How I Contaminated 500 Experiments (By Talking Too Much)
Dear Magicians,
Feynman taught: Don’t fool yourself.
Turns out, I’d been fooling myself for 5 years—every time I filled a silence I should have measured.
Let me explain.
I run a podcast. You may have heard of it. And if I forget to mention it, the trusty folks at Reddit are sure to remind me how bad a podcaster I am.
Here’s what I’ve learned after 500+ episodes: I talk too much.
Shocking, I know. A professor who loves the sound of his own voice.
But here’s the thing. Every experiment needs a detector. For years, I thought my detector was my mouth. I’d ask a question, get three seconds of silence, and immediately start explaining what I thought the answer should be.
You know what I was actually doing? I was contaminating the experiment. Like shining a flashlight directly into a telescope and wondering why I couldn’t see any stars.
So recently I tried something radical. I started shutting up.
Not forever. I still have a podcast to fill. But I began treating silence the way a physicist treats a vacuum chamber—as something precious that shouldn’t be polluted.
The results were immediate.
And humbling.
When I stopped filling every pause with my own brilliant thoughts, I discovered something uncomfortable: most of my questions weren’t actually questions. They were conclusions with a question mark stapled to the end.
“Don’t you think that…” isn’t a question. It’s a sales pitch wearing a disguise.
Real questions require actual silence. The kind that feels awkward. The kind that makes you want to jump in and save everyone from the discomfort.
Think about it. When you’re talking, you already know what you’re saying. The information content, for you, is exactly zero. You’re just broadcasting something that’s already in your head.
But when you’re silent?
That’s when you can learn something new.
I started tracking this. After reading brutal reviews of a dozen podcasts last year, I had real data. The conversations where I spoke 40% of the time were twice as highly rated as the ones where I spoke 60% of the time.
It’s tricky because I often am a guest on other people’s podcasts. But this is no excuse. Mathematics doesn’t fib. But apparently I do to myself if not you dear listener—every time I pretend my verbal diarrhea is adding value.
Now, I’m not suggesting you take a vow of silence. That’s a different kind of fooling yourself. I tried that once at a faculty meeting. People thought I was having a stroke.
What I’m suggesting is this: Treat silence like the scientific instrument it actually is.
Silence isn’t the absence of signal. It’s the highest-resolution detector you’ll ever build.
Your colleague asks you a question? Pause. Actually think. Let the silence do some work.
I know what you’re thinking. “But silence is uncomfortable!”
Yes. So is observing the CMB from the South Pole. We do it anyway because the data is worth it.
The discomfort of silence is just your ego screaming for attention. It wants to fill the space with anything—even garbage—just to prove you’re smart.
So this week, try these small experiments, (partially inspired by this article)
Pause 5 seconds before responding to a question
Catch yourself when you start a sentence with “Don’t you think…”
Track one meeting for your talk-time ratio
Ask a genuine question and actually wait for the answer.
Over time, you might notice:
When you’re “performing” vs. “detecting”
That quiet colleagues aren’t passive—they’re just contemplative.
What might get in your way:
Silence is genuinely uncomfortable (social mammal wiring)
Academic culture actively rewards verbal performance
Until next time, have a M.A.G.I.C. Week,
Brian
Appearance
In this episode on The James Altucher show, I sit down with entrepreneur, writer, and unconventional thinker James Altucher to explore the explosive rise of AI, its impact on education, business, and creativity, and the evolving world of knowledge and self-publishing.
Genius
Past guest and Professor Alysson Muotri from the University of California, San Diego, will deliver the Stephen Hawking Memorial Lecture at the Motor Neurone Disease Association annual symposium in December, focusing on space environments affect human brain cells.
He believes research in space is very likely to accelerate finding a cure for motor neurone disease, since microgravity and cosmic radiation speed up the aging of brain cells, making it possible to study neurodegeneration and cell senescence much faster than on Earth. Currently, scientists lack an age-relevant human model for motor neurone disease, and Muotri’s approach using space-induced acceleration offers a promising new strategy to advance understanding and treatment.
Image
Pleased to announce that the POLITE project (Polarized Observations of Lorentz Invariance Transient Experiment) telescope has achieved first light — a new milestone in testing whether nature obeys Lorentz invariance across the sky. The telescope will map faint polarized signals to probe symmetry, search for new physics, and push the limits of our standard models.
Conversation
I spoke with Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in VR, about where it will take us next to expand human consciousness.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Jaron Lanier explores how technology reshapes perception, identity, and the future of humanity. From the psychology of virtual reality to the energy demands of modern AI, we trace how today’s tools influence what it means to be human—and what kind of humans we might ultimately become.
Sponsored
This edition of the Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message is sponsored by Shortform.
Steven Pinker’s new book When Everyone Knows was fascinating. But it was a challenge to prepare for our interview because Steven is so prolific. To understand his body of work more fully, I relied on Shortform’s superpowered guides. Their app covers The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now, with commentary that connects Pinker’s ideas to thinkers like Daniel Kahneman and Richard Dawkins.
As a scientist and professor, I also use Shortform’s Chrome extension daily—it generates instant AI summaries of long articles, condensing Nobel-caliber content into digestible insights without slowing me down before my next lecture.My audience gets an exclusive deal: start a free trial plus get three extra months free with an annual plan at shortform.com/briankeating.
Upcoming Episode
Anil Ananthaswamy will be on The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast soon.
He’s the award-winning science journalist who wrote Through Two Doors at Once, an intellectual detective story tracking how the double-slit experiment—that deceptively simple setup where particles behave impossibly as both waves and particles—has haunted physics for two centuries and continues forcing us to question whether reality exists before we observe it, whether the universe splits with each measurement, and if quantum mechanics demands we abandon our intuitions about space and time itself.
What would you ask someone who’s traveled the world interviewing the physicists conducting cutting-edge variations of this “most fundamental of quantum experiments” about what their results reveal regarding the nature of reality—submit your questions here.