The Billion Dollar PDF
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摘要
Jeremy Giffon joins us for his second conversation on Invest Like the Best. This episode is a window into one of those conversations about how power, status, capital, and attention are shifting in America.
We discuss the billion dollar PDF, why narratives shape capital formation, how the timeline became market infrastructure, why America’s billionaire class may be losing status to the “poaster” class, the hidden philosophers behind Silicon Valley, lessons from the last 18 months in private markets, East Coast versus West Coast finance, Buffett, beating the market, and much more.
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
5:50 The Billion Dollar PDF
11:31 Algorithms and Power Laws
20:28 Peak Guy
31:19 Opting Out of the Timeline
36:14 AI and White-Collar Jobs
43:31 The Next Era of Finance
53:56 The New Economics of Software
1:03:22 Underwriting Emerging Managers
1:18:17 Silicon Valley’s Hidden Philosophy
Presented by Ramp:
https://ramp.com/invest
Sponsored by Vanta, WorkOS, Rogo, and Ridgeline:
https://www.vanta.com/invest
https://workos.com/
https://rogo.ai/invest
https://www.ridgelineapps.com/
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Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc
#InvestLikeTheBest #JeremyGiffon #VentureCapital #CapitalMarkets #SiliconValley
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中英文字稿 
你知道吗，你可以通过设立一个新想法，来组织数十亿美元的资本。有时候，有人适时地以正确的方式把一个想法具象化，成为某个时代的基础观点或意见。每个人都有点慌乱，不知道发生了什么。这时就需要有人来制定故事和叙述，其实这个叙述甚至不一定是对的。只要有一种自信，像是“事情就是这样，跟我来”，资本就会跟随这个价值十亿的“文件”在这个领域中流动。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
You can, you know, form billions of dollars of capital around simply setting a new idea. Every once in a while, someone basically crystallizes a notion right at the right time in the right way that sort of becomes the foundational viewpoint or opinion on a certain era. Everyone is a little panicked. They don't know what's going on. And someone just needs to sort of set the story and set the narrative. And it doesn't even have to be right. But there's just a sort of confidence of like, this is happening. Follow me. Capital just follows the billion dollar PDF around the field.
我们将有机会谈论57个不同的想法，就像我们每天都会做的一样。但是，我总是很想从关于投资的几个问题开始和你交流。我坐在你附近，我们共用一个办公室，所以我每天能听到很多这些故事。我觉得，如果你能将你通过与这些公司创始人和他们幕后资本进行的数百次对话中的观察，形成对创始人和投资方的建议，这将会非常有趣。在过去的18个月里，你在这个前沿领域学到了什么？可以以建议的形式和大家分享一下。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
So we're going to have the chance to talk about, as we do on a daily basis, you and I, 57 different ideas. But I'm always interested to begin with you a couple questions about investing. I sit near you. We share an office. So I get to hear a lot of these stories every day. And I think it would be really fun for you to turn your observations from all those God knows how many hundreds of conversations with founders of these companies and with the capital that has backed them in the past to sort of share what you've learned from that frontier over the last 18 months framed as advice for founders and advice for capital.
因为我不认识很多像你这样以高重复次数研究情况的投资者。那么，在最初的18个月里，你学到了什么呢？你学到了很多。在长期的私人市场中，你会真正意识到一个很重要的因素，就是资金的故事讲述能力。因为他们的产品，比如实际的现金回报，需要十年才能实现。所以在这期间你所出售的，不管是通过季度更新、活动，还是与你的有限合伙人（LP）的单独对话，实际上都是在讲述故事。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Because I just don't know very many investors that are looking at situations like you are with such a high rep count. So what have you learned in the first 18 months of doing this? You've learned a lot. You really realize in, let's say, long term private markets that the great filter, so to speak, for funds is their storytelling ability fundamentally because, you know, their product, which is like realized cash returns, take a decade. And so the thing that you're selling in the interim, whether it's through, you know, a quarterly update or your event or just your one-on-one conversations with your LPs or whatever, is really just narrative.
我们经常遇到的一个非常有趣的情况主要有两个方面。首先，某家公司历史较长，但最近才开始表现出色。这种情况很有趣，因为对于这类公司而言，公司的故事或叙述是，一个有着七年历史的公司，突然间开始显著增长。可能是因为人工智能或其他原因，但他们已经运营了六、七年。然而，这类公司很难获得融资，因为投资者的看法往往是：好吧，你去年增长了200%，但从绝对数字来看，你的收入才只有800万美元，而公司已经成立七年了。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
A particular situation that's very interesting that we've seen a lot of is twofold. One is that the business is kind of old, but has started to do well recently. That's an interesting scenario because it's one of these instances where merely because of the company, the story, again, the narrative of the company is that at seven years old, let's say the company has really started to inflect. Maybe it's because of AI or maybe it's because of something else, but they're six or seven years into their life. It's very difficult for those companies to get funding because the story is, well, okay, fine, you grew 200% last year, but, you know, you're only on absolute terms, you're only at 8 million of revenue and you're seven years in.
在我看来，如果你只是更改一个名字，讲一个不同的故事，然后随意把时间设定为两年前开始，那家公司可能就会变得非常热门。这种情况很有趣。我认为解决方法就是在叙述和故事上更灵活。这类问题的一个延伸是，有很多公司处于一个略有起色的阶段，事情开始进展顺利，但他们面临三种选择：基本上是无法获得大幅度的融资，所以他们实际上面对的是过渡融资、战略性的并购、人才收购，或者缩减规模以实现盈利。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Whereas I think literally if you just change the name and told a different story and just, you know, are sort of arbitrarily started the clock two years ago, that company would actually be like really hot. And so like, that's an interesting situation. The fix, I think, is just to be more flexible on narrative and story. Sort of a derivative of that problem is just the amount of businesses where they're in a spot where it's kind of working, things are starting to go well, but they're faced with three choices, which is basically they're not going to raise a significant up round. And so really they're staring down a bridge round, strategic like M&A, acqui-hire, or cutting to profitability.
这些情况确实非常棘手。如果你遇到了这种情况，我认为你需要在股权结构方面发挥创意。如果你有一些现金，考虑买回投资者的股份，将所有人转换为普通股，并花更多时间研究股权结构。否则，我发现内部分阶段融资的情况可能会非常不友好，我对此感到震惊。我觉得这在风险投资中是一个不太被讨论的话题。为什么呢？因为他们可能会有像3倍清算优先权、认股权证、保护条款或其他条款。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And those are just really hard situations. If you're in that situation, I think that's where you really want to get creative with the cap table. And if you have some cash, buy back your investors, convert everyone to common, really start to spend more time on the cap table. Because otherwise, like, I've been shocked at sort of how hostile insider bridge rounds really are. I think this is like an under-discussed part of venture. How so? Just they have like, you know, 3x liquidation preferences or warrants or ratchets or other things.
有一个有趣的观点是，如果你在下行趋势中采取剥削行为，大家都会对你表示不满。但如果你在上行趋势中进行剥削，比如说，“我希望能在两年后以相同的价格投资”，这其实也是一种剥削行为。然而，由于这种剥削显得更乐观，所以大家反而喜欢它。那么，你会给初创公司创始人在一开始考虑股权结构时提供什么建议呢？我们现在显然处于一个高度波动和不确定的时期。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
There's sort of this like interesting idea that if you're extractive to the downside, everyone sort of boos you. But if you're extractive to the upside, where you say, you know, I want the right to invest at the same price in two years from now, they're both like similarly extractive. But because one is like an optimistic extractive, everyone loves that one. So what advice would you give to founders in thinking about their cap table from the start? We're obviously in a highly volatile, highly uncertain period right now.
没有人知道这是否是软件的终结。我认为，这确实是自互联网转型以来最前所未有且充满不确定性的时期。在这样的时期，你需要的是更多的选择和灵活性，以及能够真正为业务做出正确决策的能力，而不是被资本结构所限制。因此，也许你的业务需要转型为服务型业务，也许你需要收购其他公司，也可能需要在一段时间内盈利运营。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
No one knows if it's the death of software. I think it's, you know, certainly the most unprecedented and uncertain time since at least like the transition to the internet. And so I think what you want in that time is a lot of optionality and the ability to be nimble and the ability to really be able to do what is right for the business and not be constrained by the cap table. And so, you know, maybe your business needs to become a services business. Maybe you need to acquire other companies. Maybe you need to run profitably for a while.
你知道，也许你需要改变整个商业模式。可能比如说，如果按座位收费的方式行不通，你需要转向按使用量收费。或许你需要淘汰一批客户。我认为在动荡时期，保持选择的多样性是有用的。总的建议是，除非你非常确定只想尝试这一件事情，并且它要么会取得巨大成功，要么彻底失败，否则你应该考虑保持多种选择。这通常意味着筹集较少的资金，从使命更广泛的投资者那里筹集资金。这样可以避免陷入各种棘手的问题，比如需要不断筹集更多资金，否则对员工不利，对招聘不利，员工的期权会变得毫无价值，他们开始离职，所有这些都会降低选择的多样性。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
You know, maybe you need to change your whole business model. Maybe like, you know, if per seat pricing goes away, you need to pivot to usage. Maybe you need to fire a bunch of your customers. And so I think like, you know, in volatile times, it's always useful to have optionality. And so I think like, I guess the general piece of advice is just unless you're certain that you want to just like try this one thing and it's going to be huge or zero, you should think about optionality, which usually means raising less, raising from investors with a wider mandate. I'm not getting stuck in all these weird problems where like you need to continue to raise more money. And if you don't, it's bad for employees. It's bad for recruiting. People's options get underwater. They start to leave like all those things sort of reduce optionality.
这很有意思，因为总体来说，我认为承诺是一种比选择性更好的策略。但是，在高度不确定的时期，因为未来难以预测，你基本上想要确保自己能够保持高度灵活，快速转变，做自己想做的事情，不被限制于我们已经设定好的局面。我们的资金配置也只能做这件事，这同样适用于投资者。他们也有同样的问题。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
It's funny because in general, I think like commitment is a much better strategy than optionality. But I think in highly volatile times where it's hard to tell the future, you basically just want to control for being able to like be super nimble, turn on a dime, do what you want, not be constrained by like, well, we're set up. Our capital is set up in such a way that we can really only do this one thing, which is also true for investors, by the way. They're same problem.
回到投资者和在实现10年投资回报或其他之前构建一家投资公司有效叙述的问题上，你提出了一个伟大的想法，叫做“十亿美元的PDF”。你能描述一下你所指的是什么，以及十亿美元PDF的有趣组成部分通常是什么吗？这是你我之间的一种玩笑式想法，结果却有点成真了。我认为，我们越深入思考这个问题，就会发现，每过一段时间，就会有人在适当的时间以适当的方式清晰地表达出一种观点，这种观点会成为动荡时代的基础性观点或意见。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Going back to the investors and the construction of an effective narrative for building an investing firm before you've delivered the 10-year investment returns or whatever, you have this great idea called the billion-dollar PDF. Can you describe what you mean by that and what the interesting components of a billion-dollar PDF tend to be? This is sort of an idea that you and I came up with in a joking way that like kind of turned out to be true. I think the more we thought about it, which is every once in a while, someone basically crystallizes a notion right at the right time in the right way that sort of becomes the foundational viewpoint or opinion on uncertain era.
我认为，每个人都有点不确定，每个人都有点恐慌。他们不知道发生了什么。而这时，只需要有人站出来讲述故事，设定一个说法。即便这个说法未必正确，但它带来了一种信心，好像在说："事情就是这样的，跟着我走吧。" 当这些结合在一起时，就形成了一个新的叙述，让大家暂时可以依靠，直到下一个说法出现。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And I think it's just this idea of everyone's a little bit uncertain. Everyone is a little panicked. They don't know what's going on. And someone just needs to sort of set the story and set the narrative. And it doesn't even have to be right, but there's just this sort of confidence of like, this is what's going on. This is happening. Follow me, almost. When those come together, they just set a new narrative that everyone can kind of rest on for a period, really, until the next PDF comes along.
这个“价值数十亿美元的PDF”概念是指，仅仅通过提出一个新想法，就可以以某种方式形成价值数十亿美元的资本。你可以把资本想象成10岁的孩子在踢足球，他们都在追逐球跑。资本就像这样跟着这个价值数十亿美元的PDF到处跑。这大概是一个不错的借口来谈论这个话题，我也不知道我们会聊多久，可能会聊很长时间。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And the billion-dollar PDF thing is this idea that really like you can form billions of dollars of capital in one way or another around simply setting a new idea. And then, you know, maybe you can think of capital as like 10-year-olds playing soccer. You know, they all sort of just follow the ball around. And they're just, the capital just follows the billion-dollar PDF around the field. It's probably a good excuse to talk about, I don't know how long we'll talk about this topic, probably a long time.
这种联合发布的概念，我猜就是一个十亿美元的PDF，简直就是这种形式的终极表现。而那个以X为主的动态界面就像一个熔炉，我的时间线就是从那里获取的。当然，还有其他地方。但似乎这些概念真的占据了人们的欲望和注意力。也就是说，每个人最终都想在那个动态界面上有一席之地。这是一种奇怪的现象。我希望你能随意谈谈，我想问你关于那时间线的五六个子部分。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
This joint notion of posting, which I guess is a, you know, a billion-dollar PDF is just like the ultimate form of that or something. And the furnace that is the timeline of predominantly X, that's where I get my timeline. There's other places as well. But it seems like these notions have really taken over people's desires and attention. Meaning, like, everyone wants to ultimately have a spot on that timeline. It's a strange phenomenon. I'd love you to just riff on, there's like five or six subcomponents of the timeline that I want to ask you about.
也许我们可以先谈谈你对这种现代奇怪现象的看法。我认为它是技术变革的一个结果。我觉得技术变革实际上是那个统一的推送系统。关于X，人们没有意识到的一点是，每个人每天都会收到相同的500条推文。而且这是针对数以亿计的日活跃用户。对于不发帖的人来说，他们可能没有意识到这点，就是在这些平台上，发布者和潜伏者的比例非常悬殊。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
But maybe to start, just how you're thinking about this strange modern phenomenon. I think it's downstream of technological change. And I think the technological change is really the unifeed. So what people don't appreciate about X is that everyone gets served the same 500 tweets per day. And it's hundreds of millions of daily active users. You know, the thing that people who don't post don't realize is just how many, you know, whatever the poster to lurker ratio on these things is enormous.
因此，如果你不亲自上网查看那些你原本不知道整天在看X的人评论你的内容，就很难真正感受到这种影响。我总是感到惊讶，比如当我发了一条好推文时，有人给我发信息说起这件事，而我完全不知道，他们可能是我非常熟悉的人，但我根本不知道他们整天都在看推特。其实每个人似乎都整天在看推特。而我认为这个统一的信息流，就是这一现象的技术催化剂。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And so it's really hard to feel the impact unless you're actually, like, getting onto the feed and seeing all the people that you didn't know were reading X all day commenting on your thing. I'm always surprised, like, when I post a good tweet and, you know, whoever texts me about it, that I literally had no idea, you know, so it could be someone I know well and I had no idea that they read Twitter all day. But everyone reads Twitter all day. And so the unifeed, I think, is sort of the technological catalyst for this phenomenon.
这就是X，顺便一提。很有趣的是，X有点像是传统的社交网络。虽然它可能永远也达不到其他平台的规模，但它却扮演着一个重要的角色。我觉得有趣的是，差不多20年过去了，它依然比以往任何时候都更重要，几乎成为了全球信息的来源。这意味着每个人都在读同样的东西，它就是全球的报纸。就像30年前人们会谈论期刊的最新文章，现在人们谈论的则是X上的最新推文或文章。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
It is X, by the way. Like, it's interesting how X is sort of, like, it's sort of the Lindy social network. Like, it's just going to, it probably is never going to reach the scale of the others, but it just fills this, like, vital role. And it's interesting to me how it's, like, you know, however long, I'm probably almost 20 years now. And it's still sort of more important than ever, sort of just, just, like, source of truth, almost, for the whole world. And what that means is everyone is reading the same thing. It's the global newspaper, right? And so in the same way that, you know, people would talk about the latest article in the journal 30 years ago, now it's the latest tweet or the latest essay on X.
因此，我认为这造成了一种局面：在资本市场和政治领域，甚至在某些新闻行业、创业和技术领域，世界上所有最重要的人每天早晨都在阅读日报。这些东西确实在形成舆论。它们给证券定价，决定资本的流向，也无疑会撰写政策。因此，有这样一种观点，即另一个很大的筛选因素可能是，你的机构是否能根据时代的节奏生存下去。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And so I think what that creates is that all the sort of most important people in the world, at least when it comes to capital markets and politics and I'm sure some other journalism. Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship. Technology. They're reading their daily paper every morning. And these things really form opinion. And they price securities and they dictate where capital flows and they certainly write policy. And so there's this idea that another great filter, perhaps, is that, like, whether your institution will only survive if it's timeline native.
这句话的意思是它对时间线具有反应性和反身性。具备反应性是指它不断监控时间线，而反身性是指它的行为会影响时间线，然后再解读并对此作出反应。你可以想像一下，白宫显然就是这样的机制。风险投资是这样的，当然公共股票市场也是这样的。这种机制围绕着“故事是什么”这一概念展开，十分有趣。令人觉得有意思且幽默的是，我经常收到关于我在某处提到过的观点的邮件，那就是“发帖是最后的伟大精英制度”。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And what that means is that it is reactive to and reflexive to the timeline. Reactive, meaning that it, you know, is constantly monitoring the timeline and reflexive in that its actions then affect the timeline, which it then sort of reads and reacts to. And you can think of, you know, the White House is obviously like this. Venture capital is like this. Certainly public equities are like this. There's this idea of, like, what is the story? And what's interesting is funny. Like, one of the things I get emails about the most is a comment I made somewhere about how, like, posting is the last great meritocracy.
我收到过一些关于这方面的邮件，因为人们说这让我突然开窍了。我开始不断地发布内容，如果你擅长这件事，发布内容能改变你的生活。这直到今天仍然适用，可能比以往任何时候都要真实。这在某种怪异的方式上算是一种能力至上的体系。现在有算法和人工智能等东西，但在某些方面，它比过去更根据能力来决定成功。就像一切事物一样，这已经有点像彩票机制了。在过去，你必须努力经营并积累大量粉丝，然后仅仅因为有大量粉丝，你发一条无聊的推文也会很受欢迎。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
I get emails about that because people are like, that really clicked in my head. And I start posting and posting changes your life if you're good at it. That's still true today, maybe more true than ever. And it is sort of a meritocracy in a weird way. Now there's the algorithms and AI and all this stuff. But, like, it's still, you know, in some ways, it's a lot more meritocratic than it used to be. Like, everything, it's been a lottery-ified. And so, like, you know, in the old times, you had to, like, sort of grind away and build this huge following. And then by virtue of having a big following, you could post a really inane tweet and it would be very popular.
但现在情况变了。现在你甚至可以是一个新账号，只要写一篇好的帖子，算法可能就会选中你，把你的内容展示给5亿人。就像一个全球性的报纸，每个人都在读，大家都觉得它很有影响力。同时，这也有点像一个元现象：如果你能看到所有有影响力的人对报纸上的文章做出反应，并通过他们的反应让那件事情变得更重要。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
But that doesn't happen anymore. Now you just, you can, you can literally be like a new account and just write a good post and then the algorithm selects you and it'll display you in front of 500 million people. It's sort of this, like, weird thing where you have the global newspaper that everyone reads, that everyone finds highly influential. There's also this, like, this sort of meta thing where it's like the newspaper. If you could see all the influential people reacting to the articles in the newspaper and then by virtue of reacting to it, making the thing more important.
任何人都可以在上面发布内容。人们依然非常低估了时间线对政策制定的影响、有多少投资是通过时间线完成的、有多少商业是基于时间线建立的。我认为，一切都将越来越趋向于“时间线原生”。我认为TPBN是一个很好的例子。而且，现在这个情况下，几乎每隔一天，就有人写关于AI的色情同人小说，并且显著地影响公众市场。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And anyone can post to it. People are still very much underestimating how much policy gets dictated from the timeline, how much venture rounds are done on the timeline, how much businesses are built on the timeline. And I think increasingly everything will just become sort of timeline native. I think TPBN is a great example of this. And certainly, right, like, you know, in this, in, in, when we're recording this, every other day, someone wrote, writes some sort of, you know, pornographic fanfic about AI and it moves the public markets dramatically.
我觉得这又回到了那个“价值十亿美元的PDF”这个想法上。当人们面对不确定性时，他们在寻找一个故事，一个最吸引人的故事。在当今这个信息快节奏传播的时代，人们关注的不是那种经过深思熟虑、大家会讨论一整年的书，而是那些听起来聪明、有吸引力并且具有娱乐性的内容。也许这里有一个改变，就是一个好的帖子必须非常具有娱乐性，因为人们上社交媒体就是为了娱乐。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And so I think, again, it sort of comes back to this billion dollar PDF idea of when there's uncertainty, people are just looking for what is the story? What is the most compelling story? And the way that it works on the timeline is it's not, you know, it's not this well-considered book that comes out that everyone talks about for a year. It's sort of, what is the thing that sounds smart, feels good, is it has to be entertaining. Maybe that's another change is like a good post has to be very entertaining because people are on the timeline to be entertained.
他们可能会自欺欺人，说他们使用这些平台是出于其他原因，但实际上只是为了娱乐。而这显然是算法所选择的方向。因此，就有这样一种想法：最具娱乐性、稍具趣味性、稍微正确的内容，将在日常生活中形成一致的行动和共识。这也影响到了他们的行为。Ramp 是唯一一个旨在让您的财务团队变得更精简、更快速、更优秀的平台，平均每年为企业节省 5% 的成本，以便企业可以专注于增长。使用 Ramp 的客户，其收入增长速度是美国平均企业的 3.2 倍。Visa、Vercel、Cursor、Stripe、Notion、Eleven Lab、Shopify 和其他 70,000 家企业都在使用 Ramp。我们也在使用，您也应该考虑。了解更多信息，请访问 ramp.com/invest。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Like they can lie to themselves and say they're on it for other reasons, but it's just to be entertained. And that's obviously what the algorithms are selecting for. And so there's this idea that like the most entertaining novel, somewhat interesting, somewhat correct thing is going to set the actions and the consensus for everyone on a day-to-day basis. And this translates into their actions. Ramp is the only platform built to make your finance team leaner, faster, and better, saving businesses 5% annually on average so you can stay focused on growth. Ramp customers grew revenue 3.2 times faster than the average American business. Visa, Vercel, Cursor, Stripe, Notion, Eleven Lab, Shopify, and 70,000 other businesses all run on Ramp. Mind us too, and so should yours. Learn more at ramp.com slash invest.
Felix by Rogo 是一个个人财务助手，它可以将一个简单的指令转换成符合您公司模板、背景和标准的完整、可交付给客户的工作成果。您可以发邮件给 Felix，例如，请根据这些评论进行整理，或者让它用这些电子邮件的内容更新我的追踪器。您还可以让它帮您计算买家的支付能力，Felix 会将完成的 PowerPoint 演示文稿、Excel 模型和参考研究快速准确地发送回给您。Felix 以您团队已有的工作方式进行操作，全天候迅速准确地交付工作。更多信息请访问 rogo.ai/felix。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Felix by Rogo is a personal finance agent that turns a single prompt into finished, client-ready work using your firm's own templates, context, and standards. Send Felix an email like, take these comments and turn them for me, or update my tracker with the context of these emails. Or run the ability to pay math on this buyer, and Felix sends back finished PowerPoint decks, Excel models, and sourced research. Felix works the way your team already does, delivering work quickly and accurately around the clock. Learn more at rogo.ai slash Felix.
从 OpenAI 到 Cursor 再到 Perplexity，最优秀的人工智能和软件公司都使用 WorkOS 来实现企业级准备，这个过程不再需要耗费数月，而是可以在一夜之间完成。访问 workos.com 可以跳过那些枯燥无味的基础设施工作，专注于你的产品。 这是否只是为普遍存在的幂律概念提供了助推剂？就像我在我们的节目中注意到的事情之一，以前这些公司之间的差异很小，表现最好的公司比表现最差的公司好一些，但并没有好到惊人的程度。这种情况已经完全改变了。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
The best AI and software companies, from OpenAI to Cursor to Perplexity, use WorkOS to become enterprise-ready overnight, not in months. Visit workos.com to skip the unglamorous infrastructure work and focus on your product. Is this all just jet fuel, fuel in the fire, for the notion of power law in general? Like, one of the things I've noticed in our show is, it used to be that they all, the variance was quite low. The very best one did a bit better, but not a crazy amount better than the worst one in terms of performance. And that has completely changed.
现在似乎有一个门槛，我们今天早上才讨论过，如果突破了这个限制，就感觉好像接管了全世界的思维，并在短时间内吸引了所有人的注意。是的，那些少数突破的事情的影响远远超过其他所有事情的总和。因此，真正重要的是成为其中一个脱颖而出的事物。这样思考时间线是否正确？实际上，重要的就是能成为其中之一。所以你应该尽可能地在你发布和写作的内容上接近这个分布的边缘。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And now there seems to be this threshold, we were just talking about this morning, that if you breach the containment, if you breach this threshold, it literally feels like you have taken over the world's brain. And just shoved everyone's eyes at your thing for a short period of time. Yes. And the impact of those handful of things are so much bigger than all the rest of them combined. And so what you're playing for is really to be just one of these breakout things. And like, that's probably, is that the right way to think about the timeline? And it's like, that actually is all that matters, is that you get one of those. So you should be, you should be living at the edge of the distribution as much as possible in what you're posting about, writing about.
我的意思是，我也不太清楚，一切都只是技术变革的结果。比如说，你的播客以前遵循正态分布，是因为它是通过RSS订阅发布的。但是现在，它通过算法和剪辑来分发，甚至连观看的方式也发生了变化。我敢说，你的大部分观众都在通过YouTube观看或收听，而这是个新的平台。即便你在YouTube上订阅了一个播客，他们也不会按时间顺序展示每一集。所以我觉得这些变化都是技术带来的新的趋势。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
I mean, I don't know, everything's, everything's just downstream of technological change. So the reason, you know, your podcast followed a normal distribution was because it was the technology delivering it was an RSS feed. And now it's an algorithm and it's clips and, and, and I mean, even the method, right? Like I'm sure some obscene amount of your viewers are watching on, watching or listening on YouTube, which is new. And no one, you know, even if you subscribe to a podcast on YouTube, they're not going to show you every single episode in chronological order. So I think this stuff is all just new, just downstream of technology.
我认为内容或听众本身并没有发生变化，只是传递的方式变了。从某种意义上说，或许播客领域相较于YouTube的落后之处在于，播客世界依然对如何迎合算法推送内容缺乏经验。如果你深入了解Twitter群聊，特别是现在他们公开了算法后，你会发现有很多具体的操作细节，比如回复、点赞、内容长度等，这些都是为了迎合算法偏好的数字。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
I don't think it's like something has changed in the content or in the listeners. It's just how it's delivered. And, you know, in that sense, maybe one world where the podcast world sort of lags behind the YouTube world is that the podcast world is still sort of highly naive to serving content to the algorithm. Like, you know, if you get deep into the like Twitter group chats, especially now that they've posted the algorithm, like there are all these like very specific things that you can do around replies and likes and length and all these like ultimately notes. Numbers that the algorithm is selecting for.
我想说，像主播和在 YouTube 上做视频的人肯定明白这些。而对于播客来说，它们可能显得有些随机，因为播客还没有完全理解，就像我们正在录制这个视频让大型语言模型（LLM）来审查并决定展示给观众什么。之后，观众才会决定是否喜欢它。但我们往往忽视了这个最初的筛选过程，而事实上确实是这样。你觉得这让人感到压力大吗？或者感觉非常像反乌托邦？
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And, you know, I would say like streamers and people on YouTube and stuff certainly understand that. And, and podcasts, I think maybe the reason it feels a little bit random is because podcasts still like really aren't into the meat of understanding that like we are recording this video for a LLM to review and decide what it wants to show people. And then people will decide if they like it or not. But like that first filter, we don't really think about, but that is the case. Does that stress you out? Does that feel like deeply dystopian?
我常听到很多人感慨书籍的消亡，说人们不再读书了。这让我感到很有趣，因为我自己读过很多书，我也喜欢书。在我生命中有很大一部分时间都花在阅读上。不过，对我来说，大家那么感慨书籍的消逝，我感受不到那么严重的危机。或许注意力不集中的问题是真的存在，比如对我来说，专心去读一本书确实比以前难了。但我觉得，诸如访谈和其他我阅读或接触的东西，总体上也挺好。我并不觉得因为书变得更难读了，就没有兴趣了。我反而觉得这些其他资源也同样滋养了我。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
I hear a lot of lamentation over the death of books. People don't read anymore. And it's so interesting to me because I, I just, you know, I've read a lot of books. I like books. Um, I've spent a good portion of my life reading books, but it doesn't, I don't know. I, it doesn't really bother me that people, I don't see the big crisis that everyone laments about with books. I mean, the attention span thing maybe is, is true. Like it's certainly way harder for me to read a book just on a pure like focus, but I feel like the sum total of the interviews that I listened to and the things that I read and all this stuff are great. And like, I, I don't think I don't have an appetite for books just because they're harder to read. I think I'm like feeling nourished from the other sources.
这很有趣，对吧？因为，你知道，如果你考虑一下，比如色情片，它显然是有害的，因为人们不进行实际的性行为，而是观看色情片。这很明显，性行为比观看色情片更好。这似乎是显而易见的，但人们却会把它和书籍相提并论。在我看来，把书籍放在一起有点像在为一种科技的消亡而哀唱。书籍曾经是传播信息的最佳方式，但现在有了新的、更引人入胜的方法。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And it's interesting, right? Cause like, you know, if you think about, uh, like, like porn, it's like more obviously bad because like people don't have sex and they watch. Porn and it's like fairly straightforward that sex is better than porn. And it's like, that seems like an obvious thing, but like the people will hold that up right next to books. And I don't know, like to me, the book thing feels a little bit like a swan song for, you know, a technology that, um, you know, there will still be a place for, uh, but like it was the best way we had of delivering information. And now there's new ways and they're, they're, they're more compelling and more interesting.
你知道，你当然要提醒一点，我对语言非常敏感，也注意我们使用的词汇，比如说“终端在线脑腐”。我们意识到这些是关于死亡、腐烂和毁灭的词，非常消极和虚无主义的。因此，我们确实需要平衡一下，因为我们并没有选择这些活动的中性或积极的术语。我认为，没有人会把多读书这类事情自我理解为一种非常消极的事情。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
You know, you have to caveat that of course, with like, I'm very sensitive to language and you know, the terms that we use like terminally online brain rot. Like we, we recognize like these are terms of death and, and, and, and rotting and, and like destruction and, uh, very negative nihilistic terms. And so, you know, you do have to balance that with like, we didn't call it like, uh, we didn't pick neutral or positive terms for these activities. Um, and I don't think ever anyone ever like would, you know, self-conceive of reading a lot of books as being this like very negative thing.
所以反方观点是，我们实际上有一种深刻的感觉，认为这是不好的。我认为，就像任何事情一样，它变得不太宽容。所以如果你非常有纪律和动力，那么你使用新媒体的方式比以往任何时候都要好。但如果你没有这些品质，那么结果可能会比以往任何时候都糟糕。你提到白宫时，我肯定这是第一个完全适应时间线并具备反应能力的白宫。是的，我认为这是第一个现代化的政府，不论是好是坏。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
So the counter argument would be that, no, actually we have this deep sense that, that it is bad. Um, and I think maybe like everything it's, it's just less forgiving. So if you're highly disciplined and motivated, um, the way that you can use new media is better than ever. But if you're not, then it's just going to be worse than ever. You mentioned the white house as I'm certainly, this is the first white house that feels completely timeline native and reactive. Yes. I think it's the first modern administration for better, for worse.
好的。这还意味着什么呢？在这种情况下，“现代”除了与时间轴原生相关外，还意味着什么呢？它只是对时间轴高度反应灵敏和反思。我认为它是超敏感的，可能就像过去的政府会对民意调查上瘾一样。我认为它更关注时间轴，而不是民意调查，后者完全在于理解中间派、普通人的愿望和需求。但时间轴其实是转向一种更偏共和党的模式，你关注的是几十万有影响力的人。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Yeah. What else does that mean? What else does modern mean in that context other than timeline native? It's just highly reactive and reflective to the timeline. Um, I think it's hyper aware, you know, maybe in the same way that past administrations would be sort of addicted to polling. I think it looks more at the timeline than, than polling, which is all about understanding the wants and desires of the, the median, the average person. But the timeline is actually, it sort of shifts back to a more Republican model, which is that you're caring about whatever it is, a few hundred thousand people who are influential.
本·萨斯是前参议员，他有个很有趣的观点，他觉得现在华盛顿的政治人物大多想成为像TikTok和YouTube明星这样的公众人物，而不是真正关注治理。他对此表示谴责，因为我们本来希望国会议员和参议员主要应该对治理感兴趣。然而，现实并非如此。不过我现在开始意识到另一个可能的转变，那就是政府或者可能是民意调查在引导治理方向。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And, um, you know, uh, uh, Ben Sass, the, uh, the, um, the, the former Senator, uh, has this great notion that Washington is now mostly people who want to be, uh, like TikTok and YouTube stars is like mostly what congressmen and senators want to be. And, uh, he condemns it, which is true from some very simple sense, which is, you would hope that like congressmen and senators primarily interested in governance. Um, but they're not, but on the other hand, like, I think maybe a shift of this that I'm only just putting together now is like government or maybe, uh, polling drives governance.
如果你主要关注的是时间线，你可以这样理解：现在在政治领域表现出色的人，其实就是优质内容的创造者。他们基本上是内容创作者，因为民意调查就是时间线的缩影。这一点很有趣，因为究竟是谁出现在时间线上呢？读者可能更能代表国家中等水平的群体，但那些发布内容并左右时间线看法的人，其实只是一个非常小的群体。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Whereas if you're really only pulling the timeline, you can sort of think about it as this is why, you know, we have the people who do well in politics now are just optimized for content. They're basically content creators because the polling is the timeline. And that's interesting again, because who is on the timeline? Uh, I mean, the readers is probably more of an, like, uh, uh, an accurate sample of the, the median people in the country, but the posters who are dictating what the timeline thinks of something is a really, really small group.
嗯，可以这样说吧，原本的投票主体像是白人男性地主，而现在在政策上产生影响的人群可能是那些在社交媒体上发帖积极的人。我不确定这是好事还是坏事，但这显然是一个非常不同的群体，我觉得它不一定与任何特定的社会人口特征紧密相关。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Um, and so it's almost just like, you know, if the, uh, if the original sort of vision for who voted was, um, you know, white male landowners, maybe the vision or the, the version of people who matter for policy now are, are just the good posters, which is like, I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but it's, it's certainly a very different group. That I don't think correlates super tightly to any particular demographic trait necessarily.
你和许多优秀的发帖者是朋友。那到底是什么造就了一个优秀的发帖者呢？其实，我觉得这跟写作有些相似。通常来说，可能需要有一点内心的纠结，或者生活中有些不如意的地方。就像我们通常想到漫画创作者一样。也许发帖就像是作家和喜剧演员的结合。发帖确实需要具备喜剧元素，你需要能够创造出能够引起共鸣的小段子，这种段子像是瞬间的能量释放，以一种有趣的方式表达出来。这好比是一种喜剧、诗歌和写作的混合体。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
You're friends with many or most of the great posters. What makes a great poster? You know, I think it's not that dissimilar to writing. And so I do think that like being a little bit tortured, having a bit of a, like messed up personal life, just in general, you can think of the idea of comics or something. Yeah. And maybe posting is a little bit like, uh, a writer mixed with a comedian or something like that. Certainly has the comedic element of, you need to sort of have a riff that resonates and it's sort of this like instant hit. It's phrased in an interesting way. There's sort of like a blend of like comedy, poetry and writing.
你曾经用过一个有趣的说法：我们正处于“巅峰之人”的阶段。你觉得我们真的是这样吗？这是什么意思？我认为我们确实处于这个阶段。很难说从哪里开始这个话题。在异教信仰中，上帝被认为是无处不在的，一切事物都被神灵所主宰和控制。然后在文艺复兴时期，人们可以说上帝居住在云层之上，好像有一个可以对话的人在那里。随着我们对云层之外的探索，我们发现那里并没有什么“人”。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Do you think we're at, you've used this funny phrase before, uh, that we're at peak guy. What does that mean? I think we are at peak guy. It's hard to say where to start this. There's a pagan understanding of God as being like in and around you everywhere. Everything is animated. Everything is controlled and dictated by the gods. And then in the Renaissance, you could say that God lives above the clouds, but there's like a guy up there that you can talk to. And then when we discover what's past the clouds, we go, okay, well, there's no guy up there.
然后我们发现了空间。所以基本上，你必须继续想，好吧，也许他超越了空间。并且，也许我们不知道它是否还是一个"他"，或者说不是一个具体的人，可以与你交流，而是一个概念性的存在。上帝就这样变得越来越遥远，越来越抽象。但关键是，自从我们变成一个无神论的社会以来，我们一直在寻找一些可以仰望和崇拜的东西。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And then we discover space. And so basically you have to just keep going, well, okay, like maybe he's beyond space. And, uh, maybe we don't know that it's a guy anymore, uh, or like a distinct person or something, uh, that you could address and talk to, but it's this conceptual thing. God just sort of like moves farther and farther away and becomes more and more conceptual. But the idea is that like, ever since we've sort of become an atheist society, we've been looking for things to sort of look up to and worship.
现在说每个人都必须崇拜某种东西有点陈词滥调。也许更准确的说法是，社会中总是需要类似“牧师”的角色，而我们一直在寻找新的“牧师”。我们曾尝试把科学家当作“牧师”，但科学的项目似乎有点崩溃了。这是一个被广泛讨论的话题。我们曾希望物理学能为我们提供意义，但它却没有。自战争以来，物理学基本上停滞不前。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
It's sort of trite now to say that like everyone has to worship or whatever. I think maybe like the more precise thing would be that, um, the, there's always a role for a priest in society and we've been looking for new priests. And I think we tried scientists as priests, but sort of the scientific project has fallen apart a little bit. Um, this is a widely discussed. We looked to physics as hopefully going to provide us meaning. It hasn't. Physics has largely stalled since the war.
我认为我们已经超越了将科学视为意义来源的阶段。我觉得，如今我们将那些亿万富翁看作新的意义来源。在表面上，花那么多时间去关注亿万富翁对物理学、神学、健康或与积累财富无关的话题的看法似乎并不合逻辑。但我认为，我们这样做的原因是，因为这些亿万富翁已经成为我们新的“祭司阶层”，也就是说，我们认定在我们的社会中，成功的商业是最重要的价值。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And so I think we've moved beyond science as a source of meaning. And so I think like there's this billionaire class that we've sort of looked to as the new sources of meaning. Like, like on its surface, it doesn't make a lot of sense that we would spend so much time caring about what billionaires think about whatever physics or theology or health or topics unrelated to accruing a billion dollars. But the reason we do, I think is this is our new priestly class, which is we've said, okay, you know, the, the values that are important in our society are being successful at business.
要在商业上取得成功，一般来说，你必须聪明且努力工作。因此，这些人在我们的价值体系中被视为达到了最高的敬仰境界。因此，我们会倾听他们的建议。我们愿意接受那些可能是亿万富翁或接近亿万富翁阶层的人的科学和医学建议，他们代表了一个新兴的阶层。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And to be successful at business, you generally have to be smart and hardworking. And so these are the people that have ascended to the highest realm of piety in our value system. And so we're going to listen to them. We were willing to like take scientific and medical advice from, I would say, people who are either in the billionaire class or are adjacent to the billionaire class, which is the poster class, which is like the new class, I think.
所以，“厌倦亿万富翁”这个想法是这样的：我觉得我们已经受够了对亿万富翁的崇拜。原因之一是他们不再那么稀有。在过去的20年里，亿万富翁的数量（至少是那种思维状态下的亿万富翁）大概增加了一百倍，可能还不止。我们曾希望他们能为我们提供解决方案，但这种期待并没有得到满足。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And so the, the peak guy thing is like this idea that I think we've had enough of the billionaire. There's basically been a lot of billionaire worship. Part of it is that they've gotten way less scarce. I think billionaires, at least like sort of state of mind billionaires have probably grown a hundred X in the last 20 years, probably more. We sort of look to them to provide us these answers and it has not been satisfying.
我认为，这种“我想听所有关于这个亿万富翁的播客，并研究他的日常习惯和观点”的想法，已经到了一个饱和点。同时，我觉得还有一个新的观念，就是金钱的影响力似乎不如从前那么强大。在我们的政治环境中，金主阶层的影响力并没有以前那么显著，至少不像我们之前所想的那样显眼。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And so, you know, I think this notion that like, I want to catch every podcast with this billionaire and I'm going to study his routines and habits and care about what he thinks about these things has come to its like full saturation. I think there's also this like secondary idea, which is that money, I think we've just seen is not as powerful as we maybe, maybe it once was, or we, or we think it is insofar as, you know, certainly our political landscape, we have not seen the donor class be nearly as successful as they maybe used to be, or we thought they were.
如果你是亿万富翁，你在可以做的事情上其实受到很多限制，对比之下，一个非洲军阀甚至历史上的一些贵族都可能有更多的行动自由。所以可能存在三种力量在减少成为亿万富翁的意义。首先是通货膨胀，使得亿万富翁的价值在下降；其次是社会权力结构的演变，限制了他们的权力，比如安德鲁·卡内基曾经可以对抗工人，但现在如果一个亿万富翁在网上发布不当言论甚至可能被迫辞职。因此，这个阶层整体上似乎变得不那么重要了。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
If you're a billionaire, you're sort of quite limited on the things that you can do vis-a-vis like an African warlord or even, you know, certainly a upper baron. Right. And so maybe there's these sort of like three forces of inflation is sort of driving down what it means to be a billionaire at all. And then the evolution of like power structures in society are also limiting, like Andrew Carnegie could take up arms against his workers. But like now if you, if you like post the wrong thing as a, as like a billionaire, you have to resign. And so like, there's a sense that this whole class has just become less important.
然后我也觉得，现在媒体和播客领域已经非常饱和。你了解的东西已经很多了，你能理解这些事情。但是我们不再想从亿万富翁那里获取人生建议，也不想再听他们谈论正在发生的事情。因此，我会说整个领域都感觉非常饱和。我觉得如今在播客中从某个新的亿万富翁那里学到非常有趣的东西的可能性不大。而这在大约六年前并不是如此。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And then I also think, look, like just the media and podcasts, it's just saturated. There's just, you, you, you get it, you, you understand this thing. But we, but we don't want to take life advice. We don't want to hear about what's happening from, from the billionaire class anymore. And so I would say that like that whole set just feels very saturated. It feels unlikely that there's a marginal billionaire that I'm going to learn something very interesting from on a podcast. And I don't think that was the case like six years ago.
因此，合乎逻辑的问题是，下一个重要的群体是什么？当我们寻找下一批“精神领袖”时，好像在摸索。我认为，这个群体就是“信息发布者”（比如社交媒体上的活跃意见领袖）。可以看到，亿万富翁阶级对这些“信息发布者”有一些敬重和顺从。一个明显的例子就是，科学家群体接替了过去的神职人员成为社会的指导者。而通过观察哪个群体对下一个群体表现出服从，就能看出下一个重要群体是谁。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And so the logical question is like, what is the next class? As we sort of flail around looking for our next set of priests. And I look, I think, I think it's the poster. And, and I think you can see this because I think the billionaire class is a little bit deferential to the poster. And so like one very clear way is the science class sort of inherited the priests, the priesthood after the actual priests. And then you can always look which class is subservient to the next to see who's next.
科学课似乎变得服从于亿万富翁阶层。这无疑是埃普斯坦事件给我们的教训，对吧？所有科学家都围绕着金钱和魅力。而现在我认为亿万富翁阶层也变得服从于“网红”阶层。所以，我觉得你可以看到大家在选择社会偶像时的倾向，好像在说：“好吧，这就是我愿意花两小时听讲，并以此为生活基础的人。”至于为什么说他们服从于“网红”呢？
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And like the science class becomes subservient to the billionaire class. This is certainly the, the Epstein lesson, right? Which is all the scientists are clamoring around the sort of money and glamour. And that now I think the billionaire class has become subservient to the posting class. And so, so I think you can sort of see who society collectively chooses to be like, all right, this is the guy I want to listen to for two hours. And, you know, base my life on subservient to the poster class evidenced how, why do you say they're subservient to the posters?
我前一段时间参加了一个活动，那里聚集了一群亿万富翁投资者，他们都在争着坐在泰勒·科恩旁边，因为他是那里最有趣的人。是的，每个房间都有一个「老大」。你最好弄清楚「老大」是谁。没错，我觉得这个想法很有道理，就那么简单。还有一种从属的关系线。有趣的是，这同时也说明了一个关于稀缺性的道理，一如既往。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
I was at this thing a while ago and it was a bunch of billionaire investors and they were all fighting over who could sit next to Tyler Cowen because he's the most interesting person there. Yeah. Every room has a boss. Every room has a boss. You better know who it is. Yeah, exactly. And I think, I think there's, there's very much something to that. It's sort of that simple. And, uh, there's sort of this line of subservience. There's also this interesting point about, it's just scarcity like always.
亿万富翁的增加可能会导致他们的衰落。 如果有太多的亿万富翁，比如格兰特·卡尔登是亿万富翁，埃隆·马斯克也是，这就显得很荒谬。因此，我们可能需要重新定义最高层的阶级，而不是简单地以“十亿富翁”为标准。这并不重要，我们需要用其他标准来区分，比如重新定义前100名。现在看来，亿万富翁实在是太多了。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And the billionaire inflation thing is the seat of their demise. That if there's so many billionaires, if, you know, Grant Cardone is a billionaire and so is Elon Musk or something, it just makes it so stupid. And so we either need a new class at the top and it's not Deco or sent a billionaire. Like that doesn't, who cares? It's like something else that distinguishes, we need to like reclassify the top 100 or something, Robert Barron's. But yeah, it just seems like there's too many of them.
所以没有人在乎，所以我也不再关心。这似乎比在别人心中或社交媒体上获得影响力还要容易赚到十亿美元。而且，如果我可以通过命令实现这一点，那将是成为一位流动通胀调整后的亿万富翁。我认为这个数字可能没有太大变化。但我总觉得，用这种回顾性历史视角来看问题非常有用。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
So no one, so I don't care anymore. And it's, it seems much easier to get a billion dollars than it does to gain the real estate in people's minds or on the timeline that like the top couple of posters can do. And if I could just have it by decree, it would be who is a liquid inflation adjusted billionaire. I think that number probably hasn't changed a whole lot. But again, I think I always find it so useful to take this sort of like retrospective historic frame.
净资产就像一个全新的概念。 这是一个非常新的概念。如果你读《傲慢与偏见》，关于达西先生，他们总是在谈论这些男人多么富有。达西先生被描述成每年从他的庄园获得1万英镑的收入。这就是他的财富，这就是他的现金流。有趣的是，没有人在小说里有一个具体场景去给达西先生做折现现金流（DCF）计算。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Net worth is like this new idea. It's like a really new idea. If you read like Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy, like, you know, they're talking about how wealthy all the men are. Mr. Darcy is discussed as getting 10,000 pounds a year from his estate. That's his wealth. It's his cash flow. And it's funny, like no one, there's not like a scene. No one did a DCF or Richard Darcy?
是啊，在《傲慢与偏见》里并没有这样的场景，比如：他有没有抵押他的地产去贷款？而且也没有那种想法，说他的地产值20万，因为他从不会卖掉他的地产。地产并不被视作他的资产。这就像是排行榜上的概念得分，因为你根本没法拿来花。我觉得这样说可能有点俗，但成为亿万富翁更多的是一种心态。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Yeah, there's not like a scene in Pride and Prejudice where they're like, does he have a lot of margin loan against his estate? And there's also not this idea of, well, okay, his estate's worth, you know, whatever, 200,000 because he would never sell his estate. It's like, why would you, it's not viewed as his assets. So it's just like wholly conceptual just points on a leaderboard, like truly, because you can't spend it. I really think it's kind of crass to say, but billionaire is like a state of mind.
在如今的私人市场和净资产的概念中，加上通货膨胀，"亿万富翁"已经变成了一个可以被轻松贴上的标签。我认为，你会发现"亿万富翁"有点像一个政治标签，与实际财富状况只有一点关系。现在很多时候，人们会被称为"亿万富翁"，即使他们并不怎么富有，只是具备某些特点和关联。所以我觉得这个词语有点像以前的"百万富翁"。过去"百万富翁"曾经有和如今"亿万富翁"相似的分量，但现在这个词有点变得无足轻重。当你称某人为百万富翁时，也许只是在说他们属于上中产阶级。这样的人算是生活富裕，有一个房子，但不重要的是他们到底有五百万美元还是八十万美元。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Between like private markets and net worth as a concept and then inflation, billionaire is now sort of like something you can just be dubbed. I think you'll come to see billionaire as sort of this like sort of political label that's only tangentially related. I mean, you see this on the timeline a lot, which is people get referred to as billionaire who are, you know, not rich at all, but they sort of have these traits and associations. And so I think this term, it's sort of a millionaire, right? Like millionaire. No one says that anymore. Yeah. And it used to be, it used to sort of carry the same weight as billionaire, but now millionaire is sort of just this like, it's, it's, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's both irrelevant, but it also like what it, when you say someone's a millionaire, you're sort of just saying they're like a, you know, whatever upper middle class. It's a well-to-do person with a house, but it doesn't matter if they have $5 million or $800,000.
这就像一种更宽松的阶级现象，可能是因为货币贬值了，无论是字面意义上的贬值，还是在它所能实现的功能方面的贬值。时间是固定不变的，对吧？因此，新的稀缺性就变成了你能在屏幕上吸引的注意力。如果你考虑今天最有趣的发帖者，我不是要你支持他们中的任何一方，而是想让你想象你认为最有趣的人。嗯，谁会想起来呢？这里的区别在于，有些人我会想开推特通知，因为我觉得他们每一条帖子都很棒，这样的人其实少之又少。另外，还有一些非常好的发帖者因为他们频繁发布内容而出名。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
It's like this looser class thing as maybe the currency gets devalued both in terms of in the literal sense and also in the sort of what you can do with it sense. I mean, time is fixed, right? And so then the new scarcity is just like attention you can draw on the, on the screen. If you think about the most interesting posters today, I'm not asking you to endorse them one way or the other, but just the people that you think are the most interesting. Yeah. Who comes to mind? The distinction to draw is there are, um, there are the, the people that I want to get tweet notifications for, because I actually think each one of their posts is really good. And that's like a vanishingly small number. And then there are good posters who have really made something of themselves because of their prolificness.
我的意思是，发帖的另一个问题在于，它依然奖励了多产性，这是我坚决反对的。我一直认为 Twitter 应该以“追随者数量除以帖子数量”来决定影响力，但事实并非如此。它只是在奖励多产性。我认为有一种看法认为，最重要的媒体内容没人看，最重要的作者没人读，最重要的哲学家无人理解，最重要的股票没有基本面。在一个充满法定货币的世界里，一切似乎都变成了这种奇怪的“法定”现象。这对哲学家和作者来说尤其如此，比如，有人真的去读这些作者写的书吗？我不这么认为。我觉得只有少量的意见领袖会阅读这些书，而其他人则把书看作偶像。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
I mean, the, the, the other sort of problem with posting is like, it still does reward prolificness, which I am still sternly against. I always think Twitter should be dictated by followers divided by posts, but that's not how it works. It just rewards prolificness. I think there's this idea that like the most important media property won't be watched. The most important author isn't read. The most important philosopher is not understood. The, the most important stock has no fundamentals. Like everything, I think like in a world of fiat currency, everything sort of becomes this like weird fiat thing. Certainly it's true about philosophers, authors, like, does anyone really read the books these authors write? I don't think so. I think a small amount of tastemakers read the books and then other people look at books as idols.
如果某件事情得到了某些重要人物的认可，就会产生一种模仿性的庆祝效果。即使是播客，就像你说的那样，剪辑往往比整个播客节目传播得更好。我自信自己可以通过某种方式判断出一个播客、博客文章或书籍是否优秀，而不必真的去读完它。我能通过某些反馈感觉到哪些节目受欢迎，而不需要去听它们。在某种程度上，这就是事情的本质。你可以想象有一个世界，人们只看到了几个播客的片段，而没有人真正去听那个播客完整的内容。但我并不认为这会降低这个节目的价值。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And if they're like sort of blessed by the right people, then there's sort of this like mimetic celebration of the thing. And even podcasts, like you said, right? Like clips do a lot better than the podcast episode. Like I, I, I think I pride myself. Like I can tell if a podcast or a blog essay or a book or something is good or not without having read it just by like sort of triangulating it. Like, I, I know which one of your episodes do well without listening to them because I can sort of like feel from the reception and, and like, to some extent that is the thing. Like you can imagine a world where there's a few clips from a podcast, but no one ever listens to the podcast. But like, I don't actually think that would diminish the value of the property.
这就像一切都在被加工和包装以吸引注意力，但又尽量少占用人们的时间。是的。我听到了一个有趣的故事，关于一个有X百万粉丝或所谓读者的出版物，不管他们怎么描述。背后的人告诉我，其中大约95%的读者其实只是像在Instagram上快速浏览那些引文亮点或类似的东西。他们仍然算是读者。这对我来说真的很让人沮丧，因为整个发布和内容的世界都围绕这种单一的时间轴重新规划，而他们都在迎合它所需的东西。但这是一个你不得不参与的游戏。我很好奇，我知道你经历过，比如说六个月之类的时间，完全不参与这些，你就这样消失了。那种感觉怎么样？你会鼓励人们尝试选择退出这种状态吗？
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
It's like everything is being processed and packaged for catching attention, but taking the least amount of that person's time. Yeah. I heard this interesting story about a publication that has X millions of followers or whatever readers, however they describe it. And the person behind it told me like something like 95% of the readers are people that scroll through like the quote highlights on Instagram or something and whatever. There's still a reader and it's just a fascinating, it's to me, it's all quite depressing that we're all the world of posters and content has reoriented around this, this monolithic timeline and they're all just feeding it what it wants. But that's the game you sort of have to play. And I'm curious, I know you went, I don't know, six months or something completely off of it. Like you just, you just disappeared. What was that like? And is that a path that you would encourage people to give a try opting out?
我认为从中得到的结论是，人们不应该自欺欺人地认为自己在消费媒体时追求的不是娱乐。因为这些内容都是以娱乐为目的而制作、筛选和编辑的，其在屏幕上的任务就是让你感到愉悦。因此，我认为这就是一个重要的教训：我不会告诉别人他们生活中应该有多少娱乐，但本质上就是这样。劳力士或耐克可能会让你相信他们的产品是投资或资产而非负担，因此你会花更多的钱去购买它们。同样，播客、帖子和文章也可以让你相信自己所读的内容对你有用、富有成效，比整天看电视更有意义。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
I think my takeaway from that would simply be that one should not fool themselves that they are looking for anything other than entertainment in all the media that they consume. Because it is produced to be entertaining, it's selected to be entertaining, it's edited to be entertaining. The job to be done of what is on the screen is to entertain you. And so I think that is the big lesson, which is like, look, like I'm not going to tell people how much entertainment they should have in their life. But that is what it is fundamentally. Rolex or Nike can convince you that their thing is an investment or an asset versus a liability. And so then you'll spend way more money on it. Podcasts and posts and essays can convince you that what you're reading is useful for you and like productive and anything other than watching TV all day.
无论我每天想在时间线上花一个小时还是八个小时，这其实跟我想得到多少娱乐有关。除此之外，我想说的其他事情都相对平淡，因为如果你不是一个完全与世隔绝的人，你其实不会错过什么重要的事情。最“开明”的方式可能是自己不去阅读这些媒体内容，而是通过身边的人在聚餐时、午餐时的分享来获取信息，让他们先接触这些信息，然后再告诉你哪些是有趣的。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Whether I want to spend an hour a day on the timeline or eight hours a day on the timeline is just about like how much do I want to be entertained. And, you know, anything else that I would say about it, I think is, is, is fairly, fairly milquetoast in the sense that like, yeah, it doesn't, you don't really miss anything. If you're like a relative, if you're not a complete hermit, like you hear about what's important, it gets filtered through you. Probably the most like enlightened way to consume this media is to not read it yourself and just sort of get the filtered takes from people around you at dinners and lunches and stuff. And you just sort of let them, you know, first of all, expose themselves to the radiation and then like kind of come back and tell you what's, what's interesting or not on there.
我们的朋友杰西是这样想的。他在生活中拒绝使用任何算法。我们就问他，那你怎么知道包括新闻在内的信息呢，这些都是算法。他说，人们会告诉你。我认为这就是我的收获：自由和影响力之间的取舍问题。你认为这种取舍是真实存在的吗？我觉得它确实存在。我感兴趣的问题之一是，似乎在各种类型、风格或模式中，总有这样一种人，但这种人似乎已经基本灭绝了。不幸的是，这可能只是因为技术的发展，这样的解释虽无趣，但可能准确。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Our friend Jesse thinks about it this way. He refuses any algorithm in his life. And we were like, well, how do you know it's including news, which is just an algorithm. It's like, how do you know what's going on? He said, well, people tell you. Yeah, that would be my takeaway. The freedom versus impact question. Do you believe that trade-off's real? I think it's real. One of the questions I'm interested in is there seems to be, I'm always interested in this in various classes of guys, archetypes, genres, whatever. And there seems to have been this type of person that's largely gone extinct, which is, and again, unfortunately, I think this is probably all just explained away by technology, which is sort of a boring, but maybe accurate explanation.
就像西奥多·罗斯福或安德鲁·卡内基这样的人，他们能够花很多时间在休闲上，远离自己的生意。比如，对于卡内基来说，有趣的是，他可能还是有史以来最富有的人，或者至少接近最富有。但我对于这样的想法感到非常着迷：这真的是真的吗？比如说，你必须每天工作22个小时才能取得这些改变世界的成就，这种观念真的正确吗？
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
But like the Theodore Roosevelt's or the Andrew Carnegie's of the world who are able to spend a lot of their time in leisure, a lot of time away from their business. And, you know, what's so interesting, like for Carnegie, for example, is, you know, he's arguably still the richest person or very close to the richest person that's ever lived. But I'm fascinated by this idea of like, is that necessarily true? Like, does the idea that you have to be working, you know, 22 hours a day to get these sort of world-changing outcomes, is that necessarily true?
我觉得这段话的意思是，像拉里·埃里森（Larry Ellison）这样的现代人物很有趣，他似乎有些不走寻常路。他声称自己创建甲骨文（Oracle）的初衷就是为了能够随时消失两周去航海之类的，而实际上他确实也是时不时地出现或消失。那么，你还能在不全天候在线的情况下成为商业领袖吗？美国总统不可能失联一个月，但在商业领域也是如此吗？我也不确定。有时候大量的努力工作是不是只是一种表现？
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Like, I think it's interesting of like, I think Larry Ellison is like the contemporary figure who sort of bucks this trend. And, you know, he claims to have started Oracle very much with the intention of being able to disappear for two weeks to sail or whatever, and still by all accounts sort of like drops in and drops out. And can you still be a player and not be like jacked in 24-7? It's unfathomable that the president of the United States could be off the grid for a month. But is that true in business? I don't know. Is a lot of hard work performative?
也许在卡内基的例子中，这很有趣，因为他一生都对自己加入这种社会感到自觉，也许就像在他那个时代的展示人物一样。他知道对于他来说，光有钱是不够的，他想要被社会接受，想成为有学问的人，想要写作和从事相关的事情。而且，从这种意义上说，世上并无新事。我坚信这样的看法：最终的状态就像是在展示自我。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Maybe in the case of Carnegie, it's interesting because he was self-conscious his whole life about joining this sort of society, maybe at the posters of his day. Like, he knew that for him money wasn't going to be enough and he wanted to be accepted into society and be well-read and be a man of letters and do writing and stuff. And, you know, in that sense, like, there's nothing new under the sun. You know, I firmly believe this to be true that, like, the end state is just posting.
就像很多亿万富翁和公司创始人在积累了财富之后，开始频繁使用Twitter，或开设播客，又或者购买媒体公司。也可能开一个YouTube频道，甚至成立影视公司。这似乎成了他们最终的归宿。我认为，可以从两个角度来解读这一现象：一是，当你积累到一定财富后，就想要积累名声；另一种看法是，财富的价值在减少，而你实际上意识到真正稀缺的资源是关注度和影响力。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Like, the amount of billionaires and founders who turn to Twitter after they accrue their wealth or start a podcast. Or buy a media business. Start a, yeah. Start a YouTube channel. Sort of film company. Yeah. It's just like, it sort of is the end state. And I think, you know, one way that you could look at that is just that once you accrue wealth, you want to accrue fame. The other way of looking at it would be that, again, like, wealth is less valuable and you actually realize that the scarce asset is attention and influence.
因此，你知道，你几乎是在对抗你的钱迅速贬值的趋势，试图转向那些真正稀缺的东西。我觉得非常有趣的是，你我所认识的那些我们最感兴趣的七八个人，他们不是那种喜欢发帖的人。这种情况有点有趣的对立，他们似乎抵制了这种诱惑或者类似的东西。这让我想知道这是否有点像个陷阱。但这个概念很有趣，就是你提到的努力工作是表演性质的这个说法。其实这让我思考努力工作是否具有表演性质，以及在我们谈过很多次的AI和职位流失问题上，你是怎么看待的。我个人对此非常感兴趣。而且似乎人们围绕反对AI恐惧感所团结的问题是，它将以一种以往技术变革没有做到的方式摧毁工作，因为AI的应用太过普遍。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And so, you know, you're almost hedging against the sort of, you know, rapidly devaluing nature of your money and trying to switch to what is actually scarce. I find it very interesting that, call it, the seven or eight people that you and I know that we're most interested in are not posters. There's sort of some interesting opposite. And, like, they've resisted the temptation or something like that. And that makes me wonder if it's almost like a trap. But it's such an interesting concept that hard work is performative is the phrase you used. It actually makes me wonder that hard work being performative thing, how you're thinking about this AI and job displacement question, which you and I have talked about a bunch about. I'm super personally interested in. And it seems to be the, like, the issue around which people are rallying for the anti-AI fears is that it's going to destroy jobs in a way that prior technology changes didn't because it's so ubiquitous.
这是一种智能技术，而且发展速度非常快，即便与之前的技术变革相比——那些变革也曾导致工作岗位的消失或变化——但它们的变化过程更为缓慢。这正是为什么这次变化让人感到恐惧的原因。它引发了关于现代意义上的工作尤其是白领工作的一些问题。我想知道你对人工智能和工作岗位流失有什么看法。对短期到中期的预测很难做，而且结果可能不太乐观。你知道，我有个朋友，他有正在上大学的孩子，还有一个10岁的孩子，他对上大学的孩子非常担心，但对10岁的孩子并不担忧。我认为这种担忧的方向是有道理的。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
It's intelligence and it's moving so fast that even if you compare it to prior tech changes, which all displaced jobs or changed jobs or whatever, it happened more slowly. And that's why this one's so scary. But it gets at questions about what is work really in the modern sense, especially white-collar work. I'm curious what you think is going to, how you're thinking about, like, AI and job displacement. The short to medium term prognosis is hard to speculate on and could very well be bad. You know, a friend of mine told me that, you know, he has kids in college and he has a 10-year-old and he's very worried about the kids in college, but not the 10-year-old. And I think that is directionally correct.
从一个10岁小孩的视角来看，我觉得这很棒。首先，任何可以自动化的东西就应该被自动化。当你真的仔细思考这个问题时，很难反驳这一点。所以，对我来说，想到我的人生可能处于最后几年，在这期间我还需要坐在电脑前处理事务，真的让我感到非常解放。我不太理解那种关于“工作岗位已经饱和”或“我们即将没有工作机会”的想法。对我来说，很明显，每一个，尤其是白领的工作在某种程度上都是“虚构的”，只是人为创造的。很显然，有些例外，但大部分情况下，它们和住所、食物、医疗及其他基本需求无关。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
So from, you know, maybe from the 10-year-old's perspective, look, I think it's great. I think, first of all, anything that can be automated should be automated. I think it's really hard to argue against that when you really, really think about it. And so, you know, the notion to me that I might be in the last years of my life where I ever have to sit down in front of a computer and, like, do things with it is, like, tremendously liberating. I don't really understand this idea of, like, we're at peak jobs or we're going to run out of jobs. To me, it's, like, very obvious that every, certainly every white-collar job is, like, totally fake and made up in the sense that, like, these are not contingent for, largely, you know, obviously there's exceptions to this, but they are not contingent for shelter and food and medicine and other necessities.
这段话的意思可以翻译为：
这就好比说，我不是在谈论那些事情。大多数工作并不涉及那些问题。或者即使涉及，也是非常间接的。所以，你知道，大多数工作，就像你的工作是分配资金。因为资本本身具有通货膨胀的特性，你不能让它闲置着。这是金钱的一个巨大“弊端”：就是当你拥有它时，你不能让它不动，否则它会消失。所以，你不得不对它做些事情。这就形成了整个机制。所以像我的工作就是，当你有钱且不想让它消失时，你需要把它交给别人。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
It's, like, I'm not talking about those. But most jobs do not touch those. Or if they do, they touch it in a very, very derivative way. And so, you know, most jobs, like, you know, what is your job as an allocator? It's, like, well, because capital is inherently inflationary, you have to, you can't just leave it alone. Like, this is one of, like, the great sort of, I don't know, maybe evils of money is that, like, once you get it, you can't just leave it alone because then it goes away. And so, you have to do something with it. And this, like, creates this entire whole thing. And so, like, my job is, like, when you have money and you don't want it to go away, you have to give it to someone.
然后，你把它交给一群人。然后我拿过来，把它投入到一些有生产力的东西上。希望你不会亏钱，反而能赚到更多的钱。这有用吗？这好吗？嗯，当然。但是，这不是真实的。它就像是有趣且有用，但不是直接的方式。对我来说，在这种情况下，你可以创造无限多的工作。我们将会有无限的需求和欲望。我们的经济完全由我们那种无法满足的消费欲望驱动。因此，我们会想到新的东西来消费。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And so, you give it to a bunch of people. And then I take it and I put it into things that are productive. And then hopefully you don't lose your money. You get more money. And, like, is this useful? Is this good? Yeah, sure. But, like, it's not real. And it's, like, fun and useful, but not in a direct way. And to me, there's, like, unlimited amounts of jobs that you can create in those sorts of scenarios. We're going to have unlimited wants and desires. And our economy is solely driven by our, like, unquenchable desire to consume things. And so, we're going to come up with new things to consume.
在短期和中期内，可能会出现波动，会有很多工作岗位的流失等等。这并不好，这可能会导致很多困惑和失望。但是，从长远来看，我们将发明新的事情来做。我们已经解决了所有问题。所以，对我来说，担心不会有更多的工作机会并不太让我感到困扰。因为我觉得我们总能给自己找些事情去做，而这就是事情的意义所在。而且这也很好，总比闲着无事要好。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And now, again, in the short term and medium term, that might be volatile and there might be a lot of job loss, et cetera. And, you know, that's not good. And, you know, there could be a lot of despair. But in the long run, like, we're just going to invent new things to do. Like, we've already solved all of our problems, you know. And so, to me, like, the worry about, oh, we're not going to have more jobs, it just doesn't really resonate. Because I feel like we just make up stuff for us to do. And that's sort of the whole point of it. And that's good. Like, you know, it's better than being idle.
也许更多的人应该悠闲一些。我觉得，这在各个方面都有迹象表露出来，比如说在家办公这个现象，就明确表明，其实很多人并不需要真正做满40小时的工作。他们可能用40小时参加会议，或者需要待命40小时。但如果你在想象中设想一下，如果你在生产流水线上工作，即使你能在自己家后院搭建一个微型生产线，你还是得每天在生产线上待10个小时。这种情况下，在家办公就没有那么重要了。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And maybe more people should be idle. But I think, like, there's all sorts of ways that this, like, shows through the cracks, right? Which is, like, you know, the work from home thing, I think, is, like, a strong indication of, well, actually, like, most people don't have 40 hours of work to be done. Like, they maybe have 40 hours of, like, meetings to sit in. Or they have 40 hours that they have to be on standby. But, you know, I think the reason, work from home, I think, wouldn't be that important if you, like, let's imagine a version where you work on a factory line. And you can set up a microcosm of the factory in your backyard. But you've still got to be on the line 10 hours a day.
是啊，我觉得在家工作，可能你可以在家吃午饭，而且不需要通勤了。不过，这并不是一个巨大的改善。人们之所以这么喜欢在家工作，是因为他们每天实际工作的时间只有两三个小时。所以，在家工作的星期五就像是四天工作周的一个试探。我觉得这挺好的。对我来说，我们依然可以继续支付员工在家工作或者一周工作四天的工资，这其实表明我们现在需要人们付出的劳动时间比以前少了，但生产力依然没有下降。有些工作可能本身就可有可无，人们也许会更开心，不再需要在屏幕上把信息从一个地方搬运到另一个地方。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Yeah, I guess work from home, like, maybe you can have lunch at home and your commute, you don't have a commute anymore. And that's, but it's not, like, this huge improvement. The people, the reason people are so attached to work from home is because they actually have, like, two or three hours of work to do per day. And so, work from home Fridays is, like, is a soft launch of the four-day work week. And I think this is all fine. Like, to me, the fact that we can continue paying people to work from home or do four days a week or whatever is just a sign that, like, actually, we need less time, less labor time out of people than we used to. And we're still able to be just as productive. Some of these jobs maybe are made up and actually people will be happier not ushering bits from one place to another on a screen or something.
我很好奇你是如何看待寻找自己职业的问题的。你曾经给我发了一条信息，让我记忆犹新：我们都有某种道德责任去管理自己的天赋。如果你同意这个观点，我想请你详细谈谈。在这样的思维下，成功和失败可以从一个很酷的角度重新审视，使我们不再依赖他人告诉我们该做什么，而是向内在进行探寻。对此你能多说一些吗？我认为浪费本身在审美上就是不好的，而最糟糕的浪费莫过于浪费自己的天赋、技能和特长。这些是你特别擅长的事情，是你能为他人做到但他们可能做不到的事情。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
I'm curious how you think about searching for one's vocation. You texted me one time something that stuck in my head, which is that we all have some sort of moral duty to steward our gifts. And that if you think about, if you agree that that's true, I'm curious for you to expound on that. But that then reframes success and failure in a cool way that maybe cuts through this, you know, priestly class thing of, like, looking to others to tell us what to do versus looking internally. Can you expand on that? I think there's something even just aesthetically bad about waste. And I think one of the worst things that you can waste is your gifts, your skills, attributes, things that you're uniquely good at, things that you can do for others that you might be able to do that others can't.
对我来说，一个最大的挑战之一就是努力去理解如何最好地利用这些技能。首先，要弄清楚自己拥有哪些技能，这说起来容易做起来难。然后，弄清楚如何使用它们。我觉得大概有两种模式。一种是以非常纯粹和不掺杂任何东西的方式使用这些技能，你不试图把你的工作和天赋结合起来。这样的人就类似于为了支持自己的艺术或兴趣而有一份日常工作的那种人。而另一种，也许是更有野心的方式，就是尝试将商业活动与自己的工作和天赋结合起来。我认为这就涉及到一个问题，是否应该追求自己的激情。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
For me, one of the great challenges has been trying to understand how to best use those skills. First of all, figure out what they are, which is easier said than done. And then figure out how you can use them. You know, there's kind of two modes, I guess. One is that you use them in a very pure and unadulterated way. And you don't try and integrate your work with your, how you use your gifts. And this would be sort of, you know, the person who has a day job in order to support their, their craft or something. And then the other, perhaps more ambitious version is trying to integrate commerce and their work with their gifts. And, you know, I think, um, this gets into the, like, should you pursue your passion thing?
你说过一句话让我印象深刻：我们应该把大部分时间花在能够激发和利用我们天赋和才华的事情上。如果没有做到这一点，那显然不是我们该专注的事情。我也认为，如果一个人在工作中感到非常愉快，这往往是一个很强的信号，表明他很好地将工作与天赋结合在了一起。你觉得未来的金融业会是什么样子？在八十年代，上一个金融时代主要是由KKR这些公司主导的，他们大多在做杠杆收购。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And, and I think it's really difficult, but you said something to me, which is like the thing that you are spending most of your time on really ought to like spark and utilize your sort of genius and gift. And if you're not doing that, like, it's obviously not the thing that you should be spending most of your time on. And so I think like, you know, there's proxies for this. Like, are you having, I think people who are having, uh, having a lot of fun at their job or like, it's a very strong indicator that you've combined the two well. What do you think the future of finance looks like in the eighties and the last era was built by those people from KKR and mostly doing leverage buyouts.
好的。这些公司无疑非常重要且规模庞大，但它们是在很久以前创立的。在很多情况下，这些公司仍由创始人或与创始人关系密切的人管理，而这些人现在年事已高。你认为下一波金融浪潮会是什么样子？创始人在任何商业、国家或组织中都扮演着极其重要的角色。所以我认为值得注意的是，我们当前所处的这个范式中，最大和最重要的金融公司都源于一个杠杆收购的文化，而这首先是一个依靠债务驱动的理念。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Yeah. Whereas that's, those firms are obviously really important and really big, but they were started a long time ago. And in many cases they're still run by people that were the founder or close to the founder getting up there in age. What do you think the next wave of finance look like? The founder is incredibly important and sort of the, um, the founding act is incredibly important in, uh, in any business or country or organization really. Um, and so I do think that it's notable that like the current paradigm in which we live, the largest and most important finance firms come out of a culture of leverage buyout, which first of all, it's a debt driven idea.
这是一种金融工程，从某种程度上说它具有剥削性，因为其主要目标是使某个事物更有利润。我并不是想贬低杠杆收购，也不认为它们像人们所说的那样邪恶，但其核心理念是利用债务和金融工程来赚取大量金钱，而企业本身的质量可能对核心交易来说是次要的。这就是当今这些大公司的创始人及其创立行为的基础。如今，像阿波罗、黑石和KKR这样的公司，杠杆收购在很多情况下只是他们业务的一小部分，但我认为这仍然是其核心文化的一部分。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
It's financial engineering. It's, um, it's extractive insofar as the primary goal is to make a thing more profitable. And I'm not trying to disparage leverage buyouts. I don't think they're like as evil as people say, but the idea is like kind of the core idea behind it is like using debt and financial engineering to make a lot of money. In a way that the quality of the business itself is maybe ancillary to, to, to the, to the core trade. Um, and those are the founding, you know, uh, the what the founders and the founding acts of these large firms today are. And so, you know, now that the Apollos and Blackstones and KKRs, the world, um, you know, I think in a lot of cases, the leverage buyout is a very small part of what they do today, but I do think it's still like in the core culture.
我们之前一直在思考的一个问题是，未来的20到30年会是什么样子，特别是当这些全球最大的金融公司，它们的创立行动就是种子投资的时候。这种投资是以股票为驱动的，遵循幂律分布，抱有极大的乐观态度，而且主要是定性的。那么，如果像黑石和阿波罗这样的公司在创立之初就是以这样的种子投资为核心，它们会是什么样子呢？对此我并没有一个明确的答案，只是觉得这很值得关注。就像股权融资是一种比债务融资更新的概念一样，让人深思。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And one thing that, you know, we've pondered about before is like, what, what does the next 20 or 30 years look like when the, those firm, the, the, the largest financial firms in the world, their founding action was seed investing. It's equity driven, it's power law, it's hugely optimistic, it's largely qualitative. Um, you know, what is it, what, what would a Blackstone and Apollo look like if that was the core seed at the, at the start of the, you know, at the inception of the firm? Um, and I don't have a great answer. I just think that it is like, it's notable, you know, in the same way that sort of equity financing is a far newer idea than debt financing.
嗯，你知道，股权融资显然是一个更乐观的想法。它的上升空间没有限制。因此，围绕股权和债务存在各种哲学观点。债务则更加古老，并且，众所周知，债务在道德上是否良好一直存在争议。所以，我认为，金融的关键可能在于这些极其乐观的人与那些更保守、更关注风险的人之间的对比。或者可以说，这是从量化到质化的一种转变。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And, um, you know, equity financing is obviously a far more optimistic idea. It's, um, it's uncapped to the upside. And so there's all these sort of philosophical ideas around equity versus debt and debt is far more ancient and, and, and, you know, debt obviously has a very controversial past about whether it's morally good. And, um, and so I, you know, I do think like there's this idea of like, what if the crux of finance is with these kind of wildly optimistic people versus people who might be more conservative, more concerned about the downside, more concerned about maybe one way of looking at it is a shift from the quantitative to qualitative.
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▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Vanta automates security and compliance for over 16,000 fast moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, keeping them audit ready around the clock. It's the number one agentic trust platform, and it now helps companies like yours watch for the risks that show up between audits across your vendors, your AI tools, and your whole environment. Every new tool your team signs up for, every vendor that turns on AI features is an opportunity for something to go wrong. And most security programs weren't built for AI's pace of growth. The Vanta agent works like a 24 seven GRC engineer in the background, finding issues, drafting fixes for you, and cutting vendor assessment time by up to 50%. Whether you're a fast growing startup or a global enterprise, Vanta helps you earn and prove trust. Invest like the best listeners get a special offer for $1,000 off at vanta.com slash invest.
Ridgeline 是第一个为投资管理公司提供端到端记录系统的平台，它集成了人工智能技术，能够在一个统一的平台上进行组合会计、对账、报告、交易和合规操作。由于 Ridgeline 的人工智能功能远远领先于其他投资管理软件，很多公司正逐步抛弃旧有技术，转而使用 Ridgeline。我听到很多投资经理关于人工智能的讨论，大致分为两类：一些不知道从何开始，而另一些则信心满满，认为自己能在一个周末之内构建自己的订单管理系统。然而，现实是，运营一个投资公司始终需要管理、控制以及一个确保数据真实性的唯一信息来源。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Ridgeline is the first end-to-end system of record with embedded AI for investment management firms, running portfolio accounting, reconciliation, reporting, trading, and compliance on one unified platform. Firms are moving off legacy technology and onto Ridgeline because of how far ahead Ridgeline's AI features are compared to anything else in investment management software. I've been hearing from a lot of investment managers about AI, and they fall roughly into two camps, with some unsure of where to even start, and others convinced they can build their own order management system over a weekend. The reality is that running an investment firm will always require governance, controls, and a single source of truth for your data.
没有任何AI热情可以改变这一要求。Ridgeline正是建立在这一基础上，这就是为什么我相信在AI时代脱颖而出的公司将是那些运行在Ridgeline统一平台上的公司。如果您对公司的AI战略非常重视，Ridgeline应该成为讨论的一部分。您可以在ridgeline.ai请求演示。关于东西海岸金融之间的区别，您还对哪些方面感兴趣？是从事这一行业的人们，还是乐观态度与现实主义或金钱导向之间的区别。东海岸金融被认为是倾向于提取价值、悲观和注重风险的，这种形象还是有一定的真实基础的。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And no amount of AI enthusiasm changes that requirement. Ridgeline is built on exactly that foundation, which is why I believe that firms that come out ahead in the AI era will be the ones running on Ridgeline's unified platform. If you're serious about your firm's AI strategy, Ridgeline should be part of that conversation. You can request a demo at ridgeline.ai. What other differences are interesting to you between East Coast and West Coast finance? The people doing it, the optimism versus not pessimism, but realism or dollar orientation. There's truth to the caricature, which is East Coast is extractive, pessimistic, downside-oriented.
西海岸天真、愚蠢、缺乏深度。我认为这在某种程度上是正确的。但我也认为，现在东西海岸正在融合。显然，西海岸在某种意义上“吃掉”了东海岸。风投资本创造了世界上最大的一些公司，而私募股权则没有做到这一点。私募股权在一些情况下取得成功，往往是通过收购或金融工程。因此，风投资本无疑是一种对世界更有益的力量。虽然它只是一个小小的资产类别，却推动了所有重要事物的发展。它也代表了一种文明技术：愿意让年轻人尝试一个非常投机的想法，哪怕失败了也基本没有惩罚或负面影响。因此，风投资本显然是一种非凡的力量。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
The West Coast is naive, stupid, unsophisticated. I think that is true to some obvious extent. And I think they're merging now, and I think, look, it's no coincidence that the West Coast is definitely eating the East Coast. Venture capital has created the biggest businesses in the world, and private equity has not. And where private equity has, it's largely been through sort of acquisition and, again, financial engineering. And so it's sort of inarguable that venture capital is this sort of much better force for the world. It's, you know, it's this tiny little asset class that has produced all the most important things in the world. It's also this sort of civilizational technology, which is you're willing to give young people millions of dollars to try a very speculative idea with, like, basically no retribution or downside if it doesn't work. So it's clearly this amazing force.
我觉得东西方在薪酬结构方面发生了一个非常有趣的转变。在我成长的过程中，我了解到华尔街是一个每年能赚很多现金的地方，没有持久的股权价值，但会定期获得很多流动现金。而西海岸则是一个“纸上富贵”的概念，你拥有的股权可能在未来某个时间会取得巨大的回报。而现在有趣的是，这种情况似乎开始反转了。因为很多公司都上市了，现在在华尔街你的薪酬结构更多是基于受限股票单位（RSUs）。你会像在公司里的某个部门工作一样思考，尤其是在公司的高端层面，你可能不再只是关注具体某个基金的表现，而是更加关心整个公司的股价和整体业绩。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
I think there's been a very interesting, like, flip in compensation between East and West. When I was growing up, my understanding was that, you know, Wall Street is where you would get paid huge amounts of cash on a yearly basis. You would have no enduring equity value, but you would get paid a lot of liquid cash on a fairly regular basis. And the West Coast was this idea where you would, you know, be rich on paper. You would have equity that would be this, maybe be this enormous payoff in some distant future. And I think what's sort of interesting is you could argue, and I would argue, that those have started to flip now. Whereas, like, Wall Street, because all these businesses have gone public, you know, on Wall Street you're comped on RSUs. And you're thinking like a firm. And you're, you know, maybe it's, especially at the top end of the firm, you're less worried about carrying any one fund. And you're more worried about the stock price and performance of the firm as a whole.
然后，有趣的是，在硅谷，这种情况几乎转向了一种类似于年度现金结算的模式。考虑到市场情况，公司长期保持私有化，催生了成熟的二级市场。而且，这种类似的年度投标实际上成为了一个平行的流动市场。因此，在硅谷，你实际上获得了大量的现金报酬。而且我们已经看到了这样的趋势，尤其是在AI领域，甚至风险投资公司被收购、普通合伙人离开他们的公司等等这种情况，使得这个市场实际上变得更加流动化，更加以金钱为导向的，或者说，也许不是更以金钱为导向，但肯定是更加流动，更加功利的。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And then, interestingly, in Silicon Valley, it's almost moved towards a, like, an annual cash basis. But given how these markets, you know, companies staying private, creates these sort of mature secondary markets. And there's these, you know, that sort of de facto yearly tenders becoming almost a parallel liquid marketplace. And so you're actually paid huge amounts of cash in Silicon Valley. And I think we've seen that with, certainly with the AI stuff and even, you know, venture capital firms getting acquired and GPs leaving their firms and all that sort of stuff where it actually is becoming more money-driven, more liquid, more, well, maybe not more money-driven, but certainly more liquid, more mercenary.
我总是对这些结构性变化如何开始改变事物感兴趣。正如你所知道的，硅谷是一个你可以随时变现、每年都有现金收入、并且在各家公司之间跳槽的地方。而华尔街则是一个你持有大量限制性股票单位（RSU），更加注重长期和公司整体价值的地方。综合这些，你会在哪里寻找机会呢？你的定位非常有趣，因为你可以进行类似风险投资风格的成长股权交易，也可以做特殊情况私人股权风格的交易。在你的职业生涯中，你已经投资了几十家软件公司。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And I think, like, I'm always interested in these structural shifts and how that starts to change things where, you know, the Valley is a place where you're liquid and you're getting cash out yearly and you're jumping from firm to firm. And Wall Street is a place where you have a bunch of RSUs and you're sort of, you know, thinking more about the long-term and the enterprise value of the firm. If you addled this up, where are you looking for opportunity? Like, you have such an interesting mandate because you can kind of, you could do a venture-style growth equity deal. You could do a special situations private equity-style deal. You've historically, across your career, invested in dozens of effectively software companies.
你一直以来明智地避免了可能被云代码或类似事物冲击的公司。然而，我觉得你依然对软件领域的价值所在充满好奇。作为一个纯粹的投资者，你是如何应对这个奇怪且充满不确定性的局面的？我们在很大程度上持观望态度。我们非常幸运，在选择和考察上有着极为广泛的自由。可能唯一有共识的是一些实验室狂热者的末日愿景。但除此之外，我觉得一切都悬而未决。所以，这很难说。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
You've, I think, so far wisely avoided companies that could get railroaded by cloud code or something like this. And, but nonetheless, like, I think you're still curious about where there might be value in software. How are you approaching, just as a pure investor, how are you approaching this very strange, high-ball, high-uncertainty landscape? We've largely sat on the sidelines. We're very fortunate to have such a wide mandate in sort of what we can do and look at. Maybe the only consensus view is, like, the niche sort of apocalyptic vision at some of the core zealots at the labs. But outside of that, I think it's really sort of a jump ball. And so, it's hard to say.
我觉得我可以概括地说，市场往往缺乏很多细微的差别。SaaS（软件即服务）其实只是一种商业模式。它是指你通常按人头每月或每年付费，来使用一种帮助你操作电脑的工具。从这个角度来看，SaaS确实面临不少问题。不过我不认为对很多今天因恐慌而被抛售的企业来说，这商业模式本身就是它们面临的真正问题。这让我觉得很有意思。我最近写了一篇文章，谈到一个公共经理长线投资MAG-7（指七大科技公司）——不具体考虑交易本身的细节——可能是不错的资本配置。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
I think the one thing that maybe I could say in general is that markets lack a lot of nuance. I think, you know, SaaS is a business model. It's not, it's literally just a business model of this idea that you pay usually per person per month or per year for access to a tool that helps you use your computer. I think in that sense, SaaS is in a lot of trouble. But I don't think for a lot of these businesses that are, you know, being really sold off today out of fear that that is actually what is important to the business at all. It is actually interesting to me. I wrote a post recently about the idea that, like, a public manager being long, the MAG-7 is, you know, without taking a specific view on the trade, is probably, like, good capital allocation.
有时候，你就是应该做显而易见的事情，顺应共识，因为共识通常是正确的。我收到的一些反对意见是，这些东西（指一些大公司）已经完美定价。但其实，大公司的52周波动幅度几乎达到100%，这说明它们根本未被妥善定价。市场缺乏细致的判断力。我认为这与我们之前讨论的内容有关，也许某些比我聪明的人能够更清晰地解释这一点。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Because sometimes you just got to do the really obvious thing and just follow consensus, because consensus is, you know, usually right. And, you know, one of the pushbacks that I got to that is, well, these things, you know, they're the biggest companies in the world. They're priced to perfection. But, like, I think it's underrated the fact that the 52-week variance on these things is, like, nearly 100% for the biggest companies in the world. And so, they're not priced well at all. And the market lacks extreme nuance. I think it goes back to what we were talking about, which is, you know, probably someone smarter than me could draw out a much clearer picture.
这与被动资金流动和证券的边际定价者有关系。而影响证券边际定价者的是群聊中随机人们写的帖子，这些帖子是算法挑选出来的。其实，我以前从没这样想过，但从这个角度来看，算法，也就是人工智能，确实在某种真实的意义上影响着市场定价。因为它选择了想要展示给人们的内容，然后人们根据这些内容来进行定价。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
But there's something to do with passive flows and the marginal pricer of security. And what's informing the marginal pricer of securities is the posts in the group chats that the random people are writing, that the algorithm's chosen. I mean, in this way, I've actually never thought of it before, but, like, in this way, the algorithm, the AI, frankly, because that's what my understanding is, that's what's driving most of the algorithms now on Twitter and YouTube and stuff, is pricing the market in some very real sense. Because it's choosing the narrative that it wants to show to people, and then those people are pricing off that.
我认为，这又是一个教训，那就是市场并不总是有效的，缺乏细微差别。今天我们看到的最大问题就是这一点。我觉得很多人都在两个极端之间有误解。对许多管理者来说，最诚实的做法应该是观望一段时间，但他们由于结构上的限制或意愿问题，无法这样做。因此，他们只能寄希望于最好的结果，继续投入资金，而这就成了明天要面对的问题。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And so, you know, I just think it's another lesson, which is, like, markets are not efficient. There's no nuance. So, you know, that would be the big thing that we're seeing today. I think there's a lot of delusion in either direction. The most honest thing for a lot of managers to do would be to sit it out, but they're structurally unable or unwilling to do that. And so, you just sort of, you know, hope for the best and put capital out the door, and it's sort of a problem for tomorrow.
所以，我认为在私人市场上，很多事物的定价依然是不理性的，这些定价往往与企业的质量无关，更多是由于资金的激励结构。你提到SaaS只是一种模式，其中有好有坏。关于这种超级资本支出高、代币多、涉及适时资产的新趋势，你怎么看？似乎有一类新公司已经显得非常强势。前几天我好奇地查看了我们的投资组合，发现大约60%多的市场价值不是纯粹的软件，而是其他类型的资产。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And so, I think a lot of things are still getting priced irrationally in the private markets in ways that are totally unrelated to the quality of the business, but are more of a function of just the incentive structure of the funds. You mentioned the SaaS is just a model, and there's good and there's bad. What do you think about this trend of super CapEx-heavy, token-heavy, real-world asset? Like, there's this new genre of company that seems to have emerged as really dominant. I was looking the other day, I was curious in our portfolio what percent was not pure bits, and it's like 60-something percent is not just software, you know, based on the market value of our investments.
我对此感到惊讶。就是，这个比例真的很高，而过去10到15年里，风险投资几乎都是全在软件领域。那么，你怎么理解这种趋势、这种商业类别呢？比如，较低的毛利率什么的。可以这样看，我们在2016、2017年的时候，已经处于风险投资回报非常高的后期阶段了。现在我们看到，过去20年里，风险投资的回报一直都很好。因此，按理说，资本会流入这个资产类别。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
I was surprised by that. Like, it's a really high percentage, whereas VCs have mostly historically been, like, all software for the last 10 or 15 years. What do you make of this class of, this trend, this class of business, lower gross margins, you know, things like this? One way that you can look at this is, you know, we were really in the late innings in, let's call it 2016, 2017 on, of, okay, returns in venture capital have been very high. And so, and now we've seen, whatever, 20 years of venture returns being very good. And so, logically, capital is going to flow into the asset class.
问题在于，风险投资市场在很大程度上受到限制，因为优秀企业的创办数量相对固定。我认为这可能与伟大创始人的数量有限有关。我认为这就是一个有限的量。越来越多的资本流入风险投资领域，但公司数量基本是固定的。所以，你必须在同样数量的公司中投入更多的钱。这在疫情和人工智能兴起之前，就已经成为一个实际的问题，因为在一个B2B软件企业中能够注入的资金毕竟是有限的。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
The problem is that the venture market is largely constrained in that the amount of great businesses that are started is relatively fixed. Probably, I believe, downstream of how many great founders there are. I think there's just a finite amount. More and more capital flows into venture. There's basically a finite amount of companies. So you have to put more money into the same amount of companies. And this was becoming a real problem right before AI and COVID, which was that there's only so much money that you can cram into a B2B software business.
尤其令人烦恼的是，现在创办公司变得越来越便宜。所以，从实际情况来看，你会发现或者依然可以看到，很多资金都流向了土地拥有者和一些投资支持者。因此，这就成了一个真正的问题，因为资金不喜欢被阻挡，就像水一样，它希望找到最有效的路径。但是，由于过去的高回报，资金想要流入风险投资领域，却被阻碍了。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And especially when, annoyingly, the companies are getting cheaper and cheaper to start. And so, you know, functionally, what you saw, and what you still see to some extent, but what you really saw was that all this capital was just flowing to landowners and to compensation backers, basically. And so, it was like this real problem, which is that, you know, capital hates getting blocked. It's like water. It wants to find the most efficient path. And it was getting blocked because it wanted to flow into venture because there was backward-looking higher returns.
但是，这就像是受到限制。你只能往这些公司里塞进有限的钱。而且，你知道，这也是激励我创立基金的原因之一，我看到这个问题，就是这些公司筹集到的钱和它们实际需要的钱没有关系。然后，就像突然出现了"天降神助"一样，突然冒出了两个很好的类别，能够很好地吸收这些资本。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
But, like, it was just constrained. You can only cram so much money into these companies. And, you know, it was a lot of what inspired me to start my fund was seeing this problem, which was just that, like, the amount of money these companies are raising is unrelated to the amount of money they need. And then, you know, almost as if, like, you know, deus ex machina, all of a sudden, there was two great categories that could just soak up this capital.
我真的相信，从某种意义上来说，企业和资产就像资本的海绵。在过去负利率时代，多余的资本必须找到去处。如果没有现成的去处，它就会创造一个可以去的地方。我觉得这种情况下，高资本支出（capex）项目的兴起是一个非常幸运的现象，比如人工智能，这几乎是终极的高资本支出项目，还有所有与硬件相关的内容。因此，我认为，从某种角度来看，资本市场迫切地寻找可以投放资本的地方，而当时没有合适的地方。这就导致了这些公司从资本的「下游」几乎自然而然的诞生。我觉得这个看法与大多数人的看法有些不同。这就是我的哲学性观点。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And I really do believe, in some sense, that, like, businesses and assets are sponges for capital and that the excess, if the, you know, in an era of, back then, we had negative interest rates and stuff, the capital has to go somewhere. And if it has nowhere to go, it will create somewhere for it to go. And I think that there's a very sort of fortuitous arising of these high-capex businesses of AI, the ultimate high-capex project, and obviously all the hardware stuff. And so I think, in some sense, like, you could say that the capital markets were desperately looking for a place to go, to put the capital, and there was no place. And so these companies almost got created downstream of capital, which I think is a little bit different of the narrative than most people would look at. So that's sort of the philosophical view.
从经济角度来看，我认为SaaS（软件即服务）在市场上遭受重创的部分原因在于，它的本质是你在卖一段字符串。软件产品本质上就是如此，而复制一段字符串的边际成本几乎为零。因此，边际成本为零意味着你出售的产品应该有很高的利润。最初的设想是，会有很高的前期成本，但随着时间推移，会有非常高的毛利润，最终希望实现很高的净利润。不过，净利润似乎常常无法实现，直到私募股权介入并强行提高净利润为止。这种时代基本上只是这种“卖字符串”现象的一个结果。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
The economic view, I think part of the reason SaaS is getting punished so much today in the market is because it was this idea of you're selling a copy of a string, fundamentally. That's what a software product is. And the marginal copy of a string is very close to zero. And so with zero marginal cost, the thing that you're selling should be highly profitable. The vision of that was that you will have high upfront costs, and then you will have very high gross margins, and hopefully one day very high net margins. Although the net margins seem to never sort of materialize until private equity gets their hands on things and sort of forces the net margin out. That era is largely just a downstream coincidence of this, like, selling strings.
现在我认为我们正处于一个出售计算能力的时代。在这个时代，你无法仅仅一次性编写提示语然后出售输出的多个副本。每次都需要重新进行计算，因此边际成本显然不是零。我认为这对软件行业来说是一个根本性的巨大变化。我认为这意味着高毛利率成为常态的时代将会结束。取而代之的是较低的毛利率、更薄的净利率以及更大规模的发展。我认为你正在看到的就是资本正在流向顶级的大规模服务提供商。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And now I think we're in an era where we're selling compute. And selling compute, you can't write the prompt once and then sell copies of the output. You have to do the compute every single time. And so the marginal cost, obviously, is not zero. And I think this is, like, a fundamental huge change to the software business. And I think it means that this era of high gross margins being the norm is just going to go away. And what's going to make up for it, I think, is lower gross margins, much thinner net margins, and just much more scale. And I think that's sort of what you're seeing, which is that the capital is flowing to the top-end provider of the scale.
我认为，你也知道，十年前我们谈论市值达到3到4万亿美元的公司是不可想象的。这其中很大一部分原因是通货膨胀，但另一个原因是规模效应。我认为，说未来会有市值10万亿美元的公司，等等，这并不会引起争议。由于利润率下降，所有的回报都将集中到规模上。显然，低利润率和小规模的业务并不是好生意。因此，简单来说，这有点像软件行业的沃尔玛效应。我认为未来的公司将呈现出低毛利率、极薄的净利率和巨大的规模。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
I think, you know, it would have been unthinkable that we talk about companies in $3 to $4 trillion market caps 10 years ago. A big part of that is inflation, I believe. But, you know, another part of that is just the scale dynamic, which I think it's uncontroversial to say we're going to have $10 trillion companies and so on and so forth. So there's just going to be, because margins are going to drop, you're just going to, all the returns are going to accrue to scale. Because, obviously, low margin, low scale is not a very good business. And so maybe it's a bit of a, crudely, a bit of a Walmart effect in software, which is that, you know, I think the future looks like low gross margins, razor thin net margins, huge scale.
这可能是一个问题，对于那些类似于小型企业的SaaS服务提供商来说，就像沃尔玛来了。这就好比打破市场神话的一种新视角，也就是击败市场有多困难这个问题并没有大家想的那么严重——无论你如何定义市场。我很好奇你对此的看法。似乎在杰克·博格尔之后，一个深入人心的观念就是击败市场极其困难，所以你甚至不应该尝试，应该直接放弃。我认为你对此有非常不同的看法。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And this is probably a problem for the sort of, you know, if the SaaS provider is the mom and pop shop, like Walmart's coming to town. You have this funny view that the whole myth of how difficult it is to beat the market, so just however you want to define the market, is wrong. I'm curious for you to expound on that. Like, that seems to have become, kind of post-Jack Bogle, one of the deeply held truths of the market is that it's extraordinarily difficult to beat the market, so you shouldn't even try. You should just opt out of the battle. I think you have a very different view on this.
是的，我会从两个角度来解读这个问题。第一，我认为巴菲特和芒格是我的主要投资导师。巴菲特建议他在伯克希尔公司以外的资产应该投资在标普500指数基金。这是他给大众的建议。因此，有人认为巴菲特是在说你无法击败市场。但我并不觉得他是这个意思。我认为他的意思是，对于普通人来说，不应该尝试去击败市场。在这种说法中，他没有谈到那些积极的投资者。也许可以这样简单理解：巴菲特建议，你可以把所有的钱都投到标普500指数基金中。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Yeah, I would take two different kind of cuts at this. One would be that I think Buffett and Munger were my kind of main teachers on investing. Buffett says that he wants his state outside of Berkshire to be put in the S&P. That's his advice to the general public. And so I think people take that to say that Buffett's saying you can't beat the market. I don't think that's what he's saying. I think he's saying for the average person, you shouldn't try and beat the market. Implicit in that statement is leaving out any sort of active investor. Maybe the anecdotal side would be Buffett saying, you know, you should put all your money into the S&P.
这是你应该做的最理性的事情。从另一个角度来看，有一种经验论证：绝大多数专业人士在扣除费用后甚至无法超过市场表现。这就像一个一连串的重击：投资界的大佬都说别尝试，似乎世界上具备最佳动力和智慧的人也做不到。此外，我认为对于专业的基金经理来说，要超过市场确实很难，因为他们面临着普通人没有的各种因素。这有点像巴菲特现象的悖论。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
That's the most rational thing you should do. On the other side is the sort of empirical argument, which is, look, most professionals don't even beat the market after fees. And this is sort of this great, this is this one-two punch of, you know, the godfather of investing says don't try. And then seemingly the smartest people with the best incentives in the world can't do it. And then the other thing is I just think that I think for a professional money manager, and this is sort of the paradox with the Buffett thing, is that for a professional money manager, it is really hard to beat the market because you have all these other factors that the average person doesn't have.
这有点像彼得·林奇的观点。我越来越觉得彼得·林奇在这方面像是天才。他的观点是，作为专业的资金管理者，你通常有许多限制，包括经营业务和保持客户满意。因此，我认为专业的资金管理者要击败市场反而比普通的业余投资者更难。你知道多少人，像是买了比特币并获得了很好的收益，或者买了特斯拉汽车然后又买了特斯拉的股票，或者买了苹果电脑又买了苹果的股票？对冲基金无法这样运作，但这些人通过这样的方式取得了超越市场的表现。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And this is sort of like the Peter Lynch argument. I increasingly think Peter Lynch was just like kind of a genius about this, which is that like, yeah, when you're a professional manager, by and large, you have all these mandates, you're running a business, you have customers that you need to keep happy. And so I actually think it's more difficult for the professional money manager to beat the market than like the average amateur. How many people do you know who like bought Bitcoin and did really well or they bought a Tesla and then they bought the Tesla stock or they bought an Apple computer and they bought the Apple stock? And you can't run a hedge fund that way, but they've outperformed, you know, just doing that.
所以，我觉得有一种奇怪的情况，就是单独看每条建议都没错，但其实要超越平均水平并不像人们想象的那么难。有一种观念被各种其他因素混淆了，使得这种看法变得模糊。我想问问从有限合伙人（LP）的角度来看，如果你是一个LP，你会关注什么。我经常被LP问，他们应该把钱投到哪里，哪个管理团队比较好，或者他们应该投资于哪个基金。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And so I think there's a little bit of this like weird thing where in isolation, none of the advice is wrong, but like it's not as difficult as people think to, I think, outperform or do better than the average. And there's this notion that gets caught up in all sorts of other things that I think sort of sullies that view. I wanted to ask an LP's perspective and like what, basically like what you would do if you were an LP, what you'd be looking for. I get asked a lot by LPs where they should put their money or like what managers are good or should they invest in this fund?
有一点让我印象深刻，那就是我觉得你必须用一种有点玩世不恭的视角来看待这些事情。也许这不是一种玩世不恭，而是更加现实的视角，因为这些首先是商业，他们的产品就是回报。所以，你需要认清自己属于哪种类型的客户。比如，当有人问我应该把50万美元投资在哪里时，我会说，可能不应该投入那种正处于边缘状态的50亿美元增长基金。但其实我经常被这样问。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And one thing that struck me is like, I think you have to take a somewhat cynical view of these things as, and maybe it's not actually cynical, just maybe the more realist view of these are businesses first and, and, you know, their product is returns, but like they're a business. And so you have to recognize what sort of customer you are. Like, you know, the question of where should I put my 500 grand check? You probably shouldn't put it into like, you know, marginal $5 billion growth fund, but I actually get asked that a lot.
就像，我是否应该投入一点，比如一两百万美元到这个基金里呢？答案是，这可能是个不错的基金，但你能用这百万美元找到更好的投资方式吗？大概是能的。这听起来很明显，但实际上却不是。我觉得人们不理解的是，如果你是个不能开出像主权基金或机构那样大额支票的投资者，那你就截然不同，很多企业并不是为你这种客户设计的。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Like, should I put some, you know, one or $2 million into this fund? And the answer there is like, well, you know, it's probably going to be a good fund, but like, could you find something much better to do with that million dollars? Probably. And it sounds obvious, but like in, in reality, it's, it's not. And I think what people don't understand is that basically if you're a principal, let's say if you're a principal that can't write like sovereign or institution size checks, you're a totally different customer and the businesses are not designed to serve you as a customer.
像增长基金可能是一个很好的地方。如果你需要把一亿美元放到某个地方，那可能是一个非常非常好的选择。但如果只是投资五十万美元，这里就不太合适了。如果你的业务是为主权基金和大型捐赠基金服务的，你的产品就会与那些面向小客户的产品有很大不同。这就涉及到，如果你有一笔小资金，你该怎么做？我认为这正是新兴管理公司被低估的地方。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Like the growth fund is probably a great place. If you have to park a hundred million dollars somewhere, it's probably a very, very good place, but it's not a good place to park like a 500 grand check. If your business is set up to service sovereigns and large endowments and stuff, you just like your product is just so different from what you're going to serve for someone smaller. And this gets into the like, well, okay, if you have a small check, what do you do? And I think this is where the emerging manager stuff is really underrated.
这段文字大致可以翻译为：
“我们寻找那些与收益高度一致的经理，无论是因为收益对未来资金至关重要，还是因为这是他们获取所有收益的方式。在新兴经理的情况中，你是否发现有趣或吸引人的特征？我认为这可能和我看所有事情的方式相似。但尤其是在评估一个新兴经理人的时候，当你实际上完全信赖这个人时，我觉得人们仍然会失败。”
这段话的意思是：寻找那些利益和收益紧密相关的经理，也就是在他们实际对收益负责的情况下工作的人，并探讨这种情况在新兴经理中是否有吸引力。即便在全面信任一个人时，也承认可能仍然会有失败。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And, and looking for, you know, looking, basically looking for places where the manager is actually most tightly aligned to returns, either because returns are critical to future funds or that's actually how they're going to make all their money. Are there features of the emerging managers situation that you find interesting or attractive one way or the other? It's probably similar to how I look at everything, but I think, uh, you know, especially for an emerging manager, when you're truly just sort of underwriting the person, I think people still fail.
在我看来，他们可能过于重视投资理论、过往记录等东西，而低估了对个人实际情况的关注。我认为你我都非常相信“你如何做一件事，就会如何做所有事情”这个理念。因此，我认为我们应该更多地探究，比如，询问一个管理者的个人财务状况，这可能是一个极其被低估的问题，对吧？
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
They probably overweight the, uh, in my view, they, they overweight the investing thesis and track record and stuff and underweight just the like facts about the person. You know, I think you and I are both big believers in the idea of like how you do one thing is how you do everything. And so, um, I think the more that you can probe, you know, like, uh, I think like the personal financial situation of a manager is an incredibly underrated thing to ask about, right?
如果你的银行账户里有几亿美元，同时你正在筹集3000万美元的资金，这与只有一百万美元的银行账户却要筹集一亿美元去做某件事以赚取最多利润的人是截然不同的。这两种情况下，出发点和承担风险的能力是非常不同的。我对此有一个看法，那就是这些人是处于仰视还是俯视的状态。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Like, um, if you have a couple hundred million dollars in the bank account and your bank account, and you're raising a $30 million, uh, fund, that's very different than someone who has a million dollars in the bank, who's raising a hundred million dollars to go, you know, do a thing that they're trying to make, make the most money from. There's like two very different places to start from underwriting. One sort of notion I have about this is whether, whether someone is looking up or looking down at something.
这个想法有点像这样，你知道的，你拿两个同样的基金，比方说两个5000万美元的基金。一个是来自某个银行里只有50万美元的人，另一个是来自某个银行里有5亿美元的人。这两者显然会被非常非常不同地对待。对于那个有5亿美元的人来说，5000万美元的基金就像是一个玩具一样。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And the idea is sort of like, you know, you take the same, again, take the same, let's say two $50 million funds. One is from someone who has 500 grand in the bank. And one is from someone who has $500 million in the bank. Those are just like, obviously going to be treated very, very differently for the latter, for the $500 million person, the $50 million fund is going to be like this, like play thing, play thing.
好的，翻译过来是这样的：
是的，就像我说的，“玩具”这个词并不是贬义的。因为以轻松的心态对待，“玩具”反而可能表现得更好。这样的话，你的压力会小一些，不会被大量的金钱吓倒。我觉得这种心态其实并没有得到广泛的认可。你经常可以看到这样的情况，比如说在新的创业项目中，如果你负责的项目资金比你以往处理过的金额多几个零，那种巨大的数额会让人感到有点畏惧。即便是那些掌管着上亿资产和数十亿基金的成功人士，对于需要承担超出他们过往经验数个数量级的风险时，也会感到有些心理压力。相对而言，如果承担的风险金额对你来说是微不足道的，那么心理负担就会小很多。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Yeah. And again, like toy isn't meant to be pejorative, like the toy might very, might very well do better because it's held with a looser grip. It's less on the line. You're going to be less paralyzed by the sheer like quantities of dollars. I feel like that that is generally not, not super, super recognized. And, um, and you see it all the time, like in new ventures, if you're helming something that is, you know, let's say two or three zeros more than you have, there's just a sort of like monumentalness to it that is a bit intimidating. And, and, and, you know, you can scale this all the way up, be the hustle woman is worth a hundred million with a $10 billion fund. Like it's just a big sort of scary thing. And I don't care who you are when you're taking, when you're taking bets that are, you know, an order of magnitude larger than, uh, any amount of money you've ever had. There's just a psychological factor there versus when you're taking bets, um, that is, you know, uh, that are maybe sort of negligible to you.
我认为，这也与另一个原因有关，即为什么人们比个人更容易取得超越：比如说，投入很小一部分你财富中无关紧要的资金去投资一只股票是很容易的，因为你不需要为此做过多解释，也不怕以后受到评价。而如果涉及的是一个超出你现有资金数额的投资，那可能会影响你的表现记录，你需要去解释，这还包含了许多与判断投资是否良好无关的因素。你和我一直对金融领域中所谓的“潜规则”特别感兴趣。你有一个有趣的想法，认为在SPV（特殊目的载体）和大型私人公司里，正在出现一种类似封建制度的体系。能分享一下这个想法吗？
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And I think this also gets back to the, like part of the reason I think it's easier for people to outperform individuals is like, it's easy to, you know, sort of take a flyer on a stock with a, you know, very marginal fraction of your net worth that you don't feel you need to explain. And you're not going to be judged on later than it is to do with maybe a dollar amount that's more money than you have. And it's going to affect your track record and you're going to have to explain it. And all these other factors that are not related to like, do you think this is a good investment or not? You and me are always so interested in this or what I'll call the underbelly of finance. And you have this funny idea around, uh, the sort of feudal like system that is emerging in the world of SPVs and the big private companies. Can you share that idea?
有一个有趣的观点。我是说，这在实验室中比较具体，但也不仅限于此。可以说，我们有点像从头开始重建封建制度，在这个制度中，有像Elon、扎克伯格、Dario、Sam这样的“大佬”。他们可以通过分配资源来创造新贵，因为这些资源分配类似于最典型的代际财富。比如，你获得了SpaceX或Waymo的某种资源分配，你能从中收取巨额费用。这种情况有点像是一个完全人造的产物，有人给你一个看似随意的数字，而他们也知道你没有足够的资金，所以你肯定会想办法去填补这个空缺。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
There is this funny notion. I mean, it's sort of specific to the labs, but it's, it's a broader, a broader thing as well. I suppose we're sort of recreating the feudal system from first principles where there are the Lords, um, Elon, uh, Zuckerberg, Dario, Sam, and they're sort of, they can sort of make landed gentry by giving out allocations because these allocations are sort of these sort of like the best, uh, gender, uh, best example of generational wealth. You know, you sort of, you get this allocation in SpaceX or in Waymo or whatever, and, uh, you get to charge huge fees on it. And it's sort of this like wholly synthetic product, which is someone gives you a sort of arbitrary number. Um, again, like they know you don't have the money, so they know you're going to go fill it.
然后你可以出去，并基本上说：“我就像是得到了一个契约，字面上国王给了我这片国家里的500英亩土地。而且，埃隆（马斯克）给了我1亿美元在SpaceX进行分配。” 你可以出去收取费用并从中赚取一大笔钱。这里有一种情况，就是你有分配权吗？我对这感兴趣，因为这是一种纯粹的关系上的、完全合成的东西，我不确定之前有没有存在过，或者至少没有在这样的规模和程度上存在过。因为通过你的人际关系，你基本上可以得到这样一片土地，并将其带给一个主权机构或基金会。他们会为这个途径支付费用，这是一种纯粹的付费获得的途径。但是可能不同之处在于，你可以说这仅仅是中介活动，但不同之处显然是，中介活动像是一次性的交易，但这些分配权好像可以永远存在。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And then you get to go out and basically say, I've been given like a deed on, on, on literally like the King has given me 500 acres on, on, on, on in this country. And, you know, Elon has given me a hundred million dollars to allocate in SpaceX and you get to go out and charge fees and make a bunch of money from it. And there's this sort of this thing of like, do you have allocation? And I guess I'm interested in it because it's sort of this like purely relational, wholly synthetic thing that I'm not sure has ever existed before, or, or those certainly not at the scale and magnitude where like you can go due to your relationship, basically get this like landed estate and then take it to a sovereign or a foundation. And they will pay you for that access, like a pure sort of, um, paid for access, but maybe where it's different is like, you know, you could say that's just brokering, but the difference is obviously that, you know, brokering is sort of like a one-time transaction, but these allocations sort of, you know, they live on forever.
你见过最离谱的费用安排是什么？没有GP承诺，设有10%的一次性前期费用和一些利润分成结构。这种情况下，基本上就像是要求在没有风险的情况下获得改变人生的巨额回报，并且还能享受到巨大的上行收益。另外，我见过一些情况是，没有设定期限限制。我知道，曾经有一些比较有名的例子，比如SpaceX的合同，很多人十年前就这样做了。我知道有些合同是永远收取费用的，但归功于这些资本，你为15年前投资于SpaceX而支付的2%费用还是让你非常满意的。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
What's the most egregious fee setup you've seen in one of these? No GP commit 10% one-time upfront fee with some carry structure generally, where you're just like demanding basically that you get paid like life-changing amounts of money with zero risk. And then you also get a huge amount of upside. The other thing is like, they often don't have, um, I've seen a few that have, don't have a term limit. I know there was like famously some, a lot of SpaceX ones. I think people were doing that 10 years ago. And, uh, I know there's certainly some, some that just have just collect the fee forever, but I mean, to capital's credit, you're very happy to be paying that 2% on the SpaceX thing that you did 15 years ago.
嗯，呃，所以这有点像双赢的局面。但这并不是说这些行为都是坏的。只是有点有趣，因为这并不是投资，也不是严格意义上的中介，而是一种非常不同的事情，可以称之为内部人游戏。当然，还有所有的欺诈和不良行为，我觉得这些是泡沫等因素带来的结果。你如何看待自己的生产力（实在没有更好的词了）？我们之前谈过，其实内容只是娱乐，不是真正的学习。我们不应该自欺欺人。因此，它在很大程度上是非生产性的，但这没关系，因为它是娱乐。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Um, uh, and so it's sort of a win-win. It's not to say these are all bad. It's just, it's sort of funny cause it's not investing. It's not strictly brokering. It's this very like different thing that is like a holy insider access game. And then of course all there's, there's all the fraud and bad behavior that I think comes with all the bubble and stuff. How do you think about your own productivity for lack of a better word? We talked before about how content is really just entertainment, not learning. We shouldn't kid ourselves about that. So therefore it is largely unproductive, which is fine. It's entertainment.
你如何看待自己在拥有这些强大工具的情况下变得更加高效？我个人非常关注效率。对我来说，最有意义的事情莫过于我们的对话，我猜这些都是人际关系的衍生品。因此，我并不觉得——我想我读书减少的部分原因是因为我周围有很多读书很多的朋友。因此，如果只能保留一样东西，我希望是与那些我觉得有趣的人交流。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
How do you think about, to the extent you care about yourself personally being a lot more productive with all this insane tool? I certainly care about productivity. For me, by far the most generative thing is our conversations, which I guess are downstream of relationships. And so I don't feel, I think part of the reason my book reading has gone down is I'm friends with a lot of people who read a lot of books. And so I think like, if I could only keep one thing, it would be conversations with people that I find interesting.
我觉得我对古怪和让人不太喜欢的人有一种特别的包容力。有时候人们会问我，你平时都接触些什么媒体内容？而我的回答是：交谈。但这个回答总是让人觉得不够满意。我想这可能是因为他们的朋友里没有那些古怪的人。而我的很多朋友，大概在大多数人眼里是古怪甚至是让人反感的。如果我在认识一个人一段时间后，依然无法预测他们接下来会说什么，我就会对他们非常感兴趣。这显然是一种非常多样化的体验。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And, but I also think like I'm uniquely tolerant of sort of distasteful and weird people. Like I do think part of the reason I get asked if I'm at like, what's your media diet? And conversations are my answer. And it always feels like the answer sort of falls flat with people. And I think it's because they're not friends with like weirdos. Like I, like a lot of my friends, I think are sort of, um, people would largely like find strange at best, distasteful at worst. If I can't predict what the person's going to say after knowing them for a while, I like them a lot. And that's obviously like a very high variance thing.
旧书是好的。我这辈子读了很多旧书，但我觉得YouTube的价值仍然被低估。YouTube上有很多非常冷门的内容。可以说，YouTube是我们这个时代，甚至可能是有史以来的亚历山大图书馆。但是，我觉得YouTube并不具备生成性。我认为唯一具有生成性的是对话。而且，在2026年前期，我觉得聊天机器人能让人误以为自己在产出内容。但如果我真的去看自己采取的行动，你会发现在聊天机器人上进行一个充实的两小时对话后，你会觉得自己非常有成效。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Old books are good. I've read a lot of old books in my life, but I think YouTube remains underrated. Like there's a lot of really obscure things on YouTube. YouTube sort of remains the library of Alexandria of, of our time, maybe of ever. But yeah, YouTube doesn't feel generative. I think the only thing that's generative is conversations. And, you know, so far in early 2026, I would say chatbots can lull you into feeling generative. But if I actually look at like the actions that I've taken, like you can feel really productive after like a good two hour session on a chatbot.
但实际上我不认为他们最终属于那个类型。如果你考虑一下伟大的投资想法，简单和复杂之间的正确平衡是什么？不只是那些你自己做过的，还有你研究过的。我确实认为很多人非常重视复杂性，仅仅因为它复杂。我认为很多投资者更在意让自己显得聪明、看起来很有头脑，而不是专注于赚钱。因此，对我个人来说，这是我自我提升的一个重要领域，因为显而易见的是，聪明的做法并不总是赚钱的方法。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
But I actually don't think they're that ultimately that genre of it. If you think about great investing ideas, what is the right balance between simplicity and complexity? If you think of both in the ones that you've done yourself, but also studied. I really do think people value complexity for the sake of complexity a lot. I think a lot of investors are in the like feel clever, look smart game more than the money game. And so, you know, personally, I think this has been a big area of like self-development for me, which is the clever thing is not always the thing that makes money, obviously.
所以我认为，要么你需要寻找那些复杂到无人问津的投资想法，要么它应该非常简单。我越来越相信简单这一点，比如说，你可能想投资像Elon Musk这样的项目，或这一类的想法。我觉得真正的能力在于能把这个想法推销出去。我认为许多投资媒体实际上是为那些人服务的，他们善于把这些想法包装得与众不同，显得非常聪明，但实际上也许仅仅就是投资Elon Musk或者比特币。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And so I think like you either have to say, I am looking for investment ideas that are so complex that no one is going to do them or it should actually be quite simple. I'm a bigger and bigger believer in the simplicity, which is like you probably want to be long Elon Musk, you know, or like that level of idea. I actually think like the gift is being able to sell that idea. I think a lot of the investing media actually serves for the people who are really good to dress up those ideas in a way that makes them feel differentiated and smart enough to what is actually sort of just long Elon or long Bitcoin.
我认识一个专门处理破产案子的人，他赚了很多钱。不过，这项工作非常复杂，非常困难。说实话，这是一项需要投入大量精力的工作，很辛苦，难度也很大，涉及很多风险和人际交往的事情。我觉得这就是一个通过复杂性赚钱的例子。而相对简单的一个例子就是：在那些大公司股票低于200周移动平均线的时候买入。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
I think of a guy that I think of a guy that I know who exclusively does bankruptcies and he makes a lot of money, but like that's very complex and very difficult. But, you know, it's a tremendous amount of work. It's grimy. It's difficult. It's there's a lot of risk and interpersonal stuff. And like that to me is like an example of getting paid for complexity. Whereas a good example of simplicity is like you should just buy like big companies when they're out there 200, 200 week moving average.
我非常喜欢这个想法，因为它简单明了，但非常正确。我特别喜欢的一个故事讲述的是如何在投资时理清思路，获得彻底的清晰，故事的主角是理查德·雷恩沃特。关于他的故事中，有一个是这样的：你走进他的办公室，带着一本黄色的法律记事本，在一页纸上写出你的投资论点，然后告诉他你打算将多少比例的净资产投入这个项目。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And it like I love that idea because it's just so simple. But it's right. One story that I absolutely love cutting through the mess and getting to like complete clarity on how to evaluate an investment is from Richard Rainwater, which is, you know, he there's these stories about him that he you would basically come into his office with a yellow legal pad and you would write out your thesis on one page and then you would tell him what percentage of your net worth you're going to put in the deal.
根据你的单页论文和你计划投入的净资产百分比，他会决定是否同意。我觉得这非常聪明。我知道很多人都不会这样做，因为这确实很难。这使事情变得更加困难。首先，要在一页纸上写出一篇有说服力的论文是很难的，用400页的幻灯片来展示要容易得多。其次，没有人愿意坦言自己只投入净资产的3%。对我来说，这是我听过的关于如何真正简单明确地判断这是否是一个好投资的最好例子之一。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And based on your one page thesis and the percentage of net worth that was going to put in, he would say yes or no. And I think that's genius. Like I really know people don't do that because that's really hard. It makes things way harder. First of all, it's hard to write a compelling thesis in a page. It's much easier to do it in a 400 page slide deck. And second of all, no one wants to say, well, I'm only putting 3% of my net worth in this. You know, and to me, that's one of the most simple, clear examples of really cutting to is this a good investment or not that I've ever heard.
我认为，现在一个很自然的提升点是具备出色的招聘能力，这意味着两件事：首先是吸引一个优秀且独特的人才库，其次是从中有效地挑选合适的人才。这是你在创建企业时非常注重的一点。在这个时代，如果你擅长这种技能，那将是无比宝贵的，尤其是在这种情况下，杰出人才带来的回报不断增加。关于这个过程的这两个阶段，你学到了什么?
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
One of the, I think, natural points of leverage now is the ability to hire extraordinarily well, which means two things, attract an amazing differentiated talent pool and then select from that group effectively. Yeah. That's something that you thought a ton about in building your business. And it seems like a skill that if you got good at it would be unbelievably valuable in this era specifically where the returns to like outlier talent seem to be going up and up and up. What did you learn about the two stages of that process?
我特别感兴趣的是，首先要吸引到独特的人才。也许最实际的方法是我认为最容易实现的，就是改善职位描述。我觉得很多职位描述似乎只是走个形式，写出来也没人看，更重要的是它存在而不是它写了什么。所以我尝试遵循一个非常简单的原则来撰写职位描述，因为我打算把它发布在 Twitter 和 LinkedIn 上。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Like, and I'm especially interested in attracting a unique pool of talent in the first place. Maybe the most practical thing is that I think is very low hanging fruit is just the job description. Um, I think job descriptions are one of these things where they are written for nobody to be, to be read by nobody. And there's sort of this like token document, like it's more about does the job description exists, uh, is more of the question versus like what's written in the job description. And so I tried to write one that followed a very simple rule, which was a, uh, you know, I was going to, obviously I was going to post it on, on Twitter and LinkedIn.
我认为你发的任何内容都必须是一个很好的独立帖子，不能只是一些如果你不认识我就不会分享的东西。因此，这是第一点。我认为第二点同样重要的是，任何销售推介——职位描述也应该如此——都需要明确说明你不想要的对象。关于有争议的声明，有一个好处是，当它引起共鸣时，会在对的人心中产生深刻的共鸣。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And so I think anything you post has to be a good standalone post, you know, um, it can't just, it can't be something that you, but it can't be something that you wouldn't share if you didn't know me. Um, uh, and so that's the first. And then the second, I think was really that I think, I think what's so important in any sales pitch, which is what a job description should be is, uh, disqualifying who you don't want. And the nice thing about a divisive statement is that, um, it, when it resonates, it deeply resonates with the person.
所以我试着想一下，我希望一个人具备哪些特质，然后将这些特质结合起来，形成一种做事风格，因为你做一件事的方式往往反映了你做所有事的态度，这样这个人就会成为我感兴趣的类型。显然，技能和经验是基本要求。我尝试写下那些真正能激励人的特质和理念，希望合适的人看到后会觉得：“哇，这个人真的懂我，理解我，”并且让那些人感到震撼。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And so I just tried to think of, okay, like what are all the traits that I would want someone to have and try and make them again, to go back to the, like, uh, how you do one thing is how you do everything that would make them the type of person that I was interested. Obviously the skills and the experience was going to be table stakes. I tried to write out, um, traits and ideas that would really be inspiring and for the right person to be like, whoa, like this person really gets me, understands me and would make people mad.
我发布的一些内容中，最有趣或者说反响最大的一条是：“你在一个排名前十的学校中属于思想上的少数派。” 我觉得有趣的是，这句话完全可以有多种解读。有些人会因为我只提到排名前十的学校而感到不满，但对于“排名前十的学校”这说法，本身就很模糊。因此，我喜欢的是这种开放性表达。也就是说，确实有一些学校是毫无争议地属于前十名的。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
One of the things that I posted, uh, the one that kind of was, was the funniest was, uh, or got the most reaction was, um, you're an ideological minority at a top 10 school. And what I love about that is that it's entirely open for interpretation. So, you know, um, uh, I would get people who would be many different things, right? Who'd be angry that I only want a top 10 school. The nice thing about top 10 schools, it's a fully ambiguous statement. And so, you know, what I love about it is, um, oh, I love about it that, I mean, a, there's, there's some schools that I think uncontroversially are top 10.
所以我理解这些人，但你也可以简单地声称你的学校是前十名。我遇到过几个人，他们的学校根本谈不上靠近这一排名，但他们就这么声称了。我觉得这很棒。有些人选择不参与，因为他们觉得不知道自己的学校是否在这个行列中。我觉得这很好，因为我不需要那些人，然后再谈谈意识形态上的少数派。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And so I get those people, uh, but you can also just sort of assert that your school is a top 10. And I had a few people from schools that I would not say were anywhere close, just sort of assert that. And I thought that was great. I had people select out because they were sort of like, you know, oh, I don't know if my school is, I'm not going to find that's great. Cause I don't want those people and then ideological minority.
这真是件有趣的事情。我原本有某种想法，但人们却给了我各种关于意识形态的回答，因为你知道，我并不一定是想讨论政治。有很多关于某人在学校如何表现突出的回答。我觉得这些陈述很有意思，因为它们非常模棱两可。在某种程度上，它们也自带了一种信心测试。而且，我甚至会收到一些信息，像是“嘿，我觉得这很荒谬，你应该雇用我，即使我没上过前十名的学校，你真是个傻瓜。”
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
It was really interesting. I had a certain idea in mind, but people gave me all kinds of answers about ideological because, you know, I didn't necessarily political. There was all kinds of answers around, um, you know, how that person stood out at the, at their school. And so I think like those statements are great because they're like highly ambiguous. They can be, um, there's a bit of an inherent test of confidence. And, uh, and then, you know, I, I would even get a few posts that were like, Hey, you know, I, I think this is bullshit. You should hire me. I didn't go to a top 10 school. You're an idiot.
我也爱那个人。对吧。我觉得，多用这种能够引起回应的表述是很不错的。试想一下，如果你在面试中想要展现所有这些特质，你需要怎么做。所以，我认为这种表达在职位描述中被低估了。把面试的元素融入到职位发布中是个很酷的想法。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And I love that person too. Right. And so like, I think the more you can do statements like that, where they like get this sort of reaction is great. Uh, and you sort of like do all like, imagine what you would have to do in an interview to like get at all of those various traits. Um, and so yeah, statements like that, I think are very much underutilized in these job descriptions. It's a cool idea of baking the interview into the job post itself.
在我看来，今天有一个可能被低估的研究领域，我知道你对此很感兴趣，那就是分析重大运动背后的文化和智力传统。我认为，这在这次科技浪潮中确实是如此，但我并没有看到太多相关的讨论和文章。我很希望你能聊聊你对推动我们所见过最大科技变革浪潮之人和机构背后核心信仰的看法。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
It seems to me like an underrated area of inquiry today that I know you're interested in is the cultural and intellectual traditions behind major movements. And I think that that has certainly been true in this wave of technology and it's not something I see talked about, written about very much. And I'd love you to just riff on your interpretation of the key, uh, sets of beliefs behind the people and the institutions that are ushering in the biggest wave of technology change that we've probably ever seen.
我对事物、人和地方的品质和特性被误判价值感兴趣。我不确定这是否一直如此，但至少在今天确实如此。我认为有些品质和特性，比如身高、智商、简历等，是被广泛认可并且定价合理的。然而，还有其他一些特质和特点，我们则集体上选择不对其定价。在硅谷，人们往往低估了哲学家、思想家以及支撑整个体系的模仿性观念。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
I'm interested in mispricings in qualities and attributes, uh, about things and people and places. I don't know if this has always been true, but it's true today. I think there's some, uh, qualities and attributes that are, you know, widely recognized and priced efficiently, let's say, um, height, IQ, resume, et cetera. And then there's other traits and characteristics that, um, we have just decided collectively not to price for Silicon Valley people sort of underrate the philosophers and thinkers and, um, sort of like memetic ideas that underpin the whole thing.
我认为硅谷的科技发展背后有一种类似新佛教功利主义的哲学。这很有趣，因为你会发现像Will McCasle这样的思想家参与了SPF和FTX。同时，还有像Nick Land这样的人，他们的思想在硅谷暗中发酵并影响着许多人，但这些思想未必被明确提及。当然，现在这些名字已经被提到过了。你也可以用同样的话形容Curtis Yarvin。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
I think there is a real philosophy that's some sort of like neo-Buddhist utilitarianism, uh, that underlies the like technological developments in Silicon Valley. And it's interesting because you see it like Will McCasle, uh, gets involved with SPF and FTX. There's these sort of thinkers like Nick Land, um, that are, there's sort of ideas percolate underneath the surface in the Valley and are influential in everyone, but are not necessarily named. I mean, now they have been, um, you could say the same thing about Curtis Yarvin.
多年来，我一直觉得很惊讶，能听到大科技公司领袖在不提名字的情况下表达出Curtis的想法。比如，利用研究和一些知识分子的观点。我觉得，就像世俗的人们普遍低估了宗教信仰对人们的重要指导作用一样，在硅谷和这些技术的发展过程中，这些文化和哲学思想的影响也被低估了。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
I thought it was remarkable for years how you could sort of hear Curtis's ideas coming out of the mouth of a mouth of the big tech leaders without being named. There's things like leverage research and all these intellectual characters that I think, you know, in the same way that I think, um, uh, people's religious beliefs are generally underrated by secular people in terms of how important that is as a guiding light. And I think, uh, in the Valley and the development of these technologies, these sorts of cultural and philosophical ideas are underrated.
不管你喜欢与否，这些模式非常实用。它们融入了一些宗教元素，如犹太教和佛教的思想，以及一种类似于实用主义的倾向，并最终演变成某种利他主义的因素。很多人可能会觉得这仅仅是文化的一部分，但实际上，这些东西很重要。我觉得整个文化中心对这些模式的影响在整体上被严重低估了，因为它决定了为什么这些东西会被构建，以及它们内在的世界观，以及构建它们的人所具有的内在世界观。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Like the, you know, like it or not, the models are highly utilitarian. They have this weird mix of religious ideas from, from Judaism, from Buddhism, um, and this sort of like utilitarian bent that turns into a factor of altruism. And, and, you know, people sort of think like, okay, like, you know, this is just cultural, whatever, but it, it, these things matter. And it just feels to me that this whole cultural epicenter has been highly underrated in general and informing, um, why these things get built and what the worldviews inherent in them are and what the inherent worldviews are in the people who build them.
在我看来，80年代的华尔街似乎有点自负，甚至有点像异教徒文化，强者和美丽是最重要的。这种文化有一方面的享乐主义，也有一种开放但有点虚无主义的特点，因为一切都是为了赚钱。它的核心思想不同于其他的。我认为关键在于，科技行业自视为完全自以为是，认为他们所构建的东西不是单纯由罪恶或贪婪和野心驱动。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And it almost feels to me that, um, that was Wall Street in the 80s was sort of vain, uh, almost pagan, the strong and the beautiful are what's most important. There's a hedonistic aspect to it. There's an openness that it's a little bit nihilist because it's all just about getting money. It's not the same notion. And I think at the crux of that is that technology views itself as totally self-righteous, which is that like the thing that they are building, it's not nakedly sin driven or driven out of a greed or ambition.
这起源于一个名义上无私的想法，就是我们在建造一个全世界都能使用的产品。这是一个正和的局面，表面上看来确实如此。但我确实认为，这种想法几乎到了病态的地步，因为完全没有考虑到其他因素，这有些像是影子般的存在。而这种理念中也完全没有提到：如果你从事金融行业，你需要把金融的收益转化为有价值的东西，比如艺术、建筑、慈善事业、文化，或者是你所生活的地方。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
It's driven out of this, you know, a nominally altruistic idea of no, we're building this thing, this product that the whole world uses. It's, it's positive sum, um, which is true on the surface, but I do think that it's almost, it's almost pathological at the point where there's no recognition of all the other factors. It's, it's, it's almost sort of shadow-esque. Um, and there's none of this notion of like, well, if you work in finance, you sort of need to try, you need to translate the gains from finance into something worthy, into, into art, into architecture, into philanthropy, into just culture in general, or into the place that you live.
没有这样的存在，因为我认为科技界将自身视为，呃，终极慈善事业就是你正在构建的业务。我认为如今的硅谷并没有那种需要通过参加图书派对、艺术活动等来合理化、记录甚至包装他们行为的冲动。我认为这是一种有趣的区别。我希望更多的人能尝试记录这些事情，因为所有的疯狂、性、毒品和摇滚都以一种书呆子式的方式存在。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
None of that exists because I think tech views itself as, you know, the, the ultimate philanthropy is, is the business that you're building. I don't think Silicon Valley today has the same sort of reflexive need to justify or document or even launder sort of what they're doing through, you know, through going to book parties and, and, and arts and, and all this sort of stuff. Um, and I think it's like this interesting, this interesting difference. And I, I wish that more people would, um, try and document this stuff because it's all there, all the crazy, all the sex, drugs and rock and roll is there in its own sort of like nerdy autistic way.
文化，我觉得一直以来都非常被低估，而宗教信仰，无论是真正的宗教还是某种类似宗教的信仰，总是能够填补那种空虚。每次谈话时，我总是希望我们能再多聊三个小时。再次感谢你为我做这一切，感谢你的时间，也谢谢你邀请我。你知道小的优势是如何随着时间的推移而不断累积的，这在投资中是如此，在经营公司时也是如此。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
And the culture, again, I think culture is just like vastly underrated and, and religious beliefs, whether literally religious or sort of pseudo religious, but, but, but filling that void. As always, when we talk, I wish we had three more hours. Thanks for doing this for me again. Thanks for your time. Thanks for having me. You know how small advantages compound over time. That's true in investing and just as true in how you run your company.
您的支出系统就是您的资本分配策略。Ramp 通过默认智能化设置，使其更聪明，提供更好的数据、更好的决策以及随时间提升的经济效益。请访问 ramp.com/invest 了解详情。随着您的企业成长，Vanta 将与您一同扩展，通过自动化合规管理为您提供安全和风险管理的一站式信息源。更多信息请访问 vanta.com/invest。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Your spending system is your capital allocation strategy. Ramp makes it smarter by default, better data, better decisions, better economics over time. See how at ramp.com slash invest. As your business grows, Vanta scales with you, automating compliance and giving you a single source of truth for security and risk. Learn more at vanta.com slash invest.
从Open AI到Cursor再到Perplexity，最顶尖的AI和软件公司都使用WorkOS，使其在一夜之间就具备企业级能力，而不是经过数月的等待。访问workOS.com，跳过繁琐的基础设施工作，专注于你的产品。Ridgeline正在重塑资产管理技术，成为真正的合作伙伴，而不仅仅是一个软件供应商。他们帮助公司规模扩大5倍，实现更快的发展、更智能的运营和竞争优势。访问ridgelineapps.com，看看他们能为你的公司带来什么突破。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
The best AI and software companies from open AI to cursor to perplexity use WorkOS to become enterprise ready overnight, not in months. Visit workOS.com to skip the unglamorous infrastructure work and focus on your product. Ridgeline is redefining asset management technology as a true partner, not just a software vendor. They've helped firms 5X in scale, enabling faster growth, smarter operations, and a competitive edge. Visit ridgelineapps.com to see what they can unlock for your firm.
每家投资公司都有其独特之处，而普通的人工智能无法理解你们的流程。但 Rogo 可以。Rogo 是一个专门为华尔街打造的人工智能平台，它与你的数据相连接，理解你的流程，并产生真实的结果。请访问 rogo.ai/invest 了解更多。
▶ 英文原文 ⏱
Every investment firm is unique and generic AI doesn't understand your process. Rogo does. It's an AI platform built specifically for Wall Street, connected to your data, understanding your process, and producing real outputs. Check them out at rogo.ai slash invest.