Dr. Brian Keating
speaker
1,291 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Sep 2025
Dr. Brian Keating’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's within all of us. And the smarter you get—look, I've interviewed 21 Nobel Prize winners on my podcast, and And never once – I mean, they've all been brilliant. They've all been incredibly accomplished in their field, obviously, to get to that level. And I've criticized the Nobel Prize, but not the people that win it.
You can't – I mean, the one rule I learned when I was asked to nominate winners on the two occasions I've been asked to nominate the winners of the Nobel Prize is that you can't nominate yourself, right? That's the one rule that they adhere to that Alfred Nobel stipulated in 1880.
But most other things they've disavowed, unfortunately, which is a grave sin, by the way, because, you know, in Judaism, the greatest mitzvah, which means commandment, people think it means good deed. It doesn't mean good deed. It means commandment. You're commanded to do certain things. And one of the things you're commanded to do that has greatest, utmost importance is to bury the dead.
and to not leave a dead body unescorted. Why is that? Well, it's the one thing they can't reciprocate, right? They can't, you bury the dead, they're not going to bury you, right, by definition. And so it's the ultimate altruistic, you know, beneficence in the sense. And when Alfred Nobel wrote his will, he specified exactly what he wanted.
He wanted to go to one man who did the greatest accomplishments for the greatest benefit of mankind in the preceding year. So it was one person, preceding year, and it had to benefit all of humanity. So it was what we call, in Hebrew, an ethical will. So it wasn't just a will, here's my money. He had no kids. He had no wife. He had no heirs to give the money to.
So he gave it all, in the sense, towards the betterment of mankind. Literally, that's what it says. But many of the other things they've disavowed. He can have three people win it. They can win it for stuff done 30 years ago, 50 years ago. But one of the few things that they've actually kept is this focus, if you will, that it should benefit. It should provide a benefit to humanity.
And then you wonder, well— That's also a non-scientific element of science, right?
And would you say then, just based on that, that somebody who identifies as a scientist alone is fundamentally unhealthy? Is not maybe psychopathic?
All PhDs are like that.
The problem is scientists don't, we don't get any ethical training. And I say that, you know. It's all implicit. It's implicit that you're just going to learn it. Similarly, we don't get training in public communication. I view my YouTube channel and my podcast, et cetera, as I don't get paid for it. The university has not revoked my tenure, but they don't help with it.
They don't provide any resources for it. There's no antagonism. I do it because— Well, at least they don't get paid.
But, no, and I have a great relationship with the chancellor and my deans and so forth. I'm very blessed to be where I am. And it's one of the best campuses for many other reasons. But all this to say, I don't get, you know, it's not part of my duties as a professor to do the explanations that I do and provide interviews with Nobel Prize winners. I do it because I believe in two things.
I believe I have a moral obligation, and maybe you'll agree too, maybe not. I have a moral obligation. I'm taking your money. I'm taking taxpayer money. Imagine if you're the person who installed the countertops in your home. And they said to you, you said, you know, excuse me, you know, sir, you know, how's it going? I'm sorry, Jordan, what I do.
is so specialized, it's so erudite, you cannot possibly understand it. Even with your PhD and your success story, you'd say, go to hell. You don't talk to your boss like that. I am your boss. The public is our boss.
And a lot of it is p-hacked and, you know, implicitly, you know, hacked to get the results that were desired, whether it's for some drug company's benefit. But even beyond that, the workaday scientist, I'm talking to the person in the lab next door to me, not some, you know, shill for Pfizer or something like that. I'm talking about just a workaday scientist.
And, you know, she or he will say to me, I'm not good at that. I'm sorry. You, Brian, you have to give to it. By the way, I don't think I'm that good. But I do think that I have an innate desire for the 1% gains that can be made by iteration. That every iteration, I try to get 1% better. My conversation, the questions I ask, the types of conversations that I have and the depth that I go into.
And I think that's my unique skill, if anything.
I mean, your videos are online from Harvard, from Toronto, et cetera. But when I say that to them, they say, well, I'm just not good at that. And I say, oh, yes, I forgot. I forgot. I forgot, you know, to my friend. I'll say, yeah, you were born knowing quantum electrodynamics. No, no, no. I work really hard at it. Oh, oh. So you work hard at that which you think is valuable.
So that means you're telling, you're admitting, you're copying to the fact that you don't think communicating to your boss is important. And I find it shameful. And I don't think that everybody should be out of the lab, you know, tanking 20% of their time and learning how to communicate like Neil deGrasse Tyson. But they should spend some of that time.
And they're trained to do diversity inclusion. Yeah, yeah. You're trained. Or they're punished for not doing it, at least. Well, you won't even get in the door now. You won't even have your applications reviewed. I'm interested to see what happens in the coming administration as we speak.
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