiment that I helped desire. So let's just, let's just roll back a tiny little bit. So we've got the bicep to telescope. First off, why is it called the bicep telescope? Why is it a bicep at all? So the inflationary universe predicts that if inflation took place, the universe would be suffused

with what's known as gravitational waves. These are waves of the gravitational force field. So as they pass by a person, say, if that was possible to imagine, the person would gain and lose weight, alternatively, as the wave propagates by. So it changed the force in which gravity is pulling on you. Obviously on Earth, it wouldn't make any big difference, but say far in interstellar space, and potentially this is a thought experiment you could do. Now, you know that these gravitational waves were first detected directly in 2015, resulting in the LIGO experiment leadership, or at least three of the four people that did it, winning the Nobel Prize, which is a problem that we can talk about. And then that was for the coal lessons of two black holes of the mass, each one about 30

times the mass of the sun. They came together and made a black hole that was slightly less massive than a black hole with the mass of 59 solar masses, say. So one entire mass was converted to gravitational energy. It couldn't be converted to light, these black holes by virtue of their intense gravity or black. And so they coalesced, they gave off by Einstein's equation equals MC squared. They converted one solar mass worth of mass, you know, their gravitational binding energy

into pure gravitational wave energy. That, if you can imagine, all the mass in the universe, not just 30 mass black hole, 30 solar mass black holes, every black hole, every galaxy, every person, every single plant, everything in the universe, exploding forth, not just over the course of a second as these black holes call us, but over the course of a trillion of a trillion of a trillion of a second, how violent that process would be, that would create waves of gravitational energy. Those waves would travel at the speed of light, and they would influence the oldest light that we know to exist in the universe. And that's called the cosmic microwave background radiation. It's a type of microwave energy, radio energy

that comes to us in all directions. That energy would be twisted and curled in a certain way that I described in the book with about 60 illustrations, custom made for the book. And that twisting curling pattern was known as B-Mode polarization or curl pattern polarization. And so when I made up the acronym BICEP, I wanted it to reflect that we're trying to muscle our way

back to the beginning of time and get the jump on these curls. So the BICEP does the curling on your body. So that's the origin of the name. So that's such a good name. That's such a good thing. It's a very clever way to do it. And the gym bro is up and down the country

that are uploading you for coming up in it as well. So we've got the telescope, I'm gonna imagine it must have been an absolutely massive undertaking to be able to come up with something like that and it's in the most inhospitable climate on the planet that is the most remote with the least supplies and all the rest of it. So what was the process like of actually creating it? So creating it, you know, I always say it was less difficult than actually, you know, coming up with the idea was harder than actually building a thing. Because you've been having a very, sorry for interrupting.

Is that a reflection of the theoretical versus experimental debate again, do we think? Yeah, exactly. So very figurative. Yeah, it's very hard to convince other people what a great genius you are. But it turns out you need to in order to have the wherewithal financial and the

most valuable capital, human capital, and getting young people to believe in your ideas and to follow you literally to the ends of the earth as they did. And then to actually build the instrument, you know, is an engineering challenge, but it's not an instrumentable one. Now, I say so with a little bit of glibness, but in truth, I have to give credit to these hard, extremely hardworking people in the field like my students and my collaborators all around the world because this telescope was actually able to be cooled down to a temperature that's 10 times lower than the temperature of interstellar space, which is just unfathomable. So a quarter of a degree above absolute zero. So if you could cool something down to absolute zero, all of its motion, all the chemicals,

all the molecules would stop, completely stop dead. And perhaps if there's no motion, there's no time. Right? So time is really measured by the reckoning between successive events. Well, if nothing's moving, no time could elapse. And that's deeply connected with this theory of inflation. So how do you go from non-univers to universe? You know, it's kind of a big mystery, right? It's like going from non-life, like just chemicals pouring, chemicals together getting something

living. And so for me to go from non-experiment to experiment, although that's the zero to one moment in Peter Tiel's language, I know you like him, you know, going to that extreme is very difficult, but it's not as hard as getting all the assets together, like a military campaign to the bottom of the world. So that took four or five years to do, then by nature of the faintness of the signal, we had to observe for a total of between the two experiments that I was a part of that made this announcement possible, six years of observation. And then another four years of data analysis on supercomputers, you know,

just running nonstop, the biggest most massive computers on earth. And that, and then 50 people working, you know, at some times day and night around the clock to make this announcement that we had seen the spark that ignited the very big bang that we believe exists today So you saw or the six years of Capture were done then and further four years of processing and at the end of that What what happened because someone someone at some point has come into the room and said something like Professor Katie and I think we found it. Like that point must have occurred.

Can you talk us through that? Yeah, so that's one of the ironies of the book and one of the things I think the book does a good job at attempting to describe it is how human scientists are. So what you just described is the confirmation of a theory, right? You said, someone can't, we think we found it. So that's like Eureka. What does Eureka mean when our comedies would say it? I mean, Eureka, I found it. So to find something means you were looking for something, right? Unless you just like, all right, I saw this like that's weird. And that happens a lot in science too. And I argue in the book, that's the purest

form of scientific discovery when it's serendipitous. That was like a like a deep, deep field image, right? Like there's this big blank space, we're just going to point the thing in this. Or the poster that happens. Yeah, our closer to where you are now, Jocelyn Bell, discovering pulsars for the first time, completely accidentally. She wasn't looking for pulsars. It just showed up in her data, and she did the hard work to unravel it. And eventually, a Nobel Prize was awarded for her work, but not to her, to her male advisors,

as I point out in the book. But exactly, so there's serendipitous discoveries, those are pure, those cannot be found, and they're also not susceptible to what's known as confirmation bias. If you have some idea about me, or you're bouncing out of club, or so, you have to have some notion

about what's desirable or what you're looking for, but in science, we like to think that scientists are completely dispassionate. But what if there are non-scientific forces at work, such as people like me who at the time was really obsessed with the Nobel Prize and winning it and being elevated to this very, very tiny pantheon of scientists or household names. That was so enticing. It really dominated a lot of my early career mental energy. And so when we, yes, when we did discover the signal that I knew if correct, even when I came up with the idea for the experiment, would be the biggest, you know, home run or

what do you call it, century, hitting a center, I don't know, and cricket. The idea of doing that was so intoxicating to both discover the purity of the scientific quest, but also being honest to win a Nobel Prize. When we did that, of course, then we just basically looked in as many places as we could to see if we were right or not and kept coming up that we were. But the farther we went down, the more committed to the hypothesis confirmation we were as well. Then the ultimate revelation was done not in a peer-reviewed journal article, as typically required as the gold standard of scientific discovery,

but only since the late 1800s, by the way. But nevertheless, that discovery was announced at a press conference, however, at Harvard University on March 17, 2014, to, as I said, worldwide fanfare with Nobel laureates in the audience and other Nobel laureates speaking to those Nobel, you know, potential Nobel laureates, speaking to those past Nobel laureates. And I wasn't at that event. And the feeling of, you know, creating something, being a part of something, only to see sort of the control taken away from me, that is a big element of the book. And furthermore, the quest that drives many scientists. I say not all scientists suffer

from the sameality that I did, but many of us do. Just listening and the few podcasts that you've done with scientists and they're fantastic, the word noble price comes up off a lot. It's sort of a way of subconsciously perhaps acknowledging the authority bias that human beings have, that we want to have experts to listen to. We want to offload the responsibility of thinking for ourselves, just honest. We want to trust that Einstein knew better than us, so he won the Nobel Prize and he came up with the photon and special relativity. So I'm going to listen to him about world government being the ideal situation and you know, I don't know how you feel about that

but I think you are totally right we sometimes afford We afford particularly intellectual thinkers and Almost universal level of admiration which you know Sur Isaac Newton there we go, like, fantastic, like, listen to him about physics, probably don't listen to him about what you should do this Sunday afternoon. Like, exactly. Yeah. And it's called the halo effect. It's called the halo effect. People want to believe that there'll be people, you know, so in America, every four years, we get this list of, of noble laureates that say, you know, which Democrat you should have. I've never seen

them once say they should vote for a Republican. Now you can say whatever you want about Republicans or Democrats, but you know, if it's scientific, there should have been at least like one who would, you know, you know, it's hard to believe this, the group think is so perfect, but it is. And that's only, it's totally totally is. This was the, I'll give you the 30 seconds synopsis to my podcast with Sabina. For anyone who is listening, if you go back, Sabina Hassan Felder, the beauty in physics, I think it was called the episode. And the bottom line, the punchline of the whole thing was that I had discovered during

the podcast that physicists were people too. And I always presumed that they were these input process, output, robotic kind of paragons of perfect intellectual pureness. And it turns out that it's just as political, if not more political, then it made me feel like my job, which is manipulating social networks to get people to go to nightclubs, almost felt like relatively kind of noble. And then on the flip side, there's all of the, you gotta be in this right camp,

you gotta be, you can't be backstabbing this person, or you've, you've adhered yourself to this particular kind of theory, that means you can't be in this. And I couldn't And I couldn't believe just how bipartisan and try partisan and all the rest of it it was. It blew me away. It really is.

And it's a way of just oversimplification, which is a natural human urge. And it just proves that humans, a scientist are human. And I think the cliche, the trope that we are just walking with competing is really nonsensical. a scientist or human. And I think the cliche, the trope that we're just walking Wikipedia's is really nonsensical. And I do my best to, you know, display the humanity of the scientists by both making many, many mistakes every day. You can ask my wife about that. But also, you know, having a having a real clear cut, you know, kind of image of what is, what is

important about science. So if you look at science, the word science in Greek roughly translates into knowledge, but that's very different than wisdom, as I always point out to my colleagues, you know, just because you're a scientist, it has nothing to say whatsoever about your wisdom. I mean, so on a Nobel laureate, he was actually a here at St. UC San Diego where I am. He said, if you think that Nobel laureates are so brilliant, you should see them in the morning of the event when they're trying to find where the eggs are served, which is another cliche.

But at the same time, again, I don't have problems with the Nobel laureates who win. I have an issue with this process, with this establishment, which, like what Sabina talks about, both of our books have a similarity in that we're taking on these sacred cows. And sacred cows are not always deserving of that stature. And I think in the case of the Nobel Prize, it's helped us such high esteem that one should

be careful about the outsized influence that it has on scientists certainly, but especially on non-scientists, members of the public, members of your audience. When they hear Nobel Prize, they're just going to stop thinking. I'll listen to what he, and it's mostly men, by the way, which is already a tip off that there's something rotten in Stockholm, right? I mean, there's many, anyone who thinks that women aren't as bright as men, so why is it true that only one percent of all winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics

and Chemistry are women? There's something obviously at work that's systemic, that needs to be changed, and yet the Nobel institution is incredibly ossified and really susceptible in my mind to a vast reformation that they're very unwilling to do. Can you take us through what the Nobel Prize is? Because, you know, the term of the Nobel Prize, I know it, and again, I am Mr. Avatar for the lay person. So, you know, I know that the Nobel Prize is given

in a number of different categories. I know that it's maybe once every year or once every couple of years, and I know that lots of Jewish people, wouldn or once every couple of years, and I know that lots of Jewish people win it. Like those are kind of, that's the beginning and the end of my knowledge. I don't know why it exists. I don't know where it started.

I don't know who looks after it. I don't know what the process is or whatever it is. So give us the cliff notes on what the Nobel Prize is. So my book begins with the story of how Alfred Nobel's younger brother blew himself up. And it's kind of weird. What does that have to do with cosmology? So Alfred Nobel was a Swedish, actually Russian, Swedish inventor and entrepreneur who is the son of a father who had invented some military applications for high explosives in the 1850s in Sweden, and it mainly been selling them to the Russian Empire for their many wars that they were conducting in that

time period. But the goal of having a stable form of nitroglycerin, which is very, very powerful explosive, but also very mercurial and explosive, that, uh, and dangerous. That was a goal of many, many inventors. That would be the killer app that could be used to safely do construction, uh, if, could be invented. So Alfred Nobel's younger brother, so he was one of seven kids, I believe, Alfred, and, uh, three or four of them died before they were 22 years old, mostly by, you know,

natural causes, but in the case of his Mostly by, you know, a natural causes, but in the case of his younger brother, he was experimenting with this compound, nitroglycerin, and he dropped a vial of it, and it blew up the laboratory in Stockholm where he was working in the family laboratory, killed about four other people that were his lab assistance. And that really drove a manual Nobel

that the Nobel Brothers father in Sain. And he ended up giving control of the company to one of his other brothers. And one thing led to another, but Alfred went off on this quest. Single-minded focus to find a safe version of nitroglycerin. And he invented it. And it made him perhaps one of the richest people

of the world of that time. And today's dollars worth billions of dollars. And this company that still bears his name exists, which is which is amazing. There are very few companies that are based on an invention by an inventor from the 19th century that still have that name that still exists. I mean, maybe ten of them around the world. In this case, it made him incredibly wealthy, but it was still tied to the manufacture and sales of arms between different countries in Europe that were continually a war with

one another, and then also dynamite and ballastite and all sorts of other military, core-dite explosives used to kill people. And one day, about 20 years after he invented dynamite, Alfred was walking around the streets of of Paris, France and he came upon a headline Scrooge, or, you know, somebody like really celebrating their death. And it shocked him so much that he resolved to use his vast personal fortune after he died to endow a will, which would give out prizes in five categories, literature, medicine, physics, chemistry, and peace.

And so peace kind of the one that a little bit stands out, but all five of these awards, and they've since enlarged it to include economics about 80 years after he died. And they're given out annually, and what Alfred wanted, and he said explicitly in his will, which can find on the Nobel Prize website to this day, he said, I want these prizes to go to the person

in the singular who created the most important or beneficial discovery or invention in the preceding year that has had the biggest benefit on mankind. So there are three stipulations. A single person would win it for an invention made last year and that had the greatest benefit on mankind. Now unless you're theoretical particle physicist, I don't know how much the Higgs boson improves

your daily life or benefits your daily life. If you do, then please consult the psychiatrist, because it's really not that relevant to our daily lives. Very important in the grand scheme of the universe, but it would exist whether we discovered it or not. Unlike, say, the X-ray, which was the subject of the first Nobel Prize in 1901, which is improved and better the lives of human beings. Is that what got the first Nobel Prize? Yeah, so I talk about that. That's a pretty cool, pretty sort of big, big impact discovery, right?

Absolutely. And there have been other ones. And so, so I pointed on the book, because what happened was, as I said, Chris, I, I was, you know, created this experiment, which was immediately claimed to be nobel worthy the day of the announcement in 2014. But you, what you weren't there for. Which, what's that? What you weren't there for. You weren't there. That was, yeah. So I talk about that. about that a very very honest in the book about you know my my foibles and faults in the whole affair, but but in truth, you know, I think it ended up being that there were competitions and there

were discussions and polls on the internet and papers published, you know, that really claimed that of all the, you know, kind of people on earth that I might have a decent shot, better than one in five or something of winning a Nobel Prize, which is pretty high. There's billions of people on earth, right? And how often do you get to be in that very select group? And then as I described in the book, it was not to be. Obviously, the title would be different

if I had won the Nobel Prize, not lost it. So the title is losing the Nobel Prize, but it has two different meanings. One of the meanings is how I personally lost it and lost out on this opportunity, although creating something Nobel worthy and then having that slip away, I describe the emotions of that and the personal side of that, but also the cosmic side of it. What does it mean to talk about things like the multiverse and like the inflationary universe and the creation of the Big Bang? What does that mean in a world in a universe that's polluted with contamination and with confirmation bias and with all these other

foibles that human beings have? So that's one aspect of the title. But then if you can imagine this, you know, so imagine what is it, Prince Harry, he and Princess Megan, they want to come to a club and you're at that club and they're about to come into your club and you hooked it up, they're just so, you're just gonna love it, you're gonna take selfies with it. And then right before they get there,

they say, you know what, we're not gonna come to your club or any of your clubs. In fact, could you recommend a better club for us to go to better than any of the ones here? So what ended up happening was not only did I lose the Nobel Prize chance that I, you know, best chance I would ever have, but that same year that I potentially could have won it, I was asked by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences to nominate the winners of the Nobel Prize that, you know, I would have won had my experiment not been disconfirmed and our results

retracted. Our claim of discovery retracted. The experiment was correct. It still is correct. We still believe it's true, but the interpretation of what we saw has been changed radically from detecting the impromptu of God, if you like, or of the Big Bang of nature to the most humble substance in the universe, this cosmic dust that I describe at some length in the book. I was going to say, what's the specifics about, because you've gone from, you were there, you were at the finish line, ready to go. But it seems like there's kind of two elements to this story.

One of them is the potentially systemic, more political side that I want to hear a little bit more about how the Nobel Prize is judged and stuff like that. But obviously the sort of meat and veg of it is the fact that what you found was interpreted differently to what you originally thought. Is that correct? Can you take us through that? Yeah. So when we set out to measure the universe's earliest light and this curling, twisting pattern that gives Bicep its name, etc. The experiment was designed to see an effect. And there was a design to see this leftover aftershock of the Big Bang via gravitational waves. aftershock of the Big Bang via gravitational waves. And so it wasn't designed to necessarily rule out every other potential source of cosmic

mimicry. So there could be sources that we did know about, say, the earth emits a type of signal that could be mistaken for it. So we designed the experiment to block out the signal from the earth because we had a located at the South Pole on earth. Similarly, say, the atmosphere could do it or there could be a mission from sources that are not cosmological, but they are in the solar system or in the galaxy.

And we knew about those sources and we did our best to eliminate them. But there was one source that we simply did not have enough information. And there was one group of astronomers that had this information. In fact, they were led from the European Space Agency, it was a satellite called the Planck satellite. And they had measured the sky, and they knew that they had information, which could tell

us if we had seen cosmic dust, which are particles, grains of carbon, nickel, iron, particles left over from a previous explosion of a generation of stars called the supernova that may have existed, that did exist in our galaxy prior to our solar systems existence and other solar systems existence. And without such supernovae, we would probably not exist because the iron in your blood, the hemoglobin molecule, the carries iron molecules, iron atoms. That was forged. As iron molecules were forged in the core of a supernova that exploded in our local stellar neighborhood, 4.9 billion years ago.

So you literally, as Carl Sagan used to say, have star dust flowing through your blood, very poetically, but it also flows through the galaxy. And because it's made of iron, just like the filings as Michael Faraday showed and others showed, they align themselves in magnetic fields. Or our Milky Way galaxy has a magnetic field too, and it can produce the exact same curling

twisting pattern of microwaves as the big bang's inflationary epoch could. So that was the signal that we missed stuck. And the reason that we didn't have access to information which would have disconfirmed our claim earlier is because it was held by our competitors. The Planck satellite did not want to share this information with us. We didn't know if they had detected it as well as we had

and want to scoop us out of this discovery and potentially win their own Nobel Prize or they didn't have a good understanding yet of their own deficiencies so forth with their instrument. And it turned out to probably be a little of both, but there's this incredible competition that exists within science to get there, not only get there first, but to just obliterate the competition. Like leave no doubt that you made this definitive measurement.

We wanted that to be clear throughout the entire paper, press conference, everything we did, that there should be no doubt that what we discovered was what we claimed. And in the end, the results were correct, but we made a very exquisite measurement of the emission from dust particles in our local galactic neighborhood. Incredibly challenging, by the way, because the signals that we saw were just a few parts and a billion out of the temperature of the South Pole. Just exquisite technology. I describe how exciting it is, this technology, and how it's progressing and will progress based on the lessons learned from bicep 2 to build a next generation of instrumentation and such as the Simon's Observatory, which is a big project that I am leading

here in San Diego, based with institutions around the world. Literally 250 researchers on every continent currently on the planet, which is amazing to think about. So the real discovery and its aftermath and how it affected me and the field personally is really tied up in this quest at least personally for me with the Nobel Prize. And I came to see it in a sense as almost a false idol. And I came to see the Nobel Prize in a sense as a religion, as a type of religion, ironically practiced by mostly secular scientists, right? 70% of our national academy of sciences declare themselves to be atheists,

not agnostic, but atheists. And yet, if you go to any website that supports science or any discovery where the upper echelons of authority need to be referenced, and even in Sabina's books, and she's not really beholden to them, but she constantly is interviewing Nobel laureates and talking about things that were reword with the Nobel Prize and saying, well, nothing's been award the Nobel Prize.

And theoretical physics shows you how poor these predictions as a scorecard, as a talisman, as an icon. And I make these parallels between a religion and the Nobel Prize. And I think they're quite, I're quite, you know, I think that that nobody really disputes it, which is kind of interesting to me. Nobody disagrees with their reformation. So I present five ways to improve the Nobel Prize before it's too late. Because I think if you have an institution that refuses to change,

it's operating, you know, mode that it's at risk of catastrophic, kind of existential crisis. Well, it loses its purity, right? Like the whole point, again, for me, as someone who doesn't know what he's talking about, one of the only things that I want the Nobel Prize to do is for it to go to the right person. Yeah. Do you know?

For people, right. For people. I want to get on to what the process for the Nobel Prize consists of. But just the final thing that I want to kind of round off the story for you personally was, how did you find out about the fact that there had been this particular change in how your discovery had been viewed. And then what was the next sort of, what were the next couple of days like, I'm fascinated to hear what that means to someone who's pushed so hard and come so close.

Yeah, yeah, it was, it was a mixture of emotions, you know, first obviously, embarrassment, a little personal sense of humiliation that I had gone along with this result, even though I had some doubts about it, we all had doubts, but certainly I had voiced a lot of doubts. A little bit of gratitude that I had not been so publicly associated with the face of this detection because I had had been kind of eliminated, which I described in the book and how this role, I wasn't eliminated completely, obviously, but the way the announcement was made, I was, you know, prevented from being a part of it. So bizarrely, the thing, the thing that you felt a little bit, maybe jilted,

you kind of been left at the altar, so to speak, when it came to the glory, but in a roundabout fashion that I'd also protected you from being the figurehead who, upon whose shoulders most of the backlash had landed, I suppose. That's right, exactly right. And yeah, so I just admit that how it felt, I wasn't glad I wanted us to be glad, I wanted us to be right. I wanted us to be right, even if I didn't win the Nobel Prize. But in the end, the day new mom to the story for me became a recognition that, as I said, ironically, all these scientists are atheists, but they worshiped this golden crucifix of an icon, the Nobel Prize, which literally has a graven image, you know, a picture of Alfred Nobel on it, and you bow down to it on the day he was, he died in December 10th, 1896.

That's what the day that they're awarded on his birthday. And for me, this kind of religion no longer holds the idolatrous transfiction that it had once before, and that it no longer really consumes my daily life in any way, other than, you know, to think that the privilege of getting paid to do the research that I get to do and work with the genius people, students, and other scientists around the world that I get to work with, that is reward enough. And when we make the Nobel Prize, this Paragon of Scientific Excellence, we are kind of reducing ourselves, sorry, to say, you know, to kind of like entertainers in the Hollywood Oscars. Because I pop idol or X factor, right?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And for us, I think, you know, scientists should be the most immune from that. Aren't we supposed to be hyperrational and these paragons of intellectual honesty? But I think we're human beings. And the problem is that, as I often say, I didn't interview with Scott Eastwood, who's Clint Eastwood's son, a very famous podcaster here in the States. And saying like, well, you don't really expect, you know, a movie studio doesn't really expect that all of its films are going to win Academy awards. I mean, some of them, you know, are going to be like the Fast and the Furious and they're just not

we're and he's like, I was in the Fast and the Furious. That was a highlight of my podcast and career. But, but, you know, but he's he agree with me, you know, it's like the the actors and actresses who go into Hollywood, they don't go into it saying, Oh, I'm only a good actor if I win a Nobel Prize, but are an Oscar, rather, but the studios, you better believe they want most of their pictures to get. That's why they have 10 different world nomination and it's the other, yeah, hum the or right ore. Right. All these things, Sundance. And they're all about giving each other awards. And there is no second, there is no golden globes or sag comparison, you know, second runner

up for the Nobel Prize. There's just nothing like that. So it puts the Nobel Prize under great scrutiny and holds it up to this level of, of really a steer of being, you know, just the augustness of winning it. I think that it does a detriment, has a detrimental effect on scientists, but to the extent it's going to survive, I wanted to preserve the purity of it by making certain reformations. I talk about, as I say, five of the ways that you could do it, after we've been invited to nominate winners of the Nobel Prize and coming upon it,

you know, as a scholar would. So I received a letter a couple of weeks after we made, you know, the final nail and a coffin for our detection back in 2014. And I got a letter from the world Swedish Academy, which said, you know, do not talk strictly confidential. I mean, I so I guarantee it's the last time I'll be asked to nominate winners of the Nobel, but but it said, you know, here's what you need to do. Look for the multiple winners, you know, who deserve the prize. It could be something done decades earlier and it couldn't and it didn't mention anything

about having a benefit on mankind. I said Alfred only said three things in his will. It has to go to one person in the preceding year who had the greatest benefit. And here they are asking me to do nothing of what he asked me to do. And I felt like, well, that's kind of the worst things you could do is not, is not have respect for the wishes of a dead man. Right. A dead man has a one chance, a one will, and imagine, you know,

you know, you're going to live, you know, 100 more years or whatever, but you write your will someday and you say, I want all the money to go to Oxfam or whatever, and they give it to like, you know, whatever. all the money to go to Oxfam or whatever. And they give it to like, you know, whatever. I don't even know what they give it to. But they give it or you know, green piece and they give it to ExxonMobile or BP, you know, even pretty pestile, but what could you do?

Nothing, absolutely nothing, because you're dead. And so I felt like it's become, it's incumbent upon scientists like me to advocate for change from within. And I don't have any illusion, delusion that they're going to listen to me, but I felt the story was too important to ignore. And so far, I've gotten great feedback from people around the world, scientists and lay people about what it's like to really aspire to this and to really make great, important discoveries, but not judge yourself on whether or not this three inch diameter gold,

Medallion, like a rap star would wear, you know, goes around your nose. I could see, I could have seen you with that rap to around your neck, which is a shame. Well, there's a couple of things, a couple of things I've been thinking about as you've been speaking now. One of them, the first thing that you said was that,

the humiliation maybe came a little bit higher than the disappointment and some listeners of the show will know that I came off a motorbike in Bali a couple of years ago and driving along now driving a 50-pence per day Balinese Mo Peds, which is my that was my era, the second era is not really being very good at riding a motorbike. And a truck pulls out in front of me and I come off the bike anyway

and I'm wearing a tiny pair of swim shorts and a little vest. And I just, it's me versus Balinese road and it wins all day. Like I've got kind of like second degree burns on half of my body. And most of the left-on-side of me is stuck in the Balinese tarmac,

which is very cool. It's perfect for removing skin. It'll be a pretty cheap scrainer. And the first thing that I felt, I was riding with these two Aussie guys who I'd made friends with while I was out there, I was traveling on my own, I'd made friends with these two Aussie guys and they're counting you me and I counting you them beforehand, but anyway, we relatively new friends. And I was in mortal danger, I'd just injured myself, like the forefront of my mind should have been my injury. And the first thing that I felt when I stood myself up and brushed bits of tarmac out of me was embarrassment. The head of Abraham Mazlow's hierarchy of needs, like forget the fact about like worrying about I'm injured or is this going to scar or

I you know, is another car coming? Is there going to be another car behind me that hits me? No, no, no I wanted to stand up and think you twat like that's the thing that I thought and it's just so telling of the fact that we are No matter how as you say these sort of paragons of beautiful intellectual truth and purity and all the rest of the stuff, it's born out of a flawed system and that system is human. And the other thing is that I think is really super interesting is the journey that it's allowed you to go on, which I think is a lot of people will be able to draw a comparison with, which is kind of that of discovering that the process

of what you have created, that life is a process of becoming not being. And that as you've gone along the way, you're now able to look back on it and say, well, you know, like the fact that I was able to bring all of these people together and In a very bizarre way, I wonder whether or not you would have the same level of New Onsen subtlety appreciation for all of the different elements if it was overshadowed by a larger ward. I don't know whether you'd be able to look back with the same degree of high fidelity, that granular kind of... Yeah, absolutely not. I agree with you 100%. I mean, I was joking, you know, people say, oh, you're a hypocrite, you wouldn't turn a Nobel Prize down if you won. I say, well, you want to see

on a film sincere, just get them to award me the Nobel Prize. And don't. Yeah. In all seriousness, I feel like, yeah, it's almost a blessing because it's sort of like a liberation. Yeah, I don't know if you're married or whatever, but I always say, you know, when I met my wife, I got to stop like going on dates. Like, I never have to have a first date again, you know, hopefully. Yeah. I got that. Yeah.

And it's very liberating when you free your mind of it. And so when I freed my mind of obsession about, I was told to get tenure or to get to high level of promotion at the University of California. I have to win an Nobel Prize. I've been told by many people that they're basically judged in their careers on their prospects of winning an Nobel Prize. To be liberated from that and say, well, you know, that is completely an asinine metric by which to judge a human being. And I say in the book, you know, the journey is more important than the gilded destination.

And, you know, we make fun of like, you know, I don't know if you, you know, whatever, how biblical you want to get. But, you know, back in the Bible, it talks about the Israelites worshipping a golden calf, you know, this icon made of gold that they made themselves, a few weeks after witnessing God allegedly wipe out Egypt with all these plagues. And I thought, that's so silly, but in truth, 3000 years later, here we are doing the exact same thing. We worship a golden icon with a picture of Alfred Nobel.

And that is part of the way that we value our self-worth. I think that that's a shame in a modern scientific society to feel that way. And so I feel like it's part of my, you know, one of the lessons learned and how to handle it. It's not just about, you know, losing a Nobel Prize, which, you know, probably all of your listeners can sympathize with, but how do you handle not winning, you know, top 50 podcasts or how do you handle not, not, you know, getting to, you know, be high school class president. These are all things that, you know, your former likely not to get into your own personal promise length and then to get in it. And

that's okay, right? You're not going to get in to be Manchester United or Newcastle. What is your team? Newcastle. The good. So, you know, from my perspective, so how do you handle that? Because that's the state. If you look at the probability distribution of what you're going to spend your life being, it's not being a noble prize winner, it's not being... It's as perito as it comes, isn't it? Exactly. It's not done.

Exactly. So I hope that people, you know, will enjoy the journey and not fixate on the destination. Let's hope the journey is a lot more successful than your Balinese motorcycle journey. That would be nice. I think it's super, super interesting to speak to yourself, especially after having spoken to Sabina. And to hear just how folly some of the elements of science are, and you know, something that was super interesting that we kind of moved past was when you had the European Space Agency and they didn't supply you with the particular types of information that you needed that would have helped you further your research. And you think like, I think from my side, things like physics, especially when we're talking about

making developments and learning about the universe is the same as medicine in that the goal should be as wide and as vast progression as expedited as is possible. But you, that's not what happens. It becomes narrow and deep because there's certain information that will benefit one particular group and over another and et cetera And I don't know, I think removing ego from the situation is going to be impossible. And you can't litigate for it. You're not going to be able to have someone come in and say, you need to share your research with these people or whatever. And as well, we can talk all we want.

And the listeners will be in the midst once we are broadcast you'll be in the midst of some very mindful other guests that we've had Rick Hansen and Corialin and all these meditation experts you know detach from the ego and all these sort of stuff but on the flip side like telling someone who's won something fantastic, like, oh man, like you should have never even gone for that in the first place. You should detach from your ego. You're like, well, no, fuck off. Like I worked really hard for this.

And I'm the one that got it. And because that story's newsworthy and all the ones of the runners up aren't, you inevitably end up with this asymmetry of glorification. Yeah, but exactly who is going to advocate for reform right there people that when it have a vested interest in it you know I know that there have been peacemakers who turn down the Nobel Peace Prize right. Oh yeah I wanted to ask that what what does the peace what do you make a peace prize how does that work what do you have to do. I mean some been, you know, it's, it's one of the few prizes that anybody can nominate anybody for. So you could nominate me.

I can nominate you. Let's do that. Yeah. That's a good one. It's a great one. Yeah. But the physics prize you have to be invited. Right.

And one of the criteria to be invited is that you want a Nobel prize. That's one option. So, oh, the rich get richer. If you want a Nobel prize, your graduate student and postdoc is much more likely to get a Nobel Prize, or conversely, if you work for somebody, you're likely to get. So I go through all these kind of different machinations within it, but I think like there is sort of a vested

interest in keeping, look, the Nobel Prize is a monopoly. It's the most prestigious award of its kind. Just like the Oscars are a monopoly. Yeah, there are other runners up, but it's pretty head and shoulders above them, right? But the Nobel Prize, there is no real secondary competitor to it. I mean, I challenge people to know about it. And so as such, it has a huge responsibility to inform the public about how science is

actually done. Now, describing the books and the cruel aspects of the Nobel Prize, wherein people that mostly women, but sometimes men as well, including just a year, two years ago, when one of Scotland's greatest scientists, Ron Dreever, was basically written out of history because he happened to die six months before the Nobel Prize for LIGO was awarded.

And it's all part of these crazy rules that they like to adhere to, that they themselves choose and pick what to apply, as they say, they don't follow what Alfred wanted. So I hope your listeners get a chance to engage with it. I welcome, we have a couple of websites. We set up one is just called losing the Nobel Prize.com where people can suggest winners and put a petition, kind of like move on.org strategy.

And then I have a mailing list on my website, BrianKeding.com, that people can engage with. I love hearing from people, how it's affected them, and it's gotten a lot of good attention. I used to think, well, I shouldn't even care about whether it wins these awards for best books of the year, but you just get in droid straight back in again. I did, I can't even yeah, I can't even be.

I can't even be stoic anymore. It's like, I'm too fortunate. No, it's really, it's received a lot of lovely attention. And so yeah, I'm really interested to hear what you think about it. And I'm excited to read it. I really, I really, really am. I think the mind you share, and I'm looking forward

to finding out the sorted details about what goes on behind the scenes and stuff like that. So yeah, Brian, it's been a blast. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. And let's keep in touch, Chris. I certainly will do links to everything will be in the show notes below. Please make sure that you follow Brian online. He has a very interesting Twitter feed and his website will be linked below, so man, thank you, catch you later on. Thank you so much Chris.

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