人性的44个残酷真相

纳瓦尔（Naval）一直是我心中的英雄。他那篇著名的短文《How to Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky)》曾彻底改变了我的人生轨迹，《纳瓦尔宝典》更是我反复翻阅、每次都有新收获的枕边书。

2025年3月31日，Naval久违地现身播客节目——《~44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature – Naval Ravikant~》，与主持人Chris Williamson展开了一场长达三小时的深度对谈。两人围绕人类本性的44个“残酷真相”，畅聊幸福、成功、自由、身份、死亡、文化冲突等诸多话题。

这场对话的文字稿接近4万字，字字珠玑，金句频出。不仅对Naval以往的观点进行了全新解读，也展现了他更加坦诚和成熟的一面。正因如此，我决定将这场对谈编译成中文，与大家一同汲取思想的养分。

Happiness vs. Success

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Is success worth it then?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Oof. I’m not sure that statement is true anymore. I made that statement a long time ago, and a lot of these things are just notes to myself and they’re highly contextual. They come in the moment, they leave in the moment.

Happiness is a very complicated topic, but I always like the Socrates story where he goes into the marketplace and they show him all these luxuries and fineries and he says, “How many things there are in this world that I do not want,” and that’s a form of freedom, so not wanting something is as good as having it.

In the old story with Alexander and Diogenes, Alexander goes out and conquers the world and he meets Diogenes who’s living in a barrel. Diogenes says “Get out of the way, you’re blocking my sun,” and Alexander says “Oh how I wish I could be like Diogenes in the next life,” and Diogenes says, “I don’t wish to be Alexander.”

So there are two paths to happiness: one path is success, where you get what you want and satisfy your material needs. The other is like Diogenes, where you just don’t want it in the first place. I’m not sure which one is more valid, and it also depends what you define as success. If the end goal is happiness, then why not cut to the chase and just go straight for it?

幸福 vs. 成功

克里斯：幸福意味着满足于你所拥有的一切，而成功却源自不满足。那么，成功真的值得追求吗？

纳瓦尔：哎呀，我现在也不确定这句话是否还成立了。我很久以前说过类似的话，但这些话其实是当时自己的感悟，都是高度情境化的。有时随境而生，有时随境而灭。

幸福是个非常复杂的话题，但我一直很喜欢苏格拉底的一个故事。他走进集市，人们给他展示各种奢侈华美之物，苏格拉底却说：“原来这个世界上竟然有这么多我并不需要的东西。”不去想要某种东西，本身就等同于拥有它，这其实就是一种自由。

另一个故事则是关于亚历山大大帝与第欧根尼的。亚历山大征服了世界后遇见了住在木桶里的第欧根尼。第欧根尼对他说：“让开点，你挡住我的阳光了。”亚历山大说：“我真希望下辈子能像你一样洒脱自在。” 第欧根尼却回应道：“我可从未想过要做亚历山大。”

所以说，实现幸福有两条路径：一条是通过成功得到自己渴望的东西，从而满足物质需求；另一条则像第欧根尼那样，从根本上就不想要那些东西。至于哪一种更有效，我自己也没答案，毕竟取决于你怎么定义成功。如果我们追求的终极目标就是幸福，那为什么不跳过中间步骤，直接奔向幸福呢？

Does Happiness Hinder Success?

Does being happy make you less successful? That is conventional wisdom, that may even be the practical earned experience of your reality. You find that when you’re happy you don’t want anything so you don’t get up and do anything.

On the other hand, you still got to do something. You’re an animal, you’re here to survive, you’re here to replicate, you’re driven, you’re motivated, you’re going to do something. You’re not just going to sit there all day. Some people do, maybe it’s in their nature, but I think most people still want to act, they want to live in the arena.

I found for myself as I’ve become happier—that’s a big word, but you know, more peaceful, more calm, more present, more satisfied with what I have—I still want to do things, I just want to do bigger things. I want to do things that are more pure, more aligned with what I think needs to be done and what I can uniquely do. So in that sense I think that being happier can actually make you more successful, but your definition of success will likely change along the way.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is that a realization you think you could have gotten to had you not had some success in the first place?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: At least for me, I always wanted to take the path of material success first. I was not going to go be an ascetic and sit there and renounce everything. That just seems too unrealistic and too painful.

In the story of Buddha, he starts out as a prince and then he sees that it’s all kind of meaningless because you’re still going to get old and die, and then he goes into the woods looking for something more. I’ll take the happy route that involves material success. Thank you.

幸福会妨碍成功吗？

当你感到幸福，会不会因此而变得不那么成功？传统的智慧，甚至是你的亲身经验，也许都会告诉你：当你过得很幸福时，你就不会想要更多，于是也失去了行动的动力。

但从另一方面看，人终究得做点什么。你是个动物，你活着就要生存、繁衍，有内驱力，有原始的动机，总归会行动起来，而不会整天无所事事地坐着。当然也有人这样活着，也许那就是他们的天性，但我相信，大多数人还是渴望去行动，渴望进入人生的竞技场。

对我自己而言，随着我越来越幸福（虽然“幸福”这个词有些宏大，但可以说是更平和、更平静、更关注当下、更满足于已有的一切），我依旧渴望有所作为，而且想做更大的事情。我渴望做那些更纯粹的、更贴近于我认为值得去做、也只有我能做好的事情。因此，从这个意义上来说，我认为更幸福反而可能会让你更成功，只不过在此过程中，你对成功的定义很可能会发生变化。

克里斯：你认为，如果你一开始并没有取得一定的成功，你还会有这样的感悟吗？

纳瓦尔：至少对我来说，我始终想先走物质成功的道路。我并不打算成为一个苦行僧，放弃一切去过清贫的生活，那对我来说过于不切实际，也太痛苦。

就像佛陀的故事一样：他起初是个王子，但很快他意识到，一切物质享乐最终毫无意义，因为人终究难逃衰老与死亡，于是他离开了宫殿，踏上了追寻内心真谛的旅程。但如果是我，我宁可选择一条兼具物质成功与幸福的路——谢谢，不必过于清苦。

The Path to Freedom

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think it’s quicker in some ways. One of your insights is it’s far easier to achieve our material desires than it is to renounce them.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: It depends on the person, but I think you have to try that path. If you want something, go get it. I quipped that the reason to win the game is to be free of it, so you play the games, you win the games, and then hopefully, you get bored of the games.

You don’t want to just keep looping on the same game over and over, although a lot of these games are very enticing and have many levels that are relatively open-ended. Then you become free of the game, in the sense that you’re no longer trying to win it—you know you can win it—and either you move to a different game or you play the game for the sheer joy of it.

通往自由之路

克里斯：在某种意义上，这条路可能更快捷一些。你曾经说过，实现物质欲望远比放弃它们要容易得多。

纳瓦尔：这要看具体是谁，但我认为人们的确应该先试着走一走实现欲望这条路。如果你渴望某样东西，那就放手去追。我曾经开玩笑地说：你赢得一场游戏的真正意义，是为了从此摆脱这场游戏。你参与游戏、赢下游戏，然后你希望自己对这游戏感到厌倦。

你总不可能一直在同一个游戏里无限循环下去，尽管许多游戏很诱人，而且层次丰富、结局开放。最终，你会从游戏中解脱出来，不再执着于非要赢得胜利——因为你知道自己随时可以赢。到那个时候，要么你换一个新游戏，要么你继续玩这个游戏，但只是为了纯粹的乐趣。

Suffering and Progress

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Another one of yours: most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term. That’s classic—winning the marshmallow test on a daily basis. But there’s an interesting challenge where I think people need to avoid becoming a suffering addict, sort of using suffering as the proxy for progress as opposed to the outcome of the suffering. Right?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: It’s like, I was in pain not eating the marshmallow. I was in pain doing this work. I have attached well-being and satisfaction to pain, not to what the pain gets me on the other side of it.

If you define pain as physical pain, then it’s a real thing, it happens, and you can’t ignore it, but that’s not what we mean by suffering. Suffering is mostly mental anguish and mental pain, and it just means you don’t want to do the task at hand.

If you are fine doing the task at hand then you wouldn’t be suffering, and then the question is what’s more effective: to suffer along the way or just to interpret it in a way that it’s not suffering? You hear from a lot of successful people, they look back and they say, “Oh the journey was the fun part.” That was actually the entertaining part and I should have enjoyed it more. It’s a common regret.

痛苦与进步

克里斯：你曾经提过一个观点：生命中大部分的收获，都源于短期内忍受痛苦，以换取长期的回报。这是经典的“棉花糖实验”，每天都要面对这样的考验。但这里面存在一个有趣的挑战，那就是我们要避免成为“痛苦的瘾君子”，也就是说，把痛苦本身当作进步的标志，而不是痛苦之后真正获得的结果，对吧？

纳瓦尔：是的。人们可能会认为，我忍着不吃棉花糖很痛苦，我做这件工作很痛苦，于是就把幸福感与满足感和痛苦本身联系在一起，而不是和痛苦背后的收获相联系。

如果你把痛苦定义为身体上的疼痛，那它确实是真实存在的，你无法忽视它。但我们所说的“痛苦”，大多指的是心理上的煎熬和折磨，根本原因在于你并不想做眼前的任务。

如果你真的接受了眼前这件任务，那么其实你根本不会感觉到所谓的痛苦。这时候真正的问题就变成：哪种做法更有效？是一路忍受痛苦，还是干脆换个角度看待这件事，让自己不再感到痛苦？你经常会听到很多成功人士回过头来看时会说：“其实旅途本身才是最有趣的部分，真正值得享受的就在过程里，我当时应该更好地享受它。”这种遗憾非常常见。

Learning from Your Past Self

There’s a little thought exercise I like to do which is, you can go back into your own life and try to put yourself in the exact position you were in five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago, twenty years ago. You try to remember who you were with, what you were doing, what you were feeling, what were your emotions, what were your objectives, and really try to transport yourself back and see if there’s any advice you’d give yourself, anything you’d do differently.

Now you don’t have new information, don’t pretend you could have gone back and bought a stock or bought Bitcoin or whatever, but just knowing what you know now in terms of your temperament and a little bit of age-related experience, how would you have done things differently?

I think it’s a worthwhile exercise to do. For me, I would have done everything the same except I would have done it with less anger, less emotion, less internal suffering because that was optional. It wasn’t necessary.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And I would argue that someone who can do the job at least peacefully, but maybe happily, is going to be more effective than someone who has unnecessary emotional turmoil.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Well, you end up with a series of miserable successes, right? The outcome may have been the same, but the entire experience of getting there…

向过去的自己学习

我经常做一个小小的思想练习，就是回到过去，设想自己置身于五年前、十年前、十五年前甚至二十年前的某个时刻。你努力回忆当时的自己正和谁在一起，正在做什么，心里是什么感受、有什么样的情绪，怀抱怎样的目标。你真正地将自己带回那个时刻，试着去看看你能给当时的自己什么样的建议，有哪些事你会想换个方式去做。

注意，这里你并不会有任何新的外部信息，不要假装自己能回去买股票或者比特币。但仅仅凭借现在你对自己性格的了解，以及多年积累下来的经验，回头看看有什么事情你本可以换一种方式去做。

我觉得这是个很有价值的练习。对我来说，我可能依然会做完全一样的选择，但会少一些愤怒，少一些情绪的波动，少一些内心的折磨。因为这些负面情绪，完全是可以选择避免的，它们并非必需。

克里斯：而且我认为，一个能够以平静、甚至愉快心情做事的人，肯定会比一个整天处于情绪风暴中的人更有效率。

纳瓦尔：是啊，否则到头来，你得到的不过是一连串令人痛苦的成功。最终的结果也许没什么不同，但整个实现目标的过程却完全不同……

The Journey Is All There Is

And the journey is not only the reward, the journey is the only thing there is. Even success, it’s human nature to bank it very quickly, right, because the normal loop that we run through is you sit around, you’re bored, then you want something, then when you want something you decide you’re not going to be happy until you get that thing, then you start your bout of suffering or anticipation while you strive to get that thing.

If you get that thing then you get used to it, and then you get bored again, then a few months later you want something else, and if you don’t get it then you’re unhappy for a bit, and then you get over it then you want something else. That’s the normal cycle. So whether you’re happy or unhappy at the end, it tends not to last.

Now I don’t want to be glib and say that there’s no point in making money or being successful. There absolutely is—money solves all your money problems, so it is good to have money.

That said, there are those stories, I don’t know if you’ve seen those studies, I don’t know how real these are, a lot of these psych studies don’t replicate, but it’s a fun little study that shows that people who break their back and people who win the lottery are back to their baseline happiness two years later.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Again, don’t know if that’s entirely true. I think money can buy you happiness if you earned it, because then along the way you have both pride and confidence in yourself, and you have a sense of accomplishment, and you set out to do something and you were right, so I’ll bet that lingers, and then as I said, it solves your money problems.

So I don’t want to be too glib about it, but I would say in general, this loop that we run through of desire, dopamine, fulfillment, unfulfillment—you have to enjoy the journey. The journey is all there is. Ninety-nine percent of your time is spent on the journey, so what kind of a journey is it if you’re not going to enjoy it?

旅程本身，就是一切

事实上，旅程不仅仅是最终的奖赏，旅程本身就是我们生命中唯一真实存在的东西。即便获得了成功，人类的天性也是很快就会习以为常。我们通常经历的模式是这样的：一开始你无所事事，感到无聊；然后你开始渴望某样东西；接下来你决定，除非得到这件东西，否则你不会感到满足。于是你便开始了一段为了达成目标而经历的痛苦或期待。

但当你真的得到了，你很快就会习惯它，接着又会再次陷入无聊状态。几个月之后，你又开始渴望其他东西。如果这次你没得到，你就短暂地不开心一阵子，然后又会逐渐忘掉，再次进入下一轮欲望循环。这种模式不断重复下去。不管最终你是开心还是不开心，这种情绪都不会持久。

当然，我不想随意地说赚钱或追求成功毫无意义。赚钱绝对是有意义的——因为金钱能解决所有关于金钱的问题，能解决问题就是一件好事。

话虽如此，你可能听过一些类似的心理学研究——当然，我也不知道这些研究多可靠，毕竟许多心理研究后来都无法被重复验证。但确实有一个有趣的小研究表明：那些严重受伤导致瘫痪的人，以及那些彩票中奖的幸运儿，两年后他们的幸福感都会回到最初的水平。

克里斯：没错。

纳瓦尔：当然，我不确定这种说法是否完全准确。我觉得，如果你通过自己的努力赚到了钱，那么金钱或许确实能够带给你幸福感。因为在追求目标的过程中，你建立了自信，积累了成就感，最终证明了自己当初的判断是正确的。这些内心的收获是会持续的。更不用说，钱还能解决实际问题。

所以我不想对金钱的价值过于轻描淡写。但总体而言，这种欲望、期待、满足、空虚的无限循环告诉我们：你必须学会享受过程本身，因为过程才是生命的全部。你99%的时间都花在了过程里，如果你不去享受它，这样的旅程又有什么意义呢？

Managing Desires

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How do you shortcut that desire contract?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: You could focus, you could decide that I don’t want most things. I think we have a lot of unnecessary desires that we just pick up everywhere, have opinions on everything, judgments on everything, so I think just knowing that those are the source of unhappiness will make you be choosy about your desires.

And frankly if you want to be successful, you have to be choosy about your desires, you have to focus. You can’t be great at everything. You’re just going to waste your energy and waste your time.

管理欲望

克里斯：怎样才能缩短这种欲望的循环？

纳瓦尔：你可以专注于真正想要的，主动选择放弃绝大部分的欲望。我认为我们之所以不快乐，很多时候源自那些无处不在、不必要的欲望，比如我们到处收集的观点和随意做出的评价。如果你意识到这些多余的欲望正是你不幸福的根源，你自然会更加谨慎地选择自己的欲望。

坦白地讲，如果你真的想获得成功，就必须在欲望方面精挑细选，并保持专注。你不可能在所有领域都卓越，如果你想样样都好，只会白白浪费你的精力和时间。

Is Fame Worth It?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is fame a worthwhile goal?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: It gets you invited to better parties. It gets you to better restaurants. Fame is this funny thing where a lot of people know you, but you don’t know them, and it does get you put on a pedestal. It can get you what you want at distance, so I wouldn’t say it’s worthless. Obviously people want it for a reason, it’s high status so it attracts the opposite sex, especially for men it attracts women.

That said, it is high cost. It means you have no privacy, you do have weirdos and lunatics, you do get hit up a lot for weird things, and you’re on a stage so you’re forced to perform. You’re forced to be consistent with your past proclamations and actions, and you’re going to have haters and all that nonsense.

But the fact that we do it, the fact that we all seem to want it means that it would be disingenuous to say, “Oh no, no, I’m famous, but you don’t want to be.” That said, I think fame, like anything else, is best produced as a byproduct of something potentially more worthwhile. Wanting to be famous and craving to be famous and being famous for being famous, these are sort of traps.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Fame bait.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah exactly, so it’s better that it’s earned fame. For example, earn respect in the tribe by doing things that are good for the tribe. Who are the most famous people in human history? They’re people who sort of transcended the self, the Buddhas and the Jesuses and the Mohammads of the world.

Who else is famous? The artists are famous—art lasts for a long time. The scientists are famous—they discover a thing. The conquerors are famous, presumably because they conquered for their tribe, was someone that they were fighting for.

So generally the higher up you rise by doing things for greater and greater groups of people, even though it may be considered tyrannical or negative, like Genghis Khan is famous, but to the Mongols he was doing good, to the rest of them not so much. The higher level you’re operating at, the more people you’re taking care of, the more you sort of earn respect and fame, and I think those are good reasons to be famous.

If fame is empty, if you’re famous just because your name showed up in a lot of places or your face showed up in a lot of places, then that’s a hollow fame and I think deep down you will know that and so it’ll be fragile and you’ll always be afraid of losing it and then you’ll be forced to perform.

So the kind of fame that pure actors and celebrities have, I wouldn’t want, but the kind of fame that’s earned because you did something useful, why dodge that?

名声值得追求吗？

克里斯：名声是一个值得追求的目标吗？

纳瓦尔：名声能让你获得更好的聚会邀请，去更好的餐厅。名声的奇妙之处在于，很多人知道你，但你并不认识他们，它确实会把你推上一个特殊的位置。它能让你更容易获得远处的东西，所以我不会说名声毫无价值。很显然，人们追逐名声是有原因的，它是一种很高的社会地位，能吸引异性——尤其对男性来说，更容易吸引女性。

话虽如此，名声也伴随着很高的代价。它意味着你几乎没有隐私，你会遇到奇怪的人、疯狂的粉丝，会接收到各种奇怪的请求。你始终站在舞台上，被迫不断地表演。你过去说过的话、做过的事，会变成一种束缚，你必须保持一致。与此同时，你也会收获很多嫉妒、攻击和无休止的麻烦。

但事实上，我们都仍然在追求它，这本身就意味着如果我对你说：“哦不不不，我虽然出名了，但你千万不要这样做，”这种说法是虚伪的。但我要说的是，名声与其他事情一样，最好是作为你做更有价值的事情后的副产品而产生。如果你只是单纯地渴望名声，或者仅仅是因为出名而出名，这其实是一种陷阱。

克里斯：一种“名声的诱饵”。

纳瓦尔：没错。所以最好的名声是你真正赚来的名声。比如你为部落做了贡献，为大家谋取利益，从而获得了人们的尊重。人类历史上最著名的人物是谁？是那些超越了自我的人：佛陀、耶稣、穆罕默德，他们为了人类整体的福祉而行动。

还有谁著名呢？艺术家是著名的，因为艺术作品能够长久流传；科学家是著名的，因为他们做出了重大发现；征服者也是著名的，虽然他们的行动可能是暴力的、负面的，但至少在他们的群体看来，他们是为自己人而战。比如成吉思汗对于蒙古人来说是伟大的英雄，对于其他民族则并非如此。你为更广泛的群体谋利益，照顾更多的人，就更容易获得真正的尊重和名声，我认为这样的名声才值得去追求。

如果你的名声毫无内涵，只是因为你的名字或脸庞频繁出现而出名，这种名声将是空洞的。我相信你内心也会明白这一点，因此这种名声非常脆弱，你会一直害怕失去它，也会因此不得不不停地表演。

因此，我并不想要那种纯粹靠曝光度而获得的演员或明星式的名声，但如果是通过做一些有价值的事情获得的名声，那又何必刻意回避呢？

Changing Your Mind

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, you can’t. There’s a challenge I think, especially if people make very loud public proclamations about things. You mentioned there about, you’re almost a hostage to the things that you used to say. Being able to update your opinions and change your mind looks very similar to the internet as hypocrisy does. The difference between me saying something in the past and saying something different now is perhaps I’ve learned, perhaps I’ve updated my beliefs.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Right. But so few people do it in a legitimate way. I think that the grifter shill—you’d see this is the smoking gun that shows that he didn’t really believe that thing all along.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I went to a retreat in LA a couple of years ago, and there was a guy that I used to follow, a big business and productivity advice content creator, really successful, and he just totally stepped back from everything, went monk mode and focused on his business.

改变自己的想法

克里斯：确实。尤其是当一个人曾经非常高调地公开表达过某种观点时，这种挑战就变得特别明显。正如你刚刚所说的，你过去的言论反而变成了对你现在的束缚。在互联网上，能更新观点并改变想法，看起来和虚伪几乎没什么差别。但过去的我与现在的我之所以表达了不同观点，可能只是因为我成长了、更新了自己的信念。

纳瓦尔：没错。但真正以真诚的态度去更新观点的人实在太少了。大部分人都是投机取巧，这就让人抓住把柄：“看吧，这就是证据，他从来不真正相信他说的话。”

克里斯：几年前我在洛杉矶参加过一次静修会，当时遇到了一个我以前经常关注的人。他是个非常成功的商业和效率领域的内容创作者，但后来他完全从公众视野消失了，进入了类似“僧侣模式”，只专注于他自己的事业。

Living Authentically

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I asked him why, and he said, “I started feeling like I had to live up to in private the things that I was saying in public.”

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Right. It’s what Emerson said, “Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” But essentially, look, all learning is error correction. Every knowledge creation system works through making guesses and correcting errors. So by definition, if you’re learning, you’re going to be wrong most of the time and you’ll be updating your priors.

For example, I did this Joe Rogan podcast, I don’t know, eight or nine years ago, and people will call out like the one thing that didn’t turn out to be correct. They just beat on it because it helps them in their mind raise their status a little bit – “I caught him in an error.”

If you catch someone in a blatant lie where they believe one thing and say another, that’s legit – that’s a character flaw. They shouldn’t be lying. But on the other hand, if they just made a guess at something and got it wrong, that’s different. Mostly it’s about the AI AGI thing, and I think I’m still right about that, but it’s a different story.

People who think we have achieved AGI just fail a Turing test from their side. It’s funny how people latch onto single proclamations, but the reality is all of us are dynamical systems. We’re always changing, always learning, always growing, and hopefully we’re correcting errors. But what you don’t want to be doing is lying in public because you’re trying to look good. I think people can smell that.

What this world really lacks right now is authenticity, because everybody wants something. They want to be seen as something, they want to be something that they’re not. So you catch a lot of people saying things that they don’t really believe, and I think people are very sensitive to that. Bullshit radars have become hypersensitized to try and work out whether or not this person means the thing that they’re saying.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Most of us are wrong most of the time, especially in any new endeavor. There’s a difference between being wrong and disingenuous though.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Correct. Purposely wrong. Exactly.

I think that’s the big difference. If someone is wrong, no big deal, as long as they have a genuine reason for saying what they’re saying or believing what they’re believing. But if they are lying to elevate their status or their appearance or to live up to some expectation, that’s the mistake. And that’s a mistake not just for the listener, but a mistake for themselves, because then you’re going to get trapped in the hall of mirrors. You yourself are going to be consistent with your past proclamation, so if you’re lying to others, you’re going to be lying to yourself.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re puppeted by a person that you are not even.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: That’s right. It’s like, what was the line? You’re basically trying to impress people who don’t care about you. And they don’t like the real you, and if they saw the real you, they wouldn’t care. And the people who would like the real you don’t get to see the real you, so they pass you by.

You only want the respect of the very, very few people that you respect. Trying to demand respect from the masses is a fool’s errand.

活得真实

克里斯：我问他为什么会做这样的转变，他回答：“我开始发现自己在私下必须活成我公开宣扬的那个样子。”

纳瓦尔：没错。正如爱默生所言：“愚蠢的一致性，是小人物才会纠结的烦恼。” 但本质上来说，所有的学习过程都是一个不断纠错的过程。任何知识创造的系统都是通过尝试和修正错误来进步的。所以，从定义上讲，如果你在学习，那么大部分时候你必然是错的，也必然在不断更新你的认知。

举个例子吧，大约八九年前我上了乔·罗根的播客，直到今天还有人会专门指出我当时讲错的一件事情。他们不断强调这一点，因为这样会让他们自己感觉地位稍微提升了一些——“看吧，我抓到了他的错误。”

如果你抓住一个人明显的谎言——他说的与自己真正相信的完全不符，这确实是性格缺陷，他们不应该撒谎。但另一方面，如果只是某个判断错误，那性质就完全不同了。比如很多人纠结于我关于人工智能（AGI）的预测，但其实我觉得我仍然是对的，不过这是另外一个话题了。

那些认为我们已经实现AGI的人，其实是自己没能通过图灵测试。有趣的是，人们总爱抓住某个单一的论断不放，而事实上，我们每个人都是动态发展的系统，一直在改变、学习、成长，并希望不断地修正过去的错误。但你绝对不应该做的，就是为了在公开场合显得好看而说谎。我认为大家都能感受到这种虚伪。

当下的世界真正缺少的东西，恰恰就是真实。因为每个人都渴望着某种东西——渴望被看成某种人、渴望成为他们并非真实的那个人。于是你看到很多人说着他们并不真正相信的话。我觉得人们对于这一点特别敏感，现在大家的“虚假探测雷达”都高度敏锐，总在试图辨别说话的人是不是真心的。

克里斯：我们大多数人在大部分时候都是错的，尤其是在面对任何新领域的时候。但“错”和“不真诚”之间，还是存在区别的。

纳瓦尔：没错。刻意为之的错误才是真正的问题。

我认为这才是最关键的区别。如果有人做错了事情，这本身没什么大不了，只要他有真实的理由去相信或去说那些话。但如果有人在撒谎，只是为了抬高自己的地位、外表或符合别人的期望，那就是个错误了。而且这种错误不仅仅欺骗了听众，更欺骗了他们自己——因为他们会被困在自己制造的镜厅中。他们会为了与过去说过的话保持一致，而不得不继续欺骗自己。

克里斯：你变成了一个连你自己都不是的傀儡。

纳瓦尔：对。就像有句经典的话所描述的那样：“你费尽心思讨好那些根本不在意你的人。那些人并不喜欢真实的你，一旦他们看到了真实的你，也并不会在乎。而那些真正会喜欢真实的你的人，却因为你一直戴着面具，从未见到真正的你，与你擦肩而过。”

你真正需要的，只是你自己真正尊敬的那极少数人的尊重。而试图从大众那里获取尊重，是一场注定失败的游戏。

Status Games vs. Wealth Creation

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Satisfaction games, the allure of accruing, whether it’s fame, actual fame, or just the competition comparison trap, it’s always there. There’s a real draw of being swayed by social approval, but how should people learn to get less distracted by status games in that way?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I think it just helps to see that status games don’t matter as much as they used to. In old society, let’s go back to hunter-gatherer times, there was no such thing as wealth – you just had what you could carry. There was no stored wealth, so wealth creation games didn’t exist. All that existed was status games. If you were high status, then you got what little was available first, but even back then you had to earn your status by taking care of the tribe.

Now we have wealth creation where you can actually create a product or a service. You can scale that product or service and you can provide abundance for a lot of people, and that’s not zero-sum, that’s a positive-sum game. I can be wealthy, you can be wealthy, we can create things together. And clearly since we are all collectively far, far wealthier than we were in hunter-gatherer times, wealth creation is positive.

But status is limited. There’s limited status to go around. It’s a ranking ladder, it’s a hierarchy, and so if one person rises in status, somebody else has to lower in status. Now you can have multiple kinds of status, so you can expand some kinds of status, but it’s not like wealth creation where it can go infinitely, where we can all be living in the stars and moon bases or Mars colonies.

Just realize the status games are inherently limited. They’re always combative. They always require direct combat, whereas wealth creation games can be just you creating products – you don’t have to fight anybody else.

Yes, in the marketplace your product has to succeed, but that’s not quite the same as invective against other people or being angry with other people or feeling pushed down or pushed up or having a beef with somebody. So I would argue that wealth creation games are both more pleasant, they’re positive-sum, and they actually have concrete material returns. If you have more money you can buy more things.

Show me where you can exchange your status at the bank.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Exactly, it’s vague and fuzzy.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Now, you see people get rich, they have money, what do they want? They want status, so they go to Hollywood, start starring in movies, they donate to non-profits, they go to Cannes or Davos, and they start trying to trade the money for status.

People always want what they don’t have, and we are evolutionarily hardwired for status because as I said, wealth creation didn’t really exist until the agricultural revolution when you could store grain. Then the industrial revolution took it to another level and now the information age is taking it to yet another level.

There’s never been an easier time to make money. Yes, it’s still hard, but there’s never been an easier time to create wealth, because there’s so much leverage out there, there’s so much opportunity. You still have to go find it, it’s not easy, it’s not going to fall on your lap and you have to learn something and know something and do something interesting, but nevertheless it’s possible to many more people. A few hundred years ago you were born a serf, you were going to die a serf, there was almost no way out of that.

That’s changed, and so I would argue that you’re better off focusing on wealth games than status games. If you’re trying to build up, for example, your following on a social network and get famous and then get rich off of being famous, that’s a much harder path than getting rich first, and then going for your fame afterwards would be my advice.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: A lot of people do that, as you said. It’s funny how people who have achieved such a level of wealth – you think why do you need the status, given that most people use status to then try and cash in to achieve wealth? If you’ve achieved “fuck you money” already, if you’re post-money or asset-heavy as it’s known, why are you trying to go in the other direction?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: As you said, because we’ve got an illustrious history biologically of wanting status, and wealth is kind of novel. It’s new. Wealth is something that you have to understand more intellectually. Yeah, there’s a physical component, more food, more survival, but to truly understand the effects and the powers and the abilities and limitations, and the advantages and disadvantages of wealth, you have to use your neocortex a lot more.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Does that mean the reason to play the game is to win the game and be done with it? Is it harder to win and to be done with for status than it is for wealth?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: That’s a good observation, I hadn’t thought that through, but you’re right. I think people will always want more status, but I think you can be satisfied at a certain level of wealth.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, you always have this sort of sense, and this is what leaderboards are.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: That’s right. And it is zero-sum.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And it is, I guess, you know, the Forbes richest people on the planet.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah. That one’s harder to climb the ladder on, but the fact that, for example, iTunes and YouTube can put you in competition against your contemporaries every single day, and make you go up and down and show you likes and comments and ratings subscribers…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is how much you’re up. Exactly. They keep you running on that treadmill forever.

Jimmy Carr has this cool idea where he says trajectory is more important than position. So, if you are number one hundred and one in the world, but last year you were number two hundred, versus you’re number two in the world, but last year you were number one, there is this sense of the deceleration is very, very tangible.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: And again it goes back to evolution. Something that is bleeding eventually dies, unless you stop the bleeding, so you’re hardwired not to lose what you have. Because we evolved in conditions where we’re so close to just not surviving, you don’t want to give anything up. It’s hardwired into us to not give anything up.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So you grip tightly?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: That’s right.

地位游戏 vs. 财富创造

克里斯：满足感的游戏，追逐积累名望——无论是真正的名声，还是和他人的比较竞争，这种诱惑一直存在。人们总会情不自禁地被社会认同所影响。那么，怎样才能不再被这种地位游戏轻易分心呢？

纳瓦尔：我认为关键在于认识到，地位游戏并不像过去那么重要了。在早期社会，回到狩猎采集时代，当时并不存在真正意义上的财富，你只能拥有你随身能携带的东西，没有储存财富的概念。所以，当时只有地位游戏。你地位越高，就能优先获得有限的资源，即使如此，你的地位也必须通过为部落做贡献来获得。

但现在情况不同了。如今我们有财富创造游戏，你可以创造产品或服务，可以通过规模化提供价值，让很多人都变得富裕。这并不是零和游戏，而是正和游戏。我可以富裕，你也可以富裕，我们甚至可以一起创造更多财富。从整体上看，我们显然比狩猎采集时代要富裕得多，因此财富创造是一种积极向上的事。

但地位却是有限的。地位天生就是稀缺的资源，它是排名，是等级。一旦有人上升了，必定意味着其他人下降了。当然，你也可以拓展不同种类的地位，但地位本身不像财富创造，它无法无限扩大。我们可以想象一个人人都生活在星辰、月球基地或火星殖民地的未来世界，但无法想象人人都拥有最高的地位。

你必须意识到，地位游戏本质上是有限的，必然充满竞争，必然涉及直接冲突。但财富创造游戏则不同，你可以只专注于创造你的产品，不需要和任何人作斗争。

当然，你的产品在市场中要成功，但这与直接攻击他人、嫉妒他人、感到被排挤或打压是完全不同的。财富创造的过程更令人愉悦，是正和的，并且拥有实质性的回报。比如，你有钱就可以买更多东西。

你见过谁能到银行用他的“地位”取现的吗？

克里斯：确实如此，地位是模糊而飘忽的东西。

纳瓦尔：但你会看到，很多人变得富有后想要追求地位。他们跑去好莱坞拍电影、去戛纳、达沃斯，或向非营利组织大笔捐款，试图用钱换取地位。

人总是渴望他们没有的东西。从进化的角度看，我们天生对地位有强烈渴求。因为如我所说，财富的创造直到农业革命出现之后才真正开始兴起（有了谷物储藏）；工业革命则将其带到一个更高的层次，而现在的信息时代又进一步扩大了这种可能性。

历史上从未有过像现在这样容易赚钱的时代。 当然，赚钱依旧很难，但创造财富的机会却前所未有地丰富。如今你可以运用各种杠杆，有大量机会可供发掘。当然，财富不会凭空掉到你怀里，你仍然需要去学习一些东西，拥有一定知识，做一些真正有意思的事情，但如今实现财富自由的机会比过去多得多了。几百年前你出生是农奴，你死的时候依旧是农奴，几乎没有机会翻身。

这一切已经彻底改变了。因此，我会建议你，比起关注地位游戏，更应该关注财富创造游戏。比如，如果你试图通过增加社交媒体的关注量和名气来赚钱，那会远比你先通过财富创造赚钱，然后再用这些财富获得名气困难得多。

克里斯：正如你所说，很多人却在反其道而行之。这很有趣，有些人明明已经拥有了巨额财富——我们称为“超脱金钱”（fuck you money）或财富自由，他们为什么还要反过来追逐地位呢？一般人都是追求地位，目的是希望最终将其兑换成财富，而这些已经拥有巨额财富的人又为何如此？

纳瓦尔：就如你所说，我们在生物进化上天生就渴望地位。相比之下，财富则是一种新颖的概念，需要你用更多理性的思考才能理解。是的，财富当然也有物质成分，比如更多的食物、更好的生存条件，但想要真正理解财富的影响力和局限性，以及其优势与劣势，都需要更多地动用你的新皮质（理性思考）。

克里斯：这是否意味着，玩这些游戏的真正目的是为了最终赢得游戏并摆脱游戏？地位游戏是否比财富游戏更难“赢了就走”呢？

纳瓦尔：这是个很棒的观察，我之前还没想过，但你说得没错。我觉得人们对地位的渴望很难满足，但财富达到一定程度之后，人们通常是可以感到满足的。

克里斯：确实如此，但人总会有种感觉：排行榜永远在那儿，刺激着人们。

纳瓦尔：对，这就是零和游戏。

克里斯：就像《福布斯》全球富豪榜那样。

纳瓦尔：没错。这种地位的阶梯更难攀爬。但以iTunes和YouTube为例，它们每天都让你和同领域的人竞争，让你关注你的点赞数、评论数和订阅量……

克里斯：你今天排名又提升了多少。这种机制让你永远在跑步机上追逐不停。

喜剧演员吉米·卡尔曾经说过一句很棒的话：“轨迹比位置更重要。”比如，你如果现在排名世界第101位，但去年排名第200位，你会感到巨大的进步；而你如果现在排名第2位，但去年排名第1位，你会强烈感受到下降带来的不安。

纳瓦尔：没错，这种心理还是回到进化本能。如果某个东西正在流失，除非你及时止损，否则你最终会一无所有。这是我们的天性，因为在人类进化过程中，我们一直处于生存的边缘，我们本能地不想失去已经拥有的一切。

克里斯：于是你就死死地攥紧它。

纳瓦尔：对，就是这样。

The Importance of Self-Esteem

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The worst outcome in the world is not having self-esteem. Why?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: It’s a tough one. I look at the people who don’t like themselves and that’s the toughest slot because they’re always wrestling with themselves. It’s hard enough to face the outside world, and no one’s going to like you more than you like yourself, so if you’re struggling with yourself then the outside world becomes an insurmountable challenge.

It’s hard to say why people have low self-esteem. It might be genetic, it might just be circumstantial. A lot of times I think it’s because they just weren’t unconditionally loved as a child and that sort of seeps in at a deep core level, but self-esteem issues can be the most limiting.

One interesting thought is that to some extent self-esteem is a reputation you have with yourself. You’re watching yourself at all times, you know what you’re doing and you have your own moral code. Everyone has a different moral code, but if you don’t live up to your own moral code, the same code that you hold others to, it will damage your self-esteem. So perhaps one way to build up your self-esteem is to live up to your own code – very rigorously have one and then live up to it.

Another way to raise your self-esteem might be to do things for others. If I look back on my life and what are the moments that I’m actually proud of, they’re very far and few between. It’s not that often and it’s not the things you would expect – it’s not the material success, it’s not having learned this thing or that. It’s when I made a sacrifice for somebody or something that I loved. That’s when I’m actually, ironically, most proud.

Now that’s through an explicit mental exercise, but I’ll bet you at some level I’m recording that implicitly. So that tells me that even if I am not being loved, the way to create love is to give love, to express love through sacrifice and through duty. And so I think doing things like that can build up your self-esteem really fast.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s interesting when you talk about sacrifice, because a lot of the time people say, “I sacrificed so much for my job.” It’s like, yeah, but that was you sacrificing something that you wanted less for something that you wanted more, as opposed to genuinely taking some sort of cost.

自尊的重要性

克里斯：你曾经说过，这个世界上最糟糕的境况就是缺乏自尊。为什么？

纳瓦尔：这确实是个棘手的问题。我见过那些不喜欢自己的人，这是最艰难的处境，因为他们每天都在和自己内心搏斗。面对外部世界已经足够困难，而世界上永远不会有人比你自己更爱你自己，如果连你自己都在挣扎和内耗，外面的世界就会变成一道无法跨越的难关。

人们为什么会缺乏自尊呢？很难给出一个准确的答案。可能是基因造成的，也可能是环境因素所致。我觉得很多时候，是因为他们童年时期没有得到无条件的爱，而这种缺失深入骨髓。但无论什么原因，自尊的缺乏绝对是一个巨大的限制因素。

有一个很有趣的观点：在某种程度上，自尊就是你与自己之间的“声誉”。你随时都在观察自己，你知道自己在做些什么，你也有自己的一套道德准则。每个人的道德准则各不相同，但如果你无法遵守自己的准则，尤其是你要求别人也遵守的那个标准，你的自尊就会受到损害。因此，或许提升自尊的一种有效方法，就是严格地遵守自己的道德标准。设定一个清晰的原则，并认真地去践行它。

另一个提升自尊的方法可能是为他人做一些事情。回想我自己的人生，那些真正让我感到自豪的时刻，其实非常罕见。而且往往并非你想象的那些，比如获得的物质成功，或者学到了什么特殊技能。那些让我真正感到自豪的，恰恰是我为自己所爱的人或事做出牺牲的时刻。很讽刺，但事实就是这样。

虽然这是通过一种显性的心理练习得出的结论，但我相信在潜意识层面上，我也在记录着这些感受。这告诉我，即便我并未被别人所爱，创造爱的途径就是给予爱，通过奉献与责任来表达爱。因此，我认为这样的行动能够迅速提高你的自尊。

克里斯：你提到牺牲这一点很有趣。很多人常说：“我为了我的工作做出了巨大的牺牲。”其实，这更多的是拿你不太想要的东西，去换取你更想要的东西，而不是真正意义上的牺牲或付出代价。

The Price of Integrity

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And, yeah, I wonder whether if self-esteem is you adhering to your internal values, your actions aligning with your values, even when it’s difficult or perhaps even more so when it’s difficult. I wonder whether there is a price that people who are more introspective, high integrity pay because they think, well, you’ve got this heavier set of overheads that you need to pay in some way.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Well, being ethical were profitable, everybody would do it, right? So, at some level it does involve a sacrifice, but that sacrifice can also be thought of as you’re thinking for the long term rather than the short term. For example, virtues are a set of beliefs that if everybody in society followed them as individuals, it would lead to win-win outcomes for everybody.

So if I am honest and you are honest, then we can do business more easily, we can interact more easily because we can trust each other. Even though there might be a few liars in the system, as long as there aren’t too many liars and too many cheaters, a high trust society where everybody’s honest is better off, and I think a lot of the virtues work this way.

If I don’t go around sleeping with your wife and you don’t sleep with mine, and if I don’t take all the food that’s at the table first and so on, then we all get along better and we can play win-win games.

正直的代价

克里斯：如果自尊意味着你的行动与内在价值观保持一致，特别是在困难的时候，我很好奇，那些更具有自省精神、更讲究诚信的人，是否要付出更多的代价？毕竟他们肩负着更沉重的内心成本。

纳瓦尔：是啊，如果讲道德能轻松赚钱，那人人都会去做。所以，道德在某种程度上必然意味着牺牲。但这种牺牲你也可以理解为，是放弃短期利益，以换取长期利益。举个例子，“美德”其实就是一套信念，如果社会上的每个人都去遵守这些美德，最终结果就是实现所有人的双赢。

如果我诚实，你也诚实，我们之间就能更顺畅地合作，更轻松地互动，因为我们彼此信任。即便社会上偶尔有些骗子，只要骗子不占多数，一个高信任度的社会总体来说会更繁荣。我认为大部分美德都是类似的道理。

比如，我不去勾引你的妻子，你也不去勾引我的；我不会抢走桌子上的所有食物……遵守这些规则，我们才能更好地相处，创造双赢的局面。

Game Theory and Society

In game theory the most famous game is Prisoner’s Dilemma, but that’s all about everybody cheating and the Nash equilibrium, the stable equilibrium there is everybody cheats. The only way you can play a win-win game is if you have long term iterated moves, but that’s not actually the most common game played in society.

The most common game played is one called a stag hunt, where if we cooperate we can bring down a big stag and both have big dinners, but if we don’t cooperate then we have to go hunt like rabbits and we each have small dinners.

That game has two stable equilibriums – one could be where we’re both hunting the rabbit, and one could be where we’re hunting the stag. So the high trust society is a more virtuous society where I can trust you to come hunt the stag with me and show up on time and do the work and divide it up properly.

So you want to live in a system where everybody has their own set of virtues and follows them, and then we all win. But I would argue you don’t need to do that for sacrifice, you don’t need to do that for other people, you can do it just purely for yourself. You will have higher self-esteem, you will attract other high virtue people.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Would I go on a stag hunt with me?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Correct. Yeah, that’s right. If you’re the kind of person who long term signals ethics and virtues, then you’ll attract other people who are ethical and virtuous, whereas if you are a shark, you will eventually find yourself swimming entirely amongst sharks and that’s an unpleasant existence.

This goes back to the equivalent of the marshmallow test. The marshmallow test does not replicate – it got hit hard in the replication crisis recently, but it is about trading off the short term for the long term. I think for a lot of these so-called virtues, there are long-term selfish reasons to be virtuous.

博弈论与社会

博弈论里最著名的游戏是“囚徒困境”，但囚徒困境描述的是一个充满背叛和欺骗的环境，在那个情形下，稳定的纳什均衡就是所有人都互相欺骗。唯一能实现双赢的囚徒困境，就是长期重复的博弈。但现实社会中，更普遍的其实是“猎鹿博弈”。

在猎鹿博弈中，如果我们合作，就能猎到一头大鹿，每个人都有丰盛的晚餐；但如果我们不合作，每个人只能独自猎兔，只能获得少量食物。

这个游戏存在两个稳定均衡：一个是所有人都选择猎兔子，各自温饱；另一个是大家齐心协力猎鹿，共同富足。因此，一个高信任度的社会，其实就是一个更有美德的社会。在这样的社会里，我能放心地与你合作去猎鹿，信任你会准时到场，认真工作，并公平分配收益。

因此，我们渴望生活在一个所有人都有各自的美德，并认真践行这些美德的社会里，那样我们都将受益。 但我要强调的是，这种美德的践行并非必须为别人而牺牲，你完全可以为了自己去践行这些美德。这会提升你的自尊，也会吸引更多有美德的人靠近你。

克里斯：“我是否愿意跟自己这样的人去猎鹿？”

纳瓦尔：对，就是这个意思。如果你是一个长期践行道德与美德的人，你就会吸引其他同样诚信而有美德的人。但如果你是一条鲨鱼，迟早你会发现自己身边只有其他鲨鱼，那样的生活绝对不会好过。

这也类似著名的棉花糖实验（虽然最近这个实验的结论受到了质疑和复制危机的冲击），但它的核心依然成立：牺牲短期利益换取长期利益。事实上，很多所谓的美德，本质上都是长期的、自私的理性选择。

Self-Doubt and Confidence

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Did you deal with self-doubt in the past? Is that something that was a hurdle for you to overcome?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yes and no. I think I dealt with self-doubt in the sense that, “Oh, I don’t know what I’m doing, and I need to figure it out,” but I didn’t doubt myself in the way of “somebody else knows better than me for me” or that “I’m an idiot” or “I’m not worthwhile.”

I guess I had the benefit that I grew up with a lot of love. The people around me loved me unconditionally and so that just gave me a lot of confidence. Not the kind of confidence that would say I have the answer, but the kind of confidence that I will figure it out and I know what I want, or only I am a good arbiter of what I want.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, that level of self-belief I suppose allows you to determine what is it that matters to me, my self-esteem. Should I chase this thing or not? I can make a fair judgment on that as opposed to being so swayed. It’s such a good point about even if you think you’re not consciously logging the stuff that you’re doing, there is some part that’s in the back of your mind. Was it the daemon? Is that what the ancient Greeks or something used to talk about?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah. In computer science, there’s a concept of a daemon, which is a program that’s always running in the background. You can’t see it. But yeah, it probably comes from the ancient Greek daemon.

What you know that you don’t even know you know is far greater than what you know you know. You can’t even articulate most of the things you know. There are feelings you have that have no words for them. There are thoughts you have that are felt within the body or subconsciously that you never articulate to yourself.

You can’t articulate the rules of grammar, yet you exercise them effortlessly when you speak. So I would argue that your implicit knowledge and your knowledge that is unknown to yourself is far greater than the knowledge you can articulate and that you can communicate.

At some level you’re always watching yourself, that’s what your consciousness is, right? It’s the thing that’s watching everything, your mind, including your body. So if you want to have high self-esteem, then earn your own self-respect.

I have this idea, the internal golden rule. So the golden rule says treat others the way that you want to be treated. The internal golden rule says treat yourself like others should have treated you, and it was a repost to maybe people that didn’t grow up with unconditional love.

自我怀疑与自信

克里斯：过去你会经历自我怀疑吗？这是你曾经必须跨越的障碍吗？

纳瓦尔：算是，也不完全是吧。我过去经历的自我怀疑更多是：“天啊，我还不知道该怎么做，我需要弄清楚这些。” 而不是那种：“别人肯定比我更了解我该做什么” 或者 “我真是个笨蛋，我不配拥有这些” 的那种自我怀疑。

可能我成长过程中的优势在于，我身边的人给了我足够多的爱，那种无条件的爱。这让我拥有了许多自信。这种自信并不是说我拥有所有问题的答案，而是一种深层次的确信，知道我一定能想办法搞定，也相信我知道自己真正想要什么，知道只有我才最清楚自己的需求。

克里斯：对，这种自我信念让你可以明确判断，哪些东西对我真正重要，对我的自尊真正有价值。我是否应该追求这个目标？我能够对这个问题做出自己的公正判断，而不会轻易受到外界的干扰。你刚刚讲了一个很好的点，就是即便我们自己以为并没有主动记录下这些经历，某个层面，我们的大脑深处也正在悄悄记录着这一切。古希腊人称之为“守护神”（daemon）对吗？

纳瓦尔：对。在计算机科学领域也有一个类似的概念，daemon（守护进程），它是在后台默默运行的程序，你看不到它，却在持续发挥作用。这一术语或许的确源自古希腊的“守护神”（daemon）概念。

你所“知道但却不知道自己知道”的东西，远远多于那些你能清楚说出自己知道的东西。你甚至无法表达出自己掌握的绝大多数知识。有些感觉是无法用语言表达的，有些念头深藏于身体之内或潜意识里，从未明确表达过。

就像语言的语法规则，你也无法完整地说明出来，但你在说话时却能毫不费力地运用它们。因此我认为，你的隐性知识——也就是那些你甚至意识不到自己拥有的知识，远远超过了你能明确表达和沟通的显性知识。

某个层面上，你总是在观察自己，这也正是意识的本质。意识就是那个在观看你的一切、你的思想甚至你的身体的“旁观者”。所以，如果你想拥有高自尊，那就努力赢得自己对自己的尊重吧。

我有个理念，叫“内在的黄金法则”。传统的黄金法则告诉我们：“你希望别人如何对待你，你就要如何对待别人。”而我的内在黄金法则则是：“你要像别人本该善待你那样善待你自己。” 这尤其适用于那些成长过程中并未获得无条件爱的人。

The Nature of Love

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. On the love thing…

NAVAL RAVIKANT: One of the interesting things about love is you can try to remember the feeling of being loved. So go back to when someone was in love with you or someone did love you, and really remember that feeling, like really sit with it and try to recreate it within yourself.

Then go to the feeling of you loving someone and when you were in love. I’m not even talking about romantic love necessarily, so be a little careful there. I’m talking more about love for a sibling or a child or something like that, or a parent. Think about when you felt love towards someone or something, and now which is better?

I would argue that the feeling of being in love is actually more exhilarating than the feeling of being loved. Being loved is a little cloying, it’s a little too sweet, you kind of want to push the person away, it’s a little embarrassing, and you know that if that person is too much into it that you feel constrained.

On the other hand, the feeling of being in love is very expansive, it’s very open, it actually makes you a better version of yourself, it makes you want to be a better person. So you can create love anytime you want, it’s just that craving to receive it that’s the problem.

爱的本质

克里斯：说到爱的这个话题……

纳瓦尔：关于爱，有一点非常有意思：你可以尝试去回忆一下被爱的感觉。回忆一下曾经有人爱着你时的状态，真正地去体会并试着在内心重新创造这种感觉。

接着，再想想你去爱别人的感受，当你主动去爱另一个人时的体验。我这里甚至不一定指浪漫的爱情，要稍微谨慎一点——更可能是兄弟姐妹、孩子、父母之类的爱。回忆一下当你对某个人或某件事产生深厚感情时的状态。那么问题来了，这两种感受究竟哪一种更好？

我认为主动去爱他人的感觉，实际上比被爱的感觉更为美妙。被爱多少有一点腻味，有点过于甜蜜，甚至会让你想稍微推开对方。有时候，被人爱得太热烈了，你会觉得有些尴尬，甚至会觉得受到了一种束缚。

而主动去爱的感觉则完全不同，它让你内心更加开阔，更加敞亮，甚至激励你去成为更好的自己，促使你不断成长。因此，你随时可以创造爱的感觉，而问题往往出在对他人爱的渴求上。

The Cost of Pride

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The most expensive trait is pride. How come?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Oh, that was a recent one. I tweeted that just because I think that pride is the enemy of learning. When I look at my friends and colleagues, the ones who are still stuck in the past and have grown the least are the ones who were the proudest because they sort of feel like they already had the answers and so they don’t want to correct themselves publicly.

This goes back to the fame conversation – you get locked into something you said, it made you famous, you’re known for that and now you want to pivot or change. So pride prevents you from saying “I’m wrong.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s pride in this context here?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: It could be as simple as you’re trading stocks and then you don’t admit you were wrong, so you hang on to a lousy trade. It could be that you made a decision to marry someone or move somewhere or enter a profession, it doesn’t work out, and then you don’t admit that you were wrong, so you get stuck in it.

It’s mostly about getting trapped in local maxima, as opposed to going back down and climbing up the mountain again. And that’s why it’s an expensive trait, because you continue to need to repay it in one form or another.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, you’re just stuck at a suboptimal point. It’s going to cost you money, it’s going to cost you success.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: And time.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And time.

骄傲的代价

克里斯：你曾经说过，最昂贵的人格特质是骄傲。这是为什么？

纳瓦尔：对，这是我最近发的一条推特。我之所以这么说，是因为我发现骄傲是学习的最大敌人。当我观察我身边的朋友和同事时，那些固步自封、不肯成长的人往往是那些最骄傲的人，因为他们觉得自己早就掌握了答案，于是不愿意公开地承认错误，去修正自己。

这其实跟之前我们谈的“名声”那个话题有点类似——你公开宣称过某些观点，正是这些观点让你出名，让你被大家所认识，但当你想要转变或者调整时，你的骄傲阻止了你承认：“其实我错了。”

克里斯：在这里，骄傲具体指什么呢？

纳瓦尔：骄傲可能很简单，比如你炒股票，交易失败了，你却拒绝承认自己的判断有误，于是你死死抱住一笔糟糕的交易。也可能是你决定跟某个人结婚，或搬到某个城市，或进入某个行业，最终你发现这是个错误的决定，却因为骄傲而无法承认，于是就陷在其中难以自拔。

更准确来说，骄傲使你困在了“局部最优”中，你不愿意下山重新攀登更高的山峰。这就是为什么我说它是最昂贵的特质，因为它迫使你不断地在不同的领域付出代价。

克里斯：是啊，你被困在了一个次优点，它会让你损失金钱，损失成功。

纳瓦尔：更重要的是，它让你损失了宝贵的时间。

克里斯：没错，最宝贵的就是时间。

The Willingness to Start Over

NAVAL RAVIKANT: The great artists always have this ability to start over, whether it’s Paul Simon or Madonna or YouTube. I’m dating myself a little bit, but even the great entrepreneurs, they’re just always willing to start over.

I’m always struck by the Elon Musk story where he did PayPal as X.com originally, actually, was his financial institution that got merged into PayPal.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, it’s good that you’ve got the domain, you know what I mean?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, exactly. I’ll park that, I’ll hold on to it. He’s been using it for quite a while, and he said something like along the lines of, “I made two hundred million dollars from the sale of PayPal, I put one hundred million dollars into SpaceX, eighty million dollars in Tesla, twenty million in Solar City, and I had to borrow money for rent.”

This guy is a perennial taker. He’s always willing to start over. He doesn’t have any pride about being seen as successful or being seen as a failure. He’s willing to put it all in.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Back himself again each time.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Back himself again each time, but the key thing is he’s always willing to start over. Even now when he’s sort of made his new startup as USA. He’s basically trying to fix it like he would fix one of his startups.

I think that is a willingness to look like a fool, and that is a willingness to start over, and a lot of people just don’t have that. They become successful, they become rich, they become famous, and that’s it, they’re stuck. They don’t want to go back to zero, and creating anything great requires zero to one, and that means you go back to zero, and that’s really painful and hard to do.

重新开始的勇气

纳瓦尔：伟大的艺术家总是拥有重新开始的勇气，无论是保罗·西蒙、麦当娜还是U2乐队。我知道这样说可能有点暴露年龄了（笑）。但伟大的企业家们也是如此，他们总愿意一次次地从头再来。

我总会想起埃隆·马斯克的故事。他最初创建了X.com，后来与另一家公司合并为PayPal。

克里斯：能拿到这个域名也是挺好的（笑）。

纳瓦尔：对，他还一直留着这个域名，并且继续使用。他说过类似这样的话：“我卖掉PayPal赚了两亿美元，把一亿投进了SpaceX，八千万投进了特斯拉，两千万投进了SolarCity，最后还不得不借钱付房租。”

他就是这样一个愿意不断投入的人。他不在乎别人怎么看待他的成功或失败，他愿意把所有一切再次押上。

克里斯：每一次都坚定地支持自己。

纳瓦尔：没错，但最关键的是，他始终愿意重新开始。即使到了现在，他甚至将整个“美国”当成了一个初创公司，用修复初创公司的方式去修复它。

这背后是一种勇于看起来像个傻瓜的勇气，也是一种愿意重新开始的决心。但很多人做不到。一旦他们获得了成功、金钱、名声，就再也回不去了。他们不愿意重新回到“零点”。但要创造任何伟大的东西，你就必须从0到1，这意味着你必须回到零，而这过程非常痛苦和艰难。

Choosing Happiness

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Talking about risk, something I’ve been thinking about a lot to do with you. Any moment when you’re not having a good time, when you’re not really happy, you’re not doing anyone any favors. I think lots of people have become unusually familiar with suffering silently in that sort of a way of not having a high bar for your expectation for quality of life.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah. A lot of it is just you’re memeing yourself into a bad outcome because you think that somehow suffering is glorious, or that it makes you a better person. My old quip was, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy? Why can’t you figure that one out?”

The reality is you can be smart and happy, there are plenty of people in human history who are smart and happy, and I think it just starts with saying, “Yeah, you know what, I’m going to be happy.”

There was a guy that I met in Thailand a long time ago and he used to work for Tony Robbins. He had a great attitude, and we were sitting around and he said, “I realized one day that someone out there had to be the happiest person in the world, like that person just has to exist.” He said, “Why not me? I’ll take on that burden, I’ll be that guy.” I heard that and I thought, “Wow that’s pretty good, that’s a good frame,” but he knew how to reframe things.

I think a lot of happiness is just a choice in the sense that you make. First you just identify yourself as “actually I’m going to be a person that’s going to be happy, I’m going to figure it out,” and you just figure it out along the way.

You’re not going to lose your other predilections, you’re not going to lose your ambition or desire for success. I think a lot of people have this fear that “Oh if I’m happy then I won’t want to be successful.” No, you’ll just want to do things that are more aligned with the happy version of you and you’ll be successful at those things. Believe me, the happy version of you is not going to look back at the unhappy version and say, “Oh man, that guy was going to be more successful, I wish I was him.” You’re actually trying to be successful so you’ll be happy.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, so do…

NAVAL RAVIKANT: That’s the whole point. You’ve gotten it backwards.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You unlocked one of my trap cards. One of my favorite insights is that we sacrifice the thing we want for the thing that’s supposed to get it. So we sacrifice happiness in order to be successful, so that when we’re finally sufficiently successful, we can actually be happy.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: And if you have some sort of simultaneous equation, and you just sort of stripped success off from both sides… Yeah, at least in my own life, I have not found there to be a trade off. If anything, I have found that the happier I get, the more I am going to do the things that I’m good at and aligned with and that will make me even happier, and so I actually end up more successful, not less.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The aligned with thing is interesting. I’m gonna try and put this across as delicately as I can.

选择幸福

克里斯：说到承担风险，我最近一直在想你曾说的一句话：“任何时刻，如果你过得并不开心，你也没在为任何人做贡献。” 很多人习惯于默默承受痛苦，习惯于降低对生活质量的期待。

纳瓦尔：对啊，很多人都在给自己制造痛苦，因为他们以为痛苦是光荣的，或者认为经历痛苦会让他们成为更好的人。我以前常开玩笑说：“如果你真那么聪明，怎么不去想办法让自己开心点呢？”

事实上，你完全可以又聪明又幸福。历史上很多聪明人也是幸福的。关键就在于你得明确告诉自己：“是的，我要选择幸福。”

很多年前我在泰国遇到一个曾为托尼·罗宾斯工作的人。他的心态特别棒，他说：“有一天我意识到，这个世界上一定存在一个最幸福的人。既然总有人得承担这个‘世界最幸福的人’的头衔，那为什么不能是我呢？我来承担这份责任，我就要成为那个人。” 我听完就觉得：“哇，这个思维方式真不错。” 他懂得如何重新定义事情。

我认为幸福很多时候是一种主动的选择。首先你得告诉自己：“没错，我要成为一个幸福的人，我会搞清楚如何实现它。” 你自然就会在过程中逐渐摸索出方法。

你不会因此而丧失自己的抱负或对成功的渴望。很多人害怕：“如果我变得幸福了，我就不会再想要成功了。” 实际上并非如此，你只是会去做那些更符合“幸福的你”的事情，并且在这些事情上取得成功。相信我，那个幸福的你绝不会回头看那个不快乐的你，说：“哦，那个家伙本来会更成功，我真希望我是他。” 毕竟，你追求成功的根本原因就是为了获得幸福。

克里斯：没错，这正是我要说的一个重要观点。我们经常为了一个“中介目标”，牺牲我们真正想要的东西。比如我们牺牲幸福去追求成功，只是希望当我们足够成功后再去获得幸福。

纳瓦尔：就像一道方程式，你在两边同时减去“成功”这个变量，最后才发现其实幸福和成功并非矛盾，至少在我自己的人生经历中，我并没有发现二者存在取舍。相反，我发现越是幸福，我越愿意去做我擅长且真正热爱的事，结果反而让我更加成功，而不是更少。

克里斯：你刚提到的“符合自己内在的事”很有趣。我想用更委婉一点的方式表达一下。

The Freedom of Self-Prioritization

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I would say from the bit of time that we’d spent together, you have a really interesting trait of holistic selfishness. You’re sort of prepared to put yourself first. You seem largely unfazed by saying or doing things that might result in other people feeling a little bit awkward if it’s truthful for you. It’s like unapologetically self prioritizing, I guess.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, I think everybody is, maybe unapologetic is the part that’s relatively rare, but I think everybody puts themselves first. That’s just human nature. You’re here because you survive, you’re a separate organism.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Interesting. I’m maybe, but I know we like to virtue signal and pretend we’re doing it for each other. How many times does somebody say, “Yeah, of course, I’d love to come to the wedding.” They’re like, “I don’t want to be at the fucking wedding.”

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I don’t go to weddings.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But this is my point. Right. So I don’t think you’re necessarily right with that. I think that people don’t put themselves first. I sometimes think that they compromise what it is that they want in order to appease socially what’s in front of them.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I just view it as everyone’s wasting their time on it. Don’t do something you don’t want to do. Why are you wasting your time? There’s so little time on this earth. Life goes fast, what is it, four thousand weeks that’s your lifespan? And yes, we hear that, but we don’t remember it, but I guess I’m keenly aware of how little time I have, so I’m just not going to waste it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How have you got more comfortable at being the unapologetic self prioritizer?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I’ve gotten utterly more and more ruthless on it, mainly it’s that I see or hear people’s freedom, and then that liberates me further. So I read a blog post by P. Marka, aka Marc Andreessen, where he said don’t keep a schedule, and I took that to heart, so I deleted my calendar and I don’t keep a schedule, I try to remember it all in my head, if I can’t remember it, I’m not going to add it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m glad you got your own time.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, exactly, I had to look things up at the last minute. But ironically, don’t even know if Mark himself follows that, but he made the correct point. I read a little story about Jack Dorsey doing all his business off his iPhone and iPad and not even going into a Mac, and I said, okay, I want to do that, so I’m going operate through text messaging and I put up my nasty email.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Does that feel like more freedom?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: It does, yeah, because you’re on the go, so I have a nasty email autoresponder that says I don’t check email and don’t text me either, right? If you need to find me, you’ll find me.

Obviously, some of this is a luxury of success, but some of these habits I adopted long before actually, the hostile email autoresponder started a long time ago. I used to own the domain, I let it go, dontdocoffee.com, I used to reply from that email just so people would get the point, but I stopped being rude about it, now I just ghost, I just disappear.

My wife knows not to ever book or schedule me for anything, I’m not expected to go to couples dinners, I’m not expected to go to birthdays, I’m not expected to go to weddings. If somebody tries to rope her into having me show up, she says he makes his own decisions, you gotta ask him directly.

无歉意地把自己放在第一位

克里斯：从和你相处的这段时间看，我觉得你身上有一种非常独特的、全面的“自私”。你非常坦然地把自己放在首位，即使说出或做出的事情可能会让别人觉得有些尴尬或不自在。可以说，你毫无歉意地优先考虑自己。

纳瓦尔：我认为每个人其实都是这样，只不过“毫无歉意”这一点相对比较少见罢了。但人性本来就是把自己放在首位的，你作为独立个体，活下来就是最重要的。

克里斯：这很有趣，但我不完全同意你的看法。大多数人都在试图表现自己的无私，比如经常有人虚伪地说：“当然啦，我很乐意去你的婚礼！” 而内心真正想法是：“天啊，我根本不想参加这场婚礼！”

纳瓦尔：我从来不参加婚礼。

克里斯：没错！这就是我的意思。我觉得很多人并不会真正把自己放在首位，反而是为了迎合眼前的社会关系而妥协自己的需求。

纳瓦尔：在我看来，所有这样做的人都是在浪费自己的时间。你不想做的事就不要去做。生命如此短暂，一辈子只有4000个星期左右。虽然大家都听过类似的话，但却很少真正牢记在心。但我对生命的有限性感受得非常清晰，我不会浪费时间。

克里斯：你是如何逐渐习惯于这样坦然地把自己放在第一位的？

纳瓦尔：我越来越果断地这样做了，主要是我看到了或听到了别人实现自由的方式，这让我更加解放。比如我看了马克·安德森（Marc Andreessen）写的一篇博文，他建议：“不要使用日程表”，于是我删掉了我的日历，尝试完全用记忆来管理时间。如果我记不住某件事，那说明它不值得占用我的精力。

克里斯：还好你记得我们今天的对话（笑）。

纳瓦尔：对，幸亏我提前稍微查了一下（笑）。但最关键的是，我学会了如何拒绝浪费自己的时间。我甚至设置了非常直接的邮件自动回复：“我不查邮件，也不要发短信给我。如果你真的需要找我，你会找到方法的。”

显然，这种生活方式一定程度上需要有一定的成功和自由度做支撑。但其实有些习惯是我很早之前就养成的，比如那个拒绝与人喝咖啡的域名dontdocoffee.com。我以前回复邮件时会直接用这个邮箱地址，提醒对方别再浪费彼此的时间了。现在我不再这么直接，更多时候我只是悄悄地消失。

我太太也知道不该帮我安排任何活动。我不会被要求去参加什么夫妻聚餐、生日派对或婚礼。如果有人想通过她约我，她会告诉对方：“他做决定很有主见，你最好直接问他本人。”

Embracing Serendipity

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What about vice versa? Well, you’re not killing serendipity in a way, are you?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: No. I’m freeing up all my time, so my entire life is serendipity. I get to interact with whoever I want, whenever I want, wherever I want, but I hear the invite, then make the decision.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because if there’s fewer things incoming, you’re assuming that you know best for you.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I don’t commit to anything in the future, so I’ll say, okay, if that thing is interesting, I’ll see if I can get in that day when I’m in the mood, but there’s nothing worse than something coming up that your past self committed you to, that your present self doesn’t want to do.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Goddamn it, positive.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, and then it destroys your entire calendar. It destroys your day because there’s like, oh, this one hour slot which is sitting like a turd on my calendar that I have to schedule my whole day around. I can’t do anything twenty minutes before, twenty minutes afterwards.

Even for phone calls, if someone wants to do a phone call, say, okay, just text me when you’re free, I’ll text you when I’m free, we’ll just do it on the fly. It’s a much better way of living than this overly scheduled cal.com or iCal, whatever.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The over scheduled life is not worth living?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: It’s not. I think it’s a terrible way to live life. That’s not how we evolved, it’s not how we grew up, it’s not how we were as children hopefully, unless you have a helicopter parent or a tiger mom. Your natural order is freedom.

I had a friend who said to me once, “You know, I never want to have to be at a specific place at a specific time” and I was like, oh my god, that’s freedom. When I heard that, that changed my life right there.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re still alarm clock less?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yes, I’m alarm clock less. Today, I did set my alarm clock just so I wouldn’t miss this.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Very important, yeah.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: But just so you know, I set the alarm clock for 11am in case I was stricken with the flu, slept in. I was still not going to set my alarm clock for 8am or 9am, and sure enough, got up many hours before that. But it was sort of a backup emergency alarm. In fact, sometimes when there’s something that I need to do, I don’t want to look at a calendar, so I’ll just set an alarm for it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Just sink a little bit more into that, like, that kind of “fuck you” energy, that self prioritizing energy, because I think people rationally love the idea of this. I’m going to do what only I want to do, even if they’ve got the level of freedom.

拥抱“偶然”的生活

克里斯：但从另一个角度来看，你不会因此扼杀掉生活中的偶然惊喜吗？

纳瓦尔：不会啊，我反而是释放了全部的时间，所以我的整个人生都是由“偶然”组成的。我可以随时、随地、和任何我想见的人互动——我听到一个邀请，然后自己决定是否接受。

克里斯：因为你减少了输入，也就意味着你相信自己才是最了解自己的那个人。

纳瓦尔：我不会对未来做任何承诺。如果某件事听起来不错，我会留着机会，等那天我有心情再决定。但最糟糕的情况莫过于：你的过去替你做了一个承诺，而你的现在根本不想去做。

克里斯：天哪，这太有共鸣了。

纳瓦尔：是啊，然后这个承诺毁了你一整天的安排。你日历上突然出现一个像粪便一样的“一小时块”，你必须围绕它调整一整天的时间。这之前你不能专注，之后你也心不在焉。

就连打电话我都不会预约时间。我会说：“你有空时发我短信，我有空时也发你短信，咱们临时通话。” 这比那些全靠cal.com或者iCal堆出来的行程表生活方式，舒服太多了。

克里斯：那种“被过度安排的人生”，根本不值得过。

纳瓦尔：完全不值得。那不是我们进化出来的方式，不是我们童年生活的自然状态——除非你有直升机父母或虎妈。人类的本能状态是自由。

我有个朋友曾经说过一句话改变了我：“我永远不想必须在某个特定的时间出现在某个特定的地方。”我当时心想：“天啊，这才是真正的自由。”

克里斯：你现在还不用闹钟吗？

纳瓦尔：是的，我现在基本不用闹钟。今天唯一一次设闹钟是因为不想错过这次录音。

克里斯：太重要了（笑）。

纳瓦尔：但我设的是上午11点的闹钟，以防万一感冒睡过头。我可不会把闹钟定在8点或9点那种时间，最后果然还是早早醒了。那只是一个“应急备份”罢了。事实上，有时候我甚至不想看日历，只会设个闹钟提醒我该做的事。

克里斯：说说你那种“随时自我优先”的生活态度吧。我觉得很多人理性上很喜欢这种方式——“我只做我想做的事”——即便他们其实已经具备足够的自由。

Freedom and Productivity

NAVAL RAVIKANT: It’s not “fuck you” energy in the sense that I think everyone should live their life that way to the greatest extent possible. Obviously we have our requirements around work and obligations that are genuinely important to us, but don’t fritter away your life on randomly scheduled things and things that aren’t important, don’t matter, and events and weddings and tedious dinners with tedious people that you don’t want to go to.

To the extent you can bring freedom into your life, optimize for that, you’ll actually be more productive. You won’t just be happier, more free, you will be more productive, because then you can focus on what is in front of you, whatever the biggest problem of that day.

When I wake up in the morning, the first four hours are when I have the most energy and that’s when I want to solve all the hard problems, and the next four hours are when I kind of want to do some more outdoorsy activities or I want to work out or maybe I can have some meetings, but I’ll try to do those last second based on whatever the day’s priorities demand. The last four hours I kind of want to wind down, I want to hang out with the kids, and I want to play games, or read a book or something like that.

So, having that flexibility and freedom is really important, so you can just put whatever is most needed into the slot at that moment. Instead if I have like a meeting at 2pm and then I have to get a thing and some emails done, I put that off till 6pm and I’m rushing, I’m not going to be productive.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re certainly not free.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I’m definitely not free, but also another thing that I really believe is that inspiration is perishable. Act on it immediately. So when you’re inspired to do something, do that thing. If I’m inspired to write a blog post, I want to do it at that moment. If I’m inspired to send a tweet, I want to do it that moment. If I’m inspired to solve a problem, I want it that moment. If I’m inspired to read a book, I want to read it right then.

If I want to learn something, do it at the moment of curiosity, the moment the curiosity arrives, I go learn that thing immediately. I download the book, I get on Google, I get on ChatGPT, whatever, I will figure that thing out on the spot, and that’s when the learning happens. It doesn’t happen because I’ve scheduled time, because I’ve set an hour aside, because when that time arrives I might be in a different mood, I might just want to do something different.

So I think that spontaneity is really important, you’re going to learn best when you’re having fun, when you genuinely are enjoying the process, not when you’re forced to sit there and do it. How much do you remember from school? You know you were forced to learn geography, history, mathematics on this schedule at this time according to this person. Didn’t happen. All the stuff that sticks with you is what you learned when you wanted to, when you genuinely had the desire, and that freedom, that ability to act on something the moment you want to is so liberating that most of us go through our lives with very little tastes of that. If you live your entire life that way, that is a recipe for happiness.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It feels like efficiency that you have.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Efficient also. You have the inspiration that is going to be the most frictionless time to ever do that particular task.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So I’ve had the inspiration to do that. I’ll put that off until a time when I no longer really want to do it quite so much. And while I do want to do that thing, I’ll do something else that I needed to do because it’s on the schedule. It does not work.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Procrastination is because you don’t want to do that thing right now. You want to do something else. Go do that something else. I reject this frame that efficiency and productivity and success are counter to happiness and freedom. They actually go together.

The happier you are, the more you can sustain doing something, the more likely you’re going to do something that will in turn make you even happier and you’ll continue to do it and you’ll outwork everybody else. The more free you are, the better you can allocate your time, and the less you’re caught up in a web of obligations and commitments, and the more you can focus on the task at hand.

自由与生产力

纳瓦尔：我不觉得这是一种“去你X的”态度。我认为每个人都应该尽可能多地为自己而活。我们当然有一些对自己真正重要的责任与义务，但别把生命浪费在那些随机安排、不重要、不必要的事上，比如应酬、婚礼、无聊的饭局、和你根本不想打交道的人。

你越能把自由引入自己的生活，就越应该去优化它。你不仅会更幸福、更自由，你也会更高效，因为你可以专注于眼前真正重要的事。

我每天早上醒来的前四个小时，是我精力最充沛的时候，那是我解决最难问题的时段。接下来的四个小时，我可能会去户外活动、锻炼身体，或者参加会议，但这些通常都是临时安排的，取决于当天的优先事项。最后四个小时是放松时间，我想陪陪孩子，玩玩游戏，读读书。

所以，这种灵活的结构非常重要，你可以把“当下最重要的事情”放进恰当的时间段。如果我下午两点有个会议，那我的整个下午就被破坏了。我会推迟邮件，拖延任务，结果到六点一股脑儿冲刺，效率反而低下。

克里斯：而且这根本不自由。

纳瓦尔：是啊，完全不自由。而且我真心相信一点：灵感是易逝的，必须立刻行动。当你有灵感时，就应该立即去做。不管是写博客、发推、解决问题还是读书，我一定要立刻动手。

如果我想学一个东西，我会在好奇心出现的那一刻立刻去学。我会下载那本书，上Google，打开ChatGPT，马上查资料、动脑、解决它。真正的学习发生在那个“我现在就想知道”的瞬间，而不是安排在某个死板的时间表里。因为等那个时间到了，你可能早就没兴趣了，或者当时只想干点别的。

所以我认为自发性非常重要。你会在真正享受的过程中学得最好，而不是被迫坐在那里硬撑。你还记得在学校学的地理、历史、数学吗？那些都是按固定时间、固定进度、固定老师被强塞进脑子的，学不进去。而你现在真正记得住的，都是你在自己真正想学的时候学到的。

那种“想做就做”的自由，是一种极致的解放。但大多数人一生中只偶尔尝到一点点这种滋味。如果你能让整个人生都以这种方式来生活，那就是幸福的秘诀。

克里斯：你这根本是一种更高效的方式。

纳瓦尔：对，而且效率也更高。你顺着灵感去做，那就是执行那件事最顺畅、最自然的时机。

克里斯：而大多数人呢？他们有灵感，却把它搁置了。等到灵感淡了，才开始硬着头皮去做。而他们在灵感还在的时候，却去处理那些“日程安排上说该做”的事。完全错位。

纳瓦尔：拖延的真正原因，是你现在并不想做那件事。你其实更想做别的事，那就去做那件事。我拒绝接受“效率”和“幸福”、“自由”相互对立这种思维方式。它们其实是彼此增强的。

你越幸福，越能持续投入；你做的事越符合自己的节奏和天性，你就越有可能把事情做好，收获更多幸福；你越自由，就越能合理分配时间，减少被杂事与义务缠住的风险，从而专注于真正重要的事。

Finding Your Authentic Work

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This is related to another insight of yours. The less you want something, the less you’re thinking about it, the less you’re obsessing over it, the more you’re going to do it in a natural way. The more you’re going to do it for yourself, you’re going to do it in a way that you’re good at, and you’re going to stick with it. The people around you will see the quality of your work is higher. But this seems like a difficult tension to navigate because an obsessive attention to detail is a competitive advantage of your work as well. So you have these two things sort of conflicting with each other.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: No one is gonna beat you at being you. Find what feels like play to you, but looks like work to others. So it looks like work to them, but to you it feels like play, it’s not work. So you’re gonna out compete them because you’re doing it effortlessly, you’re doing it for fun, they’re doing it for work, they’re doing it for some byproduct. To you, it’s art, it’s beauty, it’s joy, it’s flow, it’s fulfilling.

You must enjoy podcasting. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be good at it. You wouldn’t have nine hundred episodes either. If you decided that the right way to get ahead in life was to go write books, nobody would have heard of you. Chris Williamson’s book would be a complete flop, that’s not who you are. You’re a podcaster. You enjoy talking to people, you enjoy interviewing them.

The more you do things that are natural to you, the less competition you have. You escape competition through authenticity by being your own self.

找到属于你的那份“真工作”

克里斯：这让我想起你提过的另一个观点：你越是不执着、越是不去刻意追求某件事，越是能以一种自然的方式去做它。你会更发自内心地去做，也更擅长坚持下去。旁人能看到你的作品质量很高。但这中间好像有种微妙的张力——因为那种对细节的痴迷，本身也是你工作的一种竞争优势。这两者似乎是矛盾的。

纳瓦尔：没有人能在“做你自己”这件事上打败你。你要找到一件事：对你来说像在玩，对别人来说却像在干活。别人看你在努力工作，你自己却感觉轻松愉快，像是在玩耍。你会因为这份轻松而脱颖而出，他们是在拼命干活，你是在享受过程；他们是为了结果，你是为了美、为了创作本身、为了心流和满足感。

你肯定是真的喜欢播客这件事。要不然你不可能做得这么好，也不可能做出九百期。如果你硬逼自己去写书，说那才是成功的路径——可能根本不会有人听说你写的书。《Chris Williamson 出书记》一定会扑街，因为那不是你。你是播客主持人，你喜欢和人聊天，喜欢深度对谈。

越是顺从你的本性去做事，竞争就越少。你靠“做自己”摆脱了竞争。你越真实，越没人能跟你比。

Productize Yourself

If I had to summarize how to be successful in life in two words, I would just say productize yourself. That’s it. Just figure out what it is that you naturally do that the world might want that you can scale up and turn into a product, and it’ll eventually be effortless for you. Yes, there’s always work required, but it won’t even feel like work to you, it’ll feel like play to you, and modern society gives us that opportunity.

Know, if you were two thousand years ago, you’re born on a farm, your choices are very limited, right, you’re going to do stuff on that farm. Now you can literally wake up and you can move to a different city, you can switch careers, you can switch jobs, you can change the people that you’re with, you know you can change so many things about who you are and who you’re with and what you’re doing that there is infinite opportunity out there for you, literally infinite.

So it’s much better to treat this like a search function to find the people who need you the most, to find the work that needs you the most, to find the place you’re best suited to be at, and it’s worthwhile to spend time in that exploration before diving into exploitation. The biggest mistake in a world with so many choices is premature commitment. If you prematurely commit to being a lawyer or a doctor and now you’ve got like five years invested into that, you might have just completely missed, you might just end up in the wrong profession, wrong place, the wrong people for thirty years of your life grinding away, and yes, the best time to figure that out was before, but the second best time is now, so just change it.

把自己“产品化”

如果让我用两个词来总结如何在这个世界上获得成功，那就是：“产品化自己。”

你要找到那个你做起来毫不费力、别人又刚好需要、而且可以规模化的东西，把它变成一项产品。这会变成你天生适配的工作。是的，依然需要努力，但它不会让你感到“劳累”，它会像游戏一样让你乐此不疲。

放在两千年前，你生在一个农场，那你就只有干农活一个选项。但今天，你可以起床就搬去另一个城市，换个职业，换个圈子，甚至重塑自己的身份。世界已经为你敞开了几乎无限的可能。

你真正要做的，是把人生当成一次搜索任务，去寻找最需要你的人，最适合你的工作，最适合你居住与成长的环境。在投入前，值得花时间探索。在选择如此丰富的世界中，最大的错误就是“过早承诺”。

如果你22岁就死咬着“我要做律师”或“我要做医生”，投入了五年，才发现完全不适合自己，那你可能要为这个错误的选择搭进去整整三十年。是的，最好的时间是当初，但第二好的时间，就是现在，立刻改变它。

Say No By Default

And also presumably kill things that aren’t working very quickly. By default, you should kill everything, you know, if you can’t decide, the answer is no, and most things you just be saying no to. Part of my keeping my calendar free is just by default saying no to everything. Do I want to create a calendar just to add your event, right, or to add your need or your desire?

One of the other things about, know, early on in life you’re looking for opportunities, so you’re saying yes to everything, and that is a phase that you go through, that is the exploration phase. Later when you found the thing you want to work on, you’re in the exploitation phase, you have to say no to everything by default, and if you don’t say no to everything by default, if you have to even explicitly go out of your way to say no to something, that will take up time.

For example, know there are lot of people out there who are into hustle culture, and a big piece of hustle culture is like, well you’re not going get something if you don’t ask for it, so they’ll hustle people, they’ll always be sending you requests, messages. This is a famous person problem but I have it, and people are always asking me for things and I kind of squirm when I get these messages and I’m sure you get these two text messages, emails saying, “Hey Chris, my friend so and so should really be on your podcast” or “you should come to my event,” “you should write a forward for my book,” and you kind of squirm when you get this right, and you have to figure out how to say no.

One of the things I learned along the way is that if you wouldn’t ask somebody else to do it and then you get that request yourself, can just dismiss it, you don’t have to respond, you don’t even let it enter your brain. You have to be able to delete emails and text messages without flinching if you want to scale, and scaling is very important, scaling your time is really important. Every interruption will take you out of flow, so the only way you can remain in flow is if you get either very good at ignoring these things by default or closing yourself off like a hermit like our mutual friend Tim Ferriss does, or you just become emotionally capable of not registering these as something that causes turbulence inside of you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That not registering it emotionally thing, is that fundamental? That’s so fundamental to so many things in life. Can we dig into that a little bit? Is it because again, I’ve only seen you as you. Right? I didn’t know you twenty years ago. I didn’t know you as a child. So I’ve only seen you with this holistic selfishness, the integrated self prioritization, whatever we—I don’t know what we called it.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Selfish is fine. I’ll take selfish. I’m selfish. I’m a very selfish person. Don’t contact me.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That emotional reaction—whatever that is. Also get the sense too that maybe people have lived obligation life for so long that they actually kinda struggle to tap into what it is that they want. They’ve hidden their wants and their desires and their needs, they deprioritized themselves so much for so long. They go, what do I want, actually? What is it? Do I want to go to this thing or not? Because all I’ve done is be puppeted. Right? I’ve been marionetted by other people’s desires for so so so long. I can’t even tap into that anymore, and saying no feels like a war crime.

默认说“不”

你还需要学会快速放弃。默认拒绝那些无效的事。你犹豫不决，那答案就是“不”。大多数事情你都应该说“不”。

我之所以能保持日程表的空白，就是因为我默认对一切都说“不”。我不会为了你一个需求就给你开个时间表——那是我的时间。

人生早期是探索期，那时你说“是”没问题；但当你找到了方向，就进入了“专注期”，这时候你必须默认拒绝一切。否则，连拒绝本身都将消耗你大量的时间与精力。

比如现在流行的“拼命文化”，其中很重要的一环就是“你不去争取，你就得不到”，所以总有人试图靠发送信息来“砸单子”：发你私信、发你邮件、发你请求——“我朋友一定得上你播客！”“你一定要来我这个活动！”“你能不能帮我书写个序？”你看了都不舒服，是不是？

所以我学到的一点是：如果你自己都不会去麻烦别人做这件事，那你也完全可以无视别人向你提出这个请求。直接删掉，不用回，不用解释，连你的大脑都不必为此打开一毫秒的“处理窗口”。

你必须练习毫不犹豫地删除消息，这是你想要放大自己、保持专注、维持心流的前提。每一次中断，都会把你拉出“心流”；所以你要么练成“自动屏蔽”的能力，要么就像Tim Ferriss一样，把自己变成隐士。无论哪种，你都得学会不让这些干扰搅乱你内心的平静。

克里斯：你刚提到“情绪免疫”，我觉得这真是关键中的关键。我们能不能更深入地聊聊这个？因为我只见过现在的你，我不知道你20年前是什么样子，也不知道你小时候是什么样。所以我看到的是一个自我整合得很好的人，一个“全然自我优先”的你。

纳瓦尔：说“自私”也没关系，我接受这个词。我就是一个非常自私的人——不要联系我。

克里斯（笑）：但我觉得更深的层次是，有些人已经活在“义务人生”太久太久了，他们早就失去了“我到底想要什么”的感觉。他们已经把自己的渴望、需求、兴趣压抑得太深了——以至于当你问他们“你真的想去那个聚会吗？”他们居然回答不上来。

他们说不出自己想要什么了。他们太久被别人的期待牵着走，以至于说一句“不”都像在犯战争罪一样。

Observe Your Thoughts Objectively

NAVAL RAVIKANT: So I think it’s really good to be able to view your own mind and your own thoughts objectively, and that is the big benefit of meditation. It creates a small gap between your conscious observation self and your mind, and that lets you then look at your thoughts and evaluate them a little bit like you would a third party’s statements.

If you just take your mind to be you and they’re integrated in one and the same at all times and you’re reacting from the mind, then you’re not even going question things that come into your mind. Anything that comes in that creates your reaction will immediately create a reaction, but if you can observe your thoughts a little bit and not in some woo woo way, but you can even just do it through therapy, can do it through journaling, you can do it any way you’d like, you can just take long walks, don’t have to meditate and do lotus position, all that is unnecessary.

But if you can observe your own thoughts and view them a little objectively, then you can start being a little more choosy, a little more critical, and you can realize that there are no problems in the real world other than maybe things that inflict pain on your body. Everything else has to become a problem in your mind first. You have to view it and interpret it and create a narrative that it is a problem before it becomes the problem.

Then you realize that a lot of your emotional energy is spent on reacting to things that your mind is automatically saying are problems, and you don’t need all those problems. Do you really need that many problems in your life? Again I would say try to focus on just one overarching problem and then go solve that problem.

It’s like if you want to be successful, define success very concretely, focus on that and everything else, when it enters your mind it becomes a problem, whether it’s a judgment about the girl walking down the street or the car that just cut in front of you or whether it’s like you know this, your accountant did this stupid thing, like yes it’s going to trigger you but observe for a moment that like it’s triggering me, I’ve created a problem, do I really want to have this problem right now, do I want to spend the energy on this problem or do I want that going somewhere else?

And it doesn’t have to be that over, you don’t have to, the mind mud wrestling with itself is also a problem.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I have, my problems have got problems and I have a real problem about fixing my problems.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, exactly, and so you just, you’re going to be much happier and much more focused, again I think happiness and focus and success can kind of complement each other. You’re going to have much more energy, just think about it as mental energy, you’re have much more mental energy to focus on the actual problems you want to solve if you don’t start unconsciously, subconsciously, reactively picking up problems everywhere. So before anything can be a problem that takes up your emotional energy, you have to accept it as a problem, you can be choosy about your problems, and I’m not saying I’m perfect in that regard, but I think I’m better than I used to be.

客观地观察你的思维

纳瓦尔：我认为，能客观地观察自己大脑和思想是一种极其重要的能力，而这也是冥想的最大好处之一。冥想在你与“意识中的观察者”和“你的思维本身”之间打开一道小缝隙，使你能够像分析第三方的言论一样，去分析自己脑海里的念头。

如果你把大脑里蹦出来的每一个想法都当作“我本人”，每次都自动反应、毫不质疑，那你就是被思维牵着走。你甚至不会去分辨这个念头是否有意义，它直接控制了你的行为和情绪。

但如果你能稍微拉开距离去观察自己的思维，不用非得打坐盘腿，哪怕是通过写日记、散步、做心理咨询也可以，那你就能更挑剔、更理性地看待这些“内心新闻推送”。

你会发现，现实世界中真正的问题少之又少，除了那些会对你身体造成疼痛的事，其他所谓的问题，其实都是你先在脑海中认定“它是个问题”，才变成了问题。

也就是说：我们的大量情绪能量，其实都浪费在了对“非必要问题”的反应上。而这些“问题”，并不是客观存在，而是你自己接纳了它们、激活了它们。

你真的需要这么多问题吗？你不如专注于一个重要的问题，全力解决它。

比如你想获得成功，那就具体地定义什么是成功，然后把所有别的杂念当作无关的干扰——街上走过的女孩、插队的车、会计的小失误……这些当然会激怒你，但你可以拉出一点距离来观察：“这激怒了我。但我真的想把这当成一个值得投入精力的问题吗？”

而且，不需要让头脑陷入“和自己打泥巴仗”的状态，那也是一种痛苦的内耗。

克里斯：我的问题有自己的问题，而我还为了解决这些问题的问题而感到焦虑。

纳瓦尔：对（笑），这就是恶性循环。如果你能学会只关注你愿意投入能量去解决的问题，你会更快乐、更专注。幸福、专注和成功是可以相互成就的。

你的大脑每天的能量是有限的。如果你不加选择地对每个念头都产生情绪反应，你的注意力就会被撕裂。但如果你学会筛选和忽略，就可以把精力用在真正想做的事上。

Choose Your Problems Wisely

Well, lots of people are addicted to solving problems, right, so much so that sometimes people create problems when we don’t have any, simply so that we can solve them. We have that going on, and then even worse is we take on problems that we can’t affect.

So, you know, another one of my little quips was, you know, a rational person can sort of find peace by cultivating indifference to things that are out of their control, and I’m as guilty as anybody of doomsurfing on X or social media and getting worked up about things that I can’t do anything about, right? Like do I want to be fighting those battles in my mind when I literally cannot do anything about it?

So if you find yourself looping on a problem like you’re watching the news too much and you’re getting caught up in a problem you can’t do anything about, you have to step away from that, and modern media is a delivery mechanism for mimetic viruses, and what’s happened now is you know, one hundred years ago, five hundred years ago, if something wasn’t happening in your immediate vicinity, you wouldn’t hear about it. It wouldn’t be a problem for you, but now every single one of the world’s problems has turned into a mimetic virus, which is going into the battlefield of the news and is trying to infect your mind in real time. Hyper speed.

So that, yeah, so that you become obsessed with the war in Ukraine, is really far away, or you get obsessed with climate change or you get obsessed with AI doom or you get obsessed with whatever, and there’s nothing as riveting as the old religion, the world is ending, the world is ending, pay attention, the world is ending.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Cassandra Complex at global scale.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Cassandra Complex at global scale and I would argue that large percentages of population are essentially just infected with these mimetic viruses that have taken over their brain and are causing them to do incredible gyration about things that probably aren’t even true or are greatly exaggerated, but even to the extent they are true, are things that that person can do nothing about and they should put their own house in order first.

So you know another little line I have for myself is your family is broken but you’re going to fix the world, right? People are running out there to try and fix the world and their own lives are a—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh my god.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Right, and I think it defies credibility if you can’t fix your own life first. I’m not going to take you seriously if you can’t fix your own life, like all these philosophers who you know seem like people you emulate and so smart or like these brilliant celebrities and they go off and commit suicide, well you just kind of invalidated your whole way of life. It’s like that line of in No Country for Old Men where the killer is waiting for the protagonist and protagonist shows up and the killer says, “Well you know if your set of rules brought you here, then what good are your rules?” Didn’t work.

I am self, I’m holistically selfish in that I want to be objectively successful in everything I set out to want.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Mhmm.

明智地选择你的问题

很多人是“问题上瘾者”——他们甚至在没有问题的时候制造出一个，只为了让自己去解决。更糟的是，他们还会花大量精力去焦虑那些自己根本无能为力的问题。

我有句小语录：“理性的人通过对无法控制的事物培养冷漠，从而获得内心的平静。”我自己也不例外，经常陷入社交媒体的“世界末日”旋涡中，焦虑于那些我无能为力的事。

所以，如果你发现自己反复陷入某个无法控制的问题，比如你因为看新闻太多而越来越焦虑，那么你就该“拔掉电源”。

现代媒体本质上是模因病毒的投送系统。在过去的年代，如果某件事不发生在你身边，它根本不会进入你的意识。但现在，世界上每一个角落的问题都在实时以超高速度，感染你的思维。

你会突然开始关注乌克兰战争、气候危机、AI 灾难论……这些事有的确实严重，有的夸张到离谱，但关键是：即使它们是真的，你能做些什么呢？你又为什么要为此焦虑？

克里斯：这就是“卡珊德拉综合症”的全球版本。

纳瓦尔：没错，是全球规模的卡珊德拉。大量人类正在被这些模因病毒感染，脑子被占据，情绪被劫持，精力消耗在根本帮不上忙的事上。与其如此，不如把自己的生活先理顺。

我还有一句自我提醒的格言：“你家里一团糟，但你却想去拯救世界？”

克里斯：我的天。

纳瓦尔：这很讽刺，但是真理。如果你连自己的生活都理不顺，我是不会把你当回事的。那些哲学家、名人，大家都觉得他们活得很聪明、很有智慧，但最终却选择了自杀……那你整套生活方式的正当性，不就被自己亲手推翻了吗？

这就像电影《老无所依》里的那句台词：凶手对主角说：“如果你的那一套规则把你带到了这里，那你的规则还有什么意义？”

我说自己“自私”，是因为我想在我选择想要的每一件事情上，都客观地成功。

克里斯：嗯。你做到了。

Don’t Settle for Mediocrity

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, and you have one life, don’t settle for mediocrity. Don’t settle for mediocrity, and I think the only, like, people debate intelligence for example, right? We talk about IQ tests and all that, but I think the only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life, and there are two parts to that.

One is getting what you want, so you know how to get it, and the second is wanting the right things, knowing what to want in the first place. I could want to be a, you know, six foot eight basketball player, and I’m not going to get that, so it’s wanting the wrong thing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s wanting something that you can’t get.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: That’s wanting something you can’t get. There’s also wanting something that you don’t want.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, wanting something that’s a booby prize.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: There are plenty of booby prizes out there too, right? I don’t know if that won, don’t know if won in about twenty or so. Yeah, prizes that are just not worth having, or that create their own problems. But if you’re not careful, you can end up in a place in life not only that you don’t want to be, but one that you didn’t even mean to get to.

别向平庸妥协

纳瓦尔：是啊，这一生只有一次，别向平庸低头。我一直觉得“聪明”这件事被大家过于神化了，整天讨论IQ啊天赋啊，但我认为判断一个人是否真正聪明，只有一个标准：你有没有活出你想要的人生。

这其中包含两部分：第一，你知道自己想要什么；第二，你有能力去实现它。比如我如果一心想成为一个身高六尺八寸的NBA球员，那注定是徒劳的——这就是想错了方向。

克里斯：那是追求一个你根本无法得到的东西。

纳瓦尔：对，而且更常见的，是人们追求一些他们根本不是真的想要的东西。

克里斯：那些“华而不实的奖品”。

纳瓦尔：没错，生活中到处是这种“伪奖品”——表面看似光鲜，其实毫无意义，甚至会带来新的问题。如果你不清醒地思考，你可能会走到一个你根本不想去、甚至从未打算去的地方。

Navigating Life’s Decisions

NAVAL RAVIKANT: That’s if you’re kind of proceeding unconsciously. And usually I think people end up there because they are going on autopilot with sort of societal expectations or other people’s expectations, or out of guilt or out of mimetic desire. Peter Thiel has this whole thing from Renee Gerard about how mimetic desires are desires picked up from other people, and some of those are automatically baked into society like go to law school, go to med school, go to business school. Or they might be from watching what your friends are doing and what the other monkeys are doing, or it might be what your parents’ expectations are.

Guilt is just society’s voice speaking in your head, socially programmed so you’ll be a good little monkey and do things that are good for the tribe. But I think the best outcomes come when you think it through for yourself and decide for yourself, and I don’t think people spend enough time deciding.

For example, we run on these four-year cycles. In Silicon Valley, you go join a startup, you vest your stock over four years, that’s the standard. In college, you go for four years, high school you go for four years. Some things take longer – you have children, they hit puberty nine years later, that’s like a nine-year cycle until that relationship changes. But we’re used to these fairly long cycles, multi-year cycles, in which we are committed to things. You go to law school, four or five year cycle. You go be a lawyer, forty year cycle.

These are very long cycles. The amount of time we spend deciding what to do and who to do it with is very short, very, very short. We spend three months deciding, one month deciding on a job where we’re going to be for ten years or five years. And because a lot of discovery is path dependent, where the next thing you find on the path is dependent on where you were on the previous path, you sort of start going down this vector that is a very long distance.

People decide frivolously which city to live in, and that’s going to decide who their friends are, what their jobs are, their opportunity, their weather, their food supply, their air supply, quality of life. It’s such an important decision but people spend so little time thinking it through. I would argue that if you’re making a four-year decision, spend a year thinking it through, like really thinking it through. Twenty-five percent of the time.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, exactly, there’s the secretary theorem. Don’t know if you know that one?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Is that after you’ve done this many people, pick the best one of the next however many?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s right. Yeah.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: The secretary theorem is this computer science professor trying to figure out how much time he should spend interviewing secretaries and then how long to keep the secretary. So, let’s say he’s going to have a secretary for ten years, does he keep searching for one year, two years, three years, one month, two months, what is the optimal time?

And it turns out that the optimal time is somewhere around a third. About a third of the way through, you take the best person you’ve worked with and try to find someone that good or better. So by the time you’ve gone about a third of the way through, you have seen enough that you now have a sense of what the bar is, and then anybody who meets or exceeds that bar is good enough. This applies to dating, this applies to jobs and careers, this applies generally.

But the interesting thing about the secretary theorem is that it’s actually not time based. It’s not based on one third of the time, it’s iteration based.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The number of candidates. The number of shots you took on goal.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: That’s right. So, you want to have lots and lots of iterations.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So in that sense you need to bail out quickly, and you need to be decisive quickly.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: That’s right. You need to take opportunities quickly, and bail out quickly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Like, if you go back and you look through failed relationships, probably the biggest regret will be staying in the relationship after your year was over.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Exactly, you should have left sooner. The moment you knew it wasn’t going to work out, you should have moved on.

如何做出人生决策

纳瓦尔：这种情况往往发生在你没有清醒意识地活着。人们被社会期待、他人意见、愧疚感、或者模仿心理（mimetic desire）驱动着，像开着自动驾驶一样过完一生。Peter Thiel 提到过哲学家 René Girard 的观点：人类的大部分欲望，其实都是“学来的”。我们追求某些东西，仅仅是因为别人也在追求它。

比如：去读法律、医学、商学院——这些欲望早已嵌入社会文化之中。或者你只是盲目跟着朋友的脚步走，跟着“其他猴子”模仿而已。又或者，是被父母的期待裹挟着前进。

愧疚，其实就是社会的声音在你脑中作祟。它是文化编程的一部分，目的是让你做一个“听话的小猴子”，服务于群体的利益。但最好的结果，永远来自于你自己深思熟虑之后做出的选择。

而我认为，大多数人根本没有花足够时间去思考这些重大决策。我们的人生其实是被几个“长周期”所决定的：大学四年、初高中四年、硅谷创业者股票归属期四年、生儿育女甚至是十年以上的周期。而这些周期一旦开始，就很难中途掉头。

问题是：我们在做这些决定时花的时间，远远太少。找工作可能就花一个月思考，但这份工作可能要你待上十年。搬去哪个城市，可能一拍脑袋决定了，但那将决定你的朋友圈、职业机会、生活质量、甚至空气和食物。

我觉得如果你要做一个“四年起步”的决定，你至少应该花三个月到一年去认真思考。25%的“预思考时间”，是值得投入的。

克里斯：这让我想到“秘书定律”——你知道这个吗？

纳瓦尔：就是那个“先观察一定比例，再挑选最佳”的理论？

克里斯：对，就是那个。

纳瓦尔：这是计算机科学里一个很有意思的模型。设想你要雇一位秘书，打算合作十年，那你该花多长时间面试、多久内做决定？理论表明，你应该在前1/3的时间里观察和积累标准，然后选那个能达到你心理预期的人。

这个理论不仅适用于招聘，还适用于择偶、找工作、选职业方向等等一切生活决策。

有意思的是，它其实不是以“时间”为维度，而是以“尝试的次数”为维度的。

克里斯：对，是基于你尝试过多少次、面对过多少候选对象。

纳瓦尔：所以你真正要做的，就是大量迭代。

克里斯：而这也意味着——你必须学会快速放弃、果断出击。

纳瓦尔：完全正确。你要敢于抓住机会，也要敢于快速抽身。

克里斯：很多失败的关系，如果回头看，人们最大的遗憾往往不是开始得太快，而是拖得太久。

纳瓦尔：没错。你早就知道这段关系不合适，但却没能及时离开。你真正该做的，是在察觉的那一刻就放手。

Iterations vs. Repetitions

So in that sense, I think Malcolm Gladwell popularized this idea of ten thousand hours to mastery. I would say it’s actually ten thousand iterations to mastery.

It’s not actually ten thousand, it’s some unknown number, but it’s about the number of iterations that drive the learning curve, and iteration is not repetition. Repetition is a different thing. Repeating is doing the same thing over and over. Iteration is modifying it with learning and then doing another version of it. So that’s error correction. So if you get ten thousand error corrections in anything, you will be an expert at it.

迭代 vs. 重复：通往精通的路径

纳瓦尔：马尔科姆·格拉德威尔曾提出“一万个小时定律”，说你要掌握一项技能，需要投入一万个小时。但我更愿意说，真正通向精通的，是一万次“迭代”，不是一万小时。

它的核心不在于时间，而在于你经历了多少次反馈修正。迭代和重复是两回事：重复是机械地做同一件事，而迭代是你每做一次，就从中吸取经验、调整方式、做出一个新版本——这就是纠错机制。如果你在某个领域完成了一万次高质量的“错误修正”，你自然就会成为这个领域的专家。

Overcoming Cynicism and Pessimism

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Don’t partner with cynics and pessimists. You mentioned there about the people who’ve got a nightmare going on at home and are trying to fix the world, but a lot of the time that cynicism and pessimism we find in ourselves. We see the world whether it’s because we’ve imbibed what the news or the negative people around us have said, or it’s a bit more endogenous than that. It’s just sort of in us. It’s the way that we see the world. How can people avoid cynicism and pessimism within themselves?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Cynicism and pessimism is a tough one. We’re naturally hardwired for it. Again, I go back to evolution, I’m sorry to keep harping on evolution, but within biology there’s very few good explanatory theories and theory of evolution by natural selection is probably the best one. So if you can’t explain something about life or psychology or human nature through evolution, then you probably don’t have a good theory for it.

I would say that pessimism is another one that comes out of this, which is in the natural environment, you’re hardwired to be pessimistic because let’s say that I see something rustling in the woods. If I move towards it and it turns out to be food and prey, then good, I get to eat one meal. But if it turns out to be a predator, I get eaten, and that’s the end of that. So we are hardwired to avoid ruin and just dying, so we are naturally hardwired to be pessimists.

But modern society is very different. Despite whatever problems you may have with modern society, it is far far safer than living in the jungle and just trying to survive, and the opportunities and the upside are non-linear.

For example, when you’re investing, if you short a stock, the most money you can make is 2x – if the stock goes to zero, you double your money. But if the stock is the next Nvidia and it goes 100x or 1000x, you make a lot of money. So upside through leverage is nearly unlimited.

Also in modern society because there’s so many different people you can interact with, if you go on a date and it fails, there are infinite more people to go on a date with. In a tribal system there might have been twenty people and you can’t even get through all of them. So modern society is far more forgiving of failure and you just have to neocortically realize and override that. You have to realize that you’re much more running a search function to find the thing that’ll work and then that one thing will pay off in massive compounding.

Once you find your mate for the rest of your life, you find your wife or your husband, then you can compound in that relationship. It’s okay if you had fifty failed dates in between. The same way once you find the one business you’re meant to plow into and it’ll compound returns, it’s okay if you had fifty small failed ventures or fifty small failed job interviews. The number of failures doesn’t matter, and so there’s no point in being a pessimist.

I would say you want to be skeptical about specific things. Every specific opportunity is probably a fail, but you want to be optimistic in the general.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How do you navigate that tension?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I mean exactly as I said, I’m optimistic in the general that if something fails right now, then this is a little woo-woo, but it wasn’t meant to be, it was a learning experience, it was an iteration. As long as I learned something from it then it’s a win. If I didn’t learn from it then it’s a loss, but as long as you’re learning and you keep iterating fast and cutting your losses quickly, then when you find the right thing, you have to be optimistic and compound into it.

So you don’t want to jump into the first thing, you don’t want to marry the first person you date necessarily unless you got very lucky, but you want to investigate and explore very, very quickly until you find the match, and then you have to be willing to go all in. You have to be willing to move your chips to the center of the table, so both those approaches are required.

如何超越内心的愤世嫉俗与悲观主义

克里斯：你曾说过“别和愤世嫉俗者或悲观主义者合作”。但其实我们每个人心中都有那么一点愤世嫉俗。它可能来自负面新闻、身边人的情绪污染，甚至是内在的气质。那我们要如何不被这些负面心态吞没呢？

纳瓦尔：愤世嫉俗和悲观确实难以摆脱。我们本能地倾向于它。还是要回到进化论——我知道我老是提这个，但进化论确实是我们理解人性和心理机制最有解释力的模型。

在自然环境中，悲观是一种生存优势。比如你听到树林里有动静，如果你选择走过去，结果可能是猎物，你就能吃上一顿。但如果是掠食者，那你就完蛋了。所以我们被大自然“硬编码”为宁愿错过机会，也不要被吃掉。

但现代社会不是丛林。无论它有哪些问题，它的风险远低于原始时代，而它的上升机会却是非线性的。

比如在投资中，做空一只股票最多赚2倍，因为它跌到0就到底了。但如果你投资对了像Nvidia这样的企业，可能是100倍甚至1000倍的回报——上涨的空间几乎是无限的。

在现代社会，如果你一次约会失败，还有无数个可能的对象；而在原始部落里，可能整个村子只有20个异性。现代生活容错率更高，你的每一次失败只是搜索函数中的一次尝试。

所以你得学会用大脑的理性层来覆盖那些进化来的原始本能。你要明白：只要你不断尝试，不断学习，最终找到的那个“对的东西”会带来指数级回报。无论是找到对的人、对的事业、对的合作对象，一旦遇到对的，就可以开始复利累积。

所以你失败了50次？无所谓。你只是还没找到那一次就值得你“梭哈”的机会。

克里斯：那你如何处理“谨慎”和“乐观”之间的张力？

纳瓦尔：就像我刚才说的，我对“整体”保持乐观，对“具体”保持审慎。如果某个项目失败了，那它“不是注定的”，它是一次学习，是一次迭代。只要我从中学到了东西，那就是一次胜利；只有当我没学到东西，那才算是失败。

所以要快速学习，快速试错，快速止损——但一旦找到那个“对的”，你必须敢于ALL IN，全力投入。

你当然不能遇到第一个人就结婚，除非你运气爆棚。但你应该非常快速地探索、试错，一旦确认匹配，就要果断下场，把筹码全推到桌面中间。这就是人生的游戏节奏：快试错，慢下注。

两种能力都必不可少。

Beyond Labels and Identity

It’s a barbell strategy, it’s sort of black or white, and most people are sort of stuck in this gray bit, like “I’m half in, but I kind of don’t really know if I am.”

Also think like labels like pessimists, optimists, cynic, introvert, extrovert – these are very self-limiting. Humans are very dynamic. There are times when you feel like being introverted, there are times when you feel like being extroverted, there are contexts in which you’ll be pessimistic, are contexts in which you’ll be optimistic.

Leave all those labels alone. It’s better just to look at the problem at hand, look at reality the way it is, try to take yourself out of the equation in a sense. Like obviously you’re involved, but motivated reasoning is the worst kind of reasoning. You’re not going to find truth through highly motivated reasoning. You have to be objective, and objective means trying to take yourself out of it as much as possible or at least your personality out of it as much as possible.

To the extent you run with this thick identity and personality, it’s going to cloud your judgment, it’s going to try and lock you into the past. If you say “I’m a depressed person,” yeah, you’re going to be unhappy. That’s a way of locking yourself into your past. Even saying “I have trauma, I have PTSD” – yeah, you feel something, there are memories, there are flashes, there are occasional bad feelings, but don’t define yourself by it because then you’ll lock it into your identity and just going to loop on it.

It’s better to stay flexible because reality is always changing and you have to be able to adapt to it. Adaptation is also intelligence, adaptation is survival. Adaptation is kind of how you’re here. You’re here because you’re an adapter and your ancestors were adapters. So to adapt, you’ll see things clearly, and if you’re seeing them through your own identity, it’s going to cloud your judgment.

超越标签与身份认同

这是一种“杠铃式策略”——要么黑，要么白。大多数人则卡在中间的灰色地带，像是“我算是这样吧，但其实我自己也搞不太清楚”。

再看看那些标签，比如悲观主义者、乐观主义者、愤世嫉俗者、内向、外向——这些标签其实都很局限。人类是流动而多变的。有时你会倾向内向，有时又会表现得很外向；有些场合你悲观，有些场合你乐观，这都正常。

别再执着于贴标签了。真正重要的是直面问题本身，真实地看待当下的局势，尽可能把“自我”从判断中剥离。虽然你当然身在其中，但所谓“动机导向型思维”是最糟糕的思维方式。你无法通过强烈的自我投射去抵达真相。客观意味着尽量把你的性格、情绪甚至自我意识从分析中移除。

如果你过度依赖“厚重”的身份认同与性格设定，它只会模糊你的判断力，把你困在过去。如果你告诉自己“我是个抑郁的人”，那你自然会陷在不快乐里，因为你已经把过去封存在了自己的身份里。就连说“我有创伤，我有PTSD”也是如此——你确实有感觉，有回忆，有不好的情绪，但别让这些变成你的“定义”，否则你只会不断在这个标签中兜圈子。

灵活一点更好。现实是不断变化的，而你要有能力跟上它的节奏。适应不仅是一种智慧，更是一种生存能力。你之所以能活到今天，是因为你是个适应者，你的祖先也是。要想适应，就必须看清现实，而不是透过“我是谁”这层有色眼镜去看。

Defining Happiness

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Moving on to sort of thinking about happiness, obviously, a topic of yours. It’s honestly the one that I feel least qualified to talk about. Is it like a guy that’s got long arms teaching you how to bench press, or a dude that’s really tall teaching you how to dead lift, someone that feels like they came from behind the eight ball?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, it’s you’re asking a crazy person about their thoughts, so I just thought it through.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is happiness still more about peace than it is about joy?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: It’s just one of those overloaded words that means different things to different people, so I’m not even sure we’re communicating the same language. But what is happiness? I think it’s just basically being okay with where you are. Not wanting.

关于幸福的定义

克里斯：接下来聊聊幸福，这也是你的常谈话题之一。但说实话，这是我最没资格讨论的话题。有点像一个手臂很长的人教你怎么卧推，一个很高的人教你怎么硬拉——听起来像是一个本来就不占优势的人却来讲怎么逆袭。

纳瓦尔：是啊，就像你去问一个疯子他对生活的看法——我只能尽量理性地思考这个问题。

克里斯：你现在仍然觉得“幸福更多是和平而非快乐”吗？

纳瓦尔：幸福这个词被用滥了，每个人对它的理解都不一样，搞不好我们根本没在讲同一个概念。但对我来说，幸福就是——对你现在的状态感到“可以了”，就是“没有非得要改变点什么”的那种安稳感。

The Nature of Happiness

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Not wanting things to be different than the way they are. Not having the sense that anything is missing in this moment. Needing something to change your current positive situation being contingent on an adjustment. I’m getting something from the outside world. Ironically, I think most people, if you were to ask them when they were happiest for a sustained period of time, not for a brief moment, because pleasure can override happiness and create kind of this illusion of happiness.

But if you ask people when they were happy for a sustained period of time, they were probably doing some variation of nothing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s interesting, because in the chase is this sort of lack, this contingency, but then you get bored. If you just sit around all the time, you get bored, so you want adventure, you want surprise, like there’s the funny thought experiment of the bliss machine, which is suppose I could drill a hole in your head and put electrode in, and they did this with monkeys, and I can put a wire in there, and I can stimulate just the right part of your brain, and I can put you in bliss, and you would just be in bliss, would you would you want that?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Might be nice. For how long?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Do it and I’ll tell you.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Right. So most people will say, well I don’t want that, I want meaning, I don’t want just bliss, want meaning, and you’re like, okay, well I’ll put an electrode in there and I’ll give you meaning, how about that? And if you kind of run this thought experiment long enough, I think most people realize, actually, what I want is I want surprise. I want the world to surprise me, and I want to wrestle with it in ways that are somewhat predictable but somewhat not, and you kind of end up back where you started.

So, I don’t know if necessarily, for some people, pure happiness is the ultimate goal. They want to, you know, just be blissfully happy wherever they are, whenever they are, but I think other people, most people would say, well I’m here in this world, I’m here in this life, I don’t understand it or why, but I want to be engaged, I want to be surprised, I want to do things, I want to accomplish things, I want to want things and then get them. Right? That’s kind of the whole game that we’re all playing here.

幸福的本质

纳瓦尔：就是不再想着“如果能怎么样就好了”。不再觉得此刻还缺了点什么。不再把“我此刻的感受”建立在“必须有所改变”之上。不再等着外部世界来给予什么。

讽刺的是，如果你去问一个人“你人生中最幸福的一段时间是什么时候”，他回忆起来的通常不会是短暂的高潮片刻——因为那些可能只是快感掩盖下的假象。而是他会说出某段时间，那个时期他大概什么也没在追，什么也没太想做，就是“没事发生”——那才是持续的幸福。

克里斯：这很有意思。因为“追逐”本身意味着一种匮乏感，一种前提条件。但如果你真的一直什么都不做，也会感到无聊。这时你就会渴望冒险，渴望惊喜。比如那个经典的思想实验：如果我能在你脑袋上钻个洞，放根电极进去——科学家真的在猴子身上做过——只要刺激大脑某个部位，就能让你感到极度的幸福。你愿意一直活在这种“极乐机器”里吗？

纳瓦尔：听起来不错。但你能撑多久？

克里斯：你试试就知道了。

纳瓦尔：对。大多数人最终会说，“我不要那种虚假的幸福，我要的是‘意义’。”好啊，那我就在你脑袋里插另一根电极，给你“意义感”，可以了吗？

如果你不断推进这个思想实验，你会发现多数人最终的回答其实是：“我想要的是惊喜。我想让这个世界偶尔带给我一点不可预测的东西，我想跟它搏斗，有时候可以预判，有时候又出乎意料。”结果绕了一圈，又回到了原点。

所以我不确定，对所有人来说，“纯粹的幸福”是不是真正的终极目标。有些人是想永远活在幸福中，不受干扰。但更多的人会说：“我来到了这个世界，我还不太明白它的意义，但我想参与其中。我想被它惊艳，我想做点什么，实现点什么。我想拥有‘想要’，也想体验‘得到’。”——这就是我们每个人都在玩的那场游戏。

The Value of Surprise

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Surprise is a really interesting, the sort of unpredictability, I think total bro science here, but I’m pretty sure that that’s kind of how dopamine works, that things are a bit better than you expected. That within that it means that if you for the perennial insecure overachievers that cloy for control, that really want to be able to the schedule is perfectly done and we know the itinerary, we know where we’re going to be at this time, you’re, in some ways, I guess, reducing down the capacity for surprise because everything has become very contrived, prescribed, done in advance, laid out.

Your ability to be surprised actually diminishes.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, if nothing worked out the way you expected, if it was all serendipity and you didn’t want that, you would just be a ball of anxiety. On the other hand, if everything worked out as you expected and wanted, you’d be so bored you might as well be dead. So there’s some, you know, the river of life kind of flows between these two banks and enjoy it.

惊喜的价值

克里斯：惊喜真的很有趣，那种“不可预测性”。我这是纯粹的“猛男科学”推论哈，但我觉得多巴胺大概就是这么运作的——事情比你预期的稍微好一点，这种落差就能让人兴奋。

可问题是，对于那些习惯控制一切、追求完美日程的“焦虑型高成就者”来说，他们倾向于把每件事都规划得井井有条——我们知道几点出发，知道几点在哪儿……这一切安排得越妥当，意外发生的空间就越少，也就越难有真正的惊喜。

你体验“被惊喜”的能力，其实是在不断被削弱的。

纳瓦尔：是啊，如果你的人生完全偏离预期、全靠运气，那你可能会焦虑到崩溃；但反过来，如果一切都如你所愿，分毫不差，那你很快也会无聊得像死了一样。所以说，人生这条河，其实就流淌在这两岸之间——既不是完全混乱，也不是彻底可控。你得学着在其中享受它。

Self-Reflection and Unhappiness

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You say thinking about yourself is the source of all unhappiness, but presumably you need to work on yourself and your weaknesses as well. So some degree of reflection is important, and if thinking about yourself as a source of unhappiness, is this a price that you need to pay? I need to sort of reflect inward. I’m going to have to diminish this level of happiness for a little while, and then I can use this new level, I’ve got my brown belt on and I can go out into the world as a brown belt.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: What I’m specifically referring to that is, if you’re thinking about your personality and your ego and the character of you, and you’re obsessing over that, that’s where a lot of depression and unhappiness sort of lingers and gets cultivated. So thinking about woe is me, this happened to me, that happened to me, I have this personality, I have this issue, I deserve this, I didn’t get that, that’s you’re just strengthening a little beast in there that is insatiable, and that’s where I think a lot of unhappiness comes from.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s the beast?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: It’s the ego, but that word is so overused that I kind of hate to use the word, but it’s like a recurring collection of thoughts that are very self obsessed and will never be satisfied, and very concretized as well, so they’re not malleable, not particularly flexible. But you’re just adding to them by thinking about them all the time, you’re creating narratives and stories and identities, but that’s different from solving personal problems.

So if you encounter something, you learn from something, you’re reflecting upon the learning, then you can reflect upon it, absorb it and then just move on, but sitting there saying I’m Chris, I’m Naval, I deserve this, this happened to me, that person wronged me, this is who I am, this shouldn’t have happened, I need to go get revenge on this, I need to fix that or change this, I mean that I think is where a lot of mental illness is from.

So it depends if you are thinking about something to solve a problem and get it off your chest, and get it off your mind. If it leaves your mind clearer at the end of it, then I think it was worthwhile. If it leaves your mind busier at the end of it, then you’re probably going in wrong.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is this a justification for detachment, cultivated ignorance, distraction?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Detachment is not a goal, detachment is a byproduct. It’s just a byproduct of just realizing, you know, what matters and what doesn’t, and just for one moment on the self thing, I think everybody craves thinking about something more than themselves.

If you want to be happy to some extent, you have to forget about your personal problems, and one way to do that is take on other problems, bigger problems, and that could be a mission, that could be spirituality, that could be kids, it could be caring about the planet, although I think people take that a little far, and then they get kind of oppressive and tyrannical and supportive abstract concepts, but so these can be taken too far, just like religion, for example, just like anything in excess.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, anything in excess, right?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: But generally, the less you think about yourself, the more you can think about a mission, or about God, or about a child, or something like that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So, I remember Vinny Himath, the founder of Loom, said, I am rich, and I have no idea to do what to do with my life, and you replied, God, kids, on mission, pick at least one.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: That’s right. Preferably all three. It’s very liberating.

自我反思与不幸福

克里斯：你曾说过，“思考自己是所有不幸福的根源”。但人总得去提升自己、修正弱点吧？这就意味着某种程度上的自我反思是必要的。那是不是说，为了进步，我们得“容忍”一定程度的不幸福？就像你修炼武功，暂时受点苦，练到“棕带”之后，就能以一个更成熟的状态重新出发？

纳瓦尔：我说的“思考自己”，特指那种对性格、身份、过往的执念。比如你反复咀嚼“我太惨了，我经历过这些，我是这种性格，我有这个缺陷，我应得那个但没得到……”这些念头就像是在喂养内心一个永远填不满的小怪兽。我觉得，这就是很多不幸福情绪滋生的土壤。

克里斯：那个“小怪兽”是什么？

纳瓦尔：说白了就是“自我”，虽然这个词被用滥了我也不太想用，但你可以理解成一个反复出现的、以自我为中心的思维集合，它固执、不灵活、永远不满足。而你每次陷进去想它的时候，其实都是在不断加固它，制造新的故事、标签、身份认同。但这跟“解决问题”是两回事。

如果你是在面对一个问题，通过反思从中学习，然后消化吸收，再向前走，那当然没问题。但如果你只是坐在那里反复告诉自己：“我是克里斯”“我是纳瓦尔”“我应该得到这个”“我被谁伤害过”“我就是这样的人”“这不该发生在我身上”——那就很容易陷入精神内耗。很多心理问题，其实就是这么来的。

所以重点是：你反思的目的是为了清理内心、放下某些负担，还是反而让脑子更乱、更沉重？如果结果是清明的，那就是有价值的反思；但如果让你更混乱，那可能方向错了。

克里斯：那这样说来，这是不是在为“抽离”“有意无视”或者“用娱乐来逃避现实”找理由？

纳瓦尔：抽离不是目的，而是一种副产品。当你真正看清了什么重要、什么不重要，自然就会从很多执念中脱身。

关于“自我”的话我再说一句——其实每个人都渴望有点什么可以思考，而不是老是绕着自己转。

如果你真想更快乐一点，你就得停止围着自己的烦恼打转。你可以去关注更大的事情：一个使命、一种信仰、孩子、地球、社区……虽然这些也可能被过度神化、甚至走向极端，但它们的确能把你从自我中抽离出来。

克里斯：就像任何东西用力过猛都会出问题，对吧？

纳瓦尔：对，任何事一旦“用力过猛”都可能变味。

但总体来说，当你越少想着“我我我”，越多地去思考使命、信仰、孩子、世界——你反而会变得更自由。

克里斯：我记得 Loom 的创始人 Vinny Himath 说过：“我已经很富有了，但我完全不知道自己的人生该干什么。”你当时回复他：“信仰、孩子、使命——至少选一个。”

纳瓦尔：是啊，最好三个都有，那才是真的自由。

Overthinking and Depression

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I think overthinking about yourself is probably the—it may not be the cause of depression, but it certainly doesn’t help.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Rumination.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah. I kind of had a self induced Stockholm Syndrome from this sort of a thing, because I like to think about stuff, and you provide yourself with an endless number of things to think about.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So you’re kind of the prisoner and the prison guard at the same time.

And I had Abigail Schrier on the show, she wrote this book called Bad Therapy, sort of pushing back against therapy culture for kids, specifically for kids, but there was a blast radius that covered pretty much everything, including kind of CBT, and I’m like, we’re getting perilously close to some really evidence based stuff here, but the more that I’ve thought about it, and the more that I’ve looked at the evidence, there is like basically a direct correlation between how much you think about yourself and how miserable you are.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Therapy is great if it lets you vent and it solves the thing, and then a session later you’re done, you’re clear. But if you’re just looping on the same thing forever, then it’s actually the opposite. You’re bathing in it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re indulging in it. Yeah. How have your “become happy” techniques developed over time?

过度思考与抑郁

纳瓦尔：我觉得，“过度思考自己”可能不一定是抑郁的根源，但它一定会让情况更糟。

克里斯：就是那种反复咀嚼、沉溺其中的思维模式。

纳瓦尔：对。我曾经也有点“自我制造的斯德哥尔摩综合征”——因为我太喜欢思考了，就会不断地给自己制造可以思考的东西。

克里斯：你成了自己的囚犯，同时也是自己的狱警。

我之前请过 Abigail Shrier 来做节目，她写了一本书叫《Bad Therapy》（坏疗法），批评如今“治疗文化”对孩子的泛滥影响——虽然主要针对青少年，但其实也波及了整个心理治疗生态，比如认知行为疗法（CBT）也在波及范围内。

起初我觉得她已经快挑战一些很有科学依据的东西了，但我越研究，越发现有个非常明显的规律：一个人越常“想自己”，他的痛苦感通常也越强。

纳瓦尔：如果你接受心理治疗，是为了把心里的事情倾诉出来、解决问题，然后下次见面你已经清爽多了，那当然很好。但如果你只是反复围绕同一个问题打转，那它就起反作用了——你只是在那个情绪里反复浸泡。

克里斯：变成了一种“沉溺”。

纳瓦尔：是的。那不是疗愈，而是一种“自我沉迷”。

克里斯：那你后来是怎么一步步找到“幸福”的？

Happiness Without Techniques

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah. I used to have a lot of them. Now I kind of try not to have any because I think the techniques themselves are kind of a struggle. It’s sort of like bidding for status implies you’re low status, it reveals that you’re low status, so someone who’s basically trying to show off, comes across as low status, the same way someone who’s trying to be happy is sort of saying I’m unhappy and creating that frame, so it’s better just to not even think in terms of happiness.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Position yourself as being in lack in order to attain.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah. I don’t even think in terms of happiness, unhappiness anymore. I just kind of just do my thing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Again, another question that’s similar to a bunch of them. Do you think you could have got there had you have not done the procedural systematic sort of step by step by step, this is what it is, and then come out the other side?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I don’t think there are any formulas, I think it’s unique to each person. It’s like asking a successful person, how did you become successful? Each one of them will give you a different story, you can’t follow anyone else’s path, and most of them are even probably telling you some narratized version of it that isn’t quite true.

I mean, that’s something that I continually realize, especially as I get to spend more time around people that are successful, and you hear it’s very important to prioritize work life balance, right? That’s one of the most common things that people who have attained success say.

没有技巧的幸福

纳瓦尔：说实话，我以前有一大堆方法。但现在，我反而尽量不去用任何“技巧”，因为这些技巧本身就会让你陷入“努力追求”的状态。

就好像：一个人如果非要证明自己有地位，那其实说明他没有地位；同理，一个人如果总是在努力“表现得幸福”，那其实是在默认“我并不幸福”——这反而制造了一种匮乏感。所以我现在宁愿不再用“幸福”这个词框住自己。

克里斯：你在“追求”的那一刻，其实已经站在了“我还不够”的立场上。

纳瓦尔：对。我现在已经不太从“幸福”或“不幸福”的角度去看自己了。我就是做自己该做的事，仅此而已。

克里斯：但你觉得，如果没有当初那些“系统化”的自我训练与反思，你还能走到今天这种状态吗？

纳瓦尔：我不认为有什么标准化流程，每个人都有自己的路径。这就像你问一个成功的人：“你是怎么成功的？”每个人都会给出一个不同的版本，而大多数说出来的故事，本身可能就是被润色过、叙事化的。

我越是接触到更多成功人士，越发现这一点。而且很讽刺的是，你听得最多的一句话是：“工作与生活要平衡”——可现实是，他们很多人在奋斗阶段，根本没有“平衡”可言。

The Path to Success

NAVAL RAVIKANT: That’s not my experience. If you look at—you shouldn’t be asking somebody who is successful what they do to continue their success now. You should be asking them what did they do to attain their success when they are where you were.

And the people who are really extraordinarily successful didn’t sit around watching success porn. They just went and did it. They just had, they had such an overwhelming desire to be successful at the thing that they were doing that they just went and did that thing, they didn’t have time to study and learn and listen, and they just did it. It’s the overwhelming desire that’s the most important, and the focus that comes from that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s a tweet of yours that was, people who are good at making wealth, or people who are good at attaining wealth don’t need to teach anybody else how to do it.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, you don’t need mentors, you need action, that was one of them. Another one is, you know, the people who actually know how to make money don’t need to sell you a course on it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There it is. Yeah, there’s lots of variations on it, but if you don’t, another one, if you don’t lie awake at night thinking about it, you don’t want it badly enough.

通往成功的路径

纳瓦尔：我的真实经验是——你不应该问一个已经成功的人“现在你是怎么做的”，而应该问：“你在还没成功、跟我一样的时候，是怎么做的？”

真正取得非凡成就的人，根本不会天天坐着刷“成功学鸡汤”。他们就只是去做了。他们有一种压倒性的渴望，想要在某件事上成功，于是他们全力以赴地去做了。他们没有时间研究各种方法论，没有时间听课、学套路——他们只是在做自己非做不可的那件事。

最关键的是这种“全神贯注的渴望”，以及随之而来的聚焦力。

克里斯：你曾发过一条推文：“那些真正懂得如何致富的人，不会去教别人怎么致富。”

纳瓦尔：是啊。“你不需要导师，你需要的是行动”——我发过这句话。还有一句是：“真正会赚钱的人，不需要靠卖课程来赚钱。”

克里斯：对，还有那句：“如果你不会在深夜辗转反侧地想着这件事，那你就还不够渴望。”

纳瓦尔：就是这样。

Sleep and Priorities

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, I think you’ve, I’ve heard you talk before about how sort of unclosed loops problems that you’re working on can cause you to be sleepless, and this—I’m not a good sleeper.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Tell me about that.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Oh, I mean, my eight sleep hates me. It’s always hard to me. I failed at sleeping again. Brian Johnson thinks I’m going to die early. He’s probably right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How much do you reckon you sleep at night? Do have any idea?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Oh, it’s so random. Some nights I’ll sleep eight hours, some nights I’ll sleep four hours, but it’s literally just random.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Are you bothered about that? Are you trying to optimize? Are a sleep coach teaching you how to—

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I don’t flog myself over things. If I want to sleep, I’ll sleep. If I don’t want to sleep, don’t sleep. It’s not a—I don’t think I’m doing anything right or wrong.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You don’t label it good night, bad night?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: No. I work out every day because I think it gives me more energy and I’ve gotten into a good habit with it. Maybe I’ll do the same thing with sleep, maybe I’ll develop a good habit, but I’m not going to beat myself up over it. There’ll come a point where it’s important to me and when it’s important to me, I’ll just do it.

You know, most of, like for example, you look at people with addictions, right, overeating or smoking or whatever, they can kind of go through all the different methods, but it’s half hearted, and then one day they’re like, oh shit, I’ve got lung cancer, my dad has lung cancer, they drop it immediately. So I think a lot of change is more about desire and understanding than it is about forcing yourself or trying to domesticate yourself.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s efficiency again, I guess, you know, aligning the thing that you want to do with the way that you feel about what it is that you want to do.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, it’s not getting caught up in a half desire or mimetic desire, it’s really just being aware of what it is that you actually want at this point in time, and when you want something, then you will act on it with maximal capability.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Mhmm. Mhmm.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: And that’s the time to act on it. In the meantime, just doing it because other people tell you you should do it or society tells you you should do it or you feel slightly guilty about it, these are half hearted efforts, and half hearted efforts don’t get you there.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: As you get older, one thing that becomes harder to ignore is your testosterone levels.

睡眠与真正的优先级

纳瓦尔：我记得你以前说过，“那些还没解决的问题和未完成的循环”，会让你晚上睡不着——我自己就是个睡眠很差的人。

克里斯：说说看。

纳瓦尔：我连我的智能床垫 Eight Sleep 都讨厌我，它天天提醒我“你又没睡好”。我已经对睡眠放弃挣扎了。Brian Johnson 还说我这样会早死，可能他是对的。

克里斯：你平均每晚睡多少？心里有没有个大概数？

纳瓦尔：完全随机。有时候能睡八小时，有时候只有四小时，真的是随缘。

克里斯：你会为这个烦恼吗？有没有想找睡眠教练之类的来“优化”？

纳瓦尔：我不会因为这个自责。如果我想睡，我就睡；不想睡，我就醒着。我不觉得这有什么“对”或“错”。

克里斯：你不会把某晚标记成“好睡”或“糟糕”？

纳瓦尔：不会。我每天锻炼，因为这让我精力更好，也成了习惯。或许以后我也会把睡眠训练成一个好习惯，但我不会为此苛责自己。等哪天这件事对我真的重要了，我自然会好好对待它。

你看那些有瘾的人，比如暴饮暴食或抽烟，他们可能试过各种方法，但大多数时候只是敷衍；直到某天，比如发现自己或家人生了癌，他们才会立刻戒掉。所以我认为，改变更多来自“真正的渴望与理解”，而不是“强迫自己改变”或“自我驯服”。

克里斯：这又是“效率原则”了吧？让你“真正想做的事”和你“对这件事的感受”一致起来。

纳瓦尔：对。关键不是那种“半心半意”或者“模仿来的欲望”（mimetic desire），而是你真正意识到，此时此刻你到底想要什么。当你真的想要某件事时，你自然会拿出最大能力去做它。

克里斯：嗯哼，完全同意。

纳瓦尔：所以行动的时机就是你真的想做的时候。至于那些“别人说你该做”“社会告诉你该做”“你有点内疚所以试着做”的行为，大多是软弱的努力，而软弱的努力，注定无法带你走得太远。

克里斯：年纪一大，最难忽视的，还有一个东西叫——睾酮水平。

Dealing with Anxiety and Stress

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You mentioned anxiety before. “Imagine how effective you’d be if you weren’t anxious all the time” is one of yours, and anxiety is the emotion du jour of the twenty-first century. Lots of driven people are very anxious, very paranoid – that’s what’s caused them to be effective. It pays to be so attentive, detail-oriented, not letting things go, staying up at night thinking about it. That’s the paranoia coming in. What have you come to learn about anxiety and dealing with it?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Anxiety and stress are interesting – they’re very related. Stress is when your mind is being pulled in two different directions at the same time. If you look at an iron beam, when it’s under stress, it’s because it’s being bent in two different directions. When your mind is under stress, it’s because it has two conflicting desires at once.

For example, you want to be liked but you also want to do something selfish, and you can’t reconcile the two, so you’re under stress. You want to do something for somebody else, but you want to do something for yourself. You don’t want to go to work but you want to make money – so you’re under stress.

One of the ways to get through stress is to acknowledge that you actually have two conflicting desires and either resolve it, pick one and be okay losing the other, or decide later. But at least just being aware of why you’re stressed can help alleviate a lot of stress.

Anxiety, I think, is sort of this pervasive unidentifiable stress where you’re just stressed out all the time and you’re not even sure why. You can’t even identify the underlying problem. The reason for that is because you have so many unresolved problems, unresolved stress points that have piled up in your life that you can no longer identify what the problems are. There’s this mountain of garbage in your mind with a little bit of it poking out the top like an iceberg – that’s anxiety. But underneath there’s a lot of unresolved things.

You need to go through very carefully every time you’re anxious and ask, “Why am I anxious this time?” If you don’t know why, sit and think about it. Write down what the possible causes could be. Meditate on it. Journal. Talk to a therapist. Talk to friends. See when that stress goes away. If you can identify, unravel, and resolve these issues, then I think that helps get rid of anxiety.

A lot of anxiety is piled up because we move through life too quickly, not observing our own reactions to things. We don’t resolve them. This goes counter to what I was saying earlier about not reflecting too much on things, but you reflect on the problems to observe them and solve them. You don’t reflect on them to feel better about yourself.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: To indulge them.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Well, if you’re doing it just to feel better about yourself, that could be strengthening your personality and your ego, and could be creating a more fragile personality.

One big anxiety resolver for me is ruminating on death. I think that’s a good one. You’re going to die. It’s all going to zero. You cannot take anything with you. I know this is trite, and I know we don’t spend enough time thinking about the big questions – we kind of give up on them when we’re very young.

A little child might ask the big questions like “Why are we here?”, “What’s the meaning of life?”, “What is this all about?”, “Is there Santa Claus?”, “Is there God?” But then as adults, we’re taught not to think about these things. We’ve given up on them. But I think the big questions are the big questions for good reasons, and if you can keep the idea in front of you at all times that you’re going to die and that everything goes literally to zero, what’s the distress about?

应对焦虑与压力

克里斯：你刚才提到了焦虑。你说过一句话我印象很深——“想象一下，如果你不是总是焦虑，会有多高效。”焦虑几乎成了二十一世纪的标志性情绪。很多有事业心的人都非常焦虑、充满警觉——正是这种状态让他们如此高效。他们特别专注、注重细节、绝不轻易放手，甚至会因为某件事彻夜难眠。这其实就是偏执的一种体现。你对焦虑和应对它，有什么新的认识？

纳瓦尔：焦虑和压力确实很有意思，它们之间密切相关。所谓“压力”，其实就是你的心思被同时拉向两个不同方向。就像一根钢梁，当它承受压力时，就是因为两股力量从不同方向同时作用在它身上。人的内心亦然，当你有两个彼此冲突的愿望时，就会产生压力。

比如，你既想讨人喜欢，又想做一件自私的事，但这两个愿望无法调和，于是你就处于压力之中；你一方面想帮别人，另一方面又想为自己做点什么；你不想上班，但又想挣钱——这都是压力的来源。

减轻压力的一个方法是，先承认你内心的确存在两个相冲突的欲望，然后做出选择——要么坚定选一个，接受放弃另一个的代价；要么告诉自己晚点再决定。但哪怕只是意识到这份冲突的存在，就已经能缓解很多压力了。

而焦虑，则是一种更弥散的、模糊不清的压力感——你只是一直处于紧张不安之中，却说不出具体为什么。这是因为，你积压了太多未解决的问题和压力点，它们在你心里堆成了一座垃圾山。你看到的，只是那座“冰山”露出水面的一角，剩下的都藏在水下，这就是焦虑的本质：大量未被梳理的、潜藏的内在冲突。

应对焦虑最关键的一点，是每次感到焦虑时都要认真追问：“这次我为什么焦虑？”如果一时想不明白，就静下来想，写下来可能的原因，冥想、写日记、跟心理咨询师谈谈、或找朋友聊聊。观察哪些时刻焦虑减轻了，逐步梳理出真正的根源。一旦你开始识别、拆解并解决这些问题，焦虑就会慢慢减轻。

很多人的焦虑，其实是因为他们走得太快了，根本没有时间去观察自己的反应，更别说解决问题。虽然我曾说过别老沉溺于反思，但在面对具体问题时，反思是为了看清、解决，而不是为了“自我安慰”。

克里斯：不是为了沉溺其中。

纳瓦尔：对，如果你反思只是为了感觉好点，那反而是在不断强化你的自我形象、你的人格边界，久而久之反而会变得更脆弱。

对我而言，一个化解焦虑的强效方式，是去思考死亡。我知道这听起来老套，但这真的有用——你终将会死，一切最终都会归零。你什么都带不走。我们总是太少去思考这些“终极问题”了。小时候我们还会问：“我们为什么在这里？”、“生命的意义是什么？”、“这一切到底意味着什么？”、“真的有圣诞老人吗？”、“有神存在吗？”但长大之后我们就不再问了，好像早早就放弃了思考。

可我认为，这些问题之所以被称作“终极问题”，是因为它们的确重要。如果你能时刻记得：你终将归于虚无，那现在这点焦虑，又算得了什么呢？

The Brevity of Life

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: For better or worse, life is very short. How should people deal with its briefness?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Enjoy it. Make the best of it. You know, it’s even briefer than that. Each moment just disappears, it’s gone. There’s only a present moment, and it’s gone instantly.

So if you’re not there for it, if you’re stressed out, or you’re anxious, or you’re thinking about something else, you missed it. Any moment when you’re not in that moment, you are dead to that moment. You might as well be dead because your mind is off doing something else or living in some imagined reality that is just a very poor substitute for the actual reality.

One of my recent realizations was, what is wasted time? What is the waste of time? I don’t like to waste time, but what is wasted time? Everything is wasted time in a sense because nothing matters in the ultimate, but in each moment the thing matters. In each moment, what’s happening in front of you literally has all the meaning in the world, and so what matters is just being present for the thing.

If you’re doing something that you want to do and you’re fully there for it, there’s not wasted time. If you don’t want to do it and your mind is running away from it, and you’re reacting against it, and you’re wishing you were somewhere else, and you’re thinking about some other thing, or you’re anticipating some future thing or regretting some past thing or being fearful of something, then that’s wasted time.

That’s time that’s being wasted when you’re not actually present for the reality in front of you. So my definition of wasted time – yes, I do want some material things in life, and there are things that have more value than others within this life, but this life is very short and bounded. The true waste of time is time that you are not present for, when you are not there for it, when you are not doing the thing you want to do to the best of your capability such that you’re immersed in it.

If you’re not immersed in this moment, then you’re wasting your time.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: People get worried about dying and no longer being here, but they don’t realize that so much of their life is spent not being here in any case.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: That’s right. But I think people crave being here for it, and when you’re here for it, you’re actually not thinking about yourself. You are more immersed in the thing, the moment, the task at hand.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We don’t want peace of mind, we want peace from our mind.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: That’s right. The mind is what kills each you alive if you let it, and there’s more to you than the mind.

人生苦短

克里斯：不论好坏，人生的确非常短暂。人们该如何面对这份短暂？

纳瓦尔：享受它，尽可能地活好它。说实话，人生甚至比我们想象的还要短。每一个当下都会瞬间溜走，转瞬即逝。世界上真正存在的，只有“此时此刻”——可它又立刻消失了。

所以，如果你不在场，如果你在焦虑、在胡思乱想、心不在焉，那这一刻你就错过了。任何一个你不曾真正活在其中的时刻，对你来说就如同死亡。你虽然活着，但大脑早已游离于此，陷入某种想象的虚构现实，而那不过是现实的劣质替代品。

我最近才真正意识到一个问题——什么叫“浪费时间”？我一向不喜欢浪费时间，但它究竟意味着什么？从某种意义上说，所有时间都是“被浪费的”，因为从宇宙尺度来看，一切都无所谓；可是在每一个具体时刻，那一刻本身却意义非凡。重要的是：你有没有真正“在场”。

如果你正在做自己想做的事，并全心投入其中，那么这段时间就没有被浪费。但如果你并不想做这件事，你的心思早已逃离、不断抗拒、想着去别处、挂念着其他事、沉溺于对未来的期待或对过去的懊悔，又或者担忧着某些可能发生的事，那这才是真正的浪费。

当你没有活在当下，没有回应眼前的真实现实，这段时间就被浪费了。所以对我而言，浪费时间的定义是——你没有“在场”的时间；你没有全力以赴做自己想做之事、没有沉浸其中的时间。

如果你不能沉浸在此时此刻，那你就是在浪费时间。

克里斯：很多人害怕死亡，害怕“从这个世界消失”，但他们没意识到，其实他们大半人生都没有真正“在这个世界里”。

纳瓦尔：正是如此。我觉得人们本能地渴望“活在其中”，而当你真的做到了，你就不会再想着“自我”了。你会完全沉浸在当下的体验、当下的任务之中。

克里斯：我们并不是想要“内心的平静”，我们是想要“摆脱内心的喧嚣”。

纳瓦尔：说得太对了。正是大脑杀死了我们的鲜活感——如果你放任它为所欲为的话。而你，远远不止是那颗喋喋不休的脑袋。

Beyond the Mind

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How so?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Well, I mean, I don’t want to disassemble the body, so to speak, right, because…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Please go on.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: At the end of the day, everything arises within your consciousness. You’ve nowhere else to experience it.

That consciousness is relatively static in a sense that it’s been exactly the same from the moment you were born to the moment you die. Everything that you experience from your body, your mind to the world to everything is within that consciousness, and that thing, that base layer of being – and this is what the Buddhists will tell you – is the real thing.

Everything that comes and goes in the middle, including your mind, including your body is unreal, and trying to find stability in those transient things is your castle that you’re building on sand that’s going to crumble.

Life is going to play out the way it’s going to play out. There will be some good and some bad. Most of it is actually just up to your interpretation. You’re born, you have a set of sensory experiences, and then you die. How you choose to interpret those experiences is up to you, and different people interpret them in different ways.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s the old line about two people walking down the street, they’re having the exact same experience, one is happy, one is sad, right? It’s a narrative in their heads, it’s how they choose to interpret.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: So I think when I said that it was a long time ago, I was talking more about having positive interpretations and negative interpretations, but these days I think it’s better just not to have any interpretations. And to just allow things to be.

You’re still going to have interpretations. You can’t stop it, and nor should you try, but even that having an interpretation is just a thing you can leave alone.

超越大脑的存在

克里斯：怎么理解这点？

纳瓦尔：我是说——我不想把人拆解成“身体 vs 心灵”之类的结构，但你想啊：

到头来，一切体验都发生在你的“意识”里。你没有第二个地方可以感知这个世界。

这个意识其实是相对恒定的——你出生那一刻是什么样，它直到你死亡前都差不多。你的身体、思想、世界、经历，全都发生在那个“意识”之中。而这个最底层的“存在”，就是佛教里常说的“本体”。

从身体到念头，这些中间层都是暂时的、会来会去的。你若在这些东西上寻找稳定，就像在流沙上盖城堡，注定要塌。

人生会以它自己的方式展开。有好事，也有坏事。大多数经历，其实取决于你如何“解读”它们。你出生、体验了一系列感官输入，然后死去。你怎么理解这一切，全看你自己。不同的人，对同样的经历，会得出完全不同的感受。

克里斯：就像那句老话：两个人走在同一条街上，经历完全一样，一个快乐，一个悲伤——区别只在他们脑海里的叙述方式。

纳瓦尔：对。以前我还会建议人们用“正面解读”去替代“负面解读”，但现在我觉得——最好的方式是干脆不去解读。就让事情发生就好。

你当然还是会有解读，这是人类本能，你也不需要强迫自己完全摆脱。但就连这些“解释”，你也可以选择不搭理它们。只是让它们飘过，不回应，不附着。就像云飘过天空，你不需要每一朵都分析一遍。

Valuing Your Time

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I really want to try and just dig in a little more to the best way to remind people that they should value their time, just how brief it is – that the time that you spend ruminating, being distracted, fears of the past, regrets…

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I don’t want to tell anybody how to live their life. I would just say that to the extent that you want to improve your quality of life, the easiest and best way to do that is to observe your own mind and your own thoughts and be a little more observant of yourself objectively. Then you’ll kind of realize your own loops and patterns. It takes time, it’s not overnight, it’s not instantaneous.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So you mean letting go is not a one-time event?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, and letting go is not necessarily even the right answer. If you’re trying to be an enlightened being and you want to live like a god and everything’s going to be perfect and be a Buddha, sure you can let go, but I think in practice it’s actually quite hard to do.

I think you’re going to find a lot of fulfillment out of life by just doing what you want to do and genuinely exploring what it is that you want rather than doing what other people expect you to do or society expects you to do or what you might just think should be done by default. I think most older successful people will tell you that their life was best when they lived it unapologetically on their own terms.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Be selfish.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Holistic selfishness.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There you go. Exactly. We can clip that little…

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I’m telling you about…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s really selfish.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah. And then we just keep running about it. Bad guy. Great.

珍惜你的时间

克里斯：我特别想深入探讨一个问题——我们该如何提醒人们，时间有多宝贵、多短暂。那些花在胡思乱想、分心、悔恨、恐惧上的时间，实在太可惜了。

纳瓦尔：我不想告诉别人该怎么过人生。但如果你想提升生活质量，最简单也最有效的办法，就是开始观察自己的大脑和想法——以一种客观的方式看待自己。你会慢慢识别出自己的惯性回路、思维模式。当然，这个过程不会一蹴而就，需要时间。

克里斯：所以“放下”并不是一劳永逸的事？

纳瓦尔：对，而且“放下”也未必总是正确答案。如果你追求开悟、想活得像个神、一切完美，想当佛陀，那你可能得学会“放下”。但现实中，这种彻底放下其实很难。

我觉得你想真正活得有满足感，不如去探索你真正想做的事，而不是做别人期望你去做的，或者社会告诉你应该做的，或者你脑子里默认“好像就该这么做”的事。多数年长且成功的人都会告诉你：他们人生中最快乐的时光，是活得最“自成一派”、不向谁解释的时候。

克里斯：做一个“自私的人”。

纳瓦尔：是的，但要做那种“整体性的自私”（holistic selfishness）。

克里斯：对，就是这种感觉。我们可以把这一段剪成短视频了（笑）。

纳瓦尔（笑）：然后我们就一直聊这种“坏人哲学”。太棒了。

Trusting Your Gut vs. Your Head

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I had this insight, a question, I guess. How much do you think that we should trust the voice in our heads? Because half of wisdom suggests to rely on your sort of bottom-up intuition, and then half of it has to be sort of top-down rational as possible. How do you navigate the tension between head and gut in this way?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I think the gut is what decides, the head is kind of what rationalizes it afterwards. The gut is the ultimate decision maker, and what is the gut? The gut is refined judgment, it’s taste, aggregated. It could be aggregated through evolution, in your genes and your DNA, or it could be aggregated through your experiences and what you’ve thought through.

The mind is good at solving new problems, new problems in the external world that have defined edges – beginnings and ends and objectives. What the mind is actually really bad at is making hard decisions. So when you have a hard decision to make, I find it’s better to ruminate on it, think through all the pros and cons, but then you sleep on it, you wait a couple of days, you wait until the gut answer appears with conviction and it feels right.

When you’re younger, it takes longer because you just don’t have as much experience, and when you’re older, it can happen much faster, which is why old people are more set in their ways as a consequence. They know what they want, they know what they don’t want.

So it takes time to develop your gut instinct and judgment, but once you’ve developed them, don’t trust anything else because you can’t go against your gut – it’ll bite you in the end.

头脑 vs. 直觉：如何决策？

克里斯：我最近有个想法——我们到底该相信脑子里的那个声音多少？一方面智慧告诉我们要相信“直觉”，另一方面又说要尽量理性分析。你是怎么在“头脑”和“本能”之间找到平衡的？

纳瓦尔：我觉得，“决定”其实是由直觉（gut）做出的，脑子只是事后找理由、包装它而已。

你可以把“直觉”理解为一种被提炼过的判断力，是“品位”的总和。它可能来自基因演化，也可能来自你的人生经历与深度思考。

大脑确实擅长解决一些外部世界中边界清晰的问题——比如“有明确起点和目标”的事情。但当面对真正困难的决定时，头脑其实是很糟糕的工具。

所以当我面对艰难决策时，我会先想一圈所有利弊，但不会立刻做决定。我会先睡一觉，过几天等那个“坚定的直觉”浮现出来——那种你一感受到就知道“对了”的感觉。

年纪小的时候，这个过程会更慢，因为你的经验积累还不够。但年纪越大，越容易快速抓住那个“对”与“不对”的信号。这也是为什么年长者看起来更“固执”，其实是他们知道自己要什么，也知道自己不要什么。

所以直觉和判断力，是需要岁月和经历慢慢养成的。一旦养成了，你就应该信任它，不要违背它——因为违背直觉的决定，最后都可能反噬你。

Relationships and Personal Growth

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Usually in relationships that failed you can look back and say, “Oh actually I knew it was going to fail because of this reason, but I kind of went ahead anyway because I wanted it to be this way, right? I wanted this person to be a different way than they are, or I wanted to get a different thing out of it than I thought I was going to, than I knew I was going to get, but I just wanted it.” So sometimes desire will override your judgment.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Wistful thinking. It traps you into a pathway that just chews up time.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s that insight of yours?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Think we can’t change ourselves, but we can; we think we can change other people, but we can’t.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Exactly.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I think to add to that, you can’t change other people, you can change your reaction to them, you can change yourself, but other people only change through trauma or their own insight on their own schedule, and never in a way that you like.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Al Anon teaches that people do sometimes change, but rarely in relationships and never when they’re told to.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Absolutely. The fastest way to alienate somebody is to tell them to change.

关系与成长

克里斯：大多数失败的感情，回头看其实都有预兆。你当时心里是知道的，但还是硬着头皮往前走，因为你“希望”它会变得不一样。你希望对方是另一个样子，你希望这段关系能带给你某种你其实知道它给不了的东西。有时候，渴望会压过判断。

纳瓦尔：对，那是一种“理想化幻想”（wistful thinking），它会把你困在一条耗时间、耗精力的路上。

克里斯：你不是有句很经典的话吗？

纳瓦尔：我们总以为自己无法改变，其实能；也总以为能改变别人，其实不能。

克里斯：太对了。

纳瓦尔：补充一句：你确实无法改变别人，但你可以改变你对他们的反应方式，你可以改变自己。而别人，只有在经历创伤或自己主动觉醒时才会改变——而且几乎从来不是你希望的方式或时机。

克里斯：Al-Anon（匿名家庭支持小组）就讲过：人确实会变，但极少是在一段关系中变的，更不会是在被要求改变时变的。

纳瓦尔：完全同意。最容易让人疏远的方式，就是告诉他们该怎么改变。

Learning Without Pressure

NAVAL RAVIKANT: In fact, the Dale Carnegie School of Public Speaking operates by getting you up there and realizing that the number one problem with public speaking is that people are very self-conscious. People who are practicing in the Dale Carnegie School of Public Speaking start speaking and the people in the audience are only allowed to compliment them, genuine compliments, not fake compliments, on things that they did well. You’re not allowed to criticize them on things that they did poorly and eventually they develop self confidence.

The same way, there’s the Michel Thomas School of Language Learning. What they do is you listen to a teacher talking to a student—they’re not teaching you, you’re not expected to remember or memorize anything—you just listen to a student stumbling over the language. It’s a better way to learn because you yourself don’t feel flustered or tested or graded. You’re not in your own head as much.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct, you’re not in your own head and you’re just observing. You might even be laughing at the student or agreeing with the teacher or sympathizing with the student, but because you are a passive observer you can be more objective about it. You aren’t threatened or fearful and you can learn better.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Coming back to the original point of you can’t change people, if you do want to change someone’s behavior, I think the only effective way to do it is to compliment them when they do something you want.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Positive reinforcement.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah exactly, not to insult them or be negative or critical when they do something you don’t want. We can’t help it, it’s obviously in our nature to criticize and I do it as well, but it reminds me that when somebody does something praiseworthy, don’t forget to praise them. Definitely go out of your way, and it’ll be genuine—it has to be genuine, it can’t be fake. People want authenticity, but just don’t forget to praise people when they do something praiseworthy, and you’ll get more of that behavior.

无压力的学习方式

纳瓦尔：戴尔·卡耐基的公开演讲课程很有意思。他们发现人们在公众面前发言最大的障碍，是“过度自我意识”。所以在他们的训练中，观众只能给予发言者“真诚的正面反馈”，不能批评。久而久之，学员就会建立起自信。

米歇尔·托马斯的语言学习法也一样：你不是直接学，而是“旁听”老师和一个学生互动——你听那个学生怎么磕磕绊绊地学语言。因为你不被考核、不被测试、不需要记忆，你反而能学得更自然。

克里斯：是的，你不再陷在自己脑子里，只是在观察而已。你可能会笑那个学生，可能也会跟老师产生共鸣，但正是因为你是个“旁观者”，你能保持客观，没有压力，反而更容易学进去。

纳瓦尔：说回“人无法被改变”，如果你真的想让一个人改变行为，我觉得唯一可能有效的方式，是在他们做出你期望的行为时给予真诚的赞赏。

克里斯：正向反馈。

纳瓦尔：对，不要在他们做错的时候批评他们。我们本能会想批评别人，我也会。但要提醒自己：当别人做对了的时候，一定要记得夸他们，真诚地去夸。人是渴望真实的生物，你不能假装，但一旦是真心的鼓励，你就会看到那种行为越来越多地出现。

Relationship Clarity

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There was a really famous thread on Reddit about five questions to ask yourself if you’re uncertain about your relationship. One of the questions was, “Are you truly in love with your partner or just their potential or the idea of them?” That’s the “they show such great promise” thinking. They look at their ability for change and growth. They’re on the right path.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: The partner matching thing is so hard. When people come and ask me, “Should I be with this person?” Well, if you’re asking me, the answer is clearly no, right? Because you wouldn’t have to ask if you were with the right person. Or when you ask someone why they’re in a relationship with somebody and they start reading out his or her resume, that’s also a bad sign.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do you mean?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: It’s like, “Oh, we have so much in common, we like to golf together.” That’s not a basis for a relationship. Or “Oh, you know, she’s a ballerina,” or “He went to Harvard.” These are resume items, not who the person actually is.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s a better answer?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: “I just love being with this person. I just trust them. I enjoy being around them. I love how capable he is. I love how kind she is. I love her spirit. I love his energy.”

The more materially and concretely definable the reasons are you’re together, the worse they are. The ineffable is actually where the true love lies.

Because real love is a form of unity, it’s a form of connection, it’s connecting spirit. My consciousness meets your consciousness. The underlying drive in love, in art, in science, in mysticism, is the desire for unity, it’s the desire for connection.

As Borges famously wrote, in every human there’s a sense that something infinite has been lost. There’s a God-shaped hole in you you’re trying to fill, and so we’re always trying to find that connection. Love is trying to find it in one other person and saying, “You’re male, I’m female,” or whatever your predilections are, and now we connect, now we form a whole, a connected whole.

In mysticism it’s about sitting down to meditate and feeling the whole. In science it’s like atoms bouncing is mechanics but that generates heat, so thermodynamics and motion or kinetics are one combined theory—that’s a whole. Electricity and magnetism are one thing, that’s the whole, creates that sense of awe.

In art, I feel an emotion, I create a piece of art around it, and then you see that painting, or you see the Sistine Chapel, or you read the poem and you feel that emotion, so again it’s creating unity, it’s creating connection. I think everybody craves that, and so when you really love somebody, it’s because you feel a sense of wholeness by being around them, and that sense of wholeness probably doesn’t have anything to do with what school they went to or what career they’re in.

Just tying that into “life is short”—if you’re faced with a difficult choice and you cannot decide, the answer is no. The reason is modern society is full of options.

感情的辨别力

克里斯：Reddit 上有个很火的讨论帖，说在感情里犹豫时，有五个问题可以问自己。其中一个特别有意思：“你是真的爱这个人，还是只是爱他/她的‘潜力’？”——你是在爱一个真实的人，还是一个“可能变得更好”的幻想？

纳瓦尔：找对象这件事真的很难。有人问我：“你觉得我该跟这个人在一起吗？”——如果你还得问我，那答案多半就是“不”。

还有一种不妙的信号是：你问别人“你为什么和这个人在一起”，他们开始给你念简历。

克里斯：什么意思？

纳瓦尔：比如：“我们兴趣相投，都喜欢打高尔夫”，“她是个芭蕾舞者”，“他上过哈佛”……这些都是“履历条目”，不是这个人“本身”。

克里斯：那什么才是更真实的回答？

纳瓦尔：“我就是喜欢和这个人在一起。我信任他。我享受和她相处的感觉。我爱他的能力，我欣赏她的善良，我喜欢她的灵魂，我喜欢他的能量。”

你在一起的理由越“具体、可量化”，其实越危险。真正的爱，是不可言喻的，是精神与精神的连接。

爱是一种统一感（unity），是一种心灵上的契合。“我意识中的我”与“你意识中的你”相遇。这种想要合一、想要连接的本能，其实贯穿于爱、艺术、科学与神秘主义之中。

博尔赫斯说过，人类内心深处，总有一种“某种无限的东西被失落了”的感觉。我们内心有一个“神形空洞”，而爱，就是我们试图用“另一个人”来填补那种缺失。

你是男性，我是女性（或者其他任何组合），我们相遇，我们连接，我们成了“一个整体”。

冥想，是与整个宇宙的合一；科学，是追寻不同领域的统一原理（热力学、电磁学、相对论……）；艺术，是情绪的传递：我感受到一种情感，我创作，你通过作品感受到我感受到的情感——这又是一种合一。

我们都在寻找“统一”，而当你真的爱一个人，你是通过他/她，感觉到了那种“完整”。而这份完整，几乎与他/她的履历毫无关系。

联系到“人生短暂”这个话题：如果你面对一段关系，迟迟做不了决定，那答案大概率是“不要”。

因为在当代社会，你不是没得选，而是选择太多。真正对的那段关系，是不需要你反复权衡的。你就是知道。

Decision Making Principles

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Knowing this rationally sounds great, but having the courage to commit to it in reality is a different task. Cutting your losses quickly in the big three—relationships, jobs, and locations—is hard. What would you say to someone who may cerebrally be able to agree with you?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: My cousin said this about me. He said, “What I really noticed about you is your ability to walk away from situations that are just not great enough for you, or not good enough for you.” And I think that is a characteristic that I have.

I will not accept second best outcomes in my life. Ultimately, you will end up wherever is acceptable to you. You will get out of life whatever is acceptable to you.

There are certain things to me that are very important where I will not settle for second best, but then there are a lot of other things I just don’t care about. If I spend all my time caring about those things, I don’t have the energy for the few things that matter.

In decision making, I have a few heuristics for myself. Other people can use their own, but mine are:

1. If you can’t decide, the answer is no. If you’re offered an opportunity, if you have a new thing that you’re saying yes or no to that is a change from where you’re starting, the answer is by default always no.
2. If you have two decisions, A or B, and both seem very equal, take the path that’s more painful in the short term, the one that’s going to be painful immediately, because your brain is always trying to avoid pain. Any pain that is imminent, it is going to treat as much larger than it actually is.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This is kind of like a decision making equivalent of a Taleb surgeon? The surgeon that doesn’t look as good because he’s more likely to be a good surgeon.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, it’s similar in that appearances are deceiving because you’re avoiding conflict, you’re avoiding pain. So take the path that’s more painful in the short term because your brain has created this illusion that the short term pain is greater than the long term pain.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because long term, you’ll commit your future self to all kinds of long term pain.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Mañana, mañana. Exactly.

1. Take the choice that will leave you more equanimous in the long term—more mental peace in the long term. Whatever clears your mind more and will have you having less self-talk in the future, if you can model that out, that is probably the better route to go.

决策原则：真正重要的三件事

克里斯：理性上我们都知道这些道理，但现实中真正有勇气去做决定、去“止损”——尤其是在感情、工作、居住这三大人生板块里，真的很难。如果有人脑子里认同你的观点，但做不到，你会怎么建议他？

纳瓦尔：我表哥曾说过一句很中肯的话：“我注意到你最大的特点之一，就是你总能果断离开那些‘不够好’的局面。”我想这确实是我身上比较突出的一个特质。

我不会接受人生中“第二好的选项”。最终，你的人生会停留在你“可以接受”的那个层次上。你能得到的，就是你愿意接受的。

对我来说，有一些事情是我绝不妥协的，但大多数事情我根本不在意。如果我把精力花在那些我不在意的事上，我就没有能量去抓住那些真正重要的。

在决策方面，我有几个自己的小原则。也许不适合所有人，但对我管用：

1. 如果你拿不定主意，答案就是“不”。如果有人向你提出一个新机会、一个需要做选择的新局面，只要你犹豫了，默认就是拒绝。因为如果你真的想要，你根本不会犹豫。
2. 两个选项看起来差不多，就选那个短期更痛苦的。你的大脑天生会回避痛苦。任何眼前的痛苦，在脑海中都会被“放大”。所以更好的路线，往往是那个“现在难，但以后轻松”的路径。

克里斯：这听起来像塔勒布说的“选那个长得不靠谱但更有实力的外科医生”。

纳瓦尔：有点像。很多时候，我们被“看起来更舒服”的选项欺骗了。其实那个短期更难走的路，往往才是通向长远轻松的唯一通道。

克里斯：否则你会把未来的自己绑在一个长远的痛苦里，只因为你不想面对眼前的那点不适。

纳瓦尔：对，“明天再说吧”——结果就是永远拖着。

3. 选那个能让你内心更平静的选项。哪条路能让你未来少点自我对话、少点内耗、少点“后悔”的回放？那就是值得走的路。

The Three Key Life Decisions

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I would focus decision making down on the three things that really matter, because everything else is downstream of these three decisions, especially early in life. Later in life you have different things to optimize for, but early in life you’re trying to figure out who you’re with, what you’re doing, and where you live.

I think on all three of those, you want to think pretty hard about it. People do some of these unconsciously. With who you’re with, very often it’s like, “We were in a relationship, we stumbled along, it felt okay, it had been enough time, so we got married.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Not great reasons.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Maybe not terrible reasons either. People who overthink these things sometimes don’t get the right answer, but maybe here, if you’re the kind of person that’s not going to settle for second best, you iterate on a closed timeframe, so you don’t run out the clock, and then you decide.

On what you do, you try a whole bunch of different things until you find the one that feels like play to you, looks like work to others, you can’t lose at it, get some leverage, try to find some practical application of it and go into that.

And then where you live is really important. I don’t think people spend enough time on that one. People pick cities randomly based on where they went to school, or where their family happened to be, or where their friend was, or they visited one weekend and really liked it.

You really want to think it through, because where you live really constrains and defines your opportunities. It’s going to determine your friend circle, your dating pool, your job opportunities, the food and air and water quality that you receive, your proximity to your family, which might be important as you get older and have kids. Very, very important decision.

Weather, quality of life, how much you stay inside or outside, how long you’ll live based on that—I think people choose that one probably more poorly than the other two. They put a lot less thought into that one.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: In some ways, yeah, but also you’re so right, how many people fall backward into a relationship and before they know it, “We’re living together, we got a dog, we got a kid, we’re married.”

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, and then when you have kids, because that’s half of you and half of them running around, you’re never going to separate yourself from that. So once you have a child with somebody, then the most important thing in the world to you is half that other person, whether you like them or not.

人生最重要的三个决定

纳瓦尔：我认为一个人应该把决策的焦点收敛到三个最重要的方向上——因为你人生中绝大多数事情，都是从这三项衍生出来的，特别是在你年轻的时候。

一是“和谁在一起”，二是“做什么工作”，三是“住在哪里”。

这三件事，每一件都值得深思。很多人做这些决定时其实是下意识的。比如感情，有些人只是觉得“在一起挺久了”“感觉还行”，就顺理成章结婚了。

克里斯：听起来不是很好的理由。

纳瓦尔：也不算最糟的啦。有些人反而因为过度分析，反而陷入选择瘫痪。但如果你是那种“不愿将就”的人，那你就该给自己设定一个截止时间内不断试错，然后做出决定。

关于“做什么”——我建议你多试几样东西，直到找到那个“你觉得像在玩、别人看着像在工作”的事。你擅长、愿意深耕，又能找到杠杆和实际应用的事情，就是你该干的。

最后，“住哪里”这个问题，我觉得大多数人根本没花足够时间去思考。他们选城市的方式通常很随意：念书在那里、家人在那里、朋友推荐、或者某个周末玩得很开心就决定搬去。

但其实，“你住在哪里”会深刻影响你的人际圈、感情对象、职业机会、生活质量、甚至寿命。

克里斯：你说得对，很多人其实是在“跌进一段关系”里，然后一步步地开始“同居、养狗、生孩子、结婚”。

纳瓦尔：是啊。但一旦你和一个人有了孩子，这个孩子就是你的一半和对方的一半组成的。无论你是否还喜欢对方，你都再也无法真正“切割”这段关系。那个你曾经将就的人，永远和你的人生绑定在了一起。

Nature vs. Nurture

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Jeffrey Miller had a tweet a long time ago that I always think about. He said, “Every parenting book in the world could be replaced with one book on behavioral genetics.”

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I am a big believer in genetics. I do think a lot of behavior is downstream of genetics, and I think we underplay that. We like to overplay nurture and underplay nature for societal reasons, but nature is a big deal. The temperament of the person you marry is probably going to be reflected in your child by default.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: People should watch for a securely attached kid, pick a securely attached partner.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Well, the secret to a happy relationship is two happy people, right? So I would say if you want to be happy, then be with a happy person. Don’t think you’re going to be with someone who’s unhappy and then make them happy down the road. Or if you’re okay with them being unhappy, but there are other things you like about them, that’s fine, but this goes back to conversation. Conversations are unhappiness with other things.

天性 vs. 教养

克里斯： 杰弗里·米勒很早前发过一条推文，我一直记得。他说：“世上所有育儿书，其实都可以被一本关于行为遗传学的书取代。”

纳瓦尔： 我非常相信基因。我觉得很多行为都是由基因驱动的，我们在这方面往往低估了影响。出于社会层面的原因，我们更愿意高估教养、低估天性，但其实天性的影响力很大。比如你伴侣的性格，很可能直接遗传给你们的孩子。

克里斯： 所以应该选择一个有安全型依恋的人作为伴侣，这样孩子才容易安全依恋。

纳瓦尔： 没错，一段幸福关系的秘诀，其实是两个人本身都幸福。你要是想快乐，那就找一个本来就快乐的人在一起。别以为你可以跟一个不快乐的人在一起，然后靠你让他变快乐。或者你能接受对方不快乐，但他身上有其他你欣赏的点，那也行，但这就回到我们说的——很多时候，两个人的对话，其实是“不幸福”+“其他因素”的组合。

The Importance of Values in Relationships

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, and actually, we talked a little bit about how people do connect successfully on spirit and those things, but that’s maybe a little too abstract. If you want to get a little more practical, could be based on values, and values are the set of things you won’t compromise on. Values are the tough decisions of, my parent got sick, do they move in with us or do we put them in nursing home? Do we give the children money or do we not? Do we move across the country to be closer to our family or do we stay put where we are?

Do we argue about politics? Do we care or do we not? Right? The values are way more important than checklist items, and I think if people were to align much more on their values, they would have much more successful relationships. The emotional pain of fearing change, I have this thing, the job, the location, the partner, I’m going to enter or not enter this thing, for the most part it’s leaving.

I think we have this sort of loss aversion that we really feel. Evolve loss aversion, it’s painful separating yourself in front of your friends. It’s embarrassing. And how would you advise people to get past themselves with that loss aversion, that fear of change?

关系中的价值观有多重要

克里斯： 我们刚才聊到，人们确实能在“精神层面”产生连接，但那听起来还是有点抽象。如果我们想落到更实在的层面，那就是“价值观”。所谓价值观，就是你不会妥协的东西。

比如：父母生病了，是接到家里一起住，还是送去养老院？孩子要不要经济支持？要不要为了家庭搬家？政治观点不同要不要争论？我们到底在乎不在乎这些？——这些问题，比起所谓“条件清单”，才是关系的核心。人们如果能更早、更深地对齐价值观，亲密关系往往会更稳固。

我们很多痛苦，其实来源于对变化的恐惧。工作、地点、伴侣——我要不要迈进这一步？或者要不要离开？多数时候，是“舍不得离开”。我们人类对失去有本能的厌恶，会感觉很痛苦。尤其是在别人面前说出“我们分手了”，那种羞耻感让人难以接受。

你会怎么建议他们面对这种“自我设限”——这种怕改变、怕失去的心理？

Overcoming Fear of Change

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Oh my god. I’m going to… Yeah. It’s the hardest thing in the world, starting over. It’s back to the zero to one thing, it’s the mountain climbing thing, you’re not going to find your path to the top of the mountain in the first go around, sometimes you go up there, you get stuck and you come back down, and the difference between all the successful people and the ones who are not, is the ones who are successful want it so badly they’re willing to go back and start over, again and again, whether in their career, or in their relationships, or in anything else.

The more seriously you take yourself, the unhappier you’re going to be.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You learned how to take yourself less seriously?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Well, fame doesn’t help on that one, because that is one of the traps of fame. People are always talking about you, they have a certain view of you, and you start believing that, and then you take yourself seriously, and then that limits your own actions. You can’t look like a fool anymore, you can’t do new things anymore. If tomorrow I announce I’m a breakdancer, right, that’s going to be met with a lot of scorn and ridicule.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’d back you if you want to make that pivot.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, the truth is if I want to be a breakdancer, I’d be breakdancing, but you know, like I’m starting a new company, zero to one again, from scratch, let’s do it, you know, one more time, and not just going and raising a big VC fund or retiring or what have you, but that’s because I want to build the product, I want to see it exist.

So I think that you constantly just have to force yourself, have to remind yourself. Look, deep down, you’re still the same Chris you were when you were nine years old. Deep down, you’re still a kid, you know, you’re still curious about the world, you still have a lot of the same predilections and desires at once, you’ve got a nice veneer on it.

But one of the nice things when you have kids is you realize how much closer they are to you in personality and knowledge and know how. Like I look at my son who’s eight and I just notice like wow he probably has sixty to eighty percent of my knowledge and development wisdom and he has a lot more freedom and he has a lot more spontaneity, in some ways he’s smarter, and there’s not a big gap here left to close. This kid’s going to be done very soon, caught up to me, and so to the extent that I think I know better or that I’m somewhere or that I’m someone, it’s just an illusion, it’s just a belief.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s the lineage between that and taking yourself too seriously?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I shouldn’t take myself too seriously because there’s nothing here to take that seriously, and if I take myself too seriously then I’m going to get trapped, I’m going to circumscribe myself again into a limited set of behaviors and outcomes that keep me from being free, keep me from being spontaneous, keep me from being happy. So it just goes back to, you know, don’t think about yourself too much.

如何克服对改变的恐惧

纳瓦尔： 哎呀，说实话，重新开始真的是这世界上最难的事之一。这就像“从零到一”，就像攀登一座山。你第一次不可能就找对通往山顶的路，有时候你走着走着卡住了，只能退回来重来。成功者和失败者之间最大的区别，就是那些成功的人想要的太强烈了，强烈到可以一次次重新开始。无论是事业、关系，还是其他领域，都是如此。

你越把自己当回事，就越容易不快乐。

克里斯： 你后来学会了“别把自己太当回事”吗？

纳瓦尔： 说实话，成名这件事反而让这更难。因为人们总在议论你，对你有既定看法，你也容易信以为真。一旦你开始把自己太当回事，就会被这些“设定”限制住。你不能再做蠢事，不能再尝试新东西。比如我要是明天宣布我要去当霹雳舞舞者，大家肯定觉得我疯了，取笑我。

克里斯： 要真想转行，我会挺你到底！

纳瓦尔： 哈，那我真要想跳，早就开始练了。不过我现在是又要创业了，从零再来一遍，不是去搞风险投资、也不是退休，而是真的去构建一个产品，去让它诞生。我喜欢这种感觉。

我常常提醒自己：你其实还是那个九岁的克里斯，本质上你没变。你依然对世界好奇，依然有那些本能的欲望，只是现在披上了一层“成年人的外衣”。

你知道，有了孩子后你会更深刻地意识到这一点。我看我儿子，他才八岁，但我发现他可能已经掌握了我六七成的知识和智慧。他更自由、更有灵气，从某些方面看，甚至比我聪明。我们之间并没有多大差距。所谓“我是谁”、“我有多厉害”，很多时候不过是幻觉，一种自我设定。

克里斯： 所以你是说，不要把自己太当回事，是因为“你其实没什么好当回事的”。

纳瓦尔： 没错。如果你太把自己当回事，就会把自己关进一套有限的剧本里，只敢做某些事、只允许自己有某些结果，这会限制你的自由、自发性，最终也会限制你的幸福。说到底，别太把“我”挂在心上。

The Advice We Already Know

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s a special type of pain in realizing that the advice that you need to hear right now is something that almost always you learned a long time ago, and that you’re basically sort of the same person you were as you were nine. You know, a lot of the time people ask questions like, what advice do wish that you would give yourself ten years ago? Right. People ask themselves that question.

Almost invariably, the advice that you would give yourself ten years ago is still the advice that you need to hear today.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Absolutely, that’s why I did that exercise of thinking back, you know, ten years, twenty years, thirty years ago, what advice would I give myself, for me it’s just be less emotional. Don’t take everything so seriously. Do the same things, but do them without all the emotional turbulence, and so that’s the advice I’m giving myself going forward.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s funny how we need that distance to be able to be a little bit more objective, to have a little bit more perspective, and it’s almost a little bit of a trick, right, because typically when you do that, say, would you tell a friend that was going through this? Right. And then you try and turn the advice to the friend around onto yourself, but you always think, I’m not the friend. You’re okay, you, ten years ago, there’s enough distance in that, you go, oh, I actually am still that person. There’s just a single line between that.

那些我们早就知道的建议

克里斯： 有一种很特别的痛苦，就是你发现此刻最需要听的建议，其实是你很多年前就听过的。人们总爱问：“如果可以回到十年前，你会给自己什么建议？”但讽刺的是，我们今天最需要的建议，往往还是那一句老话。

纳瓦尔： 完全认同。这也是我喜欢做的练习之一——想一想，十年前、二十年前、三十年前的我，需要什么建议？对我来说答案很简单：少动情绪，别太当真。还是做同样的事，但不要让情绪带着你跑。这也是我现在不断提醒自己的。

克里斯： 是啊，我们往往需要一点“心理距离”，才能更客观、更清晰地看清眼下的处境。就像你对朋友特别宽容、特别理性，可一轮到自己就糊涂了。但当你说“十年前的我”，突然就像在对别人说话了，你反而能给出很清醒的建议。而现实是——你还是那个人，本质没有变。

Understanding vs. Discipline

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, related to this story is I think understanding is way more important than discipline. Now, Jocko would have a fit, but you know, on physical things discipline is important. If I want to build a good body, got to work out on a regular basis, but on mental things, I think understanding is way more important.

Once you see the truth of something, you cannot unsee it. All of us have had experiences where we’ve seen a behavior in a person and then it just changes what we think about that person, we no longer want to be friends with them, or we deeply respect them if it was really good behavior that maybe was observed unintentionally.

So when we really do see something clearly, it changes our behavior immediately, and that is far more efficient than trying to change your behavior through repetition.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Could you give me an example?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: If you were, let’s say that you have a friend and then that person turns out to be a thief, you see that person stealing something, you’re done with them.

If you are, you know, the smoking lung cancer example is a good one, right, someone close to you, or anytime someone close to you dies, or you even hear about someone dying, you hear about someone, what’s the first thing you do? The first thing, assuming that you weren’t that close to them, obviously your closeness is different, but if you weren’t that close to them, but you know, you hear about someone in your extended social circle dying, you immediately start trying to distinguish yourself from them.

You know, “oh well how old is this person, were they a smoker, did they have an issue, do I have that issue?” Right, you immediately start comparing, and what you’re doing there is you’re sort of just trying to see if there’s an overlap here, but if you see the truth in something, if you’re like, “oh my god, this person was the same age as me and they died,” and that’s starting to happen at my age, where I’m starting to hear about extended circle people. Just reminds you, time is really short.

There’s a truth there, there’s a truth there that you cannot unsee. Or, for example, I think, you into bodybuilding or something back when? I don’t know.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Just like bro lifting stuff.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Okay, bro lifting. Yeah. Right, but there probably was a point where you were being really agro in the gym and you injured yourself.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Many times.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Right, and each one of those was a deep understanding of don’t go beyond this point, right? There was a truth there. So again, when you see these things in such a way that you can’t unsee them, that changes your behavior instantly, and I would argue that that introspection to find those truths is actually very useful.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is that a justification for more experimentation, exploration, experience in life, so they’re trying to find serendipity because all of these experiences are going to teach you a inescapable lesson?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: You’re going to do what you’re going to do, I mean your level of exploration I think is sort of up to you, but life is always throwing truth back at you. It’s about whether you choose to see it, whether you choose to acknowledge it, even if it’s painful, truth is often painful, right? If it wasn’t, we’d all be seeing truth all the time, reality is always reflecting truth, that’s all it is.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why would you not have accessed it already?

理解比自律更重要

纳瓦尔： 是的，顺着这个话题，我其实觉得：理解，比自律重要得多。当然啦，Jocko Willink 听了可能要暴走（笑）。身体方面，自律确实重要，比如你想练出一个好身体，就得坚持锻炼。

但在心理层面上，真正的改变，靠的是“理解”。一旦你看清了一件事的真相，你就无法再假装没看见。

我们都经历过这种事：你看清了一个人某种行为之后，哪怕是个小细节，你对他的看法可能瞬间改变。可能是失望，也可能是敬佩，但那个行为，一下子改变了一切。

这种洞察，比反复告诫自己“要改掉某个习惯”有效太多。理解是真正能改变行为的“捷径”。

克里斯： 举个例子？

纳瓦尔： 比如你有个朋友，你亲眼看到他偷东西了——你可能瞬间就决定断交了，对吧？

又或者是“吸烟与肺癌”的例子。你身边某人因吸烟去世，你听到这个消息后第一反应是什么？你会开始对比：“他几岁？是因为吸烟吗？我有没有同样的问题？”你其实是在判断，“我是不是也处在风险里”。

但如果你突然发现：“天啊，他跟我年纪差不多。”那种冲击，就会让你再也无法忽视现实——你会被真相震撼到，从此行为改变。

克里斯： 所以你是在说，我们需要更多探索、体验、犯错，去寻找这些“一锤定音的真相”？

纳瓦尔： 探索的程度当然因人而异，但现实一直都在向你抛出真相。关键是你有没有看见、有没有承认。哪怕那个真相是痛苦的。真相往往是痛的，如果不是，我们早就人人都觉醒了。现实就是不断照见你的真相。

克里斯： 那为什么我们总是“没看到”？

Wisdom Must Be Discovered Personally

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Exactly, you know, all the philosophy that’s out there, for example, it’s almost trite, like most people they look at philosophy like until they discover it for themselves, because wisdom is the set of things that cannot be transmitted. If they could be transmitted, you know, we’d read the same five philosophy books, it would all be done, we’d all be wise.

You have to learn it for yourself, it has to be rediscovered for yourself in your own context, you have to have specific experiences that then allow you to generalize and see the truth in those things in such a way that you’re not going to unsee them, but each person is going to see them in a different way. I can tell you that Socrates story, and it’s not going to resonate until there’s something that other people desire that you realize you yourself don’t want, and the moment that happens, then you’ll see the truth in the general statement.

智慧必须靠自己领悟

纳瓦尔： 完全正确。比如哲学，其实很多人眼里它早已变得陈词滥调，直到有一天你亲身经历、亲自领悟，它才真正有意义。因为，所谓智慧，是无法传授的。要是能教，我们早就看完那五本哲学经典，人人皆贤，世界大同了。

可惜不行。你必须在自己的生活中重新发现这些道理。你必须经历一些独特的体验，然后才能从中提炼出“不可忽视的真相”，并以你自己的方式看清它。而每个人“看清”的方式都不同。我可以给你讲苏格拉底的故事，但它不会打动你，除非你有一天发现：别人渴望的东西，其实你自己并不想要。那一刻你才真正明白苏格拉底说的是什么。

Unteachable Lessons

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I want to just read you a two minute essay that I wrote a couple of weeks ago. It’s called Unteachable Lessons.

I’ve been thinking about the special category of lesson, one which you cannot discover without experiencing it firsthand. There is a certain subset of advice that for some reason we all refuse to learn through instruction. These are unteachable lessons.

No matter how arduous or costly or effortful it is going to be for us to find out ourselves, we prefer to disregard the mountains of warnings from our elders, songs, literature, historical catastrophes, public scandals, and instead think some version of, “yeah, that might be true for them, but not for me.” We decide to learn the hard lessons the hard way over and over again.

Unfortunately, they all seem to be the big things too. It’s never new insights about how to put up level shelves or charmingly introduce yourself at a cocktail party. Instead, we spend most of our lives learning firsthand the most important lessons that the previous generations already warned us about.

Things like money won’t make you happy, fame won’t fix your self worth, you don’t love that pretty girl, she’s just hot and difficult to get, nothing is as important as you think it is when you’re thinking about it, you will regret working too much. Worrying is not improving your performance. All your fears are a waste of time. You should see your parents more. You’ll be fine after the breakup and be grateful that you did it. It’s perfectly okay to cut toxic people out of your life.

And even reading this list back, I’m rolling my eyes at how fucking trite it is. These are all basic bitch, obvious insights that everybody has heard before. But if they’re so basic, why does everyone so reliably fall prey to them throughout our lives? And if they’re so obvious, why do people who have recently become famous or wealthy or lost a parent or gone through a breakup start to proclaim these facts with the renewed grandiose ceremony of someone who’s just gone through religious revelation?

It’s also a very contentious list of points to say on the Internet. If you interview a billionaire who says that all of his money didn’t make him happy or a movie star who said that her fame felt like a prison, the Internet will tear them apart for being ungrateful and out of touch. So not only do we refuse to learn these lessons, we even refuse to hear the message from those warning us about them.

And even more than that, I think for every one of these, if I consider a bit deeper, I can recall a time, including right now, where I convinced myself that I am the exception to the rule, that my particular mental makeup or life situation or historical wounds or dreams for the future render me immune to these lessons being applicable. No. No. No. My inner landscape would be solved by skirting around the most well known wisdom of the ages. No. No. No. I can thread this needle properly. Watch me dance through the minefield and avoid all of the tripwires that everyone else kicks.

无法传授的教训

克里斯： 我前段时间写了一篇小短文，叫《无法传授的教训》，念给你听。

我一直在想，有那么一类特别的道理——你不亲自经历一次，就永远学不会。人类总有一小撮建议，明明长辈反复叮嘱、歌曲反复吟唱、文学作品反复书写、历史反复警示，可我们依然选择无视。

哪怕这个教训再痛苦、再昂贵、再辛苦，我们还是心里想着：“那是他们的事，不是我。”我们偏要自己去撞南墙。

而最可惜的是——这些“必须亲自领悟”的教训，恰恰都是人生中最重要的事。它们不是告诉你怎么装好一个置物架，也不是教你如何在酒会上打招呼；它们是：

钱不会让你快乐；
名气不会修复你的自我价值；
你并不爱那个漂亮姑娘，你只是想征服她；
没有任何事像你当下想的那样重要；
你会后悔工作太多；
焦虑并不会提升表现；
你所有的恐惧几乎都是浪费时间；
多陪陪父母；
分手之后你会好起来，甚至会感激这一切发生；
你完全可以远离那些消耗你的人。

我念这份清单的时候，自己都忍不住翻白眼。它听起来真的太“普通”，太“老掉牙”。但如果它们这么普通，为什么我们一生中还是反复跌进这些坑？

又为什么，当某人刚经历名利、丧亲、分手之后，会用一种“如获启示”的姿态，郑重其事地宣告这些道理？

而且这类话题在网上特别容易被攻击。一个亿万富翁说“钱不能带来幸福”，一个明星说“名气像监狱”，评论区会瞬间炸锅，说他们虚伪、不知足、脱离群众。

我们不仅拒绝学习这些教训，甚至连“听别人说这些”都不愿意接受。

更讽刺的是：我们每个人，在某个时刻——包括现在——都曾暗暗相信：“我是例外”。

“我和他们不一样。”
“我的背景、性格、创伤、理想……这些让这条真理对我无效。”
“我能避开这些坑。我能在雷区里跳舞，不踩中任何一个地雷。”

The Value of Unteachable Lessons

NAVAL RAVIKANT: And then you kick one, and you share a knowing look, the kind that can only occur between two people who’ve been hurt in the exact same way, and a voice in the back of your mind will say, I told you so. That’s unteachable lesson. It’s a good essay.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think one of the reasons why these lessons are unteachable is because they’re too broad, they have to be applied in context. A number of the ones that you laid out contradict each other, like spend more time with your parents and don’t work so hard, but at the same time, you do want to be successful, right? I think a lot of these lessons come from down on high, from as you said, like the famous movie star or the billionaire saying, “Oh, you don’t need money to be happy,” it’s like, well okay then give it up.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Right? So in reality I think many of these contradict each other. It’s like if you went to school and you just studied philosophy for four years, you would not know how to live life because you wouldn’t know which philosophical doctrine to apply in which circumstance. You have to actually live life, go through all of the issues to figure out what it is that you want, what’s the context in which some of these things apply and some of them don’t. Yes you want to visit your parents more often, but you don’t want to live with your parents and you don’t want necessarily see them every day or every weekend depending on the parent. You might not get along with one of them, so I think it is highly contextual.

That said, I would argue that once you figure it out for yourself, you can kind of carve these variations on these maxims that apply to you, and then you’ll have a specific experience that helps you remember it and actually execute on it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And you can also phrase it in a way where it’s not trite anymore.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: It’s personal. So a lot of my maxims in those to self are carved in a way that they’re modernized. They’re saying something true, which might be trite if I didn’t say it in a new way or in an interesting way that is more relevant to me today.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There was a Nobel Prize winner who said something to the effect of “everything worth saying may have been said before, but given that nobody was listening, it must be said again.”

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, it has to be said again, it has to be recontextualized for the modern age. Things do change, technology changes things, culture changes, people change.

为什么这些“烂道理”依然有价值

纳瓦尔： 然后你踩中了一个地雷。你和另一个受过同样伤的人交换了一个心照不宣的眼神。脑海中有个声音轻轻说：“我早就告诉过你。”——这，就是无法传授的教训。

这段写得很好。

克里斯： 我觉得这些教训难以传授，还有一个原因：它们太宏观，必须放进具体情境中才能“生效”。

有些看似矛盾，比如“多陪父母”和“别太拼工作”。但如果你真的想成功怎么办？所以这些建议听上去就像是站在山顶的“过来人”在喊话，你就会想：“那你把钱捐出来啊？”

纳瓦尔： 没错。现实中，很多人生箴言彼此矛盾。就像你读哲学四年，却依然不知道该怎么过人生。因为你不知道在什么情境下该用哪个观点。

你必须亲自活过，自己体验，才能知道什么是你真正想要的，哪些教训适用于你，哪些不适用。

比如你是该多去看父母，但也不是要天天住一起。有些人跟父母根本合不来。这里面全是细节，全靠自己拿捏。

但我也认为，一旦你自己悟到了，你就能用属于自己的语言，把这些“俗套”的道理打磨出真正的力量。它们不再陈词滥调，而是成为你生活中亲手刻下的座右铭。

克里斯： 而且你可以用一种崭新的方式去表达它们，就不“油”了。

纳瓦尔： 对，因为那是你的。很多我写的“写给自己的格言”，其实就是这种现代化处理。我把那些可能显得老套的东西，换了一种说法，让它在今天的语境下对我仍然有力量。

克里斯： 有位诺贝尔奖得主说过一句很棒的话：“所有值得说的话可能早就说过了，但既然没人听懂，那就必须一说再说。”

纳瓦尔： 对，而且要一遍又一遍用不同方式重新说。因为时代在变，科技在变，文化在变，人也在变。

Wisdom vs. Appearing Wise

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: On that, I’ve heard you say, you talk about the difference between seeming wise and being wise, that you tried to appear smart as a kid.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Still do.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Rote memorization, masquerading as insight and wisdom. I’d certainly feel that, you know, a lot of the show, for me, I think, has been, was and still is, a redemption arc from this decade of my life where I completely suppressed any intellectual curiosity. Like, okay, I’ll be a professional party boy for ten years, stand on the front door of a nightclub and give out VIP wristbands and have access to all of the pretty girls or the cool parties or whatever it might be.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Seems like it worked out okay.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It did in some ways, but it was a good way to spend my twenties. But to sort of come back above water, two degrees, one of which was a master’s, and then this, like, just shut down any of that learning. I did that while I was at uni. While I was at uni, I was running the events. So it was actually a decade and a half.

I think there was a big redemption arc within this show, and I constantly have to kind of wipe the slime off me of this sense that I need to prove myself. That’s why it really resonates with me when you’re memorizing things that indicate that you don’t understand them, or that sort of rote memorization and regurgitation masquerading as wisdom, because people use fluency as a proxy for truthfulness and insights. They use the complexity of your language and your communication.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, there’s a lot of jargon out there. I think it’s the mark of a charlatan to explain a simple thing in a complex way, and so when you see people using very complicated language to explain simple things, they’re either trying to impress you and obfuscate, or they don’t understand it themselves.

真正的智慧 vs 看起来很聪明

克里斯： 顺着这个话题，我记得你提到过“看起来聪明”和“真正智慧”之间的区别。你说你小时候很努力地想显得聪明。

纳瓦尔： 现在还是有点（笑）。

克里斯： 那时候你靠死记硬背，装得像个有智慧的人。我懂，那种感觉太熟悉了。我人生有整整十几年完全压抑了好奇心，就为了“活得酷一点”。

我曾是夜店的门卫，发VIP手环、带美女进场……当了十年派对达人，靠这个在社交场上混得风生水起。

纳瓦尔： 听起来你也没混差嘛。

克里斯： 某种意义上是的，那是我二十多岁时的方式。但后来我开始“浮出水面”，重新学习、读书、搞播客。现在我每天都在努力摆脱过去那个“光鲜外壳里的空洞感”。

我也特别认同你说的：人们常常把流畅表达错当成真知灼见。复杂的语言、漂亮的措辞，常常被误以为是真理的标志。

纳瓦尔： 是的，术语横飞的地方，往往真理缺席。一个人如果用复杂语言去解释简单的事，要么他在耍花样，要么他自己都没弄明白。这才是真正的“智者”与“装聪明”的人的分水岭。

Authenticity vs. Performance

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But there’s an allure in that though. This was one of the things I had to do when I went to therapy. I don’t think I’ve talked about this before. I needed to turn off “podcast Chris” when I stepped into therapy because most of the time that I spend one on one in a deep conversation that’s undistracted throughout the week, I’d trained myself over, you know, when I started doing it, seven hundred episodes now, nine hundred and whatever.

I knew what I could say to this therapist to just sort of veer off a little and create some nice story, put a bow on it, push it across the table, watch your eyes light up a little bit, like a little grin or a self-deprecating joke or whatever. I’m like, you’re not here. You’re performing. You’re doing the Chris Williamson thing with the sort of jazz hands.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I have my own version. So you have podcast Chris. I have podcast guest Naval. Very often, I’ll think of something, I’ll have some, what I think is an insight, and I want to tweet it or write it down, but in my mind, I’m talking about it on a podcast. That’s kind of how my mind registers it, and for a while, I thought this was a bad thing, and I tried to eradicate podcast Naval, and then I just realized that’s just how it comes out, so I might as well just be okay with it.

Now, do you know the reason I’m on this podcast? I haven’t done a proper formal interview, straight up, top ten, twenty podcasts in a long time. Since Rogan, maybe?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Probably since Rogan. You went out at the top, right? That was the theory.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Well, it’s still at the top. And then, you know, I’ve done some stuff with Tim Ferriss, a good friend, but that’s been more co-hosting. I haven’t been a guest. And then I did one or two random things where I just stumbled into a thing, but it wasn’t like this, and I reached out to you for this one.

I have lots of people reaching out to me for podcasts. I did not answer them. I reached out to you, and the reason is a really funny one. It’s because when I am playing Podcast Naval in my head, for some reason, you’re on the other side, and I don’t know why. I literally don’t know why. It’s not like I’ve even seen many of your podcasts. I think I’ve seen some snippets here and there, but for some reason, you were the guy in the podcast, in podcast Naval. And so I was like, oh, I might as well just do it. So I reached out to you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I wonder if this will close that loop or further entrench it. I wonder if you’ve made it way worse now, and you’re just going to have—well, first off, it was a dream, and now it’s reality plus a dream.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: There are enough people that I turned down where I said I’m just not doing podcasts, that I feel bad about that. I gotta go back and do those podcasts, but I probably wear out my welcome. I have nothing new to talk about, so I don’t know what I’m going to say.

真实 vs. 表演

克里斯：但这种感觉确实很有吸引力。我在做心理治疗的时候，必须做的一件事就是把“播客版的 Chris”关掉。我之前好像没在别处讲过这事儿。平时我一周能有的那种一对一、专注又深入的交流，大多数都发生在录播客的时候。我做这行七百期起步，现在都快九百多了，脑子已经形成了某种模式。

我知道自己在心理咨询的时候该说点什么，能稍微把话题带偏一下，讲个不错的故事，加个收尾，总结得漂漂亮亮的，再推过去，看着对方眼神亮起来，露出一丝微笑，或者听我自嘲一下。我心里就会冒出一句：你不是来这儿的，你在演。你又在“演 Chris 了”，带着一点手势和光环那种感觉。

纳瓦尔：我也有自己的版本。你有播客版的 Chris，我有播客嘉宾版的 Naval。很多时候，我脑子里刚冒出个点子，觉得挺有意思的，想着发推或者写下来，但我脑子里的场景是：我在播客上讲这事儿。就好像我潜意识默认这就是表达的方式。

一开始我以为这是个问题，我试图摆脱“播客版 Naval”，后来我才明白——这就是我表达自己的方式，那就接纳它好了。

你知道我为什么上你这节目吗？我已经很久没正式接受访谈了，哪怕是排名前十、前二十的播客。可能是从 Rogan 之后吧？

克里斯：应该是从 Rogan 那次之后。你是在巅峰时隐退，对吧？

纳瓦尔：现在还在巅峰（笑）。我后来和 Tim Ferriss 做过几期，但那更像是一起主持节目，不是被采访。我还偶尔参与过一些杂七杂八的播客，都是凑巧碰上的，但没有像今天这样。我这次是主动找你来的。

我收到很多播客的邀请，基本都没回。但你这，我是自己联系你的，原因其实挺好笑的：因为我脑子里那个“播客 Naval”的画面，对面坐着的那个人，不知为何就是你。我真的不知道为什么，也不是说我看了你很多播客，可能刷到过几个片段，但就是不知道为啥，我脑子里你就是那个对话的人。所以我就想，那干脆来一次吧。

克里斯：我好奇这次会不会让这个印象消失，还是让它更加根深蒂固。说不定你以后更难摆脱了——原来只是个幻想，现在是现实加幻想的混合体。

纳瓦尔：我其实还挺愧疚的，因为我拒绝了那么多人，说我不上播客。但我大概应该去补上那些对话，只是怕自己讲的都是老话题，让人觉得没意思了。

Conversations vs. Interviews

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, I appreciate you. You’d said on Rogan, and this was something to kind of pay it back to you, I had a five-headed Mount Rushmore of guests before I started this show, and it was Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Alain de Botton from the School of Life, you, and Rogan, and that was my hydra of a Mount Rushmore.

And I knew someone had asked you at some point, maybe it was a tweet or something after Rogan, or maybe even said it on Rogan where you said, I don’t like to say the same thing twice, at least not in the same way. I don’t like sequels.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah. Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And I really, really respected that. You know, that was 2019. You said it was eight or nine years ago.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I have a terrible memory. Yeah. You’re right. 2019, right before COVID.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And, I really appreciated that, because there is something in the content game you can continue to sort of—I’m sure I’ll have said many things today that the audience will have already heard. But, caring enough about having novel insights or at least having a new perspective on similar insights. In the space of six years since you were on Joe, the first thing I said to you today was, I’m not convinced I actually fully agree with that thing that I used to say, which is cool. Right? That’s you showing that the position that you put in the ground previously is not a tether. It’s not you being held to it anymore.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I think the reason why I wanted to be on this is because for some reason I have the impression that you engage in conversations, and I like conversations. I don’t like interviews. This is why I was doing my last startup Air Chat, which was all about conversations, and conversations to me are more genuine. They’re more authentic. There’s a give and take, there’s a back and forth, there’s a genuine curiosity.

It’s not to say the other podcasters don’t do it, they absolutely do do it, but for some reason in my mind, I had you as the guy that I would actually have a conversation with, and sure enough, you just read me your essay, which I don’t think anybody else would really do, right? That implies there’s a give and take, there’s a genuine curiosity, and I think that’s useful, because then, certain inexplicit knowledge that I had will be surfaced for myself, and I think that’s helpful.

对话 vs. 采访

克里斯：我真的很感谢你今天来。你曾在 Rogan 那次说过一件事，我特别记得。我在开始做播客前，心里有一个“五头的总统山”嘉宾名单——Jordan Peterson、Sam Harris、Alain de Botton、你，还有 Rogan。这就是我心目中的神团。

有人问过你，也许是 Rogan 的节目里，也可能是你发的推文，你当时说过：“我不喜欢重复说同样的东西，尤其是以同样的方式。我不喜欢做续集。”

纳瓦尔：对，有印象。

克里斯：我非常欣赏你说的这点。那是 2019 年，你说已经是八九年前的观点了。

纳瓦尔：我记性差，应该是 2019，对，疫情前。

克里斯：我真的很佩服这个态度。内容创作这件事，确实很容易滑进“复制粘贴”的惯性里。我今天肯定也讲了很多观众听过的内容，但我一直很在意要有新的洞察，哪怕是对旧观点有新的视角。你看，今天我们开始聊的第一个话题，就是我发现自己已经不再完全认同以前说过的一些话了。这种变化其实很酷，对吧？这说明你曾经的观点并不是个“锚”，不是个你被拴住的东西。

纳瓦尔：我之所以想来上你这期节目，是因为我一直觉得你是在“对话”，而不是“采访”。这也是我当时做 Air Chat 那个项目的初衷——我觉得“对话”更真实，更有生命力。它是有来有回的，是好奇驱动的，是彼此在探索。

当然，也有很多播客确实在做深度交流，但不知为何，我脑海里一直把你当作那个能“对话”的人。你刚刚念了一段你写的文章给我听，我想不会有太多播客主持人会这么做。这就说明这是一种互动，是一种真诚的探索。而这种互动，能把我心里一些原本模糊的认知给勾出来，对我自己来说，也是种收获。

Finding Resonance in Others

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, you’re seeing, to kind of break the fourth wall a bit, you’re seeing very much of some of the gateway drug insights that you had that you just don’t get to choose. I’m aware that you kind of have an anti-guru sentiment in you, like a very strong, like, don’t listen to me. I don’t know what I’m doing.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Guru is a trap. Do not follow me. Do not bow to me. Do not do any of the other things to me.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But, if you see resonance in another person, and I think this is what we’re all trying to find. People can complain about the mountains of content creation that happens, and maybe rightly so. But if you’re able to find someone and you see in them a little bit of you, maybe not even much of you, but like, oh, that bit of them, their self-esteem or the way they look at relationships or what they want to do, the kind of life they want or the level of peace of mind that they want to have. If you find in somebody else a little bit of that, it’s kind of like what you’re saying before. You can no longer be unconvinced of that, and it steps in and becomes a part of you.

And, yeah, you’re maybe seeing reflected back to you some percolated, very meandering insight from however long ago. Maybe in five years time, you’ll be like, you know that thing that you said about the lessons and the blah blah blah? It’s cool. That’s like synthesis.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: The reason I spend a lot of time in San Francisco is because it’s a gravitational attractor for the smartest people in the world, and despite all of the many problems the city had, because it’s mismanaged beyond belief, it does just seem to pull in the young, smart, creative people. Not just the ones who are building technology, but they’re exploring every facet of life and they’re weird and sometimes it’s repulsive and it’s bizarre, but you talk to these people and you just see a very intelligent person coming at life in a completely different way.

Putting it to the combinatorics of human DNA which are uncountable, and giving you a weird perspective that can twist your mind around, and to do that you always have to be learning. You can’t be in a guru mentality. If I’m with somebody and they’re listening to every word I say and hanging on it, that’s not interesting for me, I’m not going to learn anything. I want people who are intelligent, who will say something back that is a little different, and I may not agree with it, but it’s going to leave a mark, it’s going leave an impression. It’s going to leave an impression to the extent that both that they are correct, and that I choose to listen, and I’ll choose to listen if I don’t view myself as higher status or smarter than them.

在他人身上找到共鸣

克里斯：打破“第四面墙”来讲，你其实正展示出一种“启蒙式”的洞见：有些事情，你是没得选的。我知道你对“导师”这个角色有天然的抗拒，你骨子里有种强烈的情绪在说：“别听我的，我也不知道自己在干嘛。”

纳瓦尔：所谓“导师”，那是个陷阱。别跟着我走，别向我鞠躬，也别把我神化成什么。

克里斯：但如果你在另一个人身上，看到一丝与你产生共鸣的东西——我想这正是我们每个人都在寻找的。有人可能会抱怨现在内容泛滥，创作太多，批评得也不无道理。但如果你真能找到一个人，在他身上看见一点点你自己：也许是他对自我价值的看法，他处理关系的方式，他想要的生活，或者他所追求的那份内心的安宁……哪怕只有一点点，那也是某种“见证”——你再也无法否认那样的存在，它就这样悄悄地成为你的一部分。

也许你在我这看到的是一种沉淀很久、曲折蜿蜒才浮现出来的洞察；也许五年后你会说，“你当年说过那个什么什么的，现在我明白了。”——那就是“综合”，就是“内化”。

纳瓦尔：我之所以长期待在旧金山，是因为它像一块磁石，吸引着全世界最聪明的一群人。尽管这个城市管理混乱，问题重重，但它依然吸引着那些年轻、有创造力的头脑。不只是搞科技的，还有在探索各种人生可能性的怪人。他们有时古怪得让人退避三舍，但跟他们聊一聊，你就会发现：这是个用完全不同方式在思考世界的聪明人。

人类的DNA组合是无限的，而这些人给你一种怪异的视角，会彻底搅动你的思维。要做到这一点，你必须始终在学习。你不能抱着“我是导师”的心态。如果我身边的人只是一味听我说话，对我俯首称臣，那对我来说一点意思都没有——我学不到任何东西。我喜欢那些聪明人，他们会回敬我一句不同寻常的话，哪怕我不完全同意，但它能在我心里留下印记。这种印记之所以留下，是因为对方说的有道理，而我愿意倾听——前提是我不自认为比他更聪明或更有地位。

The Value of Authentic Relationships

NAVAL RAVIKANT: The flip side of that is I’m not really impressed by high status people. In fact, most of my friends who have gone on to become very famous or successful, the less I spend time with them. Partially because they get surrounded by an army of sycophants—it’s just hard to break through. And because I don’t want anything from them, I don’t like situations in which transactional relationships are implied.

That’s clearly a gift to people of that status, because the higher they climb up that hierarchy, the fewer people don’t want anything from them. So in that way, you want to be an even better friend. But they get surrounded by people who do want things from them and are so good at pretending they don’t, that it’s just not worth my time to try and break out from that group.

So, it does get lonely at the top, so to speak, but it’s also by choice, because it’s a champagne problem.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, you can be your own best friend too.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I am my own best friend actually, so I really do enjoy spending time with myself. The smartest people aren’t interested in appearing smart and don’t care what you think. A lot of life is not giving a shit, but a lot of the best things in life come out of that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Does this mean, sort of talking about that rote memorization masquerading as wisdom and insight thing, which I think perhaps podcasts like this will have contributed to? You hear someone like Alan Watts who’s like a painter with words—very simple, very sort of unpretentious—but if you’re intellectually curious, you only see the production of his thoughts. You don’t necessarily see the work that’s gone into the thoughts behind, so you confuse the presentation of them for the insight. Does that make sense?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Of course, yeah. A lot of my stuff is more polished. One of the funny things right before this podcast was I thought, “Oh, maybe I should go back and read my old tweets just so I remember what I said and I can articulate it well.” Then I realized that’s just performance. I would just be memorizing my own stuff to perform.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s an extra special level of hell that you’ve descended into.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Exactly, memorizing me to be more me.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Bingo.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: And I still live up to some expectations or some famous personality that I now have to become, some straight jacket that I have to put on. So, I’m having to live up to in private the things that I prefer. Pretty quickly I saw through that—it’s nonsense, and it also constrains my time and it’s just work.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think that’s your meditation practice at work there, that mindfulness gap to be like, “Yeah. There’s that thing again.”

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Exactly, hello. It’s not about changing your thoughts, it’s not about fixing your thoughts, it’s not about changing yourself, it’s just about being observant of yourself so that whatever change needs to happen will happen. You trying to change yourself is very circular—the mind trying to change the mind. The mind doesn’t like wrestling with itself. I don’t think it gets you anywhere.

真实关系的价值

纳瓦尔：反过来说，我对所谓“高地位人士”并不感冒。事实上，我很多朋友后来变得非常有名、有成就了，我反而跟他们来往得更少了。一方面是他们身边总围着一群奉承拍马的人，很难真正接近；另一方面，我不想从他们那里得到什么，我不喜欢那种默认存在“交易”的关系。

对那些身居高位的人来说，这其实是一种“礼物”：越往上爬，身边真正不图回报的人越少。所以，作为朋友，你更应该真诚。但问题在于，他们身边总是有人装得滴水不漏，仿佛毫无所求——你就很难穿透那层假象，根本不值得花时间。

所以，“高处不胜寒”这句话没错。但有时候那也是自己选的，算是一种“香槟式烦恼”。

克里斯：是啊，你也可以成为你自己的好朋友。

纳瓦尔：我确实是我自己最好的朋友。我真的很享受独处。最聪明的人往往不在乎自己看起来是否聪明，也不在意你怎么评价他们。人生的很多美好，其实来自于“不在意”。

克里斯：这是不是也跟你之前提到的“背诵式的伪智慧”有关？就像很多播客其实也助长了这个趋势。比如你听艾伦·瓦兹讲话，他就像个语言画家，讲得特别简洁而不造作。但如果你只是知识猎奇者，你看到的只是他表达出来的部分，却没意识到那些话背后积累了多少思考，于是你就把“表达本身”误当成了“洞察”。你懂我的意思吗？

纳瓦尔：当然。我很多内容都经过打磨。其实刚来录这个播客时我还想过：“要不我回去翻翻以前发的推文，好记住我说过什么，这样就能讲得更顺。”但后来我意识到，那只是“表演”。我是在背自己的台词来演自己。

克里斯：那你已经走到“自我表演的地狱”深处了。

纳瓦尔：对啊，背诵“我”来变得更像“我”。

克里斯：精准命中。

纳瓦尔：然后我还要活成某种“公众人物”的样子，好像得套上那身“人格紧身衣”。我很快就看穿了：这全是胡扯。这不仅在束缚我，也消耗我的时间，本质上就是一份苦差事。

克里斯：我觉得这就体现了你的冥想功夫，有那个“觉察的间隙”，能看清：“哦，又来了。”

纳瓦尔：正是如此，哈喽～冥想不是去“改变”你的想法，不是去“修正”你自己，而只是学会观察。只有当你能看到自己真正的样子，改变才有可能自然发生。如果你试图用思维去改变思维，那就是“绕圈子”。思维本身不喜欢跟自己搏斗，那根本不会有结果。

The Best Ways to Spend Wealth

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’ve spent a lot of time either creating wealth or thinking about how to create wealth. What have you learned are the best places to spend wealth?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I actually think Elon had this one figured out, which is he plowed his own money back into his own businesses to go and do bigger and better things for humanity.

You could give it to nonprofits, but a lot of nonprofits are grifty, or it’s people who didn’t earn it trying to spend it, or they don’t have tight feedback loops on having a good effect. One of the things I want to do as an aside is I want to create a little school for young physicists, but that’s my nonprofit thing. I’ve actually underwritten media and some physics stuff. I don’t like to talk about my so-called philanthropy, because I think that makes it less real, that makes it more status oriented.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Like less philanthropic.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, exactly. Then people look at how charitable my charity is, and people also come hunting for money, so there’s all that disease. I don’t believe in giving to schools—they have enough money. Ivy Leagues have enough money and they don’t know how to spend it.

I think the best use of money is creating a product for people that they voluntarily buy and they get value out of. In that sense, I think Steve Jobs and Elon and entrepreneurs like that have created a lot of value for the world. One of the things I can do is take my own money and invest it in myself to go and build the next great thing that I think needs to exist, and that’s basically what I’m doing right now. I’m doing a new business, I’m self-funding it, I’m applying a lot of money into it. I’m going to build something that I think is beautiful, that I want to see exist.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Have you spoken about this yet, or is it still dark?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: It’s so early. Maybe I’ll show it to you in a few months. Hopefully months, and I’m excited about it, and that’s a good use of money.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What about the worst places to spend wealth?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: What is the old line, if it flies, floats, fornicates?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Very nice way to change the final F. Very impressive.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Oh, that’s the way I heard it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m pretty sure it’s Felix Dennis who had that quote.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, he said, “If it flies, floats, or fornicates, rent it.” I think the last one was a little too—it’s wrong. He didn’t have a family, didn’t have kids, so he missed the big one.

But yeah, there are lots of bad ways to spend money. I believe in investment, I don’t believe in consumption. You’re born with a short housing position, you close that out, you get yourself a nice house, get yourself some help to free up your time, so you’re not doing things that other people can do better. Treat people well—always overpay and expect the best, pay them like they’re the best and then expect the best.

Overall I think a good use of money is to take risks and build things and do things that other people can’t do, align it with your own unique talents so you can keep delivering to the world. I’m not going to sit idle, I’m not going to retire, that’s a waste of whatever time I have left on this earth. If I’m doing something I enjoy, then I’m already in perpetual retirement. Because work is just a set of things you have to do that you don’t want to do. So if you want to do it, it’s not work.

There are things that I want to do that don’t feel like work. I can put money behind them and I can use that to instantiate them into reality. I don’t want to say “make the world a better place” because that’s too trite, but it’s more just create a product that I am proud of that wouldn’t exist otherwise, that other people will get tremendous value from.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And it’s been enabled through wealth because you’re able to take a level of risk that you wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Exactly, yeah. Wealth gives you freedom. It gives you freedom to explore more options, and in my case it gives me freedom to start businesses without having to ask other people for permission, or to warp my vision based on their desires to make a return, or how they think money should be made.

最值得花钱的方式

克里斯：你花了很多时间在创造财富，或者思考如何创造财富。那你觉得，最值得把钱花在哪里？

纳瓦尔：其实我觉得，埃隆·马斯克在这方面是个很好的例子——他把自己的钱继续投入到自己的事业中，用来创造更大、对人类更有益的东西。

当然你也可以捐给非营利机构，但很多非营利组织存在“骗捐”的问题，或者说是一些没真正创造财富的人，在花别人的钱，他们也没有什么反馈机制去判断事情做得好不好。我自己也有点这方面的打算，比如办一所小型的青年物理学家学校，这是我个人的公益项目吧。我也投资过一些媒体和物理相关的东西。但我不太喜欢对外谈这些“慈善”，我觉得一旦说出来，就变得不那么纯粹了，反而更像是一种“秀地位”。

克里斯：就不那么像是在“行善”了。

纳瓦尔：对，就是这个意思。一旦你公开慈善行为，别人就开始打量你到底有多慷慨，而且还会有很多人找上门来要钱，那简直就是灾难。我也不相信捐钱给大学——尤其是常春藤名校，那些学校已经有的是钱了，而且还不知道怎么好好花。

我觉得钱最好的用法，就是拿来做出别人愿意自掏腰包购买的产品。乔布斯、埃隆这种企业家，就是靠这种方式给世界带来了巨大的价值。我现在也在干类似的事，用自己的钱去做一个我觉得值得存在的新项目——完全自筹资金，全力以赴。我想做点我自己都觉得很美、很骄傲的事。

克里斯：你已经公开说过了吗？还是还在保密阶段？

纳瓦尔：现在还太早了，可能几个月之后给你看看。我挺兴奋的，这对我来说就是花钱的好方式。

克里斯：那你觉得，最差的花钱方式是什么？

纳瓦尔：那句老话怎么说来着，“只要是会飞、会漂、会……”（笑）

克里斯：你这改词改得还挺优雅的（笑）。

纳瓦尔：我听到的版本就是这样。

克里斯：应该是菲利克斯·丹尼斯说的那句，“会飞的、能漂的、能让你上头的——都该租。”

纳瓦尔：对，他是这么说的。但他最后那个观点我不认同——他没成家、没孩子，所以忽略了人生真正重要的部分。

花钱的坏方式当然很多。我相信“投资”，不相信“消费”。人生下来就“欠了一套房”，你把这笔债还清了，给自己找个好住处，雇点靠谱的人帮你处理那些别人做得比你好的事，释放你的时间。对人要好——多给点钱，把人当高手来请，才能请来真正的高手。

归根结底，我觉得钱最好的用处，是去承担别人承担不了的风险，去创造别人创造不了的东西，最好还能和你独特的天赋匹配上，那你就能持续为世界贡献价值。我不会闲着不干，也不会退休——对我来说，那是对生命最大的浪费。如果我做的事让我享受其中，那我已经处于“永恒的退休”状态了。所谓的“工作”，本质上是你不想做却不得不做的事。如果我愿意做，那它就不是工作。

有些事情我真的想做，我可以用钱把它们变成现实。我不会用“让世界更美好”这种太空泛的说法，但我想做一些我发自内心觉得值得存在的产品，它本来不会出现，却因为我而诞生，而其他人也会从中得到巨大的价值。

克里斯：而且这一切的实现，都是因为你有了财富，才有了承担这些风险的自由。

纳瓦尔：没错。财富带来自由——自由去探索不同的可能性。对我来说，它的意义在于，我可以不靠别人，不需要去讨好投资人，不必因为别人的回报预期而扭曲自己的愿景。我可以完全按照自己相信的方式，去创造。

Beyond the “How to Get Rich” Thread

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is there anything that you’d add to the “How to Get Rich” thread? Is there anything where you thought, “If I could go in and edit and add one more…”

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Oh, there’s like ten thousand things. I could talk about that topic forever, to be honest. That thread was so short, and it was so limited, and it was so crafted in a sense, although I wrote it very spontaneously. It left so much on the cutting room floor that I could just talk about that topic for days, but it’s all contextual.

Business is very, very contextual. You have to look at the particular business and understand what’s being done and why it’s being done and how it’s being done, and then you can tear it apart or reassemble it properly. I like to think that that is actually where I have specific knowledge and expertise. My specific knowledge and expertise is not in happiness and not in philosophy. Yes, my life is very hacked to be very unique, but I don’t think that’s where my specific knowledge is.

My specific knowledge is in being able to analyze a business, especially a technology business, and take it apart at the seams and predict in advance what is likely to work and what is not likely to work—Clubhouse notwithstanding, because you’re still going to be wrong most of the time. It’s like playing the lottery, but you know one or two of the ticket numbers in advance. You only have to be right a few times or even just once to get the big score.

Peter Thiel started PayPal, but he made all his money on Facebook. Now he’s done more since then obviously, but that was the big winner. That’s true in any power law distribution—number one is going to return more than two through N put together, two will return more than three through N put together. You’re operating in a highly leveraged intellectual domain, so the outcomes are going to be non-linear.

I know a lot about the topic, but it’s highly contextual. It makes a lot more sense if there’s a specific business in front of me, a specific entrepreneur, and I can take that apart. There are certain companies where I’ll say, “This is not going to work because you the entrepreneur are doing this for the wrong reasons. You’re doing A so you can get to B—just go to B. Or you’re doing this to make money when really the person who’s doing this because they love the product is going to beat you. Or you’re raising money from the wrong people who are in it for the wrong reasons. Or your co-founder is not in it for the right reasons, or you don’t have the right kind of co-founder, or your vesting schedule is wrong, or you’re starting the business in the wrong place, or you’re approaching it from this angle instead of that angle.”

Of course I’ll be wrong too, but I’ve just seen a lot of data, I have my theories around it, and that’s where I feel very comfortable operating.

The problem is when I have to talk about how to create wealth—and “how to get rich” is a clickbait title deliberately—but when I talk about how to create wealth in the abstract, it’s very difficult. You have to just say the timeless stuff, you have to be right in almost every context, and so it really limits what you can say.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The lack of specificity makes it challenging.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Correct. It’s back to philosophy, but when I can get specific about it, that’s when the real knowledge is becoming useful.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You could be like a wealth counselor for people.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, part of the reason why I started doing podcasts—and this is ego at play, so I’ll admit it freely—when I was tweeting, I kind of pioneered philosophy Twitter, or a certain kind of practical philosophy Twitter. In one hundred and forty characters I would try to say something true in an interesting way that was insightful to me at the time.

But then that got copied, there’s thousands of us now—thousands of people spitting it out, ChatGPT trying to create these things all day long. Although I like to think that my stuff is incompressible—I’m saying it in the tightest way possible, which is kind of a little failed poetry background.

What I realized was if you truly have a deep understanding of something, then you can talk about it all day long. You can re-derive everything you need from that understanding, no memorization required. You can get it from first principles, and every piece of what you know is like a Lego block that just fits in and forms a steel frame—it’s solid, it’s locked in there. So on a podcast I can unload much more deeply about some of these topics.

“如何致富”之外的那些事

克里斯： 如果你能对那条“如何致富”推文补充点什么，有没有哪一条是你现在想加进去的？

纳瓦尔： 哦，简直太多了，可能有一万条我想加进去。说实话，我可以永远聊这个话题。那条推文实在太短了，限制太多了，虽然我写得很随性，但其实经过了精心打磨，最终砍掉了太多内容。我可以围绕这个话题连续讲好几天，但前提是：一切都要看语境。

商业就是非常依赖语境。你得具体分析某个生意，理解它在做什么、为什么这么做、怎么做，然后你才能拆解它，或者重新组合。我真正的“专属知识”就是在这儿。我的专长不在幸福，也不在哲学。虽然我的人生设计得非常独特，但我不认为那部分才是我的专精。

我真正的专长，是拆解一个生意，尤其是科技类的，能从根部分析出哪些因素可能会成功，哪些不太可能成功。当然，这不代表我不会看走眼——比如 Clubhouse（语音社交平台）我也曾看错过。做投资就像买彩票，只不过你提前知道一两个号码而已。但你只需要对上那么一两次，就能赢得一次大满贯。

彼得·蒂尔创办了 PayPal，但他真正的大赚是在 Facebook 上。当然，他之后也做了很多，但那一笔才是决定性的回报。在这种“幂律分布”下，第一名的回报往往超过第二到第 N 名的总和；第二名超过第三到第 N 名的总和。你是在一个高度杠杆化的智力领域中博弈，结果一定是非线性的。

我对这个话题知道得很多，但一切都必须具体到某一个公司、某一位创业者，才能让我的知识真正派上用场。有时候我会告诉一个创业者：“你做这个项目的动机就错了。你想通过 A 去达到 B，那干嘛不直接去做 B？你一开始就为了赚钱而来，那你很可能会输给那个真心热爱产品的人。或者，你从不合适的投资人那儿拿了钱，他们进来就是为了错误的原因。又或者，你的合伙人其实没想清楚自己是否真的愿意陪你一起走下去；再或者你们的股权归属期（vesting）设计得不合理；你创业的地点错了，切入的角度也不对……”

当然我也会犯错，但我见得多了，也有一些自己的判断逻辑。这就是我真正擅长的领域。

问题是，一旦让我谈“如何创造财富”这种抽象话题——更别说那条“如何致富”其实就是标题党——我就得说些放之四海而皆准的“永恒真理”，这就让表达变得非常受限。

克里斯： 缺乏具体性，让这件事变得很难。

纳瓦尔： 没错。又变成了哲学问题。但一旦可以谈细节，那才是知识真正开始发光的时候。

克里斯： 你其实可以做一个“财富顾问”。

纳瓦尔： 哈哈，我当初开始录播客其实也有点出于“自恋”，我承认。以前我主要发推，在推特上算是开创了一种风格，叫“实用主义哲学推”吧。每一条推文 140 个字内，我都力求讲出一句我自己当时觉得真、有趣、有启发性的话。

但后来这种风格被复制了，现在满推特上都是，有上千个人在发这类内容，连 ChatGPT 也在“批量生产”这些句子。虽然我愿意相信，我写的东西是“不可压缩”的——我已经用最紧凑的方式表达了那种意义，多少也受我过去写诗的影响。

我后来意识到，如果你对某个领域真的理解很深，那你就能从头开始、一直讲下去，根本不用死记硬背。你可以从第一性原理重新推导出一切。你脑子里的每块知识就像是乐高积木，不断拼接、形成一个钢筋结构般的体系——稳固而有力。这也是为什么在播客上，我能更深入地谈论这些话题。

The Value of Understanding Over Memorization

NAVAL RAVIKANT: So for example, we can talk about any business you like, but it has to be in context, it has to be real, it has to be an actual problem, then we can solve it. I’ll just really love that heuristic of if you’re having to memorize something, it’s because you don’t understand it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You don’t understand it, that’s right.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: If you have to memorize something, it’s because you don’t understand it, and if you understand something, you don’t have to memorize it. Again, you know, just to sort of call out lot of what I tried to do, this redemption arc thing of if I sound smart, that’s like being smart.

ChatGPT has memorized the entire Internet. Good luck competing with that. You’re not going to beat the memorization. You’re not even going to beat the library of memorization. You’re going to beat any ten books in memorization, so memorization is not the thing. Understanding is the thing.

Being able to exercise judgment is the thing. Taste is the thing, and understanding judgment, taste, these come out of having real problems and then solving them and then finding the commonalities.

理解的价值，远胜于死记硬背

纳瓦尔：我们可以聊任何一个商业案例，但前提是它必须有情境、是真实的，是一个具体的问题，然后我们才能去解决它。我非常喜欢一个经验法则：当你必须死记硬背的时候，说明你并没有真正理解。

克里斯：完全正确，说明你还没理解。

纳瓦尔：对啊，如果你不得不背，那就是还没搞懂；反过来，如果你真正理解了，就根本不需要背。说白了，我一直在试图完成一种“救赎”，就是：听起来很聪明，好像就等于真的聪明。

ChatGPT 已经把整个互联网都背下来了，你想靠记忆力赢它？祝你好运。别说拼记忆力了，就连图书馆那种级别的知识储备你都比不过。所以关键不在“记得多少”，而在于“懂得多少”。

真正重要的是判断力，是品味。而判断力和品味，源于你不断遇到真实问题、解决问题、从中找出共通之处的过程。

Philosophy and Universal Truths

What is philosophy? Everyone, you live long enough, you’ll be a philosopher. Philosophy is just when you find the hidden generalizable truths among the specific experiences that you’ve had in life, and then you know how to navigate future specific experiences based on some heuristics, and you create a philosophy around that.

Any subject pursued deeply enough will eventually lead to philosophy. Mastery in anything, literally anything, will lead you to being a philosopher. You just have to stick with it long enough and generalize the truths back out, and these are universal truths. It’s back to the unity and variety. You can find unity in anything if you go deep enough.

And that’s why the trite stuff unfortunately sort of keeps coming back around, you’re like, well look, this is cliche for kind of a reason. It’s cliche for reasons, but you know, sometimes you learn new things, sometimes you do figure out new things too, even in philosophy.

For example, science has advanced, as science has advanced, it’s actually expanded our boundaries of philosophy. When we used to think that the earth was the center of the universe, you would actually have a different philosophical outlook than when you think the universe is vast and we’re infinitesimally small. It will give you a different philosophical outlook, the same way if you think that nature is driven by angels and demons and gods versus if there are laws of physics that are computable and understandable, that will lead you to a different philosophical outlook.

If you think that knowledge is something that is passed down from above and through generations versus something that is created on the fly and then tested against reality, that will lead to a different philosophical outlook. If you think humans are created by God as opposed to humans evolved from some unicellular organism, yeah, still doesn’t solve the original problem, who created that, but at least it takes you further back.

Even sim theory is an attempt at reformulating philosophy based on what we know about computers, even though it kind of leads to a lot of the same conclusions as Creator, but it is at least philosophy that is informed by technology and by science. So philosophy can also evolve.

Moral philosophy evolves, right? There was a time when every culture practically that was a conquering culture practiced slavery, now almost all cultures abhor slavery, that’s moral philosophy having evolved.

There was even like, this sounds too ludicrous to be true, and I don’t know if it fully is true, but there were a fairly large group of doctors based on studies who believed until the 1980s that babies couldn’t feel pain, and so even to this day I think circumcision is done without anesthesia, because under the theory that very young children, babies don’t feel pain, and that’s ludicrous, and there was a study that came out in the 80s that said no no they do feel pain, it’s like oh yeah of course, right?

So people can be stuck in bad philosophical traps for a long period of time, so even philosophy can make progress, and as an example, one of the realizations that I had, and this is thanks to David Deutsch and my friend James Pearson also thinking it through a little bit, is that there are these timeless old questions that we run into where the answers seem like paradoxes, so we stop thinking about them.

哲学与普遍真理

什么是哲学？活得够久，每个人终将成为哲学家。哲学，就是在你独特的人生经历中，发现那些可以被普遍化的隐藏真理，从而为未来的每一次选择，构建一套属于自己的思维准则，并据此建立起一种生活的“哲学”。

任何领域，只要深入到极致，最终都会通向哲学。对任何事情的真正精通，迟早会引导你成为一位哲学家。你所要做的，只是坚持足够长的时间，从细节中抽象出规律，把它们上升为一种普遍的真理。这正是“统一与多样”的体现——任何事物，只要挖得够深，最终都能挖出某种统一的内核。

这也是为什么很多“陈词滥调”总会不断重现。它们之所以成为老生常谈，恰恰是因为它们有一定的道理。但与此同时，哲学也并非毫无新意，它也会进步，也会涌现新的见解。

比如说，科学的发展其实拓展了哲学的疆域。过去我们以为地球是宇宙的中心，那套世界观和如今我们认知到宇宙浩瀚、人类渺小所带来的哲学观是截然不同的。同样地，当你相信自然是由天使、魔鬼、神灵主宰，和你认为世界遵循可计算、可理解的物理法则，你的哲学观也会不同。

你若认为知识是自上而下、由祖先传承而来，那你的一套哲学体系将非常不同于将知识视为不断被创造、并持续接受现实检验的那种体系。你若认为人类是由上帝创造的，和你认为人类源自单细胞生物演化而来的，虽然这两种观点都无法回答“最初的源头是谁造的”这个终极问题，但后者至少把思考推进了一步。

甚至“模拟宇宙理论”这种看似疯狂的想法，也是在试图用现代计算机知识对哲学进行重构。虽然它的结论和“有造物主”的传统观点有些相似，但它毕竟是建立在科技与科学基础上的一种新式哲学探索。可见哲学并非一成不变，它也会随着时代演进。

道德哲学也是如此。曾经，几乎所有拥有征服欲的文化都将奴隶制视为理所当然，而如今，奴隶制已被全球几乎所有文明所唾弃——这是道德哲学的进步。

甚至还有一些你可能会觉得荒谬得不可思议的观点：直到上世纪80年代，居然还有不少医生基于所谓研究相信婴儿不会感到疼痛。所以直到今天，很多地方的婴儿割礼仍不使用麻醉——因为他们认为婴儿“感觉不到”。直到80年代的一项研究明确指出婴儿会感到痛苦，大家才幡然醒悟：“当然会啊！”但在那之前，人类在这个问题上困于一场“哲学误区”之中，长达数十年。

所以说，哲学是可以进步的。而我自己也有过类似的体会，这得益于David Deutsch，以及我的朋友James Pearson的一些深入思考：我们经常面对那些永恒而古老的问题，它们的答案似乎总是矛盾的，于是我们索性放弃继续思考。但真正的进步，恰恰藏在这些看似无解的地方。

Resolving Philosophical Paradoxes

So an example is free will, do you have free will, or does anything matter, is there a meaning to life? And we get stuck in them because for example, is there a meaning to life? Like yes, life has a meaning because you’re right here, you create your own meaning, this moment has all the meaning you could imagine, it’s all the meaning there is. On the other hand you’re going die, it all goes to zero, heat, death, the universe has no meaning, right? So which one is it?

Well the reason why it seems paradoxical is because you’re asking the question of a human here now at a certain scale and a certain time, and then you’re answering it from the viewpoint of the universe over infinite time, so you pull the trick, you switch the level at which you’re answering the question, and questions should be answered at the level at which they’re asked.

So if you ask the question, is there meaning? You Chris are asking that question. Yes, yes to Chris there is meaning, there’s meaning right here, this is a meaning, you can interpret any meaning you want onto it. Don’t ask the question as Chris and then answer it as God or as the universe. That’s the trick that you’re playing. That’s why it seems paradoxical.

The same way you can say, do I have free will? People debate free will all day long. The question is answered at the wrong frame, so they ask the question, do I as an individual have free will? Hell yeah, I have free will. My mind body system can’t predict what I’m going to do next. The universe is infinitely complex. I’m making a choice in my mind and I’m doing something. There’s my free will.

So answer at the level at which you were asked, of course I have free will because I feel like I have free will and I treat you like you have free will and you treat me like I have free will, we have free will. The problem then is you start trying to answer the question as if you’re the universe, you’re like, well on the universal scale, big bang particle collisions, no one makes any choices, you know, how could you be any different than what the universe wants you to be, and it’s all one block universe, so you don’t have free will.

Don’t answer the question at the level at which it wasn’t asked. So if God asked the question, is there free will? No, there is no free will. The universe asked the question, there is no free will, but if an individual asks the question right now, then yes there is free will.

So a lot of these paradoxes resolve themselves, philosophical paradoxes that people have been struggling with since the beginning of time, when you just realize they’re you’re answering them at a scale and time different than they were asked.

破解哲学悖论

拿“自由意志”举个例子：你有自由意志吗？万事是否有意义？人生有没有意义？这些问题常常让人陷入困惑。比如“人生有没有意义？”——你可以说有啊，此刻你就活在其中，你赋予它意义，这一刻本身就蕴含了所有你能想象的意义，它已经足够丰富。可换个角度想，你终究要死，一切归于虚无，热寂降临，宇宙终将无意义。那到底哪种说法才是真的？

之所以显得矛盾，是因为你提出问题时是站在人类、此时此刻、某个具体尺度上；但回答问题时却突然跳到了宇宙、无限时间的尺度上。这是偷换了问题的层级。而哲学问题，必须在被提出的那个层级上去回答，才能得出真实的答案。

所以你问：“生命有没有意义？”——是你，Chris，在此时此刻提的问题。那当然有意义，这一刻就是意义本身，你完全可以赋予它任何你想赋予的意义。但别用“Chris”这个身份来提问，却用“上帝”或“宇宙”的视角来回答。你玩了个把戏，把问题移到了另一个维度。悖论就是这么产生的。

“自由意志”也是一样。人们总在争论个没完没了。可问题的答案本来就错放了层级。你问的是：“我有没有自由意志？”——当然有。我这个身心系统根本无法预知自己下一步会做什么。宇宙如此复杂，我的内心在做出选择，然后我付诸行动——这就是自由意志。

你问的是你自己，那当然有自由意志。你感受到它，我对你也做出有自由意志的假设，你也这样看我——这就是我们之间的自由意志。问题出在你一转头又试图用宇宙的尺度来回答这个问题。你说，大爆炸、粒子碰撞、一切都是因果必然、宇宙就是一个封闭的“块状宇宙”，根本没有什么选择的空间，那我们当然没有自由意志。

但那不是你提问的尺度！如果是“上帝”在问：有没有自由意志？答案当然是没有；宇宙问，也可以说没有。但如果是一个人——你——在此刻提出这个问题，那答案就是：有，自由意志存在。

所以许多困扰人类几千年的哲学悖论，其实都是因为我们搞混了提问和回答的层级。一旦你意识到这一点，许多所谓的“悖论”也就烟消云散了。

Changing Beliefs

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Speaking of updating beliefs, is there anything that you changed your mind around recently? Very recently? I mean, all the time. But are you talking about, like, philosophical existential things, or like technological things?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah. Philosophical existential things, or anything that comes to mind, if there’s anything that’s front of mind where you go, yeah, that’s a pretty big OS update.

I’m less laissez faire than I used to be on a societal level, I think that culture and religion are good cooperating systems for humans, and so if you want to operate in a high trust society, you need to have sets of rules that people need to follow and obey, so they get along even if they’re, you know, one size fits all doesn’t work for everybody.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s moved up a little bit from libertarian?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, I mean, pure libertarians get outcompeted and die. Why? They get overrun because they’re every man for himself.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They can’t coordinate.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: They can’t coordinate, exactly right. So, the coordination problems, like culture exists to solve fundamental coordination problems, religion solves coordination problems, ethnicity solves coordination problems historically, and when you break down those coordination systems too fast and don’t replace them with anything else, you get societal breakdown, so you can have very malfunctioning societies.

You know, go to Japan versus go to any western city and you can see the difference being a culture that’s working and a culture that’s not. So I think that that’s like a broader set of things that I’ve changed my mind on a fair bit. I used to be much more laissez faire on that stuff, let’s put it that way.

What else? I mean, on child raising, I’ve gotten a lot looser, you know, I’m still not like completely laissez faire, but I’m much more realized like kids are going to be kids and you kind of let them do their thing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’ve gone to- Debate with them. Is it Talib that has the ascending levels of like anarchism versus conservatism, is that his insight? Like, the local level, I’m this.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: That’s right. It seems like you’ve gone the other way. It’s like, at the child level, I’m an anarchist. At the societal level, I’m a conservative.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: No, he was quoting somebody else, some brothers, I forget which ones, but he was making the point eloquently as he often does, that at the family local level, he’s a communist. At the family level, you’re a communist. At maybe the extended family level, you’re a socialist. At the local level, you know, you’re kind of a Democrat and so on, until at the federal level you’re a libertarian.

You’ve done it the other way, you know, being a libertarian with the kids and you’re being a religious conservative at societal level. That’s a way of looking at it. Don’t know if the scale is that simple.

改变信念

克里斯：说到更新信念，你最近有没有改变看法的事情？我指的是最近发生的，哪怕是刚刚？

纳瓦尔：有啊，其实我经常会有。你是指那种哲学性的、存在层面的改变，还是技术层面的？

克里斯：哲学性或存在层面的，如果你最近有什么特别在意的，像是一次“操作系统级别”的更新。

纳瓦尔：我现在在社会层面上，已经不像以前那么放任自流了。我开始认为文化和宗教，其实是人类协作的有效系统。如果你想要一个高信任的社会，就必须有一套大家共同遵守的规则，这样即便每个人不一样，社会也能运转良好。而“统一尺寸”这种一刀切的做法，并不适合每一个人。

克里斯：所以你从自由意志主义的立场上，稍微往上调了一点？

纳瓦尔：可以这么说吧。毕竟，纯粹的自由意志主义者是会被淘汰掉的。为什么？因为他们被碾压了——各自为政，没有协作。

克里斯：他们协调不了。

纳瓦尔：对，协调不了，正是问题所在。文化的存在，本质上就是为了解决根本的协调难题。宗教解决协调问题，族群认同解决协调问题。如果你把这些系统拆解得太快、又没拿新的东西来替代，那结果就是社会瓦解，变得极度失序。你去日本看看，再对比一下任何一个西方城市，你就能感受到什么叫“一个在运作的文化”与“一个失灵的文化”之间的差别。这一整套理解，是我这几年改变最大的地方之一。我以前对这些是完全不管的。

还有嘛，比如在养育孩子方面，我也比以前宽松很多。虽然还称不上完全放任，但我更能接受“孩子就是孩子”，他们得有自己的成长路径。

克里斯：所以你在家庭教育层面变得更像个无政府主义者了？塔勒布是不是也提到过类似的层级？他是不是说在不同层级上，我们的政治倾向也不同？

纳瓦尔：对，他提到过。好像那是他引用别人的话，我记不得是哪对兄弟说的。他的意思很有意思：在家庭内部，你是个共产主义者；在亲友圈层面，你是个社会主义者；到了地方社区，你是个民主党派；到了国家层面，你就变成自由意志主义者了。

你现在好像反过来了——你在家庭里是个自由派，在社会层面反倒变得像保守主义者了。这也是一种有趣的视角。当然，这个层级划分也许没有那么绝对。

Thoughts on AI

What else do I change my mind on? I think the modern AI is really cool, I think it’s, but I think these are natural language computers. They’re starting to show evidence of kind of reasoning at some levels, but I don’t think they do creativity.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: One of my favorite takes is from Dwarkash Patel, and he says, if you gave any human on the planet 0.00001 percent of the consumption that LLM has, any LLM, they would have come up with thousands of new ideas.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Right. Give me one new idea. One fundamental new idea. Just being generated. Yeah, like I’m big into poetry, every poem ever written by an LM is garbage, I think even their fiction writing is terrible, even the new GPT-four zero five, with all due respect to Sam and crew, I think they’re terrible writers.

I find them really bad at summarizing, they’re really good at extrapolating, you know, paperwork, they’re very bad at actually distilling the essence of something and what’s important, they don’t have opinions or a point of view, but they’re still unbelievably powerful breakthroughs.

They solve search, they solve natural language computing, they make English a programming language, they solve driving, they solve simple coding and backup coding, they solve translation, they solve transcription, they are a fundamental breakthrough in computing, is a different way to program a computer rather than you explicitly speak its language and write the code and then run the data through it. You just run enough data through it until it figures out how to write the program, that’s huge, but are they AGI? Not yet, and I don’t see a direct path from here to there, maybe we’ll have to solve a few more problems before that happens, and I think ASI is a fantasy, don’t think there’s any such thing as artificial super intelligence, where it has some kind of intelligence that humans can’t fathom.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay. Yeah. It seems like, I don’t know, if you’re from the Bostrom camp or whatever.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: No. I’m not an AI doomer. I think that’s such a flawed line of reasoning.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But let’s say that, you know, you came out of the lesswrong.com, like, slate star codec world, and there was this sort of lineage from computers and AI gets more powerful, more powerful, more powerful, and then you end up AGI, ASI.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: ASI, yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And it seems like LLMs have been this sort of orthogonal move from that, which are you saying you don’t believe they are a step on that?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah. I think it’s a different branch. I think Stephen Wolfram puts it better. It’s a different form of intelligence. It’s like if you see a jaguar in the jungle, it has a different form of intelligence, you’re like a plant has a form of intelligence, how it can like photosynthesize and grow, it’s a different form of intelligence.

And intelligence again, like love or like happiness, this overloaded word that means many things to many people, but by my definition, where, you know, the true test is you get what you want out of life, it doesn’t even have a life, it doesn’t even want anything, it’s different.

I do think it’s unbelievably useful, I’m glad that it exists. You don’t see it much yet in large scale production systems replacing humans because of the tendency to hallucinate, so you can’t put it into anything mission critical.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Confidently wrong one time out of ten.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Correct. And it doesn’t even know when it’s wrong, and maybe they’ll get that one out of ten down to one out of a hundred, but you kind of always want human oversight for critical things. I always feel so bitter. I’m petty sometimes.

关于AI的思考

我还有什么观点在变化呢？我觉得现代AI真的很酷，它基本上就是自然语言计算机。它们开始在某些层面上表现出推理能力的迹象，但我不认为它们具备创造力。

克里斯：我特别喜欢Dwarkash Patel的一个观点。他说，如果你给地球上任何一个人相当于大型语言模型0.00001%的训练量，他们早就想出了成千上万的新点子了。

纳瓦尔：没错。那你给我一个新点子。一个真正全新的、根本性的创意。真的诞生出来的那种。比如我自己很喜欢诗歌，但我觉得所有由语言模型写出的诗都是垃圾；他们写的小说也一样糟糕。就连最新的GPT-4.5也一样，尽管我对Sam他们团队很尊重，但说实话，他们训练出来的模型写得真的很烂。

我觉得它们在总结方面做得也不好——更擅长的是“推演”：比如处理文书、生成合约这种，它们特别在行。但要它们提炼出事情的本质、指出最重要的部分，它们就不行了。它们没有观点、没有立场。但即便如此，它们仍然是极其强大的突破。

它们解决了搜索问题，解决了自然语言计算问题，它们让英语变成了一种编程语言；它们解决了自动驾驶、解决了简单编程与代码补全、解决了翻译、解决了转录……它们是计算机领域的一次基础性突破。它们改变了我们编程的方式：不是你写程序、输入数据，而是你把足够多的数据喂给它，让它自己学会如何写程序。这太惊人了。

但这算AGI吗？还不算。我也看不出现在这条路直接通向AGI。我们可能还要先解决一些更本质的问题。而至于ASI（人工超级智能），我觉得那是幻想，我不相信存在什么“人类无法理解的超智能”。

克里斯：你可能不太认同像Bostrom那样的观点？

纳瓦尔：对，我不是那种AI末日论者，我觉得那种推理方式有严重缺陷。

克里斯：但如果你从lesswrong.com或者slate star codex那种社区出来，大家都有一条清晰的逻辑链：AI会越来越强，然后进入AGI阶段，最终发展到ASI。

纳瓦尔：对，ASI。

克里斯：而LLM（大语言模型）似乎像是偏离那条路径的一种“正交分支”？你是觉得它根本不属于那条进化线？

纳瓦尔：是的，我觉得这是另一种进化路径。Stephen Wolfram说得更好，它是一种完全不同形式的智能。就像你在丛林里看到一只美洲豹，那是另一种智能；一株植物能够进行光合作用并自主生长，那也是一种智能。

“智能”这个词，本身就像“爱”或“幸福”一样，是个被滥用的词，不同人对它的理解千差万别。而在我看来，真正的智能，是你能够从人生中获得你想要的东西——而AI甚至没有“人生”，它也没有“想要”任何东西，所以它是完全不同的存在。

我确实认为它无比有用，我也很高兴它存在。但你现在还不会看到它在大规模生产系统中真正取代人类，因为它还是会“胡说八道”（hallucinate），所以不能用于任何关键任务。

克里斯：每十次就会自信满满地错一次。

纳瓦尔：对，而且它自己根本不知道自己错了。即使他们未来能把错误率从十分之一降到百分之一，你在关键任务上也总会希望有人类来监督。我有时候确实挺小心眼的，会感到不甘心。

The Future of AI and Self-Driving Cars

NAVAL RAVIKANT: My less equanimous version of me is petty, and I always want to teach it a lesson if it gets something wrong. I’m anthropomorphizing it, but it doesn’t have a point of view. They are going to get a lot better, and they might get to the point where the error rates are so low that you can put them into certain bounded problems.

Self-driving will be solved completely because it’s a bounded problem. Cars don’t go off-road and drive through houses and stuff like that. The creative side of coding doesn’t go away. If anything, programmers get even more leveraged and more powerful, and rather than computing replacing programmers, programmers use AI to replace everybody else.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: On Tesla versus Waymo, would you bet on software or hardware for self-driving?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I think Tesla’s in the stronger longer-term position, but it’s hard to argue with what’s working right now and Waymo is working right now. I would not underestimate them because there’s a learning curve that you go through when you actually deploy something, and Waymo is way ahead in that regard.

Tesla’s camera-only approach, if it works, is superior—it’s much more scalable, and Tesla knows how to print cars. They can mass manufacture cars. But I think they’ll both be around, they’ll both be fine. It’s everybody else who doesn’t have a self-driving vehicle that’s screwed.

关于AI与自动驾驶的未来

纳瓦尔：我有时候不那么平和，会带点小报复心理，总想“教它（AI）一点教训”——当然，我这是在拟人化它。因为它本质上没有观点、没有自我意识。但AI确实会越来越强大，或许有朝一日，它的出错率低到可以放心地应用在某些“边界清晰”的任务上。

比如自动驾驶，这个问题终将被完全解决，因为它本身就是一个边界清晰的问题。 车子不会去越野、不会冲进房子这种不可预测的场景。至于编程里的创造性部分，并不会因此消失，反而是程序员的影响力被AI进一步放大了。不是计算机取代程序员，而是程序员利用AI取代其他所有人。

克里斯：那你怎么看特斯拉和Waymo之争？自动驾驶最终是软件胜出还是硬件胜出？

纳瓦尔：从长远来看我更看好特斯拉，但就眼下而言，Waymo确实跑通了。我不会低估他们，因为“实际落地”这一步是有学习曲线的，Waymo在这方面遥遥领先。

特斯拉的纯视觉方案如果跑得通，那就无敌了，扩展性更强，而且特斯拉能量产——他们会造车，这是很大的优势。我觉得未来两个都会存活得很好，真正麻烦的是那些连自动驾驶影子都没有的公司。

Declining Fertility Rates

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You mentioned kids there, and you had a tweet that said, “I’m not convinced that declining fertility needs to be proactively fought.”

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Well, think back—thirty years ago, twenty years ago, everybody was saying overpopulation of the earth is going to be a problem, Malthusian ending, we’re going to have too many people. And all of a sudden we’re going to have too few people.

Part of it is just the doomerism meme is always alive and well. It just gets repackaged. We’re running out of oil, we have too much oil. The world is cooling, the world is warming. There’s always something to scream about—the world is ending, there’s no progress in technology, AI is going to blow up the world. People tend to overdo in both directions.

What is the actual fertility problem? People are having fewer kids because they’re choosing to have fewer kids. Women have gotten emancipation, independence in the workforce, they’re making more money. People don’t need kids as insurance policies. Maybe they’re living hedonistic lives—God bless them—they want to have more fun, they want to have fewer kids. I don’t see the act of choosing to have fewer kids as a problem.

Let’s move one level up. It’s because of retirees. A large percentage of the population is essentially retiring at the guaranteed age of sixty-five or seventy thanks to social security, and they need other people to pay for it. They need more workers, and if the workforce is shrinking, then you have a small number of people who are supporting a large number of retirees. In democracies, you can’t take pensions away—the voters vote you out—so this slowly strangles the economy.

So what do you do? You have a bunch of immigration, and then the whole culture changes. You end up in a low-trust society, and people start fighting over limited resources, and how do you control which immigrants come in, and how do you make sure that they’re good taxpayers after they’re in?

You end up in this trap where the low fertility rate is upstream of the downstream problems that are cultural and societal, but I’m not sure that you’re going to solve that by making people have more kids. How are you going to meme them into having more kids? I’m not even sure it’s necessarily a problem, because you have more resources now, you have less of a burden.

There’s a flip side where every kid is a lottery ticket for invention, so there’s some benefit to having more kids, but you can’t force it. I think it’ll work itself out. Scott Adams has this great law which he calls the Adams law of slow-moving disasters: when disasters are very slow-moving, like peak oil or global warming or population collapse, and everyone can see them coming, economics and society are forced to solve them, because enough individual people have incentives to go solve them.

I don’t know exactly how it gets solved, but I think it could get solved in various ways. Maybe people retire later, maybe AI and automation and robots take care of the older people, maybe we figure out how to have immigrants while still keeping a high-trust society, maybe we outsource more things, maybe we just have more land and housing to go around.

Believe me, if we were having too many kids, everybody would be complaining about how there’s no housing and there’s no land. So they’ll always find something to care about. I just don’t view this as something that any individual or government action is going to solve. I think economics and incentives over time will solve it, and I’m not even convinced it’s that big of a problem.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is there anything that you do think—

NAVAL RAVIKANT: It may be self-correcting too. If there are too few kids in society, the returns to having kids literally might just go up. It might just be easier to have incentive to now have a child because there’s so few around. They’re going to get the best job opportunities, resources.

You could come at it from a pain side, which is you look at all of the other people around who don’t have kids. Let’s say that pensions completely drop off and the only way that old people are able to survive is if their children pay them some sort of stipends. Well, that’s a pretty good incentive.

I also think that people have been memed into thinking that kids make your life worse, and that’s pretty bad.

关于生育率下降

克里斯：你之前发过一条推文，说你并不认为需要“积极对抗”生育率下降的问题。

纳瓦尔：是啊，想想看——三十年前、二十年前，大家还在大喊地球人口过多，末日将至，马尔萨斯式崩塌指日可待。现在忽然又变成“人口太少”了。

某种程度上，这就是“末日叙事”的新一轮换皮。我们快没石油了——哦不，我们石油太多了。地球在变冷——哦不，它在变暖。总有点什么可以惊叫——“世界要毁灭啦”，“科技停滞了”，“AI要统治人类了”。人类总是倾向于走极端。

那生育问题到底是什么？很简单，人们之所以不愿意生孩子，是因为他们自己做了这个选择。女性获得了自由与经济独立，有了工作收入，不再需要孩子作为“养老保险”。有些人就是想过得更开心一点，享受生活，少点家庭负担。说实话，我不觉得这是个问题。

如果你往上跳一个层面，核心其实是养老系统。现在大量人口会在65或70岁退休，靠养老金生活，而养老金是后辈缴税养着的。如果劳动力在减少，那就是少数年轻人要养活一大群老年人。在民主社会里你不可能砍养老金，否则你就被选民赶下台——于是整个经济系统慢慢被掐住了喉咙。

那怎么办？只好靠移民，但随之而来的又是文化冲突、社会信任度降低。移民来了，你怎么筛选？怎么确保他们能成为好公民、好纳税人？这一系列“下游问题”的上游，其实就是生育率。

但我也不认为“让人多生孩子”就是解决办法。你怎么“洗脑”大家去多生？我甚至不确定这算不算“问题”，因为少点人口也意味着人均资源更多、负担更轻。

当然啦，反过来说，每个孩子都有可能带来一项新发明——这一面确实存在，但你不能强求。总的来说，我觉得这事儿会自我修复。Scott Adams 有个理论叫“缓慢灾难法则”：凡是能提前预见的慢性灾难，比如石油枯竭、气候变化、人口萎缩，只要足够多人有足够的动力，市场和社会最终都会逼出解决方案。

我不知道最后的答案是什么，但我能想象很多方向：比如人们退休得更晚，或者AI和机器人来照顾老人，或者我们搞清楚怎么引入移民却不打破高信任社会结构，又或者住房和土地更多、更便宜等等。

你看，如果现在大家都在疯狂生孩子，那大家就会开始抱怨“房子不够、地也不够”。总有点什么让人焦虑。但我不认为这是靠个体或政府能解决的事，最终还是要靠经济和激励机制慢慢自然演化，我甚至怀疑这压根是不是个大问题。

克里斯：那你有什么觉得真的是问题的吗？

纳瓦尔：这件事可能是自我修复的。假如社会里孩子越来越稀缺，那生孩子的“回报”自然就会提升——孩子更容易找到好工作、获得更多资源。也许你甚至会因为痛苦倒逼：比如养老金彻底崩了，老人必须靠孩子养活自己——这就是最真实的激励。

还有一点，我们这代人真的被“洗脑”了，觉得孩子会毁掉你的生活，而我觉得这其实挺可悲的。

The Joy of Parenthood

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s your experience been?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Kids make your life better in every possible way. If you want an automatic built-in meaning to life, have kids.

I think there are these bad psych studies, like most psych studies unfortunately, that say that people are unhappy when they have kids. It’s because you’re catching them in the middle of changing a diaper and you’re saying, “Are you glad you had kids or not?” Or they don’t even say that, they say, “Are you happy or not?” And they say, “No, I’m not happy right now.”

But what they don’t realize is that person has found something more important than being happy in the moment—they found meaning, and the meaning comes from kids. If you ask parents, “Do you regret having kids?” I think it would be ninety-nine to one. It would be, “No, I don’t regret having kids. I love having kids. I’m so glad I had kids.” It’s incredibly rare to meet a parent that regretted having children.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s pretty good odds.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: It’s extremely good odds. I think a lot of people get late into life and then they can admit that they should have had kids, but it’s kind of late in the game.

A lot of times you see everybody who has a pet, and they’re pushing them around in a stroller. What is that? That’s a sublimated desire for children.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Malcolm Collins says that having a pet is to children as using porn is to sex. He basically thinks that it’s sort of a surrogate.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: It’s definitely in that direction. I like pets, I like animals, but I don’t like the idea of neutering or spaying something and then keeping it as a prisoner in the house and having to train it. I don’t want to be responsible for that.

关于为人父母的喜悦

克里斯：你自己的体验是怎样的？

纳瓦尔：孩子会以各种方式让你的生活变得更好。如果你想要一种“自带意义”的人生，那就去生孩子吧。

有很多心理学研究——就像大多数心理学研究一样，质量堪忧——说什么有了孩子的人更不幸福。可问题是，你去采访一个正在换尿布的父母，然后问他“你现在开心吗？”他当然说不开心。

但他们没有意识到，这些父母已经找到了比“此刻的快乐”更重要的东西——他们找到了意义。而这种意义，正是来自孩子的。如果你问父母：“你后悔生孩子吗？”我敢打赌，99比1的结果是“不，我不后悔。我太爱他们了，我太庆幸自己有了孩子。” 真正后悔当父母的人极少极少。

克里斯：这概率真的挺不错的。

纳瓦尔：不只是“不错”，简直是惊人。很多人要到人生后期才会承认自己其实应该要孩子的，但那时候已经太晚了。

你看街上那么多人推着宠物车，把猫猫狗狗当孩子一样照顾——那是什么？那就是对孩子渴望的一种替代。

克里斯：Malcolm Collins说，养宠物之于孩子，就像看色情片之于性生活——一种替代而非本质。

纳瓦尔：完全是这个方向。我也喜欢宠物、喜欢动物，但我不喜欢把它们绝育、关在屋里、训练它们听话的那一套。我不想承担那种“主人”的责任。

Parenting Philosophy

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Given that you’ve been thinking more about child-rearing, what do you hope that your kids learn from their childhood?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: They just be happy and do what they want. I don’t have particular goals in mind for them. I think that’s another route to unhappiness.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s different though, right, than learn versus goals. It’s not necessarily what do they want. What do you want them to want out of life? Like, you had that idea around your number one job as a parent is to provide unconditional love to your kids.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah. So I want my kids to feel unconditionally loved, and I want them to have high self-esteem as a consequence of that. But I don’t get to choose anything—all I get to choose is my output. I can output love, I can’t choose what they feel, I can’t choose how they behave, I can’t choose what they want, I can’t choose what they turn out to be.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And downstream from that, there should be freedom, there should be a degree of freedom that comes from the self-esteem, that comes from the unconditional love.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, they should make their own mistakes and learn their own lessons and have their own desires and fulfill them as is appropriate. Like any parent, I wouldn’t want them to be hurt, wouldn’t want them to be unhappy, but I cannot control these things.

关于育儿的理念

克里斯：你这几年对育儿也思考了不少，你希望孩子从童年中学到什么？

纳瓦尔：我只希望他们能快乐，做自己想做的事。我对他们没有任何具体目标，因为那只会带来不幸福。

克里斯：但“学到什么”跟“人生目标”还不完全一样吧。比如，你希望他们从小获得什么样的价值观？你以前说过，父母最重要的职责，是给予孩子无条件的爱。

纳瓦尔：对，我希望我的孩子能感受到无条件的爱，并且因此拥有健康的自尊。但我只能控制“我付出什么”，我无法控制他们“感受到什么”、也无法决定他们“想要什么”、“变成什么样的人”。

克里斯：那从这个基础出发，他们应该也能获得更多自由，去探索自己的欲望和人生。

纳瓦尔：是的，他们要犯自己的错，学自己的教训，追求自己的梦想。就像任何父母，我当然不希望他们受伤或不开心，但这些事情我没法掌控。

Parenting Practices and Science

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You replied to my friend Rob Henderson, he was talking about how kids fall asleep more quickly when they’re being carried, and you said “cry it out and co-sleeping is dangerous. What’s IYI science?”

NAVAL RAVIKANT: IYI is from Nassim Taleb, it’s “intellectual yet idiot.” These are people who are over-educated, and they deny basic common sense. There’s a lot of that that goes on in child-rearing, thanks to really bad studies and bad public medical directives.

For example, a few parents—maybe they’re drunk or they’re high or they have other issues—and they roll over their kid when they’re sleeping, the kid suffocates, or they neglect their kid. Because of that they say, “Well, don’t co-sleep with your kids.”

Well, kids in every society through all of human history co-slept with their parents. Where else do you think they were sleeping? There weren’t houses with multiple rooms. We’ll put them in the other tent? It’s just nonsense. Co-sleeping has been around since the dawn of time.

So has feeding kids cow milk or goat milk when breast milk runs out or is not available. Yet we’re told formula with soy and corn syrup, which was invented recently, is somehow better than cow milk, and cow milk can be dangerous for your kids, and co-sleeping is dangerous for your kids, and cry it out is the right answer. All of that is nonsense.

It’s very clear that we raised children throughout human history without these interventions. To me, the idea that you’re going to let your kid cry it out—I get why that’s done for practical reasons, so that you can get some sleep and you can go to work in the morning—but the reality is when you let the kid cry it out, you’re letting the kid bawl until it finally gives up.

A kid left by itself to cry it out in the paleolithic wilderness is going to get eaten by a tiger. So this kid is starting off on the wrong foundation. The one I mentioned earlier about the idea that babies don’t feel pain—that’s ludicrous.

关于育儿方式与科学

克里斯：你有一次回复我朋友Rob Henderson的帖子，他说孩子在被抱着时会更快入睡。你回说“哭到睡”和“分房睡”其实很危险。你当时还说“IYI科学”很扯，啥是IYI？

纳瓦尔：“IYI”是Nassim Taleb发明的词，意思是“Intellectual Yet Idiot”——“受过高等教育的蠢人”。他们一肚子知识，却连最基本的常识都否认。在育儿领域，这种现象特别严重，归根结底是一些糟糕的研究和误导性的公共医学建议惹的祸。

比如，有个别父母可能是醉了、嗑药了，睡觉时不小心压到了婴儿，导致窒息死亡。于是公共卫生机构就一刀切地说：“不要跟孩子同床睡。”

问题是，全世界几乎所有文化里，父母和孩子从来都是睡在一起的。你以为古代人会把婴儿安排在另一间屋子里？另一顶帐篷？这简直是天方夜谭。“共睡”从人类文明诞生之初就存在。

再比如，过去母乳喂完之后，自然过渡到牛奶或羊奶。但现在却说牛奶不安全，要喂由大豆和玉米糖浆做成的奶粉——这些都是现代工业才有的东西。他们甚至还说“哭到睡”“才是正确的方法”。这完全是胡说八道。

人类几千年来从没用这些现代产品，孩子不也照样长大？你说“让孩子哭到睡”，我理解，现实中很多父母要上班，需要睡觉。但实质上你是在告诉孩子：“你一个人哭吧，没人来救你。”他哭到最后只是放弃了希望。

你要是把婴儿独自扔在旧石器时代的荒野里，他哭一会儿可能就被老虎吃掉了。所以让孩子一开始就建立在这种“无人回应”的基础上，是很糟糕的。还有人说“婴儿不会感到疼痛”——这更是荒唐至极。

The Dangers of Intellectual Yet Idiot Beliefs

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve never heard that before, it’s such a wild idea.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, I’m not saying that’s one hundred percent true. I read it on Twitter, and I did one level confirmation on it, but it’s so ludicrous that I should probably do two or three level confirmations before I talk about it. But there are definitely some people who believe that, enough that it was a thing in certain circles for a while.

I think we just go through these IYI beliefs, these intellectually yet idiot beliefs come from people who take a little bit of knowledge and extrapolate it too far. They think we know more than we know due to recent scientific studies, and these are junk science. These are low power studies on very certain contexts that then get over applied. Behavioral psychology is very guilty of this, but it’s true across a lot of science.

So even with science you have to be skeptical. You have to look very carefully at whether it applies in the right context, if it comes from good sources, if they ran enough high-powered studies, if it’s widely accepted.

There are a whole bunch of things you’re just not supposed to talk about. You can’t say anything negative about vaccines because God forbid, what if they don’t get the polio vaccine, right? And that’s part of the reason why the recent vaccine debate happened, because we’ve taken our worship for vaccines too far.

The same way there’s this whole SIDS thing, sudden infant death syndrome. It’s like, no, kids don’t suddenly mysteriously die. More likely there was neglect or there was a problem, and then whoever was the caretaker doesn’t want to admit to the problem or didn’t recognize the problem, but kids don’t just spontaneously die in the crib.

关于“知识分子式愚蠢”（Intellectual Yet Idiot）的危险

克里斯：我从没听过这种说法，太离奇了。

纳瓦尔：我也不是说这百分百靠谱。我是在Twitter上看到的，只简单查证了一下就说出来了——它太荒谬了，我本该多做几轮确认再提。但的确有人相信这种东西，而且在某些圈子里还风行过一阵。

我们这个时代，真的充满了这种“IYI信念”（Intellectual Yet Idiot，受过高等教育的愚人信念）。这种信念来自一群人，他们懂一点知识，就胡乱外推。他们自以为靠着几项“新近科研成果”就掌握了真理，而实际上那些研究不过是“垃圾科学”。往往是样本很小、语境很窄的研究，然后却被过度泛化应用。行为心理学尤其常见这种问题，但在很多领域都存在。

所以即使是科学，我们也要保持怀疑精神。你得仔细判断这研究是不是适用于当下的语境、它的来源是否可信、有没有足够多的高质量实验、是否在学界广泛被接受。

现在有很多“禁区”，比如你不能说疫苗的坏话，因为大家怕你这么一说，别人连小儿麻痹疫苗都不打了。正因为这种“神圣化”疫苗的风气，才导致了最近疫苗相关的巨大争议。

再比如“婴儿猝死综合征”（SIDS）。主流说法是：婴儿会莫名其妙地死掉。但更可能的情况是：有人疏忽了，或者发生了某种意外，而照顾者不愿承认，或根本没意识到问题所在。婴儿不会无缘无故就死在婴儿床上。

Parenting and Natural Instincts

NAVAL RAVIKANT: They talk about swaddling babies. You swaddle babies, basically tie them up, mummify them, so you constrict them so they don’t die of SIDS where they roll over and they can’t get back. I mean, it’s just all this craziness around child raising. It’s a real minefield.

You have these scared parents, they’re having a kid for the first time and they open a book and they start reading how to raise children, and I would argue that your natural instincts on what to do with your child are actually pretty good.

It’s funny when my wife and I had our first baby, I remember at the hospital, first one was a natural birth at the birthing center, we went home and it was like, “there you go, that’s it,” and we’re like, “what do we do?”

Where’s the instruction manual? You take them home, and then you relax and you realize, actually instincts are pretty good. If the kid cries, check to see if they’re clean, feed them, all that. Your basic instincts are actually very, very good, and kids’ instincts are actually very, very good. They know what they want and they want things for a reason.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And they can encourage you to give to them?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yes, it’s usually children are not deficient adults who can’t reason, and to some extent that’s true, but mostly it’s not true. Mostly they have very good reasons for what they want, and you as a parent mostly have communication problems with them. They can’t yet communicate to you, you can’t communicate to them.

So early on with my kids, I tried to focus on teaching them explanatory theories and of course having them memorize is just the most frivolous solution. I’ll give you a very simple example.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: So, this is Twitter. And this is the “how to get rich without getting lucky” thread. So, first one.

关于育儿与本能

纳瓦尔：比如把婴儿裹紧、用襁褓“束缚”起来，说是为了防止SIDS（翻身窒息），这类育儿建议简直满天飞。整个育儿领域简直像踩地雷。

新手爸妈往往吓坏了，第一胎刚出生，就开始狂读各种“育儿圣经”。但我认为，你内心的育儿本能，其实比你想象的好太多了。

我还记得，第一胎是在自然产中心生的。我们一回到家，心里就想：“现在怎么办？孩子怎么养？”我们甚至还在想：“有没有说明书？”然后你慢慢放松下来，会发现，其实一切都没那么复杂。孩子哭了？那就看看是不是该换尿布、是不是饿了。父母的本能，其实非常可靠；孩子的本能，也一样。他们知道自己要什么，而他们之所以要，是有原因的。

克里斯：而且他们还知道怎么引导你去满足他们。

纳瓦尔：是的。我们总以为孩子是“没发育好的成年人”，不会讲理——虽然某种程度上这没错，但大多数时候并非如此。他们很多“想要”的东西，都是有充分理由的。只是你们之间沟通障碍太大：你听不懂他们、他们也还说不清楚。

所以我在孩子很小的时候，就开始有意识地引导他们形成解释型思维。我从不鼓励死记硬背——那是最肤浅的“学习方式”。我举个简单例子：

Teaching Children to Think

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Well, a simple one is, you know, how does knowledge get created? If you follow the critical rationalism David Deutsch philosophy, then it’s by guessing and then by testing your guesses. So, whenever they ask me something like, “well, do you think that is?” I’ll say, “Well how would we figure out if that’s true?” So that’s a basic game you can play.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Involving them.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Involving them, but another one is that a lot of the rules that you teach kids have to do with hygiene. You must brush your teeth, cover your mouth when you cough, clean up after yourself, don’t touch that, wash your hands after you do this, don’t eat food off the floor. But all of these are subsumed under the germ theory of disease.

So if you instead go on YouTube and show them videos of germs, or if you have them look under a microscope at anything, they’re like, “ah!” They can infer what’s going on. There’s creepy crawlies everywhere and I got to watch out for them.

关于如何教孩子“思考”

纳瓦尔：比如，知识是怎么产生的？如果你熟悉David Deutsch的“批判性理性主义”，你会知道：知识来自于猜测与检验。所以当孩子问我，“你觉得是这样吗？”我不会直接给答案，而是说：“那我们怎么知道它是真的？” 这其实就是一种小游戏。

克里斯：把他们也带进思考的过程。

纳瓦尔：对。再比如我们教孩子的很多规则，其实都跟“卫生习惯”有关：要刷牙、咳嗽要捂嘴、饭后要收拾、别乱摸东西、上完厕所要洗手、地上的东西不能吃……但这一切，其实都可以统一归因于“病菌理论”。

所以与其硬性规定，不如带他们去看一段YouTube视频，了解细菌的存在，甚至带他们看显微镜下的东西。他们会一下子明白：“哇，这世界到处都是微生物，原来我必须小心点！” 这种通过直观感受形成的理解，远比死记规则有用得多。

The Red Queen Hypothesis and Pathogens

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Then you can talk about how, if you look at humans, our real enemy are pathogens. I think a lot of aging and disease are actually downstream of our competition with pathogens over time, to a point that people still don’t fully appreciate.

There’s a red queen hypothesis which is that we undergo sexual selection to mix up our genes, so every twenty years, every generation we mix up our genes. But if you look at how bacteria and viruses mutate through just random mutations, their mix-up rate on their genes and evolution rate is roughly the same as ours, even though they go through thousands of generations in those twenty years.

Because they’re not doing sexual selection, they’re doing asexual replication and mutation, their evolutionary rate is roughly equivalent to ours. So we’re in a red queen race where we’re both running at roughly the same speed using very different strategies.

A lot of how we’ve evolved is around pathogens. Our immune system is one of the most expensive things to run in the body, so much is about immune system optimization.

Junk DNA in bacteria and CRISPR was discovered because in bacteria their DNA is evolved to fight viruses. The way it does that is by taking viral DNA and snipping it up every time there’s a viral attack and storing it in their own DNA so they have a copy so they can recognize it next time it attacks.

关于“红皇后假说”与病原体的演化博弈

纳瓦尔：如果你认真观察人类，你会发现我们真正的敌人其实是病原体。我认为，人类的很多衰老和疾病，其实都源自我们与病原体长期对抗的结果，只是现在的人还没有完全意识到这一点。

有一个理论叫红皇后假说（Red Queen Hypothesis），意思是我们之所以会进行有性繁殖，是为了不断“混合基因”——每一代人，基因都会被重新组合。为什么要这么做？为了在进化竞赛中不断更新、应对环境变化。

而细菌和病毒不需要性繁殖。它们通过无性复制和高频变异，在二十年间可以经历几千代，它们的基因重组和进化速度，竟然与我们相当。所以我们和它们其实在进行一场“等速但路径不同”的演化竞赛。我们混基因，它们突变。我们生一代，它们千变万化。这就是红皇后竞赛——不停奔跑，只为留在原地。

人类的很多进化，其实都是为了应对病原体。我们的免疫系统，是全身最“昂贵”的系统之一，消耗巨大。我们有这么多免疫机制，就是为了“防病”这场持久战。

比如CRISPR，最早是在细菌体内发现的。它是怎么工作的？细菌每次遭遇病毒攻击时，就会把病毒DNA剪下来、存进自己的基因库里，下一次病毒再来时，它就能识别并对抗。这就是细菌对抗病毒的“免疫记忆”。

Population Structure and Lifespan

NAVAL RAVIKANT: A lot of the population structure of species determines how long their lifespans are. If in a given species there’s a very high rate of infection, then the older members of the population are carrying diseases that will then infect the young, so it’s important for that species to get rid of the old faster. So the higher the disease rate in a given population, the less long-lived the entire population, so the older ones don’t infect the younger ones.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh that’s a hypothesis.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: It’s an interesting hypothesis. Homeostasis within the human body, how we’re always returning to a given level of things, that’s a fundamental part of our makeup – our temperature, pH, blood pressure and so on under homeostasis.

But if you engage in any kind of signaling, like you take a peptide for example, that’s a signaling molecule, you take a hormone externally, the body will counteract it. You take testosterone, the body will counteract it, it will down-regulate its own production very fast, and the body releases its own hormones in pulses rather than steady state.

物种结构、寿命与传染病的关联

纳瓦尔：一个物种的“群体结构”很大程度上决定了它的寿命。如果某个群体的传染病发病率很高，那老年个体就可能携带病毒并传染年轻个体。那这个物种的演化策略就是：尽快让老的个体“退出”，以保护年轻的个体。所以，传染病越严重的群体，平均寿命可能越短。

克里斯：这是个很有趣的假设。

纳瓦尔：是啊。人体还有一种机制叫“体内稳态”（homeostasis），也就是身体会维持某种“平衡状态”——像体温、pH值、血压等等，都会自动调整回正常范围。

但如果你用外部手段刺激它，比如吃某种激素或肽类物质（这类物质会触发信号传导），身体会迅速做出反应。比如你补充睾酮，身体就会马上降低自身的睾酮分泌。我们体内的激素，都是脉冲式释放的，而不是恒定缓慢的释放。

Why Our Bodies Use Hormone Pulses

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Why is that? Well that’s because bacteria and viruses can infect your body and trick your body, they can take it over. Toxoplasmosis does this, rabies does this, they take over macroscopic structural bodies. Small bacteria and viruses would hack our bodies and literally take them over if we didn’t have defense mechanisms, and one of those defense mechanisms is homeostasis.

Anytime you see something getting out of whack, you immediately push back really hard on it because did I just get infected? Is something trying to take me over?

It’s also why hormones get released in pulses at night rather than in steady state low levels. Enemy bacteria can release toxins or the same signaling molecules in small quantities, but they can’t pulse, they can’t coordinate to pulse. Your body can coordinate to pulse as a macroscopic object, but microscopic objects can’t coordinate to create the same pulses.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, that’s cool.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: So you know that it’s coming from you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is that why?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Correct, you know it’s endogenous rather than exogenous.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I never knew that.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: And that’s why we resist a lot of exogenous treatments, a lot of our medical treatments don’t work.

为什么人体喜欢“脉冲式激素释放”？

纳瓦尔：为什么激素要“脉冲式释放”？这其实也是一种防御机制。如果你被细菌或病毒感染了，它们可能会释放某些信号分子，来“欺骗”你的身体。像弓形虫（toxoplasmosis）、狂犬病毒（rabies）就会劫持宿主行为。

如果我们不具备这些“异常反应”的机制，病毒和细菌可能就能完全接管我们的身体。而“脉冲释放”是一种安全机制：只有我们自己能协调得这么精准地“集中发射”，而微生物做不到。

所以，当身体检测到某种激素浓度异常稳定，就会怀疑：“我是不是被入侵了？” 然后马上反向调节，恢复平衡。

克里斯：这也太酷了。

纳瓦尔：对啊，你就能知道这种信号是“自己产生的”，而不是“外来的”。

克里斯：原来是这样啊。

纳瓦尔：正因如此，很多外源性治疗方案效果不佳——身体会本能地“抵抗外来的干预”。

Bacteria and Viruses as Our Natural Predators

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Anyway, there’s a bunch more I could go on, but you see this in cancers where a lot of bacteria show up. The Epstein-Barr virus shows up in a lot of cancers. Now it seems like the gut microbiome influences so many things.

Basically, bacteria and viruses are at the top of the food chain compared to us. We are top of the well-known food chain, but bacteria and viruses eat us, fungus eats us. These microscopic predators are our natural predators.

So a lot of aging, societal structure, hygiene, religious strictures against pork, circumcision, all of these things are designed to resist bacteria and viruses. So if you can teach children this philosophy at an early age, you shortcut all the debates.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How effective have you been at teaching that philosophy to children?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: That one I think I’ve been pretty effective, I’ve drilled that one at home. The one I haven’t quite gotten around to yet is evolution. I’m starting to do little bits of that, like we came from monkeys, what does that mean? Already got them thinking about some of the deeper questions.

细菌与病毒才是食物链顶端的“猎手”

纳瓦尔：如果你去看癌症相关研究，会发现很多细菌的踪影，比如Epstein-Barr病毒几乎在各种癌症中都能看到。现在研究表明，肠道菌群（microbiome）对我们影响巨大，几乎无所不在。

从某种意义上说，细菌和病毒才是“真正的顶级捕食者”。 我们人类在已知生物链里居于顶端，但我们会被细菌、病毒、真菌慢慢吞噬。它们才是我们的“自然捕食者”。

所以我们的人类文明，很多东西——比如衰老机制、社会结构、卫生规范、甚至宗教里的饮食禁忌，比如不吃猪肉、割礼——本质上都是为了防御这些微观猎手。

如果你能从小教孩子理解这套“病原体主导论”的世界观，很多教育问题都能迎刃而解。

克里斯：你成功把这套理念教给孩子了吗？

纳瓦尔：这一点我做得不错，基本已经内化给他们了。但关于“进化”这部分，我才刚刚开始，比如我们从猴子进化而来，孩子们开始会问：“那是什么意思？”算是刚开始引导他们思考这些更深层次的问题。

Philosophical Questions for Children

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I did ask my young son, “can nothing exist?” I thought that was a fun question, so I like to throw a fun question.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How old is he now? Like four, three?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: No, no, he’s eight.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, right.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: An eight-year-old and a six-year-old. I asked them both like, “can nothing exist?” And they had pretty good answers. Another one we played with the other day was like, “what is the matrix?”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: You know, what is this? What is all this? I just find it entertaining. It’s just fun to talk about these questions with your kids.

I’m not saying that one is a good way of child raising. It’s not leading to any deeper learning.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Other than maybe just have them start, or continue to question the basic structure of reality, and not move past it so quickly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Also, take joy, you know, what’s the meta lesson that’s being taught there? Dad spends time asking questions to which there are not necessarily an answer, because there is something enjoyable in the process of learning and trying to decipher what’s happening.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Possibly. Also, dad tries not too hard to teach people things. I don’t want to be didactic.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He helps them to arrive at…

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, correct. Dad is here to help you solve problems when you have problems, and you constantly have problems. So if you come to dad, dad can help explain to you how he would solve the problem, but most of the time they don’t want that. Most of the time they just want me to solve the problem.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right, okay.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: So sometimes I just have to play dumb. It’s like, “why is my Wi-Fi not working on my computer?” I’m like, “I don’t know, did you try turning on that thing?”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Look, you’ve got like a rebellious sovereign child, sovereign as they may be, but sometimes they still need…

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah. Dad to step in.

关于孩子的哲学提问

纳瓦尔：有一次我问我儿子：“‘虚无’可以存在吗？”我觉得这是个很有趣的问题，时不时我就会丢出这种“趣味哲问”。

克里斯：他多大了？三四岁？

纳瓦尔：不，他已经八岁了。我们家有一个八岁的，一个六岁的。我把这个问题也问了他们俩：“虚无能存在吗？”他们的回答还挺不错的。前几天我们还聊了另一个问题：“什么是矩阵（The Matrix）？”

克里斯：噢，这个可以。

纳瓦尔：你知道的，就是“这一切到底是什么？”我觉得和孩子聊这种问题特别有意思，很好玩。

我不是说这就是最佳的育儿方式，也没指望它能带来多深的学习。

克里斯：是，但它可能带来的潜移默化是什么？比如：爸爸会花时间和你聊那些没有标准答案的问题，因为探索、思考、试图理解这个世界的过程，本身就是一种乐趣。

纳瓦尔：也许是这样吧。而且爸爸也不是那种非要灌输什么道理的人，我不想太说教。

克里斯：你是在引导他们自己去得出答案……

纳瓦尔：对，爸爸在你有问题时会陪你一起解决问题。但说实话，大多数时候他们并不想我引导，他们就想让我直接帮他们搞定。

克里斯：哈哈，明白。

纳瓦尔：所以有时候我也只能“装傻”。比如他们问我：“爸爸，为什么我的电脑Wi-Fi连不上了？”我就回答：“我也不知道啊，你试试按一下那个按钮？”……

克里斯：你这是养出一个“主权意识很强”的孩子啊，但无论再怎么独立，有时候还是需要爸爸出手。

纳瓦尔：没错，爸爸还是得顶上。

Preserving Agency in Children

NAVAL RAVIKANT: So in addition to feeling loved and having high self-esteem, I think the most important trait that would be nice to not rob them of is agency. I want them to preserve their agency. They’re born naturally agentic and willful, but a lot of child raising can beat that out of them by essentially domesticating them.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s right.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: And I would rather have wild animals and wolves than have well-trained dogs, because I’m not going to be around to take care of them.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, so they’re going to have to be able to look after themselves.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Exactly. A friend of mine, Parsa on Air Chat, he had a great saying. He said he wants his children to be quick to learn and hard to kill. That was pretty good.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

关于保护孩子的自主性（agency）

纳瓦尔：除了“被爱”和“自尊”，我最希望孩子能保有的品质是自主性（agency）。孩子天生是有主见、有意志力的，但很多育儿方式会把他们驯化掉，把他们的野性打磨成乖顺。

克里斯：对，社会化的过程常常就是压制自我。

纳瓦尔：我宁愿养一只野狼，也不想养一条听话的狗。因为我不可能一直在他们身边，他们终究要靠自己活下去。

克里斯：他们得自己扛得住这个世界。

纳瓦尔：是的。我有个朋友Parsa在Air Chat上说了一句特别棒的话：“我希望我的孩子能学得快，又难以被摧毁（quick to learn, hard to kill）。” 这句话太赞了。

克里斯：简直金句。

The Culture War

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I remember you saying, just thinking about sort of future and culture and stuff like that, I remember you saying that the left had won the culture war, now they’re just driving around shooting the survivors. After the last six months of change that we’ve seen and sort of where we’re at at the moment, what do you think the future of the culture war looks like?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: It’s not over yet. They definitely won earlier rounds, they took over institutions. I think now it’s much more of a fair fight, where you have people like Elon supporting different forces.

Through history, historians will argue about this, but there’s the “great man of history” thing, where it’s like, oh you have the Einsteins, you have the Teslas, you have the Genghis Khans and the Caesars. They determine the flow of history.

And then there’s the other point of view that no, there are these massive forces at play – demographics and geography and so on, and then the particular great man doesn’t matter, they just come and go. Napoleon doesn’t matter, there would have been somebody else, the specific names are not important.

Because of the leftist turn that our institutions took in the last few decades, they now only subscribe to the great forces theory of history, not the great man theory of history. But I think now we’re seeing the two play out, where you’re seeing Trump and Elon and other individuals rising up and saying, “no, we resist.”

关于文化战争的未来

克里斯：我记得你之前说过一句很有意思的话，说“左派已经赢得了文化战争，现在他们只是在扫射幸存者”。但过去半年我们又看到了很多变化——你现在怎么看文化战争的未来走向？

纳瓦尔：这场战争还没结束。左派确实赢下了前几轮，占领了不少体制和机构。但现在战况变得更平衡了，有像Elon这样的人站出来支持另一边的力量。

在历史学界，有一个争论是关于“伟人史观”还是“结构史观”。前者认为是爱因斯坦、特斯拉、成吉思汗、凯撒这些人推动了历史进程；而后者认为，真正推动历史的是更大的结构性力量——比如地理、人口、经济等，个人只是这些浪潮中的泡沫。拿破仑不重要，因为总会有另一个拿破仑。

过去几十年，受左派影响较大的机构更倾向于后者——结构决定论。但现在我们重新看到了“个人的力量”，比如特朗普、马斯克这些人，他们站出来说：“不，我们要反抗。”

The Battle Between Collectivism and Individualism

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, that’s interesting. And I think that unfortunately, the battle between these collectivist forces versus individuals is as old as humanity itself, and it is fundamental to the species. We are not a completely individualistic species—no man is an island, a single person can’t do anything by themselves—but we’re also not a borg, we’re not a beehive, we’re not an ant colony, we’re not all just drones marching along. So which is it? We’re somewhere in the middle, and the human race is always kind of bouncing between the two.

We like strong leaders, we like to be led, we like to coordinate our forces and do things, but at the same time we’re also all individuals willing to break away and do our own thing. Everyone’s always fighting to be a leader, there’s always status games going on, so there’s a pendulum that’s always swinging back and forth. In modern economics, the way that manifests is between sort of Marxism and capitalism.

Marxism is like “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.” We’re all equal, there’s a millennial project, we’re all going to be equal in the end. Don’t try and stand out, but do what’s good for everybody. There’s a religious aspect to it.

Then the capitalist individualist is like a libertarian—every man for himself. You each do what you want and it will work out for the greater good. That’s Adam Smith, the invisible hand of the market will feed you. The baker should bake and the butcher should butcher and the candlestick makers should make candlesticks, and it’ll all work out. Each person does their best and they trade.

So which is it? Which theory is correct? I think there’s always going to be a battle between the two.

集体主义 vs. 个体主义：永恒的摇摆

纳瓦尔：更深层来看，其实这场文化战反映的是人类社会从来没有解决过的一个古老矛盾：个体与集体之间的冲突。

我们不是完全的个体主义物种——一个人无法独自生存。但我们也不是“博格人”、不是蚁群——我们不是没有自我、只知道服从的蜂巢生物。

我们在两者之间来回摇摆：我们渴望领袖，也渴望自由；我们愿意协同作战，也愿意独立出走；我们总是在争夺领导权，也不断在打“地位游戏”。

现代经济学里，这个矛盾体现在：马克思主义 vs. 资本主义。

马克思主义说：“各尽所能，按需分配。”每个人都平等，不要出风头，一切为了集体，有一种宗教式的乌托邦愿景。而资本主义讲的是“每个人为自己负责”，自由市场的“看不见的手”会自动协调所有人的利益。你做你擅长的事，通过交换实现共赢。

哪一个更正确？现实中，这场博弈永远不会停止。

The Modern Power of the Individual

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I think the interesting thing is what’s going on now—there’s a modern flavor to it which changes it. The modern flavor is that the individual is getting more powerful because they’re becoming more leveraged. Someone like an Elon Musk can have the leverage of tens of thousands of brilliant engineers and producers working for him. He can have factories of robots manufacturing things, he can have hundreds of billions of dollars of capital behind him, and he can project himself through media to hundreds of millions of people.

That is more power than any individual could have had historically, so the great men of history are becoming greater. That said, that same leverage is increasing the gap between the haves and have-nots. In the wealth game, more people are winning overall and the average is going up, but in the status game, there are essentially more losers—there are more invisible men and women who are getting nothing out of life and have no leverage, relatively speaking.

Objectively speaking, they might be better off—they still have phones and they still have TVs. It’s not that we’re absolute creatures. We’re relative creatures.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: And so to the extent that we’re relative creatures, there are more losers than winners, and in a democracy, those people will outnumber the winners and they will vote the winners down.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep.

“个体”的现代化与超级杠杆

纳瓦尔：但在当下，这场博弈又多了一层“现代化”的味道：个体正在变得前所未有的强大。

比如Elon Musk，靠着科技和资本的杠杆，他一个人可以调动成千上万的工程师、机器人工厂、上千亿的资本，还能借助媒体影响全球数亿人。这种杠杆，是历史上任何一个“伟人”都不曾拥有过的。

所以“伟人”正变得比以往更伟大。

但与此同时，这种杠杆效应也拉大了人与人之间的差距。在财富游戏中，确实越来越多的人“赢了”，整体生活水平上升了；但在地位游戏里，“失败者”却变得更多。那些没有影响力、没有杠杆的人，在这个社会里变得越来越“透明”。

客观上讲，他们可能比几十年前富裕很多，有手机、有电视、有热水。但问题是：人类不是“绝对感觉”的动物，而是“相对比较”的动物。

克里斯：没错。

纳瓦尔：而从“相对”角度看，现在的失败者比成功者要多得多。而在民主制度下，人数占多数的一方可以用选票来“拉下”那少数的赢家。

克里斯：是啊。

Power and Democracy

NAVAL RAVIKANT: And so that’s the battle that kind of goes on. The democracy has gotten very broad, and so one of my other quips is that it’s not the right to vote that gives you power, it’s power that gives you the right to vote. We’ve confused the two.

What happened was, voting started as a way for people who had power to divide up the power and not fight amongst themselves. The winners of the revolution, the winners of the war, the people in the House of Lords and the House of Commons—they divide up power amongst themselves and say, “Hey, we have all the money, we have the power, we are the knights, we have the swords, we have the warriors, we could kill everybody, but we don’t want to just fight each other all day long. We don’t have to be Game of Thrones forever, so we’re going to divide up power by voting amongst ourselves.”

But then as society goes on and becomes more and more peaceful, that franchise for voting gets spread. It gets spread to people who don’t have land, who don’t have power, who may not be able to inflict physical violence. Eventually you get to the point where everybody’s voting. Everybody’s voting for candy and fairies and all the free things in life. Then eventually people start voting to oppress each other—the fifty-one percent in any domain vote to suppress the forty-nine. Tyranny of the majority.

But not all of them are willing to back that up with physical power, and so you can end up in a situation where people who don’t have physical power are using the institutions of the state to control the people who do have physical power.

As a simple example, taking the United States—people who don’t have guns voting to disarm the people that do have guns. Well, if the people who do have guns get coordinated and care enough, you can’t do that.

关于权力与民主

纳瓦尔：我们现在所看到的社会斗争，其实本质上是权力分配的问题。民主如今已经变得非常广泛，而我曾经说过一句话：“赋予你投票权的不是权利，而是权力本身。”我们把两者混淆了。

投票最初是什么？是那些手握权力的人之间的一种“和平分赃”机制——比如打赢战争的贵族、掌握资源的领主、下议院与上议院的代表们。他们不想天天互相厮杀，于是说：“我们都有财富、有军队、有骑士、有刀剑。我们彼此能干掉对方，但不如别再过《权力的游戏》式生活了，大家坐下来，通过投票分配权力吧。”

可随着社会变得越来越和平，这种投票权也开始不断“扩散”，从有产者扩展到无产者，从掌权者扩展到普通人，甚至是完全不具备实际权力的人。结果呢？人人都有投票权了，大家开始投票要糖果、要精灵、要免费的美好生活。

更糟的是，一旦大多数人可以投票，“多数的暴政”就会出现。51%的人可以合法地压迫49%。而这些人可能并没有“背后的暴力能力”，他们只是用国家机器去压制那些实际上握有力量的人。

举个简单例子：美国有一群没有枪的人，投票通过法律，要没收有枪者的枪。但如果那些真正有枪、有组织的人不答应，这种法律根本推不动。

The Foundation of Power

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I think eventually these societal structures are unstable. They break down because eventually the people who have the power say, “No, wait a minute, you don’t get to vote. You only got to vote because you had power, and now you don’t have power and you’re somehow trying to vote.”

All of nature, all of society, all of capitalism, all of human endeavors are underpinned by physical violence, and that is a very hard truth to swallow and hard to get away from.

Nature is red in tooth and claw. If you don’t fight, you don’t survive, you don’t live—you die. That’s true of everything alive today, and humans are no different. So giving up physical power and then thinking you can exercise political power fails, which is why every communist revolution, which is all about equality and kumbaya and brothers and sisters, ends up being run by a bunch of thugs. Because if you don’t have a way to divide up the wealth based on merit, then it’s always going to be based on power and influence. The thugs with the guns always win in the end.

So the question is just, can you keep the thugs with the guns paid and happy in a successful society where you’re allocating based on merit? Because if you can’t, then you do it based on power. I do think that this battle is not over, but that’s because it never stopped. It’s always been there from day one, it will continue.

权力的根基：暴力与生存

纳瓦尔：所以说，这种结构最终是不稳定的。因为真正掌握权力的人会意识到：“等等，你之所以能投票，是因为你曾经有权力。现在你没权力了，却还想主导局势？”

这是个令人不愿面对、但无法回避的真相：
自然、社会、资本主义，人类的一切秩序，其底层其实都建立在“物理暴力”的威胁之上。

“自然血淋淋、利齿利爪”，你不斗争就无法生存，这对所有生命体都成立，人类也不例外。你放弃了武力，再妄想单靠制度维系政治权力，是站不住脚的。

所以每一次的“共产主义革命”，最初都打着平等博爱的旗号，最后却必然是一群持枪的暴徒控制了国家。因为当你无法用“才能”来分配资源时，最后只能用“力量”来分。

所以问题并不是能不能避免暴力，而是：你能不能在一个有 merit（才能、贡献）导向的社会里，让掌握暴力的人也愿意服从这个游戏？如果不能，那游戏就会崩盘，重新回到丛林规则。

这场斗争从未停止过，自人类诞生起就存在，也会一直存在下去。

Navigating News Saturation

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is it a battle to not care about the news in an age of news saturation? All of this stuff—headlines twenty-four hours a day stream directly into your consciousness through a device in your pocket. A lot of what we’ve spoken about today is freedom—freedom from having to think about things or care about things that you do not have control over or that you shouldn’t or that you don’t want to. Yet people are just submerged up to the bottom of their nostrils, basically drowning in worry. So is it a battle to sort of stay out of the news when you’re saturated in it?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, I mean, as you’re saying, the human brain has not evolved to handle all the world’s emergencies breaking in real time, and you can’t care about everything, and you’ll go insane if you try. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care at all—there’s no “should.” If you want to care, go ahead and care.

I would just say that you’re probably better off only caring about things that are local, or things that you can affect. If you really care about something that’s in the news, then by all means care about it, but make a difference—go do something about it. Make sure that it’s your overwhelming desire and you don’t have five other desires at the same time.

Also, realize the consequences of it—you’re going to be unhappy until that thing gets fixed, and that thing will often be out of your control.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep, desire is a contract to be unhappy until you get what you want.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Exactly. For the most part, that’s something that is in your life, it’s like, “until I lose the weight,” “until I get the job.” It can be outside too.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: If it’s “until the carbon dioxide parts per million are below this particular number,” that’s a tough one. Or all the people with Trump derangement syndrome—he’s living rent-free in their heads and driving them insane. I get it. There are politicians who have definitely driven me insane as well, but it comes at a very high cost, and it’s something that is out of your control that you cannot really influence, so it’s probably good to at least be conscious of it.

如何在信息过载中保持自由

克里斯：那换个角度，在这个信息泛滥的时代，不去关注新闻、保持内心自由，是不是也成了一场“战斗”？我们口袋里的手机24小时推送新闻，信息直接冲进我们的大脑，很多人基本已经被焦虑淹没到了鼻尖。

我们今天谈了很多“自由”——包括从不必要的关注中解放出来。但人们就是沉溺在无止境的担忧中。那我们该如何抵抗这种“新闻洪流”？

纳瓦尔：你说得对。人类大脑根本没进化到能同时处理全世界的紧急事件。你不可能关心所有事，否则你会疯掉。

这并不是说你不该关心任何事，而是要有选择地关心。如果你真的对某件事在意，那就全力以赴——但请确保你不是同时在意五件其他事。

而且你要知道：当你开始在意某件事，你也“签下了一份痛苦的契约”——你将会持续不快乐，直到它被解决为止。而那件事，往往根本不在你的掌控之中。

克里斯：对，欲望其实是一份“你不会快乐，直到愿望实现”的契约。

纳瓦尔：没错。很多时候你会说：“我得先瘦下来我才能快乐”、“我得拿到那份工作”……当然也可以延伸到外部：“等全球碳排放降到某个数值”。可问题是，那种愿望几乎永远不会实现。

就像有些人被“特朗普焦虑症”困扰，他在他们脑海里长期免费租住，活活把他们逼疯。我理解，有些政客也曾让我抓狂。但这种情绪的代价非常高，尤其是当你明知道你无法影响它的时候。

所以，哪怕你决定去在意，也请清醒地知道：这是一种选择，也是一种牺牲。

What Will Historians Study?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You mentioned historians before. One of my friends has a question. His equivalent of Peter Thiel’s question of “what is it that you believe that most people would disagree with?” His is, “what do you think is currently ignored by the media but will be studied by historians?”

NAVAL RAVIKANT: You’re asking me that question right now? What do I think is ignored by the media but will be studied by historians? Well, the media is only focused on very timely things, right, so it depends if you want to talk about timely or timeless.

As a simple example, if I just look at things that maybe in the next five or ten years are going to make a massive difference that people are not focused enough on—and I think within two years this will be obvious, so I’m not making a prediction. Predictions are tough.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And you’re going to have to eat it in a few years.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, I’m going to eat this in a few years, so I’m probably wrong, but two things that I pay attention to that I don’t think a lot of people do pay attention to:

未来历史学家会研究什么？

克里斯：你刚才提到了“历史学家”。我有个朋友喜欢问一个问题，跟Peter Thiel那个“你相信什么而大多数人不相信”的问题有点像。他的问题是：“现在媒体普遍忽略的事情，将来会被历史学家认真研究的，会是什么？”

纳瓦尔：你现在就要我回答这个问题？我认为媒体忽略、但历史学家未来会研究的是什么？这个问题取决于你是在问“及时的”事件，还是“永恒的”议题。因为媒体总是聚焦于眼下最热的东西。

不过我可以举两个简单的例子——它们可能在未来五到十年内带来巨大影响，但目前却没有得到足够关注。其实可能两年之内大家就会意识到它们的重要性了，所以我也不算是在“预测”，因为预测这事儿向来很难。

克里斯：而且几年后你还得为这些话买单。

纳瓦尔：对啊，到时候可能打脸了。但目前我关注的两件事，我觉得大众还没太关注：

The State of Modern Medicine

NAVAL RAVIKANT: One is I think just how bad modern medicine is. I think people just put a lot more faith in modern medicine than is warranted. Like our best ideas for a lot of things are surgery, just cutting things out, treating things that are “extraneous”—like “oh you don’t really need a gallbladder, don’t really need an appendix, you don’t really need tonsils, all that’s surplus requirement.” That’s false. The human body is very efficient, all those things are needed.

I think the state of modern medicine is pretty bad. We don’t have many good explanatory theories in biology. We have germ theory of disease, we have evolution, we have cell theory, we have DNA genetics, morphogenesis, embryogenesis, and not much else. Everything else is rules of thumb, memorization—A affects B because it affects C and D, but we don’t understand the underlying explanation. It’s all just words pointing to words pointing to words.

Biology is still in a very sorry state, and because we are not allowed to take risks that might kill people, we just don’t experiment enough in biology. A lot of treatments are just outright banned by large regulatory bodies, so we just don’t have the innovation.

I think we’re still in the stone age when it comes to biology and we’ve got a long way to go, and I think people will look back aghast at this. I think this is Brian Johnson’s point—he’s like, “Let’s be extreme, let’s try to live forever. Let’s be more experimental, and I’ll start as N of one and start experimenting on myself.”

Even there I disagree with Brian on many things, like taking huge amounts of supplements. I think we just don’t know supplements outside of the natural context—like just eat liver, man. But that’s fine, and I wouldn’t be vegan either, but I really appreciate that he’s experimenting, he’s good-natured about it, he shares everything. We need more people like that.

So I think the state of biology—people will look back and say, “Wow, that was the dark ages.”

现代医学的困境

我觉得现代医学的状况，其实比大家想象中要差得多。人们对它的信任远远超过了应有的程度。

我们对很多病症的最佳方案，居然还是“动刀”——把东西切掉，比如“胆囊不重要，阑尾不重要，扁桃体也没啥用”，这些说法全是错的。人体极其高效，每一个器官都有它存在的意义。

从理论层面看，我们在生物学上也没建立多少真正解释性的理论。有的也就是“细菌致病理论”、“进化论”、“细胞学说”、“DNA遗传学”、“形态发生”、“胚胎发生”……其他的基本上就是一些经验法则，全靠背诵：“A影响B，因为它又影响了C和D”，但我们其实根本不知道背后的机制。说白了，就是用词解释词，空转。

我们不够了解生命，也因为医学不能犯错——哪怕可能导致死亡的风险——所以我们根本不敢做足够多的实验。很多潜在有效的治疗方法，被监管机构一刀切地禁止了，创新空间被严重压缩。

我觉得我们在生物学领域还处在“石器时代”，未来人们回头看，会震惊于我们今天的原始与无知。

Brian Johnson 倒是走得很激进，他说“要活得更久，就要敢于实验”，从自己开始做“N=1”的小白鼠实验。他很多做法我并不完全认同，比如吃那么多补剂，我觉得离开天然食物背景的补剂其实没太多科学依据——你直接吃点动物肝脏不是更好吗？我自己也不会吃素。但我欣赏他乐于尝试，态度积极，也肯公开分享自己的数据。我们需要更多这样的人。

所以我相信，将来人们回头看，会说：“哇，那时候的生物医学，简直还在黑暗时代。”

The Future of Warfare

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I think another thing that we’ll look back on is that we still continue to underestimate how important drones are going to be in warfare. The future of all warfare is drones. There will be nothing else on the battlefield, because I think of the end state of drones as autonomous bullets. Not even autonomous—they’re self-directed.

If that’s the future we’re headed towards, that’s just like—why would you have an armed force? There’s going to be no aircraft carriers, there’s going to be no tanks, there’s going to be no infantrymen, there’s just going to be autonomous bullets against your autonomous bullets. Whichever ones win, the other side just surrenders because it’s over. I think that’s the second piece of it.

战争的未来

另一件被严重低估的事情，是无人机在战争中的决定性地位。

未来所有战争的核心，都会是无人机，战场上不会有别的东西了。它们的终极形态就是“自主飞行的子弹”。甚至都不能说是“自主”，而是“自导自爆”。

如果未来真是这样，那还有什么“武装力量”可言？不再需要航母，不再需要坦克，也不再需要步兵。只会是“你的无人机打我的无人机”，谁的赢了，另一边就认输。

战争将彻底变成算法与机械的较量，人类不再是战场上的主角。这才是真正的“兵不血刃”。

The Rise of GLP-1 Medications

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I think a third piece that is going to be kind of unexpected is the GLP-1s, which I know you and I have privately discussed before. I think these are the most breakthrough drugs since antibiotics, they’re probably more important than statins, they’re sort of miracle drugs. The downsides and side effects are so minor compared to the upsides beyond just weight loss.

They also seem to be addiction breakers, they seem to lower many kinds of cancer, they almost metabolically reverse aging up to a certain point, and I think they’re going to bend the curve on healthcare costs.

The big question people are going to be asking over the next five years is why are Americans paying thousands of dollars a month for this when people overseas are getting them for free, or can order them from China for free.

If I were Bernie Sanders, the platform I would be running on is I would say, okay, we’re going to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to Novo and Eli Lilly, and we’re just going to make these free. There are hundreds of analogs of these things that work, these are not going to be limited to just the few that are being used today. Take one of them or two of them and make them free, and I think it’ll make a big difference.

As you and I were discussing earlier, this does bend a lot of people out of shape who got there the old fashioned way, and they want to see obesity as a moral failing on people’s parts. It lowers their status if the signal is less of a signal.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, so they’re incentivized to say, “Oh, well you don’t know the downsides, it’s irresponsible to suggest it’s going to cause cancer, have fun losing bone and muscle mass,” but none of that stuff is really true.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: The cancer stuff is actually beneficial. I know people who are taking these things for anti-aging reasons – they’re already fit but they just want to age better and have a stronger insulin metabolism.

There’s evidence now these things put off dementia, Alzheimer’s, colon cancer, cardiovascular disease – it’s insane. The list of benefits is insane.

There’s no free lunch, but this is a class of drugs that prevents you from taking other drugs into your body. It prevents you from taking too much sugar, many calories in an era of abundance, prevents you from smoking. There’s an organization called Casper that is now doing a study on heroin addictions and they’re showing that this can lower opioid overdoses and heroin addiction.

There’s a lot of overwhelming medical evidence coming out, and I think something like ten percent of the population might have tried these.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, that’s the number that I’ve seen. Massive.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I think about fifty percent of the population say that they would like to try it. I think the body positivity movement is dead, and we always kind of knew it was a scam. I mean it’s dying very, very quickly.

I quipped like “you can never be too rich, too thin, or too clean,” and immediately a whole bunch of people went nonlinear in my mentions. “Do you mean too thin, and what about the hygiene hypothesis?” Obviously there’s always exceptions, but people want to be thin and fit, and people want to be clean, back to the pathogen discussion that we had.

I think overall that there’s going to be huge demand for these things, and our modern medical system is not built to supply these well. I don’t hold it against the pharma companies, I think they did their job by creating the thing, but I think next we need to step up and figure out how to make it broadly and cheaply available, as opposed to just milking it only for people with obesity who can get Medicare to sign off for it, or people paying out of pocket at very very high prices.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The benefits of societal distribution of the safer GLP-1s is so large that whichever politicians tackle that is going to be richly rewarded.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Well, obesity is the number one source of malnutrition worldwide. There’s twice as many people that are obese than are starving, so about half a billion people are starving and a billion people are obese.

So many problems are downstream of that. Look at how much of the federal budget goes into dialysis because of kidney failure, and why is that? It’s because of diabetes. So many of the problems that we have in modern society are downstream of obesity.

You know this – fitness is so important. Yes, in some people these things cause muscle and bone loss, but not in the people who are eating high protein and working out hard, so they can be taken in a way that’s safer.

Some versions of these like liraglutide, the original one, they’ve been around for decades and the others have been around for about a decade. We already have, as you said, ten percent of the population taking them, so they’re already quite widely distributed.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: A good sample size.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah, it’s a great sample size, what more do you need? If you have a bacterial infection that’s eating you, I don’t say “oh I have this antibiotic but it’s going to raise your blood pressure,” it’s like no, take the antibiotic.

If you’re going to kill yourself, I say take this antipsychotic and stay alive a little longer and solve it. I don’t say “oh it’s going to cause your heart rate to go up by three beats a minute.”

Similarly, if you’re poisoning yourself with toxins and overuse of substances that you shouldn’t be using – either heroin, alcohol, cigarettes, sugar or just sheer calories – take this GLP-1. They also improve digestion, you just have less food matter going through your stomach. Lower cancer risks across the board, there’s quite a few cancers that they lower. Cardiovascular benefits too.

I’ve been very surprised by the negative reception whenever you have a conversation about GLP-1s.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Indeed.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Well think about how many sacred cows are being gored, right? All the people who are basically saying “you should work harder, you should be fit like I did.” It’s lowering their status.

Think about all the nutritionists and doctors and trainers who are now being put out of business in a way. It’s like why does the American military keep buying aircraft carriers in the age of drones? There’s an incentive bias, there’s very strong motivated reasoning, but it doesn’t matter. Ten percent of people are on it, everybody wants to be fit, it’s going to spread like wildfire.

GLP-1 药物的崛起

纳瓦尔：我觉得还有一个“意想不到”的重大趋势，就是 GLP-1 类药物——你我私下也聊过这个话题。我认为它们是自抗生素以来最具突破性的药物，可能比他汀类药物还重要，堪称“奇迹药物”。副作用极小，而带来的好处远不止减肥。

这些药物似乎还能打破上瘾机制，对多种癌症风险有抑制作用，甚至在一定程度上逆转人体代谢老化过程，并且有望显著降低医疗支出。

接下来五年人们会问的最大问题是：为什么美国人每月要为这种药付出几千美元，而在其他国家几乎可以免费获得，甚至能从中国几乎免费订购？

如果我是 Bernie Sanders，我的竞选主张会是：我们掏几千亿美元给诺和诺德和礼来制药，把这些药全民免费化。 这类药物有很多不同的变体，不会仅限于当前市面上的几种。挑出一两种，免费推广，我相信会带来极大改变。

当然，这也触动了很多人敏感的神经。那些通过“传统方式”减重的人，会觉得“肥胖本该是一种道德失败”，而现在这个信号被削弱了，间接削了他们的地位。

克里斯：对，所以他们就会拼命说：“你不知道这些药的副作用，这太不负责任了，它会致癌、会让你流失骨骼和肌肉”，可这些说法很多其实根本站不住脚。

纳瓦尔：事实是，这类药物对癌症反而有益。我认识一些人，本身就很健康，使用它们纯粹是为了抗衰老、改善胰岛素代谢。

现在有越来越多证据显示，这类药物可以延缓老年痴呆、阿尔茨海默症、结肠癌、心血管疾病的发生——这份“好处清单”简直疯狂。

当然，没有什么是完全“免费的午餐”，但 GLP-1 是一种让你“不再摄入其它毒物”的药物。在这个充满诱惑的时代，它能让你少吃糖、少摄入热量、少抽烟。现在甚至有机构在研究它对海洛因成瘾的抑制作用，数据显示它可以降低阿片类药物的过量使用和依赖。

大量医疗证据正在涌现，目前大约有10%的人口尝试过这类药物。

克里斯：对，我看到的数据也是这样，真的很多。

纳瓦尔：而且，大概有50%的人口表示他们想试。“身体积极运动”（body positivity）已经是昨日黄花了，其实我们一直都知道它是个骗局，现在只是快速瓦解而已。

我曾开玩笑说：“你永远不会太有钱、太瘦或太干净。”结果一堆人疯狂跳出来说，“什么叫太瘦？你有没有听说过卫生假说？”当然，凡事都有例外，但大多数人就是想要瘦、想要健康、想要干净——这回到了我们之前谈到的“病原体恐惧”。

未来对这种药物的需求会非常庞大，而我们的医疗体系根本没准备好应对这种爆发性需求。我不责怪药厂，他们完成了自己的使命，关键是接下来我们要解决“怎么普及”这个问题。不能只靠医保覆盖肥胖人群，或让有钱人高价自费购买。

克里斯：只要谁能推动这种安全版 GLP-1 的社会化普及，那他一定会收获巨大的政治回报。

纳瓦尔：是啊，全球最大的营养不良来源就是肥胖。 目前全球大约有5亿人营养不良、10亿人肥胖，肥胖者是饥饿者的两倍。

而我们社会中大量问题都是由此引发的。比如美国政府每年花在透析上的预算惊人，而透析的根源就是糖尿病。你知道的——健身至关重要。 有些人确实因为服用这类药物出现了肌肉和骨量的流失，但如果他们摄入足够蛋白质并保持锻炼，是可以规避这个问题的。

早期版本的 GLP-1 药物（比如 liraglutide）已经存在几十年了，其它版本也至少有十年历史，如今已经有10%的人在用，这不是小样本，而是一个足够广泛的试验池了。

克里斯：样本足够大了，确实。

纳瓦尔：这就像你感染了细菌，我手里有抗生素，我不会说“但它可能让你血压升高”，而是直接告诉你：吃药！

或者你正处于严重的心理崩溃边缘，我会让你吃抗精神病药，让你多撑一会儿，而不是说“这个药会让你心跳快3下”。

同样地，如果你正因为吸毒、酗酒、抽烟、嗜糖或过量饮食在“慢性自杀”，那就吃 GLP-1 吧。它还能改善消化系统，让你肠胃负担变轻。对多种癌症有抑制作用，对心血管也有好处。

我一直很惊讶：每当谈到 GLP-1，舆论场总会爆发负面声音。

克里斯：确实如此。

纳瓦尔：但你想想，有多少“神圣牛”在被宰？那些靠“自律减肥”建立身份的人会觉得地位被削弱了。

还有营养师、医生、健身教练——他们的专业某种程度上正在被边缘化。这就像在“无人机时代”，美国军方还死守着航母采购计划。 这背后是“利益驱动的认知扭曲”，但没关系，现在已经有10%的人在用了，每个人都想要健康，这种药物的普及速度只会越来越快。

Getting Past Your Past

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I was just thinking as you were talking that when we think about health, a lot of people kind of get captured by the way that they were brought up, the habits that they had from their childhood, or what mom and dad did, or genetic predisposition. I think you have as many reasons as many people to sort of feel hard done by challenges that you had earlier on in your life. Is getting past your past a skill, of not being owned today by your history, sort of not having that victimhood mentality?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yeah. I did have a tough childhood, but I don’t think about it. I think there are a couple of things going on there. One is I did process it quite a bit, I thought about it, but I thought about it to get rid of it. I didn’t think about it to dwell on it, or to create an identity around it.

I wanted to be successful. I wanted more than anything else to rise past that, and so I couldn’t have that as a burden on me, so I had to get rid of it. So to the extent that I dealt with it, it was for the express purpose of getting rid of it, not to create an identity or story or to reflect upon it or to say “look at me, at what I’ve accomplished and look how great I am.”

I think at some point you wrestle with that thing and then you just realize you’re never going to untangle the whole thing. It’s a Gordian knot problem. Alexander found a tangled knot in India and it said, “the famous conqueror will come and will untie this knot, nobody else can untie the knot.” He took one look at it, pulled out his sword and just cut it.

At some point, you just have to cut your past. If your past is bothering you, you will eventually get tired of trying to untangle that knot and you will just drop it because you will realize life is short. The more you have, the more you want to accomplish in this life, actually the less time you have to unravel that thing.

I just wanted to actually get things done, so I had no time to deal with it, so I just cut it. It’s like a really bad relationship, but in this case, it’s a bad relationship with your own history, so you just drop it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think so much of what we’ve spoken about today is on the shortness of life, and the fact that every moment is precious. You had to take about, the most fundamental resource in your life is not time, it’s attention.

走出过去的阴影

克里斯：刚刚你在讲的时候我突然想到，很多人一谈到“健康”这个话题，就会被自己童年时期的习惯、父母的行为模式、甚至家族遗传倾向所“困住”。他们觉得自己注定如此。而你的人生早期也经历了很多挑战。你怎么看待“摆脱过去”的能力？是不是一种可以习得的技能？也就是说，不被自己的过往控制，不陷入“受害者心态”？

纳瓦尔：没错，我的童年确实挺艰难的，但我从来不去想它。我认为有两个关键点：第一，我确实认真地处理过那段经历，但我是为了“清除”它而思考它，不是为了沉溺其中，不是为了构建一个“受害者身份”。

我最渴望的，是成功。我想从那个出发点中跃升出来。所以我不能让过去成为我的负担，必须把它清除干净。我面对过去的方式，是一种“解决它、然后扔掉它”的方式，不是想拿它讲故事，不是想博同情，更不是想拿它来证明“你看我多厉害”。

有时候，你会发现那个过去根本解不开，它就像个戈尔迪之结。传说亚历山大大帝看到那个打了死结的绳索时，没有试图一点点解，而是直接拔剑砍断了它。

有时候，你也必须一刀斩断自己的过去。如果你的过去让你痛苦，最终你会厌倦那种反复回忆、反复分析的过程。你会意识到：人生苦短，如果你还想在这辈子成就点什么，那就根本没时间在那打转。

我就是这样，我想做成一些事，而我没空和过去纠缠，所以我干脆就斩断了它。就像一段烂关系，只不过这次是你和“自己的人生历史”的一段烂关系，唯一的办法就是：放手。

Attention: The Currency of Life

NAVAL RAVIKANT: That’s right. I used to think the currency of life is money, and yes money is important, and it does let you trade certain things for time, but it doesn’t really buy you time. Ask Warren Buffett how much time money can buy you, or Michael Bloomberg. They’re rich as Croesus, but they can’t buy more time, right, Brian Johnson notwithstanding.

So you can’t trade money for time. Money is not the real currency of life, and time itself doesn’t even mean that much because as we talked about before, a lot of time can be wasted because you’re not really present for it, you’re not paying attention.

So the real currency of life is attention, it’s what you choose to pay attention to and what you do about it. Back to the point about the news media, you can put your attention on the news, but that’s how you’re spending the real currency of life, so just be aware of that.

If you want to, that’s fine, there’s no right or wrong here. Maybe it is your destiny to pick something in the news, learn about that problem, adopt that problem and solve it, but just be careful because your attention is the only thing that you have.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And that can also be captured by your own past?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Yes, you can fritter it away on anything you’d like.

注意力才是人生真正的“货币”

克里斯：我们今天谈的很多，其实都指向一个主题：人生很短，每一刻都极其宝贵。你之前也说过，人生最根本的资源其实不是时间，而是“注意力”。

纳瓦尔：没错。以前我也以为人生的“货币”是金钱。金钱确实重要，也确实能让你“用钱换时间”，但它并不能真正“买”来时间。你可以去问 Warren Buffett 或 Michael Bloomberg——他们财富如山，但也买不来多一秒钟，Brian Johnson 的尝试也不例外。

所以，钱不是人生的真正货币。甚至时间本身也不算什么，因为你可以在时间里“心不在焉”地虚度一切。

人生真正的货币，是注意力。是你选择关注什么，以及你对它采取什么行动。回到我们刚刚说的新闻媒体问题——你可以选择把注意力放在新闻上，但那就是你在“花费”你人生中最真实的货币。所以，至少要对这一点有觉察。

如果你决定这么做，也没问题。没什么对错之分。也许你的命运就是关注某个社会议题，并致力于解决它。但无论如何，请小心——因为你的注意力，是你唯一真正拥有的东西。

克里斯：而它，也可以被你的“过去”所吞噬。

纳瓦尔；没错。你可以把它浪费在任何地方。包括，沉迷于你已经无法改变的昨天。

The Advantage of Starting as a “Loser”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is there an advantage to starting out as a loser?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Absolutely, yeah. Because if you’re a loser, then you’ll want to be a winner, and then you’ll develop all the characteristics that’ll help you be a, quote unquote, “winner” in life.

That said, I wouldn’t sentence my kids to it. I don’t think you can artificially do that. It’s sort of like imagine that you were three hundred years ago, born a serf, and then somehow you managed to escape off the farm and you become a landowner and then eventually you become minor nobility and aristocrat. Are you going to put your kids back on the farm and say “you’re going be a serf again”?

I know they all like those stories. The kids themselves like those stories because it says, “I came from the school of hard knocks, my dad made me go shovel hay for a summer,” but it’s not real. You’re not going to trick them.

I think what you can do is cultivate an appreciation and gratitude for what you have, and the only way to do that is just evidence it yourself. Just show yourself how you spend money, how you respect it, what you do with it, how you take care of people, who you’re responsible for.

The more resources you have, the greater the tribe you can take care of, the more of the tribe you can take care of. When you have no resources, you’re struggling to take care of yourself, and at that point it’s good to be selfish because you can’t save somebody else if you can’t even save yourself.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: So you take care of yourself and you become the best version of yourself, but there are too many men who are able, fit, and have some money who are doing nothing with their lives, just sitting at home doing nothing, just indulging in themselves, maybe they go on dates and they get DoorDash. I have no respect for that.

I think there’s nothing worse in society than a lazy man because he’s leaving his potential on the table. It’s bad for him.

So the next thing you do is you go and you have a family and you take care of your family. Then you take care of your extended family – your cousins, brothers, uncles, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, everybody that you can.

And then if you have more resources beyond that, then you go take care of your local tribe, you take care of your people, you start trying to do some good for the world. If you have more resources than that, you go take care of an even bigger tribe, and that’s how you earn both respect and self-confidence and you live up to your potential.

成为“失败者”起步的好处

克里斯：一开始是个“失败者”，这其实有没有某种隐藏的优势？

纳瓦尔：绝对有。因为当你是个“失败者”时，你就会想成为“赢家”，而这种渴望会促使你发展出一整套能让你在现实生活中成功的品质。

但我并不会故意把我的孩子放到那种处境里。这不是能“人为制造”的。就好像你生活在三百年前，生来是个农奴，好不容易逃离了农场，成了土地拥有者，最后甚至进入小贵族阶层。你会回头把你孩子再送回农场，说“你也得从农奴干起”吗？

我们当然都喜欢这样的“逆袭”故事，孩子们也爱听“我爸当年让我去铲牛粪、磨练意志”这种事儿，但那其实是种虚构的叙事，是无法复制的。

你能做的，是培养一种“对已有生活的感恩”，而最有效的方法不是说教，而是身体力行。让孩子看到你怎么花钱，怎么看待金钱，如何善待他人，以及你愿意承担怎样的责任。

你拥有的资源越多，你就有能力照顾更多人。一开始你可能连自己都照顾不好，这时候自私一点没关系，先把自己扶起来——你连自己都救不了，怎么救别人？

克里斯：确实。

纳瓦尔：先把自己搞定，成为一个更好的自己。但我看到太多身体健康、有点钱、有能力的男人，却整天窝在家里无所事事，沉溺于自我享乐。可能点外卖、约约会，仅此而已。我对这种状态毫无尊重。

社会中最糟糕的，莫过于“有潜力却懒惰的人”。他辜负了自己，也拖累了社会。

所以，下一步你应该是组建家庭，照顾好你的家人。然后是扩展家庭——堂表兄妹、叔伯阿姨、爷爷奶奶。当你资源足够时，就照顾你身边的“部落”，做一些真正利他的事情。如果还能再进一步，那就照顾更大的群体。这是你赢得尊重、自信，并兑现人生潜力的方式。

The Value of Giving Back

NAVAL RAVIKANT: So the more you have, the more is rightfully expected of you, and I think it’s a good compact with society when highly capable people express and flex that capability by giving more and more and by doing more and more. Society rewards them with the one thing they can’t get otherwise which is status, right? Society should give you status in exchange for it. They should say, “Okay you did a good job, you took care of more people than just yourself and just the people immediately around you.”

That’s what an alpha male to me is. An alpha male is not the one who gets to eat first, the alpha male eats last. The alpha male feeds everybody else first and then gets to eat last, and they do that out of their own self respect and pride, and society rewards them by calling them an alpha and giving them status.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I wonder whether some of the pushback that we’ve got against rich, wealthy, powerful people is disincentivizing. It is, like, who is it, Zuck who donated money in Zuckerberg General’s Hospital and then they wanted to pull his name off of it. I mean, that’s like-

NAVAL RAVIKANT: I didn’t see that, but that’s really-

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, that kind of stuff backfires, right?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: You should reward people for doing-

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, you were saying before, you don’t just need to, in fact, actually actively avoid castigating people if you want their behavior to change when they get something wrong, but reinforcing it when they get something right, it’s happening at a societal level as well.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Correct, I mean like the guys who make a lot of money and go out and buy sports teams, I wouldn’t do that, right? But the one who goes out and builds a hospital, or builds a rocket to take people to the moon, you know, rescue some astronauts, you should be rewarding him for that.

给予，是最大的价值

纳瓦尔：资源越多，社会对你寄予的期待也越高。我认为这是一个良性的社会契约——有能力的人，应该通过给予、创造来兑现自己的能力。

而社会能回报他们的，是那些钱买不到的东西：地位。社会应该告诉你：“你做得很好，你照顾了不仅仅是自己和身边人。”

对我来说，真正的“Alpha男”不是那个抢着先吃的人，而是那个“最后一个吃饭”的人。他先喂饱别人，最后才吃自己的，这是一种自尊，也是一种荣誉感。社会应该回报这种行为，把“Alpha”这个称号给他。

克里斯：现在社会对有钱有权的人有很多批评，你觉得这会不会反过来打击那些原本愿意贡献的人？比如 Zuckerberg 给医院捐钱，结果大家却想把他的名字从医院门口拿掉……

纳瓦尔：我没看到那件事，但听起来真的挺糟的。

克里斯：对啊，这种事只会适得其反。你之前也说过，如果你想改变一个人的行为，与其谴责他做错了什么，不如肯定他做对了什么——这在整个社会层面也是一样。

纳瓦尔：没错。那些赚钱之后跑去买球队的人，我可能不会这么做。但如果有人用钱造医院、造火箭去月球、去救宇航员——我们应该给他们掌声与尊重。

Closing Thoughts

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Naval, I really appreciate you. I hope that this has lived up to whatever weird daydreams you’ve been having. What have you got coming up? What can people expect from you over the next however long?

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Expect nothing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s the most Naval way that we could have finished this. Dude, it’s been a long time coming. I really do appreciate you for being here today. But I do hope to deliver something.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: Oh, I think you have, so thank you. Thanks for having me.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Thank you too. Thanks for getting in my mind, and hopefully now you’re out.

NAVAL RAVIKANT: We’ll see. I mean, it might be even worse now. You’ve got the real memories to stick.

The reason to win the game is to be free of it. The reason to do podcast is to be done with it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Alright.

结语

克里斯：Naval，我真的很感谢你今天的到来，希望这次访谈能符合你那些奇怪的脑内幻想（笑）。接下来你有什么计划，大家可以期待点什么？

纳瓦尔：什么都别期待。

克里斯：哈哈，这才是最“Naval”的收尾方式。我们终于把这期等来了，真的很感谢你今天在这里。虽然你不想给大家“承诺”点什么，但我希望我们至少输出了一些好东西。

纳瓦尔：你已经做到了，谢谢你邀请我。

克里斯；我也谢谢你，谢谢你走进我的脑子——希望你现在已经出来了。

纳瓦尔：咱们走着瞧。也许现在更糟了呢（笑），因为这次是真实记忆，会留下印记。

赢下游戏的目的，是为了不再被游戏束缚；做播客的意义，是为了完成它，然后放下它。

克里斯；就这样。