深入探讨：像诺贝尔奖得主一样专注（与布莱恩·基廷）

我是卡尔·纽波特，这里是《深度探讨》，这是一个不定期系列节目，我会与有趣的人们探讨如何培养深度生活。本期节目由我们的主要赞助商Dun Daily为您呈现。我非常喜欢这款产品，因为它不仅提供了一套系统，还有日常指导，帮助您实践我经常谈论的那些高效工作理念。稍后我会详细介绍。现在，我想谈谈今天的嘉宾，布莱恩·基廷博士。

I'm Cal Newport, and this is In-depth, a semi regular series in which I talk to interesting people about the quest to cultivate a deep life. Today's episode is brought to you by our presenting sponsor, Dun Daily. I'm a huge fan of this product because it provides you with both a system and daily coaching to implement the type of productivity ideas I often talk about. I'll tell you more about that later. For now, I wanna talk about today's guest, which is doctor Brian Keating.

基廷是一位重量级科学家。他目前是加州大学圣地亚哥分校物理系的校长特聘物理学教授。他还是西蒙斯天文台的首席研究员。他在2018年写了一本很酷的书，名叫《与诺贝尔奖失之交臂》。这本书讲述了他当时进行的研究。

Now Keating is a big shot scientist. He's currently the chancellor's distinguished professor of physics in the Department of Physics at the University of California San Diego. He's also the principal investigator of the Simons Observatory. He wrote this cool book back in 2018 that was called losing the Nobel Prize. It's a book about the research he was doing.

他们当时在测量宇宙大爆炸起始火花的特征信号。他们得到了一个非常令人兴奋的信号，人们都在耳边低语，说你们会因此获得诺贝尔奖，这可是大事。但他们在数据中发现了一个干扰因素，某种程度上毁掉了这一切。于是他写了这本书，讲述了以为自己即将赢得诺贝尔奖却未能如愿的经历，并对最高层次科学和雄心壮志的现实进行了深刻的反思。

They were they were measuring the signature of the spark that started the big bang. And they have this really exciting signal, and people are all whispering in their ears, like, you're gonna win the Nobel for this. This is a big deal. And they found an artifact in the data that sort of, ruined it. And so he wrote a book about that, about thinking you're about to win the Nobel Prize and not, and it's a cool reflection about science at the highest levels, the reality of ambition.

总之，他是个有趣的人。如果您觉得这个名字耳熟，那是因为除了科研之外，布莱恩还是一位多产的天文学、宇宙学和物理学公众科普者。他有一个播客叫《深入不可能》，邀请了一些您能找到的最高水平的科学嘉宾进行深入对话，是一个非常棒的节目。他偶尔也会‘屈尊’邀请像我这样的人。

Anyways, interesting guy. Now if this name sounds familiar to you, it's because in addition to his science, Brian is also a prolific public expounder of astronomy and cosmology and physics. He has a podcast called Into the Impossible that has on some of the highest level science guests you're going to find, and they have deep conversations. It's a really cool show. He also occasionally slums it and has on people like yours truly.

不过您应该听听那一期，真的很不错。他也经常作为嘉宾出现在世界上一些最大的播客节目中，解释物理学和宇宙学等话题。您可能最近看到他在乔·罗根或安德鲁·休伯曼的节目上聊这些内容。他上遍了所有大节目。

You should check out that episode, though. It's a good one. He's also a regular guest explaining things like physics and cosmology on some of the world's biggest podcast. You might have seen him chatting about this stuff with Joe Rogan or Andrew Huberman recently. He does all the big shows.

但我邀请他来到所有节目中最棒的这一个——我自己的节目——是为了讨论他的新书《如何像诺贝尔奖得主一样专注》。这本书基于他对真实诺贝尔奖得主的访谈，询问了他们对于专注、分心以及如何产出真正重要的工作的看法。显然，这正对我的胃口。这些正是我为那本书写了推荐语的那种理念。这些也正是我的书《深度工作》最终所基于的思想。

But the reason why I had him here on the best show of all, my own, was to talk about his latest book, How to Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner. It's a book that's based on interviews with real Nobel laureates, where he asked them about their own thoughts on things like focus and distraction and what it takes to produce work that really matters. Clearly, this is right up my alley. These are exactly I gave that book a cool blurb. These are exactly the type of ideas that my book Deep Work was eventually based on.

所以我们深入探讨了这一点。但因为忍不住，我们还聊了很多其他话题，比如布莱恩进入学术界的不寻常之路，其中有一个转折让我至今难以置信，您在采访中会看到我相当怀疑。我们还讨论了最优秀的科学家是如何工作的，以及为什么布莱恩和我在获得博士学位后都没有参加毕业典礼或授予仪式，背后的心理是什么。

So we get into that. But because I can't help myself, we talk about a lot of other things as well, like Brian's unusual path into academia, which has a twist to it that I still can't believe. You'll see I'm I'm kind of incredulous in the interview. We talk about, like, how the best scientists do what they do. We talk about why neither Brian nor I went to our graduation ceremony or hooding ceremonies after we earned our doctorate, like what the psychology was behind that.

然后我们都开始讨论我们的计划，比如，嘿，我们接下来要做什么？我们都是正教授了，没有更高的职位可以晋升了。我们都有很大的平台，做很多面向公众的事情。那么，我们的选修计划是什么呢？

And we both get into our plans for like, hey, what are we gonna do next? We're both full professors. There's no more promotions to get. We both have large platforms and do a lot of public facing stuff. Like, what are our elective plans?

所以我们聊了很多。我稍微做了点心理分析。哦，不。这一集很棒。总之，你会喜欢的。

So and so we get into a lot. I do a little psychoanalyzing. Oh, no. It's a great episode. Anyways, you're gonna like it.

这家伙过着深刻的生活。他有关于如何让你自己也过上深刻生活的信息。我度过了一段愉快的时光。我想你也会的。那么，让我们直接进入我与布莱恩·基廷的对话吧。

He this guy lives a deep life. He has information for you about living a deep life yourself. I had a good time. I think you will too. So let's jump right in to my conversation with Brian Keating.

布莱恩，很高兴见到你。谢谢你，谢谢你来上节目。

Brian, it's good to see you. Thanks for thanks for coming on the show.

是的。能和一位教授同行在这里很愉快。感觉我们似乎应该在这次对话中的某个时候开个教职工会议。

Yeah. It's a pleasure to be here with a fellow professor. Feels like we should have a faculty meeting at some point during this conversation.

好吧，为了让你感到自在，我会模拟一个教职工会议，挑一个关于你如何安排一天的小细节，然后喋喋不休地讨论二十分钟，让它看起来像是你刚刚剥夺了一半人口的投票权，因为这样才能让人觉得我们真的在这里开教职工会议。要把小小的后勤问题夸大到不成比例。

Well, to make you comfortable, I will simulate a faculty meeting by picking on a very small point about how you run your day and then harping on it for twenty minutes in a way that makes it seem like you just took away the voting rights of half the population, because that's what'll make people feel like we actually have a faculty meeting here. Gonna blow little logistics way out of proportion.

低风险，高冲突。

Low stakes, high conflict.

是的，不。我的意思是，你这次上节目的直接原因是，你知道，最近你的《探索不可能》系列书籍的第二本出版了。书名叫《如何像诺贝尔奖得主一样专注》。显然，这正好是我的专长领域。

Yeah. No. I mean, you're the the proximate reason you're on is, you know, recently the second book into in your Into the Impossible Books series came out. It's called How to Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner. Clearly, this is in my wheelhouse.

对吧？我是说，它涉及科学、深度工作以及如何用你的头脑产出优秀成果的交集。但我也以此为借口请你来这儿，因为我有太多事情想和你聊聊。我觉得你的人生很有趣，你的道路很有意思。

Right? I mean, it's the intersection of science and deep work and and how to produce good things with your mind. But I also use that as an excuse to get you on here because I have so many things I wanna talk to you about. I think your life is interesting. I think your path is interesting.

我认为你对自己当前所做之事的思考也很有启发性。所以如果你愿意迁就我，我想像对待许多嘉宾那样，带着我的读者稍微了解一下你的生活历程，并从中汲取一些经验教训，直到我们谈到你最近的一些工作。希望你已经准备好了。好的，我想从这里开始。

I think your thoughts about what you're doing now is interesting. So if you'll indulge me, I wanna do what I do with a lot of my guests and actually take my my readers a little bit through your life and try to extract some lessons from it till we get to some of your more recent work. So so hopefully you're ready for that. Yeah. Here's where wanna start.

你知道，我认为人们对学术道路、严肃的学术道路感兴趣，视其为一种特定形式的深度人生。我喜欢稍微剖析一下这一点。在你早期的学术旅程中，是什么时候让你有了‘我觉得我要努力成为一名教授’的那个瞬间？

You know, I think people are interested in academic paths, serious academic paths as just a particular deep life that people take. And and I like to unpack that a little bit. When in your early academic journey did you have that moment of, I think I'm gonna make a run at being a professor?

那非常晚。可能是在我二十多岁中期，拿到博士学位之后。我一直以为，你知道，因为我是天文学家，我是宇宙学家。这意味着我研究早期宇宙，它从哪里来，正在发生什么，它会终结吗，你知道，我们是否还应该继续纳税，等等等等。

It was very late. It was probably mid twenties, late twenties after getting my PhD. I always thought, you know, being so I'm an astronomer. I'm a cosmologist. And that means I, you know, study the early universe, where it came from, what's happening to it, is it gonna end, you know, should we keep paying our taxes, etcetera, etcetera.

但我从未想过有人会付钱让你做这个，Cal。我从未想过你能靠这个挣钱。实际上，你知道，90%的职业天文学家基本上都是教授，或者渴望有朝一日成为教授。所以我从未想过有人会付钱让我做天文学家，而这正是我热爱做的事情，是能让我在小时候就进入那种令人向往的心流状态的事情，你知道，就是在没有iPhone之类的黑暗夜晚，用望远镜观测，然后在日志本上素描记录之类的。但我当时想，是啊，谁会付钱让我干这个呢。

But I never thought you could get paid to do this, Cal. I I never thought you could get paid. And and really 90% of the, you know, professionally employed astronomers are professors effectively or aspire to be professors someday. So I never thought you could get paid to be an astronomer, which is what I love to do, which is what would get me into that coveted flow state as a kid, you know, just using a telescope on a dark night, you know, before iPhones and stuff and just sketching into a logbook or whatever. But I I thought like, yeah, someone's gonna pay me to do that.

就像，他们会付钱让我当冰淇淋品尝师，或者，你知道，在六旗乐园坐过山车一样。我从未想过这是可能的。这从未进入我的认知范围，这真的很奇怪，因为我父亲是一位非常著名的数学教授。我并没有和他一起长大。我父母在我很小的时候就离婚了。

Like, they're gonna pay me to be an ice cream taster or, you know, ride the roller coaster at Six Flags. I never thought it was possible. I never entered my realm, which is really weird because my father was a very famous math professor. I didn't grow up with him. My parents were divorced when I was young.

他离开了，搬去了西海岸。我和我妈妈一起生活，后来被我的继父收养。他不是教授，但很聪明，是个聪明人。

He split, moved to the West Coast. I stayed with my mom and was adopted by my stepfather. And he was not a professor. Smart. Smart man.

但他和我妈妈从来没有真正，你知道，提到过，哦，这可能是一条特别的职业道路。但你正在经历

But he and my mom never really, you know, mentioned that, oh, this could be a particular, you know, avenue for a career. But you're you're going through

一个博士项目，还没考虑过教授职位。是的。那你当时在想什么？

a doctoral program not thinking about yet Yeah. Professorship. So what were you thinking?

我完全没想法。我只是，你知道，习惯了上学，而且我热爱学习。我喜欢学术。我一直是个学者。我的意思是，我一直对很多不同的事物充满求知欲，我当时在做那种正规的科学，你知道，用望远镜进行研究，提出假设，做所有那些他们教给你但从不使用的东西。

I had no idea. I just was, you know, used to being in school, and I loved learning. I love scholarship. You know, I always was a scholar. I mean, I was always intellectually curious about so many different things, and I was doing proper kind of scientific, you know, research with a telescope and hypotheses and doing all that stuff that they teach you but you never use.

但我做这些是为了好玩，你知道，试图弄清楚比邻星有多远。你知道吗？我能从，你知道，北威彻斯特县看到它吗？这对我来说非常好奇。我还得自学三角学等等。

But I was doing it for fun, you know, trying to figure out how far away is, you know, is Proxima Centuri. You know? Can I see it from, you know, Northern Westchester County? And it was just, you know, very curious to me. And I had to teach myself trigonometry, etcetera.

我并没有被安排学习高等数学。讽刺的是，作为康奈尔大学数学教授和纽约州立大学石溪分校创始人之一的儿子。但，你知道，我从未真正意识到你可以做这个，更不用说这会是我在学校里一直在做的事情。我现在开玩笑说，这是我，你知道，第四十九年级。

I wasn't really put along the advanced math track. Again, ironically, for the son of a math professor at Cornell and one of the founders of SUNY Stony Brook. But, you know, I never really came to my attention that you could actually do this, let alone that it would be something that I would be doing, you know, what I've been in school. I joke now. This is my, you know, forty forty ninth grade.

你知道吗？我已经连续上学四十九年了。所以我从未真正想过这是一种可能性。然后当我确实觉得这是一种可能性时，那是在我的第二个博士后期间。真的，我没有。所以

You know? I've been in school continuously for forty nine years. So I never really thought that was a possibility. And then when I did feel like it was a possibility, it was only during my second postdoc. It really it I didn't So

你在做博士后？是的。即使没有计划也去了。顺便说一句，你完全颠覆了我给听众的所有建议，因为我反复强调的一点就是不要没有计划就去读研究生。那不是个...结果你反其道而行之，却取得了惊人的成功。

you're doing postdocs? Yeah. Even without it. By the way, you're you're ruining all the advice I give to my listeners because the the one thing I come back to again and again is don't go to grad school without a plan. It's not a place to so you you did the opposite, and it was fantastically successful for you.

所以各位听众请注意，布莱恩算是个特例。

So everyone in the audience, Brian is a bit of an exception.

幸存者偏差警告。幸存者偏差警告。

Survivorship bias alert. Survivorship bias alert.

没错。好的。所以你现在在第二个博士后阶段。是的。是的。

Exactly. Alright. So you're you're in your second postdoc. Yeah. Yeah.

那么终身教职的学术道路是如何进入你的世界的？

So then how does tenure line academia enter your world?

其实我被斯坦福的第一个博士后职位解雇了，因为我某种程度上同样...我应该先解释下什么是博士后，可能有人不了解。在硬科学领域，比如物理、数学、化学等等，通常会有这样一个过渡阶段——研究生毕业后，有人付钱让你工作，告诉你该做什么，或者至少给出论文项目的大致范围。你不需要完全自己想出原创课题，但必须解决那些前所未有的原创性问题。所以做学生非常具有挑战性，但不像大多数人想的那样，哦，研究生就是像本科时做特别难的作业题。

So I had been fired from my first postdoc at Stanford because I was sort of equally so I should say what a postdoc is that people don't know. So in in the hard sciences and in, you know, computer science, I'm sure it it could be similar. But in the hard sciences, you know, physics, math, chemistry, etcetera, you typically have this waylay station between graduate school when somebody pays you and tells you what to do or at least gives you the rough parameters of what's acceptable for a thesis project. And and you don't have to really come up with with with original topics, but you must solve things that are original and for the first time ever done. So it's very challenging to be a student, but it's not just like most people think, you know, oh, grad student, that's just like really hard homework problems in undergrad.

不。这完全不一样。非常，

No. It's it's totally different. Very,

实际上课程作业非常少。这总是让人感到惊讶。

very little coursework actually. That always surprises people.

是的。这这这非常不同。但你的，你知道，目标是开始学习如何做研究。就像我拿到飞行员执照时，那也是研究生阶段，拿到执照那天，你知道，飞行教练告诉我，这就像是这不是毕业。就像，你还没完成。

Yeah. It's it's it's extremely different different. But your, you know, goal is to start learning how to do research. Like when I got my pilot's license, which was also as a graduate student, the day I got it, you know, the flight instructor told me, this is like this is not graduation. Like, you're not done.

就像，这更像是开始，而且你处于最危险的阶段，你知道，死亡谷就在你拿到飞行员执照后，直到你累计飞行时间达到大约八百小时。所以作为研究生，你有点像在那种炼狱中，而你知道，自从四百年前，那种真正的大师、学生和学徒等传统发展起来，他们开发了这种工具，有点像是研究生和教授之间的一个站台，那就是博士后。所以博士后，意思是获得博士学位后，可以成为学者，获得奖学金、助学金，或者只是为雇主工作。但在那段时间里，迈克迈克，你的目标是某种程度上建立自己创建新颖研究项目的能力，意图是证明你有能力达到下一个水平，也就是成为可能的一名教职顾问，那时你将再次有机会指导研究生和博士后，并教授本科生。所以所有这些加在一起，就是这个博士后。

Like, this is if anything, it's the beginning, and you're at your most dangerous you know, the valley of death is is right after you get your pilot's license till you have about eight hundred hours of total accumulated flight time. So as a grad student, you're kind of in that purgatory and over a thou you know, four hundred years since, you know, the tradition of of, you know, really master and student and apprentice, etcetera, they've developed, you know, this this tool that kind of is a station between graduate student and professor potentially, and that's called a postdoc. So postdoctoral, meaning after your PhD, can be a scholar, get a fellowship, scholarship, or just work for an employer. But during that time, Mike Mike, your goal is to sort of establish your own ability to create new novel research programs with the intent that you're gonna sort of prove out your ability to get to that next level, which is to be perhaps a faculty adviser when you would have, again, the opportunity to then mentor graduate students and postdocs and teach undergraduates. So all these things put together, this this postdoc.

但在某种程度上，那是我曾经拥有过的最自由的时光。自由意味着解放，不是像，哦，我有这么多时间可以刷屏。你知道？它给了我如此多的解放，以至于现在我有了从博士项目中获得的智力马力。我知道该领域所有有趣的话题，并且我实际上可以用足够的毅力去完成和跟进它们。

But in a way, it's it was sort of the most free time I ever had. Free meaning freeing, not like, oh, I have all this time to scroll. You know? It was it was it gave me so much liberation that now I had the horsepower intellectually from my PhD program. I knew all the interesting topics in the field, and I could actually accomplish and follow through them with enough perseverance.

所以在斯坦福，我从布朗大学一毕业就被雇佣了，我开始工作并想，哦，我喜欢这个新想法。我有一个新想法，你实际上可以测量大爆炸发生的那一刻发生了什么。对吧。这让我非常震惊。所以我停止研究早期星系，那是我的导师付钱让我做的研究。

So at Stanford, where I was hired right out of Brown, I started to work and think, oh, I love this new idea. I have this new idea that you could actually measure what happened at the moment the big bang occurred. Right. And and this just kind of blew me away. And so I stopped researching early galaxies that my adviser was paying me to to do.

所以她明智地解雇了我，但她帮了我一个大忙，把我介绍给了她在加州理工学院的博士后导师，名叫安德鲁·朗。我去了，他给了我一份工作，我接受了。所以我做了两个博士后，只有在第二个博士后期间，我才能实施我作为一个任性的博士后、一个轻浮的博士后发明的实验，我们实施了它并建造了这个仪器，然后这导致我获得了机构的教授职位邀请。

And so she wisely she fired me, but she did me the solid of introducing me to her PhD her postdoctoral adviser at Caltech, whose name is Andrew Lang. And I went to he offered me a job, and I accepted that. So I did two post docs, and it was only during that second postdoc when I could implement the experiment that I had invented as a wayward postdoc, as a as a, you know, frivolous postdoc that we implemented it and built this instrument, and then that led to me getting an offer at the institutions to be a professor.

是的。我认为人们并不总是认识到，在实验科学中，通常你雇佣的一部分是一个仪器、一个实验。它是我是一个质量，我建造了这个东西，或者我在一个建造了这个东西的导师手下工作，现在我知道如何做。她不可用，但我可以。这不是我认为人们经常用他们上大学的模式来思考整个学术界，那就是，嘿，你聪明吗？

Yeah. I think people don't always recognize in the experimental sciences, often what you're Part of what you're hiring is an instrument, an experiment. It's I am a mass I built this thing, or I worked under an advisor who built this thing, and now I know how to do it. She's not available, but I am. That it's not the I think people often think about all of academia in the model they had for going to college, which was, hey, are you smart?

你有潜力吗？比如，我们把你和其他所有人放在一起竞争。你是最聪明、最有趣、最优秀的人吗？我们想聘请你当教授。

Do you have promise? Like, are you Let's put you in a competition with everyone else. And are you the smartest, most interesting person who's who's great. We wanna hire you as a professor.

我称之为学术饥饿游戏。你知道吗？是的。但这从高中就开始了。

That's what I call it. I call it the academic hunger games. You know? Yeah. But but It starts in high school.

对吧？然后它永远不会停止。我是说，就连诺贝尔奖得主也无法摆脱，Cal。这太疯狂了。饥饿游戏，零和博弈。

Right? And then numb it never stops. I mean, it doesn't stop with Nobel laureates, Cal. It's insane. The the hunger games, the zero sum game.

而这之所以如此有害，是因为它与科学精神背道而驰。对吧？你不能‘赢得’科学。没有那种‘哦，是的，我赢了科学’这回事。

And and the reason that's so so pernicious is that it's antithetical to science. Right? You you don't win science. There's not like a zero oh, like, yeah. I won science.

你知道吗？不。即使他们赢得了诺贝尔奖，我认识的这些诺贝尔奖得主，他们都有冒名顶替综合症。他们觉得自己不够好，不配得奖。

You know? No. Even when he win the Nobel Prize, these Nobel Prize winners that I know, they all have things like the impostor syndrome. They're not good enough. They don't deserve it.

所以就像你说的那样，这就像是把他们扔进一个房间，看看谁能走出来。

And so exactly like you say, it's it's just like throw them in a room and see who comes out.

不过我觉得我在麻省理工学院认识的一些计算机科学家觉得他们配得上。哦，有那么几个。有几个人自我感觉相当良好。他们会想，这是我应得的。而且

Though I feel like some of the computer scientists I knew at MIT felt like they deserved it. Oh, there's a couple. There's there's a few that are pretty they have a pretty high self regard. They're like, I deserve it. And

他们花了你那么

They took you so

长时间。是的。他们花了你那么长时间。没错。不过那确实很吸引人。

long. Yeah. They took you so long. Exactly. That that's fascinating though.

所以这里，我要像心理分析师一样分析你。告诉我这是对还是错。你认为，你没有把自己视为那些游戏中的竞争者，这一点是否反而让你意外地找到了某种方式，讽刺地使你在那些游戏中更成功？换句话说，你没有焦虑地想，我需要成为教授。天啊，我做的事情对吗？

So here here's like a psychoan I'm gonna psychoanalyze you. Tell me if this is right or wrong. Do you think the fact that you didn't see yourself as competing in those games actually helped you stumble into something that ironically made you more successful in those games? In other words, you weren't anxious about, I need to become a professor. Oh my god, am I doing the right things?

我发表的论文对吗？我赢得了合适的导师吗？你只是觉得，嘿，学校很棒。这很有趣。哦，我现在可以构建东西了。

Am I publishing the right papers? Am I winning the right mentor? You were just like, hey, school is great. This is fun. Oh, I can build stuff now.

这似乎是个很酷的问题。而不知何故，这成了一种优势。

This seems like a cool problem. And somehow that was a benefit.

是的。我觉得，你知道，纽波特医生，你知道，正在诊疗中。我认为你说得完全正确。我有安全网。

Yeah. I think, you know, that Doctor. Newport, you know, is in session. I think that's exactly spot on. I had the safety net.

你知道，我知道我总能站稳脚跟。你知道，我有过实际的工作。你知道，我当过快餐厨师。我做过洗碗工。我搬过家具。

You know, I knew I'd always land on my feet. You know, I had real jobs. You know, I was a short order cook. I worked as a dishwasher. I moved furniture.

你知道，我一直都有工作。从12岁起我就没停止过工作，而且我做过很多所谓的'真正'工作。我不认为我们现在做的是体力劳动，但这确实是实实在在的工作，只是类型不同罢了。这是一种更深层次的、更具学术性的智力活动。

You know, I always had a job. I haven't stopped working since I was 12, and I had a lot of real, quote, unquote, jobs. I don't consider, you know, what we do as manual labor, but it's certainly real work. It's just of a different kind. It's a deeper intellectual, more scholastic way.

所以我知道自己擅长这个。就像，我知道自己是个学者，而学术界本就是为了学术研究而存在的，至少好的学术界是这样。我们可以争论其他某些院系的情况。但我一直觉得，我最终总能站稳脚跟。我真的，你知道，反正我知道自己赚不了那么多钱。

So I knew I was good at that. Like, I I knew I was a scholar, you know, and that academia is meant for scholarship, at least the good kind of academia. We can argue about some of those other departments. But but the point that I always felt was like, I'm gonna end up on my feet. I don't really you know, I know I'm not gonna make that much money anyway.

你知道吗？你知道吗？剧透一下：我在一所公立大学。而且我一直都在公立大学工作。

You know? You know? Spoiler alert. I'm at a public university. And I always have been in public universities.

但我一直觉得，你知道，这就像是我的，你知道，某种道路。我会尝试它。如果行不通，我知道我在别处也能成功。我曾收到过NASA的工作邀请。有件事我得说一下，就在大三结束后，美国国家科学基金会（NSF）运行了一个名为'本科生研究体验'的项目，REU项目，或者至少他们今年早些时候之前还在运行

But I always felt like, you know, this was my, you know, kind of, you know, path. I would try it. If it didn't work out, I knew I'd succeed somewhere else. I had job offers to work for NASA. One thing I should say is that right after, as a junior, the NSF runs a program called research experiences for undergraduates, REU program, or they did until I earlier this year

我想他们会恢复的。我认为他们会恢复的。

think they're coming back. I think they're coming back.

希望他们会恢复。所以我参加了那个项目，当时在威廉与玛丽学院，离你不算太远，但在弗吉尼亚州。我为NASA工作，NASA兰利研究中心。我们当时在开发无损评估的方法。你知道，Cal，当你坐上飞机时，人们没意识到，你看到飞机蒙皮上的铆钉。

Hopefully, they'll come back. So I did that, and I was at the College of William and Mary not not far too far from you, but in Virginia. And I worked for NASA, NASA Langley. We were developing ways to do nondestructive evaluate. You know, when you go on an airplane, Cal, people don't realize that you go on an airplane, you see the rivets, you know, on the airplane skin.

人们会觉得，哦，是铆钉把飞机固定在一起的。它们肯定就像螺丝一样。但其实不是。不是的。实际上那里还有胶水。

And people are like, oh, the rivets hold the the plane together. It must be like they're just like screws. And no. No. It's actually there's glue.

比如，99%的粘合来自于你看不到的胶合面，铆钉只是暂时固定铝制蒙皮，直到胶水或碳纤维固化。所以大多数人——我们当时在研究一种程序，使用不可见的辐射进行所谓的无损检测，确保飞机不会像过去一些不幸案例那样开裂解体。所以在年底——其实是夏末，我得到了一份工作机会，就像，将会是NASA的终身全职公务员职位。我热爱NASA，我能叫出所有宇航员的名字。

Like, 99% of the adhesion comes from a glue surface you can't see, and the rivets just hold the skin of the aluminum in place until the glue or the carbon fiber can set. And so most people so we were working on this procedure to use, you know, invisible radiation basically to do what's called nondestructive evaluation and make sure that the airplane wouldn't crack and come apart, as some have, unfortunately, in in the in the many years. So at the end of the at the end of the year, I was at the end of the summer, rather, I was offered a job, and, like, it was, like, gonna be full time civil service position for NASA for the rest of my life. And I love NASA. I knew all the astronauts' names.

我曾想成为航天飞机驾驶员。这就是我考取飞行员执照的原因。但我清楚自己一点：如果大四毕业后停下来，我就再也不会回去了。是的。我把学术界看作一个棘轮。

I wanted to be a space shuttle pilot. You know, that's why I got my pilot's license. And but I knew one thing about myself, that if I stopped after senior year graduation, I would never go back. Yeah. And I see academia as a ratchet.

有时候我的意思是，棘轮可以反向转动，你知道吧？但这非常困难。换句话说，如果你中断了那条道路，就很难再回头了。而反过来却很容易。

And sometimes it's I mean, you can turn a ratchet backwards. You know? It's very difficult. But in other words, if you stopped going along that path, it's very hard to to go back the other way. Whereas it's very easy.

明白吗？如果你想现在离开学术界，Cal，你瞬间就能做到。但让你MIT的同届生回来做你现在做的事？这几乎不可能。

You know? If you wanna leave academia right now, Cal, you could do it in a heartbeat. But try somebody in your cohort at MIT or whatever coming back and doing what you do. It's functionally impossible.

是的。我觉得人们没意识到，学术道路——就像你说的'饥饿游戏'——竞争异常激烈。对吧？如果你离开再回来...但我们有从未离开、沿着明星轨迹前行的人，一个职位会收到来自顶尖学校的300份申请。我觉得有时人们对学术界有种幻想。

Yeah. Think people people don't realize that, that the the academic path well, as you said, the hunger games, it's incredibly competitive. Right? It's it's if you leave and come back, like, but we have people who didn't leave, who are on their star trajectory, and there's one spot we're gonna get 300 applicants from top schools. It's, you know, I think sometimes people have this vision of academia.

就像，哦，他们会说'你决定去教书了'。然后就像，是啊，就像份工作似的。'嘿，我们去教书吧，你能找到教职或回来教书'。其实根本不是这样。

It's like, oh, it's like, they'll say, you decided to teach. And it's like, yeah, it's like a job. Like, hey, we go teach. You can you can get a teacher job or come back to a teacher job. It's like, no, no, no.

最好把它想象成NBA之类的。

It's better to think about like the NBA or something like that.

我的意思是，确实如此。

I mean, it's Exactly.

如果你离开，你并不是说你有足够的明星潜质去吸引某些球探的注意。你不能离开几年去踢足球然后再回来。他们有足够多的年轻球员。所以，在你完成第二个博士后之后，你的实验进展顺利，你得到了你的第一个终身教职轨道职位，助理教授职位。你是怎么获得终身教职的？

You're not if you leave, you're on the trajectory to be enough of a star to try to catch the attention of some scout. You can't go leave and play football for a couple years and come back. They have enough they have enough young players. So once you once you after that second postdoc, your experiment's working well, you get your your first tenure line position, assistant professorship position. How did you get tenure?

我的意思是，那是什么情况？你当时在研究什么？你有压力吗？过程顺利吗？比如，那段经历是怎样的？是的。

I mean, what was that? What were you working on? Were you stressed? Were you was it easy? Like, what was that experience Yeah.

比如说

Like for

再说一次，我从未感到压力。我从未把我的自我价值与我的职业绑在一起。我的身份是学者。我的身份是科学家。明白吗？

Again, I was never stressed. I I never tied, you know, kind of my self worth to my career. My identity is scholar. My identity is scientist. You know?

现在身份多了很多，父母，你知道，丈夫，或者别的，国际罪犯。但我的身份从来不是，哦，我的工作就是我的职业。现在也不是。比如，我对学术界有很多次感到非常失望，我相信我们所有人都是这样。但我从未担心过终身教职的问题。

Now it's a lot more things, parent, you know, husband, whatever, you know, international criminal. But but my identity was never like, oh, my job is my profession. And it still isn't. Like, I I I get very disillusioned many times, with academia, as I'm sure all of us do. But, but I never I never worried about tenure.

首先，加州大学的终身教职通过率大约是90%。我在这里二十一年了。我们只遇到过一例有疑问的情况。比如，这个人能获得终身教职吗？你知道吧？

First of all, the University of California, the tenure rate's like 90%. I've been here twenty one years. We've had one case where it was questionable. Like, did would this person get tenure? You know?

这大概是我知道的80个教职案例吧？所以实际上，我知道我大概率能拿到。你知道，除非我真的搞砸了。但我当时也很有野心。我想写书，想做更多演讲之类的事情，你知道，类似这样的发展轨迹。

And that's like probably 80 faculty cases that I've been know? So I knew practically speaking, I'd probably get it. You know, I have to really mess up. But I was also very ambitious. Like, I wanted to, you know, write books, and I wanted to, you know, do do, you know, more speaking and and things, you know, along the line.

和你做的有点像，你知道，类似的发展路径，但年纪比你大一点。所以我先到了那里，但你做得更好。我还想提一点，你刚才暗示了博士后这个奇怪的模糊状态，这种介于学生和老师之间的薛定谔状态，那就是NBA和MLB之间的区别，对吧？

Similar, you know, kind of trajectory to what you did, but Yeah. A little a little older than you. So I I got there first, but you did it better. And but one more point I wanna make that you you hinted at about the postdoc, this weird kind of ambiguous state, this Schrodinger state between student and and teacher, and that's that there's a difference between the NBA or or the MLB. Right?

MLB有，比如，单A、双A、三A之类的级别，对吧？然后这是

So MLB has, like, a single a ball, double a ball, triple a ball, like that. Right? And then This is

一个更好的类比。是的。

a better analogy. Yeah.

但但但区别在于，实际上拿到博士后职位相当容易，至少在我的领域是这样。我们这里更像是卖方市场，你知道？如果你是一个优秀博士，来自不错的项目，有很多教授都想雇你，这几乎就像桶里射鱼一样容易。但之后要从，比如说三A级别跳出来，反而变得更难。

But but but the the the difference is that it's actually pretty easy to get a postdoc, at least it is in my field. We have we're way, you know, kind of a a a seller's market. You know? If you're a good PhD from a decent program, there's so many professors that are gonna wanna hire you, and and it's it's almost like shooting fish in the barrel. But then it becomes even almost harder to break from, say, triple a ball.

你知道？想象一下，进入三A棒球其实超级难，对吧？或者单A棒球。

You know? Imagine, like, it was easy to get into no. It's really freaking hard to get into triple a baseball. Right? Or single a baseball.

你知道？就连那个也很难。但我们却把它说得像只是个垫脚石。不，它不是。

You know? Even that. But we make it like, oh, it's it's just like the stepping stone. No. It's not.

你被录取的可能性真的很小。去年在UCSD，我们一个职位收到了400份申请。这简直难以置信，而且所有这些人都可能——他们都比我当年优秀。你知道吗？所以，虽然我不会放弃我的事业，但他们——你知道——他们发表的论文数量是我的80倍。

It's it's really unlikely that you'll make it. We had 400 applications for one job last year here at UCSD. It's just incredibly and and all these people could be and and they're all better than I was. You know? So, like, I'm not gonna give up my thing, but they're all you know, they've done eight 80 times more, you know, papers.

他们是代理人。我有一个自己设计的实验，基本上是我的想法：我们可以在南极洲的南极点建造一个小型望远镜——小型意味着价格实惠，你知道，后勤上易于支持。于是我们基于这个想法在南极建造了这个望远镜，这个想法是受到天文学家之间一种所谓的'口径狂热'的军备竞赛启发。从小时候起我就有这个想法。这很让人上瘾，因为，你知道，你可以从小望远镜一直升级到詹姆斯·韦伯太空望远镜。

They're agent I had one experiment that I created, and it was, you know, basically my idea that we could build an instrument with a small telescope, small meaning affordable, you know, kind of logistically easy to support, at the South Pole, Antarctica. So we built this telescope at the South Pole based on this idea that I had inspired by this kind of arms race that astronomers have, which is that called aperture fever. As as you get a little telescope, you wanna get a bigger telescope, wanna get a bigger telescope. This I had since I was a kid. And, and it's addictive because, you know, it's it's you can go up to infant you can go up to the James Webb Space Telescope.

就像，望远镜的尺寸和成本是没有上限的。但我发明了一种非常廉价的小型望远镜。望远镜的成本大致按孔径的立方（体积）增长，而实际的集光面积只是孔径的平方，分辨率也只是与孔径成正比。所以建造大型望远镜的代价非常高昂，这意味着如果我设计出一种更便宜的望远镜，能完成十倍大望远镜的所有工作，它的成本可能只有千分之一。这在我申请资金时让它更具吸引力。

Like, there's no stopping the size of your telescope and the cost of your telescope. But I invented a small telescope, which would be very inexpensive. The cost of a telescope scales as the volume, sort of the aperture cubed, whereas, you know, the actual collecting area is just the aperture squared, and the resolution is just the aperture. So it's a very steep penalty to build a big telescope, meaning that if I devised a cheaper telescope that could do all the work of a telescope 10 times bigger, it could be a thousand times less expensive. And that made it more appealing, at the time when I applied for funding.

我的第一个资助方是加州理工学院校长基金，负责人是大卫·巴尔的摩，他获得了诺贝尔医学和生理学奖。他给了我和我的导师一百万美元的启动资金来开始这个项目。然后我们建造了这个仪器，就在我开始在UCSD工作时，我们把它安装在了南极点。所以我知道，在我争取终身教职的六年期间，我们差不多刚好能开始获取数据。我申请了加速终身教职，不管怎样都行。

My first funding agent was the Caltech president's fund, which is David Baltimore, who won the Nobel Prize in in medicine and physiology. And he gave us, my my adviser and me, a million dollar seed fund to start this off. And then we built this instrument, and then we put it down at the South Pole right when I started at UCSD. So I knew we would just about be getting data, you know, the six year period to get tenure. I asked for accelerated tenure, just whatever.

还不如多拿那每月500美元，你知道，工资我

Might as well get that extra $500 a month, you know, salary I

也这么做了。我理解。是的。我们说这不是为了工资。而是关于，我想尽快搞定它，自尊心等等。

did the same. I get it. Yeah. We say it's not about the salary. It's about like, I want to get it over with, pride, etcetera.

但然后我们的大学，我不知道你们学校怎么样，但我们大学会做一些非常愚蠢的事情，比如他们说，如果你想晋升，你必须出去从别处拿到一个工作机会。比如如果我说，看，我想晋升，他们会说，很好，你知道，你可以在未来三年内获得。或者你可以出去从斯坦福或别的什么地方拿到一个工作邀请，然后我们会匹配那个offer。这太愚蠢了。但是，你知道，这就是学术界疯狂的经济学，人们并不真正理解。

But then our university, I don't know about yours, but our university does like really dumb things where they say like, if you want to get a promotion, you have to go out and get an offer from somewhere else. Like if I wanted to get, know, George, if said, look, I want to get a promotion, they would say, great, you know, you can get it in the next three years. Or you can go out and get a job offer from Stanford or, you know, wherever, and then we'll match that offer. It's so foolish. But, you know, this is the crazy economics of academia that people don't really understand.

所以从那以后我再也没真正担心过终身职位的问题。一旦我获得了它，实际上一切都没变。我只是，你知道，继续做我正在做的事情，而我的望远镜从那以后变得越来越大、越来越贵。

So I was never really worried about tenure again. And once I got it, nothing really changed. I just, you know, kept doing the stuff that I'm doing, and my telescopes have gotten bigger and more expensive ever since.

好的。我们稍作休息，这是本次对话中唯一的一次休息，来谈谈我们今天节目的主要赞助商Done Daily。你们之前在我的节目里听我提到过，所以我想在这里实际看看他们提供什么服务。我会为正在观看网站的朋友们把Done Daily的页面调出来。杰西，我们一起来看看。

Alright. Let's take a a quick break, our only break from this conversation to talk about our presenting sponsor for today's episode, which is Done Daily. You've heard me talk about this on my show before, so I thought what we would do here is actually look at what they offer. I'm going bring up on the screen here for people who are watching the website for Done Daily. Jesse, let's take a look at this.

你们听我说过，但让我展示一下为什么我觉得它这么棒。好了，这是他们的宣传语。在这个网站上你能得到什么？我来加载一下页面。

You've heard me talk about it, but let me show you why I think it's so cool. Alright. So here's what they say. What do you get at this website? I'll load it up here.

他们称之为成功系统。使用DoneDaily，你不仅仅是勾选任务框。你是在构建一种真正能完成工作的工作方式。你会获得一位教练和一个围绕你生活打造的系统。你们将一起排除干扰，直面阻碍你前进的因素，并锁定那些将'某一天'变成'已完成'的习惯。

They call it a system for success. With DoneDaily, you're not just checking boxes. You're building a way of working that actually gets stuff done. You get a coach and a system built around your life. And together, you'll cut through the distractions, face what's been holding you back, and lock in the habits that turn someday into done.

所以是有一位真实的教练与你合作，帮你规划如何安排和组织你的生活以及你需要做的事情，然后你每天进行汇报。让我再读一下这一段。这就是它真正有效的原因。没有机器人，没有自动化，只有一个真实的人每天与你沟通，让你保持正轨、充满动力并专注。你的教练不仅仅是一个任务监督者。

So it's an actual coach you work with to figure out how you're going to approach and organize your life and the stuff you need to do, and then you check-in daily. So let me read this other block here. This is why this really works. No bots, no automation, just a real person who checks in with you every day to keep you on track, motivated, and focused. Your coach isn't just a taskmaster.

他们是你的进步伙伴。他们会帮助你反思哪些方法有效，在事情不顺时帮助你调整，并确保你始终在向前推进。看谁来了，杰西。

They're your partner in progress. They'll help you reflect on what's working, help you adjust when things aren't, and make sure you're always working forward. Look who's here, Jesse.

是啊。

Yeah.

这里有一张我的照片。我想他们是从另一个广告里找来的。他们是我的粉丝。他们的教练与你合作构建工作的许多理念都来源于我的这类内容。所以，如果你喜欢卡尔·纽波特的东西，并且需要认真应用它，这是一个很棒的模型。

There's a picture of me. I think they pulled this from another ad. They're fans of mine. A lot of the ideas that their coaches build their work on with you comes from my type of stuff. So you'll get if you like Cal Newport stuff and you need to get really serious about applying it, it's a cool model.

在线教练们，如果你真的很重要，想要完成更多事情，这会帮你实现。好了，那就是dunndaily.com。我给个赞。去看看dunndaily.com吧。

Online coaches, they make you if you're really important to get more done, this will get you there. Alright. So that's dunndaily.com. I give it a thumbs up. Check out dunndaily.com.

他们允许我们在今天的节目中只插播这一次广告。所以谢谢大家。现在让我们回到我与布莱恩·基廷博士的讨论。然后你最终做出了诺贝尔奖级别的工作。我们知道这一点是因为你写了一本很棒的书，《与诺贝尔奖失之交臂》，讲述了在如此规模和范围的项目上工作的心理状态，以及当你接近却又未能获奖时的心理变化，以及这告诉了你什么。

They are allowing us to present today's episode with only this one commercial break. So thanks, guys. Now let's get back to my discussion with doctor Brian Keating. And then you ended up with work that was Nobel caliber. And and we know this because you you wrote a fantastic book, Losing the Nobel, about the psychotic both both working on a project of that scale and scope and the psychology of what happens when you come close, and then don't quite get that prize and what that tells you.

关于那件事有几个问题。但首先，如果我们只是想解构你所在领域的要求，有很多人在研究生阶段就掉队了，有些人到了博士后但从未获得职位，有些人到了助理教授轨道但就此止步。顺便说一下，我应该对你关于80%终身教职率的说法加以限定。确实很多大学有很高的终身教职率，但这掩盖了一个事实，因为大学很擅长在更早的阶段就引导你离开。是的。

Couple questions about that. But first, if we're just trying to deconstruct what's required in your field, there's lots of people who fall off at the grad school level, who get to a postdoc but never get a position there, get to, you know, assistant track but never go anywhere from there. And I should, by the way, qualify your remark about the 80% tenure. It is true that a lot of universities have high tenure rates, but what that hides is because universities are very good at steering you out of there much earlier. Yeah.

等到他们让你申请终身教职时，你不太可能被拒绝，因为他们知道你可能能获得。而这些统计数据中没有体现的是那些就是不合拍的人。你的研究不合拍。你没有产出有趣的东西。你的H指数不够，然后你某种程度上，可能用词不当，你某种程度上自我驱逐出了学术界，我猜。

It is unlikely for you to go up for by the time they let you go up for tenure, they know like you probably will get this. And what's not capped in those statistics is that people where it just doesn't click. Your research doesn't click. You're not producing interesting stuff. Your H index isn't there, and you sort of self, this may be a bad use of the term, you sort of self deport from academia, I guess.

对吧？你会想，好吧，我需要，这行不通。当然，我不会去申请终身教职之类的。但不管怎样，所以人们在那里也会掉队。核心是什么？你的建议是什么？

Right? You're like, okay, I need to, this isn't working out. Of course, I'm not going to go up for a tenure or whatever. But anyways, so people fall off there as well. What is the core what is your advice?

如果是那种硬核的雄心勃勃的建议，我想成为明星，你知道，宇宙学家，实验物理学家，天文学家。到底是什么？重要的是什么？不重要的是什么？有哪些迷思？

If like hardcore ambitious advice, I want to be a star, you know, cosmologist, you know, experimental physicist, astronomer. What is it? What are the things that matter? What doesn't? What are the myths?

现实情况是什么？对那些有抱负的年轻科学家来说，最硬核的技术建议是什么？

What are the realities? What's like the hardcore technical advice for the aspiring young scientist?

我认为最重要的一点是专注，要培养那些让你与众不同的稀缺且有价值的技能，而不是试图成为一个文艺复兴式的全才——既能引用匈牙利文学，又能建造在50毫开尔文温度下工作的气压计系统。

I think the number one thing is is to focus, you know, to cultivate rare and valuable skills that make you unique rather than trying to be the kind of Renaissance man, you know, who can quote Hungarian, you know, literature and can also, you know, build a a barometer system that works at 50 millikelvin.

奥本海默的诅咒对吧？就像需要能读懂古代梵文脚本，还要成为出色的小提琴手之类的。不，完全没必要。

The curse of Oppenheimer. Right? Like, need to read I need to be able to read like ancient verdict script and Yeah. Just of Bargadita and, like, be a great violin player or whatever. It's like, no.

不，不。千万别那么做。

No. No. That's don't do that.

没错。所以就像我们最喜欢的棒球比喻：你可以成为一名优秀的游击手，但不必同时试图成为出色的右外野手。

Exactly. Exactly. So it's just like, again, let's keep using our our favorite, you know, baseball analogy. It's like, you could be a great shortstop, you know, but you shouldn't also try to be, you know, a a great, you know, a a great right fielder. Okay.

你确实有能力做到，你有这样的运动天赋和实力。对我来说，就是培养对某个学科永无止境的好奇心。虽然我是宇宙学家，只专精宇宙学，但沿着这个方向延伸，还有化学、热力学、量子力学、核物理、粒子物理等所有物理学分支——除了生物物理。

You you could do it. You have athletic ability that you have horsepower to do it. So for me, it was cultivating just this relentless curiosity about one subject, which as you know, like, yes, I'm a cosmologist, so I'm just an expert in cosmology. But along the lines of cosmology, there's, you know, chemistry, there's thermodynamics, there's quantum mechanics, there's nuclear physics, particle physics. There's all the branches of physics, I joke, except for biophysics.

不过，也许生物学是通过陨石来到地球的——这提醒了我，如果你有.edu邮箱地址，其实可以搞到一块陨石。

Although, it may be the case that biology came to earth via a meteorite, which reminds me, can get a meteorite if you have a dot edu email address.

但这显然是在强调，让那个提议更清晰一点，因为这很酷。

But this is clear emphasizing make that offer a little bit clear because this is cool.

我要做这个产品植入。好吧。我没有像卡尔那么多的书，也没有卡尔所有的那些酷炫玩意儿。但我确实有陨石，这些陨石实际上是我第一本书中的反派。我的团队没能赢得诺贝尔奖，就是因为这些陨石的微观版本伪装成了我们试图确认的信号。

Gonna do this product placement. Okay. So I don't have, you know, as many books as Cal, and I I don't have, all the all the cool stuff that Cal does. But but I do have meteorites, and these are meteorites that are actually the villain of, you know, of my first book. These are the reason that my team did not win a Nobel Prize is because microscopic versions of these meteorites masqueraded as a signal we were attempting to confirm.

对吧？所以科学中最危险的一句话是‘我发现了’。你知道吗？因为这意味着你在寻找某样东西，然后你找到了。

Right? So the most dangerous phrase is is in science is eureka. I have found it. Know? Like, because that means you were looking for something and you found okay.

你可能找到了它，但你可能受到了确认偏误的影响。

You might have found it, but you might be subject to confirmation.

一个如果被证实就会是重大发现的信号。

A signal that if you confirmed would have been a huge deal.

是的，没错。所以这个信号是引发大爆炸的火花。我们知道大爆炸发生了。

Yes. Exactly. Right. So the signal was the spark that ignited the big bang. So we know the big bang occurred.

我们知道宇宙在膨胀，每天都在变大，而且膨胀速度每天都在加快。所以如果你倒带这部电影，你会回到一个时间点，那时宇宙中的所有物质、所有星系、所有粒子、所有一切实际上都聚集在一个地方。这基本上就是勒梅特、伽莫夫等人所称的大爆炸。所以大爆炸就是那个瞬间。但我们不知道是什么导致了那场巨大的爆炸，如果你愿意这么称呼的话。

We know that the universe is expanding, getting bigger every day, and it's getting bigger at a faster rate every day. So if you move you know, wind the movie back in reverse, you come to a time when all the matter in the universe, all the galaxies, all the particles, all the everything in the universe was all in one place effectively. That's essentially what Lemaitre and others and and Gamov and and others coined as the big bang. So the big bang, the instant. But we don't know what caused that massive explosion, if you like, to take place.

这个理论背后的概念叫做暴胀理论，由麻省理工学院的艾伦·古斯教授在四十五年前提出。至今它尚未被确凿证实或真正毋庸置疑地证明。我们在2014年声称，通过探测所谓的引力辐射或引力波，我们确实发现了点燃这次暴胀的火花。剧透警告：在登上《纽约时报》头版、人人窃语我们将赢得诺贝尔奖之后，我们不得不撤回了这一声明。

So the theory behind that is called inflation, postulated by MIT professor Alan Guth, forty five years ago now. And it had yet to be confirmed or really proven beyond a reasonable doubt. And we claimed in 2014 that we did discover the spark that ignited this inflation by way of detection of what's called gravitational radiation or gravity waves. And spoiler alert, we had to retract it after being, you know, on the front page of the New York Times and everybody whispering that we'd win Nobel Prizes. And so we had to retract that.

但我们以为自己看到它的原因是，引力波和这些微陨石都会在宇宙中产生一种模式，如果没有额外数据，我们可能会误将其解读为点燃大爆炸本身的火花。

But the reason we thought we saw it is that gravitational waves and these micrometeorites, they both make this pattern in the cosmos that we could be misinterpreted without additional data as the spark that ignited the big bang itself.

然后你们获得了额外数据，结果并非如你们所愿。但现在你们有陨石碎片可以送人了。

And you got the additional data, and it was not what you hope. But now you have meteorite pieces to give away.

你们有陨石。所以如果你访问我的网站 brianking.com/edu，如果你有 .edu 邮箱地址并且住在美国，你保证能赢得这些宝贝之一。这些陨石有45亿年的历史，比地球还古老。这是地球在原始太阳系星云中形成时的一些物质。

You have meteorites. So if you go to my website, brianking.com/edu, if you have a .edu email address and you live in The USA, you're guaranteed to win one of these beauties. So these are 4,500,000,000 years old. They're older than the Earth cow. So this is some of the material of which the Earth formed out of in the protosolar system nebular cloud.

其中一些物质非常奇特，具有强磁性，而另一些则与你血液中血红蛋白分子里的铁分子非常相似。这是因为你的血液也源自我们早期太阳系的原始材料。所以这个陨石你可以在我的网站上获得。如果你没有 .edu 邮箱地址，我偶尔也会寄出，但保证能获得。因为我想支持我们年轻时的自己。

And some of this material is very exotic, highly magnetic, and some of it is very similar to the iron molecules in the hemoglobin molecule that's in your blood. And that's because your blood also came from the raw materials from our early solar system. So this this meteorite you'll get at my website. You If don't have a dot e d u mail email address, I do send them out on occasion as well, but guaranteed. Because I wanna support my my the younger version of ourselves.

正如你善意地为我的最新著作《像诺贝尔奖得主一样专注》——我的第四本书——写了推荐语，我不会读它，但你确实给出了最令人愉快的推荐。我来读一下，很短。你介意我读你自己的文字吗？

So as you were kind enough to blurb my my my latest book, Focus Like a Nobel Prize, my fourth book. And I won't read it, but you you you do give the most delightful blurb. I'll read it. It's short. Do you mind if I read your own writing copy?

我喜欢听别人读我的文字。

I love hearing my words read.

那么如何赢得诺贝尔奖呢？专注于重要的事情，避开无关紧要的。基廷有力地论证了世界顶尖科学家的习惯对我们其他人具有巨大价值。卡尔·纽波特，《纽约时报》畅销书作者。而这段推荐语的有趣之处在于，我应该将其与我第一版书上的推荐语进行对比——我应该说明这些书是由我撰写的，并得到了迄今为止22位诺贝尔奖得主的帮助。

So how do you win a Nobel Prize? Focus on what matters and avoid what does not. Keating makes a compelling case that the habits of the world's best scientists hold great value for the rest of us. Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author. And what what's so interesting about this blurb, I should contrast that with the blurb on my first edition of the so I should say the books are written by me with the help of so far 22 Nobel Prize.

我想我采访过的诺贝尔奖得主比世界上任何人都多。这是为我的播客《探索不可能》所做的。每次我采访完一个九人小组，我就会出版一本书。九是我最喜欢的数字。我出生于1999年9月9日。

I think I've interviewed more Nobel Prize winners than anyone on earth. And that's for my podcast Into the Impossible. And every time I interview nine a cohort of nine, I release a book. Nine is my favorite number. I was born on 09/09/1999.

这本书是在9月9日出版的。是的。

The book came out on 09/09. Yeah.

所以这是到目前为止的第二本书。那么你正在写第三本。是的。

So And this is the second book so far. So you're working on the third. Yeah.

18个人。所以第一本书，我们共同的朋友詹姆斯·阿尔图切尔写了前言，但巴里·巴里什也写了，他是因探测到确实存在的引力波而获得诺贝尔物理学奖的得主，不像我声称我们探测到的那种。明白吗？那么我为什么提起这个？所以他写了前言，巴里·巴里什。

18 people. So the first book, had our mutual friend James Altucher write the forward to, but also Barry Barish, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting gravitational waves that were actually there, unlike the ones I claimed that I we detected. Okay? So why do I bring this up? So he wrote the foreword, Barry Barish.

他是LIGO加州理工学院的教授，与基普·索恩共事，后者是电影《星际穿越》背后的智囊，所有视觉效果等等，是一位令人难以置信的智者，我也在这本书中采访了他。而且，他写了前言。所以我说，好吧，对于我的第二本书，我要找另一位诺贝尔奖得主来背书，并在书的封面上写推荐语。于是我邀请了唐娜·斯特里克兰教授，她是加拿大滑铁卢大学的教授。我邀请了她，是的。

He's a LIGO Caltech professor, worked with Kip Thorne, who's behind the movie Interstellar, all the graphics and that, incredible intellect who I also interviewed in this book. And, he wrote the foreword. So I said, well, for my second book, I'm gonna get another Nobel Prize winner to endorse and put a blurb on the front cover of the book. So I asked professor Donna Strickland, and she's a professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada. I asked her yeah.

大约两年前她接受过我的采访。她在书中也有出现。她是我书中特色人物之一，你知道，是我最喜欢的作者或贡献者之一。我请她写前言，然后，大约两周过去了。我没有收到她的回复。

She did an interview with me about two years ago now. She's in the book. She's one of my featured, you know, favorite authors or favorite contributors in the book. And I asked her to write the forward, and, like, two weeks went by. I didn't hear from her.

然后她回复了，实际上是她的助理回复的。基廷教授，唐娜·斯特里克兰非常荣幸您能邀请她，但她正处于专注于深度工作的阶段。基本上就是说她专注于深度工作。是的。我当时就想，真希望我在写书之前或者你知道，在书印刷前定稿之前就有这样的觉悟。

And she wrote back literally, her assistant wrote back. Professor Keating, Donna Strickland is very honored that you would ask her, but she's in a period she's focusing on deep work. Basically, that she's focused on deep work. Yeah. And I thought this I wish I had that before I wrote the book or before you know, you have to finalize the book before it's printed.

但这本来可以成为书中的一个例子，展示这些获奖者如何应用这些工具、策略、技巧、黑客技术和习惯，同时也是你所培养并谈论的生活方式。现在我有机会向世界分享他们的故事。所以绕了一大圈想说的是，这其实与我的教授身份不太相符。比如，我写第一本书时，我问了我的系主任，他是诺贝尔奖获得者、激光发明者的儿子。我说，我能请些假或者休个学术假吗？

But that would have made it in the book as an example of these laureates applying these tools, tactics, and tricks, and hacks, and habits, but also just lifestyle that you have cultivated and you have spoken about. And now I get to, you know, kind of share their stories with the world. So long winded way of saying this was, you know, kind of not not really aligned, by the way, with me being a professor. Like, when I wrote my first book, my I asked my department chair, you know, who's the son of a Nobel Prize winner who invented the laser. I said, you know, can I get some time off or some sabbatical?

他说，不行。我们不会因为你写书而惩罚你，但在科学领域，我们不写书。

And he said, no. The only thing we will we won't punish you for writing a book. But in science, they don't we don't write books.

是的。人们不理解这一点，他们会说，哦，乔治城大学一定很高兴因为你的书而提拔你。我说，他们根本不在乎，因为不像你们大学有个校长那样的人会想，我喜欢布莱恩吗？我们要提拔他吗？不会的。

Yeah. I people don't understand this, but they're like, oh, you must Georgetown must have been happy to promote you because of your books. I said, they could care less because it's not like there's a guy at your university, like the president, who's like, do I like Brian? You know, do we want to promote him? No.

这是来自你特定学术领域顶尖教授的保密信件，对你的学术贡献进行诚实评估。他们不在乎你写了书。这不是他们被要求做的事。他们看你的发表的研究，然后说，这个人基本上，他们给你排名。你的工作属于什么级别的学校？

It's it's confidential letters from top professors in your particular academic niche giving an honest appraisal of your academic contributions. They don't care that you wrote a book. That's not what they're asked to do. They they look at your published research and said, is this person basically, they rank you. What level school is your work?

我的意思是，这很直接，因为你知道，我们现在作为正教授已经站在另一边了。基本上就是人们在给候选人排名，比如，是的，这个人能在这里获得终身教职，那里不行。就像，你可以直接说，就像击球率一样。他们坚持用MLB（美国职业棒球大联盟）或什么的标准。所以就像，你知道，你不会因为你在场上的工作而获得击球冠军。

I mean, it's pretty because, you know, we're on the other side of this now as as, you know, full professors. Basically, it's people who are ranking the candidates of like, yeah, this is someone who would get tenure here, here, but not there. Like, you could just put exactly, you know, it's like batting average. They stick with the MLB or whatever. So just like, you know, you're not gonna get a hitting title because of your your work you do in the field.

就像，没人在乎。真的就是，你发表了什么？发表的地方有多顶级？有多少人引用？其他专家学者怎么看？

Like, no one cares. Like, it's really like, what did you publish? How, you know, exclusive are the places? How many people cited it? What do like the other expert scholars think?

所以，是的，他们不会惩罚你。他们不介意。他们对此感到困惑。我的博士导师直到在MIT合作社看到我的一本书才知道我在写书，她问，哦，你在写书吗？写什么的？

So, yeah, they don't punish you. They don't they don't mind. They're they're confused by it. My my My doctoral advisor didn't know I was writing books till she saw one of the MIT co op like, oh, are you writing books? Like what?

只要不影响你的工作就行，对吧？但这其实就像说，我是个不错的铁人三项运动员。他们会说，哦，那很棒。很酷。这是你的一个很酷的特点。

As long as it's not getting in the way of doing your work, right? But it's really the same as being like, I'm pretty good triathlete runner. They're like, oh, that's great. Like, cool. That's a cool thing about you.

和你的工作毫无关系。但好吧，我们还是回到专注这个话题上，对吧？好的。因为就像你说的，专注对你所做的工作很重要。它对你采访的那些诺贝尔奖得主也很重要。

Has nothing to do with your job. But okay, let's stick with this focus thing though, right? Okay. Because like you said, focus matter for what you did. It matter for the Nobel Prize winners you interviewed.

我从书中得到的一点是，当你看到这个标题时，你可能会以为会听到很多关于这些诺贝尔奖得主的故事，讲述他们如何能像激光束一样召唤出强度，直接穿透问题。但很多故事并不是关于这个。他们谈论的专注，更多的是关于他们选择不做什么，而不是关于如何在当下集中注意力。和我聊聊这个。我理解得对吗？

One of the things I took out of the book is you might think when you see that title that you're gonna hear a lot of stories that's about these Nobel Prize winners talking about how they can, you know, summon an intensity like a laser beam that they can bore right through. It's not what a lot of these stories are about. Focus, they're talking about as much what they choose not to do as they are about, oh, how do I actually like concentrate, you know, in the moment? Talk to me about that. Like, am I picking that up right?

你是否也有类似的体会？这里关于专注发生了什么？它既是认知活动，也是活动选择？

Do would you pick up like that similar? Like, what what what's going on here with focus as activity selection as much as it is cognitive activity?

是的。你说得完全正确。唐娜·斯特里克兰，顺便说一下，她是124年来仅有的四位获得诺贝尔物理学奖的女性之一。所以让她坐下来专注于此相当困难，但她做到了。讽刺的是，她的发明基本上是关于LASIK手术工具背后的科学和技术。

Yeah. You're absolutely right. So Donna Strickland, again, the woman and by the way, she's only one of four women who've ever won the physics Nobel Prize in a hundred and twenty four years. So it was pretty hard to get, you know, to get her to sit down and and focus on it, but she did. And ironically, yeah, her invention was for basically the science behind the tools, technology behind LASIK surgery.

那么LASIK是什么？LASIK实际上是通过切除角膜材料来调整眼睛的焦距，角膜负责大部分聚焦。你以为是你眼睛的晶状体在起作用。实际上，大部分聚焦是由角膜完成的，而晶状体是可调节的部分。角膜是首先进行粗略数量级聚焦的部分。

So late what is LASIK? LASIK is actually adjusting the focus of your eye by cutting away the corneal material that acts that actually does most of the focusing. You think the lens in your eye does it. Actually, most of the focusing is done by the cornea, and the lens is the only adjustable part. The cornea is the rough kind of order of magnitude focusing that that occurs first.

于是她和她的导师及同事们发明了LASIK技术。你知道，这叫做啁啾脉冲放大技术，它能产生巨大的激光能量，但你不想把它直接照射到人的眼睛里。你懂吗？如果有人五十年前告诉别人，我们要用激光照射你的眼睛，你会付给我们一千美元，然后你会非常开心。

So she invented with her adviser and her colleagues the LASIK. You know, it's called chirp pulse amplification that takes an enormous amount of laser energy, but you don't want to blast into somebody's eye. You know? If someone told somebody, you know, fifty years ago, we're gonna take lasers, blast it in your eye. You're gonna pay us a thousand bucks, and you're gonna be super happy.

你懂吗？人们对此感到困惑是理所当然的。但她不仅懂得如何像放大镜聚焦阳光烧蚂蚁那样聚焦强度（如果你心术不正的话），还懂得如何在频率空间进行聚焦。他们发现需要制造这种啁啾信号。所以如果你听过鸟叫，那不是正弦波。

You know? People would be rightfully kind of confused about that. But she knew how to focus not only in intensity, like a magnifying glass and an army man or an ant if you're evil, but but how to focus in frequency space. They found that what they had to do is make this chirp. So if you ever hear a bird chirping, it's not a sine wave.

它实际上是一个突发信号，非常尖锐，然后迅速衰减。就像啾啾的鸟鸣声。如果你看它的频谱，它的频率成分也是如此。傅里叶分析显示它是经过压缩、聚焦的频率能量。于是她通过在角膜上的实际空间位置加上频率控制，发现可以获得必要的组织放大效果，而不会破坏视网膜导致失明。

It's actually a burst, and then it's very sharp, and then it decays really quickly. So it's like chirp chirp. Like and so if you look at the frequency spectrum, it's also the frequency content. The Fourier analysis of it shows that it's a compressed, focused amount of frequency. So she had it in in real space in in the position on your cornea plus the frequency, and she found she could get the amplification necessary tissue and not destroy the retina and leave you blind.

她的成就真是不可思议。那么她还做了什么呢？她还经常思考如何培养下一代学者。如何真正培养出未来的诺贝尔奖获得者，或者只是科学领域的高产贡献者。正如你我所知，我常开玩笑说我们从事的是第二古老的职业。

It's incredible what what she did. So, what else does she do? Well, she also thinks a lot about how to cultivate the next generation of scholars. And how do you actually, you know, cultivate somebody who's going to be a a future Nobel laureate or just a con you know, productive contributor in science. So science education, as you and I know, I joke that we have the the second oldest profession.

对吧？我的意思是，我们基本上就是在做这个人做的事情——我很喜欢手指玩偶，Cal。你应该从早前的播客中知道。这位伽利略，如果你在听的话，我有一个伽利略的手指玩偶。他拿着望远镜——虽然望远镜不是他发明的，但他将荷兰人汉斯·利珀希的发明改进了10倍。

Right? I mean, we're we're basically doing what this guy so I love finger puppets, cals. You know from being on the podcast way back when. This Galileo, if you're if you're listening, have a finger puppet of Galileo. He's holding his telescope, which he didn't invent, but, he did improve 10 x from what the, the Dutchman named Hans Lippersche had done beforehand.

那么伽利略靠什么支付房租呢？他是个教授。但不仅如此，Cal，我不知道你怎么想，他还让学生和他住在一起。我不知道纽波特夫人会怎么想，但基廷夫人肯定不会喜欢这样。所以我们这里没有这种界限，但这就是他支付费用的方式，直到他开始写《对话》这本书。

So what did Galileo do to pay the rent? He was a professor. But not only that, Cal, I don't know about you, but he had his students live with him. I don't know how missus Newport would feel about that, but certainly missus Keating wouldn't like that. So so we don't have any borders here, but that's how he paid the dues basically until he started writing a book called the and then later the dialogue.

这本书后来让他变得，你知道，相当富有。倒不是说他超级有钱。但他的教学工作是这样的：看，Cal，这才是真正的创新，这东西叫做粉笔。基本上就是一个人一手拿着石块，在一块巨大的黑色岩石上写字。

And that then made him wealth you know, somewhat wealthy. Not not he was never super wealthy. But his job teaching was, you know, here, have this real innovation, Cal. It's it's called, you know, chalk. And it was, you know, it's basically one a guy with a rock in one hand riding on a big giant piece of black rock.

对吧？是的。所以现在他走得非常非常远，我敢肯定他连PowerPoint都认不出来了。这完全是一回事。但唐娜·斯特里克兰正在思考如何改变教育，以培养必要的技能？

Right? Yep. And so now we do very, very far he couldn't even recognize PowerPoint, I'm sure. That's exactly the same thing. But Donna Strickland is thinking about how do we change, you know, education so that we cultivate the skills that are necessary?

其他国家哪些方面做得更好？她在加拿大，但她是从更全球化的角度思考教育。看到这几乎成了她的业余爱好，真是令人着迷。书里采访的一些获奖者确实有真正的爱好，我会称之为爱好的那种。

What other countries are doing things better? You know, she's in Canada. But she's, you know, she's thinking about education more globally. And and it's just fascinating to see how that's become almost like her hobby. Now there are there are laureates I interview in the book who have actual hobbies, you know, that would you know, that I would count as a hobby.

我不觉得我会那样打发时间。如果我可以看Padres队比赛，或者了解下一代的教育，我没有她那种也许算是慈善的天性。但以布莱恩·施密特为例，他共同发现了宇宙不仅在膨胀，而且在加速膨胀，最终可能撕裂或热寂终结。他用超新星发现了这一点。而他种植酿酒葡萄。

I I don't really feel like I would spend my pastime. You know, if I could watch the Padres, you know, or I could watch, you know, learn about education for the next cohort, I don't have her kind of, you know, charitable nature maybe. But Brian Schmidt, for example, who co discovered the fact that the universe is not only expanding, but it's accelerating at an increasing rate and someday may either rip apart or end in a heat death of the cosmos. He discovered that using supernovae. He grows wine.

他种植酿酒葡萄，是一位专业的酿酒师。是的，他对此非常痴迷。但他是怎么做到的？我问他，你是怎么挤出时间的？

He he grows grapes for wine, and he's an expert vintner. Yeah. And that's he's just obsessed with it. But what does he do? I asked him, like, how do you find the time?

因为他是一所澳大利亚大学的教务长，还是一名研究科学家。诺贝尔奖得主会被邀请做演讲，甚至比你们更频繁。而他还在种葡萄。他说，我基本上有一个日历作为我的待办事项清单。

Because he's the provost of this Australian university. He's still a research scientist. Nobel laureates get asked to do, you know, speaking gigs, you know, even worse than you do. And he's growing one. He's like, I basically have a calendar that's my to do list.

那叫什么？时间盒管理。所以他们也在使用这些工具。有趣的是，他们并不知道自己正在使用你们一直在谈论的这些工具。

So what do you call that? Time boxing. So they're using these tools. The funny thing is that they didn't know they were using these tools that Yeah. You've been talking about.

对吧？另一位为书作荐言的阿里·阿卜杜拉长期研究这个，还有萨希尔·布鲁姆和尼尔·埃亚尔。这些人都使用这些工具，但我意识到加州理工学院的诺贝尔奖得主们并不知道。所以更不用说，大一新生、研究生、博士后、助理教授要怎么学会这些工具？因此我基本上是想把这本书写成一本自助书。

You know? And the other person who blurbed the book, Ali Abdallah, has been working about on for a long time and Sahil Bloom and and Nir Ayal. All these guys use these tools, but I've realized academic the Nobel Prize winners don't know at Cal. So all the more so, how does a freshman, how does a grad student, how does a postdoc, how does assistant professor, how are they gonna learn these tools? And so I basically wanted to write this as a self help book.

我的意思是，这是我在与商业听众交流时经常遇到的情况。因为，你知道，我的很多写作内容都是关于技术如何导致职场出现问题，以及你应该如何应对。但我带到那个世界的大多数想法，其实都源于如何在学术界取得成功。我去年在《纽约客》上发表了一篇名为《我如何学会专注》的文章，追溯了我书中所有知名观点都源于我在MIT读研究生的那五年。当你进入商界时，就像个巫师一样。

I mean, it's one of the things that happens to me when I talk to business audiences. Because, know, a lot of my writing, it's like, hey, here's what's going wrong in the world of work because of technology, and, you know, here's what you should do to get around it. But most of my ideas that I'm bringing to that world, it's come out of how do you succeed in academia. I mean, I wrote a New Yorker essay about this last year called How I Learned to Concentrate, and it was I traced like every major idea I'm known for in my books to a five year period as a graduate student at MIT. You go to the business world like you're a wizard.

你究竟是怎么想出这些点子的？但如果你和我共事过的图灵奖得主，或者你合作过的诺贝尔奖得主交谈，他们会说，要想做出重大成就，唯一的方法就是对你选择的工作内容非常谨慎和挑剔。问题选择至关重要，然后这需要占据你大部分精力。

Where did you even come up with these ideas? But you talk to the Turing prize winners I worked with, or the Nobel prize winners you work with. They're like, well, this is the only way to do anything significant is like you gotta be very careful and picky about what you choose to work on. Problem selection matters. And then that needs to get like the bulk of your focus.

这才是关键。其他事情则安排在你有空的时间里。如果安排不下，那就得放弃一些。但你工作的核心是，一旦找到了合适的项目，那就是最重要的。你所有的价值都来源于此。

That's what matters. And then other stuff fits in the time you have. And if it all doesn't fit, then you gotta drop some things. But like at the core of what you're doing is once you found the right project, it's like that's that's what matters. That's where all your value comes from.

如果你是诺贝尔奖得主，这是基本理念。但如果你是商业高管，你可能不了解这一点。你会觉得回复邮件很重要，保持沟通和忙碌也很重要。那么，你认为这些理念的适用范围有多广？我认为学术界产生了这些想法，因为它们确实有道理。

Basic idea if you're a Nobel Prize winner. But if you're a business executive, you don't know this. You're thinking like, well, answering emails is important and being communicative and being busy is important. So like the what degree do you think these ideas expand? I mean, I think the academia produced them because it makes sense.

这个世界是我们最初开始思考如何用大脑创造价值的地方。两千年后的今天，我们的经济大多基于用大脑创造价值。所以我们在思考这个问题上有先发优势。它能扩展到多广？我的意思是，我们能从这些想法中获利吗？

This was the world where we first began thinking about how to use the brain to create value. And now two thousand years later, most of our economy is based around using your brain to create value. So like we have a head start on thinking about this. How far does it expand? I mean, could profit from these ideas?

我们能走多远？

How broad can we go?

我认为可以。我们面临的一些挑战是，我开玩笑说在学术界每个人都高于平均水平，这也是许多学者遭受冒名顶替综合症的部分原因。巴里·巴里什告诉我，他在获得诺贝尔奖后比获奖前更强烈地感到冒名顶替综合症。我说，巴里，这怎么可能？他说，当你获得诺贝尔奖后，你会去斯德哥尔摩。

I think you can. Some of the challenge that we have is that, you know, I joke that like everybody's above average in academia, which is part of the reason that many academicians suffer from the impostor syndrome. I mean, Barry Barish told me that he felt the impostor syndrome after winning the Nobel Prize worse than before you won the Nobel Prize. I said, Barry, how can that possibly be? And he said, well, when you win a Nobel Prize, you go to Stockholm.

你必须穿上这白色领结、白色燕尾服。你要吃这顿驯鹿晚餐。你会见到瑞典的国王和王后，然后你会得到一个巨大的，你知道的，像弗拉瓦·弗拉夫那样的奖章，还能获得一百万美元，甚至可能更多。所以他们想确保你不会回来质问，嘿，你知道的，我的钱呢？

You have to dress in this white tie, white tails. You eat this reindeer dinner. You meet the king and queen of of Sweden, and you get this giant, you know, flavor flav like medallion, and you get a million dollars plus, you know, potentially. And so they wanna make sure you're not gonna come back and say, hey. You know, where's my money?

你知道的，我的奖章呢？我的驯鹿呢？所以他们让你在这本名册上签名。名册里列出了所有在你这个领域曾获得诺贝尔奖的人的名字。所以巴里是个超级好奇的人。

You know, where's my medal? Where's my reindeer? And so they make you sign this ledger. And in the ledger, all the names of everyone who's ever won the Nobel Prize in your field. So Barry's a super curious guy.

他翻回去看。他看到了费曼。你知道吗？他往回翻。他看到了居里夫人。

He turns it back. He sees Feynman. You know? He he goes back. Marie Curie turns it back.

他看到了，你知道的，费米，所有这些就像巨人一样。然后他看到了阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦。他心想，我根本不配和阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦相提并论，更别说出现在同一本书里了。你知道的，我就像个手指木偶。所以我觉得我不配。

He sees, you know, Fermi, all these just like titans. And then he sees Albert Einstein. And he's like, I don't belong in the same breath as Albert Einstein, let alone the same book. You know, finger puppet here. And so how I'm not worthy.

然后我说，巴里，我得告诉你一个好消息。爱因斯坦也有冒名顶替综合征。他问，你在说什么？我说，他觉得艾萨克·牛顿才是对科学乃至西方文明最大的贡献者。然后他说，啊，这太不可思议了。

And I said, Barry, I gotta tell you some good news. Einstein had the impostor syndrome. He's like, what are you talking about? I said, he felt that Isaac Newton was the greatest contributor, not only to science, but to Western civilization. And he's like, ah, it's amazing.

我说，但这还不是全部。因为艾萨克·牛顿也有冒名顶替综合征。他惊呼，哦，你肯定在开玩笑吧。那不是——我说，不。他没能达到他偶像的期望，他的偶像——巴里问，他的偶像是谁？

And I said, but that's not all. Because Isaac Newton had the impostor syndrome too. And he was like, oh, you gotta be kidding me. That's not and I said, no. He failed to live up to his idol's expectations, and his idol Barry asked who's his idol?

我说，耶稣基督。牛顿非常想效仿基督，他不能创造奇迹，但他大部分的著作都是关于宗教和炼金术，几乎，你知道的，算是副业——是的。他的支线任务是微积分、万有引力和光学，但他死时仍是处子之身。他说那是我唯一能模仿的方式。现在他的性格可能对此有所帮助，因为

I said, Jesus Christ. Newton so wanted to emulate Christ, he couldn't create miracles, but he spent most of his writing on religion and alchemy and almost, you know, side prod yes. His side quest was calculus, gravitation, and optics, but he died a virgin. He said that was the only way I could imitate. Now his personality probably helped with that because

这

it's

有点像个混蛋，就像很多人描述他的那样。但是，我觉得他们，你懂的？所以，要达到这个水平，Cal，你知道的，就像当你走过走廊时，你也知道，很难做到，你既要极其有能力才能达到这个水平，但又周围都是同样极其有能力的人。就好像，如果你太优秀以至于他们无法忽视你，对吧，但每个人都太优秀以至于他们无法忽视你，结果你反而被忽视了。我觉得这是一种奇怪的情绪，因为我们都有，你知道，要成为一名优秀的科学家，你必须对大自然保持谦卑，她总是把你打得落花流水，粉碎你的梦想，让你，你知道，摸索和匍匐寻求解脱。

kind of a a schmuck as as many people described him. But but I think that they you know? So to to be at this level, Cal, as you know, like, when you walk down the hallway, you know, too, it's it's hard to be like, you're simultaneously extremely competent to get to this level, but you're surrounded by so many people that are also extremely competent. It's like, if if you're so good that they can't ignore you, right, but everyone's so good that they can't ignore you, you get ignored. And and I think that's a weird emotion because we all do have a you know, to be a good scientist, you have to be humble against mother nature who always crush the hell out of you, squash your dreams, and and leave you, you know, groping and groveling for for for relief.

但你也必须有点胆量。你必须有点傲慢，相信自己能解决那些曾经击垮、击败过前人的问题。你知道，就像爱因斯坦、牛顿、耶稣的故事所讲的。就好像，如果爱因斯坦是对的，你知道，我就没工作了。好吧，直接查查爱因斯坦说了什么就行。

But you also have to be have a little chutzpah. You have to be a little bit arrogant that you can take on these problems that have crushed, killed, and and defeated people who came before you. You know, the whole point of that story about Einstein, Newton, Jesus. You know, it's like, if Einstein was right, you know, I wouldn't have a job. Like, okay, just look up what Einstein said.

或者，你懂吗？但如果他认为牛顿是对的，他就不会创立，是的，广义相对论了。我喜欢那种既有自信又保持谦逊的平衡。

Or you know? But if he thought Newton was right, he wouldn't have created Yeah. General relativity. I like You have that balance of of swagger, but also humility.

我喜欢自信这一点，并与谦逊保持平衡。但是，我的意思是，这让我想起一件事，这真的让我妻子很困惑，但我觉得你不会困惑，那就是我没有参加任何我的毕业典礼，你知道，我没去硕士毕业典礼，没去博士毕业典礼，也没参加授帽仪式之类的。

I like the swagger point and balance it with humility. But, I mean, it just reminds me. This was something that that really confused my wife, but I think would not confuse you, which was I didn't go to any of my graduation ceremonies as you know, I didn't go to my master's degree. I didn't go to my doctoral degree. I didn't do the hooding or whatever.

我的心态非常像是，如果我觉得那是值得庆祝的成就，那我就无法在学术界立足。对吧？就像，这

And my mindset was very much like, if I feel like that's something that's an accomplishment to celebrate, then I'm not gonna make it as an academic. Right? Like, this

你说这个肯定很有趣。简单。对吧？告诉我，抱歉打断一下，但在高中时，人们说，这是你一生中最美好的时光。而我说，这是我一生中最美好的时光。

had to have been funny you say that. Easy. Right? Tell me in sorry to interrupt, but in high school, people say, like, this is the best time of your life. And I said, this is the best time of my life.

就像，我希望它不是真的，我希望它不是，你知道的。我会的，但你百分之百确定。我从未参加过我的学位授予仪式，我从来没去过。我当时就想，不，算了。

Like, I hope it I hope it's, you know, not true. I will but you're a 100%. I never went to my hooding ceremonies. I never did that. I was like, like, no.

我已经在忙下一件事了。不是什么新鲜玩意儿，但就是，我已经完成了。就像，我得继续前进。

I'm on to the next thing. Not a shiny object, but just like, I'm I'm I'm done. Like, I gotta keep going.

是啊。那些怪物般的头脑，你知道的，就像二战时期的物理学巨匠们。他们，我是说，没错，他们确实在某个时候拿到了博士学位，但那只是途中一站，他们还有更重要的事要做。所以那完全就是，是的，我的心态。

Yeah. The monster the monster minds would not have like, it was the monster minds of the, you know, World War two era of physics. Like, they didn't I mean, yeah, sure. They got their doctorate at some point, like en route to, like, they had things to do. And so that was very much, yeah, my mindset.

我的大学毕业典礼，我完全不在乎。尽管我当时要毕业了，我想我大概是班里前五名吧？对吧？上那么难的大学。我当时就想，这个我不能庆祝，因为这是我未来要做的事情里最简单的一件。

My college graduation, I completely didn't care about. Even though I was graduating, I think I was like top five in my class. Right? Like identifying college that hard. I was like, this I can't celebrate this because this is the the easiest thing I've done that I'm gonna do on the route like what I wanna do.

就像每个上大学的人都会毕业。那并不具有竞争力。或者，是啊，你去读博士项目。是啊，我没被博士项目踢出来。

Like everyone graduates college that you go to college. That's not that's not competitive. Or, yeah, you go to a doctoral program. Yeah. I didn't get kicked out of the doctoral program.

好吧。但是，重要的是，你能拿到终身教职吗？所以你不能，你知道，你不能庆祝那些。就像现在对我自己的学生，哦，这太棒了。我喜欢那种盛况和仪式感，我也穿那巫师袍。

Fine. But, like, what matters is, like, can you get the tenure track job? Like, so you can't, you know, you can't celebrate those. Like, now with my own students, like, oh, this is so great. And I love the pump and the circumstance, and I wear the wizard robes.

但是

But

但现在这对你来说意味着什么？我的意思是，你看。让我现在把心理学的问题反过来问你。既然你已经完成了，你知道，我是说，你的职业生涯从达特茅斯、MIT、佐治亚一路走来。你在公众心目中的形象，顺便说一句，我觉得你实现了我总是和同事们开玩笑说但他们都做不到的事情。

But what is it for you now? I mean, look. Let's let me turn the psychology back on you now. So now that you've done you know, I mean, your your career is just I mean, from Dartmouth, MIT, Georgia. I mean, you and all the stuff you do in the public mind, which, by the way, I feel like you fulfill what I always joke with my colleagues about, but they never do.

真正教授中很少有人能做到的是，你必须回馈公众。你必须用他们能理解的语言沟通，因为是他们支付你的薪水。如果你不这样做，最终——我是说，你在私立机构工作。即使它是私立的，也有大量公共资金流入。每个机构都是如此，尤其是公立机构。

Very few of them do it that are real professors, is that you have to give back to the public. You have to communicate in a language that they understand because they pay your salary. And if you don't, eventually I mean, you're at a at a private institution. I I you know, they just because it's private, there's tons of public money that flow through there. Same with every institution, especially, you know, public institutions.

但让我问你。你知道，你的下一个目标是什么？你现在会说什么是你的重点？比如，好吧，先别管你已经是正教授了。

But let me ask you. You know, what is your next thing? What is the thing that you would say now? Like, okay. Forget about, like, your full professor.

你现在是系主任或类似职位。下一个目标是什么？你现在忽略的是什么？比如，你接下来要专注做什么能给你那种成就感？或者也许并没有这样一个目标。

You're you know, you do I think you're a department, you know, chair or whatever you're doing. What is the next thing? What is the thing that you're gonna, like, kind of the hooding that you're ignoring now? Like, what is the next thing that you're now going to focus on, say, that will give you that sense? Or maybe there's not one.

你对此怎么看？嗯，关于乔治城大学的情况是这样的，我之所以还在那里并且觉得有意义，是因为他们在二十世纪在创建生命伦理学这个领域发挥了重要作用。他们创立了肯尼迪伦理研究所，所有关于'现在我们有了操纵DNA等技术该如何应对'的重大伦理问题，他们始终走在前沿。他们说：我们有大型医学院，但我们是耶稣会学校。

How do you feel about that? Well, so here's the thing about Georgetown, like why I'm still there and why that's working, is they, in the twentieth century, played this big role in the creation of bioethics as a field. They created this thing called the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, and all the big ideas about what do we do now that we're growing like technology to manipulate DNA and these other types of issues, how do we deal about this ethically? They are at the forefront. They said, look, we've got big medical school, but we're Jesuit.

我们拥有这些价值观。它们某种程度上定义了生命伦理学。乔治城大学有这样的理念：我们应该对技术领域做同样的事情。我们应该成为那个努力思考如何应对新技术、探讨伦理关切的机构。

We have these values. They kind of define bioethics. Georgetown had this idea of like, we should do the same with technology. Like, we should be the institution that's trying to figure out, like, how do we grapple with new technologies? What are the ethical concerns?

部分原因是我们法学院可能拥有全球最大的科技法教师团队。我们非常注重政策研究。我们位于华盛顿特区，有很多专门研究这类问题的研究所。所以这就是我们要做的事情。

In part because our law school has probably the largest technology law faculty of anywhere. We're in we're very policy focused. We're in Washington DC. We, you know, we have a lot of institutes that like deal with these sort of things. So that's what we're gonna do.

我基本上就是说，嗯，这差不多就是我现在在做的事情。我面向公众的作品，从《深度工作》开始，我所有的书，其实都是技术故事。它们都是关于技术引发问题，我们如何应对。《深度工作》讲的是知识工作在陷入技术干扰的持续陷阱后发生了什么。

I And basically said, well, that's kind of what I'm doing. My public facing stuff is starting with Deep Work, all of my books, can really They're technology stories. They're all about It's technology doing something causing problems. How do we react to it? Deep Work is about what happened to knowledge work after it fell into a constant trap of technological distractions.

我们对此该怎么办？《无电邮世界》讲的是同一件事。《数字极简主义》是关于我们的手机。《慢速生产力》实际上是关于知识工作如何因为我们在技术时代采用了无效的细粒度工作展示生产力启发法而崩溃的。就像，这就是我做的事情。

What do we do about that? A world without email was about the same thing. Digital minimalism was about our phones. Slow productivity is actually about how knowledge work broke because we had this productivity heuristic that didn't work in an age of fine granularity work demonstrations because of technology. Like, that's what I do.

我说，嗯，很好。这就是我现在想做的。让我来帮你做这件事。让我来帮忙。就像，对于像乔治城大学这样的机构来说，在这方面领先是件好事。

I said, well, good. That's what I want to do now. Let me help you do that. Let me help. Like, this is a good thing for an institution like Georgetown to be ahead of.

所以我是那里数字伦理中心的创始教员之一，那是他们校园里的一个研究所，只从不同学科的实际终身教职教员中抽调人员。我还帮助创建并指导了一个新专业，计算机科学、伦理与社会，这是全国第一个真正完全整合计算机科学与伦理的专业。有些专业像是计算机科学加伦理，就像是，嘿，你是计算机科学专业的，你必须修三门伦理课程。不，不，乔治城大学，我们正在招聘人员，包括我自己，是教授围绕伦理关切构建的计算机科学课程的计算机科学家。这不是说跟这个人学算法，然后去哲学系修伦理课。

So I was one of the original faculty, founding faculty members of the Center for Digital Ethics there, which is their sort of institute on campus that draws just from actual tenure line faculty from different disciplines. And I help create and direct a new major, computer science, ethics, and society, which is the first major in the country to actually fully integrate computer science and ethics. There there are majors that are like CS plus ethics, where it's like, hey, you're a CS major and you have to take three ethics courses. No, no, Georgetown, we're hiring people, myself included, computer scientists who teach courses in this computer science courses that are built around ethical concerns. It's not take algorithms with this guy and then go take ethics in the philosophy part.

总之，就像，这就是我正在做的事情。这很吓人，布莱恩。吓人的部分是，要做到这一点，你某种程度上必须说，所以目前，我不做数学论文了。就像，那是我一直在做并且从，你知道，无论那是什么身份开始就受训做的事情。是的。

So anyways, like, that's what I'm doing. It's been scary, Brian. Here's the scary part about it, is to do that, you kind of have to say, so for now, I'm not doing the math papers. Like, the thing that I had been doing and was trained to do since I was, you know, whatever it was Identity. Yeah.

21岁。所以有趣的部分是，你知道，我是正教授了。没有更高的晋升了。计算机科学系的教员不会再为我写推荐信了。所以我没有需要担心的人了。

21 years old. So that's the interesting part is, you know, I'm full professor. There's no more promotion to get. There's no letters to be written about me from faculty in the computer science. So there's no one I have to worry about.

所以我大约一两年前做出了这个转变，现在正处在转变过程中。在转变中我做的一件事，你可能会觉得有趣，就是我开始说，我有一个所谓的‘工作室日’。那天我肯定不在校园。那天我不开会。我在我的工作室里，做播客，写我的通讯，因为它会被，你知道，每年阅读或下载超过八百万次，而且是关于技术的，这很重要。

And so I made that switch about a year or two ago, and I'm kind of in the middle of it. And one of the things I did in the switch, this might be interesting to you, is I've started saying, I have a quote unquote studio day. And I don't This is the day where I'm definitely not on campus. I don't do meetings that day. I'm in my studio, podcasting, I'm working on my newsletter because that reaches know, it's gonna be read or downloaded eight plus million times a year, and it's about technology and it matters.

这就是我现在工作的一部分。到目前为止，我还能用这个说法蒙混过关，但这不一样。真的不一样。所以我从一个在两个世界间周旋的人变成了——这某种程度上是我的新常态。我现在的世界是面向公众的。如果我们不理解技术及其对我们的影响，以及我们能做些什么，那我们就麻烦了。

And that's part of my job now. And so far I've gotten away with saying that, but it's different. It's different. So I've gone from juggling two worlds to be like, this is sort of my new This is my world now is public facing. Like how do we If we don't understand technology and how it affects us and what we can do about it, we're in trouble.

所以我不知道。这是一个有趣的转变。

So I don't know. It's an interesting shift.

我觉得这很棒。我的意思是，你提到的一些事情我也在书中试图呼应和联系。你知道，流体智力与晶体智力。在西方，也许普遍来说，我们有一种倾向，就是崇尚年轻，以及他们思维纯粹的马力和21岁时能完成的证明，同时还能写书，等等。这和你现在做的事情不同。我相信你仍然能做到，并且你仍然拥有智慧，但我开始变得稍微乐观一些，不是要变得像大卫·布鲁克斯那样，你知道，第二座山或阿瑟·C。

Think that's great. I mean, I think it's kind of some things that you echo and I try to tie into in the book as well. Know, the fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence. So we have this tendency in the West and maybe in general to venerate youth and, you know, the sheer horsepower of their minds and the proofs that you could do when you were 21 and also writing books and also, you know, it's different than what you do now. I'm sure you can still do it and you still have wisdom and so but I'm coming to be a little bit more optimistic, not to get all David Brooks, you know, second mountain or Arthur C.

布鲁克斯，他的同名者，你知道，那种应对青春已逝的挑战，在那个章节，你生命中的那个流体智力的季节，但实际上有了这些小小的数字设备，以及，你知道，我只是觉得不会再有那么多对流体智力的强调了。我的意思是，当我有一个始终在线的数字助手，我有一个挂坠式设备，我有我的手机，我有我的，你知道，随便什么。这些都是惊人的力量倍增器，但它们没有任何智慧。

Brooks, his his namesake as well, you know, kind of the the the the the kind of challenges of of grappling with your youth being over in that that chapter, that season of your life of of fluid intel but actually with these little, you know, digital devices and and, you know, I I just don't feel like there's going to be as much of an emphasis on the fluid intelligence. I mean, when I have a digital assistant always on, I have this thing with a pendant. I have my phone. I have my know, whatever. Those are incredible force multipliers, but they don't have any wisdom whatsoever.

你知道，如果我问ChatGPT，我问它，布莱恩·基廷写过哪些书？你知道？这就像新的自我谷歌搜索。它说，你写了《失去诺贝尔奖》、《进入不可能》和《时间简史》。我就想，嗯，你知道，我真希望我有那本书的销量数字。

You know, if I ask chat GP, I asked it, what what books has Brian Keating written? You know? It's like new googling yourself. And it's like, you wrote losing the Nobel Prize, Into the Impossible, and A Brief History of Time. And I'm like, well, you know, I wish wish I had the book sales, you know, numbers of that.

你知道，那几乎是圣经级别的销量数字。但不是。所以我认为，我们，而且我，你知道，你比我年轻得多，但事实是，我认为流体智力将会被商品化，而晶体智力将会被真正地重视。你所做的事情似乎完美地契合了这个假设，至少，你现在正在利用所有这些经验，这种认识，即，是的，我们从未教过我们的学生伦理。我一次都没有，而且我在这本书里谈到了这一点。

You know, it's like almost the bible book sale numbers. But but no. So so I think, like, we and I'm you know, you're a lot younger than me, but but still, the the fact is that I think there's gonna be a commodification of of the fluid intelligence and a real kind of premium put on crystallized intelligence. And what you're doing seems to align perfectly, at least with that hypothesis, that you're now leveraging all this experience, this recognition that, yeah, we never teach our students ethics. I've never once had a and I talk about it in this book.

有两个章节，我大致给出了基廷的生活、生存和学术界的规则。其中一条就像是，嗯，为什么医学生有伦理课？为什么商学院学生有——为什么法学院学生有伦理课？为什么科学家没有——哦，你们不需要？哦，得了吧。

There's two chapters where I kind of give, you know, Keating's rules for life, survival, and academia. And and one of them is just like, well, why is it that, you know, that a medical student gets an ethics class? Why is it that a business student gets an why is it that a law school student gets a biz gets an ethics class? Why don't scientists oh, you don't need it? Oh, come on.

你告诉我，比如，一些，你知道，p值操纵（p hacking），我曾与p值操纵识别之父之一圭多·因本茨（Guido Imbenz）交谈过。他在书中谈到这种现象有多么猖獗、多么具有破坏性，不仅对他获奖的经济学领域如此，对整个社会也是如此。是的，就像社会的结构可能会因为我们科学家所做之事以及我们如何教授或不教授伦理道德而被撕裂。所以我认为这是一件美好的事情，但我觉得这是人工智能无法想出的，而你却会讽刺地使用它及其在人工智能时代的应用。

You're telling me, like, some some, you know, p hacking, you know, which I talked to one of the fathers of the p hacking identification, Guido Imbenz. You know, he he, in this book, talks about how rampant, how how destructive it is, not just for economics, which he won the prize in, but for society. Yeah. Like, the fabric of society could be torn asunder by what you and I do as scientists and how we teach and we don't teach them ethics. So I think it's a beautiful thing, but I think it's one that an AI wouldn't have come up with, but you're gonna ironically use it and the applications of it in the AI era.

而这在我看来，显示了晶体智力将成为新的热门商品。

And that shows how crystallized intelligence, in my opinion, is gonna be the new, you know, hot commodity.

我的意思是，我很好奇你在自己的职业生涯中是如何看待这个问题的。对吧？你是一位杰出教授。现在人们可能不知道这些排名，但即使在教授群体中，也有这些荣誉称号和级别，这就像是大学级别的教授。真的没有比这更高的了。

I mean, how do you I'm curious how you think about it in your own career. Right? I mean, you're you're a distinguished professor. So now it's people don't know these rankings, but even as full of professors, there's these honorifics and levels you can get, and this is like a university level professor. You really don't go higher than that.

你有一个非常受欢迎的播客，而且你很擅长普及知识。对吧？因为你还会上其他大型节目。你知道，比如你上过Huberman的节目。

And you have a very popular podcast, and you're you're a good popularizer. Right? Because you go on the other, like, mega shows. You know? I mean, you've been on Huberman.

你也上过Rogan的节目。所以你能接触到大量观众。别忘了Deep Life。DeepLive。更重要的是，我的节目，顺便说一下，我和Andrew Huberman的节目加起来有数百万的下载量。

You've been on Rogan. Like, so you reach big audiences. Check off Deep Life. DeepLive. More importantly, my show, which between me and Andrew Huberman, by the way, we have millions of downloads.

这就是为什么我喜欢看到这一点。那么你现在如何看待自己的职业生涯？

So that's why that's why I like to see it. So how do you think about your career now?

是的。我的意思是，我确实获得了更多的成就感。你知道，当我看到我引用次数最多的论文时，它现在有大约2000次引用。然后我再看我的一期节目，如果只有2000次观看，我会感到失望。不过，你知道，这也没什么大不了的。

Yeah. I mean, I'm definitely getting a lot more fulfillment. You know, when I look at my most highly cited paper, it's got, you know, 2,000 citations now. And and then I look at, you know, one episode of my you know, if I only get 2,000, you know, views of an episode, I get disappointed. And, you know, it's just whatever.

当然，这是游戏化的。我想现在我至少还有一本书要写。你知道，如果我继续采访诺贝尔奖得主，我会出版——哎呀，我的摄像头刚刚断开了。就像你说的，我有个热门播客，我的摄像头。

It's gamified, of course. I think now I I have at least one more book in me. You know, if I keep interviewing Nobel Prize winners, I'll put out oops. I'm at my camera just clicked out. Just as you said, you know, I've got this popular podcast, my my camera.

是的，我得到了

Yeah. I got

第一次上镜头吗，布莱恩？得了吧。

the First time on a camera, Brian? Come on.

得到了那种奶油般的虚化效果。我得加上这个来匹配你，我的朋友。所以，接下来的重点是，我想再写一本科普书，这本书将是关于弦理论的——你显然听说过它，作为一种可能的万物理论。但很多人不知道的是，弦理论不仅未经证实，实际上截至目前没有任何证据支持它，而且它可能永远笼罩在所谓的‘不可证伪’的神秘面纱中。

Got the buttery the buttery bokeh. I gotta get that in there to match you, my friend. So the the focus on, you know, kind of the next stage is another I think I wanna write one more popular science book, and this one's gonna be about, you've heard about string theory, obviously, as a sort of a potential theory of everything. But what a lot of people don't know is that string theory is not only unproven. There's literally no evidence in support of it as we speak, but it may be permanently shrouded in the mystery of being what's called unfalsifiable.

卡尔·波普尔有个观点，认为科学应该是可证伪的，因为你无法证明木星北极没有紫色独角兽，或在所有情况下都不存在，但你可以证伪不同的主张。所以弦理论可能不可证伪，但有一个几乎对等的候选万物理论，恰巧可能印刻了有些人声称已初步发现的信号。我想解释那个信号，并解释西蒙斯天文台的科学研究——这是我目前在智利担任首席研究员（PI）的项目。这是一个价值2亿美元、有400人参与的项目，是在智利火山阿塔卡马沙漠海拔18,000英尺处的一座巨大望远镜。我想解释它如何可能被发现，因为其中一个后果是我们或许能发现时间为何有箭头。

So Karl Popper had this notion that science should be not provable because you can't prove that there's not a purple unicorn on on Jupiter's North Pole or in every, you know, in every case, but you can falsify different claims. So string theory might not be falsifiable, but there's an equal and kind of almost opposite candidate theory of everything, which just so happens to possibly imprint the signal that some people have claimed have might have tentative hints for already. And I wanna explain that signal, and I wanna explain the science of what's called the Simons Observatory, which is the project that I'm the PI of right now in Chile. It's a $200,000,000 project, 400 people on it, and it's a massive telescope at 18,000 feet above sea level in the volcanic Atacama Desert of Chile. And I wanna explain how how how it could possibly be discovered because one of the consequences of this is that we may be able to discover why time has an arrow.

为什么时间只朝一个方向流动？为什么我们似乎总是不够用？

Why does it flow in this one direction? And why do we always seem to not have enough of it?

你应该写那本书。我觉得这想法没错。不，我不知道你在西蒙斯天文台当PI的情况下要怎么写。你看，你看，我应对事情太多的反应就是做得更少。

You should write that book. I I think that's right. No. I don't know how you're gonna write it when you have to be a PI in the Simon's Observatory. You are see, see, I react to having too much to do by doing less.

你的应对方式就是设法让一切运转起来。所以我不知道，我不知道你那有什么魔法，但那确实令人印象深刻。我的意思是，你是怎么做到的？因为你仍然在做学术工作中艰苦的部分，你写书，还做播客。

You react to it by somehow just making it all work. So I don't know I don't know what your what your magic is there, but that that is impressive. I mean, how do you make that work? Because you're you still do, like, the hard parts of being an academic, and you write the books and you do the podcast.

是的。嗯，我想，对我来说，如果我的空闲时间不是这样——我有一台望远镜。我用我的望远镜。我拍摄天文图像。而恰好有些我作为爱好的事情，我的孩子们也感兴趣，你知道，纯粹是巧合。

Yeah. Well, I think, you know, for me, if it's not like if I'm my free time cal, I have a telescope. I I use my telescope. I I take astronomical images. And it just so happens that some of the things that I can do as a hobby and my kids are into it, you know, purely by coincidence.

我从不强迫他们去做。所以我能花时间陪伴孩子们，你知道，学习、研究，现在还在圣地亚哥的山里建造这台巨大的新望远镜。这超级有趣。而且我就是喜欢——你知道，即使我退休了，我仍然会教书。仍然会建造、摆弄东西。

I never, you know, force them to do it. So I get to spend time with my kids, you know, learning and and studying and building like this massive new telescope in the mountains of San Diego now. It's just super fun. And I I just loved you know, if I retired, I'd still be teaching. Still be, you know, building, tinkering.

我仍然会去旅行，而且我喜欢演讲。我会做那些事情。所以对我来说，这让我充满，你知道，感激之情。我认为这是生活中最重要的事情。如果你不感恩，你就不是一个快乐的人。

I'd still be, you know, going to travel, and and I love speaking. And I'm I I do those kinds of things. So for me, it's like, you know, it it it fills me up with with, you know, gratitude. And I think that's the most important thing in life. If you're not grateful, you're not a happy person.

如果你不是一个快乐的人，就很难成为一个好人。所以对我来说，就是这样，你知道吗？另一件我应该说的是，我们在你在我频道的采访中提到的，是安息日的概念。所以犹太教是我生活的重要组成部分。而犹太教的一个特点是七天的周期，你必须——我告诉我的学生，你不能一周工作七天。

If you're not a happy person, it's hard to be a good person. So for me, it's it's like you know? The other thing I should say and that we touched upon it in your interview on my channel was the concept of a sabbatical. So Judaism is a big part of my life. And one of the attributes of Judaism is the seven day, you know, cycle of which you have to I tell my students, you cannot work seven days a week.

你可能得一周工作六天。在你年轻、流体智力充沛、拥有所有那些优秀特质的时候，你很可能确实如此。但在我的实验室里，禁止一周工作七天。他们都知道这一点。他们知道我在节假日和周末、星期六不工作。

You probably have to work six days a week. You probably do while you're young and you've got that fluid intelligence pumping away through you and all those great traits. But are forbidden to work seven days a week if you're in my lab. And they all know it. They know I don't work on holidays and weekends, Saturdays.

顺便说一句，星期天我也不工作。但这就是关键。你需要有——如果我没有每周那样的 rejuvenation（恢复活力），你可能是对的。我可能无法完成，你知道，我大部分的工作。但我得到了重置。

I don't work on Sundays either, by the way. But but that that's the thing. You need to have if I if I didn't have that rejuvenation each week, I you're probably right. I probably couldn't do, you know, most of what I do. But I get a reset.

这就像是每周都在度学术休假。而且，只要我还有精力和健康，我就会继续做下去，因为这让我从心底感到快乐，能够做我热爱的事情，还能获得一些报酬——就像我一开始说的，这些事即使免费我也愿意做。

It's like a sabbatical literally every week. And, you know, as long as I keep having the strength and health, I'll continue to do it because it makes me fundamentally full of joy to do and be able and get paid, you know, a little bit to do what I do for what I would do for free, as I said at the beginning.

是的。人们还经常忽略这类学术职位的一点是，你通常拥有自主权，对吧？所以这和担任项目首席研究员完全不同。虽然有很多事要做，但你是负责人。比如，你可以决定我们怎么做。

Yeah. And what people often also get about these sort of academic positions, you're in charge often, right? So it is really different than being a PI on something. There's a lot to do, but you're in charge of it. Like, here's how we're doing.

学术界有很多自主权。而在企业工作中，我参与这些项目意味着我必须时刻守着邮箱，人们可以随时召我去开会。就像不断迎合别人的需求，这就是我——

There's a lot of autonomy in academia. Whereas in a corporate job, it's I'm on these projects, which means I have to be on email all the time. People can summon me to meetings. It's like constantly jumping through what other people need. It's the I

不过我得说，虽然我喜欢那种浪漫的想象，但你会惊讶地发现，尽管智利有法律禁止每周工作16小时的人工作17小时，这种限制简直让人麻木。这就是为什么播客成了我的减压阀，因为我总说我有这么多通讯需求，我试着用你的规则，Cal。拜托，我的拉比，请原谅我冒犯你的罪过。但问题是，有些对话是你我必须进行的，如果我们想维持我们的工作。但还有些对话是我想要进行的。

I should say though that, you know, just I mean, I love that romantic vision, but you'd be surprised how much, you know, like, while there's this Chilean law that prevents people that work sixteen hours a week from working, you know, seventeen, it's mind numbing. And that's where the podcast is the relief valve for me because I say like, I have all these telecoms and I try to use your rules, Cal. Please, you know, my rabbi, you know, forgive me for the sins that I make against you. But the problem is, you know, I have there are conversations that you and I have to have if we wanna, you know, keep keep up the, you know, keep up the the the, you know, what we're doing. But then there are conversations I want to have.

而播客给了我这样的机会，让我能接触到像你这样的人，像诺贝尔奖得主那样的人。我和我的第一位菲尔兹奖得主Terry Tao聊过，还会邀请另一位。这太不可思议了，Cal。我正在尝试组建一个我梦想中的大学，为像我、你和你的听众这样的人。因为世界上有太多酷炫的东西，也有太多邪恶、可怕、糟糕的新闻，尤其是在政治领域，而我们所做的给了我们一个真正的安全空间——不是智力上的安全。

And the podcast gives me that, to access to people like you, to people like the Nobel Prize winners. I talked to Terry Tau, my first Fields medalist. I'm gonna have another one on. It's just incredible, Cal. I mean, I'm trying to put together this university that I wish I had, you know, for people like me and and you and your listeners Because, you know, there's so much cool stuff in the in the world, and there's so much evil, awful, horrible news, mostly in politics and and and what we do gives us a true safe space, not intellectually safe.

我的意思是，它应该挑战你，但它给了你一个安全的空间去思考，比如，天哪，没有人会抬头看那边的 asteroid 或彗星，或者仰望星座。我讨厌那个共和党星座。所以我们拥有那个安全空间。培育它。我们需要更多这样的空间，它让灵魂得以呼吸。

I mean, it should challenge you, but it gives you that safe space to think like, god, you know, no one looks up at that asteroid over there or a comet or or looks up and sees a constellation. I hate that republican constellation. That's so we have that safe space. Cultivate it. We need more of it, and that lets the soul breathe.

我认为这正是我们所缺失的。所以我对播客也非常兴奋。我不是为了钱做的。按小时计酬的话，我可能还在亏钱，就像我写的一些书一样。

And I think that's what we're missing. So I'm I'm really jazzed about podcasting as well. And I don't do it for the money. I mean, I lose money on it probably. I lose money on on some of the books I write if you pay me by the hour.

但最终，它给了我巨大的喜悦和满足感，而这正是生活的真谛。对吧？

But but ultimately, it gives me a great source of of joy, fulfillment, and ultimately, that's the currency of life. Right?

说得好，说得妙。我们即将结束，但在结束前，我想向观众们推荐布莱恩的两项记录。第一，收听播客。对吧？

Well put and well said. We're gonna wrap it. But before we do, I wanna give two record endorsements for Brian to my audience here. One, listen to the podcast. Right?

收听《走进不可能》。不仅仅是因为其中的科学讨论特别有趣，更因为它会让你反复接触思想的生活。我认为我们现在确实低估了这一点，即真正用大脑创造价值是什么感觉。这是一个缓慢的过程，一个充实的过程。

Listen to Into the Impossible. Not just because especially the science talk is interesting, but because it will give you a repeated exposure to life of the mind. And I think that's something that we really downplay right now, what it actually is like to use the brain to create value. It's a slow process. It's a fulfilling process.

这是一个肯定生命的过程，与人工智能支持的成人社交媒体垃圾截然相反。它让你以不同的心态看待人类潜力，并让你觉得那些东西，伙计，那感觉就像是在浪费生命。然后我的第二个推荐是阅读最新著作《如何像诺贝尔奖得主一样专注》，因为你可以把它看作是深度工作的源笔记。就像深度工作是在与非学术人群对话一样。嘿。

It's a life affirming process, and it's the opposite of, you know, AI supported adult social media slop. It is just It puts you in a different mindset about human potentiality and makes you think about this other stuff as, man, that kind of feels like a waste. And then my second endorsement is read the latest book, How to Focus, like a Nobel Prize winner, because I you could think of that as like the source notes for deep work. Like, deep work is talking to a nonacademic crowd. Hey.

专注很重要。这就是你如何做到的方法。我所有的灵感都来自学术界。对吧？因为那是我所在的地方，在那里这并非疯狂的想法。

Focus is important. Here's how you do it. All of my inspiration came from academia. Right? Because that's where I was, where this is not a crazy idea.

你知道，在学术界提到深度工作，人们会说，当然，这就是我们做的事。所以如果你想要那种源材料，对吧，像那样一本书的灵感来源，这里有九位诺贝尔奖得主谈论他们究竟如何做到以及为什么这样做。因此，你不必为了获得智慧而对赢得该领域的最高奖项感兴趣。总之，布莱恩，我热爱你所做的一切。

You know, deep work in academia, people are like, yeah, of course. Like, this is what we do. So if you want sort of the source material, right, like the source inspiration for a book like that, here we got nine Nobel laureates talking about exactly how they do this and why they do this. And so you don't you don't have to be interested in winning the top prize in in that field in order to to get wisdom. So anyways, Brian, I love what you do.

总是很愉快与你交谈。感谢你来上节目。

Always a pleasure to talk. Thanks for coming on the show.

谢谢你，我的朋友。也感谢你在书上的推荐语。能与你建立联系意义非凡，我深有同感。深度生活，那是最珍贵的承诺，只有人类才能做到的，对吧？

Thank you, my friend. And thanks for the blurb on the book. It's very meaningful to be connected with you, and I'll just echo that. The deep life, that's the rarest commit commodity, the one that only human beings can do. Right?

所以好好利用它，真的非常感激你。谢谢你，凯尔。好了。谢谢你，布莱恩。

So take advantage of it and really just so appreciate you. Thank you, Kel. Alright. Thanks, Brian.

好了。就这样吧。那是我与布莱恩·基廷的对话。我喜欢和其他学者一起钻研学术。你知道，这并不像你想象的那样与你的生活脱节。

Alright. So there you go. That was my conversation with Brian Keating. I love geeking out with other academics. You know, it it's not it's not as removed from your life as you might think.

正如我和布莱恩讨论的，我现在向知识工作领域传播的许多理念——关于专注、分心、深度工作、勤奋、不过度承接工作项目以及工作量管理——这些想法的种子大多源自我在学术界的经历。因为那里是 stakes 极高、智力要求极其严格的地方，你必须真正关心诸如专注这样的事情，必须真正关心诸如工作量管理这样的事情。所以这些种子在那里萌芽，然后我帮助它们在更广泛的领域播种，如果我们继续用这个比喻的话。

As I talked about with Brian, so many of the ideas that I now talk about to the world of knowledge work, ideas about focus and distraction and deep work and what diligence and and not taking on too many work projects and workload management. Like, lot of these ideas, the seed for them came out of my experiences in academia. Because it's the one place where the stakes are so high and the intellectual demands are so strict that you have to really care about these things like focus. You have to really care about these things like workload. So the seeds were planted there that I I have then helped us sow in much broader types of fields, if we'll stick with that metaphor.

这就是为什么我喜欢钻研这些事情。但布莱恩真是个很酷的人。顺便说一句，他非常聪明。他是一位非常著名的宇宙学家，并且做出了一些非常出色的工作。他很谦虚，但他的工作确实很出色。

So that's why I like geeking out on these things. But Brian's just a really cool guy. He's really smart, by the way. He's a very well known cosmologist, and he's done some really good work. He's modest, but he's done some really good work.

如果你有 .edu 邮箱地址，就接受他的那个提议吧。去他的网站，我想是 briankeating.com。谷歌一下他的名字。如果你用 .edu 地址注册他的通讯，他会实话告诉你，他会给你寄太空尘埃。

If you have a dot e d u email address, pick him up on that offer. Go to his website. I think it's Brian Keating dot com. Google his name. And if you sign up for his newsletter, he's honest about this with a dot e d u address, he's gonna send you space dust.

我的意思是，我不知道他的太空尘埃都是从哪儿来的。我不想说他肯定有外星人关系，但，嗯，他可能有。不过，总之，你能得到一些太空尘埃。我觉得这真的很酷。很棒的讨论。

I mean, I don't know where he has all the space dust from. I don't wanna say that he definitely has a connection to aliens, but, like, he probably does. But, anyways, you can get some space dust. I thought that was really cool. Great discussion.

看看这本书。《如何像诺贝尔奖得主一样专注》。你会喜欢的。我的推荐语很真诚。快看看吧。

Check out the book. How to focus like a Nobel Prize winner. You'll love it. My blurb is honest. Check it out.

希望你喜欢这次对话。希望我还能推出更多这样的内容。虽然不会每周都做，但我们有一些想法。所以如果你喜欢，请告诉我们。不久的将来我们会再推出另一期深度节目。

Hope you enjoy the conversation. Hopefully, I have some more of these coming up. I don't do them every week, but we've got some ideas. So if you like them, let us know. We'll be back with another in-depth episode at some point in the near future.

但深度问答播客的常规周一节目会一直为你更新。所以至少每周一你都能听到我的声音。感谢收听。下次再聊。再见。

But the normal Monday episodes of the deep questions podcast, they'll always be there for you. So at the very least, you'll hear from me Monday. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time. Hi.

我是Cal。在你离开前还有件事。如果你喜欢深度问答播客，你一定会爱上我的电子邮件通讯，你可以在calnewport.com订阅。每周我都会发送一篇关于深度生活理论与实践的新文章。我从2007年2月开始写这份通讯，每周有超过7万名订阅者收到它。

It's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the deep questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 02/2007, and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week.

所以如果你认真想要抵抗困扰我们世界的分心和浅薄之力，就必须在calnewport.com订阅我的通讯，每周获取一些深度智慧直达你的收件箱。

So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you gotta sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.