安格斯·弗莱彻：原始智慧

感谢大家再次加入我们，收听联邦俱乐部的又一期播客节目。

Thank you for joining us for another podcast from the Commonwealth Club.

大家好，欢迎参加今晚的联邦俱乐部世界事务节目。我是莫伊拉·冈恩，《科技国度》及其固定栏目《生物科技国度》的主持人，我们在KQED为全美及更广范围的NPR附属电台制作节目。同时，我也是旧金山大学的教授兼生物创业学主任。今晚，我将与安格斯·弗莱彻博士对话，他是新书《原始智能》的作者。

Well, hello, and welcome to the evening's Commonwealth Club World Affairs program. I'm Moira Gunn, host of Tech Nation and its regular segment, Biotech Nation, which we produce out of KQED for NPR affiliates nationwide and beyond. And I'm a professor and the director of bio entrepreneurship at USF, the University of San Francisco. And tonight, I'll be talking with Angus Fletcher. Doctor Fletcher is the author of the new book Primal Intelligence.

你比你想象的更聪明。现在让我简要介绍一下我们的嘉宾。安格斯·弗莱彻是俄亥俄州立大学项目叙事学中的故事科学教授。他的研究被布琳·布朗誉为'改变人生'，被马尔科姆·格拉德威尔称为'震撼心灵'——当然都是褒义。我特别想强调这一点。

You are smarter than you know. So now let me tell you a little about our speaker. Angus Fletcher is a professor of story science at Ohio State's project narrative. His research has been called life changing by Brene Brown and mind blowing by Malcolm Gladwell, both in a good way. I just wanted to say that.

他的研究获得了心理学家、神经科学家以及马丁·塞利格曼、安东尼奥·迪马西奥等医学专家的认可，并受到从美国国家科学基金会到电影艺术与科学学院等机构的支持。您可能也读过他的前作，包括《奇迹工场：文学史上25项最具影响力的发明》。2023年，他因与美国陆军特种部队合作开展的原始智能突破性研究，被授予美国陆军嘉奖勋章。这正是他新书《原始智能：你比你想象的更聪明》的主题。安格斯，让我们以联邦俱乐部最热烈的欢迎之情欢迎你。

He's been endorsed by psychologists, neuroscientists, and doctors such as Martin Segelman and Antonio Di Macio, and has been supported by institutions from the National Science Foundation to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. You may also know him from his earlier books, including WonderWorks, the 25 most powerful inventions in the history of literature. In 2023, he was awarded the commendation medal by the US Army for his groundbreaking research into with US Army special operations into primal intelligence. And that's the subject of his new book, Primal Intelligence, You Are Smarter Than You Know. So Angus, a great big hearty Commonwealth Club welcome to you.

感谢你的到来。

Thanks for coming.

非常感谢沃伦。也感谢在座各位今晚的莅临。

Thank you very much, Warren. Thank you all for joining me this evening.

安格斯，我对你获得美国陆军特种部队嘉奖勋章的事特别感兴趣。我们说的是'夜行者'部队啊，心理作战单位，陆军游骑兵的摇篮，绿色贝雷帽特种部队的大本营。他们有没有授予你一顶贝雷帽？

Now, Angus, I am all over your commendation medal from the US army special ops. I mean, we're talking Night Stalkers. Talking psy ops, you know, the psychological operations. Home of the army rangers of this of the, you know, special forces, the green beret. Did they give you a beret?

我做到了

I did

没有。我没有。不行。绿色。

not. I did not. Can't. Green.

我没拿到贝雷帽。

I did not get a beret.

制服怎么样？

How about a uniform?

我不知道你对特种作战了解这么多。通常，顺便说一句，人们问我的第一个问题就是，什么是特种作战？你能解释一下吗？我得从头解释那些缩写词。

I did not know you knew so much about special operations. Normally, by the way, the first thing that people ask me is like, what is special operations? Can you explain it? I have to go through acronyms.

我们喜欢和那些家伙约会。不管我们结婚与否，你懂吗？是啊。不，我是说，这很有趣。我是说，你在谈论在阴暗的沼泽地里跑步，不管那是什么，还有，你知道的，跑向爆炸现场，但你不该那么做。

We like to date those guys. Whether we're married or not, you know? Yeah. No, I mean, is interesting. Mean, you that you're talking about running in the dismal swamp, whatever that is, and, you know, running to an explosion, but you shouldn't be doing that.

现在，他们肯定给了你一些迷彩服或者

Now, they must have given you some camo or

实际上，他们并没有。不，你当时穿的就是这样。是的，我穿着我朋友们戏称为‘周六下午女同装’的衣服，就是我的桑巴鞋和Polo衫。

They did not, actually. No. I You were wearing was literally dressed like this. Yeah. I was wearing my sort of Saturday afternoon lesbian wear as my friends like to refer to it as, you know, my Sambas and my polo shirt.

对，没错。是的。是的。完全正确。

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

嗯，这可能是机密，但你能告诉我们你为军队做了什么开创性的研究吗？

Well, it's probably secret, but you can tell us what kind of groundbreaking research did you do for the army?

基本上，军队联系我是因为长期以来，我被视为一个特立独行的人。我特别感兴趣的是人脑能做计算机做不到的事情。问题是，怎么做到的？目前对此有两种流行的广泛答案。

So, basically, the army calls me because for a long time, I'm considered to be a maverick. And the thing that I was particularly interested in is the fact that the human brain can do things the computers can't. And the question is, how? How is that happening? And there are two kind of broad answers to this question that are that are popular.

第一种是我们会想办法让计算机以某种方式做到。也许我们会给它们更多数据，也许我们会改进算法。对吧？但这就是关键。

The first is we're gonna figure out a way to get computers to do it somehow. Maybe we're gonna give them more data. Maybe we're gonna do the algorithms. Right? But that's the thing.

对吧？你知道的，也许我们能以某种方式让计算机做到。而另一种答案通常是魔法。就是那种神秘的灵魂或意识，甚至计算机也会有意识，它们就能... 但我的研究重点是说‘不’。

Right? The the you know, maybe somehow we can get computers to do it. And then the other answer is usually magic. You know? There's like this mysterious soul or consciousness, and even computers become conscious, they'll be able to And, you know, the point of my research is is no.

当你理解人脑的运作机制，理解神经元如何工作时，你就会发现人类能进行这些低信息处理过程，比如直觉、想象力和常识。所以我一直在写这些理论性工作。直到有一天，我接到陆军特种作战部队的电话，他们说：‘弗莱彻博士，我们一直在关注你。’我说：‘哦，这有点吓人。’

When you understand the mechanics of the human brain, when you understand how neurons work, you start to see that humans are capable of these low information processes like intuition, like imagination, like common sense. And so I've been writing all this work, but it was almost entirely theoretical. And then one day, I got this call from army special operations, and they said, hey, doctor Fletcher. We've been watching you. And I said, oh, that's a little frightening.

我还得说明，我是归化公民。所以当我听说美军一直在监视我时，我的第一反应未必是正面的，对吧？所以我有点紧张。

And I should also say that I'm a naturalized citizen. So when I hear that the US army has been watching me, my first thought is not, you know, necessarily a positive one. Right. So I was a little nervous.

那你原本来自哪里？

And where are you from originally?

我原本来自英格兰。其实我来自英格兰北部一个自认为是苏格兰的地方——坎布里亚。那里的人并不认为自己是英格兰的一部分，仍坚信属于苏格兰帝国。

I'm I'm originally from England. So I don't know if we have I'm actually from a part of the North Of England that likes to consider itself Scotland. It's Cumbria. It doesn't actually believe that it's that it's English. It still believes it's part of the Scottish empire.

这就是我的出身背景。不算太特别，但也足够与众不同。后来我接到军方的电话，他们说：'弗莱彻教授，我们一直在关注您的研究，发现很多人对您的研究很感兴趣，却完全不知如何应用——这太不寻常了。'

But so that's where I come from. So not anywhere, you know, too different, but, you know, different enough. And so I get this phone call from the army, and they're like, you know, professor Fletcher, we've been following you, and we've we've we've been noticing your research. And we've been noticing that a lot of people seem very interested in your research but seem to have no idea what to do with it. It's so different.

我回答：'确实如此。'他们接着说：'这通常意味着两种可能：要么您是个怪人——您懂的，就是完全疯了。'

And I said, yeah. That's true. And they said, well, that's usually an indication that you're either a crank. You know? Like, you're totally nuts.

知道吗？'他们说，'要么您的研究可能具有突破性意义。'我说：'有意思，没想到军方会追踪这个。'他们回答：'没错，我们有专人负责预见未来，而您可能就是未来。'

You know? Or there's potentially something groundbreaking here. I said, oh, interesting. I didn't know the army tracked this. I like, yeah.

于是他们招募了我。主要不仅因为我关于人脑的研究与他们观察到的现象吻合，更因为他们面临一个现实问题：特种部队选拔的年轻人正表现出更多愤怒、焦虑，应对现实问题的能力却在下降。

We we track this. You know? We have a group of people whose job it is to see the future, and we think you could be the future. So, basically, they brought me in. And the main reason they brought me in is not just because a lot of what I was saying about the human brain squared with what they had seen, but also because they had experienced this problem, which is that young people that they were bringing into the special operations pipeline were experiencing more anger, more anxiety, less ability to deal with real world problems.

有个小伙子告诉我，现在的年轻人能解数学题，却解不了人生难题。缺乏主动性，所以他们总是坐着等别人告诉他们该做什么，总在寻求认可。这就是你教大学生的现状。

One of the guys told me that they can solve math problems. You know, young kids today can solve math problems, but they can't solve life problems. Failure of initiative, so they kind of sit around and wait to be told what to do all the time. Always looking for validation. So you teach college students.

你见过这种情况吧？

You've seen this. Right?

是啊。我们发了很多参与奖章。

Yeah. We give a lot of participation medals out.

对，嗯，没错。你懂吧？他们已经习惯了。是的。

Yes. Well, yeah. You know? There's used to it. Yeah.

大学生普遍存在这种'无法起飞'的问题。你教很多创业课程应该知道，如今的学生虽然想当企业家，但缺乏主动性和情感自信。所以临近毕业时他们会突然恐慌，只想加入别人的 workforce。

And there's this, like, failure to launch problem that college students have. You know? And and because you, you know, you teach a lot of entrepreneurial subjects. And and students today, a lot of the times, they wanna be entrepreneurs, but they lack the initiative, and they lack the emotional confidence. And so they'll get to the end of college, and they'll panic immediately, and they'll just wanna go into somebody else's workforce.

懂我意思吗？要么他们突然觉得父母变聪明了——因为父母建议去法学院医学院什么的突然显得很靠谱。我们正在培养缺乏自我未来想象力、缺乏变革主动性的一代人，很大程度上这是教育体系造成的。总之军方说观察到这种现象，想请弗莱彻教授看看你的理论能否逆转趋势，他们愿意投入数百万美元建立训练管道来测试你那些疯狂理论。

You know? Or they suddenly think that their parents have suddenly become a lot smarter because whatever their parents are telling them to do, like go to law school, go to med school, suddenly seems so much better. And so we're sort of raising this generation of kids that lacks the ability to imagine futures for themselves, that lacks the ability to initiate change, you know, and a lot of it comes from the school system. So anyway, so the the army said we've we've seen this happening, and we want to bring you in professor Fletcher to see if your theories can help reverse that trend, and we're willing to build training pipelines and invest millions and millions of dollars of funding in testing your zany theories.

哇。具体怎么测试？比如直接说'给我50个人'这样吗？

Wow. How did I mean, how do you test them? You say, okay. Give me 50 guys.

是的。基本上是这样。嗯，如果你想知道，我可以告诉你，军队最初想让我验证理论的方式是，他们来到我家，基本上就是绑架了我。

Yeah. Basically. Yeah. Well, if you want, I can tell you, you know, the the initial way that the army wanted me to test the the the theories was, you know, they come to my house. They basically kidnap me.

他们开车载着我行驶了好几个小时，来到一个秘密地点，我走进一栋建筑，那是我这辈子从未见过的建筑类型。它有点像NFL球员的健身房混合体，里面有各种极其高科技的设备，人们连接着呼吸机和氧气面罩之类的东西。他们带我走进一间教室，里面坐着二十多岁到三十出头的学员，这些都是未来的特种作战人员。

They drive me for hours and hours and hours to this undisclosed location where I walk into this building, which is unlike any other building that I've ever seen in my life. It's sort of a mix of of an NFL player's gym. It has sort of this incredibly high-tech equipment and and people plugged in to, you know, respirators and oxygen masks, this kind of stuff. And they walk me through up to this classroom. And sitting in this classroom, there are there are all these individuals in their kind of late twenties and early thirties, and these are the kind of the future special operators.

先说明一下背景，这些人里约半数都是女性。他们被选中是因为具备与众不同的思维能力。你可能想象中的特种作战人员是那种留着大胡子、身高一米九八的壮汉。

And just to kind of set the stage, I should say that about half of them are women. You know? So it's a it's a they're selected for their ability to think differently, essentially. They're not you know, you might have a of a kind of a a picture in your mind of a special operator with, like, an enormous, like, beard and kind of six foot six.

特种作战人员就是指特种部队里的任何成员。

And and a special operator is anybody in special ops.

没错。特种作战人员就是特种部队成员。总之我走进教室，看着这些学员，负责人指着我说'教授'。

That's right. A special operator is anybody in special ops. Anyway, So got into this classroom. Right? And I'm and I'm looking at at all these students and and the person in charge points to me and he goes, professor.

我应了声'嗯'，他又说'教授，这些作战人员是我们能找到最聪明的人，他们活在未来，才华横溢'。

And I'm like, yeah. And he's like, professor. He's like, these operators are the smartest people that we could find. They live in the future. They're brilliant.

我说'那太好了'。然后他对学员们说'这位教授是我们能找到最聪明的教授，他会让你们变得更聪明'。我心想'好吧'，接着他指着我说'让他们变聪明吧'。

I was like, oh, that's great. And then he goes, class, this professor is the smartest professor we could find. He's gonna make you smarter. And I was like, okay. And then he and then he points to me and goes, make them smarter.

不。那简直就是开场白。我的开场白就是这样，你懂的。我当时心想，天哪。这种紧张程度在特种作战中就是家常便饭。

No. And that was literally the opening. My opening is that's right, you know. And I was like, oh my goodness. And that level of intensity is literally all you ever get in special operations.

无时无刻不是如此。他们总说，现在必须加快进度。所以我恐慌发作了，我觉得大多数人在那种情况下都会这样。首先因为，你知道，我满脑子理论。但你见过大学教授吗？

It's all that all the time. They're like, this has to work faster now. So I had a panic attack as I think most people would have in that situation. First of all, because, you know, like, I have all these theories. But have you ever met a professor?

我们在现实生活中基本没用。我不想...呃...破坏我们的形象。不，不是这个意思。我是说我作为教授而言。

We're, like, useless in real life. I don't wanna, like, blow our cool here. No. It's not I just mean That's not a problem. I just mean me as a professor.

当然，其他教授完全是...

Obviously, other professors There are totally

有个广播节目。没错。没错。你得明白。就是这样。

there's a radio show. That's right. That's right. You gotta understand. That's right.

没错。

That's right.

我懂 我懂

I got I got

两部分。没错。

two parts. That's right.

没错。

That's right.

没错。你确实是兼职教授。是的。但那些全职教授们把所有时间都花在学校里。

That's right. You're really you're you're a part time professor. Yeah. That's right. But all those all real professors who spend all their time in schools.

对吧？我们对现实世界了解多少？首先，掌握各种理论，但如何应用它们呢？这是首要问题。

Right? What do we know about the real world? So first of all, had all these theories, but like, how do I apply them? Right? So that was the first thing.

其次，我对特种作战一无所知。这个圈子有个奇怪之处——信任像开关一样。不信任你时你什么都不知道，但一旦信任你，你就无所不知。

And second of all, I know nothing about special operators. And one of the weird things about being in the special operations community is it's kind of a trust on, trust off switch. So if they don't trust you, you know nothing. But in the moment they trust you, you're inside everything.

是啊。

Yeah.

我当时没有安全许可，所以真的就像被直接扔进去

And I went in without a security clearance. And so I literally just get thrown

你在没有安全许可的情况下做了这件事。

in You did this without a security clearance.

没有安全许可。是的。这是我不得不谈判的事情。

Without a security clearance. Yeah. This this is something I had to negotiate.

你在外面为他们做事。是的。

You out there for them to Yes.

是的。没错。完全正确。是的。嗯，他们真的非常迫切，因为世界上只有一个我。

Yeah. Right. That's exactly right. Yeah. Well, they were really they were desperate on this front because there's only one me.

对吧？就像只有一个你一样，也只有一个我。所以当他们需要你时，愿意打破规则。总之，我恐慌发作了。然后以我生平最快的速度思考，我说，你知道吗？

Right? Just like there's only one you, there's only one me. And so when they want you, right, they're willing to bend the rules. So anyway, I had a panic attack. And then thinking as quickly as I've ever thought in my life, I said, you know what?

为了改进你的训练并让你更聪明，我需要了解你现在的做法。我需要看到你所有的现有训练内容，因为我觉得这样能为我争取些时间。是的。明白吗？然后他们带我参观了整栋楼，展示了所有的训练项目。

In order to improve your training and make you smarter, I need to know what you're doing now. I need to see all of your existing training because I thought that would buy me some time. Yeah. You know? And then they took me on a tour of the building, and they showed me all of the training.

我不能透露太多，但可以告诉你两件有趣的事。第一件是，他们带我经过一个房间，里面放着我这辈子见过的最大的计算机。他们说，这基本上就是最初的人工智能。他们还告诉我——我之前不知道——美国陆军实际上是计算机的发明者。他们在1943年二战期间设计了ENIAC。

And I can't tell you that much, but I can tell you two things, which I think are interesting. The first thing is, is they walked me past this room, which had the biggest computer I've ever seen in my life inside it. And they were like, this is the original AI, basically. And they told me, which I didn't know, that the US army was responsible for basically inventing the computer. They designed ENIAC in 1943 during World War two.

这些计算机一直存放在他们的地下室里，他们还发明了生成式人工智能这类东西。他们给这台计算机输入了历史上所有最聪明将军的思想，它本应是世界上最卓越的存在。我说，哇，这太不可思议了。这就是你们训练学生的方式吗？

And so they've had these computers in the basement for forever, and they also invented generative AI and all these kinds of things. And so they had fed this computer with, you know, like, the minds of all the smartest generals in history, and it was supposed to be the most brilliant thing in the world. And I said, wow. I said, this is amazing. Is this how you train your students?

你们会让学生挑战这个AI吗？他们回答，不，不不不。

Do you have them, you know, challenge themselves against this AI? And they're like, no. No. No. No.

结果发现那台计算机其实相当愚蠢。人们与之对抗训练得越多，智力反而下降得越厉害。我恍然大悟，原来如此。于是他们关上了那扇门，然后说，这才是我们真正训练人的地方。

Turns out actually computer's pretty dumb. And the more that people train against it, the less intelligent they get. And I was like, oh, okay. So they closed that door. And then they said, here's the room where we really train people.

他们打开门，里面是个图书馆，堆满了书籍。有很多有趣的书籍，我不能过多谈论。但可以说其中许多是近未来科幻小说，基本上是将你带入两年后的未来。理念是通过阅读这些故事，让你开始想象在尚未发生的现实情境中自己会如何应对。

And they opened the door, and it was a library and it was full of books. And there were a lot of sort of interesting books, I can't talk too much about them. But one thing I can say about them is a lot of them were near future science fiction. And so basically jumping two years into the future. And the idea was that you would read these stories and you would start to imagine what would I do in these realistic scenarios that haven't actually happened yet.

于是我逐渐意识到，他们在这里做的很多工作其实颇具文学性，是以故事为驱动的。因此我也能融入其中，开始用这种方式对他们进行一些训练。

And so I started to realize, oh, actually, a lot of the work they're doing here is kind of literary. It's kind of story driven. Right. And so I was able to kind of tuck in and start sort of training them a little bit in that way.

哇，真令人兴奋。他本可以写本书记录那段经历，但他没有。他让那段经历与我们所有人产生了关联。

Wow. Pretty exciting. So he could have written a book about that experience. But no. He took that experience and made it relevant to all of us.

事实上，当我开始读这本书时，真正的突破在于发现：过去你总是泛泛而谈故事本身——如何创作故事、谁创作了它们、它们对讲述者和听众的影响等等。但这次你写道，最重要的故事是你内心关于自我的叙事。让我们深入探讨这一点。

In fact, the real breakthrough for me when I started reading this book is that in the past, you've always talked about stories in general, creating stories, who created them, how you might create them, all of these things, what they did to people listening to them and telling them. But then you write, the most important story is the story you think to yourself about yourself. Let's go there.

没错，百分之百正确。首先，我们被教导故事主要用于交流，但实际上我们知道并非如此。我们知道故事在大脑中的演化远早于语言。

That's right. That's a 100% right. Yeah. So the first thing is we're taught the stories are largely for communicating, but we actually know this isn't true. We know that story evolved in the brain long before language did.

它早在数亿年前就已演化形成。其在大脑中演化的原因，是为了让我们能够想象未来的故事，从而改变世界。故事的另一个说法是情节，是计划。因此，故事本质上是我们大脑规划和想象不同未来的方式。驱动我们智力的重要部分，正是我们讲述这些未来新叙事的能力。

It evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. And the reason it evolved in the brain is to allow us to imagine stories of the future so we could change the world. Another word for a story is a plot, is a plan. So really story is the way that our brain plans and imagines alternate futures. And so a big part of what drives our intelligence is our ability to tell these new narratives of the future.

尽管这些很重要，但最重要的是我们对自己讲述的关于自己的故事。因为事实证明，这驱动着我们获得所谓的反脆弱性，以及改变周围世界的能力。那么什么是反脆弱性？反脆弱性是从悲伤、羞耻和负面经历中汲取智慧，从失败中变得更聪明的能力。换句话说，是成长的能力。

But even though those are important, what's most important is the story we tell ourself about ourself. Because it turns out that's what drives our ability to have something called antifragility and also our ability to to change the world around us. And so what is what is antifragility? Antifragility is the ability to get wiser from grief, from shame, and from negative experiences, and to get smarter from failure. It's the ability, in other words, to grow.

如果你大脑中有某个关于自己的故事，你就能将这些负面经历转化为有益体验。那么这种原始故事是什么样的？这是我深感着迷并得以观察的现象。一个有趣的重叠点是，具有反脆弱性的操作者讲述的故事与四岁儿童相同。我们得以将这些故事对齐并理解其本质。

And if you have a certain story inside your brain that is a story you tell about yourself, you're able to take all these negative experiences and process them into good experiences. And so what does that primordial story look like? This is something I was fascinated by, and this is something I was able to see. And and an interesting point of overlap is that the operators who have antifragility are telling themselves the same story as four year olds. And so we were able to kind of align these stories and kind of figure out what they were.

首先我想说明，每个人讲述给自己的故事都略有不同。我们都是独特的，不存在英雄之旅，没有原型故事，也没有普世故事。

So the first thing I wanna say is that everyone's story that he tells himself is a little bit different. We're all unique. There's no hero's journey. There's no archetypal story. There's no universal stories.

不存在这类模板。我们都有自己独特的故事。但具有反脆弱性的个人故事的共同特征，是整合的过去与分岔的未来。它看起来有点像三叉戟——当你回顾过去发生的一切时，你能将其串联成统一的因果逻辑。

There's nothing like that. All of us have our own unique stories. But the kind of common characteristic of a story a personal story that possesses any fragility is an integrated past in a branching future. So it looks a little bit like a trident. So when you think back over your past, everything that's happened to you, you're able to connect it together into one single sense of why.

「为什么会发生这些？」这帮助你获得目标感。而当你展望未来时，你能看到所有分岔的可能性。这种组合赋予你个人动力感，同时兼具适应性与灵活性。要知道，我们常被教导诸如毅力、坚持等品质的重要性。

Why is this happening? And that helps you derive your sense of purpose. But when you look out in the future, you're able to see all of these branching possibilities. And what that combination does is it gives you a sense of personal momentum, but also adaptability, also flexibility. So, you know, we're often taught that of the importance of things like, you know, grit and perseverance and persistence.

这些事情固然重要，但能够改变同样重要。问题在于如何在改变时不迷失自我？如何避免随波逐流地改变？答案就在于你拥有那个整合的过去。它就像山间流淌的溪水般为你效力。

And those things are important, but it's also important to be able to change. The question is how do you change without losing yourself? How do you change so you're not just drifting? And the answer is is you have that integrated past. What it does is it works for you like water going down a mountain.

溪流积聚的势头越强，即使遇到岩石阻碍，它也能在绕过后回归原本的河道。这种整合过去、分叉未来的能力让你在遭遇障碍后仍能绕回正轨，重归本真。我们在书中发现，特种作战人员和四岁孩童都具备这种能力，但多数人却在教育和职场中逐渐丧失——因为学校教育开始割裂你的过去，并收窄你的未来。观察商业环境中的大多数人，他们实际上拥有破碎的过去和狭窄的未来视野，眼前似乎只有一条既定道路。

The the more that that stream picks up momentum, the more that even when it encounters a rock, it's able to go back on its original course after going around that rock. And so that integrated past branching future allows you to hit obstacles and then return around it and go back to who you are. And so a big part of what we discovered in the book is that operators have this, four year olds have this, but then most people lose it through school and through work because school starts to disaggregate your past and starts to narrow your future. So if you look at most people in business environments, they actually have a fractured past and a narrow future. Like, they they can only really see one path ahead for themselves.

他们会变得极度紧绷。回望过去时，他们觉得自己仿佛是多个分裂的个体，无法确认真实的自我。这种状态与患有创伤后应激障碍的士兵如出一辙。因此我们在社群中的重点工作，就是先帮助作战人员修复这种状态，再将修复方法推广至普通人群。

They get very tight. And they look back on their past, and they think of themselves as being kind of multiple people. Not exactly sure who they are. And that shape is the same shape as a soldier with post traumatic stress disorder. And so a big part of what we were doing in the community was figuring out how to heal that in operators and then take that out and then heal that in people outside.

你提到人类拥有的四种原始核心能力：直觉、想象力、情感和常识。直觉负责提出计划（抱歉），想象力构建计划，情感维持计划，而常识筛选计划。

You you referred to four primal powers, essential powers that humans have. Intuition, imagination, emotion, and common sense. Intuition intuition speaks, excuse me, speaks plans. Imagination shapes plans. Emotion sustains plans, and common sense selects plans.

首先，我认为很多人容易混淆直觉和想象力。它们的区别究竟是什么？

I think for starters, I think a lot of people tend to confuse intuition and imagination. What's the difference?

没错。直觉是你发现机遇的能力。我最初对作战人员的研究，就是不仅要界定直觉的本质，更要探索提升直觉的方法。我们从关于直觉的普遍误解入手——如果询问当代心理学家，他们会告诉你直觉就是模式匹配。

Yeah. So intuition is your ability to spot opportunities. And I got one of the first things I started to do with the operators is start to identify not just what intuition is, but how you can get better at it. And what we started with is a common misunderstanding about intuition. So if you ask most psychologists today what intuition is, they'll tell you that it's pattern matching.

这个观点源自已故著名心理学家丹尼尔·卡尼曼，也来自计算机科学领域。其核心逻辑是：当灵光乍现时，其实是大脑在进行模式匹配。但这个理论显然是错误的。太乏味了。

And this comes from someone called Daniel Kahneman, who's a famous recently deceased psychologist, and it also comes from computer science. And so the idea is that when you have a sudden insight, it's because you're matching a pattern. This is the idea. But we know this has to be wrong. Boring.

这很无聊。这很无聊。我们也知道这肯定是错的，因为首先，计算机在模式匹配方面非常出色。但你见过有直觉的电脑吗？对吧？

It is boring. It is boring. We also know that it has to be wrong because first of all, computers are incredible at pattern matching. But have you ever met a computer with intuition? Right?

你见过能发现前人未察觉可能性的计算机吗？没有。计算机做不到这点。这是它们缺失的能力。而孩子们则相反，他们直觉超强，但在模式匹配上表现糟糕。

Have you ever met a computer who was able to identify a possibility that someone hadn't seen before? No. Computers can't do that. That's a missing skill. We also know that with children, it turns out children have incredibly high levels of intuition, but they're actually pretty bad at pattern matching.

大量研究证实了这一点。那么真相是什么？其实当你运用直觉时，你不是在识别模式，而是在发现例外。你是在做与模式识别相反的事——捕捉那些不符合规律的事物。

And there's a whole bunch of studies that that have confirmed this. So what's actually going on? Well, it turns out what's going on is that when you have an intuition, you're not spotting a pattern, you're spotting an exception. So you're actually doing the opposite of spotting a pattern. You're spotting something that doesn't fit.

当你发现异常现象时，大脑会惊呼：哇！如果这件事不符合既有模式，那就意味着模式之外还存在可能性。我们对世界的认知框架并不能涵盖所有可能性。而当我们开始关注这些例外，并想象由此衍生的各种可能时，直觉正是这种发现机遇与异常的能力，它让我们明白过去不能决定未来，当下的突变正暗示着未来蕴藏的无数机遇。

And when you spot something that doesn't fit, what your brain is saying is, woah. If this is happening and it doesn't fit the pattern, then there are possibilities beyond the pattern. So the way that we think about the world doesn't actually tell us everything that's possible in the world. And what happens when we start to lean into that exception and imagine all the different possibilities that might unfold from it. So intuition is that ability to spot those opportunities and spot those exceptions and realize that the past does not determine the future and that there are all these opportunities in in in the future that are hinted to us by these emergent shifts in the present.

想象力的作用则是将这些机遇转化为具体方案。如果你见过思维如万马奔腾的人，他们不断设想着各种可能性路径——我可以这样走，那样走，这就是想象力。所以高创造力者总能设想事物发展的多种可能。坦白说，人们常认为我很有创造力，因为看到我的职业和著作。但实际上我的想象力相当贫乏，直觉更弱。

And then what imagination does is it takes those opportunities and turns them into plants. So if you've ever met somebody whose mind seems that they're running like a million miles a minute, and they're just seeing all these different ways in which I could go this way, I could go that way, I go this way, That's imagination. And so that's why highly creative people are always able to imagine all these different ways that things can happen. And I'll be honest, people often think that I'm a highly creative person because they look at my career and they read this book. I'm actually a pretty low imagination, and I have even lower intuition.

只是因为我长期与高直觉、高想象力人群为伍，才显得具备这些特质。这两项能力固然重要，但关键在于情感与常识——因为常识能帮你筛选出可行的方案。众所周知，高创造力者能构想无数方案，但他们总是选择最有趣的那个。

It's just because I spend all my time around people with high intuition, high imagination that I seem to have them. And so those are those two powers. But it turns out the keys, really, once you've got those going, are the emotion and the common sense. Because what the common sense does is it allows you to pick the plan that's gonna work. So famously, people are highly creative.

他们会说：我可是创意人士，当然要选最有创意的方案。

They're able to come up with lots of different plans, and then they always pick the plan that they find most interesting. Right? They say, you know what? I'm a creative person. I'm gonna pick the most creative plan.

大多数时候，那种方法行不通。对吧？因为通常有效的计划往往更平淡无奇。所以常识就是能判断：嘿，这里需要创意方案吗？

And most of the time, that doesn't work. Right? Because most of the time, the plan that works is more boring. So common sense is the ability to say, hey. Would a creative plan work here or not?

如果不需要，我该执行什么更常规的方案？直觉、想象力和常识能帮你制定可能成功的新计划。而情感的作用在于筛选：哪些计划不仅会成功，还能契合我的人生叙事？这样我的人生不仅成功，还能获得个人满足感。

And if not, what's a less creative plan that I could execute instead? So intuition, imagination, and common sense are helping you create plans, new plans that can work. But what emotion is doing is it's saying, what plans could work for me? What are the plans that would not only succeed but fit with my own life narrative? So that as I go through life, I'm not just successful, but I feel personally fulfilled.

这就是我们总结的四大要素。但如果你读这本书并喜欢它，最有趣的部分在于：本书不止于识别这些能力，更告诉你如何提升它们。我们开发了特种部队专用的训练方法——

And those are the kind of four things that we were we we identified. But then I think the real hopefully, the thing if you read the book and you like it, hopefully, thing you'll you'll find most interesting is this book isn't just about identifying these powers. It's about saying, here's how you can get better at them. Here's how you train them up. Here are these exercises that we developed in special operations community behind the veil.

明白吗？后来我们将这些方法推广到常规部队，依然有效。因为军队里存在偏见，认为特种兵与众不同。当然特种兵适用，但常规部队就不行——

You know? And then we took out of the special operations community. We put it in the conventional army, and they continued to work. Because there's this prejudice in the army that special operators are special. And, of course, it works for the special operators, but it's not gonna work for all these people in the conventional army.

对吧？但事实并非如此。

Right? You know? But no.

当然。

Of course.

它确实有效。明白吗？因为事实证明，每个人都有直觉、想象力和常识。

It works. Right? It works. Because it turns out that everybody has intuition and everybody has imagination. Everybody has common sense.

你只需要把它训练起来。然后当我们在那完成之后，我们把它带进了学校。我们和小学、大学以及其他各类学生一起实践，取得了许多成功，我也就此发表了不少成果。但直到我们进入企业领域，才真正在教育空间取得了突破。

You just gotta train it up. And then so once we did it there, we took it into schools. And we do it with elementary students and college students and all these other kinds of students. And we got a lot of great success there, and I published a bunch of stuff on that. But we didn't really get the breakthrough in the educational space until we went into businesses.

因为事实证明，学生和家长不会信任你，除非某件事在商业中已经奏效。他们会想，好吧，在学校里当然行得通。对吧？但它能在我进入谷歌或任何地方工作时同样有效吗？

Because it turns out that students and parents don't trust you until something has worked in business. They're like, well, sure, it works in school. Right? But is it gonna work, right, when I'm at Google or whatever? Right?

于是我们进入了所有这些公司，在那里它确实有效，然后教育领域的人就开始认可了，好吧。

And so we went into all these companies where, like, it actually does work there, you know, and then the and then the educational spaces were like, okay.

因为它们都是由人类组成的。

Because they're all full of humans.

没错，完全正确。因为人就是人，对吧？

That's right. Exactly. Because a human is a human. Right?

我想你现在在学校里。

I think you're in school.

它会有效的，正是如此。

It'll work. That's right.

现在从常识角度出发，你写到了焦虑。通常我们认为焦虑是负面的，但它也有积极的一面。你说要通过摆脱过去的阴影来调节未来的焦虑。让我们来谈谈如何调节焦虑。

Now under common sense, you write about anxiety. And generally, we think of anxiety as bad, but it's also good. You say tune your anxiety by ridding the future of the past. Let's talk about tuning anxiety.

没错。我们来聊聊这个。因为焦虑是有益的，但在现代社会我们却被教导要害怕它。所以我想先做个说明——这是常识章节，而我的常识其实是负面的。

Yeah. Let's talk about that. Because anxiety is good, and we're taught to fear it in the modern world. So let me give a little bit of a caveat about this. So this is the this is a common sense chapter, and my common sense is actually negative.

如果你读过这本书，会发现我在各种情境下都做了与聪明人完全相反的事。所以我必须从头开始建立常识体系。从极度负面的起点出发，现在我的常识水平可能接近零了。这让你明白我进步了...

If you read the book, you'll see all sorts of instances in which I do exactly the opposite of what a smart person should do in a situation. So I really had to be bootstrapped up in terms of my common sense. And and having started from being really, really negative, my common sense is probably close to zero now. So that give you a sense of how much I've

多少。了不起的成就。

improved. Accomplishment.

正是如此。如果你从负数起步，你也可以接近零水平。但这意味着我必须非常缓慢地与操作员逐步推进，因为他们需要全面训练我。最终我们发现，对操作员而言，培养常识的关键在于理解你的焦虑及其传递的信息。

That's right. It's it's right. You too can be almost at zero if you were at negative. But this meant that I had to walk through the steps really slowly with the operators because the operators had to really train me on everything. And it turned out that the breakthrough came when we realized that for the operators, training your common sense actually comes from learning your anxiety and what your anxiety is telling you.

焦虑是人类大脑进化出来帮助你判断环境波动性的机制。当你的焦虑程度与环境匹配时，说明你正处于新情境需要警惕。准确来说，焦虑是帮你识别环境新奇度，或者说未知变量的数量。当面对大量未知因素时，正常运作的焦虑感就会上升。比如很多人说自己有社交焦虑...

So anxiety evolved in the human brain to help you determine the volatility of your environment. So if you're anxious and you're appropriately anxious, that's telling you there's something to be worried about because you're in a new situation. So anxiety evolved to help you determine environmental novelty or to be technical about it, the number of unknown unknowns. So if your anxiety is working appropriately, it'll start to go up when you're in a situation where there's a lot of unknown factors. So a lot of people talk, for example, about how they have social anxiety.

这非常普遍。但这完全正常——还有什么比素未谋面的人更未知的呢？他们可能做出任何事。当你走进满是陌生人的房间时，确实有理由感到焦虑，因为谁知道会发生什么？

This is a very common thing. But that's actually totally normal because what's more unknown than other people you haven't met before? I mean, they could actually do anything. You know? When you walk into a room full of strangers, that's a reason to be anxious because who knows?

对吧？你懂吗？没错。谁知道呢？有这么多不同的因素，所以你需要做的是，一旦开始意识到，焦虑是好的，焦虑是聪明的，但焦虑在现代社会中出现了功能失调。

Right? You know? Right. Who knows? There's all these different so what you have to do is once you start to realize, okay, anxiety is good, anxiety is smart, but anxiety is malfunctioning in the modern world.

我们很多人总是为一些本不该焦虑的事情感到焦虑，却没有获得焦虑带来的益处。那么，我们如何才能获得这些益处呢？正如你所说，操作者们会采取两个简单的步骤。首先，他们会区分对未来焦虑和对过去焦虑。事实证明，许多你担心未来会发生的事情，其实已经在你身上发生过，你只是担心它们会再次发生。

And a lot of us are anxious all the time for reasons that we shouldn't be anxious, and we're not getting the benefits of anxiety. So how do we kind of get those benefits? And so to your point, there are these two simple steps that the operators take. The first thing is is they distinguish future anxiety from past anxiety. So it turns out a lot of things you're worried about happening in the future are things that have already occurred to you, and you're worried they're gonna happen again.

但关键在于，如果它们已经发生过，那么你就知道如何应对。所以，制定一个应对计划，然后放手。不要担心它们会再次发生，因为即使真的再次发生，你也已经准备好了。这就是操作者们做的第一件事。

But here's the thing. If they've already occurred to you, then you know how to deal with them. So make a plan to deal with them and then let them go. Don't worry about them happening again because if they happen again, you're prepared. So that's the first thing that that operators do.

其次，他们会专注于他们称之为“当下加一”的概念。这个方法的原理是，当你展望未来时，看得越远，未知因素就越多。一年后的未知比一个月后的多，五年后的未知更多。许多人在面对无法控制的焦虑时，会开始看得太远。

And then the second thing they do is they focus on what they call the now plus one. So the way this works is when you're looking into the future, the further you look into the future, by definition, the more unknowns there are. There's more unknowns a year from now than there are a month from now. There's even more unknowns five years from now. And what a lot of people do when they have uncontrollable anxieties, they just start looking too far into the future.

他们看得越远，就越容易恐慌，因为他们意识到那里总是有未知的未知。然后他们会说，我的焦虑很糟糕，我得忽略它，对吧？于是他们试图只专注于当下。

And the more they look into the future, the more they start to panic because they realize there's always unknown unknowns unknowns there. And then they say, you know My anxiety is bad. I've got to ignore it. Right? And then they just try and focus on presentness.

对吧？或者冥想、禅修之类的。但这样你就错过了焦虑的益处。实际上，你应该做的是将焦虑推到一个稍后的时间点，只展望一点点未来，关注你最能立即控制的事情。

Right? Or or meditation or Zen or something like that. But then you're missing out the benefit of your anxiety. And so really what you wanna do is you wanna push your anxiety one moment forward in time. So you're looking just a little bit into the future and to what you can most immediately control.

当你这样做时，你会开始感受到一种轻微的焦虑，因为那里有一点未知，但这种焦虑实际上在激励你，帮助你发现可能性。你越专注于这一点，就越容易进入所谓的“心流”状态。你可能听说过心流，当你全身心投入一项活动，大脑以一种积极的方式完全被占据时，就会进入心流状态。而你的焦虑正在唤醒大脑中这些沉睡的部分。

And when you do that, what you'll start to feel is that you have like a light anxiety because there's a little bit of unknown there, but that anxiety is actually energizing you. And it's helping you detect possibilities. And the more you focus on that, the more you'll enter into the state that's called flow. So you probably heard of flow before, but you get flow when you are engaged in activity that's occupying basically your whole brain in a kind of positive way. And your anxiety is waking up all these dormant portions of your brain.

所以你让他们都参与这些近期活动，而不是看得太远以致恐慌，或过于专注当下以至于

So you engage all of them in this near term activity rather than looking so far ahead that you panic or being so present that you're

心不在焉？心不在焉。好吧，你掌握这些能力后，会在不同情境、不同场合中运用它们。这是一方面。这里有个我认为很有启发的见解。

disengaged? Disengaged. Well, you take these powers and you apply them in various situations, various contexts. And here's one side. Here's one insight which, I think is telling.

你说，最佳决策是将计划的新颖性与情境的新颖性相匹配。然后你又写道，要去专家无法拒绝的地方。那么弗莱彻博士，请解释一下这一点。好的。

You say, the best decisions match the newness of your plan to the newness of your situation. Then you say then you write, going where experts can't say no. Well, explain that, doctor Fletcher. Alright.

我来向点唱机解释这个。重申一下，这是常识部分。我喜欢你拷问我常识问题，因为我毫无常识可言。所以

So I'll explain this to jukebox. And again, this is the common sense part. I like that you're grilling me on common sense because I have no common sense. So

我找到了他的弱点。

I found his weak spot.

没错。不。你确实。绝对是。那好吧。

That's right. No. You yeah. Definitely. So okay.

关于常识的第一点是，你的计划要与环境相匹配。你要为时代选择正确的计划。这意味着在全新的时代，你必须制定全新的计划；而在熟悉的时期，沿用昨天奏效的方案即可，因为时代背景大致相同。这看似显而易见，但事实证明我们多数人都做不到。

So the first thing about common sense is you wanna match your plan to the environment. You wanna pick the right plan for the times. And what that means is that in really new times, you have to pick a really new plan. Whereas in familiar times, you just go with something that kind of worked yesterday because the times are pretty much the same. Now this seems obvious, but it turns out most of us don't do this.

大多数时候的情况是，我们处于熟悉的环境中感到无聊，于是开始冒险。你一生中有多少次是在感到无聊时采取了最大风险？这并不符合常理。而反过来说，当我们身处真正动荡的环境时，大多数人会感到紧张并退回到过去行之有效的做法中。

What happens most of the time is that we're in a familiar situation. We get bored and we take a risk. So how many times in your life have you taken your greatest risks when you're bored? That's not commonsensical. And the flip side of that is that most of us when we get in really volatile environments, get nervous and retreat to something that worked in the past.

比如，天啊，我感到如此不确定，我想回到过去。你知道吗？我想重复昨天、十年前或任何过去有效的做法。

Like, oh my goodness. I feel so uncertain. I wanna go back. You know? I wanna I wanna do what was working yesterday or ten years ago or whatever.

人们以为这是解决问题的方法。但实际上并非如此。尽管未来充满未知，我们无法确切知道什么会奏效，但根据定义，旧方案注定会失效。因此，即使不知道新方案的成功概率，采用它的胜算也远高于旧方案——因为旧方案的成功几率是零。你必须让自己建立这样的心理机制：新时代就要尝试新事物。

That's the way to fix the problem. And actually, no. Because even though the the the future is unknown, so we don't know exactly what's gonna work, we know that old plans by definition are definitely not gonna work. So you have a much higher chance of succeeding by using a new plan even if you don't know what the likelihood of success is than an old plan because the old plan, the chance of working is zero. So you start to got gotta get yourself in the psychology where in new times, I'm gonna do new things.

尽管不确定新方法是否有效，但我知道它们可能有效；而旧方法注定无效。这就涉及到专家及其局限性问题。

Even though I don't know they're gonna work, I know that they can work. Whereas I know that old plans cannot work. So this is where we we get into experts and how experts can be.

围棋是

Go is

专家会说'不'的领域。因为许多人对专业知识存在认知误区。当我们在生活中迷失时，会寻求导师建议，询问'我该怎么做？'。但现实是，导师的建议只适用于昨天——因为他们基于过去经验给出建议。于是人们就说：那导师岂不是没用了？

where experts can say no. Because a lot of us have a bad relationship to expertise. Like, when we're when we're sort of lost in our lives, we'll go to a mentor, and then we'll ask them, what should I do? And the reality is is what the mentor tells you to do will work yesterday because the mentor is coming from the past, you know, and they're telling you what works for them. So then we say, well, then mentors must be useless.

如果导师只知道过去有效的方法（对吧），那我就该无视他们自己摸索？不，不，不，这种想法是错误的。

If they only knew what worked yesterday, right, then I don't I'm gonna ignore them and just go on my own. No. No. No. That's not right.

导师非常擅长告诉你某件事何时尝试过并失败了，而且他们能向你解释失败的原因。所以当你向无法说‘不’的专家请教时，实际上是在向专家提交一个计划。你在问：这个尝试过吗？你能证明它行不通吗？如果他们能证明行不通，就别做了。

Mentors are really good at telling you when something has been tried and failed, and they can explain to you why it failed. And so when you go where experts can't say no, what you're doing is you're giving a plan to an expert. You're saying, has this been tried before? Can you prove to me that it can't work? If they can prove to you it can't work, don't do it.

但如果你觉得，嗯，这看起来风险很大，但我无法断言它不会成功，那就放手去做。因为专家的话意味着你的计划超出了专业知识的边界，说明它是真正的新事物。而唯有在全新环境中可行的计划，才是真正前所未有的计划——专家从未见过因而无法否决的计划。

But if you're like, well, it seems really risky, but I can't tell you that it won't work, go for it. Because what the expert is telling you is that it that your plan goes beyond the limits of expertise, which means that it's genuinely new. And the only plans that can work in genuinely new environments are genuinely new plans, which means a plan that an expert has not seen before and therefore can't say no.

有些人会说：'我这把年纪已经搞不出新花样了'。比如很多人退休后就想彻底躺平。还有些人说：'我们刚有孩子，刚买了房子还想换房，这么多事哪顾得上制定计划'。

Now some people would say, well, you know, I'm just of an age where I just you know, nothing new. You You know, a lot of people take, for instance, retirement and they go, okay, I'm gonna shut down, do nothing. You know, and then other people say, well, hey, we just started having kids. We just bought this house, and we wanna buy a house. All this stuff is going on, so I'm not even gonna have a plan.

但你提出的一个挑战我很欣赏：'今年可能取得哪些胜利？'对，我们来聊聊胜利的定义，以及你如何选择实现它，为什么这对你有益。

But you say something, one of your challenges, which I particularly liked, was what possible victories can you achieve this year? Yeah. Let's talk about what a victory is and and and and how how you might choose to do that and why that might be good for you.

没错。因为归根结底，为什么胜利对你有益？因为生命的真谛在于成长。这就是生命的意义，我们本能地明白这一点。

Yeah. Well, because ultimately, why why is it good for you to have a victory? Well, because the purpose of life is growth. That is the purpose of life. And we know that instinctively.

观察大自然就会发现，万物都在生长。但你说得对，人类到某个阶段就会想：'我只希望一切维持现状，只想安逸度日'，对吧？

And if you go out in nature, that's all that nature is doing is nature is growing. But you're right. We as human beings at a certain point, we're like, I just want everything to stay the same. I just wanna be comfortable. Right?

但成长既能带来生命最深刻的喜悦，也是对未来最好的保障。为人父母者，必须为孩子示范成长；为人师表者，就要在课堂上冒险，向学生展示成长的模样。

But growth is what both gives you the deepest joy in life. It's also what protects your future. And, you know, if you're a parent, you have to model growth for your kids. You know? If you're a teacher, you've got to take risks in the classroom and model growth for your students.

这意味着你需要为自己定义什么是胜利，什么是你渴望达成的目标，然后找出让这种胜利成为可能的方法。不是很可能，而是可能。需要我解释可能性与概率之间的区别吗？还是说这个已经清楚了？好吧。

And so what that means is you've gotta identify for you what a victory would be, what's something that you want to succeed at, and then figure out ways that that victory becomes possible. Not probable, but possible. Do you want me to talk about the difference between possibility and probability, or is that something? Okay.

是的。是的。

Yeah. Yeah.

这是我发现真正迷人的一点。不知道你们是否也会觉得有趣，毕竟你们可能不像我这么古怪又书呆子气。但大脑对可能性和概率的处理区域完全不同。当你思考概率时，激活的是大脑中与思考可能性完全不同的区域。有趣的是，如果让当今大多数人解释可能性与概率的区别，他们很可能会说：可能性就是低概率事件。

So this is something I found truly fascinating. I don't if you guys will find this fascinating because you're maybe not quite as weird and nerdy as me. But there's a difference in your brain between possibility and probability. So if you're thinking about probability, that goes on in a totally different part of your brain than when you're thinking about possibility. And what's interesting about that is if you ask most people today to explain the difference between possibility and probability, they'll probably tell you, well, you know, a possibility is a kind of low probability.

比如他们会认为可能性大概是10%、5%或1%之类的。但现实情况截然不同。真正的区别在于：概率是基于过去已发生事件的计算结果。你可以梳理所有历史事件，

So, you know, a possibility is probably, like, maybe 10% or maybe 5% or 1% or something like that. And the reality is this notes totally different. So what's the difference? Well, the difference is is that probability is calculated off of things that have happened in the past. So you can go through all those events that have happened in the past.

将它们与其他因素关联，计算出事件再次发生的几率。这就是计算机的思维方式——它们用概率思考。而可能性指的是从未发生过但符合环境规律的事件。经典案例是十九世纪末，当时世界上最伟大的统计学家

You can correlate them with other factors, and you can compute the likelihood that they'll happen again. This is what computers do. They they think in probability. A possibility is something that has never happened before but could happen because it doesn't break the laws of your environment. The classic example of this is end of nineteenth century, world's greatest statistician.

开尔文勋爵。他担任英国皇家学会会长，数学造诣之高堪称人形计算机。他通过数学论证得出结论：人类永远造不出飞机。为什么？

His name is Lord Kelvin. He's the president of the Royal Society. He's so good at math that he's basically the first computer just by himself. And he sits down and he proves mathematically that there will never be an airplane. Why?

因为此前从未有过飞机，所以飞机存在的概率为零。这段论述有据可查——他在1895年公开发表了这个绝对化的论断。

Well, because there'd never been an airplane before. So the probability of there being an airplane was zero. And you can go and you can read this. He actually says this in 1895. He comes out definitively.

然后他们在1902年又来找他，问道，你还确定吗？他回答，当然。看看这些数学计算。数学证明了一切。一年后发生了什么？莱特兄弟果然飞上了天。

And then they came back to him in in in nineteen o two, they said, are you still sure about this? He's like, absolutely. Look at the math. The math proves it. And then what happened a year later, of course, the Wright brothers, they flew.

为什么莱特兄弟能成功飞行？因为他们思考的是不可能之事。而他们之所以能这样思考，部分原因在于他们阅读了父亲书架上那些充满想象力的故事。所以当你思考自己的未来时，重要的是开始思考可能性，开始想象你人生可能经历的各种故事，并认识到故事在人脑中的力量不在于确定一个唯一真实的叙事。这也是如今人们对故事持怀疑态度的原因。

And why is it the Wright brothers were able to flew? Because they were thinking impossibility. And one of the reasons they were thinking impossibility was that they were reading these imaginative stories that were on their father's bookshelf. And so when you think about your own future, what's important is to start to think in possibility, to start to imagine all the different stories that your life could take, and to realize that the power of story in the human brain is not to identify a single true narrative. This is why people are suspicious of stories nowadays.

他们会说，你知道吗？当人们开始思考某个叙事时，就会把所有数据拿来强行套用。对吧？你经常听到这种说法，尤其是来自某些不喜欢故事的数学家或经济学家。他们会说故事不过是偏见的形式。

They'll say, well, you know what? When people start thinking a narrative, then they just take all the data and they use it to fit their narrative. Right? You'll hear this all the time, particularly from a certain kind of mathematician or economist that doesn't like story. They'll talk about stories or just forms of bias is what they'll say.

但这只在你误用故事时成立。如果你正确运用故事，你脑中不会只有一个你认为最可能的故事，而是会衍生出多个可能的故事。所以当你思考未来如何成功时，你实际上在思考：有哪些不同的方式可以实现目标？有哪些不同的路径可以选择？

Well, only if you're misusing story. Because if you're using story appropriately, you don't have a single story in your brain that you think is the most probable story. You instead have multiplying stories, all that are possible. And so when you're thinking about how you can win in the future, what you're doing there is you're thinking, what are all the different ways that I can achieve my goals? What are all the different paths that I can take?

这让现代人感到不安，因为我们被教育体系、商业运作方式以及计算机和数学思维所塑造，总认为必须有个正确答案，必须高效，必须可行。但观察孩子就会发现，可能性思维让他们充满活力。孩子们喜欢‘存在多种选择’这个想法。

And this makes people nowadays nervous when they start thinking about that because people nowadays, we've been conditioned by our school system and by the way that business works and by the way the computers and math works to think, no, there's gotta be a right answer. It's gotta be efficient. I know it's gotta work. But when you look at children, children are energized by thinking of possibilities. Children love the idea that there there are all these different options.

明白吗？如果你能让自己的大脑重新回到那种状态，只是思考：今年我有哪些不同的获胜方式？

You know? And if you can get your own brain back into that state of just thinking, what are some different ways that I could win this year?

是啊。

Yeah.

当你开始这样做时，就会解锁大脑想象这些未来的能力。你会发现，最终实现的胜利可能并非你预想中的任何一种，但它自有其非凡之处。

Then when you start to do that, you start to unlock this ability of your brain to imagine these futures. And what you'll find is that the victory you achieve is probably not one of the ones you imagined, but it's remarkable in its own way.

现在你详细记录了莎士比亚自其时代以来对各类名人的深远影响。你谈到美国演员夏洛特·库什曼时，说她把握住了莎士比亚的核心洞见——故事的成功不在于遵循套路，而在于如何打破规则。当我们听到、看到或经历一个打破规则的故事时，大脑会发生什么反应？

Now you document in detail the impact of William Shakespeare on many famous people of all sorts ever since Shakespeare existed. And you, talk about American actor, Charlotte Cushman as grasping Shakespeare's core insight. What makes a story work isn't its fidelity to formulas, it's how it breaks the rules. What happens in our brains when it hears, sees, experiences, if whatever, a story that breaks the rules?

当我们体验打破规则的故事时，会突然感到解放，因为我们意识到自己也能打破规则。我认为有必要指出这点，是因为当今世界痴迷于叙事套路。上网随处可见这些公式——无论是约瑟夫·坎贝尔的英雄之旅，还是八种经典故事类型，比如'鱼离水'等等。这些都违背了生物学现实：故事存在于大脑中，本就是为了想象未曾发生过的事。

When we experience a story that breaks the rules, we suddenly feel liberated because we realize that we ourselves can break the rules. And one of the reasons I feel this is important to say is because we live in a world now which is obsessed with narrative formulas. So if you go on the Internet, you'll see whether it's the hero's journey, the Joseph Campbell hero's journey, whether it's, you know, the eight classic types of story, you know, fish out of water, so on and so forth. There's all these formulas out there. And these all defy the biological reality, which is that story exists in the brain to imagine things that haven't happened before.

故事本无定式。当我们看到打破规则的故事时就会想起这点。这实际上正是莎士比亚这类作家最原始的功能，也是人们闲聚分享故事的意义所在。比如当朋友讲述离奇经历时，你会突然惊呼：等等，这真发生过吗？

There's no formula for story. And we're reminded of that when we see a story that breaks the rules. And this is actually really the primordial function of a writer like Shakespeare, but also of just, you know, hanging out and sharing stories with each other. I mean, when you hang out with your friends and they start telling you these stories and all of a sudden you're like, woah, wait. Did this really actually happen?

难以置信对吧？但对方坚持说：不，这确实发生了。明白吗？

I can't imagine. You're like, no. No. This actually happened. You know?

你不仅开始理解为何与这位朋友亲近——因为其独特性。你意识到：我喜欢这个人正因为他的特别，而非符合某种交友模板。同时你还会产生一种惊奇感：天啊...

You're not only starting to develop a sense of why you're close to your friend because your friend is unique. And you start to realize, oh, I really like this person because they're special, not because they're a formula, not that because they're the archetypal friend. Yeah. You know? But you're also starting to develop this sense of wonder where you're like, oh my goodness.

生活竟能走向我从未设想的方向。这让你重新接触到那些原始的故事。而我们现代社会的问题在于，被困在不断重复的套路叙事里——媒体上永远是老调重弹，好莱坞更是周而复始。

Life can go in all these ways that I didn't imagine before. And it's putting you back in contact with those primordial stories. And the problem that we're experiencing in the modern world now is we exist within these stories that are just constantly and aggressively repeated. So if you go on media, it's always the same stories over and over and over again. Hollywood is endless.

我之所以这么说，是因为我在好莱坞工作了很久。好莱坞总是一遍又一遍地重复着同样的故事。因此我们总是被灌输这些是唯一的选择。这就是为什么如今与人交谈时，人们对未来如此悲观。这对我来说是个真正的悖论，因为我们正处在一个前所未有的可能性时代。

And I can say this because I've worked a lot in Hollywood. Hollywood is always repeating the same stories over and over and over and over and over again. And so we're always being conditioned to think these are the only options. And that's why when you talk to people nowadays, people are so pessimistic about the future. This is just real paradox to me because we exist in a moment right now where more is possible than has ever been possible.

我们拥有非凡的资源——无论是人力资源、技术、科学还是艺术领域，现在的可能性比以往任何时候都多。回顾人类历史，你会意识到人们曾用比现在少得多的资源创造了多少非凡成就。然而当你与人交谈时，却感受到极度的悲观情绪。是的，这是因为我们作为一个文化，正在丧失想象新故事的能力。

We have so many extraordinary resources in terms of our human resources, in terms of technology, in terms of science, in terms of art, more is possible now than has ever been possible. And if you look back over the course of human history, you start to realize all the extraordinary things that people have done with far less resources than we have right now. Yet when you talk to people, the mood is one of extraordinary pessimism. Yeah. And that's because we, as a culture, are losing the ability to imagine new stories.

我们无法展望未来并想象不同的可能性。相反，我们只是困在重复同样的套路里。当然，学校通过强调原型理论等概念强化了这种思维。而夏洛特·库什曼的非凡之处在于——你们可能没听说过她——她是十九世纪最伟大的演员。她成为传奇是因为她想在《罗密欧与朱丽叶》中表演。

We can't look into the future and imagine different ways that it could go. Instead, we're just caught recycling the same formulas. And this is, of course, reinforced in school by this idea that it's all archetypes and so on and so forth. And so what's wonderful about Charlotte Cushman, and you probably haven't heard of her, but she was the greatest actor in the nineteenth century. And she became legendary because she wanted to act in a performance of Romeo and Juliet.

当她来到剧院时，剧院已经改写了《罗密欧与朱丽叶》，给它安排了一个幸福结局——罗密欧与朱丽叶结婚了。我不想剧透给没看过这出戏的人，但这出戏之所以不叫《罗密欧与朱丽叶的幸福婚姻》是有原因的。她到剧院后非常困惑，而当时经营这家伦敦最成功剧院的负责人说...

And when she went to the stage, the stage had rewritten Romeo and Juliet to make it have a happy ending, which Romeo and Juliet got married. Now I don't wanna spoil the play for any of you who haven't seen it, but it's not called the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet because Romeo and Juliet get married at the end. And so she got to the playhouse, and she was like, what's going on with this? You know? And the guy at the playhouse who was running the playhouse, it was the was the most successful playhouse in London at the time.

他说：'我们发现观众就是喜欢重复同样的故事。他们喜欢这些套路化的浪漫喜剧。说实话，莎士比亚那些东西真的很奇怪——他的故事如此怪异，角色如此古怪。那个哈姆雷特，他的独白没完没了。'

He was like, well he's like, we've discovered that audiences just like the same stories over and over and over again. They like these formulaic romantic comedies. And, you know, all this stuff that Shakespeare did, you know, just between the two of us, it's really weird. Like, his stories are just so odd, and his characters are so eccentric. This guy, Hamlet, he, like, talks forever.

'直接杀了国王结束剧情不好吗？这些都太奇怪了。所以我们决定重写所有...'于是这件事就发生了。

Like, what are you talking about? Like, just kill the king, get the play over with. It's all really weird. You know? And so, you know, we just decided we would rewrite all of And this happened.

如果你回溯十八、十九世纪，他们会把莎士比亚所有作品都改写成浪漫喜剧。而夏洛特，她...

If you go back to the eighteenth, nineteenth, they rewrote all of Shakespeare to make it into these romantic comedies. And Charlotte, she

国王是李尔。

King was Lear.

什么？是啊。我其实可以把这变成一部浪漫喜剧。李尔王，你能想象吗？这简直是史上最阴暗的戏剧。

What? Yeah. I That actually becomes a romantic comedy. King Lear, can you imagine? It's like the bleakest play in history.

我就想，我们应该把它改编成浪漫喜剧。观众会更喜欢的。总之，她出现了。夏洛特来了，她说，我要按莎士比亚原著表演。我要原汁原味地呈现。

And I'm like, we should make a romantic comedy out of it. People will like that better. So anyway, so she comes along. Charlotte comes along, and she's like, I'm gonna act the original Shakespeare play. I'm gonna do it the way that it was performed.

剧院基本上想撕毁她的合同。他们试图赶她走。他们说，观众不会喜欢的。太奇怪了。太新潮了。

And the theater basically tried to break her contract. They tried to throw her out. They're like, people won't like it. It's too weird. It's too new.

但最终她如愿以偿。当她走上舞台时，她说，顺便说一句，还有一件事，我要演罗密欧。于是她登台扮演罗密欧，观众爱死了。那个演出季最受欢迎的剧目，就是她出演罗密欧的莎士比亚原剧。这提醒我们，观众渴望新故事。

But finally, she got her way. And then as she was walking on stage, she said, and by the way, one other thing, I'm gonna play Romeo. And so she went on the stage and played Romeo, and audiences loved it. It was the most popular play of the season, was her playing Romeo in Shakespeare's original play. And what that is a reminder of is that audiences want new stories.

制片人却不敢给他们。要知道，我在好莱坞工作这么多年，制片人总是战战兢兢，因为他们只想拍肯定能赚钱的故事，对他们来说，就是上一季成功的套路。写书也一样。你需要一个非常有胆识的编辑。

Producers are afraid to give it to them. And, you know, I tell you, worked all this time in Hollywood. Producers get terrified because they want to make a story that they know is gonna make money, and to them, that's the story that was successful last season. It's the same thing if you write books. You gotta have a really courageous editor.

比如我的编辑就很有勇气出版这本书，做完全创新的尝试。因为编辑们骨子里最怕丢脸。所以他们有种天然倾向，在最后关头变得保守、畏缩，选择以前成功的模式。遵循蓝图。沿用现有套路。但观众真正热爱的——我知道你们心里都明白，因为你们都有过这样的体验——是那些打破你预期、改变你的电影。

Like my editor was pretty courageous to publish this book to do something totally new Because editors really at their heart, they just don't wanna be embarrassed. And so they have this natural tendency to get conservative, to get tight at the last moment, and go with what worked before. Go with the blueprint. Go with the existing stereotype. But really, what audiences love, and I know you know this in your gut because all of you have had an experience of walking in to see a movie that changed you because it defeated your expectations.

事情并非如你所料。正是这种出乎意料才具有变革性。让你兴奋的正是它讲述了一个你未曾预料的故事。因此我们需要营造一种文化，让年轻学生能创造更多这样的故事，而非被迫遵循固定模式。我们自身也应支持更多这类故事，克服对它们可能不受欢迎的焦虑——毕竟人们总对新鲜事物抱有戒心。

It was not what you thought was gonna happen. And that was what was transformative about it. That was what was exciting to you about it, was the fact that it told you a story you hadn't been expecting before. And so what we need to do is we need to start to create a culture in which students, young people can start to develop more of these stories instead of being forced to think of formula, and which we ourselves support more of these stories and put more of them out and get over our anxiety and our fear that somehow they're not gonna be successful because people don't like new things.

就像你之前说的，17岁、21岁时我能做什么？虽然看似能做不同的事，或表面上相同的事，但你总能赋予独特的转折。

And to your point earlier, you know, it's like what am I gonna do with my life at 17, 21? It's like I'm such a it's like, yeah, you can do some things that are different, or do things that are apparently the the same, but you you're taking a twist on it.

没错，正是如此。

That's right. That's right.

这真的非常非常重要。这让我想到我钟爱的幽默与大脑机制——在这些意想不到的故事或视角中，就像大脑里突然有闪电般的神经突触首次连接，让你发笑，让你兴奋。

You know, and that's that's really, really important. I'm also reminded of I love humor, and and I love the brain. And, you know, in these unexpected stories or unexpected takes on things, it's almost like there's a little lightning switch in your brain that jumped from one neuron to the other that never was there before, and you're laughing. You know? And you're you're excited.

你的大脑里正迸发着能量。

There's energy that happens in your brain.

确实如此。这里其实发生着两件事：

That's right. That's right. Yeah. And so what's happening there is two things. Right?

首先我们讨论过，当拥有可能性感知时，你就能发现世界的可能性。但你刚才指出的是，大脑发现了自身的可能性——它意识到能建立新连接，神经元可以全新方式组合，发现自己具备感知故事、体验故事、享受故事乃至为从未想过会发笑的事物开怀的能力。

So first of all, we've already talked about how when you have that that sense of possibility, you discover possibility in the world. But what you've just pointed out is your brain discovers the possibility in itself. It realizes I can make that connection. It realizes that these neurons can come together. It realizes that I have the capacity to see stories and experience stories and enjoy stories and laugh at things that I never thought I could do before.

然后它再次赋予你那种原始的生长感。我是说，这就是让人兴奋的地方，我们都有过那种顿悟时刻，无论是看电影、看喜剧时大笑，还是在课堂上遇到一位特别启发人的教授，他教给我们一些东西，让我们感叹：哇，我从未想过这两件事能联系起来，但它们确实可以。这让我们对自己更有信心，因为它让我们意识到自己拥有这种力量，这种感知力，能让我们看到以前未曾注意到的事物，而这正是成长的过程。

And then it gives you that primordial sense of growth again. I mean, that's what's so excite you know, all of us have had that sort of, like, epiphantic moment where, you know, whether it's we're watching a movie or or watching comedy and we laugh or we're in a class, we have a particularly inspired professor who's teaching us something or like, woah. I never would have thought those two things would fit together. But they do. That makes us more confident in ourselves because it realizes that we have this power, this perception that allows us to see things that we hadn't seen before, and it's growing.

安格斯能告诉我们他在常识方面从负数进步到零，我们为此鼓掌。我们为他鼓掌，是因为他设计了一个测试。书里有这个测试，你可以做一下。这个原始自我评估测试。

Now the reason that Angus could tell us he went from negative to zero on common sense, and we applaud him. We applaud him for that, is that he has a quiz. It's in the book. You can take it. The primal self assessment quiz.

我们都在努力最大化这四种能力。记住，直觉、想象力、情感和常识，你可以看到自己处于什么水平。当然，我也做了测试。你觉得我得分如何？你猜我最强的两项是什么？

And we're all trying to maximize all four capabilities. Remember, intuition, imagination, emotion, and common sense, and you can see where you are. And, of course, I took it. So what how'd you think I scored? You're my top two?

所以我猜你的想象力非常丰富。我猜对了吗？嗯。而且你看起来很有个性，所以我猜要么是直觉，要么是情感。直觉和想象力。

That's why I imagine you have very high imagination. Am I right on that? Mhmm. And you seem like you have a lot of person so I would either guess intuition or emotion. Intuition and imagination.

直觉和想象力。

Intuition and imagination.

但有趣的是关于情感的部分，当你有这些能力并说‘我真的想这么做’时，常识会告诉你‘这是你应该采取的方式’或‘也许这不是个好主意’。但在这些艰难时刻，情感必须支撑你坚持下去。你不能回头依赖逻辑，问‘成功的概率有多大？’

But Yeah. The funny thing is about going to emotion, when you have these things and you say, I really wanna do it, you know, the the emotion and the common sense, the common sense tells you like, well, this is how you should go about it or maybe not, you know, not such a good idea. But in these in these times when things get tough, the emotion has to carry you through. You can't go back to the logic and say, well, what are the probabilities?

没错。完全正确。

Exactly. Exactly.

我要战胜这个。那种情绪必须推动你完成那个项目。是的。

I'm gonna overcome this. It's like that emotion has to carry you on that project. Yes.

确实如此。是的。嗯，所以，我是说，你们都有过的基本体验是，如果你认为某件事是对的，通常你不会去做。对吧？我是说，你觉得它是对的，但如果你感受到某件事是对的，你就会去做。

It does. Yeah. Well so, I mean, here's the basic thing that you've all experienced is that if you think something is right, you generally don't do it. Right? I mean, you think that it's right, but, you know, but if you feel that something is right, you do do it.

在某个时刻，你必须感受到自己的故事是对的。你必须感受到这一点。所以我对你拥有高直觉和想象力并不感到惊讶。我还想指出，就测试而言，如果你从书中获取，这些都是相对分数。所以这些分数是相对于你而言的。

And at a certain point, you have to feel like your own story is right. You have to feel that. So I'm not surprised you have high intuition and imagination. And I also wanna point out as far as the quiz goes, if you take it from the book, these are relative scores. So these are scores relative to you.

所以你的常识可能是你最低的分数，但它仍然可能比我的高出许多倍。所以这是消极的。但是

So your common sense could be your lowest score, but it could still be many times higher than mine. So It's negative. But

你给了我希望，

you gave me hope,

安格斯。你给了

Angus. You gave

我希望。

me hope.

是的。我似乎还有些常识。对吧？而且，你知道，我们在写书过程中发现，尤其是年轻人，他们在所有这些方面都有爆发式成长的能力。我们与八岁大的孩子们做了大量工作，证明他们可以在情绪分数、常识分数或想象力分数上取得显著进步。

Yeah. I seem like I have some common sense. Right? And, you know, one of the things we discovered in the book is that in writing the book is that in young people particularly, they have the ability to have explosive growth in all of these. And we did tons and tons of work with kids as as young as eight where we showed that they could have dramatic improvement in their emotion scores or their common sense scores or their imagination scores.

这之所以重要，是因为我们观察到大约从三年级开始，所有这些能力都会大幅下降。这些研究并非仅由我的实验室完成，而是三十多年来多方研究的成果。令我震惊的是，这些发现存在了三十年却无人采取行动——我们知道孩子们在校时间越长，标准化考试成绩就越好。

And the reason this is important is we what we start seeing around third grade is a huge decline in all of these. So, you know, this isn't work that was done by my lab. This is work that's been done for more than thirty years. And what's shocking to me is that this work has been around for thirty years. No one has done anything about it is we know that the longer that kids spend in school, the better they get at standardized tests.

但他们越来越不了解自己，越来越不擅长构想新计划。当今年轻人焦虑和愤怒情绪激增的原因之一，就是当他们面临挑战时，无法做出健康恰当的反应。相反，他们立即进入威胁状态，采取战斗或逃跑反应——要么攻击，要么试图逃避。这些都与入学时间完全相关。所以如果你读这本书时像我一样在某些技能上很糟糕——事实上我在书末坦承，起初我对所有技能都相当差劲——我希望你能明白。

But the worse they get at knowing themselves, the worse they get at being able to imagine new plans. So one of the reasons we see this spike in anxiety and anger in young people today is because they don't have the ability once they're challenged to figure out a response that's healthy and appropriate. Instead, when they get challenged, they immediately go into a threat, a fight or flight response, neither attack or try and run away. And this is all correlated with them entering school. So one of the things I hope if you read the book and you're like me and you're bad at some of these skills, and in fact, I will say as I reveal at the back of the book, that I'm actually pretty dreadful at all of the skills, at least I was to start out with.

因为会有读者看完书后说：'安格斯，你肯定拥有超强的原始智力！这么原始的能力，我想招你进公司发挥想象力。'但实际上，我在所有这些方面都很糟糕。

And somebody's because somebody's gonna read this book and they're like, oh, Angus, you must have so much primal intelligence. You know? This would be so primal. I wanna bring you into my company and so you can, you know, be so imaginative. And I'm like, actually, I'm like dire at all of these things.

作为美国教育体系的产物，我有惊人的标准化考试成绩，擅长逻辑谜题，像计算机一样思考——但在这些实际能力上都很差劲。不过我们在其他人身上看到了改变，我自己也有了些许进步。虽然此刻可能没散发出多少常识，但至少还能站在这个舞台上。

I you know, like any product of of of the American school system, I have amazing standardized test scores, and I'm so good at logic puzzles. You know? And I think like a computer, and I'm actually bad at all these things. But, you know, we've seen in other people, and you can see a little bit of me. I'm probably don't not oozing common sense at the moment, but I am surviving up here on stage.

明白吗？我还在正常运作。而且他们说动了...

You know? I'm functioning. And But they convinced

我们两个上台。这很能说明问题。

us both to come up here. Kinda tells you something.

关键在于，你可以自我培养这种能力。同样，当你看到周围有人在某方面挣扎时，要知道，人生的大部分成功都取决于你制定计划的能力。这之所以重要，不仅因为计划是成功的驱动力，更因为当你主动制定计划时，就不会依赖他人。一旦开始依赖别人，首先你就会迷失自我方向。我接触过许多生活相当成功的人，但他们的成功本质上是照搬了他人的成功路径。

And so the point of it is, like, you know, you can train this up in yourself. And, also, if you see somebody around you who's struggling in some way, I mean, so much of success in life just comes down to your ability to initiate plans. And the reason that's important is not only because plans are what, you know, drives success, but if you're initiating them, you're not becoming dependent on other people. The moment you start becoming dependent on other people, what's happening is you're, first of all, losing your own way. And so I work with a lot of people who are quite successful in their life, but they're successful because they've essentially taken their plans for success from other people.

他们生命中曾经历过恐惧与压力的时刻，却不知如何应对。与其自己摸索出路，他们可能直接选择了读医学院，或是碰巧在正确时机加入创业公司等等。明白吗？这些人某种程度上已经迷失了自我。

And they've had these moments of fear and stress in their life. They didn't know what to do. And rather than sort of figuring it out themselves, you know, they just you know, they went to medical school, you know, or they happen to get lucky and join a startup at the right time or whatever. You know? And so they've kind of lost their own way.

因此，能够主动制定计划意味着：不，这是我的计划。我不依赖他人。我不会向AI咨询该做什么，也不会向外人寻求答案。

And so being able to initiate plans means, no. This is my plan. I'm not dependent. I'm not gonna ask AI for what I should do. I'm not gonna ask anyone outside.

我要靠自己完成。这意味着你的成功源于内在。你接触过很多创业者，应该明白这个道理，对吧？

I'm gonna do it myself. And that means that your success grows from within. And, you know, you you work with a lot of entrepreneurs. You see how this is. You know?

没错。创业者具备这种能力：提出新想法，在失败中坚持，调整方向，但始终保持这种积极的进程——不随波逐流，走自己的路。这正是民主制度带来的机遇。自由世界的意义就在于此，而我们许多人拥有这种机会却不去践行。

Yeah. Entrepreneurs have this ability to come up with something new, stick with it through failure, change it, but always continue that active process of not doing what other people are doing, doing it their own way. And, you know, this is the opportunity of democracy. Right? This is the opportunity of a free world is to do that, and so many of us have that opportunity and are not exercising.

这很有意思。我记得曾与一家工程公司合作，接触他们的总裁。公司上下对这位总裁赞不绝口。但每当有人提出新想法时，他就会说'哦，我们得先研究行业最佳实践'。要我说，最佳实践简直是创新的天敌。

You know, it's really interesting. I remember that there was one I was working with an engineering company and working with the president, and he was they were so happy with this president and all this kind of thing. And every time somebody had a new idea, he'd go, oh, yeah. We have to go research best practices. And I'm like, best practices are like the enemy of innovation.

要知道，如果所有人都在做的事，那就不叫创新了。后来这位总裁也没能在这个位置上待太久。

You know, if everybody's doing it, it's not innovation anymore. And he didn't last too long.

嗯，他没有持续太久是件好事，因为大量研究表明，实际上大多数所谓的公司领导者其实是追随者。他们做什么？他们跟随数据。对吧。那你需要一个领导者来跟随数据吗？

Well, that's good that he didn't last too long because there have been a lot of studies that have shown that actually most quote leaders of companies are actually followers. Because what do they do? They follow the data. Yeah. And do you need a leader to follow the data?

不，不需要。对吧？领导者的职责是率先踏入未知领域。特别是如果你是一家公司的领导者，或者一个团队的领袖，你实现这一点的方式不仅在于自己这样做，还在于赋能周围的人。

No. You don't. Right? The job of a leader is to take the first step into the unknown. And particularly if you're the leader of a company or, you know, you're the leader of a group, the way you do that is not just by doing that yourself, but by empowering the people around you.

并且，通过告诉他们：你知道吗？我不确定这是否会奏效，也不确定你是否正确，但我信任你迈出那一步。我也相信如果那一步行不通，你会找到下一步可行的方案。这正是当前缺失的东西，因为我们变得过于保守和规避风险。我们形成了这种信念，认为新事物是否有效总有外在证据可循。

And, you know, by saying to them, you know what? I don't know if this is gonna work, and I don't know if you're right, but I trust you to take that step. And I also trust you that if that step doesn't work, you're gonna figure out the next step that will work. And that's something that is missing because we've become so conservative and and fear averse. We've developed this belief that somehow there's evidence out there for whether new things will work.

我现在已经有一些问题，我们也欢迎大家提出更多问题。现场有些关于AI的小躁动。其中部分问题我会与我的合并。你之前提到AI能做和不能做的事。即便在已开发的所有技术范围内，你写道，最常被AI工程师和认知科学家提出的问题，是试图模拟人类心智。

Now I already have some questions, and we we welcome more questions as as well. And there's a there's a little AI frisson. Some of these, I'll I'll combine them with mine. You were mentioning earlier about what AI could do and could not do. And and even with all the the the tech that's been developed, within that specter, you write the the questions most often posed to you by AI engineers and cognitive scientists is trying to simulate the mind.

那么我们的大脑与任何AI程序有何不同，这种差异如何体现在我们的原始能力上？

Now how are our brains different from any program of AI, and how is that reflected in our primal powers?

所以人脑与计算机的关键区别在于，人脑能用极少信息保持智能。基本上就是这样。计算机获得的信息越多就越聪明。如果给你大量信息，你会立即不堪重负。这说明你的大脑运行着不同的机械过程。

So the key main difference between your brain and a computer is your brain can be smart with little information. I mean, that's basically it. Computers get smarter the more information you give them. If I give you a lot of information, you get immediately overwhelmed. What's what's that telling you is that your brain is running different mechanical processes.

这正是计算机有用的原因——因为它们与我们不同，而非相同。AI存在多重问题。我职业生涯中一个奇特之处是，我在自然语言处理领域（可以说是LLMs等的起源）从事AI相关工作近十年。这是我相当了解的领域，长期以来我一直是AI的强烈怀疑论者，并撰写过大量相关文章。直到最近，这种怀疑态度才开始被更多人认同。

And that's why computers are useful because they are different, not because they're the same as us. And the there are manifold problems with AI. And, you know, what I've you know, one of the quirky things about my career is as I've worked with AI and in AI for almost ten years in in terms of natural language processes, which are kind of the origin of LLMs and whatnot. So this is an area that I I know quite a lot, and I've been a very hardcore skeptic on AI for a long time and have written a lot of stuff. And it's only recently that that that that skepticism has started to become shared by people.

因为我认为我们开始看到的是，许多人正意识到我指出的AI存在的诸多问题。当然，这些问题包括缺乏原创性、AI的表层性等。但更根本的是，我们越依赖AI，就越少使用大脑中独特的部分。因此，AI真正的问题从来不只是它不完美——毕竟机器怎么可能完美？它只是个工具。

Because I think what we're starting to see is a lot of people are seeing a lot of the problems in AI that I have pointed out. And, of course, those problems are things like the lack of originality, the sort of superficiality of of the AI. But also, you know, more fundamentally, the more we ourselves rely on AI, the less we use the parts of our brain that are special. And so the the real problem with AI has always been not just that AI is not perfect because why would any machine be perfect? You know, it's just a tool.

工具不完美并非其过错。但我们越依赖它，就越会逐渐丧失自身的能力。我对AI持怀疑态度的主要原因，正是因为它现在被推销成我们该依赖的东西。你会发现，越依赖AI，就越会滑向丧失自然智力的深渊。

And that's it's not the tool's fault that it's not perfect. But the more that we rely on it, the more we kind of lose these capacities in ourselves. And so a big part of the reason that I'm so skeptical on AI is because it's being sold to us now largely as something to depend on. And you just find that the more you depend on AI, the more you start to go down this slope where you lose your own natural intelligence.

还记得谷歌出现前的时代吗？千百年来，一代代人——尤其是那些记得青春岁月的长者——都在讲述故事。他们可能不记得今早的事，却清晰记得往昔。这些代代相传的家族故事将我们联结。这些会被AI从互联网抓取的内容取代吗？家庭还会是家庭，家族故事还会留存吗？

Well, before there was Google remember that? Before there was Google, you know, for generation after generation back through the millennia, people told stories, especially older people who had memories of their youth. Might not remember what happened this morning, but certainly remembered back then. And, you know, and it connected us all, you know, generation to generation stories, which we have in our own families. Will this be replaced by whatever AI scrapes up from the Internet, or will families still be families and the family stories still remain?

家族故事与AI的核心差异在于智慧与知识的区别。AI蕴含海量知识和数据，但智慧不同于知识。任何活过三十五年以上的人都会本能理解这种差异。智慧能帮助你在陌生情境中应对。

So a big part of what the difference between those family stories and AI is is the difference between wisdom and knowledge. AI has all this knowledge in it. It has all this data in it. But wisdom is different from knowledge, and anyone who's lived probably more than thirty or thirty five years just understands the difference automatically. But wisdom is something that helps you in unfamiliar situations.

它传递经验法则，传承实践教训，让你仿佛亲历父母的岁月，参与整个历史进程。这种参与感很大程度上表现为对未知生存能力的自信。

It kinda passes on these rules of thumb. It passes on these kinds of experiential lessons. It makes you feel like you've actually participated in your parents' lives. It helps you feel like you've participated in this whole history. And a big part of that participation is just this confidence in your ability to survive in the unknown.

而知识只是告诉你已知情境的标准答案。至于AI是否会取代这些，我认为人类已开始对科技感到厌倦。我们正处于这个焦虑阶段，人们惊呼'天啊科技太糟糕了'。

Whereas what knowledge is is knowledge is telling you this is a known answer to a known situation. And so, you know, whether or not AI will replace that, I think that humans are starting to get tired of technology. Technology. I think when I think, you know, we're sort of at this hand wringing phase where people are like, oh my goodness. Technology is so bad.

直到某天人们会说'受够了'。我预见越来越多人会转身远离科技。这将是健康的转变，因为科技只在某种程度上有用——我们每个人的生活确实都因科技有所改善。

It's just and then I think at a certain point, people are like, I've had enough. And I think you're gonna start to see more and more people pivot away from it. And I think that that's gonna be healthy because I think technology is useful to some extent. Right? All of us have had our lives improved in some way by technology.

但问题在于依赖性。所以我怀疑知识能否取代智慧，但在许多个人生活的独立片段中，确实如此。你知道吗？想想过去有多少次，你可能会打电话给父母讨论某事，或者咨询其他有智慧经验的人。哦，那是

But the problem is the dependence. So I'm skeptical that knowledge will replace wisdom, but in a lot of individual pockets of individual lives, it is. You know? And you just think about how many times in the past are you know, would you maybe have called your parents to talk through something or called through, you know, someone else who was wise experienced. Oh, what's

奶酪酱的配方？

cheese sauce recipe?

对。对。对。没错。对。

Right. Right. Right. Exactly. Right.

是啊是啊。同时她告诉你配方时，还会说一大堆其他事情，那一刻她说着说着，比如‘天哪’。嗯，我

Yeah. Yeah. And then at the same time, she's telling you the recipe, she's telling you all these other things, which in the moment she's telling you, like, oh my goodness. Well, I

当时就是这样。记得

was in this. Remember

我是怎么

how I

把它烧焦的。

burned it.

但后来发现，这些恰恰是最重要的部分，它们蕴含着真正的洞见。

But then it turns out, right, it's those are actually the most important parts, you know, and those are the things that contain, like, the real insights.

我知道你有孩子，如今从六岁到高中的在校学生都面临难以置信的情况——无处不在的屏幕，无论是随时可看的电视、智能手机还是游戏，它们无孔不入且危害深远，确实是个大问题。对于孩子乃至所有人，考虑到我们作为人类的本质，你如何看待屏幕问题？

I know you have children, and it it one of the things that has happened unbelievably throughout all the kids that are in school today from age six up until through high school is all of the screens, whether it's television and any television anytime, it's, smartphones, it's games, it's they're everywhere, and they're insidious, and they're all of these kinds of things, and they're a real problem. Where do you come down on the screens, with respect to the kids and just any of us, I guess, but compared to the fact that we're human. You know?

是的。屏幕的主要问题在于它们让大脑进入无摩擦环境。技术的核心就是消除阻力让事情变简单，这意味着你用得越多就越依赖它，同时也越难适应非技术环境——因为现实世界充满摩擦。

Yeah. So the main problem with screens is that they make your they introduce your brain into a frictionless environment. So the whole point of technology is to make things as easy as possible, to remove friction. And what that means is that the more you use the technology, the more you like it because it's easy. And then it also means the less able you are to interact with anything that isn't technology because anything that isn't technology includes friction.

生活中最大的摩擦来源是什么？他人。所以当你越依赖这些设备，就会觉得：这玩意儿太棒了，让我充满力量。其实很多人没意识到——

And the source of the biggest friction in our lives is what? Other people. So what happens is the more you use these devices, then you're like, oh, this device is great. It makes me feel so powerful. I mean, one of things people don't actually know this.

史蒂夫·乔布斯既是天才又留下争议遗产的原因在于：他设计麦金塔电脑的初衷就是让你感觉更强大。它的存在是为了给你近乎神明的体验。如果你回头用早期IBM电脑，会感觉天啊这么复杂，自己像个白痴。

I mean, part of the reason that that Steve Jobs is such a genius, but also part of the reasons his legacy is is somewhat fraud is because the reason he invented the Macintosh the way that he did was to make you feel more powerful. The purpose of the the Macintosh computer is to give you the experience of almost being a god. Because if you went back and you used the original IBMs, it was like, oh my goodness. This is so complicated. I feel so stupid all the time.

那时需要输入命令操作提示符。而乔布斯用麦金塔做了什么？他虽未发明鼠标，但洞察其精髓——突然之间我就能随意拖拽东西了。

I'm having to type commands and use these, like, prompt things. And then what does Jobs do with the Macintosh? He gives you the mouse, which he didn't invent, but he saw the the the point behind it. So now all of a sudden, I can just move things around.

还不用看说明书。

And no manuals.

而且没有说明书。对吧？正是这样。嘿。突然间，你就感到充满力量，获得这种巨大的情感强化。

And no manuals. Right? Exactly. Hey. So all of a sudden, you just feel powerful, and you get this enormous emotional reinforcement.

而UX和用户设计的全部意义，就在于创造这种情感体验——对用户来说如此直观。对吧？我甚至不需要思考。这让你觉得现实世界也该遵循同样的规则。当现实不按规则时，你就不知如何应对。

And the whole point of, you UX and user design has been to create this emotional sense of it's so intuitive to me, the user. Right? I don't even have to think about it. And that just makes you think that somehow reality should obey the same rules. And when it doesn't, you don't know how to deal with it.

然后你就会想，天啊。这太让人恼火了。你知道吗？肯定是哪里出了问题。我的学生总是这样，我经常遇到。

And you're like, oh my goodness. This is so irritating. You know? There's must be something wrong. All the time with my students, I have this.

他们来我办公室说，你知道吗，我在和某人交往，但我觉得他们像精神病患者。我就问，你真觉得他们是精神病？他们坚持说，我觉得就是。这种情况时有发生。很激烈。

Well, they come into my office and they say to me, you know, you know, I'm I'm like seeing this person, but I think that they're like a psychopath. And I'm like, do you think they're a psychopath? Like like, I think they're psychopaths. It happens. Violent.

对。没错。好吧，我们当时在讨论这部电影，他们不喜欢我喜欢的片子。

Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Right. Well, you know, we were talking about this movie, and they don't like the movie that I like.

我就说，好吧。然后呢？不。不。就这样。

And I was like, okay. And then what? No. No. That's it.

他们不喜欢我喜欢的电影。那他们肯定是精神病。我就想，什么？然后你意识到，这是因为他们不知道如何处理人际摩擦。只要出现任何冲突，他们就觉得一定是哪里不对。

They don't like the movie that I like. They must be a psychopath. And I'm like, what? And then you realize it's because they don't know how to deal with interpersonal friction. And the moment that there's any conflict, they're like, something must be wrong here.

那么这里的问题要么出在我身上——我必定是个失败者、窝囊废，对吧？我该自我放逐出社会。要么就是对方具有黑暗三人格特质。你们听说过这个概念吗？就是那种让我的本科生们痴迷的理论，认为人们普遍携带自恋、马基雅维利主义等相互关联的特质，这些特质组合起来使人变得邪恶。

And what must be wrong here is either me and I must be a failure and a loser. Right? And I need to throw myself out of society, Or the other person has the dark triad. Have you guys heard of this thing? The dark triad where all my undergrads are obsessed with this idea that people are going around carrying, like, narcissism and Machiavellianism and all these kind of traits that go together and make them evil.

所以每当他们在关系中体验到片刻不适，就会认为出现了灾难性错误，而不是想着'哦，这是个成长契机'。明明我们只是两个有趣的人暂时没能理解彼此，应该共同寻找能让叙事融合的交流方式。我认为科技带来的真正问题是：它让大脑习惯性认为生活本该毫不费力，而众所周知，那些艰难的部分恰恰是最珍贵的。我是说，赋予你最大力量和智慧的人生经历，往往正是最具挑战性的部分。

And so anytime they experience, like, a momentary sense of discomfort in a relationship, they think that something is catastrophically wrong as opposed to being like, oh, this is a moment for growth. Because clearly, we're both two interesting people who aren't understanding each other at the moment. So let's figure out how to tell stories to each other that allow us to kind of get our narrative together. And so that's, I think, the real problem with technology is it's habituating our brains to think that somehow life should be effortless when actually the hard parts, as we all know, are the best parts. I mean, the the things that in your life that have given you the most strength and the most wisdom have been the most challenging parts.

那我们为何要竭力消除这些呢？当然，我们不需要时刻处于摩擦状态，有时轻松自在确实很好。我并非在批判科技本身有害，但当我们在人们年轻时过度提供这种便利，他们就越发认为世界本该如此，这反而削弱了他们培养成长能力的机会。

And so why are we trying to eliminate all of that? So, of course, we don't need friction all the time. There's times when it's nice just to have something be effortless, and so I'm not arguing that technology is terrible or bad. But the more we give people that at a young age, the more they start to think this is the way the world should be, the less it's helping them develop the capacity for growth.

也许这些学生可以互相颁发参与奖章，奖励他们...算了，这个玩笑太糟糕了。换个好问题——我正在整合所有问题——你谈到许多远见者...

Maybe these students could give each other participation ribbons for having never mind. That was a really bad one. Here's another good question. I'm integrating them all here. You talk about many of the visionaries.

比如史蒂夫·乔布斯、尼古拉·特斯拉等各类人物。他们的原始智力是否存在共性？还是各不相同？你对此有何见解？

You know, Steve Jobs and Nikola Tesla and all kinds of people. Is there a commonality in the in their, you know, primal intelligence, or are they all different? What are what do you see there?

我在书中提到一个共同点：他们都阅读莎士比亚。这现象令我着迷——为什么他们都读莎士比亚？结果发现他们不仅读，而且阅读方式相同，尤其都痴迷于《哈姆雷特》。

Well, the one thing as I talk about in the book is that all of them read Shakespeare. And this I found totally fascinating. It's like, what is going you know, what what is happening that that all of them are reading Shakespeare? And it turns out that they're not just reading Shakespeare, they're reading Shakespeare in the same way. And they're all of them particularly obsessed with Hamlet.

《哈姆雷特》中有句台词：'以陌生人之礼相迎'。意思是越怪异的事物，越要热情接纳。这些思想家的共同点在于：当遇到异常或差异时，他们不会像电脑那样处理。电脑遇到异常会怎么做？要么跳过，要么将其回归平均值。

And there's this line in Hamlet, as a stranger, give it welcome. In other words, the weirder and odder something is, the more you should embrace it. And what you see with all these thinkers is that when they see something unusual or difference, they don't do what a computer would do. So what does a computer do when it sees something weird or unusual? Well, it skips over it or it regresses it to the mean.

计算机所做的就是跳过例外情况。但这些思想家所做的却是加倍关注例外。一旦他们发现某些奇特或异常的事物，

That's what a computer does is it skips over exceptions. But what all these thinkers did is they doubled down on exceptions. Once they saw something weird or odd,

他们会说‘这很有趣’。

they said That's interesting.

让我们深入挖掘。让我们深入挖掘。这与大脑讲述故事时的运作过程如出一辙。因为故事中会发生什么？首先，故事始于一个例外。

Let's have more of it. Let's have more of it. And that's the same process that occurs in your brain when your brain is telling a story. Because what happens in a story? Well, first of all, a story starts out with an exception.

这个例外就是主角，英雄，那个与她所在世界所有人都不同的人物。这正是她成为主角的原因。那么她会怎么做？她会让自己回归平庸吗？明白吗？

That exception is the main character, the hero, the person who is different from everyone else in her world. That's why she's the main character. So what does she do? Does she regress herself to the mean? You know?

不。她会强化自己独特之处。通过这样做，她改变了周围的世界。这种故事化的思维方式对我们来说很自然，而这些思想家都认为莎士比亚强化了这种思维——正如我在书中一步步揭示的那样，你可以看到它如何引导爱因斯坦发明相对论，如何让梵高发展出色彩理论，如何使尼古拉·特斯拉借此开发出交流电系统，而他们都归功于莎士比亚。

No. She doubles down on what's distinct or unique about herself. And by doing so, she changes the world around her. And so this way of thinking in story that that is natural to us, but that all of these thinkers felt reinforced through Shakespeare, you go through and as I walk through in the book step by step by step, you can actually see how it was that it led Einstein to invent the theory of relativity. How it was that led Van Gogh to develop his theory of color, how it was that Nikola Tesla was able to use that to to develop AC electricity, and all of them credited to Shakespeare.

尽管你会认为之前应该有人指出这一点，因为他们的原话里写得明明白白，但不知为何，似乎所有人都避而不谈。

So even though you would think that other people would have pointed this out before because it's written out in their own words, for some reason, everyone seems to have avoided it.

我认为有两个原因。一是当我们接触莎士比亚时，他的作品已经被强行灌输给我们，失去了惊喜元素。是的，我们看戏剧时不会惊呼‘天哪，这刚刚发生了’。

Well, I think two things. One is that we all had by the time we got there, we had Shakespeare sort of pounded into us, and there was no we we had no element of surprise. Yeah. We didn't go to a play, oh my goodness. You know, this just happened.

所以完全没有那种‘你在开玩笑吧’之类的反应。另外还有人说莎士比亚并非一个人，这确实让事情变得复杂。不过没关系，这没关系。

So there was none of the the you gotta be kidding, you know, kind of kind of thing. The other thing is that there are the people who say that Shakespeare wasn't just one person. It kinda screws everything up here. But that's okay. That's okay.

我们知道这是可行的。我们知道这是可行的。

We know it works. We know it works.

说到这个，我成长过程中也不喜欢莎士比亚。我真的很讨厌莎士比亚。所以我写这本书的初衷之一就是：如果你曾读过莎士比亚却完全无法产生共鸣——那就是曾经的我。我在高中时读莎士比亚...

And to your point, I also didn't love Shakespeare when I was growing up. I really disliked Shakespeare. And so one of things I wanted to to do in this book is if you've ever read Shakespeare and just thought, oh my goodness, I did not connect with Shakespeare at all, that was me. Know? I mean, I read Shakespeare in high school.

我当时觉得，天啊，这太乏味了。知道吗？这是因为教学方式的问题。老师教我们莎士比亚作品里有标准答案。

I was like, oh my goodness. This is so tedious. You know? And that was because of the way it was being taught to me. It was being taught to me that there was a right answer in the Shakespeare.

对，必须用‘正确方式’阅读。这又回到了我们教育体系运作的计算模型思维。文学课教的‘解读’本质上是一种计算机功能——计算机非常擅长解读。

Right. You needed to read it the right way. And and this is again coming from this kind of computational model of where our school system works. Interpretation, which is what you're taught to do to literature, is actually a computer function. Computers are very good at interpreting.

解读就是语言转换。计算机能在机器语言、ASCII码等不同系统间转换。但孩子读故事时会‘解读’吗？不会。你会把自己想象成故事里的角色。

Interpreting is moving from one language to another. Computers are able to move in between, you know, machine language and ASCII and all these other different But when you're reading a story as a child, do you ever interpret it? No. Right? You imagine yourself as the characters in the story.

你会想：我遇到这种情况会怎么做？这正是我们需要回归的阅读方式。如果把莎士比亚剧本给演员，你立刻就能明白正确用法——演员会把自己代入角色，思考‘我能为这个角色带来什么前所未有的演绎，同时忠于剧本？’

You say, what would I have done in that situation? And that is what we need to kinda get back into. I mean, if you give a Shakespeare play to an actor, you'll immediately see how it's supposed to be used. Because an actor will pick up the play and they'll start to imagine themselves as the character. They'll start to say, what could I do that no other actor has ever done before in this role, but still have it work with the play?

我们越是将这一过程引入学校，我认为人们就会重新爱上莎士比亚。因为莎士比亚的本质并非被告知《麦克白》是这个、那个或其他事物的寓言。

And the more that we bring that process into schools, the more I think that people are gonna start to love Shakespeare again. Because that's what Shakespeare really is, not being told that, you know, Macbeth is an allegory for this, that, or the other thing.

是啊，寓言。真扫兴。

Yeah. Allegory. Real bummer.

没错。

Yes.

太压抑了。哦对，我们来搞个寓言吧。好啊，行。

It's a downer. Oh, yeah. Let's do an allegory. Okay. Yeah.

我最后一个问题是为了致敬我们在决策能力上的高分表现。哦对。无论是应用领域还是特定原始能力，每个领域都有许多选择，比如试试这个，试试那个。但这条建议直击我心：选一个你正在面临的问题。

The my my final question here is in honor of our high scores in decision making. Oh, yeah. And and and for each of these areas, whether it's in the applied area or specific primal powers, there's lots of options for, hey. Try this and try this. And this one just really got to me and said, pick a friend you're, pick a problem you're having.

向朋友寻求建议。然后实施一个让你焦虑程度与问题本身相当的方案。

Ask friends for advice. Implement a piece of advice that makes you exactly as anxious as the problem does.

正是如此。完全正确。你看，首先当我们真正迷茫时，自然会向他人寻求建议。很多时候，我们在那种时刻真正渴望的其实是安慰。

That's right. That's right. Yeah. Well, this is right because, I mean, you know, first of all, when we're really lost, right, you know, we we turn to someone for advice. A lot of times, what we're seeking in those moments is comfort.

你知道吗？那并不是你想做的事。你真正需要选择的，是那些让你与面对难题时同样紧张、同样忐忑的事情，因为这表明你正在响应建议，把握当下。这就是过程的一部分。我总是建议人们开始尝试这些方法，当然，不是生死攸关的事情。

You know? That's not what you wanna do. You wanna actually go with something that makes you as nervous, as trepidatious as the problem does because that shows you that you're meeting the advice, you're meeting the moment. And so this is part of the process. Now, I always advise people to start trying this stuff on, you know, not life and death things.

明白吗？比如如果你是急诊室的外科医生，可能第一次尝试新方法就不太合适。但开始实践这些理念吧。你会逐渐意识到，它们正在激活你大脑中那些长期休眠的区域。用得越多，这些能力就会越强大。

You know? Like if you're a surgeon in the ER, maybe that's not the time to try that out for the first time. But start to try these things. And what you'll start to realize is that it starts to activate these parts of your brain that had just been dormant. And the more you use them, the more powerful they'll become.

你会越发认识到，自己体内本就蕴藏着这种潜能，只是现代文明让你对自己产生了恐惧——是的，让你害怕真实的自己。你已经内化了这种恐惧。但当你越是能拥抱这种力量，越是信任它，越是相信自己，就越会体验到人生可能性的爆发式增长。

And the more you realize that you just have this capacity inside yourself, which you haven't been using because the modern world has made you scared of yourself. It's made you scared of yourself. You've internalized that. But the more you can start to lean into that power, the more you start to trust it, the more you start to trust yourself, the more you start to just experience this explosion of possibilities for your life.

但别过度消耗你的朋友。

But don't overuse your friends.

但别过度消耗你的朋友。

But don't overuse your friends.

刚才那句话结尾需要加个小句号。好了，我们这期节目到此结束。非常感谢你，安格斯。真的谢谢，这太棒了。

Just a a little little period at the end of that sentence there. Well, we we have reached the end of this program. Thank you so much, Angus. Thank you. This is great.

安格斯，让我们——感谢各位观众。非常愉快的一次交流。他的新书《原始智慧》即将上市——你比想象中更聪明。

Angus, let's Thank you all. It's been a pleasure. Great. His new book is Primal Intelligence. You are smarter than you know.

我们鼓励您在本地书店购买这本书的副本，安格斯将在活动结束后于大厅为书籍签名。欲了解更多关于会员资格或即将举行的线上线下联邦俱乐部活动信息，请访问commonwealthclub.org。我是莫伊拉·冈恩。谢谢，晚安。

We encourage you to pick up a copy of the book here at your local bookstore, and Angus will be signing books out in the lobby after the program. For more information about membership or upcoming in person and virtualcom Commonwealth Club events, please visit commonwealthclub.org. I'm Moira Gunn. Thank you, and good evening.

您正在收听的是加州联邦俱乐部的节目。可在Apple Podcasts、Google Play和Stitcher上收听我们数千期播客。若喜欢我们的内容，请考虑支持我们的工作，帮助我们每年为像您这样的听众带来500场节目。请访问commonwealthclub.org/donate。通过我们的旅行项目，探索国内外激动人心的目的地，用思考环游世界。

You've been listening to the Commonwealth Club of California. Hear thousands of our podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Stitcher. If you like what you've heard, please consider supporting our work and help us bring 500 programs a year to listeners like you. Go to commonwealthclub.org slash donate. Think your way around the world with our travel programs to exciting domestic and international destinations.

当您身处湾区时，欢迎亲临我们的活动现场参与。感谢您的收听与支持。

And when you're in the Bay Area, please join us live at our events. Thank you for listening and for your support.