Naval Ravikant 谈阅读、决策与生活

嘿，我是 Shane Parrish，欢迎收听新一期的《知识项目》。我们拆解可操作的策略，帮助你做出更好的决策、学习新事物、过上更好的生活。本期嘉宾是了不起的 Naval Ravikant。Naval 是 AngelList 的 CEO 兼联合创始人，投资了超过 100 家公司，包括 Uber、Twitter、Yammer 等等。别担心，我们不谈他的早期投资。他是一位极其深刻的思想家，在很多事情上挑战现状。他深入思考了我们关心的话题，比如阅读习惯、人生决策。提醒一下，这是我做过的最长的一期播客，我们的对话持续了两个多小时。如果你像我一样，你会记很多笔记。节目中提到的所有书籍和网站列表，请访问 FarnamStreetBlog.com/podcast 查看 show notes。那是 F-A-R-N-A-M Street Blog 点 com 斜杠 podcast。我们的学习部落成员可以获取文字稿。如果你想加入，请访问 FarnamStreetBlog.com/tribe。除了文字稿，我们还有世界上最好的在线读书小组和其他福利。闲话少说，有请 Naval。开始之前，先快速念一段赞助商广告。我坚持完全披露，所以我不仅要说明我个人每周都用这个赞助商来规划餐食，而且我还是它的所有者之一。Mealime 是全球下载量最大的食品应用之一。人人都要吃饭，只是有些人做得更好。如果你曾难以坚持节食，或在超市里漫无目的地闲逛却不知道吃什么，Mealime 能帮你组织起来，根据你的个人饮食偏好提供快速简单的餐食。只需选择本周的食谱，Mealime 就会为你生成购物清单，并帮助你烹饪。一旦你试过，就会发现其他购物方式简直疯狂。你节省时间和金钱，减轻压力，吃得更健康。免费下载 Mealime 应用，适用于安卓或 iPhone，或访问 Mealime.com 网站。那是 M-E-A-L-I-M-E 点 com。欢迎来到节目。今天能和你聊天，我太兴奋了，我想问你很多我脑子里一直想着的问题。

Hey, it's Shane Parrish and welcome to a new episode of The Knowledge Project, where we deconstruct actionable strategies that you can use to make better decisions, learn new things, and live a better life. This time around we have the amazing Naval Ravikant. Naval is the CEO and co-founder of AngelList. He's invested in more than 100 companies including Uber, Twitter, Yammer, and so many others. Don't worry, we're not going to talk about his early stage investing. He's an incredibly deep thinker who challenges the status quo on so many things. He's thought deeply about stuff that's near and dear to us like reading habits, decision-making in life. Just a heads up, this is the longest podcast I've ever done. Our conversation lasted over two hours, and if you're like me, you're going to take a lot of notes. A complete list of books and sites mentioned is available in the show notes at FarnamStreetBlog.com/podcast. That's F-A-R-N-A-M Street Blog dot com slash podcast. A transcript is available for members of our Learning Tribe. If you want to join, head on over to FarnamStreetBlog.com/tribe. In addition to transcripts, we have the world's best online reading group and a host of other goodies. Without further ado, here's Naval. Before I get started, here's a quick word from our sponsor. I believe in full disclosure, so I want to point out that not only do I use this sponsor personally for my weekly meal planning, but I'm also one of the owners. Mealime is one of the most downloaded food apps in the world. Everybody eats, some just do it better than others. If you've ever had trouble sticking to a diet or wandered the grocery store endlessly with no real menu in mind, Mealime gets you organized with quick and easy meals matched up to your personal dietary preferences. Just pick the recipes for the week, Mealime builds you a shopping list with all the ingredients you need, and helps you cook. Once you try it, you'll see it's crazy to grocery shop any other way. You save time and money, reduce stress, and eat well. Download the free Mealime app for your Android or iPhone, or check them out on the web at Mealime.com. That's M-E-A-L-I-M-E dot com. Welcome to the show. I am so excited to get to talk to you today and ask you a whole bunch of questions that I have on my mind.

哦，谢谢邀请。我很兴奋能来。我一直是你的作品的长期粉丝。谢谢。

Oh, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. I've been a longtime fan of your work. Thank you.

让我们从简单的问题开始。你能告诉我你具体做什么吗？

Let's get started with something simple. Can you tell me a little bit about what you do?

其实没那么简单。我很难说清楚我具体做什么。我的日常工作是我担任 AngelList 的 CEO，这家公司是我大约七年前创立的。AngelList 是科技行业初创公司的平台，我们帮助创业者融资，帮助创业者招聘人才，也帮助人们找到初创公司的工作。最近我们收购了 Product Hunt，所以我们也帮助公司向客户发布产品。所以它基本上是早期科技生态的一站式服务：无论你是融资还是投资，我们有最大的在线平台；无论你是招聘人才还是被招聘，我们有最大的初创招聘在线平台；无论你是想试用新产品还是为产品寻找客户，我们也是最大的发布平台。所以它变成了一个更大的东西。这是我的日常工作，但我也参与了很多其他事情。我投资了大约 200 家公司，担任许多公司的顾问，并在多个董事会任职。偶尔发推文。我还是一个加密货币基金的小合伙人，因为我非常喜欢这些币：比特币、以太坊、Zcash 等等。我总是在搞些新东西。我总有一堆我忘记的副项目。我讨厌这样。

It's actually not that simple. I have a hard time saying what I do. My day job is that I am CEO of AngelList, the company that I started almost seven years ago now. AngelList is this platform for startups in the tech industry, and we help entrepreneurs raise money, we help entrepreneurs recruit talent into their startups, and we also help people find jobs at startups. And now recently we acquired Product Hunt, so we also help companies launch to customers. So it's basically a one-stop shop for the early-stage tech ecosystem: whether you're raising money or you're investing money, we have the largest online platform for that; whether you're recruiting talent or whether you're being recruited, we have the largest online platform for startup recruiting; and then whether you're looking for a new product to try out or whether you're looking for customers for your product, we're also the largest online platform for launching that. So it's sort of become this bigger thing. That's sort of my day job, but I'm also involved in a bunch of other things. I've invested in about 200 companies, advisor to a bunch, and on a bunch of boards. Occasionally I tweet. I'm also a small partner in a cryptocurrency fund because I'm really into these coins: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, and so forth. And I'm always cooking up something. I always have a bunch of side projects that I forget. I hate that.

你是怎么记住所有这些的？你典型的一天是什么样的？

How do you keep track of all that? What is your typical day look like?

嗯，这就是好的部分。我没有典型的一天，我也不想要典型的一天。你知道，如果有典型的一天，我通常会在 AngelList 的办公室里，但我基本上主要通过电子邮件、电话或会议来运作，或者窝在家里。所以有些日子我完全在家工作。有些日子我不工作。我实际上甚至试图摆脱必须在特定时间出现在特定地点的概念。你知道，我关心的只是：我是否在做我想做的事？我是否高效？我是否快乐？我真的想摆脱每周 40 小时、60 小时、80 小时，或者朝九晚五，或者角色、工作、身份这些概念。它们感觉都像紧身衣。

Well, that's the good part. I don't have a typical day, nor do I want a typical day. You know, if there is a typical day, I'm usually inside my office at AngelList, but I'm basically just operating mostly on email or phone or meetings, or squirreled up at home. So there are days where I just work completely from home. There are days that I don't work. I'm actually even trying to get rid of this concept of having to be in a specific place at a specific time. You know, all I care about is: am I doing what I want to do? And am I being productive? And am I happy? And I really want to break away from this idea of 40-hour weeks or 60-hour weeks or 80-hour weeks or nine-to-five or roles or jobs or identities. It just all feels like a straitjacket.

你是我认识的最好的读者之一。你称自己为有意识的书虫，你读了很多书。你最初是怎么对阅读产生兴趣的？

You're one of the best four ratios readers I know. You've called yourself a conscious bookworm and you've read a ton. How did you first get interested in reading?

阅读是我的初恋。你知道，在我的童年，大约 9、10、11 岁的时候，我是个挂钥匙的孩子。我妈妈打多份工，晚上还要上学。我和哥哥由单亲妈妈在纽约市抚养长大，我们住在纽约市一个非常安全的区域。所以基本上，图书馆就是我的课后中心。放学后，我就直接去图书馆，一直待到关门，然后回家。这就是我的日常。但我认为即使在那个时候，我已经喜欢上书了。我小时候就读书。我记得在印度祖父母家，我还是个小孩子，坐在地板上翻看我祖父的《读者文摘》，那是当时唯一能读的东西。我的意思是，现在当然有琳琅满目的信息，每个人随时都能读到任何东西，但那时选择要有限得多。所以我会读漫画书、每一期《读者文摘》、故事书，你知道，任何我能拿到的东西。神秘小说，我非常喜欢神秘小说。所以我想我一直喜欢阅读，因为我实际上反社会且内向，从小我就沉浸在文字和思想的世界里。我认为部分原因来自于一个幸运的环境：我小时候没有人强迫我读什么。我认为父母和老师有一种倾向，说‘哦，你应该读这个，不要读那个。’而现实是，我读了很多按今天标准会被视为精神垃圾食品的东西。但最终你会喜欢上阅读。你吃完了垃圾食品，然后开始吃健康食品。你的品味会逐渐提高。所以我认为在某种程度上，这就是发生在我身上的事，因为我从漫画书开始，然后进入神秘小说，然后进入奇幻，然后是科幻，然后从科幻进入科学，然后是数学，然后是哲学。它就这样一直往上爬。但幸运的是，在我七岁或十六岁的时候，身边没有人说‘哦，你不应该读那个。’

Reading was my first love. You know, in my childhood, when I was around 9, 10, 11 years old, I was a latchkey kid. My mom was working multiple jobs and then she was going to school at night. We were raised by a single mother, my brother and I, in New York City, and we were in a part of New York City that was very safe. So basically, the library was my after-school center. I'd come back from school, I'd just go straight to the library, and I'd just hang out there until they closed, and then I'd come home. So that was just my daily routine. But I think even by that point in time, I'd already loved books. I was reading books as a child. I remember at my grandparents' house in India, I'd be a little kid on the floor going through all of my grandfather's Reader's Digests, which was all there was to read. I mean, now of course there's a smorgasbord of information out there, everybody can read anything all the time, but back then it was much more limited. So I would read comic books, every Reader's Digest, storybooks, you know, whatever we could get my hands on. Mysteries, I was big into mysteries. So I think I just always loved to read because I was actually antisocial and introverted, and I was just lost in the world of words and ideas from an early age. I think some of it comes from the happy circumstance that when I was young, nobody forced me on what to read. I think there's a tendency among parents and teachers to say, 'Oh, you should read this but don't read that.' The reality is that I read a lot that by today's standards would be considered mental junk food. But eventually you just get to like reading. You run out of the junk food, and then you start eating the healthy food. Your taste kind of gradually improves. So I think to some extent that's what happened with me, because I started from comic books, and then went from that into mysteries, and went from that into fantasy, then sci-fi, and then from sci-fi into science, and then mathematics, and then philosophy. So it just kind of kept climbing up the stack. But I'm lucky that there was no one around when I was seven years old or 16 saying, 'Oh, you shouldn't read that.'

我经常吐槽。现在读的大部分东西都是这样。纸质书、电脑或 Kindle 上读，图方便。主要是 Kindle。不是 Kindle 设备本身，它很烂。在 iPad 上读。但对于我真正喜欢的书，我也会买纸质版，这样我就有实体书了。所以没有借口不读书。你知道，一本真正的好书只要 10 或 20 美元，却能以有意义的方式改变你的人生。所以我不认为在这上面省钱是明智的。即使在我身无分文的时候，我也总是花钱买书。我从不把这看作开销。对我来说这是投资。我花在买书上的钱可能是我实际读完的十倍。换句话说，每买 200 美元的书，最后真正读完的只有 10%。所以我只读了 20 美元的书，但这仍然完全值得。

I diss stuff. It's most of what you read today. Physical or on a computer or Kindle for convenience. It's mostly Kindle. It's not the Kindle device, it sucks. On an iPad. But for books that I really, really like, I will also buy a physical copy so I have books. So there's no excuse not to read it. You know, a really good book costs $10 or $20 and can change your life in a meaningful way. So it's not something I believe in saving money on. And this was even back when I was broke, I had no money. I always spent money on books. I never viewed that as an expense. That's an investment to me. And I probably spend ten times as much money on books as I actually get through. So in other words, it's like for every $200 worth of books I buy, actually end up making it to 10%. So I'll read $20 worth of books, but it's still absolutely worth it.

你和我在这方面有共同点。是的。而且对于任何一本杰作，比如我读了一本书，知道它很棒，我会买好几本。一部分送人，一部分因为我想家里到处都有。最近我发现我读的书和以前一样多，甚至更多。因为我想这是我在 Twitter 上看到的一个账号发的推文，这个叫 Ilah Service 的人，他基本上说，我不想读所有的书。我只想反复读那 100 本伟大的书。我觉得这很有道理。所以更重要的是找出哪些书对你来说是伟大的，因为不同的书对不同的人有启发。然后真正吸收它们。因为我不知道你怎么样，但我的注意力很差。我不得不，你知道，我浏览，快速阅读，跳来跳去。我无法告诉你书中的具体段落或引文。但在某个深层次上，你确实吸收了它们，它们成为你心灵织锦中的线。所以它们确实编织进去了。有些书，我相信你也有这种感觉，你拿起一本书开始读，觉得这挺有意思，挺不错的。然后你越来越有一种似曾相识的感觉。读到三分之二或一半的时候，你意识到你以前读过这本书。这完全没问题。这意味着你准备好重读了。

You and I have that in common. Yeah. And anything that's one of the greats, like if I read a book and I know that it's amazing, I'll buy multiple copies. Partially to give away, partially because I have the volume around the house. And these days I find myself reading as much or more as I do read. Because I think this was a tweet from an account on Twitter that I saw, this guy Ilah Service, and he basically said, you know, I don't want to read everything. I just wanna read the 100 great books over and over again. And I think there's a lot to that. So it's really more about identifying what are the great books to you, because different books speak to different people. And then really absorbing those. Because I don't know about you, but I have very poor attention. I have to, you know, I skim, I speed-read, I jump around. And I could not tell you specific passages or quotes from books. But at some deep level, you do absorb them and they become part of the threads of the tapestry of your psyche. So they do kind of weave in there. There are books that I'm sure you've had this feeling where you pick up a book, you start reading, like oh this is pretty interesting, this is pretty good. And you're getting this increasing sense of deja vu. And then about two-thirds or halfway through the book, you realize you've read this book before. And that's perfectly fine. It means you were ready to reread it.

你重读哪些书？好问题。我边聊边打开 Kindle 应用。但我通常总是在读一些科学方面的书。比如我刚重读了《七堂极简物理课》。好像是这个名字。我至少读了两遍。我正在重读《人类简史》。我太喜欢那本书了。我几乎总是在读或重读吉杜·克里希那穆提或奥修的作品。他们是我最喜欢的哲学家。我在读一本关于勒内·基拉尔模仿理论的书。更像是一本概述，因为我读不下去他的原著。我在读蒂姆·费里斯的《巨人的工具》。这是他向很多高绩效者学习的心得汇编。我在重读特德·姜的《你一生的故事》。这是我最喜欢的科幻小说之一。我在读一本叫《热信息复杂性》的书。实际上是我一个朋友写的，还没出版。我刚读完罗伯特·西奥迪尼的《先发影响力》。我觉得不需要读完整本书也能抓住要点，但读一读还是好的。我确实读完了。我最近重读了威尔和阿里尔·杜兰特的《历史的教训》。一本很棒的小书。是的。我目前正在读威尔·杜兰特的《哲学的故事》。我现在有个小孩，所以有很多儿童相关的书，我主要把它们当作参考资料。最近读了爱默生和切斯特菲尔德。你这里有一本列夫·托尔斯泰的书。我还有另一本奥修的书。《妄想、伤害还是什么》？我使用并喜爱的一个博客，我保存了其中的片段。艾伦·沃茨。看，斯科特·亚当斯。我最近重读了《上帝的残骸》。我一个朋友正在重读，所以我又捡起来了。还有很多。也许就出去淘一淘。这里有一本小小的米塞斯的书。还有《卧底经济学家》。理查德·巴赫的书。还有一些杰德·麦肯纳的书。我最近试图重读《白鲸》和《哈姆雷特》，想重新接触小说，但两本都没读完。

What are the books you're rereading? Good question. I'll pull up my Kindle app as we talk. But usually I'm always reading some books in science. Like I just reread '7 Brief Lessons in Physics'. I think that was the name of it. I read that one at least twice. I'm rereading 'Sapiens' again. I love that book so much. I'm pretty much always reading or rereading something by either Jiddu Krishnamurti or Osho. Those are kind of my favorite other philosophers. I'm reading a book on Rene Girard's mimetic theory. It's more of an overview book because I couldn't make it through his actual writings. I'm reading 'Tools of Titans' by Tim Ferriss. It's a compilation of what he's learned from a lot of high performers. I'm rereading 'Stories of Your Life and Others' by Ted Chiang. It's one of my favorite sci-fi novels. I'm reading a book called 'Thermal Info Complexity'. It's actually by a friend of mine, it's not published yet. I just finished reading 'Pre-Suasion' by Robert Cialdini. I don't think I needed to read the entire book to get the point, but it was still good to read it. But I did. I recently reread 'The Lessons of History' by Will and Ariel Durant. It's a great little book. Yeah. I am currently reading 'The Story of Philosophy' also by Will Durant. I have a young kid now, so I've got a lot of child-related books that I use more as reference material than anything else. Recently read 'Emerson' and 'Chesterfield'. You've got a Leo Tolstoy book here. I've got another Osho book. 'Delusion, Damage, or Something'? Since blog that I use and love, I have pieces of it saved up. Alan Watts. See, Scott Adams. I reread 'God's Debris' recently. A friend of mine is rereading it, so I picked it up again. There's tons. Maybe just go out and hunt. Little von Mises book here. There's 'The Undercover Economist'. The Richard Bach book. There's some Jed McKenna books. I was recently trying to reread 'Moby Dick' and 'Hamlet' just to try and get back into fiction, but I didn't make it through either.

你为什么会在一天中留出时间来重读或阅读？这是你一贯的做法，还是你有时间就做？

Why do you set aside time in your day to reread or like to read at all? Or is it like a consistent thing or do you fit it in when you have time?

我在对别的一切都感到无聊的时候读书。但好消息是我很容易感到无聊，所以总有书能激发想象力。通常是在晚上睡觉前。但这不是一成不变的。度假的时候我会读书。但如果我坐在 Lyft 或 Uber 里，我会读书。有时早上在家锻炼后，我就读书。有时醒来，我就拿起手机读。我只是不设定——我不是一个很有纪律的人，所以我不给自己定这些硬性规则。但好消息是我就是喜欢读书。因为我喜欢读书，所以每当我觉得无聊又有时间的时候，我就读。而且多亏了 iPhone、Kindle 和 iPad，它们让读书变得非常方便。哦，我这里有两本书：费曼的《完全合理的偏差》，还有詹姆斯·格雷克写的关于费曼的《天才》。所以他们在对话。我翻看着。马特·里德利的《万物的进化》是我最喜欢的作者之一。我读了他所有的书，重读了他所有的书。这里还有一点戴尔·卡耐基。《三体》。《活出生命的意义》。还有很多。《人类简史》又来了。还有很多书。你看得出来。听起来像我的梦想图书馆。我是说，现在有几百本书下载了。甚至不是——我是说我们可以整个播客都坐在这里聊书。

I read when I'm bored of everything else. But the good news is I get bored very easily, so there's always a book to capture the imagination. Usually at night time before I go to bed. But it's not a flawless thing. When I'm on vacation I'll read. But if I'm sitting in a Lyft or Uber, I'll read. Sometimes in the morning at home after I've worked out, I'll just read. Sometimes when I wake up, I'll just grab my phone and read. I just don't set—I'm not a very disciplined person, so I don't really set these hard fast rules for myself. But the good news is I just love to read. And because I love to read, whenever I'm bored and I have time, I just do it. And thanks to the iPhone and the Kindle and the iPad, you know, they just make it really easy. Oh, I've got two books here: 'Perfectly Reasonable Deviations' by Feynman, and then 'Genius' which is the James Gleick book about Feynman. So this is they're talking. I'm flipping through. 'The Evolution of Everything' by Matt Ridley is one of my favorite authors. I read everything by him, reread everything by him. There's little Dale Carnegie in here. 'The Three-Body Problem'. 'Man's Search for Meaning'. There's lots. 'Sapiens' again. And a lot of books out there. You can tell. Sounds like my dream library. I mean, right now it's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books downloaded. It's not even like—I mean we could sit here the entire podcast.

你之前说过你把书看作一次性的。你是怎么开始这样看待书的？这对你读什么有什么影响？

You've said before you think of books as throwaways. How did you come to think about books like that and what impact has that had on what you read?

我是说，这其实是互联网的影响。互联网出现后，我认为它摧毁了每个人的注意力。因为现在所有人类的作品随时都能获取，而且你不断被打断。所以我们的注意力下降了，专注力下降了。但与此同时，我们变得更挑剔了。我们也想要干货。而书的问题是，写一本书、出版它、出版一本纸质书，需要大量的工作、精力和金钱。所以有时人们会把简单的想法包装成冗长的书。这大概是我最不喜欢的书了。这也是我避开整个商业和自助类书籍的原因，因为通常你只有一个好主意，却埋藏在几百上千页和大量轶事中。所以发生的情况是，我注意到在 90 年代末，我读书不像以前那么多了，我开始读更多博客。也就是少读书，多读博客。

I mean, that's really an impact of the internet. Once the internet came along, I think it's destroyed everybody's attention span. Because now all of humanity's works are available to you at any given time, and you're being interrupted constantly. So just our attention span goes down, our ability to focus goes down. But at the same time, we just become more judicious. We also want the meat. And the problem with books is that to write a book, to publish it, to publish a physical dead tree book, just takes a lot of work and effort and money. So sometimes people start putting long wrapping, long books around simple ideas. Those are probably my least favorite books. It's kind of why I avoid the whole business and self-help category, because you generally have one good idea and it's buried in hundreds or thousands of pages and lots of anecdotes. So what happened was I just noticed that sometime in the late 90s I stopped reading as much as I used to, and I started reading more blogs. That's reading less books and more blogs.

像 Farnam Street、Kevin Simler 的博客、Melting Asphalt 这些优秀博客，你能看到非常聪明的人提炼、简化并写出这些精彩内容，但通常只有一两页或三页。所以我曾非常沉迷博客，但后来就不读书了。其实很多古老的智慧都在书里，书籍承载的是全人类的集体作品，而不只是当下正在写博客的人。所以我意识到我错过了那些。后来随着 Kindle 和 iBooks 的出现，我开始像对待博客一样对待书籍：我浏览博客时会快速扫过大量文章，直到找到一篇特别有趣的，然后通读全文，可能还会做笔记。现在我用同样的方式对待书籍：我会快速浏览大量书籍，放下它们，前后跳跃，中间翻阅，直到找到有趣的部分。我只读那一部分，不会因为没读完一整本书而感到内疚。因为一本书就像一个博客存档，对吧？一个博客可能有 300 篇文章，你只需要读当下需要的 2、3 或 5 篇。我认为你可以用同样的方式看待书籍。这让我们重新打开了书籍的世界，而不是让它被埋没。

Great blogs like Farnam Street, Kevin Simler's blog, Melting Asphalt, and so on—you get incredibly smart people distilling, simplifying, and writing these great things, but it's only a page or two or three pages. So I got really into blogs, but then I stopped reading books. A lot of the oldest wisdom is actually in books, and with books you're talking about the combined works of all of humanity, as opposed to just who happens to be blogging right now. So I realized I missed that. Then with the Kindle and iBooks coming along, that allowed me to start treating books like I treat blogs: when I go to a blog, I'll skim through lots of articles until I find one that looks really interesting, then I'll read that whole article all the way through and maybe take notes. So now I treat books the same way: I'll skim through a large number of books, I'll put them down, I'll jump around—back, forward, middle—until I find a part that's interesting. I'll just consume that piece, and I won't feel guilty about having to finish the entire book. Because a book is like a blog archive, right? A blog might have 300 posts on it, and you can read just the 2 or 3 or 5 that you need right now. I think you can think of a book the same way. And that opens the world of books back up to us instead of it being buried somewhere.

我觉得我认识的很多人目前都卡在某本书上。如果你问人们是否读书，每个人都说自己读书，每个人都说自己在读一本书，他们能回答出在读哪本书。但现实是，真正读书并读完书的人非常少。

I think many people I know are currently stuck on a book somewhere. If you ask people if they read, everybody says they read, everybody says they're reading a book, they can answer which book they're reading. But the reality is very few people actually read and actually finish books.

是的，我认为这很可能是因为我们给自己设定了各种社会和个人规则：你必须读完一本书，你必须读对你有益的书，你不能读垃圾食品般的书，这是当下的热门书，等等。现实是，我实际上并没有人们想象的读那么多。我每天大概读一到两个小时——这让我处于前 0.01%——我认为仅此一点就解释了我生活中取得的任何物质成功以及我可能拥有的智慧。因为普通人不会每天读一小时书；我认为普通人每天只读一分钟甚至更少。所以，让阅读成为一种真正的习惯是最重要的事。如何养成习惯并不重要。这很像锻炼或健身：每天做点什么，几乎做什么都不重要。那些纠结于‘我应该举重还是打网球还是做普拉提还是高强度训练法还是快乐健身’的人，他们忽略了重点。重要的是每天做点什么，做什么并不重要。同样，我认为重要的是每天阅读。读什么几乎不重要，因为最终你会读到足够多的东西，你的兴趣会引导你，这会极大地改善你的生活。所以，就像最适合你的锻炼是你每天都有足够热情去做的那项，同样，我认为最好的读物是那些——书籍、博客、推特或任何包含思想、信息和学习的东西——你一直都有热情去读的那些。

Yeah, and I think that's probably because of all these societal and personal rules that we've put up: you must finish a book, you must read books that are good for you, you can't read junk food books, this is the hot book right now, and so on. The reality is, I don't actually read that much compared to what people think. The reason I probably read one to two hours a day—which puts me in the top 0.01%—I think that alone accounts for any material success that I've had in my life and the intelligence that I might have. Because real people don't read an hour a day; real people I think read a minute a day or less. So making it an actual habit is the most important thing. How you make it a habit doesn't matter. It's very much like exercise or working out: do something every day, it almost doesn't matter what you do. So the people who are obsessing over 'should I be weight training or should I be doing tennis or should I be doing Pilates or high-intensity training method versus the happy body'—they're missing the point. The important thing is to do something every day, it doesn't matter what it is. The same way, I would argue the important thing is to read every day. It almost doesn't matter what you read, because eventually you'll read enough things and your interest will lead you there, and that will dramatically improve your life. So just like the best workout for you is the one that you're excited enough to do every day, the same way I would say the best books to read are the ones—books or blogs or Twitter or whatever, anything with ideas and information and learning—the best ones to read are the ones that you're excited about reading all the time.

我认识的那些阅读量很大的人，他们都有你描述的那种阅读习惯。你是一个视觉型的人——这是从哪来的？

The people that I know who read quite a bit, they have a reading habit like you described. You're a very visual person—where did that come from?

哦，那可能来自 Tim Ferriss 的播客。我不认为我比其他人更有习惯性。我认为人类完全是习惯的动物。作为幼儿，我们生来没有习惯回路；我们本质上是一张白纸，然后我们让自己习惯化——我们学习模式，被条件化，并利用这些来应对日常生活。习惯是好的：习惯可以让你在后台处理某些事情，这样你的新皮层、你的前额叶就可以保持可用，以解决全新的问题。但我们也会无意识地在后台养成习惯，并保持几十年，我们可能没有意识到它们对我们有害。所以我们需要在一定程度上摆脱它们。我们的生活态度、情绪、幸福水平、抑郁水平——这些也是习惯。我们是否评判他人？我们多久吃一次饭？我们吃什么食物？我们是走路还是坐着？我们运动吗？我们锻炼吗？我们阅读吗？这些都是习惯。你绝对需要习惯来运作；你不能像第一次遇到那样解决生活中的每一个问题。但我们所做的是积累所有这些习惯，把它们放入身份、自我、我们自己的包裹中，然后我们依附于它：‘我是肖恩，我就是这样；我是纳瓦尔，我就是这样。’能够解除自己的条件反射，能够拆解你的习惯并说：‘好吧，那是我可能从小时候为了吸引父母注意而养成的习惯，现在我只是不断强化它，并称之为我身份的一部分。但它还在为我服务吗？它让我更快乐吗？它让我更健康吗？它让我完成我现在想完成的任何事情吗？’这非常重要。所以我不认为我更有习惯性；事实上，我认为我比大多数人更少习惯性。我不喜欢规划我的一天。但就我确实拥有的习惯而言，我试图让它们更刻意，而不是历史的偶然。

Oh, that might have come from the Tim Ferriss podcast. I don't think I'm more habitual than anybody else. I think human beings are entirely creatures of habit. As young children, we're born with no habit loops; we're essentially born as blank slates, and then we habituate ourselves—we learn patterns, we get conditioned, and we use that to get through everyday life. Habits are good: habits can allow you to background-process certain things so that your neocortex, your frontal lobe, stays available to solve brand-new problems. But we also unconsciously pick up habits in the background, and we keep them for decades, and we may not realize that they're bad for us. So we need to move on from them to some extent. Our attitude in life, our mood, our happiness levels, depression levels—these are also habits. Do we judge people? How often do we eat? What kinds of food do we eat? Do we walk or do we sit? Do we move? Do we exercise? Do we read? These are habits as well. You absolutely need habits to function; you cannot solve every problem in life as if it's the first time it's thrown at you. But what we do is we accumulate all these habits, we put them in the bundle of identity, ego, ourselves, and then we get attached to that: 'I'm Shane, this is the way I am; I'm Naval, this is the way I am.' And it's really important to be able to uncondition yourself, to be able to take your habits apart and say, 'Okay, well, that's a habit that I probably picked up from when I was a toddler and I was trying to get my parents' attention, and now I've just reinforced it and reinforced it and reinforced it, and I call it part of my identity. But is it serving me anymore? Is it making me happier? Is it making me healthier? Is it making me accomplish whatever I want to set out to accomplish right now?' So I don't think I'm more habitual; in fact, I would argue I am less habitual than most people. I don't like to structure my day. But to the extent that I do have habits, I'm trying to make them more deliberate rather than accidents of history.

你现在正在尝试改变的一个习惯是什么？你在做什么？

What's a habit that you're trying to change right now? What are you working on?

嗯，过去几年我做了很多习惯改变。我现在有每日锻炼的习惯，这是一个好习惯。我大幅减少了饮酒——没有完全戒掉，但基本不喝了。我戒掉了咖啡因。我遵循旧石器饮食法，虽然我选择了一种变体，我称之为‘类旧石器饮食’：我试图做到旧石器，但我经常失败，但我不会为此自责，因为我觉得即使接近它也比历史上我的状态要好。我试图养成冥想习惯但失败了，但我养成了保持冥想状态的习惯。所以我经历了很多习惯。目前我可能想培养的是更规律地做瑜伽，但我还没有真正制定计划。顺便说一句，我拒绝很多当今兜售的关于如何表现和打破习惯的东西。我知道有一本非常流行的书——我甚至推荐过——它谈论习惯背后的科学，其中一个令人沮丧的结论，我认为来自斯坦福，是你不能打破习惯，你只能替换它们。那是胡说八道。我确实打破过习惯。

Well, I did a lot of habit changes over the last few years. So I've now got a daily workout that I do, which is a great habit. I cut down heavily on drinking—it's not fully eliminated, but it's mostly gone. I dropped caffeine. I'm on the Paleo diet, although I elected to do a variation of it that I call the 'Paleo-ish' diet: I try to be Paleo but I fail constantly, but I don't beat myself up over it because I feel that even approximating towards it is better than where I have been historically. I tried to build a meditation habit but I failed, but I have made a habit of being meditative. So I've gone through lots of habits. Probably the one that I'm currently would like to cultivate is doing yoga more regularly, but I haven't really formed a plan around that. And by the way, I reject a lot of the stuff that's peddled around today about how you perform and break habits. I know there's this very popular book—one that I even recommended—which talks about the science behind habits, and one of its depressing conclusions, I think this came out of Stanford, is that you can't break habits, you can only replace them. And that's BS. I've definitely broken habits.

习惯完全如此。所以我认为你可以去条件化自己。你无法消除训练，只是很难。所以这需要努力，需要付出。通常重大的习惯改变都伴随着强烈的欲望动机。瑜伽那个，我会去努力。我还没有一个很好的计划，还没有真正解决它。

Habits completely. And so I think you can uncondition yourself. You can't untrain yourself, it's just hard. So it just takes work, it takes effort. And usually the big habit changes come when they're strong desire motivators attached to them. So the yoga one, I'm gonna work on. I don't yet have a great plan on that one. I haven't tackled that one properly yet.

我正在努力的一个大习惯，很难用任何正常人都能理解的方式解释，但我正在尝试关闭我的猴子思维。我认为我们出生时就像白板一样，活在当下，只是通过本能对环境做出反应，生活在所谓的真实世界中。青春期到来时，欲望开始萌发，你第一次真正渴望某样东西，并开始长远规划。因此，你开始大量思考，建立身份和自我去获取想要的东西。这很正常也很健康，是人类动物的一部分。但我认为在某个时刻它会失控，我们不断地在脑海中自言自语，走在街上时在脑中播放小电影，但实际上并没有人在那里。当然，如果你把脑海中的想法说出来，你会被当成疯子关起来。但现实是，如果街上走着 2000 人，我认为在任何时刻都有 1000 人在脑海中自言自语。他们不断评判所见的一切，回放昨天发生的事，幻想明天会发生什么，完全脱离了基本现实。这在做长远规划或解决问题时可能有好处，对我们作为生存和复制机器也有好处，但我认为它对幸福非常有害。在我看来，头脑应该是仆人、工具，而不是我的主人。它不应该 24 小时控制我、驱使我的生活。所以我接受了这个想法：打破无意识思考的习惯。这很难，因为就像“不要想粉红色大象”，我刚刚在你脑海中植入了一只粉红色大象。所以这几乎是不可能的问题。这更多需要靠感觉引导，而不是靠实际思考或思维过程。但我有意识地培养体验、心态、地点和活动，帮助我摆脱头脑。我知道整个社会在某种程度上都在这样做。追求刺激、极限运动、心流状态、性高潮等，很大程度上都是为了摆脱自己的头脑，远离那个声音和过度发展的自我意识。至少，我不希望随着年龄增长，自我意识继续发展并变得更强。我希望它更弱、更柔和，这样我就能更多地活在当下的现实中，接受自然和世界本来的样子，并深深欣赏它。这样就不必通过外部环境来追求幸福，去迎合我预先设定的观念。

A big habit that I'm working on, which is gonna be really hard to explain in any way that any normal human being will understand this, but I'm trying to turn off my monkey mind. That's I like—I think we are when we were born as children, we're pretty blank slates. We're living very much in the moment, and we're essentially just reacting to our environment through our instincts, and we're living in what I would call the real world. And then when puberty comes along, that's the onset of desire. It's the first time you really, really want something, and you start long-range planning for it. And then because of that, you start thinking a lot and start building an identity and ego to go and get what you want. This is all normal and healthy, it's part of being the human animal. But I think at some point it gets out of control, and then we are constantly just talking to ourselves in our heads. We're playing little movies in our heads walking down the street, but no one's actually there. Now of course, if you started voicing this thought in your head that you're always having, you'd be a madman and they'd lock you up. But the reality is, if you walk down the street with 2,000 people in the street, I think all thousand are talking to themselves in their head at any given point. They're constantly judging everything that they see, they're playing back movies of things that happened to them yesterday, they're living in fantasy worlds of what's gonna happen tomorrow, and they're just holed out of base reality. And that could be good when you're doing long-range planning, it can be good when you're solving problems, it's good for the survival and replication machines that we are. But I think it's actually very bad for your happiness. And so in my mind, the mind should be a servant, a tool, not my master. It's not something that should be controlling me and driving me 24/7. So I've taken on this idea that I want to break the habit of uncontrolled thinking, which is hard because the first sanity—you don't think of a pink elephant, I just put a pink elephant in your head. So it's an almost impossible problem. So it's more something that has to be guided by feel than guided by actual thinking or thought process. But I'm deliberately cultivating experiences, states of mind, locations, activities that will help me get out of my mind. And I know, you know, all of society does that to some extent. In some sense, the people chasing thrills and action sports or flow states or orgasm or any of these states that people really strive to get to, a lot of these are basically just trying to get out of your own head. They're trying to get away from that voice in your head and this overdeveloped sense of self. And at the very least, I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and become stronger as I get older. I want it to be weaker and more muted, so that I can live much more in present everyday reality and accept nature and the world for what it is and appreciate it very much. And then not have to seek happiness through external circumstances chasing to fit a preconceived notion that I have.

有很多我想问的问题。这个——是的，这真的很难。需要很多年。这不是一个六个月就能养成的习惯。这是一个终身的习惯。

There's a lot that I want to ask questions on. Is there—yeah, that's really a tough one. That'll take years. That's not a six-month habit. It's an end-of-life habit.

你认为关闭和压制猴子思维有区别吗？绝对有。压制不起作用，因为当你试图压制时，那是头脑在压制头脑。那只是你在和自己玩游戏。所以我认为这是一个非常困难的问题。

Do you think there's a difference between turning off or suppressing your monkey mind? Absolutely. Yeah, suppression doesn't work, because when you try to suppress, that's the mind suppressing the mind. That's just you playing games with yourself. So I think it's a very hard problem.

我想回到去条件化的话题。你基本上戒了酒。你是如何从那些酒精可能随时可得的社交场合和环境中重新编程自己的？结果你看到了哪些好处？你在改变这些习惯时是否将它们孤立开来？比如，“我睡得更好因为我不——”是的。

I want to go back to kind of unconditioning. You basically stopped drinking alcohol. How did you work on deprogramming yourself from the social settings and environments that you're in where alcohol is probably available all the time? And what benefits have you seen as a result? Are you isolating these habits when you're changing them? So you know, 'Oh, I sleep better because I'm not—' yeah.

酒精习惯是一个有趣的案例，因为它来自两个方面：一是可得性——身处酒精可得、被接受且是应该做的场合。二是欲望，对吧？你喝酒是因为想达到其他目的。当我拆解它时，我意识到几件事。可得性来自：晚上外出，在提供酒精的环境里，这就是可得性。所以如果你想避免，就待在家里。但待在家里不好玩。那怎么办？我开始了晨练计划。如果你早上锻炼，晚上就不能熬夜。不能熬夜，就不能喝太多酒。搞砸几次后，晨练就会很糟糕。你会头痛、感觉不好、力量下降。每天锻炼时，你可以很容易地检查自己。比如，“哦，我每天早上做的这个动作突然变难了，所以昨晚的酒精削弱了我。”所以晨练检查点真的帮助我理解了饮酒的后果。更有趣的问题是：我为什么喝酒？基本上归结为：我喝酒是为了在不那么愉快的社交环境中撑更久。我基本上是在麻醉自己的大脑。有更好的方法。其中之一是只和那些你不需要喝酒也能相处的人交往。这大大缩小了我的朋友圈和参加的活动。还有一些替代效应。替代效应的一部分是：我喝酒是为了不思考。所以我回到的问题是：我如何培养这些不太思考的状态？如果我能用另一种方式达到，那就会减少喝酒的冲动。还有一些替代，比如从烈酒换成红酒。红酒本身是自我限制的。你知道，喝两杯鸡尾酒后，你还想再来一杯。但两杯红酒——至少对我来说，通常我会头痛，所以到那时就停了。它非常自我限制。但其中一部分是年龄的作用。我现在 42 岁。我不知道，我喝一杯酒都会有一些负面后果积累。所以我仍然喝酒。我不相信“从不”和“总是”这样的词，因为我认为那是一种——

The alcohol one is an interesting case study because the alcohol habit came from two things: one was availability—just being in situations where alcohol is available and accepted and something you're supposed to do. And then the second is the desire, right? You want to do it because you're trying to accomplish something else. So when I unpacked that, I realized a couple of things. The availability came from: I'm just out, if I'm out at night in an environment where alcohol is being served, that's the availability. So if you want to avoid that, stay in. But staying in is not fun. So what do you do? Well, I started this daily workout regimen in the mornings. If you're working out in the mornings, you can't stay up too late at night. You can't stay up too late at night, you can't be drinking too much. You screw up a few times and your morning workout is terrible. You have a headache, you feel bad, you don't feel as strong. And when you're working out every day, you can checkpoint yourself very easily. Like, 'Oh well, this exact thing that I do every single morning is suddenly harder, so therefore I'm weakened from the alcohol from last night.' So the morning workout checkpoint really helped me understand the consequences of consuming alcohol. And then the more interesting question is: well, why am I doing it? And that's basically boiled down to: I was doing it to survive longer in a social environment that I wasn't particularly happy in. I essentially had to stun my brain into submission. So there are better ways to do that. One of those is only associate with people where you don't have to drink to be around them. And that really narrowed my friend circle and narrowed the kind of events that I go to. There's a little bit of a substitution effect. And some of what the substitution effect was: I was drinking so that I wouldn't be thinking. And so what I went back to is: what can I cultivate these states of not thinking too much? And if I can get there another way, then that will take away some of the urge to drink. And then there's some substitution, for example, a switch from hard alcohol to red wine. And red wine is inherently self-limiting. You know, you have two cocktails, the next thing you want is another cocktail. You have two glasses of red wine—at least for me, I usually have a headache, so I'm done at that point. It's very self-limiting. But some of it is this function of age. I mean, I'm 42 now. I don't know, I can make it through a single glass of wine without having some negative consequence buildup. So I still drink. I don't believe in words like 'never' and 'always', because I think that's a way of—

在某种程度上，约束自己和自律会让你更不自由、更不快乐，但我只想自然地处于一种不需要它、也不渴望它的状态。这是我一直在努力的方向。你觉得什么对你的生活影响最积极？

Limiting yourself and self-discipline makes you less free and less happy at some level, but I just want to be naturally in a position where I don't need it and I don't desire it. It's about what I've been working on more. What would you say most positively impacts your life?

我认为是每天早上的锻炼，这完全改变了我的生活。它让我感觉更健康、更年轻，也让我不再熬夜。这源于一件简单的事：每个人都说“我没时间”。基本上，当你向某人推荐任何所谓的好习惯时，他们都会找借口，最常见的借口就是“我没时间”。“我没时间”只是“这不是优先事项”的另一种说法。所以，你真正要问的是：这是不是优先事项？如果某件事是你的头号优先事项，那么你一定会做到——生活就是这样。但如果你有一篮子模糊的十到十五个优先事项，你最终一个也得不到。所以我做的就是：我明确地说，我生命中的头号优先事项，高于我的幸福、高于我的家庭、高于我的工作，是我自己的健康。它从我的身体健康开始，然后是心理健康，再然后是精神健康，接着是我家人的健康——也就是我家人的福祉。在那之后，我才能出去为世界做其他事情。这就像一系列从我自己开始的同心圆。因为我的身体健康成了我的头号优先事项，所以我永远不能说“我没时间”。所以每天早上，我就锻炼，需要多长时间就花多长时间。我不开始我的一天——即使世界在崩溃和毁灭——直到我锻炼完。

I think it's the daily morning workout that has been a complete game-changer. It's made me feel healthier, younger, and it's made me not go out late. And it came from one simple thing: everybody says 'I don't have time.' Basically, whenever you throw any so-called good habit at somebody, they'll have an excuse, and usually the most common is 'I don't have time.' 'I don't have time' is just another way of saying 'it's not a priority.' So what you really have to do is ask: is it a priority or not? If something is your number-one priority, then you will get it—that's just the way life works. But if you've got a fuzzy basket of ten or fifteen different priorities, you're gonna end up getting none of them. So what I did was I basically just said: my number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health. And it starts with my physical health, then second is my mental health, then third is my spiritual health, and then it's my family's health—that is my family's well-being. And then after that, I can go out and do whatever I need to do for the rest of the world. So there's a series of concentric circles starting out from me. And because my physical health became my number one priority, I could never say 'I don't have time.' So in the mornings, I just work out, and however long it takes is how long it takes. I do not start my day—and I don't care if the world is imploding and melting down—until I'm done working out.

你会休息吗，还是每天都练？

Do you take any breaks from that, or is it every day?

几乎每天都练。有几天我不得不休息，因为旅行、受伤或生病之类的，但我每年休息的次数一只手就能数过来。

It's pretty much every day. There are a few days where I've had to take a break because I'm traveling or I'm injured or sick or something, but I can count on one hand the number of breaks I take every year.

你提到幸福是你的头等大事之一。对你来说，幸福是什么？这个词意味着什么？你能解释一下吗？

You mentioned happiness being one of your top priorities. What is happiness to you? What does that word mean? Can you unpack that?

这是一个不断演变的东西。我认为就像所有伟大的问题——你知道，当你还是个小孩子，你去找妈妈问：“我们死后会发生什么？有圣诞老人吗？有上帝吗？我应该快乐吗？我应该嫁给谁？”——这类问题，没有轻率的答案，因为没有适用于所有人的答案。所以这些问题，对真理的探索——它们最终确实有答案，但答案是个人的。所以对我来说有效的答案，对你来说可能是废话，反之亦然。所以无论幸福对我意味着什么，它对你意味着不同的东西，对听众也意味着不同的东西。但我认为探索它是什么非常重要。对有些人来说，我知道是心流状态；对有些人来说是满足感；对有些人来说是 contentment（满足）。我的定义在不断演变。一年前我给你的答案会和我现在告诉你的不同。但今天，我相信幸福实际上是一种默认状态。当你移除生活中“缺少了什么”的感觉时，它就在那里。我们是高度评判性的生存和复制机器；我们不断走来走去，想着“我需要这个，我需要那个”，被困在天气里。而幸福是那种什么都不缺的状态。当什么都不缺时，你的大脑会关闭，停止奔向未来或奔向过去去后悔或计划。然后在那种缺失中，你有一瞬间的内心寂静。当你拥有内心寂静时，你就满足和快乐了。我认为人们错误地相信——你可以不同意，因为这对每个人来说都不同——但人们错误地相信幸福是关于积极的想法和积极的行为。但我读得越多，学得越多，经历得越多——因为我亲自验证了这一点——每一个积极的想法本质上都包含着一个消极的想法；它是与消极事物的对比。《道德经》说得比我更清晰，但一切都是二元性和极性。所以如果我说“我快乐”，那意味着我在某个时刻曾悲伤。如果我说“他有吸引力”，那意味着别人没有吸引力。所以每一个积极的想法甚至都包含着一个消极想法的种子，反之亦然。这就是为什么生活中很多伟大来自苦难；你必须先看到消极，才能渴望并欣赏积极。所以说了这么多——啰嗦了——对我来说，幸福不是关于积极的想法之类的东西，也不是关于消极的想法；它是关于欲望的缺失，尤其是对外部事物的欲望的缺失。所以我能拥有的欲望越少，我就越快乐。或者更进一步，接受事物的当前状态。我的大脑越少运动——因为大脑实际上存在于向未来或过去的运动中——我越活在当下，我就会越快乐和满足。但如果我抓住它，如果我说“哦，我现在很快乐，我想保持快乐”，那么我就会从那种快乐中掉出来，因为现在大脑突然开始运动，试图依附于某物，试图从暂时的状态中创造一种永久的状态。所以对我来说，幸福主要是不受苦、不渴望、不过多思考未来和过去，真正拥抱当下和现实的本来面目。因为自然没有快乐或不快乐的概念。对一棵树来说，没有对错，没有好坏。自然遵循从大爆炸到现在的连续数学法则和因果链，一切事物都完美地如其本然。只有在我们的特定头脑中，我们才不快乐或不幸福，事物因我们的欲望而完美或不完美。但我想我也开始相信自我的完全和彻底的无意义，我认为这很有帮助。例如，如果你认为自己是宇宙中最重要的事物，那么你必须让整个宇宙服从你的意志。因为如果你是宇宙中最重要的事物，它怎么能不符合你的欲望呢？如果它不符合你的欲望，那就出问题了。然而，如果你把自己看作一个物质变形虫，或者把你所有的作品看作水上写字或沙上建城堡，那么你对生活应该如何就没有期望。生活就是它本来的样子。然后你接受它，你就没有理由快乐或不快乐；那些东西几乎不适用。而在那种中性状态中留下的不是中性——我认为人们会想“哦，那会是一种非常平淡的存在。”不，这是……

It's a very evolving thing. I think like all the great questions—you know, when you're a little kid and you go to your mom and say, 'What happens when we die? Is there Santa Claus? Is there God? Should I be happy? Who should I marry?'—those kinds of things, there are no glib answers because there are no answers that apply to everybody. So these questions, the search for truth—they ultimately do have answers, but they have personal answers. So the answer that works for me is gonna be nonsense to you and vice versa. So whatever happiness means to me, it means something different to you, and it means something different to the listener. But I think it's very important to explore what it is. For some people, I know it's a flow state; for some people, satisfaction; for some people, it's a feeling of contentment. The best my definition keeps evolving. The answer I gave you a year ago would be different from what I tell you now. But today, I believe that happiness is really a default state. It was there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life. And we are highly judgmental survival and replication machines; we're constantly walking around thinking 'I need this, I need that,' trapped in the weather. And happiness is that state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down, and your mind stops running into the future or running into the past to regret something or to plan something. And then in that absence, for a moment, you have internal silence. And when you have internal silence, then you are content and you're happy. I think people mistakenly believe—feel free to disagree because again it's different for everybody—but people mistakenly believe that happiness is about positive thoughts and positive actions. But the more I read, the more I've learned, the more I experience—because I verify this for myself—every positive thought essentially holds within it a negative thought; it's a contrast to something negative. The Dao De Jing says it more articulately than I ever could, but it's all duality and polarities. So if I say 'I'm happy,' that means that I was sad at some point. If I say 'he's attractive,' that means that somebody else is unattractive. So every positive thought even has a seed of a negative thought within it, and vice versa. Which is why a lot of greatness in life comes out of suffering; you have to view the negative before you can aspire to and then appreciate the positive. So all that said—long-winded—to me, happiness is not about positive thoughts and stuff, but not about negative thoughts; it's about the absence of desire, especially absence of desire for external things. And so the fewer desires I can have, the happier I can be. Or more than that, accept the current state of things. The less my mind is moving—because the mind really exists in motion towards the future or the past—the more present I am, the happier and more content I will be. But if I latch on to that, if I say 'Oh, I'm happy now and I want to stay happy,' then I'm going to drop out of that happiness because now suddenly the mind is moving, is trying to attach to something, it's trying to create a permanent situation out of a temporary situation. So happiness to me is mainly not suffering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future and the past, really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is, the way it is. Because nature has no concept of happiness or unhappiness. To a tree, there is no right or wrong, there is no good or bad. Nature follows unbroken mathematical laws and a chain of cause and effect from the Big Bang to now, and everything is perfect exactly the way it is. It's only in our particular minds that we're unhappy or not happy, and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we desire. But I think I've also come to believe in the complete and utter insignificance of the self, and I think that helps a lot. For example, if you thought you were the most important thing in the universe, then you have to bend the entire universe to your will. Because if you're the most important thing in the universe, then how could it not conform to your desires? And if it doesn't conform to your desire, something's wrong. However, if you view yourself as a material amoeba, or if you view all of your works as writing on water or building castles in the sand, then you have no expectation from how life should actually be. Life is just the way it is. And then you sort of accept that, and you have no cause to be happy or unhappy; those things almost don't apply. And what you're left with in that neutral state is not neutrality—I think people think 'Oh, that would be a very bland existence.' No, this is...

存在，小孩子活着，如果你看小孩子，总体上他们通常很快乐，因为他们真的沉浸在环境中，活在当下，没有任何关于事情应该怎样的想法，不考虑自己的偏好和欲望。所以我认为中性状态实际上是一种完美状态，只要一个人不太陷入自己的头脑中，就可以非常快乐。

Existence, little children live and if you look at little children on balance they're generally pretty happy because they're really immersed in the environment, in the moment, without any thought of how it should be given their personal preferences and desires. So I think the neutral state is actually a perfection state and one can be very happy as long as one isn't too caught up in their own heads.

当你发现自己默认试图执着于某物时，你的内心独白是什么样的？

What is your internal monologue like when you find yourself trying to attach to something by default?

是的，我尽量留意自己的内心独白。它并不总是有效，但从计算机编程的角度来说，我尽可能让大脑以调试模式运行。当我和别人说话时，就像现在和你说话，或者参加集体活动时，几乎不可能，因为大脑要处理太多事情。但如果我独自一人，比如今天早上，我在刷牙，开始想到播客，然后陷入一个小幻想，想象你问我一系列问题，我在幻想中回答。然后我抓住了自己。我把大脑切换到调试模式，只是观察每一条指令流过，我说：‘我为什么要幻想未来的计划？为什么我不能就站在这里刷牙？’这只是意识到我的大脑在跑向未来，出于自我在规划一个幻想场景。我想：‘我真的在乎在 Shane 的播客上出丑吗？谁在乎呢？反正我都要死了。这不会归零，我什么也不会记得。毫无意义。’所以在那一刻，我关掉了它。我回去刷牙，然后注意到牙刷有多好，感觉有多棒。然后下一刻我又在想别的事情，然后我再次抓住我的大脑，说：‘我真的需要现在解决这个问题吗？’现实是，我的大脑跑掉并试图做的 95%的事情，我都不需要在那个确切时刻处理。事实上，如果它像一块肌肉，那么我最好让它休息，保持平静，然后当特定问题出现时，再沉浸其中。所以我更愿意投入的是，比如现在我们谈话时，完全沉浸在对话中，100%专注于这个，而不是想‘哦，我刷牙时没刷对’或者在心里计划别的事情。所以我认为专注单一的能力与迷失自我、活在当下、快乐的能力有关，而且讽刺的是，实际上更有效。

Yeah, I try to keep an eye on my internal monologue. It doesn't always work, but in the computer programming sense, I try to run my brain in debugging mode as much as possible. When I'm talking to someone like I'm talking to you right now, or when I'm engaged in a group activity, it's almost impossible because your brain has too many things to handle. But if I'm by myself, like just this morning, I was brushing my teeth and I started thinking forward to the podcast and I started going into this little fantasy where I imagine you asking me a bunch of questions and I was fantasy answering them. Then I caught myself. I put my brain in debug mode and just watched every little instruction go by, and I said, 'Why am I fantasy future planning? Why can't I just stand here and brush my teeth?' And it's just the awareness that my brain was running off in the future, planning some fantasy scenario out of ego. I was like, 'Well, do I really care if I embarrass myself on Shane's podcast? Who cares? I'm going to die anyway. This is not going to go to zero and I won't remember anything. Pointless.' So at that point, I shut down. I went back to brushing my teeth, and then I was noticing how great the toothbrush was and how good it felt. And then next moment I'm off thinking something else, and then I catch my brain again, say, 'Do I really need to solve this problem right now?' And the reality is that 95% of what my brain runs off and tries to do, I don't need to tackle at that exact moment. In fact, if it's like a muscle, then I'll be better off resting it, being at peace, and then when the particular problem arises, immerse myself in it. So what I would rather dedicate myself to is, for example, right now as we're talking, to be completely lost in the conversation and to be 100% focused on this, as opposed to thinking about, 'Oh, when I brushed my teeth, I didn't do it the right way,' or planning something else in my mind. So I think the ability to singularly focus is related to the ability to lose yourself and be present, happy, and actually ironically more effective.

这很快，几乎像一个相对性问题，或者你把自己从某个框架中拉出来，然后移动到另一个框架，从不同的角度观察事物，即使那是在你自己的头脑中。

That's fast and it's almost like a relativity issue, or you're taking yourself out of a certain frame and you're just moving over to another frame and watching things from a different perspective, even in that you're in your own mind.

是的，我认为佛陀谈到的许多东西，比如觉知与自我，他们真正在说的是，你可以把你的大脑、你的意识看作一个多层机制。有一个核心的基础内核级操作系统在运行，然后上面运行着应用程序。我喜欢用计算机极客的说法。我实际上回到我的觉知级操作系统，它总是平静的，一切都是安宁的，通常快乐而满足，我试图保持那种模式，不激活猴子思维，它总是担忧、恐惧和焦虑，但有着不可思议的用途。但我试图在需要它之前不激活那个程序，因为当我需要它时，我只想专注于那个程序。但如果我 24/7 一直运行它，我在浪费能量，它变成了我，而我比那更多。对吧？我认为灵性、宗教、佛教或任何你追随的东西会随着时间的推移教会你，你不仅仅是你的头脑。你不仅仅是你的习惯。你不仅仅是你的偏好。你是你的觉知水平。你是一个身体。而现代人类，我们活得不够在身体里。我们活得不够在觉知里。我们活得太在头脑中的内心独白里，所有这些，顺便说一句，只是由社会和环境从你年轻时编程进你的。你基本上是一堆硬件 DNA，然后在你年轻时对环境效应做出反应。然后你记录了好的和坏的事情，我们用那来预判所有将要抛给你的东西。然后你用那来不断尝试预测和改变未来。但随着你越来越老，你积累的这些偏好的数量非常非常大。其中一些习惯性反应非常非常大，然后它们最终成为失控的货运列车，控制你的情绪。嗯，我们应该控制自己的情绪。为什么我们不研究如何控制自己的情绪？那将是多么了不起的事情，如果你能说：‘嗯，现在我想处于好奇的状态’，然后你真的能把自己设定到好奇的状态。或者你说：‘我想处于哀悼的状态。我在哀悼一个亲人，我想为他们悲伤，但我真的想悲伤。我真的想感受那种感觉。我现在不想被一个疯狂的计算机编程问题分心。我们明天再做。’所以我认为头脑本身是一块肌肉，它可以被训练，可以被调节。它只是被社会随意地调节了，超出了我们的控制。如果你带着觉知和意图去看它，这是一份 24/7 的工作，你每时每刻都在工作，我认为你可以解开你自己的头脑、情绪、思想和反应。你开始重新配置，你可以开始重写这个程序，变成你想要的。

Yeah, I think that a lot of the things that Buddha talks about, like awareness versus the ego, what they're really talking about is you can think of your brain, your consciousness as a multi-layered mechanism. There's kind of a core base kernel-level OS that's running, and then there are applications that are running on top. I like to think of it as computer geek speak. I'm actually going back to my awareness level OS, which is always calm, all is peaceful, and generally happy and content, and I'm trying to stay in that mode and not activate the monkey mind, which is always worried and frightened and anxious but serves an incredible purpose. But I'm trying not to activate that program until I need it, because when I need it, I want to just focus on that program. But if I'm running it 24/7 all the time, I'm wasting energy and it becomes me, and I am more than that. Right? I think another thing that spirituality or religion or Buddhism or anything you follow will teach you over time is that you are more than just your mind. You are more than just your habits. You are more than just your preferences. You are your level of awareness. You are a body. And modern humans, we don't live enough in our body. We don't live enough in our awareness. We live too much in this internal monologue in our heads, all of which, by the way, is just programmed into you by society and by the environment from a younger you. You're basically a bunch of hardware DNA written that then reacted to environmental effects when you were younger. Then you recorded the things that were good and bad, and we use that to prejudge everything that's going to be thrown against you. And then you're using that to constantly try and predict and change the future. But as you get older and older, the number of these preferences that you've accumulated is very, very large. Some of these habitual reactions are very, very large, and then they end up as runaway freight trains that control your mood. Well, we should control our own moods. Why don't we study how to control our moods? What a masterful thing that would be if you could say, 'Well, right now I would like to be in a curious state,' and then you can genuinely set yourself into the curious state. Or you say, 'I want to be in a mourning state. I'm mourning a loved one and I want to grieve for them, but I really want to grieve. I really want to feel that. I don't want to be distracted right now by a mad computer programming problem. Let's do that tomorrow.' So I think that the mind itself is a muscle and it can be trained and it can be conditioned. It has just been haphazardly conditioned by society out of our control. And if you look at it with awareness and intent, and it's a 24/7 job, you're working at every moment of every day, I think you can unpack your own mind and your emotions and your thoughts and your reactions. You start reconfiguring, you can start rewriting this program to what you want.

你之前在某个采访中提到你有基础价值观，但当时没有详细说明，所以我很好奇那些是什么。

You mentioned before in one of your interviews that you have foundational values but you didn't elaborate then, so I'm curious what are those.

是的，这个问题我实际上从未列出或阐述过。但首先定义价值观，作为一套你不会妥协的事情。所以对我来说，基础价值观是我非常仔细地审视自己并刻意选择的，我说：‘你知道吗，这是一种习惯，一种生活方式，我不会妥协。我会永远这样。我只是不想以任何其他方式生活。’我从未完全列举过它们，但举例来说，我认为诚实是一个核心、核心、核心的价值观。给你举例说明我所说的诚实：我希望能够做我自己。我永远不想处于一个我必须注意言辞的环境中，因为如果我把所想和所说分开，那会在我的头脑中创建多个线程。这意味着我不再活在当下。这意味着每次我和别人说话时，我都必须进行未来规划或过去后悔。所以任何我在其身边不能完全诚实的人，我……

Yeah, it's a question I've never actually listed them or articulated them. But to define values, first of all, as a set of things that you will not compromise on. So foundational values to me are things that I've looked at very, very carefully about myself and I've deliberately chosen and said, 'You know what, this is a habit, this is a way of life, and I'm not going to compromise that. I'm going to stay this way forever. I just don't want to live life any other way.' Now, I've never fully enumerated them, but examples of them like I think honesty is a core, core, core value. To give you examples of what I mean by honesty: I want to be able to just be me. I don't want to ever be in an environment around people where I have to watch what I say, because if I disconnect what I'm thinking from what I'm saying, that creates multiple threads in my mind. That means that I'm no longer in the moment. That means that I now have to work future planning or past regretting every time I'm talking to somebody. So anyone around whom I can't be fully honest, I...

我不想再接触另一个例子，关于基础价值观是：我不相信任何短期思维或交易。所以如果我看到任何人，哪怕是在我身边，比如我和某人做生意，而他们对别人采取短期思维，我就不想再和那个人做生意了。因为我认为生活中所有的好处都来自复利，无论是金钱、关系、爱情、健康、活动还是习惯。所以我只想和我知道会共度余生的人在一起，我只想从事我知道有长期回报的事情。另一个是，我只相信纯粹的关系。我不相信等级关系，所以我不想凌驾于任何人之上，也不想低于任何人。如果我无法平等对待某人，或者他们无法平等对待我，那我就不想和那个人互动。另一个是，我不再相信愤怒。年轻时那可能对睾酮有好处，但现在我就像佛教说的：愤怒是你握在手里扔向别人的一块热炭。所以我不想生气，也不想和愤怒的人在一起，所以我把他们从我的生活中剔除。我不是在评判他们；我自己也经历过很多愤怒，所以他们需要自己解决，但去对别人发火吧。我不知道这是否符合价值观的经典定义，但这是一套我不会妥协的东西，我一生都遵循它们。我认为每个人都有价值观，而找到好的关系、好的同事、好的爱人、妻子或丈夫，很大程度上就是找到那些价值观与你一致的人，然后小事就不重要了。我通常发现，如果人们在某件事上争吵，那是因为他们的价值观不一致。如果价值观一致，小事就不会成为问题。

I don't want to be around another example of foundational value is I don't believe in any short-term thinking or dealing. So if I see anybody who's even around me, like let's say I'm doing business with somebody and they think in a short-term manner with somebody else, then I don't want to do business with that person anymore. Because I think all the benefits in life come from compound interest, whether in money or in relationships or love or health or activities or habits. So I only want to be around people that I know I'm going to be around with for the rest of my life, and I only want to work on things that I know have good long-term payout. Another one is like I only believe in pure relationships. I don't believe in a hierarchical relationship, so I don't want to be above anybody or below anybody. If I can't treat someone like a peer and if they can't treat me like a peer, then I just don't want to interact with that human. Another one is I don't believe in anger anymore. I mean that was something that was good when I was young and for testosterone, but now I was like the Buddhist saying that anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while you throw it at somebody. So I don't want to be angry and I don't want to be around angry people, so I just cut them out of my life. And I'm not judging them; I mean I went through a lot of anger too, so they have to work through it on their own, but go be angry at someone else. So I don't know if this falls into the classical definition of value, but it's a set of things that I won't compromise on and that I just lived my entire life by. And I think everybody has values, and a lot of finding great relationships, great co-workers, great lovers, wives, husbands is finding other people where your values just line up, and then the little things don't matter. Generally I find that if people are fighting or quarreling about something, it's because their values don't line up. If their values lined up, the little things wouldn't matter.

你的彻底诚实有多彻底？它对你的生活产生了怎样的影响？

How is radical honesty? Like how radical is your honesty and how has that kind of impacted your life?

我是相当诚实的。我不像桥水基金的雷·达里奥那样理论上的诚实。所以我不会走到某人面前说他们丑。我不是要搞个大场面说‘嘿，我多诚实，我要震惊你’。彻底诚实的意思是我想要自由。自由的一部分意味着我能说我所想，想我所说；它们是高度一致和整合的。这也意味着，正如理查德·费曼的名言：你永远不应该愚弄任何人，而你是最容易愚弄自己的人。所以当你对别人说了不诚实的话，你就对自己撒了谎，然后你会开始相信自己的谎言，这会让你脱离现实，走上错误的道路。所以对我来说诚实非常重要，但我不会主动去说负面或刻薄的话。我会把彻底诚实和沃伦·巴菲特的一条老规则结合起来：具体地表扬，泛泛地批评。我努力遵循这一点；我不总是做到，但我认为我做得足够多，对我的生活产生了影响。那就是：如果你对某人有批评，不要批评那个人，而是批评一般的方法或那类活动。但如果你要表扬某人，总是努力找到最能代表你所赞扬之处的具体个人，并具体地表扬他。这样，我们每个人都有的自我和身份就不会与你作对，而是为你所用。

I mean it's pretty honest. I'm not like Ray Dalio from Bridgewater who is theoretically honest. So I'm not going to go and call somebody ugly to their face. I'm not trying to make a big show of it and say 'hey I'm so honest and I'm gonna shock you.' What radical honesty just means is that I want to be free. Part of being free means that I can say what I think and think what I say; they are highly congruent and integrated. And it also means, as Richard Feynman famously said, you should never ever fool anybody, and you are the easiest person to fool. So the moment you tell somebody else something that's not honest, you've lied to yourself, and then you'll start believing your own lie, and that will disconnect you from reality and take you down the wrong road. So it's really important for me to be honest, but I don't go out of my way volunteering negative or nasty things. I would combine radical honesty with an old rule that Warren Buffett has, which is 'praise specifically, criticize generally.' I try to follow this; I don't always follow it, but I think I followed it enough that it made a difference in my life. Which is: if you have a criticism of someone, then don't criticize the person; criticize the general approach or criticize that class of activities. But if you have to praise somebody, then always try and find the person who is the best example of what you're praising and praise that person specifically. That way, people's egos and identities, which we all have, don't work against you; they work for you.

你的价值观有改变吗？或者自从结婚和成为父母后，你对它们有了更多的思考？这如何改变了你？

Having values changed at all? Or have you given more thought to them since becoming married and becoming a parent? How has that changed you?

价值观几乎从定义上来说不会随时间改变太多，但你需要一些时间来弄清楚自己的基础价值观。我认为每个人都有，只是可能我们直到后来才意识到它们。所以我的价值观有一点变化，但不大。我的妻子是一个非常充满爱心、以家庭为导向的人，这是把我们结合在一起的基础价值观之一。当你有了孩子，这真的很奇怪，但它似乎回答了生命内置的意义、生命的目的问题。突然间，宇宙中最重要的事情从你的身体转移到了孩子的身体。这改变了你，你的价值观本质上变得不那么自私了。我想说，最大的变化可能是：年轻时我非常非常重视自由。自由是我的核心价值之一。讽刺的是，它仍然是；它可能是我最重要的三个价值观之一，但定义不同了。我过去的定义是“自由去做”：自由去做任何我想做的事，自由去随时做任何我想做的事。而现在我追求的自由是内在的自由。所以是“免于”：免于反应，免于愤怒，免于悲伤，免于被迫做事。我追求的是内在和外在的免于，而以前我追求的是自由去做。

Values almost by definition don't change that much over time, but it takes some time for you to figure out your own foundational values. I think everybody has them; it's just that maybe we're not that aware of them until later. And so mine have changed a little bit but not a lot. I mean my wife is an incredibly loving, family-oriented person, and that was one of the foundational values that brought us together. The moment you have a child, it's this really weird thing, but it sort of answers the built-in meaning of life, the purpose of life question. All of a sudden, the most important thing in the universe moves from being in your body to moving into the child's body. So that changes you, and your values inherently become a lot less selfish. I would say that probably the biggest such change was when I was younger, I really, really, really valued freedom. Freedom was one of my core core values. And ironically, it still is; it's probably one of my top three values, but it's a different definition of freedom. My old definition was freedom to: freedom to do anything I want, freedom to do whatever I feel like whenever I feel like. And now I would say that the freedom I'm looking for is internal freedom. So it's freedom from: freedom from reaction, freedom from feeling angry, freedom from being sad, freedom from being forced to do things. I'm looking for freedom from internally and externally, whereas before I was looking for freedom to.

我非常喜欢这个。你一生中最大的错误是什么？你是如何恢复的？

I like that a lot. What's the biggest mistake you've ever made in your life and how did you recover?

我犯过一类错误，我会用同样的方式总结。我犯了这类错误，而且只有通过一个练习，在事后回顾时才明显。你可能听说过：当你三十岁时，你会给二十岁的自己什么建议？当你四十岁时，你会给三十岁的自己什么建议？所以如果你每十年做一次这个练习，或者如果你年轻一点，可以每五年做一次，真正坐下来问：2007 年，我在做什么？我感觉如何？2008 年，我在做什么？我感觉如何？2009 年，我在做什么？我感觉如何？至少对我来说，出现了一种显著的连贯性。那就是：我做的所有事情，我本应该仍然去做，但带着更少的情绪，尤其是更少的愤怒。因为我年轻时非常愤怒。但尤其是更少的情绪。生活会按照它本来的方式展开，有好有坏，但大部分其实取决于你的解读。你出生，经历一系列感官体验，然后死去，你如何选择解读这些感官输入取决于你。不同的人有不同的解读方式。但真的，我希望我做了所有这些事情，但带着更少的情绪和更少的愤怒。最著名的例子是：年轻时我创办了一家公司，公司做得很好，但我没有处理好与一些相关人士的关系。最终对我来说结果不错，一切顺利。

I've made a class of mistakes that I would summarize in the same way. And I made this class of mistakes, and it was obvious to me looking at the mistakes only in hindsight through one exercise. You've probably heard: when you're thirty, what advice would you give your twenty-year-old self? When you're forty, what advice would you give your thirty-year-old self? So if you do that exercise decade by decade, or maybe if you're younger you can do it in five, really sit down and say: okay, 2007, what was I doing, how was I feeling? 2008, what was I doing, how was I feeling? 2009, what was I doing, how was I feeling? And at least for me, a remarkable consistency emerged. And that consistency was that everything that I was doing I should have still done, but with less emotion and especially less anger. Because I used to be very angry when I was younger. But especially less emotion. Life is going to play out the way it's going to play out, some good some bad, but most of it is actually just up to your interpretation. You're born, you have a set of sensory experiences, then you die, and how you choose to interpret those sensory inputs is up to you. Different people interpret them in different ways. But really, I wish I had done all these things but with less emotion and less anger. The most celebrated example would be: when I was younger, I started a company and the company did well, but I didn't do well with some of the people involved. And it was a good outcome for me in the end, and everything.

结果还算不错，但过程中有很多焦虑和愤怒。而今天，我不会再陷入那些焦虑和愤怒。我会直接走到人们面前说：‘看，这是发生的事情，这是我要做的，这是我要怎么做，这是公平的，这是不公平的。’但我会意识到，愤怒和情绪本身会带来巨大的后果，完全没必要。所以我现在试着从中学习，做我认为正确的事情，但不带愤怒，并且用非常长远的眼光来看待。如果你用长远的眼光，不带情绪，那么我就不再认为那些是错误了。除此之外，我喜欢采用的观点是：我所做的一切，以及发生在我身上的一切——它们以一种无法分割的方式组合在一起——把我带到了今天这个时刻，和你交谈。这是一个美好的时刻。所以，无论是什么情况把我们带到这里，都很好，因为我在这里。

It worked out okay, but there was a lot of angst and a lot of anger. And really, today, what I would do is I wouldn't go down the angst and the anger. I would have just walked up to the people and said, 'Look, this is what happened, this is what I'm going to do, this is how I'm going to do it, this is what's fair, this is what's not.' But I would have realized that the anger and the emotion themselves have this huge consequence; it's just completely unnecessary. So now I'm just trying to learn from that and to do the same things that I think are the right thing to do, but to do them without anger and to do them with a very long-term point of view. So I think if you take a very long-term point of view and if you take the emotion out of it, then I wouldn't consider those things mistakes anymore. Other than that, I mean, there was—you know, the perspective I like to adopt is that everything that I did and everything that was done to me—and there's some impossible-to-separate combination—brought me to this exact moment here today, talking to you. And this is a good moment. So whatever set of circumstances conspired to bring us here, we're good, because here I am.

有没有一个时刻，你意识到你可以控制自己如何解读它？

Was there a moment you would say when you realized that you could control how you interpret it?

我认为很多人面临的问题是，他们不承认自己可以控制——不是控制发生什么，而是控制自己如何回应和解读情况。我想每个人都知道这是可能的，我们之所以知道可能，是因为奥修有一场精彩的讲座，标题是‘药物与灵性的吸引力’。它讲到人们为什么吸毒——从酒精、迷幻药到大麻，你能想到的都有——他们这样做是为了控制自己的精神状态，控制自己的反应。有时更糟，有时更好。有些人喝酒是因为这样就不那么在乎了，有些人吸大麻是为了放空，有些人用迷幻药是为了感觉临在或与自然连接等等。但药物的吸引力是灵性的。所以某种程度上，我们已经知道可以控制内在状态，只是用外部生物活性物质来实现。而现在公共领域有很多技巧，很多是从古代挖掘出来的，比如认知疗法、行为心理学、冥想、在大自然中长时间散步。你可以控制自己的精神状态，只是我们习惯通过改变外部环境来间接控制内在状态。比如，有一句名言说，人类的所有问题都源于不能独自在房间里坐 30 分钟。是帕斯卡吗？对，没错。如果一个人能独自在垫子上坐 30 分钟——这很难，真的很难——那就是冥想。你本质上是在挣扎并控制自己的内在状态。首先要意识到的是，你其实可以观察自己的精神状态。所以冥想的好处不是获得控制内在状态的超能力，而是你会认识到你的头脑有多么失控。它就像一只扔粪便的猴子，在房间里乱跑、惹麻烦、大喊大叫、打碎东西。它完全失控，是一个失控的疯子。你必须看到这个疯子的运作，才会对它产生厌恶，并开始与它分离。而在这种分离中，就是解放。当你意识到‘哦，我不想成为那个人。我为什么这么失控？’仅仅是这种觉察就能让你平静下来。所以有很多技巧可以用。另一个例子，很多聪明人会说：如果你对某事生气，或者收到一封不愉快的邮件想回复，等 24 小时再回复，对吧？这有什么用？你冷静下来，情绪消退，激素水平下降，24 小时后你的精神状态会更好。所以我认为人们已经知道这一点，但我们没有行动，因为社会没有训练我们这样做。社会告诉我们‘去锻炼，去变好看’，因为这是一个多玩家竞争游戏——别人能看到我做得好不好。或者告诉我们‘去赚钱，去买大房子’——又是外部的多玩家竞争游戏。但学习快乐、训练自己快乐，完全是内在的：没有外部进展，没有外部认可，100%你是在和自己竞争，又是单玩家游戏。而我们是如此社会化的生物——更像蜜蜂或蚂蚁，被外部编程和驱动——以至于我们不知道如何玩赢这些单玩家游戏了。我们纯粹在多玩家游戏中竞争。但现实是，生活是一个单玩家游戏。你独自出生，独自死去。你所有的解读都是独自的，所有的记忆都是独自的。你死后三代，没人会在乎。在你出现之前，也没人在乎。一切都是单玩家。我认为巴菲特有一个很好的例子，他问：你想成为世界上最好的情人但被公认为最差的，还是最差的情人但被公认为最好的？这是关于内在还是外在记分卡。完全正确。所有的记分卡都是内在的。可悲的是，我们坐在那里，比如嫉妒——嫉妒是我年轻时很难克服的情绪，我有很多嫉妒。渐渐地，我学会了摆脱它，但它偶尔还会冒出来。但它是如此有毒的情绪，因为到头来，你并没有变得更好：你不快乐，而你嫉妒的人仍然成功或漂亮或怎样。但对我来说，真正的突破是当我从个人根本层面意识到——这种播客的问题是我可以整天给出油滑的答案，但你必须发现自己的个人答案，因为你的个人答案会和我不同。我会对你说，但我发现的那个对我有共鸣的答案是：有一天我意识到，我嫉妒的所有这些人，我不能只挑选他们生活中的小方面。我不能说‘我想要他的身体，我想要她的钱，我想要他的个性。’你必须成为那个人。你真的想成为那个人，带着他们所有的反应、欲望、家庭、幸福水平、人生观、自我形象吗？如果你不愿意完全、24/7、100%地和那个人交换，那么嫉妒就没有意义。我想——所以我明白了。一旦我有了这个认识，嫉妒就渐渐消失了，因为我不想成为其他任何人。我完全满足于做我自己。顺便说一句，即使那样也是……

I mean, I think what the problems that a lot of people have is they don't recognize that they can control not what happens to them per se, but how they respond and how they interpret a situation. I think everyone knows it's possible, and the reason we know it's possible is there's a great Osho lecture that he calls the title 'The Attraction of Drugs and Spiritual.' It talks about what do people do drugs—everything from alcohol, psychedelics, to cannabis, so you name it—and they're doing it to control their mental state, and they're doing it to control how they react. And sometimes it's worse and sometimes it's better. But some people drink because then they don't care as much, or they're potheads because they can zone out, or they do psychedelics so they can feel very present or connected to nature or what have you. But the attraction of drugs are spiritual. So to some extent, we already know that we can control our internal state; we just use external bioactive substances to do it. And now there are a lot more techniques that are out there in the public domain, many of them dug up from older times, but you know, these ones from cognitive therapy and behavioral psychology, to meditation, to taking long walks in nature. You can control your mental state; it's just we're used to doing it by hacking our external circumstances to then come back around and control our mental state. For example, sitting on a—there's a famous line that says that all of man's problems arise because he can't sit by himself in a room for 30 minutes. Pascal? Yeah, exactly. So you know, if a man or a woman can sit by themselves on a cushion for thirty minutes—and that's hard, it's really hard to do—that's meditation. You are essentially struggling with and controlling your internal state. And the first thing to realize is that you can actually observe your mental state. So the advantage of meditation is not that you're going to gain a superpower to control your internal state; it's that you will recognize just how out of control your mind is. It is like a monkey flinging feces, running around the room, making trouble, shouting, breaking things. It's completely uncontrollable; it's an out-of-control mad person. And you have to see this mad creature in operation before you feel a certain distaste towards it, and you start separating yourself from it. And in that separation is liberation. When you realize that, 'Oh, I don't want to be that person. Why am I so out of control?' Just that awareness alone calms you down. So there are many techniques one can use. Another example that I think a lot of smart people say is: if you're angry about something, or if you get an unhappy email and you want to respond, don't respond for 24 hours, right? What does that do? It just—you calm down, the emotions subside, the hormones go down, and you're in a better mental state 24 hours later. So I think people already know this, but we just don't act on it because socially we're not conditioned to act on it. Socially, we're told 'go work out, go look good' because that's a multiplayer competitive game—other people can see if I'm doing a good job or not. Or we're told 'go make money, go buy a big house'—again, external multiplayer competitive game. But when it comes to learning to be happy, training yourself to be happy, it's completely internal: no external progress, no external validation, 100% you're competing against yourself, single-player again. And we're such social creatures—we're more like bees or ants that are externally programmed and driven—that we just don't know how to play and win at these single-player games anymore. We compete purely on multiplayer games. But the reality is, life is a single-player game. You're born alone, you're going to die alone. All your interpretations are alone, all your memories are alone. And you're gone three generations, nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It's all single-player. I think Buffett has a great example of that when he gives the—do you want to be the world's best lover and known as the worst, or the world's worst lover and known as the best? In reference to an inner or external scorecard. Exactly right. I mean, all of your scorecards are internal. And the sad thing is, you know, we sit there like jealousy—jealousy was a very hard emotion for me to overcome when I was young. I had a lot of jealousy in me. And by and by, I learned to get rid of it, and it still crops up every now and then. But it's such a poisonous emotion because at the end of the day, you're no better off: you're unhappy, and the person you're jealous of is still successful or good-looking or whatever they are. But the real breakthrough for me was when I realized at a personal fundamental level—I mean, the problem with these kinds of podcasts is I can get glib answers all day long, but you have to discover your own personal answer because your personal answer is going to be different than mine. I'll speak to you, but the one that I discovered that spoke to me was a day I realized that all these people that I was jealous of, I couldn't just cherry-pick and choose little aspects of their life. I couldn't say 'I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality.' You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? And if you're not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100% swap with who that person is, then there's no point in being jealous. I think that—and so I got it. Once I came to that realization, jealousy just sort of faded away, because I don't want to be anybody else. I'm perfectly happy being me. And by the way, even that is...

要掌控才能快乐。只是这件事没有社会回报，但有很多内在回报。它几乎是反社会回报的，因为当你在处理自己的内心时，人们并不喜欢那样。不是他们讨厌，你的朋友当然支持你，但他们从中得不到任何东西。甚至当我观察自己的同龄人时，他们在某种程度上都在自我提升——四十多岁的人多多少少都在做——但大多数参与的是群体活动：‘嘿，我们来个集体冥想’，‘嘿，听听这个小组讲座’。我总想起读过的一句话：‘只有个体才能超越。’没有人能在群体环境中达到 enlightenment 或内心幸福，或进行严肃的内在功课。这是一项非常孤独的任务。所以某种程度上，我认为那些在内在功课中不断寻求社会认可的人，其实并不那么认真。这没什么，我不是在评判，但他们渴望的是更多的社交互动，而不是真正的内在功课。

Under control to be happy. It's just there's no social rewards for it, but there's a lot of internal rewards. It's almost anti-social rewards because when you're working on your inner stuff, people don't love that. It's not that they dislike it; your friends of course support you, but they're not getting anything out of it. Even when I look at my own peer group, to the extent that they're working on themselves—and everyone in their forties at some level is—most are engaged in group activities: 'Hey, let's do a group meditation,' 'Hey, listen to this group lecture.' I keep coming back to this one line that I read: 'Only the individual transcends.' Nobody reaches enlightenment or inner happiness or does serious internal work in group settings. It is a very lonely kind of task. So to some extent, I think that people who are constantly looking for social affirmation in their internal work aren't that serious about it. It's fine, I'm not judging, but they're craving more social interaction than they're really craving internal work.

过去几年里，你在哪些重大想法上改变了看法？

What big ideas have you changed your mind on in the last few years?

在人生层面有很多。商业层面显然也有几个。更实际地说，我不再相信宏观经济学了。我在学校学过经济学和计算机科学。曾有一段时间我以为自己会去读经济学博士之类的。但越往后我越意识到，微观经济学是 hoodoos、复杂系统和政治的结合。你可以找到宏观经济学家支持任何论点。所以我认为这门学科，因为它不做可证伪的预测——而这是科学的标志——已经腐败了。你永远无法在经济学中找到反例。你永远不能拿美国经济同时做两个不同的实验。因为数据太多，人们会挑选符合他们政治叙事的东西。所以如果人们把所有时间花在看宏观经济、美联储预测或股票明年走势上，那都是垃圾。不比占星术好。实际上可能更糟：更不娱乐，更让人焦虑。所以我现在认为宏观经济学是垃圾科学。向宏观经济学家道歉。但微观经济学和博弈论是根本。我认为没有对供需、劳动与资本、博弈论、以牙还牙等东西的深刻理解，你不可能在商业中成功，甚至无法在现代资本主义社会中游刃有余。所以宏观经济学是我放弃的宗教。但还有很多其他改变。我改变了对死亡、生命本质、生命目的、婚姻的看法。我原本是想结婚生子的人。所以有很多根本性的变化，但最实际的一个是我放弃了宏观，拥抱了微观。而且我要说这不仅在宏观经济学中成立，在一切事情上都成立。我不相信宏观环保主义，我相信微观环保主义。我不相信宏观慈善，我相信微观慈善。我不相信宏观地改善世界。有很多人非常激动地说‘我要改变世界，我要改变这个人，我要改变人们的思维方式。’我考虑微观：先改变自己，然后也许改变你的家人和邻居，然后再去谈改变世界这样的抽象概念。

There's a lot on a life's level. There are a couple obviously on the business level. On a more practical basis, I just stopped believing in macroeconomics. I studied economics in school and computer science. There was a time when I thought I was going to go be a PhD in economics and all that. But the further I get, the more I realize microeconomics, the combination of hoodoos, complex systems, and politics. You can find a macroeconomist to take every side of every argument. So I think that discipline, because it doesn't make falsifiable predictions—which is the hallmark of science—has become corrupted. You never have the counterexample on the economy. You can never take the US economy and run two different experiments at the same time. Because there's so much data, people cherry-pick whatever political narrative they're trying to push. So to the extent that people spend all their time watching the macro economy, or the Fed forecasts, or which way the stocks are gonna go next year, it's all junk. It's no better than astrology. In fact, it's probably even worse: less entertaining, more stress-inducing. So I just think of macroeconomics now as junk science. All apologies to the macroeconomists. But microeconomics and game theory are fundamental. I don't think you can be successful in business, or even navigating through most of our modern capitalist society, without an extremely good understanding of supply and demand, labor versus capital, game theory, tit for tat, and those kinds of things. So macroeconomics is the religion that I gave up. But there are many others. I've changed my mind on death, on the nature of life, on the purpose of life, on marriage. I was originally someone who wanted to be married and have kids. So there have been a lot of fundamental changes, but the most practical one is I gave up macro and I embrace micro. And I would say that's not just true in macroeconomics; it's true in everything. I don't believe in macro environmentalism; I believe in micro environmentalism. I don't believe in macro charity; I believe in micro charity. I don't believe in macro improving the world. There are a lot of people who get really fired up about 'I'm gonna change the world, I'm gonna change this person, I'm gonna change the way people think.' I think about micro: change yourself, then maybe change your family and your neighbor, before you get into abstract concepts about changing the world.

你目前相信的基础知识中，你认为哪些最不稳固或最可能在未来几年改变？

Part of your base knowledge that you have today that you believe, do you consider the least solid or most likely to change over the coming years?

好问题。我的意思是，我尽量不预先决定太多事情。我认为创造身份和标签会把你锁住，让你看不到真相。所以我以前认同自己是自由意志主义者，但后来我发现自己会为一些没有真正思考过的立场辩护，只因为它们是自由意志主义的经典。现实是，如果你所有的信念都整齐地分成十个小包，你应该高度怀疑，因为它们是预先打包好的。所以我不喜欢在任何层面上给自己贴标签。任何让我拥有太多所谓稳定信念的东西。所以我很难指出我认为摇摇欲坠的东西，因为如果我觉得它真的摇摇欲坠，我就不会站在上面。我想我变得最不确定的领域是——我称之为‘如何组织社会’这类宏大信念。每个人都有。有些人认为我们应该成为共产主义者，有些人是资本主义者，有些人是无政府主义者，有些人说我们需要更大的福利国家、全民医保和基本收入，另一些人说不，我们需要削减一切。我认为整个这类信念是不可证伪的。它们几乎是宗教性的。是人们在年轻时接受的东西。没有人真正知道哪个系统更好。没有人真正知道哪个系统能最大化幸福或产出或其他什么。我知道有很多聪明的经济学家和研究人员，有很多好的数据和科学，但归根结底，我越研究，就越觉得‘好吧，也许我不知道如何最好地组织社会。’也许社会不应该只有一种组织形式，而应该有多种，这样你可以选择你最可能在其中繁荣的社会。但我不认为人类文化和社会有一个单一的正确答案，除非考虑到日益具有破坏性的技术，在更长的时间尺度上，你可以 3D 打印核武器，可以在后院作为高中物理项目制造奇点。所以我认为作为人类，我们必须超越我们是独立生物体的想法，几乎要进入某种多细胞生物体的状态，否则我们会毁灭自己。炸毁自己太容易了。这显然与我自由意志主义的本能——每个人都应该自由做任何他们想做的事——非常非常矛盾。所以我不知道如何组织社会了。而且我认为我任何残留的年轻时的关于最优社会组织的信念，很可能是错误的。而我们最终在千年后拥有的繁荣社会将会……

Good question. I mean, I try not to have too much that I've pre-decided upon. I think that creating identities and labels locks you in and keeps you from seeing the truth. So I used to identify as libertarian, but then I'd find myself defending positions that I hadn't really thought through just because they're part of libertarian canon. The reality is that if all of your beliefs line up into ten neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious because they're pre-packaged. So I don't like to self-identify at almost any level. Anyone that keeps me from having too many of these so-called stable beliefs. So it's hard for me to point to something that I think is shaky, because if I thought it was really shaky, then I wouldn't stand on it. I guess the areas where I'm becoming least certain is kind of all the—I call it the 'grand' category of 'how should we organize society' beliefs. Everybody has them. Some people think we should be communists, some are capitalists, some are anarchists, some say we need a larger welfare state, universal health care and basic income, and others say no, we need to cut it all. I think the entire class of beliefs is unfalsifiable. They're almost religious. They're things that people got into when they were young. Nobody actually knows which system is the better one. Nobody actually knows which one maximizes happiness versus output or whatever. I know there are a lot of smart economists and people studying it, there's a lot of good data and science, but at the end of the day, the more I look into it, the more I come away saying, 'Well, maybe I don't know how best to organize society.' Maybe society should not have just one organization but should have multiple organizations so you can choose which society you're most bound to thrive in. But I don't think there is a single right answer for human culture and society anymore, except to the extent that given increasingly destructive technology, on a longer timescale you can 3D print a nuclear weapon, you can create a singularity in your backyard as part of your high school physics project. So I think as a human race, we do have to sort of get past this idea that we're separate organisms and almost get into some kind of a multicellular organism situation, otherwise we'll just destroy ourselves. It'll just be too easy to blow ourselves up. And that obviously runs very, very counter to my libertarian instincts of everyone should be free and do whatever they want, etc. So I just don't know how to organize society anymore. And I think any beliefs that I have, any remnant beliefs from being younger about the optimal way to organize society, are probably wrong. And the future thriving society that we end up with maybe a thousand years from now will...

可能看起来像是我今天会强烈反对的东西，因为它们没有给个人留下空间。也许你可以为听众解释一下奇点以及你对此的看法。

Probably look like something that I would argue very strongly against today because they will have no room for the individual. Maybe you can explain for listeners the singularity and kind of what your thoughts are around that.

是的，奇点是这样一种观点：技术变革正在加速，在某个时刻加速得如此之快，以至于我们一生中会发生巨大的变化。我们创造出通用人工智能之类的东西，我们开始永生，我们作为人类的本质发生了变化。其后果最常与通用人工智能联系在一起：我们制造出一种通用人工智能，然后那个人工智能可以破解自己的代码，让自己变得更聪明，超越我们所有人，达到我们要么被淘汰、要么永生、或者介于两者之间的地步。我的想法？我认为至少可以说是异想天开。尼克·博斯特罗姆写了一本非常著名的书叫《超级智能》，它阐述了过去的观点。对《超级智能》有很好的反驳，所以我不会喘不过气来、瞪大眼睛读那本书并相信一切。奇点研究所里有人期待它的到来，但我认为这是书呆子的宗教。它具有所有相同的特征：在它发生之前无法证伪，它基本上说选民将被拯救，世界将终结，我们将永生。很难脱离圣经式的故事。我发现最推动它的人是我所说的纸上谈兵的技术专家。他们可能懂一点科学，但推动它的不是物理学博士。不是菲尔兹奖得主数学家。我受过一点科学训练，我认为自己是一个业余科学家，我知道得足够多，知道自己知道得多么少。物理学仍然无法解决三体问题：碰撞三个台球，无法告诉你发生了什么。我们无法正确建模复杂系统，无法预测下周的天气，仍然无法解决绝大多数慢性疾病。我们才刚刚开始连接肠道、大脑和体内的细菌。自然界有如此多的复杂性，人类才刚刚开始触及表面。相信我们将通过技术进入这个完美的世界，我认为这牵强附会。看，有 AI，每个人都在谈论 AI，这些人没有一个写过真正的代码。我们离创造通用人工智能并不比二十年前更近。现在，特定 AI 确实取得了巨大进步，但这些基本上都是数据处理问题。如果我将大量真实世界的图像输入神经网络，那么我可以做得更好的图像识别，毫无疑问。这是真实的，这是一个数据驱动的解决方案。算法并没有变得更好，人脑和人体的工作方式仍然远远超出我们的机器能力，所以如果会有奇点，它不会在我有生之年发生。我认为从这个意义上说，像奇点这样的东西是有害的。它们有害的原因与来世有害的原因相同：因为它让你脱离当下，给你对未来的希望，所以你不再为今天而活，开始为明天而活。我知道这听起来没什么，但实际上很重要。任何时候你走在街上，你的大脑只有很小一部分专注于当下；其余的是未来规划或对过去的回忆。这让你无法获得不可思议的体验，让你无法看到一切的美，无法感激你所处的位置。我认为如果你把所有时间都花在对未来的幻想中，它真的会摧毁你的幸福。所以我认为奇点这件事在推动技术进步的意义上是好的，我们投入更多资源，花更多时间开发，人类将利用一些伟大的东西，我们将利用伟大的技术。所以在这个意义上，它是一个推动科学前进的动因，这是一件好事。但我认为认为你在死前会通过 AI 和魔法科学的某种组合得救是妄想。你只需要过好你拥有的生活。

Yeah, the singularity is this idea that technological change is accelerating, and at some point the acceleration gets so great that there's massive change in our lifetimes. We create things like general AI, we start living forever, and the nature of who we are as humans changes. The consequence of that is most associated with a general AI: we produce a general-purpose artificial intelligence, that artificial intelligence could then hack its own code, make itself smarter, and out of all of us, to the point where we are either obsolete or immortal or something in between. My thoughts? I think it's fanciful, to say the least. Nick Bostrom wrote a very famous book called Superintelligence, which lays out the past. There are good rebuttals to Superintelligence, so I wouldn't just read that book breathless and wide-eyed and believe everything. And there are people in the Singularity Institute who are looking forward to this coming, but I think it's religion for nerds. It's got all the same characteristics: it's unfalsifiable until it happens, it basically says the chosen will be saved, the world's gonna end, we will be immortal. It's very hard to part from a biblical kind of story. I find the people who are pushing it the most are what I would call armchair technologists. They might understand a little bit of science, but these are not the PhDs in physics who are pushing this. It's not like Fields Medal-winning mathematicians pushing this. I was trained a little bit in science and I consider myself an amateur scientist, and I know just enough to know how little we know. Physics still can't solve the three-body problem: collide three billiard balls together, can't tell you what happens. We cannot properly model complex systems, we can't tell the weather next week, we still can't solve the vast majority of chronic diseases. We're just starting to connect the gut and the brain and bacteria in our system together. There is so much complexity in nature, and humans have just begun to scratch the surface. To believe that we are going to go into this world of perfection through technology, I think it's far-fetched. Look, there's AI, everyone's talking about AI, none of these people have written real code. We are no closer to creating a general AI than we were twenty years ago. Now, there are actual huge advances that were made in specific AI, but these are data processing problems basically. If I dump huge amounts of real-world images into a neural network, then I can do better image recognition, no question. That is real, that is a data-driven solution. The algorithms haven't gotten any better, and the structure of how the human brain works and how the human body works is still so far advanced beyond our machine capabilities that certainly if there's gonna be a singularity, it's not gonna happen in my lifetime. I think in that sense, some things like the singularity are pernicious. They're pernicious for the same reason that the afterlife is pernicious: because it takes you out of the moment, it gives you hope for the future, so you stop living for today and you start living for tomorrow. I know that doesn't sound like much, but it's actually a big deal. At any given time when you're walking down the street, a very small percentage of your brain is focused on the present; the rest is future planning or a great past. And that's keeping you from an incredible experience, it's keeping you from seeing the beauty in everything and from being grateful for where you are. I think it can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all your time living in delusions of the future. So I do think the singularity thing is good in the sense that it pushes forward technological advancement, we put more resources on it, we spend more time developing, and some of the great things that the human race will take advantage of, the great technologies we're gonna take advantage of. So in that sense, it's an agent that pushes science forward, that's a good thing. But I think it's delusional to think that you're somehow gonna be saved before you die by some combination of AI and magic science. You just have to live the life you have.

这很深刻。即使你活在过去，你也不是真的在活着，对吧？你必须在当下才能有任何……那里什么都没有。实际上除了这一刻什么都没有。没有人能回到过去，也没有人能够以任何重要的方式成功预测未来。所以实际上唯一存在的东西就是你恰好所在的这个空间和时间点。就像所有伟大的深刻真理一样，都是悖论。所以任何两个点都是无限不同的，任何时刻都是完全独特的，但那个时刻本身流逝得如此之快，你抓不住它。

That's pretty profound. Even when you're living backwards, you're not really living, right? You kind of have to be in the moment to have any sort of... There is nothing there. There is actually nothing but this moment. One has never gone back in time and no one has ever been able to predict the future successfully in any way that matters. So literally the only thing that exists is this exact point where you are in space at that exact time that you happen to be. And it's like all the great profound truths, it's all paradoxes. So any two points are infinitely different, any moment is perfectly unique, but that moment itself slips by so quickly that you can't grab it.

你对当前的教育体系有什么看法？当我在推特上问人们他们想问什么时，这个问题出现了几次：你会如何修复它？你对教育体系有什么看法？你对此有什么想法？

What's your opinion on the current education system? When I ask people on Twitter what they wanted to ask you, this question came up a couple times: how would you fix it? What's your opinion on the education system? What are your thoughts on that?

我认为毫无疑问它已经完全过时了。教育体系是路径依赖的结果，源于对日托的需求，对大学年龄男性监狱的需求，否则他们会充斥社会并造成大量破坏。例如，最初的中世纪大学有面向内的瞭望塔，因为你必须在那里实行宵禁，你可以把 18 岁的年轻男性锁起来，防止他们带着剑和匕首出去制造麻烦。所以称之为大学和学校。我们对它们的看法来自一个书籍稀少、知识稀少、保姆稀少、犯罪常见、暴力盛行的时代，没有自主学习这回事。所以我认为学校只是这类机构的副产品。现在我们有了互联网，这是有史以来最伟大的知识水平，完全互联。所以如果你真的有学习的欲望，学习是非常非常容易的。一切都在互联网上。你可以上可汗学院，在线获取麻省理工和耶鲁的讲座，你可以获得所有课程并进行互动，你可以阅读杰出人士的博客，你可以阅读所有这些伟大的书籍。所以学习的能力、学习的手段、学习的工具是丰富和无限的。而学习的欲望却极其稀缺。所以我只是认为学校对自我激励的学生来说并不重要。但学校的作用是，当父母工作时，他们想把孩子留在那里。它创造了社交，因为孩子们想和同龄人在一起，他们想学习。

I think there's no question it's completely obsolete. The education system is a path-dependent outcome from the need for daycare, from the need for prisons for college-aged males who would otherwise overrun society and cause a lot of havoc. The original medieval universities had guard towers that face inwards, for example, because you have to put a curfew in there and you can lock up the young 18-year-old males before they go out with swords and daggers and create trouble. So call it a college and schools. The way we think about them comes from a time period when books were rare, knowledge was rare, babysitting was rare, crime was common, violence was prevalent, there was no such thing as self-guided learning. So I think schools are just byproducts of these kinds of institutions. And now we have the internet, which is the greatest level of knowledge ever created, completely interconnected. So it's very, very easy to learn if you actually have the desire to learn. Everything is on the internet. You can go on Khan Academy, get MIT and Yale lectures online, you can get all the coursework and get interactivity, you can read blogs by brilliant people, you can read all these great books. So the ability to learn, the means of learning, the tools of learning are abundant and infinite. It's the desire to learn that's incredibly scarce. So I just don't think that schools matter for self-motivated students. But what schools matter for is wanting to keep the kids while the parents are at work. It creates socialization because kids want to be around their peers and they want to learn.

如何与同龄人社交？但如果你追求的是纯粹的学习，那学习完全可以靠自己、通过互联网，或者通过互联网与志同道合的群体联合起来完成。所以我认为这是当前教育体系的一个问题。第二个问题是选择学什么。当前教育体系必须采用一刀切的模式，它必须说：好，你现在要学 X，然后学 Y。举个例子，过时的死记硬背，对吧？在谷歌和智能手机的时代，记忆绝对——你为什么要记住特拉法加海战？为什么要记住某个州的首府？但我们仍然过分强调这些，只是因为过去一直这么做，而且我们生活在前谷歌时代。另一个例子是，当我们按一定节奏前进时——我敢肯定不是所有人，但 90%的听众都遇到过这种情况——他们在学数学，一开始跟得上：算术、几何、三角、微积分预备、微积分。然后在某个地方掉队了。在构建数学这座逻辑大厦的过程中，他们错过了一节课，错过了一个概念，或者大脑无法以某种方式理解某个解释——本该用视觉解释的却用了数字，本该用符号解释的却用了图形等等——他们就跟不上了。一旦你在数学中失去那一级，通常你就错过了梯子上的那一级，无法进入下一级。因为到了下一级，老师说：好，微积分预备学完了，现在学微积分。你说：等等，我没理解微积分预备，也不明白它如何从三角过渡到微积分，我错过了整个部分。现在学微积分，你不懂基础，就只能靠死记硬背。于是你知道了，dx/dy，看到这个符号就做这个。但你已经失去了真正的学习，失去了与基本原理的联系。如果是这样，我认为学习应该是学习所有领域的基础，并且反复学透。因为生活主要是应用基础，只有在真正热爱且对基础了如指掌的事情上才去钻研高级内容。但我们的体系不是这样建的。我们教所有孩子微积分，他们出来时根本不理解微积分，而实际上他们整个时间只做算术和基础编程反而更好。所以我认为存在学习节奏的问题。最后还有学什么的问题。有一整套东西我们甚至懒得教。我们不教营养学，不教烹饪，不教如何建立快乐积极的关系，不教如何保持身体健康——我们只提体育。我们不教幸福，不教冥想。也许有些东西不该教，因为不同孩子有不同的天赋。但也许我们应该教技术的实际构建。比如，每个学生的科学项目，与其造一个化学火山，不如造一部智能手机。我们就是没跟上。我相信我们可以改变这个体系，但我们没有。但你永远无法通过改造现有事物来改变一个体系。我不相信——我在科技商业领域有些经验，足以知道更好的方式是创造全新的东西。

How to operate society of their peers? But I think if it's purely learning you're after, that learning can be done much more either on your own or through the internet, or by uniting through the internet with like-minded groups. So I think that's one problem with the current educational system. The second problem is what do you choose to learn. The current educational system has to have a one-size-fits-all model. It has to say, well, you have to learn X now, and then you have to learn Y. And to give you examples of witnesses: obsolete memorization, right? In a day and age of Google and smartphones, memorization is absolutely—why should you be memorizing the Battle of Trafalgar? Why should you be memorizing what the capital of this or that state is? But we still put undue weight on that just because that's the way it's always been done, and we did a pre-Google world. Another example is how, when we're moving along at a certain pace—I'm sure not everyone, but I'm certain 90% of your listeners have had this happen to them—which is they were learning mathematics, and at some point they were keeping up: they were doing arithmetic, then they were doing geometry, trigonometry, then precalc, then calculus. And somewhere in there they got lost. Somewhere in there, while building the massive edifice, the logical structure that mathematics is, they missed one lesson, they missed one concept in this five classes, or they just didn't—their brain couldn't think a certain way that something was being explained to them, and should have been explained visually but it was being explained numerically, or it should have been explained symbolically and it was being explained in cartography, or what have you—but they were not able to keep up. And the moment you lose that rung in mathematics, normally you miss that rung in the ladder, you can't go to the next one. Because now on the next one, the teachers are like, okay, we're done with precalculus and now we're moving on to calculus. You're saying, wait, I didn't understand precalculus, and I don't understand how precalculus leads from trigonometry to calculus, and missed that whole part. So now I get to calculus, you don't understand the fundamentals, and now you reduce it to memorization. So now I got, okay, dx/dy, when I see that symbol I do this, yeah. But now you've lost the actual learning, you've lost the connection to the underlying principles. If so, I think learning should be about learning the basics in all the fields, and learning them really well over and over. Because life is mostly about applying the basics, and only doing the advanced stuff in things that you truly love and where you understand the basics inside out. But that's not how our system is built. We teach all these kids calculus, and they walk out not understanding calculus at all, when really they would have been better off just doing arithmetic and basic computer programming the entire time. So I think there's a pace of learning issue. And then there's finally a what to learn. And there's a whole set of things we don't even bother trying to teach. We don't teach nutrition, we don't teach cooking, we don't teach how to be in happy positive relationships, we don't teach how to keep your body healthy and fit—you know, we just say sports. We don't teach happiness, we don't teach meditation. Maybe we shouldn't teach some of these things, as different kids will have different aptitudes. But maybe we should teach practical construction of technology. And you know, like maybe everyone in their science project, instead of building a little chemistry volcano, maybe it should be building a smartphone. So we just haven't kept up. And I have to believe that we can change the system, but we're not. But you never change a system by taking the existing thing and reworking it. I don't believe—a bit of certain value in tech business enough to know that you're better off changing it just by creating something brand new.

所以我有一个幻想中的想法：等我做完 AngelList，或者有更多时间时，我想做一个 MIT 的“每个孩子一台笔记本电脑”项目的后继者。尼古拉斯·尼葛洛庞帝搞过“每个孩子一台笔记本电脑”项目。但我后来看到一篇引人入胜的文章——那是很久以前了，大概五年前，可能是在《经济学人》上——讲的是他们把一箱未开封的安卓平板电脑留在了巴基斯坦的一个小村庄。几个月后回来时，孩子们打开了箱子，自己摸索着启动了平板，破解了它们，绕过了用户管理登录，安装了一大堆应用，还建立了一个小经济体：大孩子教小孩子，他们教祖母如何做生意，他们上网，自学了英语。你知道，孩子就是学习机器；他们只需要工具。为此，我想做的是制造一种非常便宜、非常坚固、容易供电、不易损坏的安卓平板，然后分发到世界各地，预装学习应用。这样你开机后 30 秒内它就能与你互动。它会判断你说什么语言，你的能力水平——你是二年级、三年级还是五年级——当然不同学科有不同水平，然后让你深入进去，学习任何能让生活更美好的东西。别把它当成我的原始专利，明白吗。它总是让你处于挑战边缘，不断推动你。然后你可以连接全世界的老师，任何想当老师并做出贡献的人——不只是萨尔曼·汗建的可汗学院——实际上你可以用平板连接全世界的老师和学生，以每个孩子定制的节奏和水平进行，让他们学习对生活有实际成果的东西。我知道博雅教育有好处，推动那些人们不会主动去学的东西，但他们必须有一定渴望。最好等到他们认为自己准备好了，再全部给他们，因为我认为这样学习才能巩固。这就是我想做的项目。但我不认为当前学校体系能解决这个问题。

So one fantasy idea I've had is, you know, after I'm done with AngelList, or if I have more time on my hands, I would like to create a successor to the One Laptop project at MIT. Nicholas Negroponte, he had the One Laptop per Child project. But then I saw this fascinating write-up—this was a really long time ago, maybe five years ago, maybe it was in The Economist or somewhere—it was a story about how they left a box full of unopened Android tablets in a little village in Pakistan. And when they came back months later, the kids had opened the box, they'd all figured out and booted the tablets, they'd hacked them, they'd gotten past the user administration login, they'd installed a whole bunch of apps, they'd got a little economy set up, the older kids are teaching the younger kids, they're teaching their grandmothers how to run businesses, they're surfing the web, they've taught themselves English. You know, kids are learning machines; they just need the tools. So to that end, what I would love to do is create a very low-cost, very rugged, easily powered, cheap Android tablet that's hard to destroy, and basically distribute them around the world with pre-built learning applications, so that you can literally fire one up and it works with you interactively in 30 seconds. It figures out what language do you speak, you know, if any, you're going to speed symbolic, and what level of aptitude are you at—are you a second grader, third grader, fifth grader—and of course invariance by a different discipline, and then lets you dive in and let you learn anything you want that will make your life better. Just don't think about it as my original patent, see exactly. And it always keeps you on the edge and always keeps pushing you. And then you can network in all the teachers of the world, so anyone who wants to be a teacher and contributes—not just Salman Khan building Khan Academy—but essentially you could network connect all the teachers of the world and all the students of the world using tablets, and do it at a pace and level where it's essentially customized for each child, and they're learning the things that have a practical outcome in their life. I know there's advantage to liberal arts education, pushing things that people aren't going to sleep on to learn on their own, but they have to have some desire for it. It's better to wait until they think they're ready and then give it all, because I think that's the way that learning sticks. So that's the kind of project I'd like to work on. But I don't think it's solvable with the current school system.

我希望你有机会做这件事。我认为那会对世界产生巨大影响。

I hope you get a chance to work on that. I think that'd be a phenomenal impact to the world.

是啊，我觉得会很有趣。我现在更常想这个，因为我有个小孩，老实说我不想送他去学校。

Yeah, I think it would be fun. And I'm thinking about this now more because I have a young kid, and honestly I don't want to send him to school.

作为成年人，你具体是怎么学习新学科的？

How do you, as an adult, go about learning new subjects? You specifically.

嗯，我基本上只停留在基础层面。

Yeah, mostly I just stay on the basics.

我在学物理或科学，坚持打基础，所以我会为了乐趣读一些概念，但我更可能做算术而不是微积分。目前我不太适合，也许下辈子或者等我孩子长大吧，但对我来说已经太晚了。所以我得坚持做我喜欢的事。我喜欢科学的地方在于，数学是自然的语言。科学对我来说是研究真理。它是唯一真正的学科，因为它能做出可证伪的预测，真正改变世界，应用科学变成技术。技术把我们和动物区分开，让我们拥有手机、房子、汽车，甚至用电。所以科学对我来说是研究真理，数学是科学和自然的语言。从这个意义上说，我不信教，但我有灵性。对我来说，研究宇宙法则就是我能做的最虔诚的事。有些人可能在麦加或麦地那朝拜先知时获得的快感，我在研究科学时也能感受到同样的敬畏和渺小。所以对我来说，这是无与伦比的。我宁愿待在基础层面，从那里开始。这就是阅读的美妙之处。

I'm learning physics or science. I'm sticking to the basics, so I'll read concepts for fun, but I'm more likely to do something arithmetic than calculus. I'm not going to be a great fit at this point, maybe in the next lifetime or when my kid will be, but it's too late for me. So I have to stick to what I enjoy. What I love about science is mathematics is the language of nature. Science to me is the study of truth. It is the only true discipline because it makes falsifiable predictions, actually changes the world, and applied science becomes technology. Technology is what separates us from the animals and allows us to have things like cell phones, houses, cars, and eat electricity. So science to me is the study of truth, and mathematics is the language of science and nature. In that sense, I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual. To me, that is the most devotional thing I could do: to study the laws of the universe. The same kick that some guy might get out of being in Mecca or Medina and bowing to the Prophet, I get that same feeling of awe and that same small sense of self when I study science. So for me, it's unparalleled. I'd rather stay at the basics and start there. This is the beauty of reading.

顺便说一句，我在 Kindle 上读书时，有一个习惯：我会跳过三分之二的内容。我跳过它们的原因是它们有点尴尬。它们听起来不像你读的好书，可能显得琐碎或愚蠢，但谁在乎呢？我不必告诉每个人我读了什么。我读各种别人认为是垃圾甚至应受谴责的东西。我读各种我不同意的内容，因为它们能开阔思维。前几天我在 Twitter 上一个随机黑洞里，读一个人的推文，心想：‘哇，他真聪明，真有趣，真机智。’这个人是个彻头彻尾的白人至上主义者。他不是温和的那种，他认为所有白人应该守卫，像我这样的人不应该上街。但这仍然很吸引人，他仍然很聪明。我继续读，读了一遍又一遍。过了一段时间，我构建了他连贯的世界观以及他为什么这么想。但要做到这一点，我不能评判太多。我当然不会到处跟朋友吹嘘：‘嘿，我前几天从一个白人至上主义者那里学到了这个。’对吧？所以某种程度上，你读的东西几乎必须是因为你感兴趣，仅此而已。如果你不需要其他理由，就没有什么使命要完成。对，只是因为你喜欢。如果你读别人都在读的东西，你就会想别人都在想的东西。所以你需要多样性，几乎像指数基金的方法，对吧？你会抓住赢家，但你无法事先识别出很多会改变你的东西，因为很多东西都是情境化的。

One thing I don't like to do, by the way, when I do my books on the Kindle, I skip two thirds of them. The reason I skip two thirds is because they're kind of embarrassing. They won't sound like good books you read; they'll sound trivial or silly or whatever. But who cares? I don't have to tell everybody everything I read. I read all kinds of stuff that other people consider junk or even reprehensible. I read all kinds of stuff that I disagree with because of mind bending. I found myself in some random dark hole on Twitter the other day where I was reading this guy's tweets like, 'Wow, he's really smart, really interesting, very clever.' The guy was a full-blown white supremacist. I mean, he's not even mildly a white supremacist; he just thinks everyone in the white race should be guarding people like me shouldn't be allowed on the streets. But it was still fascinating, and he's still really smart. I kept reading it, and I read it and read it. After a while, I built up my own sense of his coherent view of the world and where he was coming from. But to do that, I couldn't have judged too much. I'm certainly not going to go around bragging to my friends, 'Hey, I learned this from a white supremacist the other day,' right? So to some level, you almost have to read the stuff you're reading because you're into it, and that's it. If you don't need any other reason, there's no mission here to accomplish. Yeah, just really because you enjoy it. If you read what everybody else is reading, you're going to think what everybody else is thinking. So you need the diversity, almost like an index fund approach, right? Where you're going to catch the winners, but you can't really identify a lot of them beforehand that are going to change you as a person because so much about it is contextual.

我认为现在人们读的东西几乎都是为了社会认可。所有畅销书都是关于社会进步、社会调节的。如果你真的想成功、快乐等等，那些外在指标。你在寻找一个非平均的结果，所以你不能读平均的东西。正如你所说，这些东西其实老掉牙了。你可以读亚当·斯密的《国富论》，你可以读本杰明·富兰克林的格言来理解如何生活。你可以读查理·芒格，你可以读查尔斯·达尔文从源头理解进化论。你可以读沃森和克里克理解双螺旋和 DNA 的结构。但我们选择读的却是机场畅销书排行榜第一，或者朋友在读的东西。我认识一些人，他们读了一百本关于进化论的二手书，却从未读过达尔文。或者看看宏观经济学家——我认为他们大多数读了很多经济学论文，却没读过任何亚当·斯密。对。所以在某种程度上，你这样做是为了社会认可，为了融入其他猴子，为了和群体相处。但这不是生活的回报所在。生活的回报在于脱离群体。社会认可在群体内部。所以如果你想要社会认可，就去读群体读的东西。但你需要一定程度的反叛，说：‘不，我不管社会结果如何，我就要做自己的事，学我觉得有趣的东西。’

I think almost everything that people read these days is designed for social approval. All the bestsellers are about social improvements, social conditioning. If you really want to be successful, happy, blah blah blah, all those external metrics. You're looking for a non-average outcome, so you can't be reading the average thing. To your point, all these things are actually old as the hills. You can go read Adam Smith from The Wealth of Nations, you can go read Benjamin Franklin and his aphorisms to understand how to live your life. You could read Charlie Munger, you could read Charles Darwin to understand evolution at the source. You could read Watson and Crick to understand the structure of the double helix and DNA. But instead, what we choose to read are just whatever is number one at the airport bestseller or whatever our friends are reading. I know people who have read a hundred regurgitated books of evolution and have never read Darwin. Or take the number of macroeconomists out there—I think most of them have read tons of treatises in economics but haven't read any Adam Smith. Yeah. So at some level, you're doing it for social approval, you're doing it to fit in with the other monkeys, you're fitting to get along with the herd. But that's not where the returns are in life. The returns in life are being out of the herd. Social approval is inside the herd. So if you want social approval, definitely go read what the herd is reading. But it takes a level of contrarianism and saying, 'No, I'm just going to do my own thing regardless of the social outcome, to learn anything I think is interesting.'

你认为这里面有某种损失厌恶吗？因为一旦你偏离，你就在推动——假设有一个高斯分布——你把它推向一个尾部。如果你觉得你会因此失去什么，你宁愿待在中间，以防你不在正面的肥尾里。

Do you think there's some sort of loss aversion there? Because once you diverge, you're pushing out—say there's a Gaussian distribution—you're pushing it to one of the tails. And if you feel that you're going to lose out on that, you would rather just stay in the middle if there's a chance that you're not going to be in the fat tail for a positive.

绝对。我认为我认识的最聪明、最成功的人一开始都是失败者。如果你把自己看作失败者，一个被社会抛弃、在社会中没有角色的人，那么你就会做自己的事，更有可能找到成功的道路。所以一开始就说：‘哦，我永远不会受欢迎，永远不会被接受。我已经是个失败者了。我不会得到其他孩子拥有的东西。我只想做自己，开心就好。’这很有帮助。

Absolutely. I think that's what the smartest and most successful people I know started out as losers. If you view yourself as a loser, as someone who has been cast out by society and has no role in society, then you will do your own thing and you're much more likely to find a winning path. So it helps to start out by saying, 'Oh, I'm never going to be popular, I'm never going to be accepted. I'm already a loser. I'm not going to get what all the other kids have. I'm just going to be happy being me.'

你读书时，是读完后记在脑子里，还是更像做笔记，有一个系统来跟踪或复习？

When you're reading, do you just read and it sticks in your head, or is it more like you take notes to have a system for how you keep track of that or review them?

我又懒又专注于活在当下。所以我认为做笔记就像旅行时拍照一样。它只会把你带离当下。谁会在多年后真的坐下来翻看所有旅行照片怀旧呢？直接去下一次旅行吧。所以我不相信任何过去的东西。任何东西。没有记忆，没有遗憾，没有人，没有旅行，什么都没有。因为我们很多不快乐也来自于把过去和现在比较。第一次看日落，它令人惊叹，目瞪口呆，你忘了自己。第二次看，很酷。第一百次，没什么。第一千次，有人给你看日落，你会说：‘嗯，其实我在墨西哥看过一次日落，那次真的很酷。’你甚至不在那里。所以我不相信过于执着记忆，包括阅读。所以我会做高亮，我发现自己会那样做，但我更多是因为那是一种在那一刻反复重读那个段落的方式。

I'm both lazy and I'm really focused on being present. So I think taking notes is the same as taking photos when you're on a trip. All it's doing is taking you out of the moment. And who really sits there years later and goes back and looks at all their trip photos and gets nostalgic? Just go take your next trip. Okay, so I just don't believe in anything from the past. Anything. No memories, no regrets, no people, no trips, nothing. Because a lot of our unhappiness also comes from comparing things from the past to the present. First time you saw a sunset, it was amazing, jaw-dropping, you forgot yourself. The second time you saw it, it's cool. The hundredth time, it's nothing. The thousandth time, someone shows you a sunset, you're like, 'Well, actually I saw this one sunset in Mexico this time that was really cool.' You're not even there. So I just don't believe in clinging too much to memories, and that includes in reading. So I do highlight, I catch myself doing that, but I do it more because it's just kind of a way of rereading and rereading that particular paragraph at that moment in time.

难得有一次，对于我特别喜欢的书，我想重读，但时间不够，所以我就只读标记过的段落，直到某处吸引我，然后我又被拉回书中。但现实是，我明天就可以停止标记，这也没什么区别。记笔记甚至更难，所以我不记笔记。但每个人的大脑运作方式不同。有些人喜欢记笔记。实际上，我的笔记就是推特。所以我做的就是真正地读，读，如果我有一些根本性的见解或概念，那么我喜欢推特的地方在于它迫使我把那提炼成 140 个字符，然后我试着把它作为格言发出去，然后我就被各种随机的人攻击，他们指出各种明显的例外，对我穷追猛打。我为什么要这么做呢？

Once in a blue moon, for my especially favorite books, I want to reread the book but I'll be short on time, so I'll just read the highlighted passages until something catches my eye and then I get sucked back into the book. But the reality is I could stop highlighting tomorrow and it would make no difference. And note-taking is even harder than that, so I do not take notes. But everyone's brain works differently. Now some people love to take notes. Actually, my note-taking is Twitter. So what I do is I really read, read, and if I have some fundamental insight or concept, then what I like about Twitter is it forces me to distill that into 140 characters, and then I try and put it out there as an aphorism, and then I get attacked by all kinds of random people who point out all kinds of obvious exceptions and jump down my throat. Why do I do this again?

你拥有我所知的最有思想的推特之一，所以我希望没人对你太苛刻。

You have one of the most thoughtful Twitter feeds that I know of, so I hope nobody jumps down your throat too bad.

谢谢。是啊，当你第一次拿起一本书时，你是略读寻找有趣的东西吗？你是怎么读的？还是随便翻到一页就开始读？你的过程是怎样的？

Thank you. Yeah, when you first pick up a book, are you skimming for something interesting? Like how do you go about reading it? Or do you just flip to a random page and start reading? What's your process for that?

是的，我会从头开始，但我会快速推进。如果它不有趣，我就开始往前看。我开始略读或速读。如果它在第一章内没有以一种有意义的积极方式抓住我的注意力，我会要么放弃这本书，要么跳过几章。我不相信延迟满足，因为外面有无限的书可读。有那么多好书，那么多写得那么好，我就是不能把时间花在这些上。我会做的一件事是，如果我发现书的早期作者开始做出我认为事实上不真实的陈述——一个人应该总是对新想法持开放态度——但如果他们开始制造矛盾，承认那个矛盾的认识论负担会要求我把我一生的学习都读一遍并撤销它然后重新开始，最真实的……是啊，是啊，没错。或者像，我最近和一个听起来非常非常聪明的人交谈，他向我抛出各种科学，我头晕目眩，然后他基本上说，‘正如我们所知，热力学不是真的，它是基础的，所以撤销……’是啊，那甚至不是理论，它是定律，它来自数学。所以我们就得——我们没有对话的基础。所以如果我在一本书里发现类似的东西，有人说，‘哦，是的，我清空了我的思想，我观察了我的思维过程，然后我就能漂浮起来，’那么我就得放下书，因为现在我不知道什么是真什么是假。基本上，我在寻找的是：作者是在故意撒谎还是完全被迷惑了？如果是，那么我不能用那些垃圾填满我的大脑，因为我无法区分真理和虚构。所以通常，我会略读，我会快进，我会试着找到吸引我的部分。不过通常，大多数书的情况是——大多数书有一个观点要表达，显然是非虚构，不是小说——但它们有一个观点要表达，它们表达了，然后它们给你一个接一个的例子，并应用它来解释世界上的一切。一旦我觉得我掌握了要点，我就很舒服地放下书。所以有很多我称之为伪科学畅销书的东西到处都是。每个人都在见面，人们喜欢，‘哦，你读过这本书吗？’我会说是，但现实是我可能只读了两章，但我掌握了要点。

Yeah, I'll start at the beginning, but I'll move fast. So if it's not interesting, I'll just start looking ahead. I'll start skimming or speed reading. If it doesn't grab my attention within the first chapter in a meaningfully positive way, I'll either drop the book or I'll skip ahead a few chapters. I don't believe in delayed gratification when there's an infinite number of books out there to read. There are so many great books, and so many of them that are so well written, that I just can't spend my time on these. One thing I will do is if I find that early on in the book the author starts making statements that I think are just factually untrue—and one should always be open to new ideas—but if they're starting to make contradictions where the epistemological load of acknowledging that contradiction would require me to read my entire lifetime of learning and undo it and start over, the truest... yeah, yeah, exactly. Or like, I had a conversation recently with a guy who sounded really, really smart and was throwing all kinds of science at me, and my head was spinning, and then he basically said, 'And as we know, thermodynamics isn't really true, it's fundamental, so the undo by...' Yeah, that is not even a theory, it's a law, it comes from the mathematics. So then we just have to—we have no basis for conversation. So if I find something like that in a book, where someone says, 'Oh yes, I cleared my mind and I watched my thought process, then I was able to levitate,' then I have to put the book down, because now I don't know what is true and what is false. Basically, what I'm looking for is: is the author knowingly lying or completely deluded? If they are, then I can't fill my brain with that junk, because I can't separate truth from fiction. So generally, I'll skim, I'll fast forward, I'll try and find a part that catches me. Usually, though, what happens in most books—most books have one point to make, obviously nonfiction, not fiction—but they have one point to make, they make it, and then they give you example after example after example, and they apply it to explain everything in the world. And once I feel like I've gotten the gist of it, I feel very comfortable putting the book down. So there are a lot of these what I would call pseudoscience bestsellers that are all over. Everyone's always meeting and people like, 'Oh, did you read this book?' and I would say yes, but the reality is I read maybe two chapters of it, but I got the gist.

我想换个话题，谈谈决策，这基本上是你作为投资者和 AngelList 的 CEO 所做的事情。你基本上是在别人错的时候被付钱做对。你有做决策的过程吗？

I want to switch gears and talk a little bit about decision-making, which is kind of what you get paid to do, both as an investor and the CEO of AngelList. You're kind of paid to be right when other people are wrong. Do you have a process for how you make decisions?

是的，决策就是一切。事实上，一个 80%时间做对决策的人，比如 70%的时间，会在市场上被估值和补偿数百倍。我认为人们很难理解这一点，但这是杠杆的一个基本事实。如果我管理十亿美元，我比其他人多 10%的时间做对，那就是一个判断决策上的一亿美元价值。随着现代技术、大规模劳动力和资本，我们的决策越来越有杠杆。所以如果你能更正确、更理性——这也是为什么我喜欢你的博客，因为它真的专注于帮助你更正确、更好的决策、更理性——那么你会在生活中获得非线性回报。所以决策就是一切。而决策，发生了什么？我们的大脑基本上是一个记忆预测机器。根据过去有效的事情的记忆，以及它读到的内容，它试图预测未来。而一种糟糕的记忆预测方式是‘过去发生了 X，因此未来会发生 X。’它太基于具体情境了。所以你想要的是一些原则，你想要心智模型。所以我发现的最好的心智模型来自进化论、博弈论和查理·芒格——我肯定你在博客上经常引用他。但查理·芒格，沃伦·巴菲特的合伙人，非常好的投资者，但他有大量伟大的心智模型。纳西姆·塔勒布有伟大的心智模型。本杰明·富兰克林有伟大的心智模型。所以我基本上用心智模型填满我的脑袋，但不同的模型适用于每种情况。所以我并不真正运行检查清单。但例如，我年轻时研究了很多复杂性理论。那是我进入的一个领域。偶尔，只是得到这些东西——我学到了很多关于那个领域的东西。而我最近的领域是密码学。但我在 90 年代中期非常热衷于复杂性理论。我越深入，就越理解我们知识的局限和我们预测能力的局限。这对我超级有帮助。所以这帮助我形成了一个在无知面前运作的系统。我相信我们从根本上就是无知的，非常非常不擅长预测未来。所以我不寻找——我不相信我有能力说出什么会成功。所以我尝试做的是消除那些不会成功的东西。所以我认为成功就是关于不犯错误。它不是关于有正确的判断；它是关于避免错误的判断。所以我有关如何判断我能否信任某人的心智模型，关于这件事实际成功的几率有多大，我有多大的安全边际。如果它成功了，你知道，天使投资和风险投资很好，因为它们有双峰结果：在正面，但在……

Yeah, so decision-making is everything. And in fact, someone who makes decisions right 80% of the time, so 70% of the time, will be valued and compensated in the market hundreds of times more. And I think people have a hard time understanding that, but that's a fundamental fact of leverage. If I'm managing a billion dollars and I'm right 10% more of the time than somebody else, that's a hundred million dollars worth of value on a judgment call. And with modern technology and large workforces and capital, our decisions are getting leverage more and more. So if you can be more right, more rational—and that's one of the reasons why I love your blog, because it really focuses on helping you be more right, better decision-making, more rational—then you're going to just get nonlinear returns in your life. So decision-making is everything. And decision-making, what's going on? We're basically what the brain is: a memory-prediction machine. Out of the memory of things that worked in the past, and what it's read, it's trying to predict the future. And a lousy way to do memory-prediction is 'X happened in the past, therefore X will happen in the future.' It's too based on specific circumstances. So what you want is you want principles, you want mental models. So the best mental models that I have found have come through evolution, game theory, and Charlie Munger—who I'm sure you quote a lot on your blog. But Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's partner, very good investor, but he has tons and tons of great mental models. Nassim Taleb has great mental models. Benjamin Franklin had great mental models. So I basically load my head full of mental models, but then different ones apply to every situation. So I don't really run a checklist. But for example, I studied a lot of complexity theory when I was younger. It's a field that I got into. And occasionally, just getting these things—I just learned a lot about that field. And my most recent ones: cryptography. But I was really into complexity theory back in the mid-90s. And the more I got into it, the more I understood the limits of our knowledge and the limits of our prediction capability. And that's been super helpful to me. So that has helped me come to a system that operates in the face of ignorance. And I believe that fundamentally we are ignorant and very, very bad at predicting the future. So I don't look for—and I don't believe that I have the ability to say what is going to work. So rather than what I try to do is I try to eliminate what is not going to work. So I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It's not about having correct judgments; it's about avoiding the incorrect judgments. So I have mental models around how do I determine if I can trust somebody, around what are the actual odds this is going to work, how much margin of safety do I have. If it works out, you know, the angel bets and venture bets are great because they have a bimodal outcome: in the positive, but on the...

下行风险你只能输掉 1 倍，但上行空间你可以赚到 10000 倍。所以我试图操纵这个游戏。我不相信具体的目标；它更像是一套系统。我的目标是：用你的判断力去弄清楚什么样的环境你能茁壮成长，然后建立一个系统，在你周围创造那个环境，让你在统计上更有可能成功。我不会成为这个星球上最成功的人，我也不想成为。我只想成为最成功的自己，同时尽可能少地工作。对吧？我希望在一千个宇宙中，Naval 都是成功的。其中 999 个他不是亿万富翁，但他在所有宇宙中都做得相当不错。所以不管用什么指标，或者他在大多数宇宙中都婚姻幸福。他可能没有在每个方面都做到完美，但他建立了系统，使得他在很少的地方失败。所以基本上，我只是尝试建立好的系统，然后单个决策就不那么重要了，因为我认为我们做出单个决策的能力实际上并不好。

Downside you can only lose 1X, but on the upside you can make 10,000X. So I tried to rig the game. I don't believe in specific goals; it's more a set of systems. My goals: use your judgment to figure out what kinds of environments you can thrive in, and then build a system to create that environment around you that you're statistically likely to succeed. I'm not going to be the most successful person on the planet, nor do I want to be. I just want to be the most successful version of me while working the least hard possible. Right? I want to be in a thousand universes where Naval is successful. 999 of them he's not a billionaire, but he's done pretty well in all of them. So whatever the metric is, or he's happily married in most of them. He may not have nailed it in every regard, but he's set up systems such that he's failed in very few places. So basically, I just try and set up good systems, and then the individual decisions don't matter that much because I think our ability to make individual decisions is actually not great.

例如，作为一名投资者，我更希望我的系统是：我想看 10000 家公司，挑选 500 家有潜力成为巨头的，然后有机会在五个赢家上加倍下注。我不想只看 100 家公司，挑出 10 家我认为是赢家的，然后全押它们。因为我认为我没有那个能力。而且我认为有很多事后推理和人们编造的关于他们为何成功的起源故事。但真正的区别在于：看看哪些人持续成功。尤其是在硅谷，有很多一招鲜的人。但有多少人持续地做一些有趣的事情，建立一些有趣的东西，赚钱，并做一些新的事情？

For example, as an investor, I would rather my system is: I want to see 10,000 companies, pick 500 that have a shot of being huge, and then have the option to double down on the five winners. I don't want to just look at 100 companies, pick 10 that I think are winners, and go all-in on those. Because I don't think I have that capability. And I think there's a lot of ex post facto reasoning and origin stories that people make up about why they were successful. But the real separation is: look at which people are consistently successful. Especially in Silicon Valley, there are lots of one-hit wonders. But how many people consistently seem to do something interesting, build something interesting, make money, and do something new?

我做这些不是为了赚钱。钱只是一张纸。每次我看到这些创始人把东西捐给医院或其他地方，他们都过头了；他们不需要那么多钱。所以钱在某个点之后有巨大的边际效益递减，尤其是现在我从“免于”转向“去做”。所有我不能做的事？所以从这个意义上说，钱就像我脖子上的船锚，因为它是我害怕失去的东西，是我引发嫉妒争论的东西，是那么多人想从我这里得到的东西。所以我甚至不是为了钱。而是：我能做一些有趣和新颖的事情吗？我能创造出世界上从未见过的、能从中获得价值、能使用它、并且符合我道德观的全新东西吗？这样我晚上睡觉从来没问题，而且我从来不用担心卖我自己不会买的东西。我更倾向于那个。

I'm not in this to make money. Money is just a piece of paper. Every time I see one of these building our founders giving away to a hospital or whatever, they overshot; they didn't need that much money. So there's a huge diminishing returns on money after a certain point, especially now that I'm going from freedom from to freedom to. All I do that I can't do? So literally money in that sense is a boat anchor around my neck because it is something that I've been fearful of losing, something I'm getting jealousy debates about, so many people want from me. So I'm not even in for the money. It's like: can I do something interesting and new? Can I create something brand new the world has never seen that it gets value out of, that it uses, that is congruent with my morals? So I never had problems sleeping at night, and I never have to worry about selling something that I wouldn't buy. I'm much more into that.

我没有用于决策的清单系统。我知道这是最近的大事；阿图·葛文德写了《清单宣言》。它对飞行员和外科医生有好处，但我不认为它对投资者一定很好。他完全错过了决策。我同意。顺便说一句，那是另一本你只需要读第一章就够了的书；它是一篇很棒的博客文章。但我也认为你不必对自己那么苛刻。今天发生的很多事情，你的很多听众现在，都在自责、潦草地记笔记，说“我需要做这个”和“你可以做那个”。不，你不需要做任何事。你应该做的只是你想做的事。如果你停止试图按照别人希望你做的方式去做事，那么你就能听到你脑子里那个想以某种方式做事的小声音，然后你就能做你自己。世界上没有人能在做你自己这件事上打败你。你永远不可能像我一样擅长做我，我也永远不可能像你一样擅长做你。所以当然要倾听、吸收，但不要试图模仿；那是徒劳的。相反，每个人对某件事都有独特的资格。他们有一些特定的知识、能力和欲望，是别人没有的，纯粹来自人类 DNA 和发育的组合。所以你的人生目标是找到最需要你的人，找到最需要你的生意，找到最能给你满足的项目和艺术。因为总有一些东西是为你准备的。但你不想要的是建立基于别人的清单和决策框架，因为你永远到不了那里；你永远不会擅长做别人。而且你也必然会错过一些东西。

I don't have a checklist system for decision making. I know that's a big thing recently; Atul Gawande wrote The Checklist Manifesto. It's good for pilots and surgeons, but I don't think it's necessarily great for investors. He totally misses the decision-making. I agree. And by the way, that's another one of those books where you just read the first chapter and you're done; it's a great blog post. But yeah, I also don't think you need to be that hard on yourself. A lot of what goes on today, a lot of your listeners right now, are beating themselves up and scribbling notes and saying 'I need to do this' and 'you can do that.' No, you don't need to do anything. All you should do is what you want to do. And if you stop trying to figure out how to do things the way other people want you to do them, then you get to listen to that little voice inside of your head that wants to do things a certain way, and then you get to be you. And no one in the world is gonna beat you at being you. You're never gonna be as good at being me as I am, and I'm never gonna be as good at you being you as you are. So certainly listen, absorb, but don't try and emulate; it's a fool's errand. Instead, each person is uniquely qualified for something. They have some specific knowledge, capability, and desire that nobody else has, just purely from the combinatorial of human DNA and development. So your goal in life is to find out the people who need you the most, to find out the business that needs you the most, to find out the project and the art that gives you the most. Because there's something out there just for you. But what you don't want to do is be building checklists and decision frameworks built on what other people are, because you're never going to be there; you'll never be good at being somebody else. And you're inevitably gonna miss stuff too.

你提到了如何判断是否可以信任某人。我知道你过去说过你使用巴菲特的评估人的标准，即智力、精力和正直的结合。有什么作用？你对每个标准关注什么预测信号？你如何判断是否可以信任某人？

And you mentioned kind of like how you determine if you can trust somebody. And I know you said in the past you use Buffett's criteria for evaluating people, which is the combination of intelligence, energy, and integrity. What purchase? What predictive signals do you pay attention to for each? How do you determine if you can trust someone?

很大程度上你只是……最难的是正直。正直是最难的。正直通常以两种方式体现。一种是长期的：你认识某人一段时间，你大致知道他们如何思考问题。但更有趣的一种，也是短期的一种，就是看他们如何对待其他人。有很多很多人不会坑——坑是个很重的词——但他们会对其他商业伙伴做一些自私或稍微不道德的事情，而同时他们会跟你说，‘我是你的朋友，我永远不会那样对你。’而问题是，没错，改变你对谁是朋友的定义非常容易。我发现那些真正出于正直做事的人有一个内在的道德指南针。所以他们不会对别人做不公平、不道德或糟糕的交易，因为那会玷污他们对自己的看法，而且他们晚上会睡不着觉。所以我认识的一些最正直的人，你能做的最糟糕的事情就是认为他们——嗯，我觉得你自己在那方面有感觉——他们会非常不高兴，因为他们会说，‘哦不不不，那不是我的为人，我不能成为那样的人’，然后他们会竭尽全力弥补。通常我发现，与正直的人谈判非常容易。他们会给你他们不需要给你的东西，因为他们认为那是公平的。反之亦然。所以与正直的人谈判通常非常容易，互相给予东西以确保对方足够满意，交易才能存活，因为不满意的交易会被解除，变成短期关系，没有任何复利效应。

A large part of you just... the hardest one is integrity. Integrity is the hardest one. And integrity usually comes out in two ways. One is long-term: you've known somebody for a while and you kind of know how to think about things. But the more interesting one, and there's a short-term one, is just kind of see how they treat other people. There are lots and lots of people who will not screw over—screw over is a strong word—but they will do something that is self-dealing or slightly unethical relative to another business partner, while the whole time they'll say to you, 'I'm your friend, I would never do that to you.' And the thing is, yeah exactly, it's very easy to change your definition of who friends are. I find the people who really do things out of integrity have an internal moral compass. So they don't do unfair or unethical or bad deals with other people because it would soil their own view of themselves, and they wouldn't be able to sleep with themselves at night. So some of the highest integrity people I know, the worst thing you can do is consider them—well, I think yourself feeling on that one—and they will get so unhappy because they'll be like, 'Oh no no no, that's not who I am, I can't be that person,' and they'll bend over backwards. Usually I find that people who are negotiated with who are high integrity, they're very easy to negotiate with. They'll give you things that they don't need to give you because they think it's fair. Vice versa. So negotiations with high integrity people are usually very easy, giving each other things to make sure the other person is happy enough the deal survives, because unhappy deals get unwound and they become short-term relationships which don't have any compounding benefits.

最后，如果有人到处说自己有多诚实，他们很可能不诚实。这是一个小小的警示信号。我学到的是，当一个人花太多时间谈论自己的价值观或自我吹嘘时，他们是在掩饰什么。有一本好书，已经绝版了，很难找到，也许能在网上找到，不是那种显而易见的书。书名是《操纵的艺术》。我是因为关注了 Illah Service 的一条推文才发现的，这本书真的很棒。作者基本上是在卧底，和骗子们生活在一起，花时间和他们一起行骗，学习关于骗局的一切。他非常客观，只是陈述骗子是如何运作的，并指出如何在他们不诚实时识别他们。一些警示信号是：他们会把交易推得有点太急，推销得有点太卖力，他们会谈论自己有多诚实。

Finally, if someone is going around talking about how honest they are, they're probably dishonest. It's a little telltale indicator. I've learned when someone spends too much time talking about their own values or talking themselves up, they're covering for something. There's actually a good book, it's kind of out of print, I think it's hard to track down, maybe find it online somewhere, and it's not the obvious one. The name of the book is called The Art of Manipulation. I found it because of a tweet that I followed from Illah Service, and it was really good. The author basically goes undercover, lives with con men, spends time with them running cons and learning all about cons. He's very without judgment, just lays down how con men work, and he puts down how to spot them when they're being dishonest. Some of the telltale signs are they will push the deal a little bit too hard, they'll sell just a little bit too hard, they'll talk about how honest they are.

但我生命中也有一些很棒的人，他们非常成功、非常受欢迎，每个人都想和他们做朋友，他们非常聪明，然而我见过他们做了一两件对别人不太好的事。第一次我会告诉他们，我会说：‘嘿，我觉得你不应该那样对那个人。不是因为你不会逃脱惩罚——你会逃脱——而是因为最终这会伤害你自己。不是某种宇宙因果报应，而是我相信在内心深处，我们都知道自己是谁。你无法对自己隐瞒任何事情。所以你自己的失败都刻在你的心理中，而且你自己很清楚。所以如果你有太多这样的道德缺陷，你就不会尊重自己。而世界上最糟糕的结果就是没有自尊。如果你不爱自己，谁会爱你？所以我认为你必须非常小心，不要做那些你根本不会引以为豪的事情，因为它们会伤害你。所以第一次我会警告他们。顺便说一句，没有人会改变。然后我就会疏远他们，把他们从我的生活中剔除。

But I have great people in my life who are extremely successful, very desirable, like everybody wants to be their friend, very smart, and yet I've seen them do one or two things that are slightly not great to other people. The first time I'll tell them, I'll say, 'Hey look, I don't think you should do that to that other person. Not because you won't get away with it—you will get away with it—but because it'll hurt you in the end. Not in some cosmic karma kind of way, but just I believe that deep down we all know who we are. You cannot hide anything from yourself. So your own failures are written within your psyche and they're obvious to you. So if you have too many of these moral shortcomings, you will not respect yourself. And the worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem. If you don't love yourself, who will? So I think you just have to be very careful about doing things that you are fundamentally not going to be proud of, because they will damage you. So the first time around, I warned them. By the way, nobody changes. And then I just kind of distance myself from that, sort of cut them out of my life.

但我脑子里一直有句话：‘你想离我越近，你的价值观就必须越好。’比如，当我遇到我妻子时，这是一个巨大的考验，因为我真的很想和她在一起，而她一开始并不确定。最后我们在一起了，因为她看到了我的价值观。我很幸运那时我已经培养出了这些价值观，因为如果没有，我就不会得到她。不是说我对她有什么所有权，没有那种依附关系，而是我不配得到她。就像查理·芒格说的：‘要找到一位值得的伴侣，你得配得上一位值得的伴侣。’所以我认为，培养你的价值观是长期的自私，尽管短期来看绝对涉及牺牲。如果讲道德能赚钱，那每个人都会去做。你就不需要单独提出这个概念，你不会谈论它，不会有关于它的书，没有人会说‘我的价值观’。但事实并非如此。这显然不赚钱，涉及牺牲。但就像生活中的一切，如果你愿意做出短期牺牲，你就会获得长期收益。我的健身教练 Jersey Gregory，一个非常聪明、有才华的人，他总是说：‘轻松的选择，艰难的生活；艰难的选择，轻松的生活。’所以基本上，如果你现在做出艰难的选择——吃什么，不吃所有你想吃的垃圾食品，坚持锻炼——那么你的长期生活就会轻松。你不会生病，不会不健康。价值观也是如此。存钱以备不时之需也是如此。你对待人际关系的方式也是如此。但如果你现在做出轻松的选择，你的整体生活就会艰难得多。

But I just had this saying inside my head: 'The closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be.' For example, when I met my wife, it was a great test because I really wanted to be with her, and she wasn't so sure at the beginning. In the end, we ended up together because she saw my values. And I'm lucky I had developed them by that point, because if I hadn't, I wouldn't have gotten her. Not that I own her or anything, there's no attachment like that, but I wouldn't have deserved her. That's like as Charlie Munger says: 'To find a worthy mate, be worthy of a worthy mate.' So I think working on your values is long-term selfish, although in the short term it absolutely involves sacrifices. If being ethical were profitable, everybody would do it. You wouldn't have to have a separate concept, you wouldn't talk about it, there would be no books on it, no one would ever say 'my values.' But it's not. It's obviously unprofitable, involves sacrifices. But like everything in life, if you're willing to make the short-term sacrifice, you'll have the long-term benefit. My physical trainer, Jersey Gregory, a really wise, brilliant guy, he always says: 'Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.' So basically, if you're making the hard choices right now—what to eat, not eating all the junk food you want, working out—then your life long-term will be easy. You won't be sick, you won't be unhealthy. The same is true of values. Same is true of saving up for a rainy day. Same is true of how you approach your relationships. But if you make the easy choices right now, your overall life will be a lot harder.

我喜欢这个。我还想深入探讨一下智力方面——比如，你如何区分那些真正懂行的人和那些假装懂行的人？我的意思是，我们生活的世界里，假装拥有你实际上并不具备的知识太容易了。

I like that. I want to dive into intelligence a little bit there too—like how do you separate the people who know what they're talking about from these people who pretend they know what they're doing? I mean, we're full of a world where it's so easy to pretend you have knowledge that you don't actually have.

真正的知识是内在的，是从基础开始构建的。所以回到我之前的数学例子，不懂算术或几何，你就无法理解三角学。所以基本上，如果有人用了很多花哨的词汇和宏大的概念，他们很可能不知道自己在说什么。我认为最聪明的人能把事情解释给一个孩子听。如果你不能向一个孩子解释清楚，那你就不懂。我认为这非常正确，这也是一个常见的说法。理查德·费曼非常有名，如果你去看他的讲座《六堂轻松物理课》，那是他早期的物理讲座，其中有一课他基本上用三页纸解释了数学。他从数轴计数开始，一直讲到微积分预备知识，通过一条不间断的逻辑链逐步构建。他不依赖任何定义。你知道，例如，如果有人说，‘哦，那只鸟叫这个，’或者‘这个东西的规则是那个，’他们并没有告诉你任何根本性的东西。他们告诉你的是关于人类，关于命名系统。真正的理解是关于算法，关于理解事物之间如何相互联系。所以我认为，江湖骗子的标志是试图用复杂的方式解释简单的事情。天才的标志是用简单的方式解释复杂的事情。所以实际上，他们应该能够非常非常简单地做到这一点。我不得不提醒自己这一点，因为我读了很多书，词汇量很大，所以我可以通过使用大词让自己听起来比实际更聪明。但在这个过程中，我对自己不诚实。使用更精确的词汇是可以的——英语是一种词汇丰富的语言，这允许很高的精确度。但如果你故意使用你的听众不认识的词，或者你甚至认为你用的词你的听众不认识，而你没有意识到并纠正，那么你本质上就是不诚实的。你只是在炫耀，试图蒙蔽他们。有一本很棒的书，作者是 Randall Munroe，他是 xkcd 漫画的创作者，那是一个以科学为导向的漫画，书名是《Up Goer Five》。它指的是将阿波罗任务送入太空的土星五号火箭。他在那本书中所做的是，他解释了所有非常复杂的概念，从气候变化到物理系统再到潜艇等等，但他只用了英语中最常用的一千个词。这就是为什么他把土星五号火箭称为‘Up Goer Five’，因为它被称为火箭。你不能把火箭定义为宇宙飞船或火箭——这不够指代。他说‘up goer’，这个向上走的东西。孩子们立刻就能理解。就是这样。我读了这本书，我想，‘哦，是的，对不起，你是对的。’但也许这本书是……

Real knowledge is intrinsic and it's built from the ground up. So going back to my math example earlier, you can't understand trigonometry without understanding arithmetic or geometry. So basically, if someone is using a lot of fancy words and a lot of big concepts, they probably don't know what they're talking about. I think the smartest people can explain things to a child. And if you can't explain it to a child, you don't know it. I think that's very true, and it's a common saying. Richard Feynman, very famously, if you go into his lecture Six Easy Pieces, where his early physics lectures, he has one where he basically explains mathematics in three pages. He starts from number line counting, and then he goes all the way to precalculus, and he just builds it up through an unbroken chain of logic. He doesn't rely on any definitions. You know, for example, if somebody says, 'Oh, that bird is called this,' or 'The rule for this thing is that,' they're not really telling you anything fundamental. They're telling you about humans, they're telling you about naming systems. True understanding is about algorithms, about understanding how things connect to each other. So I think the mark of a charlatan is to try and explain simple things in complicated ways. The mark of a genius is to explain complicated things in simple ways. So really, they should be able to do it very, very, very simply. And I have to catch myself on this, because I have a big vocabulary because I read a lot, so I can sound smarter than I am just by using big words. But in the process, I'm being dishonest with myself. It's okay to use more precise words—English is a big language with a lot of words, and that allows for a lot of precision. But if you're deliberately using words that your audience doesn't know, or if you even think you're using a word that your audience doesn't know and you don't catch yourself and correct that, then you're essentially being dishonest. You're just trying to show off, you're trying to pull one over their eyes. There's a great book by Randall Munroe, who is the creator of xkcd, that very science-oriented comic, and it's called Up Goer Five. It's a reference to the Saturn V rocket that took the Apollo missions into space. What he's doing in that book is he explains all these very complicated concepts, all the way from climate change to physical systems to submarines and so on, but he does it using only the thousand most common words in the English language. So that's why he calls the Saturn V rocket 'Up Goer Five,' because it's called a rocket. You can't define a rocket as a spaceship or a rocket—it's enough referential. He says 'up goer,' this thing that goes up. And kids get that right away. That's the thing. I read the book, I think, 'Oh yeah, I'm sorry, you're right.' But maybe the book is...

对，《Up Co-5》是其中一页。还有一本很棒的书叫《Thinking Physics》。我经常翻这本书，很喜欢。封底上有一句很棒的推荐语：'这是唯一一本既在小学又在研究生院使用的书。'确实如此。书里全是简单的物理谜题，可以解释给 12 岁的孩子听，让他们琢磨；也可以解释给 25 岁的物理学研究生听，而且每个谜题都蕴含着物理学的基本洞见。这些谜题都有点棘手，但任何人都能通过纯逻辑推理找到答案。我喜欢读科学家们如何取得各种突破的历史。如果你了解过广义相对论，相对论是一件迷人的东西。它是一个非常高级的概念，但在某种程度上又非常简单，因为爱因斯坦是通过所谓的'Gedanken'——一个花哨的词，意思是思想实验——提出它的。这个词在德语里就是'思想实验'的意思。所以他基本上就是在大脑里做逻辑思想实验，直到想出了相对论，然后把它形式化为数学，并做出了一些后来无法证伪的预测。所以像他这样真正聪明的物理学家，是通过纯粹推理和纯粹逻辑推理达到的。他不需要画很多复杂的图表什么的；他只是在非常基本的层面上理解事物。所以这又回到了：我认为真正聪明的思考者是清晰的思考者，他们理解事物——他们在非常非常基础的层面上理解基本原理。我宁愿把基础理解得非常透彻，也不愿记住各种复杂的概念，却无法把它们串联起来，也无法从基础推导出来。如果你不能从基础推导出来，那么当你需要用到它们时，你就迷失了，对吧？

Yeah, and 'Up Co-5' is one of the pages. There's another great book I'll call 'Thinking Physics'. I opened this one all the time and I loved it. On the back cover it has this great little pitch: it says 'the only book that's used in both grade school and graduate school.' It's true. It's all simple physics puzzles that can be explained to a twelve-year-old child; they can puzzle over it, and it can be explained to a 25-year-old grad student in physics, and they all kind of have fundamental insights in physics. They're all kind of tricky, but anyone can get to the answer through purely logical reasoning. I love reading the history of how scientists came up with their various breakthroughs. And if you have ever gone like with general relativity, relativity is a fascinating thing. It's a very advanced concept, but in a way it's very simple because Einstein came up with it with what are called 'Gedanken'—fancy word for thought experiments. This means 'thought experiment' in German. So he was able to basically just do logical thought experiments in his mind until he came up with relativity, and then he formalized that mathematics and with predictions that he made that were later unfalsifiable. So really brilliant physicists like that, they get there by pure reasoning and pure logical reasoning. It's not like he had to go draw a lot of complicated diagrams and so on; he just understood things at a very basic fundamental level. So again, this goes back to: I think the really smart thinkers are clear thinkers, and they understand things—they understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level. And I would rather understand the basics really well than have memorized all kinds of complicated concepts but then I can't stitch them together and I can't derive them from the basics. If you can't derive it from the basics, then if you need it, you're lost using them, right?

对，没错。似乎有效决策很大一部分归结为处理现实。你在做决策时如何确保自己是在处理现实？

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It seems like a large part of making effective decisions kind of boils down to dealing with reality. How do you make sure you're dealing with reality when you're making decisions?

通过不抱有强烈的自我感、判断或思维定势。猴子思维总是会根据它认为世界应该是什么样子，给出一种重复的、自动的反应，这会遮蔽你的现实。这种情况经常发生，人们把政治和商业混为一谈。例如，今年一月，有一篇关于选举的小文章预测特朗普或伯尼会赢——这两个人中会有一个赢。这不一定是我想看到的结果。我是精英阶层，我的生活相当不错，对吧？我不指望煽动者来改变一切。但我想看到现实本来的样子，而不是我希望它成为的样子。所以我认为，阻碍我们看到现实的头号因素就是我们抱有先入为主的观念，认为事情应该怎样。痛苦时刻有一个定义：就是当你看到事物真实面目的那一刻。所以一直以来，你一直相信你的生意做得很好，而忽略了它并不那么好的迹象，然后你的生意停滞了，然后你痛苦了。嗯，那只是因为你一直在推迟面对现实，甚至对自己隐瞒。好消息是，当你受苦、痛苦时，那就是一个真相时刻。那一刻你被迫接受现实本来的样子，然后你才能做出有意义的改变和进步，因为你只能从真相开始。所以我认为，困难在于看清真相。而要看清真相，你必须把自我放在一边，因为你的自我不想面对真相。所以你的自我越小，你的反应越少条件反射，你对结果的欲望越少，你就越容易看清现实。一个明显的例子是，当我们经历困难的事情，比如分手、失业、生意失败或健康问题，我们的朋友给我们建议。当我们给他们建议时，答案如此明显，我们一分钟就想到了，我们确切地告诉他们：'哦，那个女孩？忘了她吧，反正她不适合你。你会更快乐的，相信我，你会找到别人的。'你知道正确答案是什么，但那个人看不到，因为在那个痛苦和煎熬的时刻，他们仍然希望现实不同。所以问题在于——实际上，问题在于他们的欲望与现实相冲突。这阻止了他们看清真相，无论你怎么说。同样的事情也发生在我做决定的时候。我越希望事情以某种方式发展，我就越不可能看到真相。所以尤其是在商业中，如果事情进展不顺利，我试着公开承认，我试着在联合创始人、朋友和同事面前公开承认，因为这样我就没有对任何人隐瞒。如果我没有对任何人隐瞒，那么我就不会基本上自欺欺人，掩盖实际发生的事情。

By not having a strong sense of self or judgments or mind presence. The monkey mind will always respond with a regurgitated, automatic response to what it thinks the world should be, and that will cloud your reality. This happens a lot of times, and people are mixing politics and business. For example, in January this year, a little piece on the election that kind of predicted that Trump or Bernie is gonna win—one of those two characters is gonna win. That's not what I wanted to have happen necessarily. I'm an elite; my life is pretty good, right? I'm not looking for rabble-rousers to change everything. But I wanted to see reality the way it was, as opposed to the way I wanted it to be. So I think the number one thing that clouds us from being able to see reality is just that we have preconceived notions of the way it should be. There's a one definition of a moment of suffering: it's that moment when you see things exactly the way they are. So this whole time you've been convinced your business is doing great and really ignore the signs that it's not doing that well, then your business stalls, then you suffer. Well, it's just because you've been putting off reality, even hiding it from yourself. So the good news is that when you're suffering, when you're in pain, that's a moment of truth. It's a moment where you're forced to embrace reality actually the way it is, and then you can make meaningful change and progress, because you can only make something—you can only do that when you're starting with the truth. So I think the hard thing here is seeing the truth. And to see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way, because your ego doesn't want to face the truth. So the smaller you can make your ego, the less conditioned you can make your reactions, the fewer desires you have about the outcome you want, the easier it is to see the reality. A clear example of this is when we're going through difficult things like a breakup or a job loss or business failure or health problem, and our friends are advising us. Well, when we're advising them, the answer is so obvious it comes to us in a minute, and we tell them exactly: 'Oh, that girl? Get over her, she wasn't good for you anyway. You'll be happier, trust me, you'll find someone.' You know what the correct answer is, but that person can't see it because in that moment of suffering and pain, they're still wishing that reality was different. So the problem is—in reality, the problem is their desire colliding with reality. It's preventing them from seeing the truth, no matter how much you say it. The same thing happens when I'm making decisions. The more desire I have that it works out a certain way, the less likely I am to see the truth. So especially in business, if something isn't going well, I try to acknowledge that publicly, and I try to acknowledge it publicly in front of my co-founders and friends and co-workers, because that way then I'm not hiding it from anybody else. If I'm not hiding it from anybody else, then I'm not gonna basically delude myself about what's actually going on.

你说过，你能想到的任何事情都已经被想过和尝试过了。你唯一能找到新东西的方法就是非理性地坚持下去，尝试一大堆事情。这有点让想法变成了商品，但判断力和执行力却极其罕见。你如何评估一个人是否选对了想法，以及他们是否有能力执行那个想法？

You've said anything you can think of has been thought of and tried. The only way you're gonna find something is if you stick to it at an irrational level and try a whole bunch of things. This kind of makes an idea a commodity, but the judgment and execution incredibly rare. How do you evaluate if someone is picking the right idea and if they have the capacity to execute on that idea?

我发现最优秀的创始人是那些非常有长远眼光的人。所以即使是一些早期他们可能不太在意的决定，他们也会去解决，因为他们不是在盖房子；他们是在为摩天大楼打地基——至少在他们心里是这样。所以你寻找的是那些非常了解这个领域、知道会有多难但不在乎的人，因为他们就是热爱自己正在做的事情，他们投入其中，并长期坚持。所以你知道，光有激情和远见是不够的。

The best founders I've found are the ones who are very long-term thinkers. So even decisions that maybe they shouldn't care that much about early on, they fix it on because they are not building a house; they're putting bricks in the foundation of a skyscraper—at least in their minds. And so what you're looking for is someone who knows the space well, who understands how difficult it's gonna be, but doesn't care because they just love whatever they're doing, they're into it, and they commit to it for the long haul. So you know, passion and vision alone are not enough.

对，我认为史蒂夫·凯斯说过，没有执行的愿景是幻觉。光有执行也不够。不幸的是，至少在科技行业，需要很多运气：合适的地点、合适的时间、市场力量、时机，你知道，监管行动支持或反对。所以有很多事情我们无法控制：平台在哪里，哪些开源项目会出现。所以你永远无法预测外部的成功，但你可以预测失败。你可以说，'哦，这个人完全不懂这个领域，他们力不从心，'或者'这个人是个短视者，他们撑不了多久，他们走不了那么远。'因为正如我所说，没有新想法；所有的想法都已经被想过了。但关键在于想法加上执行加上激情的组合。比如史蒂夫·乔布斯是一个有远见的人和一个伟大的设计师，而不是一个……

Yeah, and I think Steve Case said that vision without execution is a hallucination. Execution alone isn't enough. And then unfortunately, at least in technology business, there's a lot of luck required: right place, right time, market forces, timing, you know, regulatory action against or pro. So there's a lot of things we don't control: where the platforms are sitting, what open source efforts show up. So you can never predict the outside successes, but what you can predict are the failures. You can say, 'Oh, this person doesn't know this field at all, they're out of their depth,' or 'This person is a short-term thinker, they're not gonna last the game, they're not gonna go as far as needed.' Because as I was saying, there are no new ideas; all the ideas have been thought. But it's about the combination of the idea plus the execution plus the passion. Like Steve Jobs was a visionary and a great designer, not a...

因为他带着造智能手机的想法而来。很多人尝试过造智能手机，但关键在于他对设计有极高的标准，他理解制造公差和技术的极限，并且能凝聚人才和资源把事情做成。他其实不在乎财务回报，从苹果只拿 1 美元年薪。他只想看到它实现，愿意一直做到成功为止。所以这是多种因素的奇妙交汇，时机恰好，技术成熟，乔纳森·艾夫也在，还有无数其他因素共同促成。但同样，也有不利因素。比如他接手苹果时，公司濒临破产。可怜的人死于胰腺癌，英年早逝。想想他本可以创造更多，为世界做更多。整个过程他可能并不快乐，把自己逼到了绝境。所以我认为，要成功你必须非理性地乐观和充满激情，但你也必须真正懂行。我遇到很多创业者是短视的，那也没关系，只是说明这不适合你。去找你能承诺十年的事情吧，因为至少需要那么久才能有好结果。你必须享受过程，因为结果没有保证。你还必须非常擅长，这意味着你热爱到愿意在没有任何回报之前就投入时间。所以最好的创始人深刻理解领域，足够反主流，有深厚热情持续投入，并且有执行力——他们能把事情做成，解决问题，能力出众。

Because he came with the idea to build a smartphone. Many people had tried to build a smartphone, but it's because he had a very high bar for the design, he understood the manufacturing tolerances and what the technology was capable of, and he could rally the people and the resources to get it done. He actually didn't care about the financial outcome; he took a $1 salary from Apple. He just wanted to see it done, and he was willing to do it for as long as it takes until it works. So it's kind of a magic confluence of factors, and then the timing in the world happened to be right, the technology was around, and Jony Ive was there, and who knows how many other factors intersected to make it happen. But just as many factors intersected on his side, there were ones that intersected against him. For example, he had taken over Apple, which was a horribly failing company at the time. The poor guy died of pancreatic cancer; he got taken out early. Think about what more he could have created, what more he could have done for the world. He probably wasn't happy in the whole process; he drove himself to ruin. So I think you do have to be irrationally optimistic to succeed and passionate, but you also have to really know your stuff. And I meet a lot of entrepreneurs who are short-term thinkers, in which case that's okay. It just means this is not the thing for you. Go find the thing you can commit to for 10 years, because that's how long it's going to take minimum to get a good outcome. And you have to enjoy the journey because there's no guarantee on the outcome. And you have to be really, really good at it, which means that you probably love it so much that you're willing to put in the time before there's even any return on it. So I think the best founders have a deep understanding of the space, are contrarian enough, have a deep passion for it so that they'll just keep working on it, and have execution skills—they just get things done, they solve problems, they're capable.

说得好。我虽然不投资天使创始人，但我们在商业或生活中都会遇到类似的人。建立合作关系时，无论是客户、供应商还是人际关系，我们都会担心对方短视、占便宜。该如何进入这种关系？它是否脆弱？我觉得这么想很有道理。我比较晚才明白一件事：至少在硅谷商业圈，优秀的人会有好结果。利用这一点，保持耐心。我 20 年前职业生涯初期遇到的每个人，当时我觉得‘哇，这家伙太厉害了，又聪明又投入’，现在都成了朋友或泛泛之交——我差点忘了他们。几乎无一例外，他们都变得极其成功。你只需要给他们足够长的时间尺度。它永远不会在你或他们想要的时间尺度上发生，但确实会发生。

I love that. I don't get to invest with angel founders, so I don't, but we all deal with people with similar concerns in business or life. If we're establishing a partnership, whether it's with a customer, supplier, or a relationship, we have similar concerns about their short-term thinking and whether they will take advantage of us. How should we go about entering that relationship, and is this relationship fragile? I think that's a good way to think of it. One thing I figured out kind of late is that generally, at least in business in Silicon Valley, great people have great outcomes. Use that and be patient. Every person that I met at the beginning of my career 20 years ago where I looked and said, 'Wow, that guy or that girl is super capable, so smart and dedicated,' now we'll just be friends or hang out or whatever—forgot about them. All of them, almost without exception, became extremely successful. You just had to give them a long enough time scale. It never happens in a time scale you want or they want, but it does happen.

在结束之前，我想绕回来再问你几个关于人生的问题。你把自己的哲学称为‘理性佛教’。它与传统佛教有何不同？你是通过怎样的探索得出这个结论的？

I want to circle back and ask you a few more questions about life before we wrap up. You've kind of called your philosophy 'Rational Buddhism.' How does that differ from traditional Buddhism, and what type of exploration did you go through to arrive at that?

'理性'部分意味着我必须与科学和进化论调和。所以我必须拒绝所有我无法亲自验证的东西。例如，冥想对你是否有益？是的。清空思绪是否是好事？是的。是否存在一种低于猴子思维的底层觉知？是的。这些我都亲自验证过。佛教中的一些信念我之所以相信并遵循，也是因为我通过思想实验验证或推理过。但我不会仅仅因为写在书上就接受。比如‘你有前世，你在偿还业力’，我没见过，我不记得任何前世，没有任何记忆，所以我只能不信。或者当人们说‘你的第三脉轮在打开，第二脉轮在……’，我不知道，这是花哨的术语。我无法亲自验证或确认任何这些。所以如果我无法亲自验证，或者无法通过科学达到，那么它可能对也可能错，但不可证伪，所以我不能视其为基本真理。另一方面，我确实知道进化论是真的。我知道我们是进化而来的生存和复制机器。我知道我们有自我，这样我们才能站起来，不被虫子吃掉——我们确实采取行动。所以‘理性佛教’对我来说，就是理解佛教所倡导的内在修行，让自己更快乐、更好、更活在当下、更能控制情绪、成为更好的人。但我不因为书上写了就相信任何玄乎的东西。我不认为我能漂浮。我不认为冥想给了我超能力之类的。所以基本上就是：尝试一切，亲自测试，保持怀疑，保留有用的，丢弃无用的。所以我的哲学归结为两极：一极是进化论，这个约束性原理解释了很多关于人类的东西；另一极是佛教，这是最古老、最经得起时间考验的关于我们内在存在状态的精神哲学。我认为它们绝对可以调和。我其实想写一篇博客文章，讲如何将佛教的教义，尤其是非玄乎的部分，直接映射到虚拟现实模拟中。我的意思是，如果你相信我们生活在 VR 模拟中，或者你相信佛教的世界观，包括轮回、涅槃等，你实际上会得出关于如何生活的相同结论。

Yeah, the 'rational' part means that I have to reconcile with science and evolution. So I have to reject all the pieces that I can't verify for myself. For example, is meditation good for you? Yes. Is clearing your mind a good thing? Yes. Is there a base layer of awareness kind of below your monkey mind? Yes. All these things I've verified for myself. And some of the beliefs that come out of Buddhism I believe and follow because again I've verified or reasoned with thought experiments myself. But what I will not accept is things that are written down just because. Like, 'Oh, you have past lives and you're paying off karma,' where I haven't seen it. I don't remember any past lives, I don't have any memory, so I just have to not believe that. Or when people say, 'Your third chakra is opening and your second chakra,' I don't know, this is fancy nomenclature. I have not been able to verify or confirm any of that on my own. So if I can't verify it on my own, or if I cannot get there through science, then it may be true or false, but it's not falsifiable, so I cannot view it as a fundamental truth. On the other side, I do know that evolution is true. I do know that we are evolved survival and replication machines. I do know that we have an ego so that we get up off the ground and worms don't eat us—we actually take action. So what 'Rational Buddhism' means to me is understanding the internal work that Buddhism espouses to make yourself happier, better off, more present, more in control of your emotions, and a better human being. But I don't subscribe to anything fanciful just because it was written down in a book. I don't think I can levitate. I don't think meditation gave me superpowers, those kinds of things. So it's basically: try everything, test it for yourself, be skeptical, keep what's useful, and discard what's not. So I would say my philosophy falls down to two poles: on one pole is evolution, the binding principle because it explains so much about humans, and on the other side is Buddhism, which is the oldest, most time-tested spiritual philosophy on the internal state of being inside each of us. And I think those are absolutely reconcilable. I actually want to write a blog post at some point about how you can map the tenets of Buddhism, especially the non-fanciful ones, directly into a virtual reality simulation. What I mean by that is, if you believe we're living in a VR sim, which I know some people are spouting, or you believe the Buddhist view of the world with samsara and Nirvana and all that, you would actually come to the same conclusions on how to live your life.

你现在生活中最想改变哪些方面？为什么？

What are the areas of your life right now that you'd like to change the most and why?

我希望自己不那么受时间束缚，不那么贪婪地报名各种事情。我不知道怎么描述。你知道它到底是什么吗？我最近发了一条推文，和某人来回讨论，他们提出了一个概念：‘你的日历应该有两步验证。’没错。登录网站时有两步验证：如果你的密码被盗，小偷或黑客没有你的手机，他们就无法登录，因为手机会生成一个唯一代码。我希望我的日历也有一个两步验证码。因为现在的我、当下的我，总是在为未来的我许下承诺。现在的我疲惫、饥饿、想回家、想睡觉、想看书、想陪老婆孩子。但未来的我是一个充满活力、精力充沛的人，总是……

I would like to be less time-bound and less greedy about signing up for things. I don't know how to describe it. You know what it really is? I had a tweet recently where I was going back and forth with somebody, and they came up with this concept of 'there should be a two-factor authentication for your calendar.' Exactly. There's two-factor authentication when you're logging into a website: if your password gets stolen, the thief or hacker doesn't have your phone, so they can't log in because the phone generates a unique code. Well, I wish there was a two-factor code against my calendar. Because current me, present me, is always making promises for future me. Current me is tired, exhausted, hungry, wants to go home, wants to go to sleep, wants to read a book, wants to hang out with the wife and baby. But future me is this dynamic, high-energy individual who always...

每次开会都精力充沛，想完成很多事。所以我承诺未来做很多事。但当未来的我到来时，实际上是现在的我又懒又饿又累。所以我想约束自己。我的做法是：每次做承诺时，先写下来，48 小时后再检查，清空思绪，问自己‘我真的承诺做这件事吗？’或者更好的是，如果承诺做某事，就立刻去做。如果现在不愿意做，那就别做，别承诺。

Show up to every meeting and have a lot of energy, and we want to get a lot of things done. So I commit myself to all these commitments in the future. But when the future me arrives, actually it's present me who is lazy, hungry, and tired. So I want to factor against myself. The way I would like to do that is: every time I make a commitment, I should instead just write it down, then check back 48 hours later and clear my mind, and say, 'Do I commit to doing this?' Or even better, if I commit to doing something, I could commit to doing it right now. If I'm not willing to do it right now, then don't do it, don't commit to it.

对，这就是 Derek Sivers 的方法，对吧？如果你现在不说‘绝对要’，那就直接说‘不’。

Yeah, that's the Derek Sivers approach, right? If you're not saying 'hell yes' right now, then you should just be saying 'no'.

我也这么认为。这是每个忙碌的人都会遇到的问题。我只是想更好地管理自己的时间。人生会经历探索阶段，然后进入利用阶段。我现在完全处于利用阶段，不再寻求更多探索。但即便如此，我很难拒绝别人。如果我能许一个愿，最重要的是让我的大脑始终处于调试模式。我会观察每一个念头，不让任何反应逃过检查、剖析、审视、理解，然后放下。但现实是时间有限，我只是一个高度条件化的生物。所以我未来几年的目标之一是形成无条件的习得反应或习惯性反应，这样我就能在当下更清晰地做决定，而不依赖记忆或预先打包的启发式和判断。

I think so. This is something every busy person deals with. I just want to be much better at managing my own time. You go through life in an exploration phase, then you switch to an exploitation phase. I'm very much in the exploitation phase; I'm not looking for more exploration. But that said, I have a hard time saying no. If I had one wish, the most important thing to me would be to constantly run my mind in debug mode. I would literally watch every single thought I have and let no reaction pass without being inspected, stripped, searched, examined, understood, and then let go. But the reality is that there's a lot of time, and I'm just a highly conditioned creature. So a lot of my goals over the next few years are to have unconditioned earned responses or habituated responses, so that I can make decisions more cleanly in the moment without relying on memory or prepackaged heuristics and judgments.

你看到人们反复犯的最常见错误是什么？

What's the most common mistake you see people make over and over?

我认为最常见的错误——这个问题很难回答，因为太依赖情境了。真的要看情况。如果我看地球上的人类，最常见的错误是认为某种外部环境会让你幸福。我知道这不新鲜，这是基本的佛教智慧，我不居功。但我现在真的从根本层面认识到了，包括我自己。我们刚买了辆新车，因为有了孩子，需要更安全的车。之前开的是 Mini Cooper，空间不够。所以买了新车，现在我在等车到货。当然，每晚我都在论坛上看关于这辆车的帖子。我为什么这么做？是因为这个物体吗？流线型的车？它不会改变我的生活太多。而且我知道车一到，我就不会再关心它了。但事实是，我上瘾于渴望。我上瘾于这种想法：这个外部的东西会给我带来某种幸福。这完全是妄想。所以我认为向外寻求任何东西都是根本的妄想。我不是说你什么都不该做。你绝对应该做。你是一个生物。你做事情来局部逆转熵。这就是你在这里的原因。你注定要做些什么。你不是注定躺在沙滩上整天冥想。所以你应该做你该做的事。但认为改变外部世界就能带来你应得的平静、永恒快乐和幸福——这是我们所有人都有的根本妄想，包括我。所以一次又一次的错误就是说‘等我得到那个东西，我就幸福了’，不管那是什么。这是我们所有人犯的根本错误，包括我，一天 24 小时，每时每刻。

I think the most common mistake, it's a very tough question because it's so contextual. It really depends on the context. I think the most common mistake, if I look out there on planet Earth, for humanity, is the idea or belief that you're going to be made happy because of some external circumstance. I know that's not original, that's not new, that's fundamental Buddhist wisdom, so I'm not taking credit for it. But I think I really just recognize it now at a fundamental level, including in myself. We just bought a new car because we have a baby, so we need a safer car. We were driving a little Mini Cooper before, not enough room. So we bought a new car, and now I'm waiting for the new car to arrive. And of course, every night I'm on the forums reading about the car. Why am I doing this? Is it the object? The sleek car? It's not going to change my life that much. And I know that the instant the car arrives, I won't care about it anymore. But what it is is I'm addicted to the desiring. I'm addicted to the idea that this external thing is going to bring me some kind of happiness. And this is completely delusional. So I think looking outside for anything is the fundamental delusion. I'm not saying you shouldn't do things outside. You absolutely should. You're a living creature. There are things you do to locally reverse entropy. That's why you're here. You're meant to do something. You're not just meant to lie there in the sand and meditate all day long. So you should do what you're meant to do. But the idea that you're going to change something in the outside world that is going to bring you the peace and everlasting joy and happiness that you deserve—that is a fundamental delusion that we all suffer from, including me. And so the mistake over and over and over is to say, 'Oh, I'll be happy when I get that thing,' whatever that is. That's the fundamental mistake that we all make, including me, 24/7, all day long.

我从这个回答中看到了自己，因为你是人。你是人，我们都会这样。我想以一个无边无际的大问题结束：生命的意义和目的是什么？

I definitely see myself in that answer because you're human. You're human, all of us do it. I want to end with a really unbounded big question, which is: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

是的，这是个很大的问题。因为问题大，我给你三个答案。第一：这是个人的。你必须找到自己的意义。别人给你的任何智慧，无论是佛陀、你还是我，听起来都会像废话。所以我认为你基本上必须自己找到。所以重要的不是答案，而是问题。你必须坐下来，深入挖掘这个问题。可能需要几年或几十年，但当你找到一个让你满意的答案时，那将成为你人生的基石。我要给的第二个答案是：生命没有意义，没有目的。奥修说这就像在水上骑行或在沙上建房子。现实是，你在宇宙历史中已经死了——100 亿年或更久——你还会再死大约 700 亿年，直到宇宙热寂。你做的任何事都会褪色、消失。人类会消失，地球会消失，我离开那个群体也会消失。所以无论你是艺术家、诗人、征服者、穷人还是无名小卒，几代之后没人会记得你。所以没有意义。你必须创造自己的意义，这取决于你决定：这是我在经历的一场戏，我只是在观看？是我在做的自我实现之舞？还是我纯粹因为喜欢而渴望的某件事？但这些意义都是你编造的。宇宙没有根本的内在目的性意义，因为如果有，你就会问下一个问题：‘为什么那是意义？’所以我们只是存在，就像理查德·费曼说的，‘全是乌龟，一路向下。’智者只是不断积累。对于那个问题，你给出的任何答案都会引出另一个‘为什么’。我不相信永生的来世答案，因为在我看来，毫无证据地相信你在地球上活 70 年，然后就能在某个来世度过永恒——那是非常长的时间——这很荒谬。什么样的愚蠢上帝会根据你在这里的短暂时间来永恒地审判你？所以我认为死后就像你出生前一样。还记得吗？就会像那样。你出生前，不关心任何事或任何人，包括你的亲人、你自己、人类、我们是否去火星、是否留在地球、是否有 AI。你根本不在乎。我遇到一个企业家，他痴迷于史蒂夫·乔布斯，做出各种牺牲想成为下一个乔布斯。我说：‘蒂姆，你现在想完全像史蒂夫·乔布斯一样吗？’他说想。但史蒂夫·乔布斯死了。他什么都不在乎。他完全归零。他没有任何感知。所以如果你想成为乔布斯，你想死？那不是个好目标。

Yeah, it's a big question. I'll give you three answers because it's a big question. One: it's personal. You have to find your own meaning. Any piece of wisdom that anybody else gives you, whether it's Buddha or you or me, it's going to sound like nonsense. So I think fundamentally you just have to find it for yourself. So the important part is not the answer, it's the question. You have to sit there and dig with the question. It might take you years or decades, but when you find an answer you're happy with, that will be fundamental to your life. The second answer I would give is: there is no meaning to life, there's no purpose to life. Osho says it's like riding on water or building houses in sand. The reality is you've been dead for the history of the universe—ten billion years or more—and you will be for the next 70 billion years or so until the heat death of the universe. And anything you do will fade, it will disappear. The human race will disappear, the planet will disappear, my leaving that group will disappear. So no one's going to remember you past a certain number of generations, whether you're an artist or a poet or a conqueror or a pauper or nothing. So there's no meaning. So you have to create your own meaning, which is what about until you have to decide: is it a play that I'm going through that I'm just watching? Is there a self-actualization dance that I'm doing? Is there a specific thing that I just desire just for the heck of it? But these are all meanings you are making up. There's no fundamental intrinsic purposeful meaning to the universe, because if there was, then you would just ask the next question yourself: 'Well, why is that the meaning?' So we just be, as Richard Feynman said, it'd be 'turtles all the way down.' The wise just keep accumulating. There is no answer you can give to that question that wouldn't have another 'why.' And I don't buy the everlasting afterlife answers, because it's insane to me, with absolutely no evidence, to believe that because of how you live 70 years here on this planet, you then spend an eternity—which is a very long time—in some afterlife. What kind of silly God judges you for eternity based on some small period of time here? So I think after this life, it's very much like before you were born. Remember that? It's going to be just like that. And before you were born, you didn't care about anything or anyone, including your loved ones, including yourself, including humans, including whether we go to Mars or whether we stay on planet Earth, and whether there's an AI or not. You just don't care. I met this entrepreneur who was obsessed with Steve Jobs and he was making all these sacrifices trying to be like the next Steve Jobs. And I said, 'Tim, do you want to be exactly like Steve Jobs right now?' He said yes. So Steve Jobs is dead. He doesn't care about anything. He's got zero. He's not registering at all. So if you want to be like Steve Jobs, you want to be dead? That's not a good goal.

你想成为迈克的新工作吗？你不想成为史蒂夫·乔布斯那样的人。做你自己就好。如果他能的话，他现在会立刻和你交换位置。所以我不认为生命有任何真正的意义或目的。我给你的最后一个答案会稍微复杂一点。根据我读到的科学内容，我的一些朋友写过这方面的书，拼凑了一些理论，也许生命是有意义的，但这不是一个非常令人满意的目的。基本上在物理学中，时间之箭来自熵。热力学第二定律说熵只会增加，这意味着宇宙中的无序只会增加，这意味着集中的自由能只会减少。如果你看看生物是什么——生命系统、人类、植物、文明等等——它们是局部逆转熵的系统。人类局部逆转熵是因为我们有行动，但在这个过程中，我们全局加速熵，直到宇宙热寂。所以你可以提出一些奇妙的理论，我也有一个我喜欢的理论：我们正走向宇宙热寂，那里没有集中的能量，一切都处于相同的能量水平，因此我们都是一体的，本质上无法区分。而我们作为生命系统所做的，就是加速达到那个状态。所以你创造的系统越复杂，无论是通过计算机和文明，还是通过艺术和数学，或者仅仅是组建家庭，你实际上都在加速宇宙的热寂，所以你正在推动我们走向最终成为一体的那个点。但如果你在寻找今天生活中的个人意义，我认为这是一个不太令人满意的答案。

You want to be Mike's new job? You don't want to be like Steve Jobs. Just be you. Right now he would trade places with you in an instant if he could. So I don't think there's any real meaning or purpose to life. And in the last answer I'll give you is a little more complicated than that. From what I've been reading in science, friends of mine have written books on this, a kind of stitched together theories, and maybe there is a meaning to life, but it's not a very satisfying purpose. Basically in physics, the arrow of time comes from entropy. The second law of thermodynamics is that entropy only goes up, which means disorder in the universe only goes up, which means concentrated free energy only goes down. And if you look at what living things are—living systems, humans, plants, civilizations, what have you—they are systems that are locally reversing entropy. Humans locally reverse entropy because we have action, but in the process we globally accelerate entropy until the heat death of the universe. So you could come up with some fanciful theory, which I have, which I like, that we're headed towards a heat death of the universe where there's no concentrated energy, where everything is sort of at the same energy level, and therefore we're all one thing, we're essentially indistinguishable. And what we are doing as living systems is we're accelerating getting to that state. So the more complex a system you create, whether it's through computers and civilization or through art and mathematics or just creating a family, you're actually accelerating the heat death of the universe, so you're pushing us to this point where we end up as one thing. But I think that's kind of an unsatisfying answer if you're looking for personal meaning today in your life.

太棒了。听着，非常感谢你。这真是令人难以置信。我真的很感激。人们在哪里可以找到你？

That was phenomenal. Listen, thank you so much. This was just absolutely mind-blowing. I really appreciate it. Where can people find you?

Twitter 上 @naval，或者我的博客 startupboy.com。非常感谢你。谢谢，这很棒。

Twitter at @naval, or on my blog at startupboy.com. And thank you so much. Thank you, it's been great.

嘿，大家好，我是 Shane。在我们结束之前还有几件事。你可以在 farnamstreetblog.com/podcast 找到节目笔记。那是 F-A-R-N-A-M-S-T-R-E-E-T-B-L-O-G 点 com 斜杠 podcast。你还可以在那里找到如何获取文字记录的信息。如果你想每周收到我的一封邮件，里面充满各种精神食粮，请访问 farnamstreetblog.com/newsletter。这是我那周在网上找到的所有好东西，我读过并与密友分享的，我正在读的书，以及更多。感谢收听。

Hey guys, this is Shane again. Just a few more things before we wrap up. You can find show notes at farnamstreetblog.com slash podcast. That's F-A-R-N-A-M-S-T-R-E-E-T-B-L-O-G dot com slash podcast. You can also find information there on how to get a transcript. And if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food, go to farnamstreetblog.com slash newsletter. This is all the good stuff I found on the web that week that I've read and shared with close friends, books I'm reading, and so much more. Thank you for listening.