吉米·索尼：科比·布莱恩特对写作的隐秘痴迷 | 《我是如何写作的》

如果科比·布莱恩特还活着，他本会出现在《我是如何写作》节目中。

If Kobe Bryant had lived, he would have been on How I Write.

吉米·索尼说整个世界都在密谋阻止你写作。他是今天节目的嘉宾，涉猎过各种写作形式——写书、专栏文章、商业文案，应有尽有。他正在写一本关于科比·布莱恩特的书。我之前都没意识到这一点。

Jimmy Soni says that the whole world is a conspiracy to stop you from writing. He's the guest on today's show, and he's done all kinds of writing. He's written books, op eds, done the business stuff, you name it. He's working a book about Kobe Bryant. And I didn't realize this.

科比曾立志成为二十一世纪的华特·迪士尼。这就是他的计划。所以他钻研写作，研究叙事技巧，投入程度达到了'科比式痴迷'的级别。后来我们还聊到了人工智能领域。

Kobe wanted to become the Walt Disney of the twenty first century. That was his plan. So he studied writing. He studied storytelling, and he obsessed to, like, the level of Kobe obsession. And then we got into world of AI.

吉米如何运用AI？用于编辑和研究，我们讨论得非常具体。开始吧。对了，我们之前聊天时你说过最疯狂的话——你说如果科比还活着，他本会出现在《我是如何写作》节目里。

How does Jimmy use it? For editing, for research, and we got really tactical. Let's rock. Well, when we were chatting before this, you said the craziest thing to me. You said, if Kobe Bryant was still alive, he would have been on How I Write.

他绝对会上《我是如何写作》。我当时就追问：什么意思？他说等做播客时再解释。所以你到底

He would have been on How I Write. And I was like, what do you mean? What do you mean? He said, I'll tell you when we get to podcast. So what do

想表达什么？好吧，我需要为这个说法提供些背景。要知道我身高一米七三，从没打过职业篮球，是看着乔丹的公牛队长大的。这话听起来有点突兀，但很重要——疫情期间确实很难熬。

you mean? All right. So I have to offer a bit of context for that comment because, you know, I'm I'm five eight and never played professional basketball and, you know, grew up loving Jordan's bulls. So this is a little bit of a non sequitur, but it's an important non sequitur. So around the pandemic, I was, I was like the pandemic was was it was rough.

尤其对幼儿父母来说更是如此。你突然就像被关在笼子里，身边是需要自由的小家伙们，初期还得避免他们接触外人。当时对新冠了解有限，大家都寻找各种减压方式——有人靠酒精，有人刷剧。而我的解压方式是推进大项目：正在写的创始人传记、商务事宜、客户工作，同时抚养女儿。

I would say it was particularly rough for parents of young kids because you you suddenly are, like, in this like, you know, you're you're caged with these, like, tiny creatures who are accustomed to having much more freedom, and you all of a sudden, like, can't have them interact with other people at the beginning. You have to be very careful about you didn't know enough about COVID, all that stuff. And so there's basically, like, you know, people turn to different sources of relief for this. They turn to whatever, alcohol, television, whatever. And my source of relief was I needed to get through big projects, the founder's book, which I was working on, business things, client things, and raising a daughter.

我组建了家庭学校，这一切都很艰难。偶然间我看到了科比的访谈视频，他谈论纪律性、心理韧性、跟腱伤势后的恢复。说实话，后来这就成了我每日清晨获取灵感的方式——每天起床先看五分钟科比视频，坚持了一两年。

I built a pod school, and it was all very hard. And I just somehow stumbled onto this video of Kobe Bryant. It was like one of these, like, video interviews that he did where he was talking about discipline and mental toughness and resilience and going through the his Achilles injury and everything else. And, honestly, just as a casual, like like, way of of providing myself, like, a morning's dose of inspiration, I would basically just wake up and, like, watch Kobe videos. And so what I did was I just every single morning for, like, a year, two years, I would wake up and one of the first things I would do is I would watch like five minutes or eight minutes on Kobe.

这样做得越久，我越意识到他不仅是成功的篮球运动员。最直观的说，他拿过奥斯卡和艾美奖，是成功投资人，参与解决流浪汉问题，还是女儿球队的教练。我了解到他退役后想成为顶尖故事讲述者，他想成为当代的华特·迪士尼。

And the reason is, the more I started to do that, the more I started to realize that he was a much bigger figure than just like a successful basketball player. Just at the level of like brass tacks, like he won an Academy Award, he won an Emmy, he was a successful investor, he had done all, he's working on homelessness, he was a coach for his daughter's teams. So I started to learn more about him, And one of the things that I learned is that in his life after basketball, what he wanted to do was become a storyteller and become a preeminent storyteller. He wanted to be Walt Disney. He wanted to be Walt Disney for this generation.

他构思了五部小说（其中四五部已出版），开始创作百老汇音乐剧，有多个电影剧本在筹备，还在打造整个媒体生态系统来革新叙事艺术。最初我的反应可能和多数人一样。

And so he had written or conceived of, I think, like, five novels, I think four of which came out, four or five of which came out. He had written, I think, the beginnings of a Broadway musical. There were screenplays in the works. He had a whole media ecosystem that he was building to take storytelling and turn it into something. And at first, my reaction was probably the reaction of a lot of people.

好吧，对他来说挺好的。他是个名人，身家千万，想做什么都行。不。

Well, good for him. He's a celebrity. He's got millions of dollars. He can do whatever he wants. No.

区别在于科比真正钻研过写作技艺。十五年来他每天写日记，研究约瑟夫·坎贝尔，研习《英雄之旅》，阅读海明威。

The difference is that Kobe actually studied the craft of writing. So every day for fifteen years, he journaled. He studied Joseph Campbell. He studied The Hero's Journey. He read Hemingway.

他会去采访作家。乔治·R·R·马丁？没错。

He would go interview writers. George R. R. Martin? Yeah.

他会和乔治·R·R·马丁混在一起，讨论写作，汲取他的智慧。他热爱J.K.

He would hang out with George R. R. Martin, and they would talk about writing, and he would pick his brain. He loved J. K.

罗琳的作品，所以会痴迷地研究。他痴迷于研究讲故事的技艺。后来我们聊天时我说，要不是遭遇不测，他本该成为这档播客的嘉宾——因为他对写作和讲故事的热爱可能远超你我，这很能说明问题。于是我决定以《纳瓦尔宝典》或《查理·芒格之道》的风格，将我的下一个项目命名为《科比之道》，探讨当他不再只是体育偶像，而是自我提升与卓越境界的象征时意味着什么。

Rowling's work, so he would go obsessively study it. He obsessively studied the art and craft of storytelling. And so fast forward when we were talking, I was like, you know, the person who would had he not met his untimely end, he would have been a guest on this podcast because I think he actually loved writing and storytelling more than you and I do, which is saying something. And so what I decided to do with all of that is I'm actually my next project is going to be a book in the spirit of, like, the almanac of Naval Ravakant or the almanac of Charlie Munger, and it's called The Tao of Kobe. And so the idea is what happens if you look at him not just as a figure in sports but as a much bigger figure in self improvement and excellence?

我正在从约400到450次访谈中收集语录，将它们编织成多数人都不了解的、关于他生平的故事。

And so I'm collecting all of these quotes from about 400, four fifty interviews and kind of stitching them together into a story of his life that I don't think most people are familiar with.

还有件事你没提——他拿过奥斯卡奖。对，最佳动画短片。

There's something that also happened that you didn't mention, is he won an Oscar Yep. For best animated short film.

没错。这背后的故事特别酷。我觉得最激励人的是：一个在篮球领域登峰造极的人，退役后通常会选择做电视节目或代言人，

Yeah. So the story there is actually it's such a cool story. And to me, the inspiring thing is that there's a few inspiring angles. One is, you know, you're this person who's at the top of his craft in one craft, basketball. And the typical route for someone like that after they leave the game is to like go do TV or go be like a celebrity spokesperson, right?

去卖轮胎、烤架、汽车之类的对吧？但他在退役前一两年被问及未来规划时说'我想成为讲故事的人'，人们竟然嘲笑他，觉得'哦真可爱，等你认真起来要做什么呢？'

Go sell whatever, tires, grills, cars, anything, right? And when he was in the year before, year or two before he was getting ready to leave the game, people would ask him what he wanted to do next, he would say, I want to be a storyteller. And they would basically laugh at him. Like, they would laugh. They would say like, Oh, that's cute.

他们不知道的是，他早从高中时期就跟随一位优秀的英语老师，投入了大量时间提升写作能力。

Like, what are you gonna do when you get serious? Right? And so part of what they didn't know is how much time he had spent actually trying to become a better writer. This was a process that started when he was in high school. He had a really good English teacher.

她激发了他对讲故事的热情。于是他开始着手创作。比如很多人不知道，他其实是自己大部分广告的幕后枪手。所有那些‘真的吗？’球鞋广告？没错，他亲自撰写了所有自己的球鞋广告文案。

She got him inspired about storytelling. So he started just, like, working on things. So for example, people don't know, he was the ghostwriter behind most of his ads. All of his Really? Shoe ads Yeah, he wrote all of his own shoe ads.

他会先写好文案再与他人合作，但许多广告确实出自他本人手笔。他还尝试过说唱音乐，虽然成绩不佳，但至少充满热情。他坦言说唱教会了他如何思考文字的音乐性、韵律以及词语间的搭配艺术。

And he would do the copy and then work with other people, but he was actually the pen behind a lot of his ads. He wrote rap music. It didn't do well. But he was at least interested. And he actually talked about how doing rap taught him how to think about, like, musicality in words and harmony and the ways things fit together.

我也注意到一句话能蕴含多大的力量。没错。说唱真的会迫使你精炼语言。

I saw also how much you can pack a punch in a sentence. A sentence. Exactly. Rap, like, really force you to compress your language.

是的。这对他来说有点难为情，因为网上流传着他那些不太出色的说唱视频。但这极大提升了他的写作能力。所以当他准备退出篮坛时——通常做法是开记者会对吧？召集媒体、架设摄像机、邀请亲友，宣布退役消息——他却决定写一首诗。

Yeah. And for him, it was a little bit of a source of embarrassment because there was these, like, videos of him, like, rapping and stuff that were not the best, but it taught him a lot about writing. So when he is getting ready to leave the game of basketball, again, typical way you do this, you have a press conference, right? You, like, assemble the mat, you assemble the cameras, you assemble your whoever, your family, your friends, and you announce that you're leaving. He decided to write a poem.

他在《球员论坛》发表了题为《亲爱的篮球》的诗作，完全由他独立创作。据说是趁兴一气呵成，但显然这些情感已酝酿多年。他称之为给篮球的情书——将篮球拟人化，写道：我要给你写封信，篮球。因此命名为《亲爱的篮球》。

So he wrote a poem called Dear Basketball that was published on Players' Tribune, and it was entirely his work. He wrote it, I think, in like one sitting or something, but it had taken a lot of time, obviously, to nurture these thoughts. And he called it a love letter to the game. So the idea was that he was gonna write a letter to the game of, he was anthropomorphizing basketball and saying, I'm gonna write a letter to you, basketball. So that's why it was called Dear Basketball.

诗作完成后，典型的科比式思维开始活跃：这样作品还能如何延伸？这产生了空前影响——没有顶级运动员这样做过。当时他已联系了交响乐大师约翰·威廉姆斯（《星球大战》等近二三十年重要电影配乐作者）和皮克斯动画师格兰·基恩（以《小美人鱼》等经典作品闻名）。

He writes it, and then this is sort of vintage Kobe, he starts to think about what else you could do with something like that because it made a real impact. Nobody had ever this before. I mean, this this is not the typical behavior of any elite athlete. Right? He he had been in touch with John Williams of kind of symphonic fame, Star Wars, all the you know, he's done every musical score that's important for the last, whatever, twenty five, thirty years, And Glen Keane, who was a Pixar animator who was most famous for, I think, doing Little Mermaid or something.

基恩参与过多部杰出皮克斯电影。科比向他们提出将诗歌改编成动画短片的构想，并阐述道：我想把它做成电影，需要手绘动画形式。

He had done, like, some like, series of of different Pixar films that have been amazing. He'd been in touch with them, and he basically had this idea for turning the poem into an animated short. And so he went to them with the idea and said, listen, I have this concept. I wanna turn this into a film. I think it could be a short film, but I think it needs hand drawn animation.

接着他直接致电约翰·威廉姆斯询问：愿意为此片配乐吗？当时约翰正在忙《星球大战》，科比爽快表示可以等待。

And then he essentially just like picked up the phone, talked to John Williams and said, would you be willing to do this? And and John the score. For the score, for the music. And John was like, well, I'm in the middle of Star Wars right now, so can you wait a little bit? Then and like Kobe's response was like, yeah, could wait a little bit.

于是这个团队组建起来。没人预料到这部短片会如何呈现，连科比自己也没把握。结果它成为了奇迹。

Right? And so he puts this team together, and they they do this short film. No one knows how it's gonna do. He doesn't know how it's gonna do. And then it's it's a marvel.

这是部震撼人心的杰作，制作精良至极。他先是获得奥斯卡提名，最终成功斩获小金人，成就了这部非凡的电影。

Like, it's a triumph. It's beautiful, and it's beautifully done. And he is a, you know, Academy Award finalist. And then they announce his name, and he's won. And it's this incredible movie.

他是首位获得奥斯卡奖的运动员，这是他一路创作、打磨的心血结晶。我记得他和格伦·基恩共同分享了那座奥斯卡奖，因为显然格伦·基恩是负责动画制作的艺术家。但这实在太不可思议了。对我而言，这本质上是一个关于将已知事物从一种形式（写作）转化为另一种形式的绝妙故事。这是一重启发。另一重则是，作为篮球运动员，你可以想象他在从事这类创作时周围人投来的异样眼光。

He was the first athlete to ever win an Academy Award, and it was something that he wrote and created and crafted along the way, and he I think he and Glenn Keane shared the Oscar for it because, obviously, Glenn Keane's animator that did the work. But it's it's incredible. I I for me, it's it's it's such an amazing story about basically just taking something that you know, taking something from one format, writing, and turning it into another. That's one piece of inspiration. The other is, as a basketball player, you could imagine, like, the looks that he's getting when he's working on something like this.

想象一下，当你向最亲密的朋友或经纪人提议联系格伦·基恩合作动画短片时，人们的反应大概是：'老兄，去代言佳得乐赚个十亿不好吗？'

Like, imagine talking to your, like, closest friends or your agent about calling Glenn Keene to, like, ask him to animate a short film with you. Like, people would be like, dude, just go sell Gatorade and make, a billion dollars. Right?

我有个独特优势——你曾分享过他的笔记给我。其中有段写道：'我和队友们在客场时，他们总说'嘿，一起出去嗨吧'，而我会回答'不去了，我要写作'。

I had the very distinct advantage of you sent me some of your notes, I had And to read all these things there's a line where he says, You know, I'm out. I'm on the road with my team members. And they're like, Hey, why don't you come out with us? He's like, I'm not going to go out. I got to work on my writing.

我还要研读约瑟夫·坎贝尔的著作。'周围人都觉得'兄弟你疯了吧？'另一部分...

I got to study Joseph Campbell. And people are just like, Dude, what are you doing? The other part of

真正激励我的是疫情期间的亲身经历。当时我在写书，总忍不住想：'如果是科比在写这本书，他的努力程度绝对是我的五倍。'他树立了工作态度的标杆——将篮球训练的纪律性完全移植到写作中。这种跨界坚持令我震撼，堪称最鼓舞人心的典范。

it that's inspiring to me was when I was in the middle of the pandemic, I was working on a book. And I just remember thinking, if Kobe Bryant was working on this book, he would be working like five times harder. Like, actually set a standard for how someone should work, because what he did was he just took the discipline that he had for basketball and applied it to writing. And that's unbelievable to me. It is the most inspiring thing to think about.

他完全沿用了球员时期的作息。退役后有人问他每日安排时，他说：'和从前一样——早起训练，送孩子上学，去办公室写作八九个小时，然后回家。'多少运动员退役后陷入迷茫，但他二十年如一日保持着职业运动员的精准作息。

He just took his schedule. He described his schedule at one point, and somebody asked him after he retired, What do you do every day? And there were all these athletes that go through intense depression, they know what to do, where to go, they've had to schedule a routinized life for twenty years or ten years or He five said, I get up, I drop. He's like, It's the same schedule. I get up, I work out, I drop my kids off at school.

这对我触动极深：他并非天生奇才，也不是十二岁就立志成为作家。人们总认为才华需要天赋，而他只是数十年如一日地刻苦钻研——在成为史上最伟大篮球运动员的同时。既然他能做到，我当然也该更努力地写作。

I go to the office, and I write for eight or nine hours. Right? And he goes, and then I come home. And it was the same and it was the same schedule that he has an had as an athlete. And so it was super inspiring to me because I was like, well, this isn't somebody that was born with genius or became a writer when they were 12.

所有人都认定他是天才，但他只是年复一年地坚持练习，在成为史上最伟大篮球运动员之一的同时。如果他能做到，我当然也能更努力地写书，对吧？

Like, Everybody identified that they were a talent. He just worked at it and worked at it and worked at it and worked at it over decades while becoming one of the best basketball players of all time. If he can do that, if he can do that, I can definitely get up and work a little bit harder on my books, right?

最让我震撼的是他被问及'写作最难的是什么？篮球能给你而写作不能的又是什么？'他回答是即时反馈和能量共鸣——投篮命中时全场沸腾，而写作时你永远看不到读者初次阅读时的表情。

The thing that struck me was he was asked what is hard about writing. Like, what do you get out of basketball that you don't get in writing? And he said it's the feedback, the energy. You know, in basketball, if you make a shot, the crowd goes wild, whatever it is. And he said, when you write, part of the thing that you miss is the look on someone's face when they read it for the first time.

他说：'多希望能坐在车里，亲眼看着孩子们第一次观看我制作的电影。'不能实现这个愿望让他非常沮丧。

He was like, I wish I could just be in the car with the kids when they watch a movie that I make for the first time. And it bummed him out that he couldn't couldn't really do that.

确实。有些时刻他确实得到了反馈，你能明显看出这些反馈对他的影响。事实上，我记得有人曾问过他一个问题，他的回答是他热爱讲故事就像热爱篮球一样。对吧？那其实是与他打篮球同等强烈的热情。

Yeah. There were some moments where he did get feedback, and it you could just tell what it did for him. Like, the the truth is that I actually think someone said someone asked him once, and I think he answered that he loved storytelling just as much as he loved basketball. Right? That actually it was a passion with equal force.

我当时就想，天啊，这太不可思议了。作为一个职业球员，能用这样的语言表达——他使用的措辞是大多数职业球员谈论自己感兴趣事物时不会用的。后来我找到一段精彩采访，对方直接问他：‘科比，你有兴趣来做电视节目吗？’

And I just remember thinking like, my god. Like, that's incredible. Like, you you know, to to be able to even speak in those terms as a pro player, like, was he was using the language that most pro players use when they talk about something they're interested in. Right? There's this great interview I found where the the the person actually asks him, so Kobe, would you want to come do TV?

他显得很不自在，最后开了个玩笑说：‘如果给我60%版税或收入分成我就签合同。’但一开始他就明确拒绝：‘那不是我要做的，那是他们的工作方式，对吧？’

I mean, you could be like Charles Barkley. And he actually gets almost uncomfortable. Like, he cracks a joke at the end, says, I'll do the contract if you give me 60 percent of the royalties or revenue or whatever. But at the beginning, he's like, no, that's not what I'm going to do. He's like, that's what they do, right?

他说：‘我要去当个讲故事的人，去世界各地寻找故事，然后精心打磨并发布。’他对叙事的热爱如此强烈，以至于当他把书稿交给出版社时，对方只想按名人出书的套路操作。结果他拒绝了多家出版社邀约，自己创立了出版公司。

I'm I'm going to go become a storyteller, and I'm going to go find stories around the world and then craft them and work on them and release them. He actually was so passionate about storytelling that when he took his book ideas to publishers, what they would do is they would sort of put him in the cookie cutter like, well, you're a successful celebrity or athlete. You have a big following, here's how we do the book. And he actually rejected, like, book deals. He decided to create his own publishing company.

为什么？因为那些出版社不愿为他想要的图书质量投入。举个例子：在某次采访中（顺便说，我花了三年半到四年时间研究科比所有采访），他提到曾花两周时间与团队重新设计某本书的条形码——就为了让条形码与书籍背景更和谐融合。没有出版社会为条形码耗费这么多资源。

What? Because they weren't going to invest in the quality of the books that he wanted to do. So here's an example. He talks in this one interview, and by the way, this is like so just to to give people a window into this, this is like I'm on year three and a half or four of diving into every Kobe interview there is. So these are not the interviews that are like the famous press conference interviews after the, like, 81 game.

我看的那些冷门采访，比如中国电视台12分钟只有几千播放量的。但发现他确实为追求完美做到这种程度——当出版社给出的方案达不到他的质量要求时，他就自己创立出版公司来做出更好的书。这太令人震撼了。

I'm watching the ones that he did on like Chinese television that are twelve minutes that have like a thousand YouTube views, right? But what I found was that he actually spent two weeks with his team re architecting the barcode on one of his books because he wanted the barcode to more fluidly and elegantly blend into the backdrop of the book, and no publisher was gonna spend two weeks and huge amounts of resources to re architect a barcode. And so there was, at every part of it, was like, Well, what's the highest quality thing we could do? Publishers were giving him insufficient answers, so he designed his own publishing company so the books could be better. And it's incredible.

想想看：当大型出版社都说‘科比我们愿意合作’时，他却认为‘你们达不到我的标准’。这种对自我的坚持令人惊叹——这才是真正热爱技艺的表现。

I mean, it's like an incredible level of commitment at betting on yourself when you have big publishing houses saying, yeah, you're Kobe Bryant. We will work with you. And he's like, You're not going to do it to my level. Like, it blew my mind. I mean, that is, like, true love of craft right there.

他在创作每个阶段都强调大纲的重要性，痴迷于找到最精准的用词，反复打磨句子段落结构，确保内容对读者有价值。作为女儿们的父亲，他总说体育界缺少以女性为主角的奇幻小说——这正是他想填补的空白：‘我要用女性主角来激励她们’。

And he even talked you know, at every stage of the craft, talked about the importance of outlining, how obsessed he was with getting the perfect word on the page, like really obsessing over sentences and paragraphs and structure, making sure that things were relevant to readers. You know, he had daughters, so he talked a lot about how sports heroes, like he had never seen a sports fantasy novel. That was what he wanted to do. And he was like, Yeah, but it has like to female leads because I'm the daughter of all girls. Like, you know, I've got to find a way to inspire them.

他在学习叙事技艺的同时重塑着规则，这点令我尤为敬佩。这就是他不为人知的一面：对你我这样的人而言，这种对待技艺的态度关乎纪律、坚持，以及纯粹的热爱——他爱的正是创作本身。

And so he reinventing the craft even as he was learning it, which I also really respected and admired. And so that's kind of this hidden part of his life that, to you and I, to people like you and I, it's an approach to craft that is about discipline and about sticktuitiveness and just about, like, actually loving the thing itself. He loved the thing itself.

没错。《亲爱的篮球》也是，很多人说篮球题材太小众，玩的人不多肯定行不通。但结果呢？虽然记不清细节，最后人们发现：大家虽不都打篮球，但都能理解那种对某件事物痴迷的感觉。

Yep. The other thing that stuck out with Dear Basketball is a lot of people said it's not going to work, basketball's too niche. You know, there's not a lot of people who play the game. It's just not going be enough man. And what ended up happening, and I forget the exact details, but what happened was they said no, a lot of people can relate to your obsession with basketball, and they'll be obsessed with something like that in their life.

科比，当我阅读你的笔记时，发现你经常思考正在经历的情绪内省。就像，你知道，人们各不相同。但如果你去意大利，去中国，人类的情感——爱、失去、悲伤、梦想、希望，无论是什么，它们都是相通的。如果你能真正进行内省，触及情感的核心，那么无论你创造的东西多么小众，无论是篮球、绘画还是其他，它都会引发共鸣，因为这些核心情感是如此永恒。所以当我翻阅你的笔记时，感觉就像，哇，

And Kobe, when I was reading your notes, I saw that Kobe would think a lot about the introspection of the emotions that you're going through. It's like, you know, people are different. But if you go to Italy, if you go to China, human emotions love, loss, grief, dreams, hopes, whatever it is they're the same. And if you can really do the introspection and get to the core of your emotion, then whatever it is, no matter how niche that thing you produce is, whether it's basketball or painting or whatever, it's really going to resonate because those core emotions are so timeless. And so as I was looking at your notes, was like, Woah,

他思考的层次竟然这么深。是的。关键是，这就像任何事情一样。他的人生、部分研究以及接触过的人让我震撼的是，他会寻找那些与你刚才描述的感受完全相同的人。所以他去找乔治·R·R·马丁，

he is thinking at that level. Yep. Well, and the thing is that it's like anything. What struck me about his life and some of his research and some of the people that he was in touch with is that he would look for people who felt that exact same feeling you just described. So he went to George R.

因为乔治·R·R·马丁对写作的感受与科比对篮球的感受如出一辙。他会与乔尼·艾维交流，因为乔尼·艾维对产品设计的执着与科比对篮球的执着一样。

R. Martin because George R. R. Martin feels the same way about his work that Kobe felt about basketball. He would talk to Johnny Ive because Johnny Ive felt the same way about product design that Kobe felt about basketball.

他寻找的是各个领域的杰出人物，并非因为他们成功或出名，而是因为他们痴迷于每个细节，痴迷于做到完美。他曾在播客里长篇大论地谈论泰勒·斯威夫特。你可能会想，好吧，老父亲视角，我去过两次周边店，我是公开的泰勒粉丝，超级‘霉粉’，部分原因是我有个女儿，这成了我们重要的情感纽带，但我也认为她棒极了，对吧？你会以为他也会这么说。

He would look for like these luminaries in every field, not because they were successful or famous, but because they were so obsessed with every detail, so obsessed at getting it right. He actually did this long riff on a podcast where he was talking about Taylor Swift. And you would think like, okay, girl, dad, look, I've been to the Arrow store twice. I'm an avowed Taylor Swift fan, huge Swiftie, in part because I have a daughter and it was a huge bonding thing for us, but also I think she's incredible, right? And you'd expect him to kind of say the same thing.

但他的观点截然不同。他说，我想了解她不仅因为我和女儿都喜欢她的音乐，更因为我想弄明白一个人如何能像她那样长期保持技艺的巅峰状态。

What he said was really different. He said, the reason that I wanted to get to know her is not just because my daughters enjoy the music and I enjoy the music. The reason is because it is I wanted to understand how someone could be at that level of their craft for as long as she has been at that

技艺的巅峰境界。

level of the craft.

所以他思考的是持久性。他会去寻找这些人，我想他的发现与你我相同：根本上必须有一种源于热爱的冲动。必须是关于爱，因为其他一切最终都会崩塌，对吧？野心这种燃料短期内燃烧纯净，但终究会变浑浊。复仇可能根本烧不干净，对吧？

So he was thinking about longevity. He would go and find these people, and I think what he found is probably what you and I have found, which is at base, there has to be an impulse that's love. It has to be about love because everything else actually falls apart, right? Ambition, a fuel that burns relatively clean for a while, and then it cannot burn so clean. Revenge probably doesn't burn very clean, right?

所以我认为你能找到所需的燃料——当然，伟大的作品也常源自那些冲动——但真正的伟业必须源于热爱。这是唯一永恒的驱动力。所以他去...对了，我记得读过他确实会找完全不相干领域的人拜师学习。他说自己阅遍、看尽李小龙的所有作品，

So I think you can find the fuel that you need, and granted, by the way, great writing has often come out of those impulses too, but the true greats, I think, it has to come from love. It's the only sustaining force there is. So he would go and he would yeah. I remember reading that he, like, he actually would go and find somebody in a totally unrelated field and just go to school on them. He said that he read, watched, or saw everything that Bruce Lee had ever done.

李小龙说过的每个字、每个音节。后来这种痴迷升级了，他决定研习截拳道——李小龙真正推向主流的武术——只为更深入理解他的思维，懂吗？我觉得他就像在寻找其他同样炽烈热爱的人。科比在寻找像他热爱篮球那样热爱某件事的人。

Every single word, syllable uttered by Bruce Lee. And then the obsession went to the next level. He decided to study Jeet Kune Do, the martial art that Bruce Lee, like, really, you know, made a mainstream phenomenon, he decided to study it so he could get inside his head even more, right? And so I think of this as like somebody who was looking for other people who love that fiercely. Like, Kobe was on a search for people who love something as much as he loved basketball.

我看过一段采访，他描述自己痴迷于篮球的气味。他爱到会去闻篮球，爱听篮球的声音，甚至能通过声音辨别球撞击的是哪种地板——因为他痴迷地研究过这些声响。这种事，我觉得绝不是‘我必须场均35分’能驱动的。当然有成就、野心和竞争的成分，但他真正热爱这项运动，然后去寻找像他这样深爱某件事的人。

He describes in one of the interviews I watched that he was obsessed with the smell of the basketball. He loved it so much he would smell basketballs because he loved it. He loved the sound of a basketball and he knew, he could tell by the sound what kind of floor it was hitting, right, because he had just like obsessed over the sounds, right? That kind of thing, I think, does not come from, I really need to make sure I hit 35 points a game, right? Like, there's a part of it that is achievement and ambition and competition, but he truly loved the game, and then he went looking for people who just, like, loved anything as much as he loved the game.

他有一句让我始终难忘的话，其实这句话总让我想起你，因为我们的友谊，我的友谊正是源于这种痴迷，对吧？没错。我们的相遇绝非偶然。我们对许多相同事物都怀有狂热。是的。

He had this great line that I always think about actually, it always makes me think about you, because this is like, your friendship, my friendship was born of this kind of obsession, right? Yeah. There's no accident that we connected. We're obsessed with many of the same things. Yep.

他说过这么一句话。有人问他，科比，你有朋友吗？他停顿了一下。那是GQ杂志的采访，他大致是这么回答的。他说，其实没有。

He has this line. Somebody asked him, Kobe, do you have friends? And he pauses. And it was in an interview in GQ, and it roughly says, he roughly answers the question. He says, Not really.

他说，我拥有的是同为痴迷者的伙伴。他说，所以我庆幸自己住在洛杉矶，因为这里有和我一样热爱自己事业的人。他接着说，我是那种会记得你生日或出席每个活动的朋友吗？不是。但当我们相聚时，我们可以完全沉浸在我们的领域中，真正从彼此的技艺中学习，对吧？

He said, What I have are fellow obsessives. He says, So I'm grateful that I live in LA because in LA there are people who love what they do as much as I love what I do. And he goes on and he says, Am I the friend who's always going to remember your birthday or like be at every event? No. But I am the person that when I get together with you, we can go full nerd on our thing and really learn from each other's craft, right?

我记得当时在想，我最深厚的友谊往往是与见面最少的人，但当我们在一起时，那种能量是无与伦比的，对吧？而这正是他本质的体现。也是你我研究和敬仰的那些人的核心特质。他们在他人身上寻找这种特质，然后全力以赴去追寻。

And I remember thinking like, my best friendships are often the people I see the least, but when we're together, there's an energy that you can't match, right? And that is, to me, the sort of essence of who he was. It's the essence of the people that you and I study and admire. They look for that in other people, and then they go and just like chase it down.

我想谈谈你的痴迷，你的技艺，因为你基本上是我个人认识的最痴迷的作家之一。我能想到的唯一可能比你更痴迷的人就是罗伯特·卡洛，

I want to talk about your obsession, your craft, because you are basically the most you're one of the most obsessed writers that I know personally. The only person I can think think who's maybe more obsessive than you is Robert Caro,

这就好比，如果你处于

which is like, if you're in

那个级别，说明你做对了某些事。所以不如聊聊，比如随便一个星期二。你一天的生活是怎样的，然后我们再展开。

that league, you're doing something right. So wanna just talk about, like, any given Tuesday. Like, what is a day in the life of you, and then we'll go from there.

好的。我可以告诉你，甚至随便哪一天，比如今天这个星期三？我起床后，几乎每天都以同样的方式开始，就是直接投入写作项目。没有拖沓，没有废话。起床，开灯，立刻投入工作。

Yeah. I can I mean, I can tell you even any given, you know, day to day, like, at any given Wednesday today? I get up, and I I start almost every day the same way, which is I go straight into the writing project. There's no no muss, no fuss. I get up, lights on, dive right into the work.

这么做有几个原因。一是这个系统多年来对我一直很有效。对吧？它就是管用。另一个原因是凌晨四点没人会打扰你。

There are a few reasons for this. One is it's a system that at this point has worked for me over many, many years. Right? Like, it just works. The other is there's no one bothering you at 04:00 in the morning.

对吧？说实话，凌晨四点。没错。四点。因为这个世界就像是个阻止写作发生的阴谋。

Right? Like, honestly Group at 4AM. Yeah. 4AM. Because the thing is is that the world like, the world is a conspiracy designed to prevent writing from happening.

没错。真的，这世界很大程度上就是设计来扰乱我的思绪、时间和精力的。明白吗？很多时候，我就像在与全世界对抗，只为守护每天三四个小时能安心写作的时间。

Right. Right. Like, actually, like, much of the world is designed to just screw with my my head, my time, my energy. Right? It's like, literally, I see myself in a contest against the world a lot of the time to just protect and preserve three to four hours a day where I can write.

人们各有各的应对方式。有些人需要躲进林间小屋——我没这种奢侈。我有女儿，她在布鲁克林上学。

And people get this all different ways. There are some people that need to move to a cabin in the woods. I don't have that luxury. I have a daughter. She goes to school in Brooklyn.

她过着正常生活。所以我要实现自己非常规的生活部分，就只能从凌晨四点工作到大约八九点。

She lives a normal life. So for me to live the abnormal part of my life, it has to happen from basically four a. M. To around, let's say, eight or nine a. M.

每天如此。这几个小时里，我只专注于手头最重要的写作项目。不处理邮件，不做行政杂务，不管TDM，也不操心厨房清洁——直接进入创作状态。

Every day. And during those hours, I'm working on whatever the most important writing project is that I'm working on. It is not email. It is not, like, the sort of administrative stuff, the TDM, making sure the kitchen's clean, all of that. I just go straight in.

老兄，我打算

Dude, I'm gonna

每天早上九点才开始工作，

be starting my days at nine in the morning,

昏昏沉沉地靠第一杯浓缩咖啡提神。而想到吉米已经完成当天所有写作时——你知道这多让人羞愧吗？倒不是因为早起本身（毕竟每个人高效时段不同），重点不在于此，这也不是什么值得炫耀的苦修勋章。

groggy as hell, triggered by first espresso of the day, diving into work. And I would start thinking, Jimmy has already done all of his writing for the day. Do you know how humiliating that is? It's not humiliating because your day might people people can find that time whenever they find that time. The point is the point is not the early rising, because it's not like some weird aggro, you know, badge of pride thing.

本质很简单：写作对我本就不易，要写好更需要无人打扰的时段——没有外界干扰，没有邮件拉扯。而凌晨四点到八九点（有时到十点）之所以理想，正因为没人会在这时候找我。

It's really basic. It's actually super basic in a way, which is, like, writing for me is a tough thing to do, and in order to do it well, I need to have time where other people don't bother me, where the world doesn't interfere, where I don't feel the pull of the inbox. And the truth is the hours of four to eight a. Or four to nine a. M.

即便陪女儿时，我也能挤出四点至七点写作，之后陪她就不会有负罪感——不用拆东墙补西墙。关键是要坚决守护这些时间。我认识的许多创意工作者都不得不这样调整作息，因为过了某个点（至少对我来说）大脑就罢工了。四点起床的深层意义就在于此。

Or sometimes four to ten are ideal because nobody is bothering me. And because, like, even when I'm with my daughter, I can eke out four to, let's say, seven when she wakes up, and then I get time with her where I don't feel like I'm, like, in parent guilt mode, right? You're not robbing Peter to pay Paul, right? But the point is that those hours are really protected, and I would say that actually a lot of the creatives I know, they have to shift their schedules this way because after a certain hour, at least for me, it just doesn't nothing functions anymore. I need to turn it off, but that's, like, a big part of the 4AM thing.

另一点是：如果优先完成写作且每周坚持七天，书就绝对能写完。质量另当别论，但只要每天四点至九点雷打不动处理最重要的事，就绝不会有烂尾的可能。

The other piece of it is if I get that work done first and I do it seven days a week, there is no possibility that a book won't get done. I don't know if the book will be good, right? That's a separate conversation. But there's no chance that something doesn't get done if seven days a week you're doing the most important thing from four a. To nine a.

M，对吧？这真的就是数学问题。如果你每天投入三到五小时做一件事，你就能完成它，然后继续过你的一天。只需要把足够多这样的日子堆叠起来。这再次说明，不是什么重大突破性的见解。

M, right? It's really, like, just math. Like if you have three to five hours a day that you devote to a thing, you're just gonna finish it, and then you can go on about the rest of your day. And so you just stack enough of those days together. This isn't, again, any kind of big breakthrough insight.

这只是对我有效的流程。还有一点，我尝试把最好的精力留给最重要的事，对我来说，最好的精力就是一天最初的几小时。如果我先把其他工作做完，再去写书，那就像给它加了普通燃料而非优质燃料，懂吗？效果会大打折扣。

It's just the process that works for me. There's one other thing, which is I try to give my best mental energy to the thing that's most important, and for me, my best mental energy is like the first hours of the day. If I front loaded, let's say, other work, and then I went to the books later, I'd kind of be giving it like I'd be giving it like regular fuel instead of premium. Right? Like, it wouldn't be the premium fuel.

优质燃料要留给早晨，留给写书项目。比如今早，我们要录音，我四点就起床了，一直在忙科比的事。我知道。

The premium fuel is reserved for the morning, and that's reserved for whatever the book project is. So for example, this morning, you and I are gonna record. I've been up since four. I was working on Kobe this morning. I know.

你今早5:16发消息说准备好了。我当时已经在处理科比的事了。这部分还有一点——杰瑞·宋飞说过'别断链'，就像他每天打卡的日历。我觉得赛斯...你

You texted me at 05:16 this morning, like, yeah, I'm ready to go. Yeah. And I I was up working on Kobe. The there's also a part of this you know, Jerry Seinfeld talks about not breaking the chain, like his calendar of hitting every day. I do think Seth Have you

见过他在纽约那张全是黄色法律便签纸的照片吗？没有。他总是用黄色便签纸写作。纽约整条街的水泥地上都铺满了他职业生涯中写过的黄便签。哇。

ever seen the photo of him in New York with all the yellow legal pads? No. He would always write on a yellow legal pad. And there's an entire street in New York, and the whole cement is just covered with yellow legal pads that he had written on over the course of his career. Wow.

说到创作留下的痕迹，那种痴迷，那种奉献精神，那张照片就是明证。

And when you talk about, like, the creative residue that comes, the obsession, the level of dedication, that photo.

没错。对我来说关键是一周七天都做，而不是五天。我前两周度假时有这种感觉——虽然很开心，但没时间按常规写书，结果整天都觉得不对劲，身体都能感知到。

Yeah. And and and the truth is that that's like a big for me, a big part of it is if I do it seven days a week as opposed to five, you just here here's here's the feeling. Alright. So I had this feeling like a a week or two ago. I was on vacation.

我很高兴去度假，但当时没条件按计划写书。虽然玩得开心，但我能感觉到身体里的化学反应不对——就像少了什么。立刻意识到：今天感觉异常。

I was happy to be there. But I did not have the time or the kind of structure to do book work at that moment. And again, was happy to be there. But I realized I felt off. Like, throughout the day, I actually like I could feel it in my body chemistry.

现在这已成习惯，不做就能察觉。就像呼吸一样真切。而美妙之处在于，当这成为默认状态，就不再是工作了。不会早上哀叹'天啊又要写科比'。

I was like, I didn't do the thing. And I knew right away. I was like, something feels off. Like, it does not feel like a normal day. And so I can, at this point, it's become such a habit that I can feel it when I don't do it.

这就像呼吸般自然。当它成为本能，就不再是苦差。我不会醒来想着'唉，又得搞科比了'。

It's like breathing. Like, it's like, I can really feel it. And the nice thing is when that becomes your default, this isn't work anymore, Right? It's not work. I don't wake up and I'm like, Oh, God, gotta Gotta work on Kobe again.

天啊。我该怎么办？这又不是盐矿苦役。我不是要提着午餐盒去不想去的地方。我每天醒来都在做世界上最热爱的事。

Geez. Like, what am I gonna do? It's not the salt mines. I'm not like packing a lunch pail and going to someplace I don't want to go. I'm waking up every day and doing the thing that I'm most passionate in the world about.

因为已经太习惯这种生活，我格外守护这段时光。所以睡得特别早。很多人以为写作生涯就是参加曼哈顿的鸡尾酒会之类的。但据我所知，大多数作家的生活枯燥得多——早睡早起，完成工作。

And because I've just gotten so accustomed to doing it, I protect that time. So I go to bed super early. Like, like, you know, don't it's like these there's a lot of people think that the writing life is like this life of like fancy cocktail parties in Manhattan or whatever. And it's really, like, a lot of the writers I know, it's much more boring. You go to bed early, you wake up early, you get your work done.

那才是我一天中最兴奋的时刻。

And that is the most exciting time there is in the day for me.

我想谈的另一件事是你写作题材的惊人多样性。虽然要讨论你现在的项目，但你写过政治演讲稿、专栏评论、代笔作品、书籍，甚至整本关于布鲁克林旋转木马的书——如此多不同类型的写作。

The other thing I want to talk about is the sheer diversity of writing that you've done. I want to talk about the stuff that you're working on now, but you've done political speech writing, you've done op eds, you've done ghost writing, you've done books, you've done a whole book about a carousel in Brooklyn. So many different kinds of writing.

对。用丘吉尔的话说就是'这布丁没有主题'——我有时也这么看自己。但这有几个原因。

Right. Right. The less charitable way of doing that would be the Winston Churchill line, he was describing something he was criticizing, was like, this pudding has no theme. It's how I feel about myself sometimes. But there's a few reasons for that.

一是写作生涯很少单线发展。不了解这行业的人很难想象。广义的写作包含广告文案、小说创作等等，你总要摸索出路。

One is careers in writing are rarely like a single track thing. It's hard if you don't know what this industry is all about. Writing broadly defined can mean anything, right? It can mean copywriting for ads, it can mean doing novels. And so you sort of find your way, right?

我在不同领域都摸索过——演讲稿、专栏、代笔、随笔，最后是书籍。有时纯粹是有话要说，找到合适载体就表达；有时是工作报酬让我精进技艺。把各类写作视为核心能力的交叉训练很有价值，就像足球运动员练瑜伽。

And I kind of found my way in different domains, speech writing, op ed writing, ghost writing, like all sorts of different things, essay writing, and then books. And for me, often it was just I had something that I wanted to say and there was a format that was gonna work well for it, so I said it. Or it was just like it was work, it was like I was being paid to do it, and you just get better. I would say that there's a lot of value in thinking of different types of writing as cross training for your core habit. So if we go back to an analogy you and I have used before about training like an athlete, like if you're a soccer player, you might do yoga, right?

作为书籍作者也写专栏，专栏让我成为更好的书作者，反之亦然。这就是交叉训练。

I'm a book writer who also writes op eds. Op eds help me become a better book writer. And by the way, writing books helps me become a better op ed writer. It's cross training. It is the way I think about it.

我在锻炼不同肌肉。专栏通常700字，要用极简篇幅表达重点，这种凝练能力在其他写作中同样重要。

I'm stretching different muscles. Op eds are typically 700 words. That is not a lot to make an important point. And so you have to really compress. Where else does word economy help?

所有写作都需惜字如金。有人说社交媒体毁了写作，我却认为推特培养了一代作家——当初180字符限制（后来240，现在稍长）迫使人们精简表达。这种训练正是通过写专栏获得的。

Oh, in every other kind of writing you do. Literally every other kind of writing, right? Like, people are like, Oh, social media is terrible for writing. And I'm like, Actually, I think Twitter improved a whole generation of writers because it forced them into, at that time, 180 characters, then two forty, and now a little longer, right? But word economy is important in any format, and I learned it through op ed writing.

我学会了如何从句子中提取词汇，重新组织使它们更简洁。这项技能来自完全不同的形式，所以我喜欢多样化的形式。我认识一些小说家、非虚构作家，他们一次只能专注于一个项目。我有个核心项目，但我确实很喜欢让大脑切换到不同的写作模式，之后再回到核心项目上。

Learned I how to take words out of sentences, rearrange things so they're a little shorter. That skill came through a totally different format, so I like having different formats. I think there are some novelists and other people I know and nonfiction writers where the only thing they can work on is one project at a time. I one core project, but I actually really like having to, like, get my brain into a different mode of writing and then come back to my core project after.

谈谈研究吧。研究如何融入这个过程？因为每当我感觉需要做研究时，常把它当作拖延的借口。比如‘得先做研究’，结果就陷入了信息迷宫。

Tell me about research. How does research factor into all this? Because whenever I feel like I need to do research, I often use it as excuse for procrastination. Oh, you know, got to do research. And then you kind of end up in rabbit holes.

另一个发现是——这很具体——研究时我有时会过度关注刚学到的东西。这如何影响你的写作流程？你是早上做研究还是下午？

And then the other thing I find, that's a very specific thing, but I find that I sometimes over index on the things that I just learned when I'm doing research. And how does that factor into your writing process? Is that something that you do in the morning, or is that like afternoon work?

好问题。这个习惯是逐渐形成的，因为我发现——对我和很多人来说——研究常是逃避写作的借口。

Yeah. This is a great question. And it's evolved over time because what I have discovered is that for myself, and I think for a decent number of people, research is an excuse not to write.

没错，正是这样。

Yeah. Right? Exactly.

老实说，除了你，没人比我更沉迷维基百科的链接迷宫了。我能花几小时研究随机话题，但这常是搁置正事的借口。后来我意识到这点。

It basically like, look, nobody, nobody, maybe except you, loves a Wikipedia rabbit hole more than I do, right? Like, no, like, it's like, I just love them, right? And it's like, I could spend hours just like researching random things, right? But it's often an excuse for putting aside the work that I actually need to do. So, over time, I realized this about myself.

我对自己说：‘兄弟，你只是用研究来逃避提笔时的焦虑——怕写得糟糕丢脸。你对项目没信心，就用研究伪装成在工作。’于是我决定把研究系统化：早晨安排得非常具体。我发现如果一睁眼就打开空白页直接写，会吓破胆。

I was like, Look, like, bro, you're just using your research time as a way of getting out of the anxious feeling that you feel when you have to put pen to paper and actually say stuff because it might embarrass you because it's said badly, right? You've got some anxiety around this project and you don't think it's going work, so what are you going to do? You're going to convince yourself you're doing fake work by doing research, So what I decided to do was I was like, Well, I just need to, like, build this into the system. So what I typically do is I structure my morning to get really, really tactical and really specific. So I have I I kind of realized, I was like, look, if you if you wake up, fire up an open page, and just start to write, you're gonna be scared out of your wits.

至少对我来说，需要预热时间。所以我设置了‘入口坡道’：比如正在写的书对应的模范书籍——我试图效仿那些崇拜的作者。

It's really hard, it's hard to, at least for me, have get the engine warm a little bit. So I have, what I like to think of is on ramps. So one of my on ramps is whatever the model book is for a book I'm writing, like a book I really admire where I'm trying to basically do whatever that author is doing.

等等，这很有趣。你会有模范书籍？

Wait, that's an interesting thing. So that's you have model books.

没错。简短插一句——我听过最好建议是：找本像你构思的石膏模型般的书，然后痴迷地研究它。

I have model books. All right. Quick digression, then we'll get back to the The digression. I've heard of that. One of the best pieces of advice I got was just to take a book that basically is like the cast, like the plaster cast for your idea, and study it obsessively.

我是说真正痴迷般地。对创始人来说，布拉德·斯通的《万物商店》就是这样的书，我记得之前跟你提过。那本书我读了不下20遍。就像我写某本书时，会把模板书反复读几十遍。我的方法之一是每天凌晨4点先花10到15分钟读模板书。

And I mean really obsessively. So for the founders, it was The Everything Store by Brad Stone, which I think I've talked to you about before. I read that book over 20 times. Like, I will read the model book for a particular book I'm writing dozens of times if need be. Part of how I do that is I spend the first ten or fifteen minutes of that time at 4AM reading the model book.

因为这有点像欺骗我的大脑：'吉米，你现在没在干活，就是在读书而已。你最爱读书了，多有意思啊。就当是上个坡道吧'。

Because what it does is it sort of like tricks my brain into thinking like, oh, oh, you're not doing anything right now. All you're doing is reading, Jimmy. You love reading. This is going be so much fun. Let's just get on this on ramp, right?

而这个坡道就是阅读。比如埃里克听了一定高兴——那本书实在太棒了——《纳瓦尔宝典》我已经完整读了九遍。边读边做笔记，拆解他某些章节的写法，分析排版为什么有效，为什么这句比那句长。

And the on ramp is reading. So for example, I think and Eric will be delighted to hear this because the book is phenomenal, but I've read The Almanac of Naval Ravikant probably nine times already, right? All the way through. And I'm taking notes and I'm dissecting things and I'm seeing how he made certain sections work and seeing why certain formatting things work and why other things didn't work. Why is this sentence longer than this sentence?

研究他是怎么做到的？但这只是前10-15分钟的'坡道'，同时也让我明白这本书成功的原因。坡道结束后，我通常会设个30分钟计时器做研究：读笔记、看视频、研读资料或重阅访谈，然后才开始写作。

And how did he do this? But that's the first ten or fifteen minutes, and it's my little on ramp, but it also is teaching me why that book worked as well as it did, right? So once the on ramp is done, what I typically do then is I'm like, all right, let's do like a little bit of research. So I set a timer, and I'll do like, I'll give myself thirty minutes, right, of like, let's read some notes or like watch a video or like study something that I found or reread an interview or reread a book, thirty minutes of research. Then I get into writing.

接着我会设定字数目标。只要完成当日字数就是成功。整个过程就是先克服心理障碍上坡道，做点研究，然后投入写作。当然需要灵活调整——比如准备访谈时就要增加研究比重。

And then what I do is I just set a word count. And so if I hit my word count every day, it's been a good day. And that's really a lot of the process, is just very brass tacks, battling your own psychology to get the on ramp, then do a little bit of research, and then get into the writing. And what I try to do is obviously you have to calibrate some of this. Like if I'm preparing for an interview, I have to dial up the research a little bit.

是指你采访别人那种访谈？消息源？

So that's an interview where you're interviewing like somebody else? Source.

对消息源。重点是如果整个上午都在研究，你就...

A source. Okay, got it. But the point remains, if you do, if you spend the entire morning researching, you

根本没时间写作。但像《支付战争》这种考据翔实的书，显然不可能每天只研究30分钟...

didn't do any writing. But then I'm trying to figure out how this squares with the PayPal book or something like that, is phenomenally researched. Yep. So you're not doing that in thirty minutes a day, there's

不，30分钟只是写作前的'甜点时间'。真正的研究往往与写作同步——写到某处需要佐证时，我会立刻查资料补进去。这算研究吗？算。算写作吗？也算。两者同步进行效率更高，多少人研究几十年却从不动笔。

no No, not thirty minutes a day. Thirty minutes a day is my, call it my like, kind of candy excuse, like before I start writing, and then I'm getting into the writing because if you're too slow, a lot of the research, I would say, happens as a blend of research and writing. So if I'm in the middle of a section and I need to make a point, I will just go dig up the fact I need and put it in the thing that I'm writing. But is that research? Yeah.

我绝不给自己找借口。同步处理这两件事效率高得多。多少人耗费数十年研究却始终写不出书来。

Is it writing? Yeah. If they happen at the same time, I'm not letting myself off the hook. I'm actually doing them at the same time, and it's far more productive. People can spend people have spent decades researching books they never write.

我确实认识一个人，他花了差不多二十年时间写一本关于柏拉图的书，但至今还没写完。还没完成，对吧？而且很容易陷入这种困境，因为创作新内容会让人焦虑。人们想谈论它，想用药物缓解焦虑，甚至想逃避它。

I actually know somebody who has spent, like, two decades working on a book about Plato, and he hasn't written it yet. It's not done. Right? And, like, it's very easy to fall into this trap, and it's very because there's an anxiety around creating new material. People want to talk about it, they want to medicate it, they want to run away from it.

本质上，这种焦虑确实存在。比如写作障碍可能是真实存在的，所以你必须与之斗争，而我的斗争方式是将写作与研究结合起来。我还做了另一件事——把所有空闲时间都变成研究时间。具体是这样做的：

At base, it is there. Like, writer's block can be real, so you have to battle it, and the way I battle is by blending writing and research. Here's another thing that I've done. I turn all time that is free time into research time. Here's how.

如果我要步行去杂货店，我会听关于我正在写作主题的播客或访谈。晚上在写PayPal相关内容时，我看的都是关于写作对象的YouTube访谈视频。这就是研究。当别人看网飞时，我在看彼得·蒂尔的访谈——欢迎来到我的生活。

If I need to walk to go do groceries, I will listen to a podcast or an interview about the thing that I am writing. In the evenings when I was doing PayPal, I was watching YouTube videos that were just interviews of the people I was writing about. So it was research. Like, it was research, but it was also, like, like, the time when somebody else might be watching Netflix, I was watching, like, interviews with Peter Thiel. Like like, welcome to my life.

对吧？但这种方式让我有大量时间进行研究，使得研究量非常庞大。当然有时确实需要花整个下午深入某个主题，但说实话，你通常可以给研究设限，先开始写作，然后再回头研究。因为研究才是好玩的部分——那是探索，是狩猎，是游戏，就像用谷歌搜索、阅读和打印资料。有趣到我根本不需要特意安排时间。

Right? But, like, but that was a useful way then of me having the time to do research so that the quantity of research was huge. I would also say there are moments when you do need to spend like an afternoon really diving into some topic, but honestly, honestly, you can typically set a limit on your research, start the writing, and then go back to the research, because the research is the fun stuff. That's the discovery, that's the hunt, that's the game, that's the like, that's just like Googling and it's reading and it's printing things out. It's like when you, it's so fun that I don't even need to schedule it.

真正需要安排时间的是创作本身。对吧。

What I need to schedule is the creation of the thing itself. Right.

能讲讲埃德·博格斯的故事吗？

Can you tell the Ed Bogus story?

可以啊。不过感觉这有点像

Yeah. I feel like it's kind

让老鹰乐队现场演奏《加州旅馆》

of like asking the Eagles to play Hotel California.

没错。但你就讲讲那个故事吧？当然可以。

Yeah. But can you just tell that story? It's so Sure.

因为我觉得这个例子完美展示了当研究进展顺利时会发生什么

Because I think the reason why is I think this is such a good example of what happens when research goes well

是啊。

Yeah.

如果你找到了替代来源，你讲述的故事会让人记忆深刻，同时触及你分享内容的核心主题。然后就会吸引像我这样的狂热分子，我会一直琢磨这个故事。

Is you find an alternative source, you tell a story that's super memorable, and then also speaks to something that is core to the theme of what you're sharing. And then you get, you know, some lunatic like me, and I think about the story all the time.

没错。给大家提供些背景信息，这个故事源于我为《创始人》一书所做的研究。那本书花了六年时间，是个非常耗神的项目。我写了双倍的字数——

Right. So, yeah, just for context for people, so this is a story that emerges from my research for the Founders book. And that book, you know, took six years. Like, was a really intense project. There was a ton I mean, I wrote double the quantity of words.

我写了大约三十五万字，最终成书只有十四万字左右。所以删减了很多内容，真的很多。我还做了大量采访，非常多的采访。

I wrote about three hundred and thousand, three and fifty thousand words for a book that ended up being about 140,000. So I cut a lot of stuff, right? A lot of stuff. And I did lots of interviews. I mean, a lot of interviews.

后来发生了件奇妙的事。我发现我们共享过PayPal前身公司的投资条款清单——抱歉不是条款清单，是股东名册，上面列着投资PayPal的人。有些名字我认得，是我研究中常见的。但在名单末尾有个叫Ed Bogus的人，我当时就想：这是谁？从没见过这名字，他不是硅谷知名投资人——

And there was this amazing thing that happened when I found So we had shared a term sheet for one of the early companies that would become PayPal, and it had not a term sheet, sorry, a cap table where it had listed the investors who had invested in PayPal. And some of the names I I recognized, you know, it would look like they were familiar names from my research. And kind of toward the bottom, there was this name of this guy, Ed Bogus, And I was like, who is this? I was like, I've never seen this name before. He's not some famous Silicon Valley investor.

也不是科技圈人士。但他很早就投资了彼得·蒂尔的公司Confinity。我就想：为什么？于是谷歌搜索他的名字，发现他是旧金山的一个音乐人。

He's not a technology person. So I start I was like, but he invested very early in Peter Thiel's company. It was called Confinity. I was like, what could why? So I Google and I type in his name, and I find out that he's like a musician living in San Francisco.

我简直懵了：这更说不通啊。难道找错人了？是小Ed Bogus吗？到底怎么回事？

And I'm like, what the hell? Now it's even more perplexing. I'm like, did I get the wrong Ed Bogus? Is that like an Ed Bogus Jr? What is going on here?

于是我做了那种姓名搜索，会显示几个可能的电话号码。我把这些都截图下来，心想必须找到这个人确认。还能怎么办？直接打电话呗。

So I do one of those searches where you can just look up somebody's name and then they'll find like a few phone numbers that might be their phone number. And I kind of screenshotted all those. And I was like, gotta track this guy down, see if he's the right guy. So I was like, what other option do I have? I call the number, right?

650...拨通电话后我说：'嗨Ed，不确定是否找对人。我是Jimmy Soni，正在写PayPal创始故事的书。有份文件显示你是早期投资人之一。不知道是不是你，如果是的话能否回电聊聊投资缘由等等。'

650 Call the number, and I'm like, Hi, Ed. I'm not sure if you're the right Ed Bogus. My name is Jimmy Soni. I'm working on a book about the origin story of PayPal, and there's this there's this document I have where it says you're one of the earliest investors. I have no idea if this is you, but if it is, if you wouldn't mind giving me a callback, I'd love to talk to you about what led you to do the investment, blah blah blah blah blah.

这完全是碰运气，根本没指望会回复。结果留言后十到十五分钟，这家伙居然回电了，完全出乎意料。

And this is this is like total Hail Mary. Right? I'm not actually expecting a callback. So I finished the phone call, leave the message, and within like ten or fifteen minutes, I get a callback from this guy. And he and I didn't expect this.

所以我有点措手不及，因为我没有准备好。然后他打电话给我，他说，嗨，吉米。是的，你找对人了。我其实是这家公司早期版本的投资人，很乐意聊聊。所以我算是抓住他了，对吧？

So I'm like a little I'm like a little caught unaware as I'm not like ready. And so he calls me and he goes he's like, Hi, Jimmy. Yeah, you've reached the right Ed. I was actually an investor in like an early iteration of this company and like happy to chat about it. So I like had him, right?

鱼已经上钩了，我现在必须行动。于是我深入话题，我说，听着，你是怎么发现这家公司的？你并不是什么知名的天使投资人。然后他有点打断了我。

I had the fish on the line. I've got to like do this now. So I like dive in and I'm like, Well, listen, like, how did you find your way to this company? You're not an angel investor of any renown. Like, goes and he sort of cut me off.

他说，是的，这是我唯一真正做过的投资之类的。这是我唯一认真的投资。结果他告诉我这个故事，简直太精彩了。他说，事情是这样的，当彼得在创建公司和投资公司，熟悉帕洛阿尔托周边的科技环境时，他还在参加国际象棋比赛，因为他是个非常出色的棋手。

He's like, yeah. This is, the only real investment I've ever made or something like that. Like, it's the only serious investment I made. And it turns out, he tells me this story, which is the most amazing story. He said, what happened is that while Peter was building companies and investing in companies and kind of familiarizing himself with the technological landscape in and around Palo Alto, he was also playing competitive chess because he was an exceptional chess player.

所以他和艾德会在象棋比赛中对决，因为艾德也是个棋手。他们会互相较量，他遇到了彼得并和他下棋，他描述彼得的棋风是无情的。有一天，彼得·蒂尔出现在艾德·博格斯的家里。他在为他的公司寻找亲友投资，他认识艾德，他说，嘿，艾德。我不知道你是否愿意投资。

So he and Ed would square off at chess tournaments because Ed was also a chess player. They would face off against each other, and he met Peter and played him, and he described his style of play as merciless. So one day, Peter Thiel shows up at Ed Bogus' house. He is looking for friends and family investment for his company, and he knows Ed, and he says, hey, Ed. I don't, you know, I don't know if you'd want to invest.

我知道我们有过一些精彩的象棋比赛。你想不想参与这件事？然后艾德拦住他，走到后面，拿出一张支票，当场写好，把钱给了彼得。作为采访者，我自然在想，等等。

I know you and I have had some good chess competitions or chess matches. Would you wanna would you wanna, you know, participate in this in this thing? And so Ed stops him, goes to the back, grabs a check, writes the check on the spot, gives gives Peter the money. And so naturally, as an interviewer, I'm thinking to myself, like, wait. Hold on.

为什么要这么做？那可是钱啊，你就这么给了一个和你下过棋的人。他说，彼得的棋风如此冷酷无情，我知道他做的任何事情都会成功。这就是他这么做的原因。

Like, why would you do that? Like, why would you? Like, that's money, and you're just giving it to this guy you played chess with. And he said, Peter was so ruthless, so merciless in his style of play that I knew that anything that he did, he would make it successful. And and that's why he did it.

他说这是他一生中做过的最好的投资之一，因为他早期投资了这家后来成为PayPal的公司。这对我来说太神奇了，因为它验证了几点：一是追查故事的每一个细节是值得的，因为你永远不知道一个故事会带你发现什么。世界可能从未知道这个轶事。艾德·博格斯可能已经完全不记得Confinity和PayPal以及他的投资了，对吧？但对我来说，这个故事充分说明了彼得的为人，也反映了那个时代，人们如何相遇和互动。

And he said and it was one of the best investees I've ever made in my life because I got in early on this company that became PayPal. And it was just such an amazing thing to me because it for me, it was really validating on a a couple one was just like, it does just pay to run to ground every little thread of a story that you're looking for because you never know when a story is actually gonna lead you to something that no the world had never known that anecdote. Ed Bogus had probably forgotten all about Confinity and PayPal and his investment and everything, right? But for me, the story spoke volumes about Peter. It spoke volumes about that era, about how people can intersect and interact.

这太棒了，这是那种我朋友们会开玩笑说我痴迷PayPal的事情。他们真的会为此调侃我，但我说，你们看，这就是我为什么这么痴迷。

It was amazing, and it was one of these things that like, my friends would jokingly, they would joke about my obsession with PayPal. They would actually like give me grief for it, but I was like, got you guys. This is why this is why I'm as obsessed as I am.

嗯，这个故事还有一点，就是有时候最好的轶事来自边缘人物。

Well, there's another thing about this story, which is that sometimes the best anecdotes come from the people on the periphery

没错。

That's right.

而且不是来自中间阶层的人。你知道吗，就像你之前提到科比时说的那样，对吧？所有人都记得他砍下81分后的新闻发布会。科比故事中有一些情节已成为经典。但还有些YouTube上只有634次观看的冷门访谈，有时恰恰是这些内容能带你挖到真正的宝藏。

And not from the people in the middle. Know, and you this sort of like what you were saying with Kobe early, right? Everyone knows the press conference after he scores 81 points. There are certain things in the Kobe story that are just part of the canon. But then there's other interviews that have six thirty four views on YouTube, and sometimes those are the things that lead you to the real nuggets.

没错。我最喜欢的作家迈克尔·刘易斯曾有个说法让我印象深刻。他说自己在普林斯顿读艺术史时发现，很多文艺复兴时期的画作看起来大同小异——基本都是宗教场景的描绘对吧？

That's right. One of my favorite writers, Michael Lewis, I heard him describe this once and it always stuck with me. He was describing he was an art history major at Princeton, and he described this thing, I guess, that happens in Renaissance paintings because a lot of Renaissance paintings, like, basically look the same. Right? They're all, like, they're all, like, depictions of religious scenes.

他说：'如果想发现精妙之处，就看画中人物的脚趾甲。'因为画家们往往在这里会放松笔触，不必像其他部分那样遵循固定范式。所以观察边缘处的脚趾甲，你反而能看到最具个人特色的笔法。顺便说，我不确定这说法是否准确，可能完全是谬论。

He said, If you wanna find the intricacies, look at the toenails. So the toenails, look at the toenails of the figures that are being drawn because it's where the artists would often like basically lose steam or have their most, like that's where they didn't have to depict everything the same way everybody else did, right? So he's like, if you look at the edges, those toenails, you'll actually see some very distinctive designs. By the way, I don't know if this is true or not. It might be wrong.

但这个意象始终萦绕在我心头，因为我总在自问：其他观察者遗漏了什么？他们没提出什么问题？比如写《创始人》时采访马斯克，那大概是我第三次（也可能是第二次）与他对话。

But the image always stuck with me because I always ask myself, what did everybody else looking at this miss? Or what question didn't they ask? Right? I'll give you an example. For as a part of the founder's book, I was interviewing Elon, and it was my, like, third interviewer interaction with him, maybe second, maybe third.

我知道不会再有更多机会了——书稿即将完成，关于他的部分素材已足够。于是我思考：还有什么问题是别人从未问过他的？

And I knew I wasn't gonna have more. There was no reason to have more. I was almost done with the book. I'd gotten from him everything I needed for his part of the story. So then I said to myself, like, what would be the question that I'd want to ask him that other people have not asked him about?

他有个早期挚友格雷格·科里，曾是Zip2的创始投资人和顾问，年纪轻轻就去世了。我当时想：如果我在二三十岁时，有位共同创业的密友离世，这绝对会对我的人生产生深远影响。不知道你是否经历过至亲离世？我很庆幸没有。但每个经历过的人都说，这种悲伤会永远如影随形。

And he had had a close friend of his who was an early investor in and advisor to his first company, Zip2, this guy, Greg Coury, and he was a close friend, and he died at a very young age. And in my head, was thinking, look, if I were in my 20s or 30s, and I had a young, close friend of mine who built a company with me die, that would leave an enormous imprint in my life, in my makeup, in everything, right? I don't know if you have a vivid experience of death, I fortunately do not. No, I don't. But everybody I know that has been through that kind of experience, it shapes everything Like that happens grief casts a shadow that never leaves you.

于是我决定以格雷格作为开场问题。我记得当时说：'埃隆，今天我想换个方式开始。我读到有位叫格雷格·科里的先生在你科技创业初期给予过帮助，后来我联系到了他的遗孀...他在你生命里意味着什么？'

So I thought to myself, like, what if I started my interview with him by asking him about Greg Corey? And that's what I did. And I remember, I said, Elon, I wanna begin our interview a little bit differently. I had read about this gentleman that had helped you early on in your life when you were trying to make it in technology, and I found his widow, and we talked, and his name is Greg Corey. And I wonder, like, what he was to you, or, like, what he represents to you.

他沉默片刻后突然说：'天啊...'接着用了整整一分钟动情追忆他们的友谊。我猜没人会问他关于格雷格的事——毕竟采访者通常只关注当下议题。但我始终提醒自己：每个受访者都有超越我们认知框架的人生维度，那些未被谈论的部分往往最能揭示本质。比如采访成功企业家时，若问及他们的家庭或大学时光，反而能更深入理解其核心特质。

Was he, you know, can you talk about him? And there's a pause, and he goes, oh my god. And he, like, actually had this incredible response, and he was like he gave me this, like, minute long meditation on Greg and their friendship and everything that it meant to him. I don't think anybody's talking to him about Greg Corey because he's ultimately, the people who are interviewing him or talking to him are dealing with much more day to day concerns, but I always try to ask myself and remind myself, like, the human beings that I interview or the projects that I'm working on, they have lives that exist outside of the very narrow frame of reference that we see them for, so what's the thing that like they never get talked about or asked about that you can like kind of find a way in and it actually reveals something about their character, right? Like I find, for example, like if you're talking to a successful, let's say, I don't know, a successful business person, they have a family life, they went to college, they have lives outside of these little domains that we're in.

这个方法屡试不爽，既让对话更轻松私密，也更有趣。我把这种'脚趾甲策略'融入工作——当然可以按部就班采访所有重要股东，但像艾德·博格斯这样有故事的人，寻找他们本身就是乐趣所在。

If you ask them about that, you'll often learn more about the core thing, and I have found this to work enough that it is a technique that I like using also because it makes things just easier and more personal and more interesting, and so that that sort of call it the toenail strategy is a part of what I try to do. So like, I like, sure, could I interview all the other important names on the cap table? Yes, and I did. But Ed Bogus has a hell of a story to tell. You just have to find him, and that's the that's the fun.

真正的乐趣就在于发现他们。

The fun is finding him.

是的。你刚才提到迈克尔·刘易斯。我们聊过那些模范书籍，但我想谈谈你心目中的英雄殿堂。那里都有谁？你真正敬仰的是哪些人？

Yeah. You were talking about Michael Lewis. We talked about the model books, but I want to talk about sort of like a hall of heroes that you have. Who's on that hall of heroes? Like, who do you really look up to?

你想效仿谁？那些你...

Who do you want to emulate? Who are these masters of craft that you

真正钦佩的技艺大师是谁？对。对我来说，一个重要人物是你之前提到的罗伯特·卡罗。可以说，他就是非虚构传记界的科比。没人能像他那样写作。

really admire? Yeah. I would say, for me, a big one is someone you mentioned earlier, Robert Caro. So, I mean, talk about, like, you know, the Kobe of nonfiction biography. You know, like, there's nobody that does it the way he does it.

其实在我们这个领域，所有人私下都在试图成为罗伯特·卡罗。真的。我们都在努力接近他的水准。他好到有人会花十年写一本书，搬到德克萨斯山区只为更好描述当地风貌，住在华盛顿公寓时每天跑去国会大厦，就为看到和林登·约翰逊眼中相同的晨光映照圆顶的景象。

All of us, I think, are actually just secretly, in my particular domain, are all just trying to become Robert Caro. Like, it really is. It's like we're just trying to do that, right? He is that good. Somebody who spends ten years on a book, somebody who moves to Texas Hill Country so he can describe it better, right, and lives that like, somebody who runs from his apartment in Washington, D.

那种奉献精神和执着程度令人难以置信。我看着他就想：如果他能做到这样，我的版本应该是什么？

C. To the Capitol so that he can see the light on the Capitol Dome the same way that Lyndon Johnson saw it. In the morning sun. In the morning sun, like unbelievable the level of dedication and commitment and everything else. And I look at him and I'm like, well, if he can do that, what's my version of that?

举个例子，写《创始人》时我知道办公室所在的街道——帕罗奥图的那条街。我特意在不同时段去实地行走，感受当时的氛围。虽然最终没把这些观察写进书里。

Right, so I'll give you an example, is I remember when I was writing The Founders, I knew the street that the offices were on, So I actually would go This is Palo Alto. This is in Palo Alto. So I actually chose different times when I would walk the street just to get a sense for what it would look like or feel like when I was doing it. And I didn't end up including those observations in the book.

但能体会到帕罗奥图有多无聊，那些街区多么缺乏灵感——这本身就很关键。

But also having a sense for how boring Palo Alto is and how uninspiring those blocks are Entirely. Is really important to know.

非常重要。因为它不是曼哈顿。帕罗奥图...

Super important. Because it's no Manhattan. No. Palo It's Alto

确实不是个能激发灵感的地方。

is not an inspiring place.

确实不是。

It's not.

然而所有这些事情都发生在斯坦福校园方圆五英里范围内。

And yet all of these things have happened within like a five mile radius of Stanford's campus.

确实如此。

Exactly.

什么？这其中有些你需要知道的事情。

What? There's something to that that you need to know.

完全同意，我朋友称之为方法写作。她说，你是个方法派作家，需要尽可能完全沉浸在你所写主题的世界里。我认为罗伯特·卡罗就是这种方法的典范。他花费如此长的时间在他承担的那些极具风险的项目上——顺便说，这些项目风险极大，《权力掮客》能否成功根本没有保证。

Totally, and my friend calls it method writing. She's like, You're a method writer. You need to inhabit your subject's world as entirely as you can. I And think of Robert Caro as basically the dean of that. To spend as long as he did with the kinds of projects that he was taking on, which were hugely risky projects, by the way, there was no guarantee that Power Broker was going work.

没有任何事情是有保证的。你看，即使在今天，如果你提到罗伯特·摩西这个名字，除了你我和我们的朋友之外，大多数人其实并不知道他是谁，对吧？所以他承担的那种创作风险，那种程度的冒险，然后以他所达到的水平完成，更不用说将历史转化为艺术，使其成为阅读的享受。天啊，那些书仿佛在振动。

There was no guarantee that any of it. Look, even today, if you were to say the name Robert Moses, most people outside of you and I and our friends don't actually know who that is, right? And so to take on the risk, the level of risk that he took creatively, and then to do it at the level that he did, and then, by the way, to turn history into art, to make it a pleasure to read. Like, oh, my God. The books, they vibrate.

它们有自己的频率。你读罗伯特·卡罗的书时，全程都会着迷。你会想，不知道怎么能有人写出这样的句子。这太神奇了。他将历史变成了文学。

They have their own frequency. You get into a book from Robert Caro, and you're just enraptured the whole time. You're just like, I don't know how somebody could do sentences like this. This is amazing. He turned history into literature.

他将其提升为高雅艺术。这令人难以置信。所以对我来说，如果有个英雄殿堂，奥林匹斯山上有个宙斯，他就是那个宙斯。他就是那么好，那么自律。顺便说，我也很喜欢他像专业人士一样对待自己的工作。

He turned it into high art. And it's incredible. So for me, if there's a Hall of Heroes and there's a Zeus in the Mount Olympus, he's the Zeus. He's just that good and that disciplined. I also, by the way, really like that he would treat his work like a professional treats his work.

他会穿上西装，尽管他不需要穿西装。他会坐下来，用打字机工作。他对工作有真正的流程，日复一日，年复一年。我认为这很重要，这就是为什么他的书将成为永恒的丰碑，对吧？那种坚韧不拔的精神值得钦佩。

He would put on a suit, even though he didn't have to wear a suit. He would sit, he'd work at a typewriter. He had a real process about his work, and it was just every day, and it was day after day after day after day. And I think there's something to that, and that's why his books will be monuments for the rest of time, right? And the doggedness is just something to be admired.

你看着这样的人，不可能不找到值得钦佩的地方。迈克尔·刘易斯怎么样？这是个有趣的例子，因为他有很多粉丝。显然我也是粉丝，但我其实——你看，我看过他所有的采访。

You can't look at a person like that and not find something to admire about them. How about Michael Lewis? So this is an interesting one because, you know, there's a lot of fans of his. Right? And so I'm a fan, obviously, but I actually have this is you know, I've watched every interview he's ever done.

对吧？我深入研究过迈克尔·刘易斯，因为他太出色了，但他出色得超凡脱俗。实际上，我认为他是我永远无法企及的天才，因为他在新奥尔良的门廊上长大，听着人们讲故事，就像在南方那样。你知道吗？

Right? Like, I I went to school on Michael Lewis because he's so good, but he's otherworldly good. Right? Like, I I actually think of him as, a talent I'll never get near because he grew up on New Orleans porches listening to people tell stories, like, in the South. You know?

所以他的文字中有种音乐性，那些故事的节奏感渗透在他的写作里，也滋养着他的作品。这就是为何我将他列入我的英雄殿堂。正如你可能已经察觉的，我不想被定型为某类作家。如果我想写一本关于旋转木马的书，接着写一本关于司法体系的书，然后再写一本关于科比·布莱恩特的书，我就会这么做。这就是我的行事方式。

So there's a quality of of musicality, a rhythm of those stories that is in his writing, and it abuses his writing. Here's why I see him as on my hall of heroes. I, as you could probably tell already, don't wanna be pigeonholed as an author. If I wanna do a book about carousels and then follow that book up with a book about the justice system and then follow that book up with a book about Kobe Bryant, I that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do that.

很多人都希望能创作各种类型的书。

A lot of you want to be able do any kind of book.

任何类型的书。没错。而且我想追随自己的好奇心，无论它带我去往多么疯狂的极端，明白吗？我想写的书单列出来，你可能会觉得我该进精神病院。真的，题材跨度太大了。

Any kind of book. Yeah. And I want to follow my curiosity wherever it's gonna take me, to whatever crazy extremes it takes me, right? And my list of books I want to write, I mean, you would think I belong in an insane asylum. Like, it's like, it's all over the place, right?

真的可以说是包罗万象。因此我钦佩迈克尔·刘易斯的地方在于——他本可以在《说谎者的扑克牌》之后，再写十本关于金融的书，对吧？他完全可以这么做。他可以不断重复这个模式，但他没有。他写了本关于教练的书。

Like, it's truly all over the place. So for me, what I admire about Michael Lewis is he could have followed up Liar's Poker with probably, like, 10 more books about finance, Right? He would have been like he he he could have done that. He could have just rinsed and repeated the entire time, and he hasn't. He wrote a book about coaching.

他写了本关于育儿的书。他写过两位诺贝尔奖得主之间的友谊。他创作了《弱点》，还有《大空头》。他会说这些作品的共同点是市场，以及理解市场中奇怪的扭曲现象。但你需要相当的灵活性和创造力才能说：我现在要写一本关于棒球的书。

He wrote a book about parenting. He's written books about the friendship between, like, two Nobel laureates. He did The Blind Side. He did The Big Short. He would say that the common denominator is markets and, like, kind of understanding weird distortions in markets, but you have to have some level of, like, dexterity and creativity to say, I'm doing a baseball book.

而且不只是随便写写——我可能要写出史上最棒的棒球著作。明白吗？这正是我最钦佩的一点：他敢于对全世界说'你们期待我继续这个领域，但我偏要另辟蹊径'。

And then I'm not just gonna do a baseball book. I'm probably the best read baseball book of all time. Right? And so that is one of the things that, like, I really admire is just his willingness to say, the world wants me to do this. I'm gonna go and do this other thing.

据我所知，他不仅才华横溢，工作极度勤奋，以真正严肃的态度对待创作，还具备非凡的叙事天赋。但即便如此，要说出'我在这方面已取得成功，现在要全部放弃去尝试完全不同的领域'，仍需要巨大的创作勇气。

Now he's ridiculously good and super hardworking as best as I can tell and, like, approaches his craft with real seriousness and and real like, a real flair for storytelling, but it still takes a huge amount of creative courage to say, I've been doing this thing well, and I have a lot of success. I'm gonna abandon all of that and go do something totally different.

你刚说他用过笔名？

Did you say wrote under a pen name or something?

对。这是我最喜欢却不为人知的故事之一。当然没人知道也正常——毕竟没人会看完迈克尔·刘易斯的每个访谈。

Yeah. This is one of my favorite stories that nobody knows. Again, that's also because nobody's gonna watch every interview of Michael Lucep.

真是个疯子。

Such a maniac.

我知道。但是，当他在所罗门兄弟公司工作时，他想写专栏文章。于是他在《华尔街日报》上发表了一篇专栏。那是他人生中的重要一天。但那篇专栏基本上是在论证银行家们薪酬过高。

I know. But but so when he was working at Solomon Brothers, he wanted to write op eds. And so he wrote an op ed in The Wall Street Journal. Big day in his life. But the op ed basically made the argument that bankers were overpaid.

他在所罗门兄弟公司工作。所以我想所罗门兄弟的领导层大概是说，你不能继续写专栏了。这行不通。而他基本上告诉他们，我会继续写专栏，但如果我用我母亲的娘家姓戴安娜·布利克署名呢？于是多年间，戴安娜·布利克发表关于华尔街的评论，而人们不知道那其实是迈克尔·刘易斯。

He works at Solomon Brothers. So the I guess the the, like, leadership at Salmon Brothers was like, you can't keep writing op eds. Like, you this is not gonna happen. And he basically told them, like, I'm gonna keep writing op eds, but what if I did it under the name Diana Bleecker, my mother's maiden name? So for years, Diana Bleaker was doing commentary about Wall Street, and people did not know that it was Michael Lewis.

他得到第一本书的出版合约，是因为出版商四处打听戴安娜·布利克是谁，最终找到了迈克尔·刘易斯。所以他多年来用笔名写作，因为他想继续写华尔街，但他在华尔街的老板们说，你不能这么做。这就是他的应对方式。我觉得这个故事非常鼓舞人心。对他来说，本可以轻易放弃，心想‘好吧，算了’。

And he got his first book deal because the publisher called around trying to figure out who Diana Bleaker is and managed to find their way to Michael Lewis. And so he was writing under a pen name for years because he wanted to keep writing about Wall Street, but his bosses at Wall Street said, You can't do it. And so that's what he was doing. And I find that story super inspiring. Like, it would have been so much easier for him to just hang it up and be like, All right, cool.

我明白了，我得退让。但他坚持了下来。对我来说，这就是技艺。是对技艺最纯粹的热爱。

I get it. I got to stand down. But he just kept going. And to me, that's like that's the craft. That's love of craft at its purest form.

即使专栏上署的是我母亲的名字，我也要继续写。说真的，这太不可思议了。

I'm going do it even if it's my mom's name on the op ed. I mean, come on. That's incredible.

是的。关于AI的发展，是什么让你如此兴奋？在我们深入讨论之前... 我想为听众们明确一点：很多人觉得AI写作适合那些不认真对待技艺的人。

Yeah. What makes you so excited about what's happening with AI? And before we get into this Yeah. Yeah. I just want to establish something for our fellow listeners, which is there's something that a lot of people feel that AI is for people AI in writing is for people who don't take craft seriously.

对。

Right.

你可能注意到我安排这次对话的方式，我真的很想表明吉米是认真对待技艺的。所以无论你支持还是反对AI，都没问题。但我真正想听的是你如何看待AI，你对AI的感受，我认为结合我们刚才的谈话背景会更有趣。

And you'll notice that in the way that I structured this conversation, I really wanted to establish that Jimmy takes craft seriously. And so whether you are pro AI or anti AI, all power to you. That's fine. But I really want to hear about how you're thinking about AI, how you're feeling about AI, and I think it's far more interesting with the context of everything we've spoken about.

是的。我认为AI是我见过最不可思议的工具，能提升我工作的每个环节。这一年来我深受震撼，像个重度用户一样积极尝试每个新工具，试图理解它们的精妙之处，努力跟上这个快速发展的领域。

Yeah. I think of it as the most unbelievable tool I've ever seen to improve every single part of the work I do. Like, I have been blown away. I've been a power user now for a year and a half, right? Like, just aggressively using every tool that comes out, trying to understand the intricacies of the tools, like trying to stay ahead of a field that's rapidly developing.

顺便说，我不是技术人员，不是工程师，也不是科技公司创始人，所以我对AI的兴趣纯粹在工具层面——有哪些工具能帮助像我这样的人更好地工作？说实话，我上一次如此震撼还是第一次连接互联网时，当时我想：等等，我现在可以连接任何人和事了。对写作者来说，最大的挑战之一就是把头脑中的想法如实呈现在纸上。

And by the way, I'm not a technical person, so I'm not an engineer, and I'm not like a founder of a tech company, so my interest in this is purely at the level of like tooling, like what tools are being developed for people like me to do our work better? And honestly, there's been one other moment when I've been this blown away, and it was the first time I connected to the internet. Like, the first time I connected to the internet, I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm connected to literally everything and everyone if I want to be. The great challenge for any kind of writer is, one of the great challenges is like, simply like getting stuff on the page that you think reflects the thing in your head.

是的。你脑海中有一幅画面，在你心里它是完美的。仿佛每个像素都恰如其分。现在你需要向别人描述那幅画面，而这正是挑战所在。人工智能帮助你更准确、更快速地完成这件事。

Yes. You have an image in your head, and in your head it's perfect. It's like every pixel is exactly where it needs to be. Now you need to describe that image to somebody else, and that's where the challenge is. AI helps you do that better and faster.

它是如何做到的？让我举个几天前刚发生的例子。作为出版人，我正在编辑一本关于丧亲之痛的书。写书的女士两年前失去了女儿。这本书非常特别。

How does it do that? Well, I'll give you an example actually from just a couple of days ago. I'm working to edit in my role as a publisher, I'm working to edit a book about grief. And the woman who wrote the book lost her daughter two years ago. This book is extraordinary.

事实上我每次编辑都会落泪。它写得就是那么好。部分原因是我为人父母，当读到别人孩子离世的故事时，那种痛感同身受。书中有一段她谈到犹太教如何强调必须尽快将遗体入土安葬。

I actually haven't been able to edit it without weeping. Like, it's that good. Part of that is I'm a parent, and when you read a book about somebody's child dying, you just it hits too close to home. There's a section in the book where she talks about how Judaism emphasizes the need for the body to be buried and in the ground very, very quickly. Yes.

按规定最多等待三天。这是最长期限之类的规定。

You're supposed to wait a maximum of three days. That's the outer limit or something.

基本是这样。我认为灵魂或精神会在三天后离开躯体。

Yeah, basically. I think the soul or the spirit leaves the body after three days.

没错，她谈到犹太典籍中有大量关于速葬重要性的记载，比如为何要讲究速度，其渊源何在？主要有两种经久不衰的解释：其一是灵魂需要尽快回归上帝或天国；其二是遗体会因暴露而腐坏。

Yeah, and she talks about how there's actually a decent amount of writing in Jewish liturgy about the importance of the speed, like why the speed matters, where does that come from? And there's sort of two, like, abiding explanations. Right? And and one is that the spirit needs to to be back to God as quickly as possible or back to this back to, you know, the heavens as quickly as possible. The other is that bodies, if they were left out, could become decayed.

肉体开始散发异味、腐烂变质。因此既有灵魂层面的考量，也有肉体方面的原因。我想更深入理解这点，了解拉比文献的相关记载，既为确认她所言属实——我并非犹太教徒，不熟悉这个传统——

They would start to like, flesh itself would start to smell and rot and all these other things. And so there was a reason that was spirit, and there was a reason that was flesh. I wanted understand that better and to understand what the rabbinical sources said about that better so that I could confirm that, one, she was telling me like, was speaking the truth. I'm not Jewish. I don't come from this tradition.

也为查漏补缺，避免遗漏《塔木德》中应引用的经文或观点。当然我可以花一个月研读犹太教义，但借助AI，我只需输入段落，让它提供文献引证、释义解析、细节阐释——这个词究竟何意？这种解释是否准确？

But, also, in in case I missed anything, like, we miss any quotes or ideas or something from the Talmud that should be in here? Could I go and spend a month really understanding Judaism? Sure. But instead, I could use AI to take the paragraph and ask AI to really give me sources and quotes and texture and nuance, and please explain what this word means and what this word means. Like, is this the actual explanation?

它给出了令人惊叹的见解，使我既能验证信息，又能将所学反馈给作者优化文本。这就像给段落做了升级，只需向AI连续提问。或许有人觉得这不公平，但我说这不过是强化版谷歌搜索——原本需要十次检索的工作，用Claude一次查询就解决了。

And it gave me really incredible thoughts so that I could verify the information, I could share some things with her that I learned that might make for better editing, right? Like, it actually enhanced that paragraph, taking it and putting it into AI and just asking it a series of questions. There are people who could say, That's unfair. And I would say, Well, all I did was just Google on steroids, Right? Like, I did was just, like, Google what I what it would have taken me 10 Google searches took me one query with Claude.

顺便说，Claude是我首选的人工智能工具，我认为它比ChatGPT更友好，更具个性色彩——当然不止我这么认为。

Claude, by the way, is my preferred is my AI of choice. I actually prefer it over ChatGPT. Okay. I think it's friendlier for writers, and I think it has just a bit more personality. I'm not the first one to say this.

已有不少文章讨论过这一点，但我认为关键在于它首先提升了你的研究能力，让你能够整合那些原本不会想到的资料来源，对吧？其次在心理层面，拥有一个随时待命的编辑是全新且极其强大的体验。过去乃至现在，作家们都有编辑协助润色作品，没有哪位作家是孤军奋战的。

There have been a number of pieces writing But about the point is that I think what it does is it, one, it enhances your ability to research and it allows you to pull sources together that you wouldn't have otherwise thought about, right? There's a second thing. Psychologically, having an editor that's always on call is new and super powerful. It used to be, and it still is, that you have editors and they help you punch up your work, right? No writer works alone.

他们都有合作者。而我现在拥有了世界上最优秀、最聪明且永不抱怨、永不疲倦、永不下线的编辑。即便凌晨四点工作急需编辑，它就在那里。当我觉得某段文字拖沓或用词不妥时，只需输入并询问：'这个词还有其他选择吗？'

They have people who work with them. I now have the world's greatest editor, the world's smartest editor who never complains, who never gets tired, who never turns off. So if I'm working at 04:00 in the morning and I need my editor, I've got it. It's right there. So if I have a paragraph that feels flabby or if I have a word that doesn't quite sit right, I can put it in and say, What are some other options for this?

或是'这里有什么问题？'这就是编辑功能。我还常用它实现另一个重要功能——这要归功于我的另一位英雄殿堂人物泰勒·考恩。

Or What's wrong about this? Right? So that's like the editorial function. There's another important function that I use it for. I think and this is something that tie that one of my another one of my kind of people in the hall of heroes is Tyler Cowen.

我知道你也与他相熟。泰勒有个著名观点：论证对立立场的能力至关重要。特别是在撰写评论文章时，完成初稿后我会让Claude为我对立观点辩护，要求它写700字的反驳文章，并强调'不要留情'。通过观察它的批评角度，我能据此强化原稿——毕竟人人都有思维盲区。

I know you're close to him as well. Love Tyler. One of things that Tyler Tyler talks a lot about is, like, the ability to argue the opposite position is insanely important. And so sometimes, particularly with op eds, when I have an op ed I've finished or something I've written where there's an argument, like a real argument, I will have Claude argue the opposite position for me. I will have it write write a takedown of Oh, this love that.

十之八九，它提出的论点都让我不得不停下来深思。当然这些工具存在风险：可能出现幻觉、引用错误等问题，但这正是人类需要审慎运用大语言模型的原因。我并非用它替代日常写作，而是在关键环节使用，这使我的工作质量与效率获得质的飞跃。

Op Please criticize, in 700 words, this op ed, and I tell it, I said, And do not hold back. I'll add personality Once to I see how it's criticized the piece, I can then go back to my piece and strengthen it against those criticisms because everybody's got blind spots. And so I have to actually be able to unearth those blind spots so that I can address them. And I would say nine times out of 10, the arguments that it makes really force me to stop and think. Everything I've just described obviously has hazards.

巴拉吉·斯利尼瓦桑有个说法：AI不是端到端，而是中间到中间。批评者总说'你需要先确定目标''最后还得核查幻觉'，这些首尾工作必须由人类完成——设定愿景在开端，事实核查在结尾。但大量中间环节现在可由AI承担。

There are hallucinations, there are problems, there are times when it gets source material wrong, but that's the whole point of human operators running these LLMs and using them judiciously. I'm not substituting for the work of getting up every day and doing writing. I'm using the tools in the places where it matters, and I cannot emphasize enough how much better and faster my work is as a result.

另外我认为，许多AI批评者其实并不真正使用它。坦白说，这些人的焦虑源于AI可能威胁其工作、收入或社会地位，但他们鲜少亲身尝试——没有实际坐下来输入指令、探索功能。

Balaji Srinivasan has a line where he says AI is not end to end, it's middle to middle. And what he means by that is when people criticize AI, they say, well, you're going to need to figure out what is the thing you want to do in the first place. Hey, there's going be hallucinations, you have to check it at the end. That's the end to end stuff. Humans have to work at the very beginning to set the vision.

有效使用AI本身就是项技能：学习提出更好的问题、设计更优的提示词、运用于数值分析或代码编写等领域。

Humans have to work at the very end to verify, to fact check, to make sure everything's good. But a lot of that middle to middle work can now be done by AI.

而且你看，我认为很多对AI的批评来自那些并不使用它的人。老实说，我认为很多批评者是出于对AI可能威胁他们工作、收入或生活地位的合理焦虑，对吧？但他们大多并未真正使用AI，没有坐下来实际操作、尝试学习如何使用这些工具。

And also, think look, I think a lot of the criticism about AI is being leveled by people who don't use it. I'll just be honest. Like, I think a lot of the people who are critiquing it are people who have an understandable anxiety about how it might threaten their work, their income, or just their like position in life, right? But a lot of them don't actually use AI. Like, they don't actually sit down with the tools and sit down and like put things in and play around and learn how to use it.

学习AI、掌握有效使用这些工具本身就是一项技能。学习如何提出更好的问题、创建更有效的提示、将其用于数值分析或编写代码，这些都是你需要掌握的——你具体是指什么？

Learning AI, learning how to use these tools effectively is a skill unto itself. Learning how to ask better questions, create better prompts, use it for things like numerical analysis, use it to write code. These are all actually things that you're What do you mean by

数值分析？好吧，看来你是文字型人才，而我则是

numerical analysis? Okay, so you're a word person, I'm a

文字型人才，但通常文字型人才都

word person, but often word people are

不，我是

not I'm

不擅长数字。就是这样。我得承认这点。其实我年轻时更偏重数学，但现在早已抛弃了那些热情。

not a numbers guy. There we go. I'll tell you that. And I think I used to be a numbers guy. Was much more math oriented earlier in my life, but now I've long since abandoned those passions.

但如果你觉得自己的计算能力相比读写能力——假设你希望提升计算能力——ChatGPT尤其擅长数字运算、电子表格处理，能将复杂事物转化为数字类比。前几天我需要写个东西，试图将描述的距比拟为宇宙飞船绕月飞行的次数。这数学计算本不难，但让ChatGPT做更高效准确，之后我还能核查数据确保无误。

But if you feel like you're, like, let's say your numeracy is compared to your literacy, let's say your numeracy is not as much as you'd like it to be, ChatGPT in particular is extraordinary at number crunching, spreadsheets, taking things that are super complex and coming up with analogies that are number related. I needed to write something the other day, and I was trying to compare the distance that I had written about to the number of times a spaceship would have to travel around the moon, right? Yeah. I could probably that math is not that hard to do, but it's much better having ChatGPT do it. Right?

我有位在顶尖科技公司做工程师的朋友（该公司正大力研发AI）。当我问他AI对工程师的威胁时——毕竟工程师们也面临被取代的焦虑——这位有家庭、需为财务未来考虑的普通人说：'AI是工程师有史以来最锋利的刀，但终究是刀——饭菜还得自己烹饪。'

And it's much more accurate, and then I can fact check it and make sure everything's accurate. It's it's I I have a friend who's an engineer at a very prominent technology company that is doing a lot with AI, let's just say that. And I asked him about AI because engineers in particular are also feeling the same pressure that AI could replace them, that it could be a threat to their livelihoods. And I asked him what he thought. He has a family.

我深有同感。无论是写COBE书还是其他项目，我仍是掌勺人，而AI是前所未有的利刃。最后还有关键一点：我常鼓励人们尝试AI，因为像我女儿写作时毫无心理负担——她不关心好坏，纯粹创作。这种天真状态妙不可言，所有父母都懂为何要把孩子稚嫩的画作贴在冰箱上。

He has a stake in the future of his financial life, right? He's not independently wealthy. And he said, AI is the sharpest knife that an engineer has ever been given. He said, But it's still a knife. I've still gotta cook the meal, Right?

关键在于没有自我意识干扰。从写作冲动到落笔成文，我女儿毫无阻滞。而我的创作过程却充斥着'会有人讨厌我''推特上的恶评'等杂念，这些精神芜秽让人想着'这文章还是搁置吧，反正不会好，万一有人不喜欢呢？'

And so I think of it the same way. I'm still cooking the meal when it comes to the COBE book. I'm still cooking the meal when it comes to all of my other projects, but AI is an exceptionally sharp knife and it is unlike anything I've ever seen. There's one final piece that people don't necessarily think about that I talk about a lot when I encourage people to try using AI. My daughter doesn't have a hard time writing.

（续前）这种纯粹的创作状态令人羡慕。所有家长都经历过——正因如此我们才会把孩子们歪歪扭扭的画作骄傲地贴在冰箱上。

It's because she has no self consciousness about the quality of her She doesn't care if it's good or bad, she just does it. And it's an unadulterated, childlike approach to creation. And by the way, it's like marvelous. Like all parents have experienced this at some point. It's why, by the way, we put our crappy drawings of our kids' stuff on the fridge, just because like we're just like, Oh, look at this, you know.

但更深刻的启示是：自我意识成了创作阻隔。在我女儿那里，写作冲动与实施之间毫无障碍；而我的写作之路却布满荆棘——潜在的非议、推特攻击等干扰，这些精神累赘让人不断自我怀疑：'这文章值得写吗？要是被人否定怎么办？'

But the bigger point is ego is not interfering. Self consciousness is not interfering between the impulse that my daughter has to write something and the act of writing it. Between my impulse to write and the act of writing is people who are going to hate me, things people are going say on Twitter, like all the interferences that get in the way, all of the stuff that clouds up, cabbages up your brain that leads you to say, You know, I should shelve this essay. It's not gonna be any good. And what if somebody doesn't like it?

或者如果他们看轻我怎么办？或者如果他们觉得…如果他们觉得…？人工智能的作用实际上是让你能快速绕过这些杂音，因为它能更迅速高效地帮你完成作品。举个例子，有个叫Whisper的AI工具。

Or what if they think less of me? Or what if they if they think, what if they think? What AI does is actually allows you to short circuit a lot of that noise because it gets you to a finished product much more quickly and effectively. So I'll give you an example. There's a there's a particular AI toy, like, called Whisper.

我记得是叫Whisper Flow。对，W-A-S-P-R。它的语音听写功能非常非常强大。有时当我思路卡壳、状态不佳或感觉不对劲时，我就用Whisper Flow口述想法，它能生成非常清晰的文字记录或转译。

I think it's called Whisper Flow. Yeah. W A S P R. And it's really, really, really effective voice dictation. And so sometimes if I'm feeling really stuck or I feel like I'm not myself that day or something's off, I will use Whisper Flow to just dictate thoughts, and it'll do a very good cleaned up transcription or translation of what I just said.

这样至少我有了个糟糕的初稿可以修改，而不会陷入自我怀疑，不会反复拖延、纠结、查资料、打扫厨房、把门口鞋子摆整齐——那些我们用来逃避完成工作的借口。AI是焦虑解药。人们以为AI会引发焦虑，对某些人确实如此。但对我而言，它彻底消除了阻碍我工作的焦虑，因为我能极速得到糟糕的初稿，然后再赋予它润色、亮点、专注力和改进。这个价值被严重低估了。

And then at least I've got a bad first draft that I can play around with, and I didn't get in my head about it, and I didn't wait and wait and wait and agonize and research and clean the kitchen and make sure my shoes were all lined up by the door and all the stuff that we use to excuse ourselves from actually finishing the work itself. AI is an anxiety antidote. People think AI causes anxiety, and I'm sure for some people it does. For me, it's been the ultimate antidote to the thing that prevents me from getting my work done because I can get to a bad first draft very, very quickly, and then I can bring to it polish and flare and attention and refinements and all of those things. And I think that's seriously underestimated.

举个私人例子——只说大概。几个月前我要写封道歉信，一直拖延着。就是那种‘啊，这人曾是朋友，我可能做错或说错什么，该怎么写’的煎熬。

Like, I'll give you an example. This is a little personal, but it's not I'll do the broad strokes. 'd write an apology to somebody like two or three months ago, and I've been dreading this note. Like, this was like one of those notes you're just like, ah, this person was a friend, I maybe did something wrong, or I said something wrong, what do I say? That kind of thing.

后来我用Whisper Flow闭着眼睛说出想说的话。虽然转录稿很粗糙，但把原本可能要折磨我数月的道歉信，变成了可快速编辑发送的邮件。内容仍是我的原话，我的思考过程。

And so I basically used Whisper Flow, I closed my eyes, and I just said what I wanted to say to them. And I had They got a bad first draft transcription of it, but it took what would have been, what, I don't know, months of agony over a note, and turned it into an email that I could take, edit, and send very, very quickly. Right? It's still my words. It's still my thought process.

AI只是帮我克服了焦虑。所以它对我既是实用工具，也是心理工具。实用场景数不胜数，人们还在探索其潜力，但对我它已是超能力。那些逃避AI的人，恕我直言，是在自陷险境。

AI just helped me overcome the anxiety. And so for me, it's been an interesting tool psychologically as well as practically. And I'm happy, like the practical use cases are voluminous. People are still discovering exactly what it can do, but for me, it's been a superpower. And I think people who are running away from it, by the way, are doing so at their peril.

这么想吧：我能手写书吗？能。罗伯特·卡罗就是。纯手写没毛病。

Think of it like this. Could I write my books by hand? Yeah. Robert Caro does. So, you know, no shade to be literally by hand.

能用打字机写吗？当然。但我选择用文字处理器——这就是我对AI的定位。

Yeah. Could I write them by typewriter? Sure. But I'm choosing to use a word processor. That's how I think about AI.

AI是它的下一代进化。我选择使用这个工具，文字仍是我的，研究、事实、访谈仍是我的，一切都源于我的大脑。

AI is the next iteration of that. I am choosing to use this tool. The words are still my own, the research is still my own, the facts are still my own, the interviews are still my own. All those things, they still belong to me. They're still coming from my brain.

AI只是加速了这些过程，给了我更庞大的研究画布和词汇段落选择空间。现代作家没理由不用AI。说它剽窃？它是在学习借鉴——谷歌图书也这么做过，但没人抗议。谷歌上到处都是书籍或话题的‘精华版’，同样没人反对。

AI simply accelerates all of that and gives me a far bigger just canvas of research and potential options for words and phrases and paragraphs, and so I don't see how any modern writer couldn't use AI, and I think the idea that it is like stealing work or no, it's been trained on work, right? It's not stealing, it's borrowing to learn. So did Google Books, but there was no outcry about Google Books, right? Like, there's plenty of information on Google that is the quote unquote like Cliff Notes version of a given topic or fact or book or novel or something. There's not the same outcry.

我的想法与之高度一致，而且我认为法院最终也会得出相同的结论。

I think of it very much in the same spirit, and I think the courts are gonna, by the way, gonna find the same conclusions too.

你一直在深入研究图书行业，对图书行业...

You've been looking a lot into the book industry and the book industry

呃...

A a

霸王龙。所以你一直在观察这个‘霸王龙’现象，之前你告诉我你深入调查后感觉这个行业现状有点荒谬——充斥着各种乱象，现在看来确实如此。那么到底发生了什么？

Tyrannosaurus rex. So you've been looking at the Tyrannosaurus rex and you were telling me that you went in and you're like, I have a feeling that this this this industry situation is a little a little wacky. Lots of nonsense going on, and it sounds like that's been affirmed. So what's going on?

我认为这对任何想出版书籍却觉得行业壁垒森严、或认为必须找到对的经纪人/参加对的派对/结识对的人才能成功的观众来说，应该是种安慰。我做出版十五年了，逐渐摸清了门道。与传统出版商合作时，我发现他们原本提供的服务正不断缩水——无论是营销、封面设计还是编辑校对。几乎所有传统出版项目中，我都得自掏腰包额外支付编辑费用，比如《创始人》那本书的封面设计就是我自己花钱升级的。

Well, I think this is this should be comfortable to anybody or this should be comfort to anybody who's listening or watching, who wants to do a book, who thinks that it's impenetrable as an industry, right, or who thinks it's impossible to do, or they have to have the right agent or go to the right parties or meet the right people, like, I've been doing books for fifteen years now, right, and I got pretty good at it over time. What I noticed when I was doing my books with traditional publishers is that all of the things that traditional publishers used to do, they started to do less and less of, right? So like marketing or good cover design or editing or all these things. In almost all of my projects with traditional publishers, I have had to pay for editing on my own just because I wanted extra editing. I had to pay for my cover design for the founders because I wanted a better cover, right?

当时我就想：等等，这些工作不都是出版商该做的吗？虽然我与现代出版商的编辑们关系很好，他们能力出色但实在不堪重负，每个编辑手头都堆满项目，作者得到的永远像是残羹冷炙。这让我意识到行业的核心问题——你永远得不到应有的重视，却还要花钱雇人完成本该由出版商负责的工作。

And I thought to myself, wait, so I'm doing a lot of these labors. And by the way, I've had great relationships at Modern Publishers. I think the world of my editors, they did a great job. They were so beleaguered, there were so many projects on their plate that you always felt like you were kinda getting whatever the table scraps were, right? And to me, that was one problem with the industry is I just didn't feel like I was getting the kind of focus and attention that one would want, and I was paying other people to help me with my work.

另一个现象是：我许多朋友的书稿被拒时，对方从不给出合理理由。有些后来都成了经典案例——就像《哈利波特》和《每周工作四小时》当初被全行业拒绝。我还发现传统出版对AI工具、AB测试、数字广告等技术手段极度排斥，而这些在数字原生领域本是基础操作。当我开始钻研这些时，碰巧结识了同样热衷此道的播客作家吉姆·奥肖内西，我们决定联手创立新型出版社。

Then the other thing I noticed is I had friends whose projects were being turned down, but they weren't being given very good reasons for why they were being turned down. And some of these, by the way, become legendary case studies, right? Legendary case studies of how like, I don't know, Harry Potter was turned down by everybody, Four Hour Workweek was turned down by everybody. And then I also noticed that there was a real allergic reaction to AI tools, to AB testing, to technology, to advertising, to all of the things that in the digital world, if you become a digital native first, you learn like, wait, you can like test everything and anything and make your products better as a result. So once I started to kind of like nerd out on this stuff a little bit, I then connected with another writer friend who also has a podcast, Jim O'Shaughnessy, and we decided to create a new publisher.

于是我们创建了'无限图书'。经过全面调研后发现，整个行业对新模式有着强烈需求。举个简单例子：传统出版合约通常预付稿酬，作者需靠10-15%的版税率慢慢抵充预付款，之后才能获得新收益。

So we created Infinite Books. And it turned out that when we kicked the tires on almost every part of publishing, there was so much desire for a new way of doing things. I'll give you a really simple example. The way publishing contracts work is you typically, like, will get in advance, and then you earn, like, you earn, like, 10 somewhere between 1015% on a given sale price of a book until you make back your advance. So you only see new money once you've made back your advance.

很多人不想要这种模式。他们希望的是：比如书卖10美元时，作者拿7块出版商拿3块。但这种分成方式从未存在过——出版合约自旧石器时代以来就千篇一律。

There are a lot of people who don't want that deal. What they want is, David, you've published a book, if the book is $10 when it sells, you make 7, I make 3 as the publisher. They want that deal, but that deal never existed because most publishing contracts were exactly the same. They'd been on the same way I don't know, the Paleolithic era, right? Like they'd been done the same way the exact same time.

如果你胆敢质疑条款，就会被贴上'问题作者'的标签。他们就像在说：'乖乖待在创作泳道里，别过问商业运作。啊，我们是艺术家，你也是艺术家'。

And if you even asked questions about whether something could be different, you were called a problem author. So you were like, No, no, stay in your swim lane, author person. Don't concern yourself with the commerce of this. Don't ask these guys, Ah, we are an artist. You're an artist.

你是艺术家，去做你的艺术创作吧。但对很多人来说，我们不得不培养多种技能。我们有过商业领域的经历，这些经历后来转化到了写作中。在无限图书公司，我们会直接与作者沟通他们想要的合作方式，然后制定出对我们财务合理的方案。

You're the artist. Go do your art thing. But for a lot of us, we've had to develop multiple skill sets. We've had lives in business that then translate over to our writing. We at Infinite Books, like, Well, why don't we just talk to authors about the deal they want and then come up with a deal that makes sense for us financially?

因此对于部分作者，我们让出70%的版税。他们可能不想要预付款。我们不一定非要提供预付款加70%的模式——当然有些作者确实需要预付款，我们会配合——但很多作者更愿意赌自己的实力。他们只需要出版社协助推进项目，并拿走收入的大头。这并不难实现。

So for a number of our authors, we're giving away 70% of the royalties. They might not want an advance. We're not going to do an advance and 70% necessarily, and some authors do want an advance, and we'll work with you if you do, but there are a lot of authors who are just betting on themselves. They just want a publisher to help shepherd the project, and they want the lion's share of the revenue. That's not a hard thing to do.

这又不是发明新火箭登陆火星。说白了就是调整合同条款。再举个例子：关于AI的争议就很典型。出版业对人工智能充满敌意。

This isn't like inventing a new rocket and taking it to Mars. Like, it's like literally just shifting a contract. I'll give you another example. Here's like a good AI example. There's all this hostility in the publishing industry to AI.

人们说大语言模型用书籍训练后会窃取作者成果，生成的内容都是粗制滥造的垃圾。好吧。每隔几年就会出现行业丑闻——抄袭。某个作者有意无意地复制了句子、段落甚至整章内容，就会遭到口诛笔伐，职业生涯毁于一旦。

People are saying they've trained the LLMs in all these books, and they're gonna steal work from authors, and they're gonna be able to create stuff, and it's all gonna be slop, and it's all garbage. Okay. There are every few years, you read about a scandal in the in the industry, and the scandal is plagiarism. Some author, whether deliberately or accidentally, will copy a sentence or copy a paragraph or copy chapters, and they'll get tarred and feathered. Their careers will be ruined.

很多人从此一蹶不振，对吧？出版社没发现抄袭，不得不紧急停印，闹上《纽约时报》，职业生涯就完了。这些人陷入严重抑郁，有的再也没走出来。即便复出，也永远带着污点。在AI时代，抄袭丑闻本应绝迹。

Many of them, like, never come back from it, right? Something will happen, the publisher doesn't catch it, they have to stop the presses, huge scandal, New York Times article, career done, right? These people enter deep depression, some of them never come out of it, right? Or they get out of it, there's always a little bit of like they have a checkered past or something. In the age of AI, there should never again be a plagiarism scandal.

想想看：作为出版商，你完全可以把作者手稿上传检测是否抄袭——这本就是你们的责任。如果发现抄袭，要么沟通确认'这里是不是漏了引号？是无心之过吗？'要么认定对方就是复制粘贴的剽窃者。

Scandal. Because think about it, you can take someone's manuscript and as the publisher, this is your responsibility as the publisher, upload it and check to see whether this person stole work. If they did, you either have a conversation with them and say, Hey, listen, did you just miss some quotation marks here? Was this accidental? Or you look at the work and you say, Oh, this person is actually just copying and pasting, and they're stealing, right?

2025年之后，抄袭丑闻根本不该再发生。AI如此强大，出版商没理由不用它来核查。这算作弊吗？我认为不是。这是诚信负责的出版行为。

Should never, after 2025, there should never be another plagiarism scandal ever again. AI is too good for publishers to not use it to check for something like that. Is that cheating? I don't think it is. I think it's just good, honest, responsible publishing.

为什么不用呢？最后一个重要例子：出版业存在傲慢心态，认为出版商最懂行，是潮流缔造者，比读者更懂封面设计。但读者根本不知道封面该什么样？我们知道。

Like, why wouldn't you use it for that? A final example, and this one's important, I think there's a haughtiness within publishing, like an arrogance that publishers know best, that they're tastemakers, that they know what the cover should look like. You don't know. You audience don't have any idea what the cover should look like. We do.

我不同意。我所有封面都做AB测试，通过专业服务快速收集数百人反馈。因为在数字时代，人们在亚马逊的购买决策往往取决于封面视觉。你可以喜欢或讨厌这种现实——

I disagree. I AB test all my cover art, and I use services that allow you to very quickly get hundreds of people to react to a cover. Why? Because in the digital world, people are making snap decisions on Amazon, and they're buying often based on the way a cover looks. Look, you may like that or hate it.

但这就是我们生存的世界。为什么不做封面测试？或许传统出版社的设计师会不高兴？抱歉，这个理由站不住脚。

It's the reality of the world we live in. Why wouldn't you AB test cover art? Well, because maybe your designer would be upset if you're at a publishing house. I'm sorry. Like, that just isn't that isn't good enough.

这不足以成为不去测试哪些方法有效、哪些无效的理由。当你有工具可以低成本地测试哪些可行、哪些不可行，并借此销售更多书籍时，你就应该使用它们。其中一些是AI工具，另一些则不是，但关键在于我注意到业界对这些工具的重视程度严重不足，而我想要的是一家能原生运用这些工具并不断探索的出版商。顺便说一句，这些观点在行业内未必受欢迎，但如果你与作者——那些真正创作书籍的人交谈，他们会为这些工具的存在感到无比欣喜，既可用于个人创作，也因出版商开始采纳而欣慰，因为这是不可逆的趋势。现在你能快速获取以往无法获得的信息、资源和反馈。

That's not a good enough reason to not test what's going to work or not work. And when you have tools available that allow you to cheaply test things that are gonna work and not work and use that to sell more books, you should use those. Some of those are AI tools, some of them are not, but the point is I just noticed a real lack of attention being paid to those sorts of tools, and I wanted a publisher that was basically doing that natively and figuring it out. So this is, by the way, this is like not these aren't popular opinions within the industry necessarily, but if you talk to authors, like the people actually creating the books, they are wildly happy that these tools exist for their personal use and then that publishers are starting to adopt them because there's no going back. Like, you can very quickly get access to information, resources, and feedback you couldn't before.

即使出版商不行动，作者们也会这么做。确实如此。

Authors are gonna do it, even if publishers don't. Yeah.

我有个朋友，才华横溢，他刚通过传统方式出版了一本书。我有两版书：原始手稿——其实就是他设计的封面配上未编辑内容的PDF打印版，以及出版商最终出版的版本——他们改了书名，重新设计了封面。我直接对他说：这简直是对原作的亵渎。

I had a I have a friend who really talented guy and he just published a book traditionally. And I have two copies of the book. I have the original manuscript, which is basically a printed out PDF with a cover he designed and a book that he wrote without any editing. And then I have the final book done by the publisher with a changed title, and they made the book cover. And I've said this to him, it's an abomination.

这确实是种亵渎。看到这本书被糟蹋成什么样，真是场彻头彻尾的悲剧。我当面告诉他：老兄，你当初没像应该做的那样为自己据理力争。但最让我恼火的是，选择传统出版让他丧失了所有个性特色。我认识的人里，他本是最与众不同的，可现在他的书和市面上其他书毫无区别。

It's an abomination. It is an absolute tragedy to see what how degraded this book was. And now, I said to him straight up, I said, Dude, you did not stand up for yourself like you needed to. But what really irks me is the way that by going traditional, he lost all sense of individuality. And this is a guy who's unlike anybody I know who has a book that is just like every other book I see now.

这实在是场悲剧。我认为我们需要另类出版方式的部分原因在于：主流体系会把一切吞噬同化，这就是为什么你到处都能看到这种千篇一律的现象。

And it's such a tragedy. And I think part of the reason that we need alternate ways of publishing things is, like, the blob takes things and turns them into the blob, and that's why you just see this homogeneity all over the place.

是的。我再给你举一个非常、非常有说服力的例子，关于我现在正在交谈的一位超级知名作家。他擅长某一类书籍并取得了巨大成功，是个真正的匠人，非常注重技艺。他在这个特定类型的书籍上很成功，出版商是五大出版社之一，他们对他爱不释手。

Yeah. I'll give you another example that's really, really compelling that somebody I'm talking to right now who's a super prominent author, and he's done one kind of book and succeeded so well at it. And he's a true craftsman, cares a lot about the craft, and he has been successful with this particular genre of book. His publisher is a big five publisher. They love him to death.

他写了一本回忆录，这是个出人意料的创作。他想要把内心的东西写出来，某种程度上，这既是出书也是个人疗愈的过程。回忆录写的是他的童年，他把稿子交给了经纪人和出版商，结果他们对他说：'你根本不是写回忆录的料。'

He wrote a memoir, which was an unexpected work. He wanted to get it out on the page. It was a bit of, like, mixed think about it like it was almost like personal therapy in addition to doing a book. Wrote a memoir about his childhood, and I guess he took it to both his agent and his publisher. And they said to him, You're really not the memoir guy.

对吧？他可是才华横溢的《纽约时报》多本畅销书作者。仅仅因为这次跨了类型，他们就认为行不通，说什么'你的粉丝只认你这个风格'。但你我心知肚明，这纯属扯淡。

Right? He is a brilliant, like, multiple New York Times bestselling author. And because it's out of genre for him, they didn't think it could work because, quote unquote, Your fans only know you as this. Yeah. You and I know, that's BS.

如果他真出了那本书，读者反而会喜欢这种突破——就像泰勒·斯威夫特，我们爱她不就是因为她不断蜕变吗？艺术家为什么不能一次次突破自我呢？我最爱的金属乐队时刻，就是他们和旧金山交响乐团合作演出，交响乐为他们的音乐注入新生命。当然，这种创作确实需要承担风险。

If he did that book, people would love it because it was different, Like, just to get back to Taylor Swift for a second, we love her because she's had multiple eras, right? We want Why wouldn't you want your artists to reinvent themselves time and time and time again, right? One of my favorite Metallica things is when they partnered with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and they did the music with the symphony, and the symphony is working with them to do something. Right? Like, you you obviously like, there's a certain amount of creative risk that comes in doing that.

没错。就像Dr. Dre的探戈专辑惨败那样，不是每次创新都能成功。但我们理应鼓励作家进行创作冒险——而现在的出版业，我觉得在这方面做得还远远不够。

Right? Like, for every one of those, there's, when doctor Dre did the tango album and it was a huge flop. Right? But, like, you wanna encourage a world in which authors are taking creative risks. I don't know that the publishing industry does that enough.

我深知这一点，因为这个人凭借这本书会取得成功，他之前的作品也都很成功。他为出版商赚了不少钱，但他们不愿冒险出版他的回忆录，只因他‘不是写回忆录的料’——用他们的话说。

And I know that because this person would be successful with this book, and he's been successful with other books. He's made his publisher a lot of money, but they don't wanna take a chance on a memoir because he's quote unquote not a memoir guy.

我认为这是区分艺术与内容的一种方式：艺术在于试图突破某种边界，人类自我并非静止不变。我们随着人生阶段更迭经历不同的喜悦与苦难，生命有其蜿蜒性，而艺术正是探索新边疆的尝试。内容则不同，当你形成固定风格和模式后，就开始为完成指标而生产，遵循一套标准化的模板规格。传统出版业很大程度上就是在推动这种模式。

I think this is one way to distinguish between art and content, that what art is is you're trying to push on some sort of frontier, the human being self, we're not these static creatures. You know, we deal with different joys, different sufferings as we change in life and there's a sort of meanderingness to life and you're trying to explore new frontiers. And I think that that's what art is. And then what content is, is once you have a style, once you have a form, you begin to kind of have a quota that you need to meet and there's a very cookie cutter package sort of specs that you need to hit. And I think that that's a lot of what you're saying is what traditional publishing gets people to.

这确实是部分原因。但听着，我们不该把这变成三十分钟的传统出版业批判——这个行业汇聚了顶尖的专业人士，许多都是各自领域的世界级人才。

I think that's part of it. And look, here's the other thing. It's like we shouldn't just turn this into like thirty minutes of bashing at traditional publishing. Here's the thing. These are exceptional professionals, many of whom are, like, world class at their craft.

这个行业充斥着极其聪明、深思熟虑的人。问题在于过度整合导致风险承受空间缩小：若连续推出不成功的书籍，就是在让出版社亏本。我理解编辑们承受的压力，但整个商业模式建立在书籍前两周必须爆红的基础上，否则就会被放弃转投下一个项目——这才是最根本的问题。

Like, this is an industry that is filled with super smart, super thoughtful people. The the the problem is is that there's been so much consolidation, and there's just less room to take risks because if you're if you have a bunch of books that aren't successful, like you're kind of costing the publisher money, right, without having a return. So I can understand why editors feel the pressure they feel. The thing is, is that the entire business model is kind of predicated on your book being a hit within the first two weeks, and if it's not a hit within the first two weeks, publishers sort of give up on it and move on to the next project. That's one of the biggest issues.

我最爱的《激流少年》就是出版业误判的典型例证。这本关于柏林奥运会赛艇队的杰作，最初面世时反响寥寥，可能只获得一两篇评论，没有重要电视宣传，出版商很快就将其视为弃子。

So one of my favorite one of my favorite books is Boys in the Boat. Right? It's a it's a quintessential example for me of the publishing industry getting it wrong. Here's why. Boys in the Boat is a masterwork, and it's a book about rowing and this rowing team, Berlin, the Berlin Olympics.

这部精彩绝伦的故事起初寂寂无声，出版方直接放弃推广。直到赛艇爱好者们口口相传，八九个月后登上《纽约时报》畅销榜才一飞冲天。

And it's it's an extraordinary story, and it's beautifully told. The book debuts, crickets, maybe got one or two reviews, no significant TV appearances, nothing happens with it. And the publisher is just like, alright. Good. We're good.

‘享受你的书吧，我们到此为止’——他们当时这么说。结果赛艇圈自发传播，最终让世界见证了这部作品。

Enjoy your book. Right? We're done. That was a write off. Rowers pick it up.

数月后，赛艇手们将书推荐给家人。出版大半年后，它突然冲上畅销榜，随后势如破竹。十年后更是被Netflix改编成汤姆·汉克斯主演的电影。

Months some months go by. Rowers pass it to other rowers. Then rowers start passing it to their families. Something like eight or nine months after the book debuts, it gets on the New York Times bestseller list, and then it takes off like a rocket. So then the rest of the world gets exposed to it, and ten years later, it's a movie, right, with Tom Hanks or whatever on Netflix.

某些作品需要时间发酵，但出版业只给两周窗口期。我们见证过太多案例：作家经年累月积累读者后才迎来爆发，可行业机制迫使作者追逐即时成功，否则就被断供所有营销支持——这不是因为出版社冷酷，而是资源必须转向新项目。

Wow. It takes a while for certain projects to take off, but the timelines in publishing are you are a hit within the first two weeks or you're not. Like it's not gonna work, right? But meanwhile, we have example after example of people who continue to sell books over a long period of time and then hit their crescendo much later, and I think that's the other thing is like the timelines in the industry force authors to basically chase instant success or you just like, you're dropped like, it's like, we're not gonna give you any marketing support, we're not gonna help you, we're not gonna do anything. And it's not by the way, it's not because they mean you, it's not because they're mean, it's just because they have to move on to other projects.

但我怀疑，许多作品若有稍长的推广窗口本可成功。就像我的书具有持久生命力——人们初次发现克劳德·香农时，根本不在乎书的出版年份。关键在于如何把书送到对的读者手中。

But what I actually have a suspicion about is that there are a number of projects that could have been successful if there had been just a little bit longer window attention paid to like, how do we get this book in the right places? And the way I know that is like, my books continue to get attention. They are evergreen books. Somebody discovering Claude Shannon for the first time is gonna seven years, they don't care when my book was published. They're gonna find him now.

所以我现在可以继续推广我的书，对于第一次发现它的人来说，它就像当初刚问世时对所有发现者一样新鲜。对吧？这也需要改变。这些项目的时间跨度太短了，这让作者们处于非常尴尬的境地，因为他们基本上就是冲冲冲。他们有个新书发布。

So I can continue to market my book now, and it's as new to the person who's discovering it for the first time as it was to every other person who discovered it when it first debuted. Right? That also needs to change. Like, the time horizons on these projects are so short, and it puts authors in this really uncomfortable position because they're basically like, go, go, go, go, go, go. They have the launch.

如果成功了，他们就是当红新秀。如果失败了，他们就会被遗忘，再也没人想和他们合作。这真的很令人沮丧。实际上，很多这样的书应该被重新发掘。很多这样的作者应该得到更多关于如何营销或如何积极行动的支持，把自己的书变成常年畅销的那种。

If they succeed, they're like the hot new thing. If they fail, they're forgotten about, and nobody wants to do business with them again. And that's really depressing. Like, it's like, actually, like, a lot of these books should be revived. A lot of these authors should get more support on how to market or how to be aggressive and make yourself into the kind of book that sells perennially.

另一个

The other

疯狂的事情是，你写了一本关于布鲁克林大桥公园旋转木马的咖啡桌书，你还写过克劳德·香农，写过PayPal，现在又写科比。你真是个异类。那么这本书的故事是

thing that's crazy is that you wrote a coffee table book about a carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park, which is, you wrote about Claude Shannon, you wrote about PayPal, you write about Kobe now. Like, is a huge outlier. So what's the story of

什么？是的。这个项目在各方面都是心血之作。这就是这本书，它叫《简的旋转木马》，实际上是个相当厚重、内容丰富的项目。

this book? Yeah. This project was labor of love in every way, actually. So this is this is the book. It's Jane's Carousel, and it's actually a pretty weighty, substantial project.

简单来说，我当时有个很小的女儿，住在纽约，总是不知道该带她做什么，这是典型的父母难题。所以我们养成了一个习惯，就是去那个位于Dumbo水边的旋转木马，就在布鲁克林大桥公园的边缘。不知为何，我女儿对这个旋转木马着迷了。我坐了超过200次。

And the quick story on this one, I had a very young daughter and I was living in New York and I was at a loss for what to do with her all the time, right? It's like, which is a classic parent problem. And so one of the things that we got into the habit of doing is we would go to the carousel, which is right on the water's edge in Dumbo, right at the edge of Brooklyn Bridge Park. And she, for some reason, my daughter just became obsessed with this carousel. So I've ridden that carousel over 200 times.

如果你在纽约坐过足够多的旋转木马，你会发现简的旋转木马比其他所有都好。我开始好奇为什么。于是我在谷歌上搜索，了解到这个项目的发起人叫简，她花了三十年手工修复这个旋转木马。我记得当时想，三十年？我连三十分钟都坚持不了。

One of the things you notice if you go to enough carousels in New York is Jane's carousel is a cut above all of the others. And I kind of became interested in like, why? And so then I went on Google and I learned that the woman who had put this project together, her name is Jane, she had basically hand restored this carousel for thirty years. And I remember thinking like, thirty years? Like I can barely do anything for thirty minutes, you know?

所以我被她迷住了，心想你怎么能坚持三十年？为什么？于是我给她发了封邮件，地址大概是janejanescarousel.com之类的。我说，我在找给女儿的礼物，不想要中国制造的塑料玩具。你有没有什么书，我可以在里面写句话，可能是本图画书？

So I was obsessed with her because I was like, how do you do this for three decades? Like why? And so I wrote an email to her and it was like janejanescarousel dot com or something. And I emailed her and I said, listen, I'm looking for a gift for my daughter that is not like a Chinese plastic toy thing. Do you have any, like, have a book that I could like write a note to her inside and then maybe it's like a picture book or something?

我以为她已经出过这样的书。她说没有。我又回信说，你真的应该考虑出一本，我觉得会很棒。她说，一起吃个午饭吧。

I assumed she'd done something. And she's like, You know, I don't. And then I kind of wrote back and I was like, should really think about doing one. I think it'd be really cool. And she said, Let's have lunch.

于是我们见了面。我告诉简，这个旋转木马的故事始于1922年的创作，它经历了世界大战，经历了俄亥俄州伊多拉公园的一场火灾，那是它最初安置的地方。它诞生于美国旋转木马制作的黄金时代，每匹马都是手工雕刻、手工上色的。

So we get together for lunch. And basically what I said is I was like, Jane, you know, the story of this carousel is a story of a of a of a creation from 1922. It survives a world war. It survives a fire in Idora Park in Ohio, which is the first park that it was placed in. It is crafted during the heyday of American carousel making when each of these horses was actually hand carved, like hand carved, hand painted.

这就是旋转木马真正堪称惊人艺术品的时代。我说，你在它被烧毁后买下它，然后手工修复了三十年，甚至不确定它能否进入布鲁克林大桥公园。到底是什么驱使你这么做？这是个故事。我说，我认为你真的应该考虑以视觉形式呈现它，比如做一本咖啡桌书籍。

This is when carousels truly were like these incredible works of art. And I said, And you then buy it after it's been burned and hand restore it for thirty years, not knowing if it's ever gonna get into Brooklyn Bridge Park. Like, what could possess you to do this? This is a story. And I said, and I think you should really think about doing it as a visual, like a coffee table book.

她接受了这个提议。我们和她的一位在菲登出版社的熟人坐下来洽谈。菲登是全球顶尖的咖啡桌书出版商之一，与Tasha、Ossouli、Rizzoli齐名。他们制作的书籍精美绝伦。于是我们去了，我准备好要做推介。

And she went for it. And we sat down with a contact of hers who was at Fiden. Fiden is one of the world's preeminent coffee table publishing companies next to Tasha, Ossouli, Rizzoli. They make beautiful books, beautiful books. So we go in and I'm there, I'm like ready to pitch.

我们面对着一群编辑，他们比我酷多了，审美敏感度也远胜于我。我说：听着，你们必须接手这个项目，因为这本书就像高线公园那本一样。高线公园是个奇迹，那本咖啡桌书美得令人惊叹，讲述了高线公园的诞生故事，充满惊艳的设计特色。我说，就像人们喜爱高线公园那样，他们也爱这座旋转木马——我深知这点，因为我就是个痴迷旋转木马的家长，我的小孩也对它爱不释手。

And we're sitting in front of all these like assembled editors, right, who are a lot cooler than me and have a lot better aesthetic sensibility than I do. And I said, Listen, you need to take this project on because the book on the Line is exactly like this. The High Line is a marvel, and that coffee table book is so beautiful, and it tells the story of how the High Line was created, and it's got all these amazing design features and elements. I said, Just in the same way that people appreciate the High Line, they love the carousel. And I know this because I love the carousel, and I'm a parent of a young kid who loves his carousel so much.

菲登的编辑突然笑了起来。我有点慌：抱歉，我是不是冒犯到你了？他说：不，吉米，我就是高线公园那本书的编辑。

And the editor at Fiden starts laughing. And I kind of was like, well, I'm sorry. Did I, like I'm did I offend you? He's like he's like, no. He's like, Jimmy, I was the editor on the Highline book.

他接着说：我热爱那个项目，也正因同样理由想接手这个项目。哇。于是我们开始筹备这本书。故事的悲剧在于，我对简的最后一次采访恰逢新冠疫情时期，大约是2020年5月或6月。

And he's like, and I love that project, and I do wanna do this project for the exact same reason. Wow. And so then we started working on this book. And the the tragic part of the story is that I did my last interview with Jane, and it was right around COVID times. And it was, like, May or June 2020.

她感染了新冠。去医院复查时，却被查出肺癌晚期。她最终没能看到书出版，但丈夫和儿子延续了旋转木马的传奇，这本书成为她事业的丰碑。为让大家感受她对木马的执着——她拒绝用化学剂剥离马匹油漆，虽然那样能快速清理木马。她说不行，因为这会彻底丢失原始色彩痕迹。

She had gotten COVID. She went in to get the all clear, but then they found stage four lung cancer. So she would never survive to see the book done, but her husband and her son have carried on the carousel's legacy and the book is a monument to her work. And to give people watching and listening a sense for how committed she was to this carousel, she refused to have the horses chemically stripped of their paint because you could clean up a carousel just by, like, tossing a bunch of chemicals into the horses, getting rid of all the paint, and then starting from scratch. She said no, and the reason is because if you did that, you'd lose whatever the original coloration was, you wouldn't know.

三十年间，她使用X-ACTO刀（我亲眼见过甚至握过）一点点刮除每匹木马上的油漆，确认原始色彩后调色补漆。她请来世界顶级细条纹画师还原马身纹饰，找到与木马原配完全匹配的风琴。她对旋转木马进行了建筑与历史意义上精确的修复，耗时三十年。就像我无法理解罗伯特·卡罗会花十年写书那样，我难以想象有人能为旋转木马付出三十年光阴。

So for three decades, using X ACTO knives, which I have seen, which I have held, she would file away the paint on every part of these horses to see what the original color was and then color match to that paint and then restore the horses that way. She brought in the best pinstripers in the world to do pinstriping because there's a lot of pinstriping on these carousel horses. She found an organ that matched the exact organ that the carousel used to have. She did an architecturally and historically faithful restoration of this carousel, and it took her three decades to do it. And it was I could not believe in the same way that I can't believe Robert Caro would do ten years on a book, I couldn't believe that somebody would do thirty years on a carousel.

了解这些时，我意识到：这就是故事所在。太不可思议了。最终成书记录了一位女性超越常人理解的执着——作为作家，我生命中最珍贵的际遇，就是遇见对某事如此痴迷的人。

So learning about it, I was like, there's a story here. I mean, this is amazing. And so that's what resulted. And it captures one woman's commitment to something that, an obsession about something, that surpasses understanding, right? It really, to me, the greatest things that I get to encounter in my life as an author is when I meet or find somebody that is that obsessed with something, right?

回到我们对话的起点：这种执着的核心是什么？至少部分源于爱。你必须深爱某物，才愿为之奉献数十年生命。如果说对亲友有什么祝愿，那就是希望他们找到如此热爱的事物。

Because to get back to the beginning of our conversation, what is at the heart of that? The heart of that is, at least partly, love. You have to love this thing so much that you're willing to give up decades of your life for it. Right? And, like, if you have one wish for the people in your life, it's that they find something they love that much.

对吧？而她找到了。她拥有那座旋转木马。

Right? And she did. She had she had the carousel.

我超爱那个故事。你学到了什么？出版这类书籍有何不同之处？

I love that story. What did you learn how is publishing one of these books different?

是的。整个过程几乎完全不同，因为字数很少。重点在于大量摄影。实际上这是个艺术挑战。

Yeah. So it's it's I mean, almost the entire process is different in the sense that it's it's not that many words. Right? It's it's it's lot of photography. It's and what I would say is it's actually it's an artistic challenge.

你需要用不同方式思考如何组织和呈现信息。好处是——不会出现'这是7万字旋转木马论文'的情况。这本书就是设计成让你这样翻阅的。

And so you to think a little differently in how you structure and present information. And you get the benefit of like, Here's 70,000 words on the carousel. No, like that's not what this is. This is designed to be flipped through in exactly the way that you're flipping through it. Right.

必须深思保留什么、删减什么、如何呈现特定图像。另一个收获是图注极其重要，我重写并撰写了所有图注。

And so you have to think a lot about what are we keeping, what are we cutting, how are we presenting certain images. Another thing I learned is like captions are super important, so I like rewrote and wrote all the captions, right?

哦，写好图注需要...

Oh, what goes into writing a good

文字精简。要在极其有限的空间里决定保留哪些内容、讲述哪些故事。

Word economy. Talk about word economy. You don't have any space at all. Right? So you've really you've gotta decide what you're gonna keep, what you're gonna cut, what stories you're gonna tell, that kind of thing.

另一个收获是：咖啡桌书籍真是一分钱一分货。全彩印刷成本远高于黑白。我们在书中部用描图纸展示马匹颜色，这个设计决策需要额外成本。还做了折叠页来集中展示所有马匹——这是我从未有过的书籍设计创意体验。

Another good example of something that I learned in doing this book is, you know, you you'd really do, in in coffee table book publishing, you get what you pay for, so that's a full color book, which costs a lot more to make than a black and white book. We did a really clever thing in the middle of the book where we used tissue paper to show the color of the horses, and that was a design decision, but obviously it costs money to have regular paper and then tissue paper. We did little fold out things, cut out things, you know, not cut outs, but fold outs of different things so we could show all the horses in one place. It it basically like, I'd never had the chance to think about the design of a book as creatively. And I will say part of this is, like, it wasn't my my work at all.

这完全是Fiden团队的天才创作。比如用描图纸在黑白马图上叠加颜色，这两页就能解释她为何拒绝化学脱漆——因为只有层层打磨并记录每层漆色，才能还原原始色彩。这次对话让我明白要敢于探索各种奇妙的可能性。

It was the brilliant people at Fiden who put all of this together and really made it into something that was monumentally beautiful. So this is a great example of, I wanted people to see how obsessed she was with the colors, so we figured out how to use tissue paper to show the color on top of a black and white image of a horse. And you can see right there, by the way, in those two pages, you understand why she did not want to chemically peel the paint from the horses, because the only way to get the original colors was to file away and file away and file away layer after layer after layer of paint, and then do little notations for what the paint was, and then have the paints recreated. I think that what I'm really taking for this conversation is just the liberty to just follow wild rabbit holes and intersections

我都找不到词形容了。太感动以至于无法清晰思考。听你讲述时我就在想：天啊，他对此充满热爱，这故事太美了。

or whatever the word is. I don't even know. I'm very moved so I can't really think clearly right now. But I think that as you were talking, I was like, Oh my goodness, he loves this so much. This is such a beautiful story.

听着听着就发现，我们完全跑题了。百分之百。

And as you were talking, I was like, We have taken such a departure from the rest of this conversation. 100

就像是，

And like,

这就是我要表达的重点。

that is the point that I'm That's trying to the point.

关键在于，我是说，我认为关键在于你，你懂的，你对你的播客和做过的不同项目也有同样感受——当你过度沉迷时，你会如此享受以至于无法停止思考、改进它。顺便说，这并不适合所有人。说实话，这种生活方式存在真正的风险，比如社交上可能付出巨大代价。对吧？而且说实话，你得找到像大卫这样的朋友，因为其他朋友都会觉得你太过了。

The point is I mean, I think the point is you you, you know, you have felt the same thing about your podcasts and about different projects you've done when you obsess over it so much, you enjoy it so much that you simply cannot help but think about it and work on it and continue to refine And it's not by the way, this is not for everyone. Like, the truth is, like, there are some real hazards to living this way. Like, socially, it can exact a huge price. Right? And you and and, like, honestly, you have, like, you have to find friends like David because all your other friends are like, you're too much for me.

对吧？比如我受不了第十五次听你唠叨那该死的旋转木马。但与此同时，当你遇到同类人时，那感觉大概就像科比·布莱恩特和乔治·R·R·马丁的对话。

Right? Like, I can't I can't hang out with you and have you talk about the fucking carousel again, like, for the fifteenth time. Right? Like, that's like that's a thing, but at the same time, when you feel when you find somebody else like that, it's a little bit like probably the conversation that Kobe Bryant was having with George R. R.

你能感知那种能量，并从中汲取养分。如果说我人生有什么追求，那就是找到这种共鸣，将其转化为故事。所以我感觉自己属于讲故事的传统传承者。

Martin. You just you know that energy, and you can sense that energy, and you feed off that energy. So it's one of those things that like that's if I have one quest in life, it's that. It's just to find that, and then to turn that into stories. So for me, that's a big part of what I I feel I'm a part of is like a tradition of storytellers.

兄弟，我能和你聊到天荒地老。

Dude, I could hang out with you forever.

谢谢参加节目。当然也谢谢你，布拉德。我。

Thanks for coming on the show. Of course. And thank you, Brad. Me.