Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley
The Physics of Focus: How a Nobel Prize-Losing Astrophysicist Cracked the Code on ADHD Success | Dr Brian Keating
15 Sep 2025
Join our community of fearless leaders in search of unreasonable outcomes... Want to become a FEARLESS entrepreneur and leader? Go here: https://www.findingpeak.com Watch on YouTube: https://link.ryanhanley.com/youtube Connect with Dr Brian Keating Into the Impossible Vol II: https://amzn.to/41StaXE Losing the Nobel Prize: https://amzn.to/4gpWNWq X: https://x.com/DrBrianKeating Ever wonder why your ADHD brain feels like it's spinning at 10,000 RPMs while the world moves at 10? You're not broken—you're just operating on a different frequency. In this episode, I sit down with physicist Brian Keating, author of "Focus" and the man who almost won a Nobel Prize (and wrote a book about losing it). We dive deep into the science of attention, the physics of focus, and why your hyperactive mind might be your greatest competitive advantage. Brian breaks down his FOCUS framework—Follow One Course Until Successful—and explains how the same principles that govern the universe can help you harness your scattered energy into laser-focused execution. What You'll Learn: Why 99% of the universe is invisible (and what that teaches us about focus) The FOCUS method used by Nobel Prize winners to achieve breakthrough results How to turn ADHD "chaos" into your secret weapon for seeing opportunities others miss The "Dune" principle: How to see the one path through infinite possibilities Why losing can be the best thing that ever happens to your career Sponsors & Recommendations Stop paying $500/month for 8 different marketing tools. Try GoHighLevel's all-in-one platform free for 14 days → https://link.ryanhanley.com/gohighlevel OpusClip: #1 AI video clipping and editing tool: https://link.ryanhanley.com/opus Riverside: HD Podcast & Video Software | Free Recording & Editing: https://link.ryanhanley.com/riverside WhisperFlow • Never waste time typing on your keyboard again: https://link.ryanhanley.com/whisperflow Episodes You Might Enjoy:From $2 Million Loss to World-Class Entrepreneur: https://lnk.to/delkFrom One Man Shop to $200M in Revenue: https://lnk.to/tommymelloIs Psilocybin the Gateway to Self-Mastery? https://lnk.to/80upZ9 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Chapter 1: What insights does Dr. Brian Keating share about ADHD and focus?
Science is what's called an infinite game. There is no winning. I can't win science. You specialize in one field and it's incredible competition. But as many of these people say, they basically are relay racers in this infinite chain, this race that goes back to prehistoric times when the first person came out of a cave and said, what are those dots in the night? What are those things up there?
Where do they come from? Where do I come from? So you're in this race, in this really race, and you get the baton for a very short amount of time. You run your leg, but your job is to pass it on. So be a hero to other people. Be in awe of other people that came before you. But realize you're one part in this infinite race against an unbeatable, in Mother Nature's undefeated.
Well, dude, I... We started in the green room talking about how the last time we talked, I think was like 21, 20.
Chapter 2: How does the FOCUS framework help in achieving success?
It was four or five years ago. Both of us were in very different places. It could have even been earlier than that. I just looked at the episode. I didn't even look at the timestamp. It's so bad. Both of us were in different places, right? And we both kind of grown and have these brands and outlets and Dude, you've just been doing so fun.
It's been so much fun to have, you know, had a chance to get to know you just a little bit, you know, a little bit. And, you know, in the podcast and now just to see how far you've taken it, how much you professionalized it. You know, you've turned it into a business as well as everything else you do. And it's just so fun to be able to reconnect.
Yeah, likewise, man. I've been following you and you're blowing up like the Big Bang yourself.
Chapter 3: What role does dark matter play in our understanding of the universe?
So it's a pleasure to be back on the show again. We shouldn't wait, you know. for just every presidential election cycle to be together.
That's true, that's true. All right, so I would not be doing myself justice if I didn't take this opportunity to ask you just a few of like the nerdy questions that I have. My first interaction with your content was when you rewrote the Galileo book or reprinted that book. I heard you on the Al Disher show. And I hear this, you know, this was very early in your kind of public persona.
And I just thought it was like the coolest fucking thing. I'm like, here's this nerdy dude who's like smart as hell, who's, you know, taking this knowledge, bringing it back into the world, like making it interesting again, talking about it. And you and you and James were chopping it up. And I was enamored by it. And and that and I've always been I was this close to going to school for astronomy.
This close, this close. I did not know that.
Chapter 4: How can ADHD be turned into a competitive advantage?
Okay, so I went and looked at a bunch of schools that had astronomy programs, the last of which was Vassar College. Wow. The problem with Vassar was their baseball field didn't have an outfield fence, so I did not become an astronomer. You want to talk about how trite some of the reasons are in which we choose the careers that we choose are?
I was this – that's what I wanted to go to school for.
It's so funny that you say that because, A, Edwin Hubble, who's the famous namesake of the Hubble Space Telescope, is the man who 100 years ago proposed that the universe is expanding and discovered evidence for it. He was a great athlete too. He was a runner and he had kind of this real devotion to his father that His father was kind of domineering like many of our fathers can be.
And he was like, no, you're going to go to law school whether you like it or not. And so he forced Edwin Hubble to go to law school and he went in the UK. He went to Oxford. And when he came back, he only came back with one – noticeable difference, which is that he developed a posh British accent. But he told his dad when he came back, he said, father, you know, I've decided not to do laws.
Chapter 5: What does the 'Dune' principle teach us about decision-making?
And his father said, what? He was outraged. He said, father, I'd rather be a second-rate astronomer than a first-rate lawyer. So apologies to all your lawyers. My brother's a lawyer, so I like to tease him with that.
That's OK. If you choose to be a lawyer, I think you're asking to be made fun of in some regard. So that's that's your that's your life choice you made. But it is funny how we make these small, seemingly large decisions at the time seem small and become a math major, which I can do even less with. So but OK, so I want to talk.
I want to stay away from like aliens and shit as much as I find that interesting. That's not what I want to ask you about. I was listening to a show the other day, and I went back and I tried to figure out who it was that said this, but it was a, we'll call it verified scientist. This guy was not an armchair Twitter ex-scientist. He was on, I can't remember.
Chapter 6: Why is losing sometimes beneficial for a career?
Maybe it was Huberman or something. I can't remember. It doesn't matter. But he threw out this kind of flippant comment or contextual comment that wasn't relevant to what they were talking about, and he just threw this in, which is dark matter might not even exist. And then he just kept going. And like in my mind, I like when like, wait, wait a minute.
I mean, I don't know one way or the other, but I don't feel like you can't just throw that out there and then move on. So so maybe like maybe just break down for the audience, because I find this this idea of dark matter to be very intoxicating as much. I only understand half of it.
Maybe what the theory is and like is there anything new that has come out to this idea that maybe it doesn't actually exist?
Oh, yeah. So it's a great question. And look, dark matter along with dark energy make up a tremendous amount of what we know about the universe. And yet we know almost nothing about these two substances. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about.
Chapter 7: How can we apply the physics of focus to everyday life?
The universe – if you thought of the universe, the energy in the universe as being a pie chart. So go to Excel, type in the pie chart and make it. And the pie chart would have the following. It would have these different components and it would have matter like you and I are made up of, protons, neutrons, in my case, croutons, baseballs, whatever you want. It has all this matter in it.
And then it has different forms of what's called radiation, which sounds scary, but it's just light or radio waves, Wi-Fi, et cetera. He wrote down how much energy is in the form of light, radiation, gamma rays, X-rays, whatever. And then you wrote down, well, what's in the form of these other two components that we know to exist, but I'll tell you more about them in just a second.
He wrote down dark matter and dark energy. So there's like four components on this pie chart. Matter, radiation... Dark matter or dark energy. And then you said, well, what does the pie chart look like? Well, it would be about 70% dark energy. It would be about 29% dark matter, so to speak.
Chapter 8: What are the implications of focusing on one path until successful?
And then it would be 1% everything else. So you and I are kind of the, not even the foam on the latte, Ryan. We're like the cinnamon sprinkled dust. You know, you go to Starbucks. We're like nothing. Literally, we're like 1%. And by the way, most of the matter in the universe, if you took that 1%, now you can chunk it up into other things, right? You can say, how much is the form of hydrogen?
How much is in the form of helium? How much is in the form of lithium, beryllium, boron? I keep going up the periodic table. And you'd get that 90% of that material that's in the form of matter, 90% of that 1% is basically hydrogen. You know, the hydrogen or maybe it's slightly more hydrogen in the form of matter that we have in molecules. Then the rest would be basically almost nothing.
So like the 10% of the 1% of the ordinary planets, rock stuff that we have is like stuff related to human beings. Okay. So we're almost not even the, we're like one grain of cinnamon essentially on the foam, on top of the latte, you know, sitting there steaming away. So dark matter is the second most abundant source of energy, mass energy in the universe.
And we've known about its existence for a hundred years. We've been able to infer the existence of dark matter for almost 100 years, and yet we've never, ever detected it. And it may be impossible to detect it. So this person that you were listening to, by the way, probably makes the rounds on podcast channels just the same.
And I know it's hard to sometimes tell the difference between a legitimate scientist, like I hope you're convinced I am. And someone who might be doing stuff for clicks or for attention, I don't know that person. Maybe they are, maybe they're not legitimate. But there's a lot of pseudoscience and nonsense that goes on on podcasts nowadays. So you just have to consider the source.
But it is true that there could be no dark matter, but then you'd have to replace the effects that we know that dark matter manifests as. You'd have to find another mechanism to reproduce those effects. Nobody says that there aren't these properties of...
The following situation in a galaxy like the Milky Way galaxy that we live in, there's sort of this known problem that the stars in the Milky Way galaxy are rotating around the black hole in the center of the galaxy at an extremely high rate. It's as if you were swinging a ball on a string. You're swinging a baseball on a string.
around your head it's going so fast you can't account like you couldn't account for it by the muscles of the person swinging it you'd have to find some other maybe there's some wind that just so happens to be making a tornado like a dust devil or whatever right around the person but in other words you'd have to come up with some other explanation besides the most simple explanation or the seemingly obvious explanation that there's dark matter
So basically how we know that something is there is because objects are being impacted by a force or something of that nature. We see the effect, but we're not seeing what's causing the effect. And that's where the idea of dark matter, dark energy comes from. Yeah.
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