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 you by our presenting sponsor, Dun 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 want to talk about today's guest, which is Dr. Brian Keating.

Now, Keating is a big shot scientist. He's currently the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics and the Department of Physics at the University of California, San Diego.

He's also the principal investigator of the Simon's 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 measuring the signature of the spark that started the Big Bang.

And they have this really exciting signal, and people were all whispering in their ears, like,

you're going to 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 the 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 going to find. 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

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