IN-DEPTH: Focus like a Nobel Prize Winner (w/ Brian Keating)

I'm Cal Newport, and this is In-depth, a semi regular series in which I talk to interesting people about the quest to cultivate a deep life. Today's episode is brought to you by our presenting sponsor, Done Daily. I'm a huge fan of this product because it provides you with both a system and daily coaching to implement the type of productivity ideas I often talk about. I'll tell you more about that later. For now, I wanna talk about today's guest, which is doctor Brian Keating. Now Keating is a big shot scientist. He's currently the chancellor's distinguished professor of physics in the department of physics at the University of California, San Diego. He's also the principal investigator of the Simons Observatory. He wrote this cool book back in 2018 that was called Losing the Nobel Prize. It's a book about the research he was doing. They were they were measuring the signature of the spark that started the big bang. And they have this really exciting signal, and people are all whispering in their ears, like, you're gonna win the Nobel for this. This is a big deal. And they found an artifact in the data that sort of, ruined it. And so he wrote a book about that, about thinking you're about to win the Nobel Prize and not. And it's a cool reflection about science at the highest levels, the reality of ambition. Anyways, interesting guy. Now if this name sounds familiar to you, it's because in addition to his science, Brian is also a prolific public expounder of astronomy and cosmology and physics. He has a podcast called Into the Impossible that has on some of the highest level science guests you're gonna find, and they have deep conversations. It's a really cool show. He also occasionally slums it and has on people like yours truly. You should check out that episode, though. It's a good one. He's also a regular guest explaining things like physics and cosmology on some of the world's biggest podcast. You might have seen him chatting about this stuff with Joe Rogan or Andrew Huberman recently. He does all the big shows. But the reason why I had him here on the best show of all, my own, was to talk about his latest book, How to Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner. It's a book that's based on interviews with real Nobel Laureates where he asks them about their own thoughts on things like focus and distraction and what it takes to produce work that really matters. Clearly, this is right up my alley. These are exactly I gave that book a cool blurb. These are exactly the type of ideas that my book Deep Work was eventually based on. So we get into that. But because I can't help myself, we talk about a lot of other things as well, like Brian's unusual path into academia, which has a twist to it that I still can't believe. You'll …