Noah Feldman on Hyper-Productivity, Learning 10+ Languages, DAOs, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show

1. 0:00 – 0:15

   Intro

   1. TFTim Ferriss0:00

      [upbeat music]

2. 0:15 – 8:33

   Growing Up Among Languages

   1. TFTim Ferriss0:15

      Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I am so excited for this episode, and I'm, am also intimidated. I have a mess of notes in front of me, which we will discuss [laughs] . My guest is Noah Feldman. You can find him on Twitter, @NoahRFeldman, F-E-L-D-M-A-N. Noah is a Harvard professor, ethical philosopher and advisor, public intellectual, religious scholar and historian, and author of 10 books, including his latest, The Broken Constitution, subtitle, Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America. He's also a hyperpolyglot, and we're going to probably talk about that right at the beginning. It tells you something when that can be omitted in the bio. Moving on. Feldman is host of the Deep Background podcast, a policy and public affairs columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, and a former contributing writer for The New York Times. He served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of Iraq's interim constitution. He earned his AB summa cum laude from Harvard, finishing first in his class. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a DPhil, which I just learned how to pronounce properly, from Oxford University, writing his dissertation on Aristotle's ethics. He received his JD from Yale Law School and clerked for Justice David Souter of the US Supreme Court. Noah's 10 books also include Divided by God: America’s Church-State Problem and What We Should Do about It; What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building; Cool War, subtitle, The United States, China, and the Future of Global Competition; Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices; and The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President. You can find him on Twitter, as mentioned, @NoahRFeldman, Instagram, @NoahRFeldman, and all things Noah can be found at Noah-Feldman.com. Noah, welcome to the show. So nice to see you.

   2. NFNoah Feldman2:14

      It's great to see you too, Tim. Thank you so much for having me.

   3. TFTim Ferriss2:18

      And I will begin with the language piece, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna segue there by stating up front, for people who don't know, that we have a shared deep interest in languages, although you put me to shame. And what I was thinking as I looked at probably 12 sheets of paper in front of me before we got started, I thought to myself, "Que quilombo. Que quilombo!" And a quilombo, I wanted to look it up, because I was gonna say this on the show, and I was like, "You know what? I should really check to see what that means." It's used in Argentina to mean what a mess. What a mess. And so I looked it up, and it actually comes from what is called lunfardo, which is this sort of Italian-adopted street slang used initially by kind of lower classes and criminals, and quilombo means a mess, scandal, uproar, disorder, or conflict. In the past, quilombo strictly referred to brothels or so-called houses of ill repute.

   4. NFNoah Feldman3:14

      I'm honored.

   5. TFTim Ferriss3:14

      However [laughs]

   6. NFNoah Feldman3:15

      [laughs]

   7. TFTim Ferriss3:16

      As the term evolved, it began to be applied to disorganized or messy conditions or situations of conflict. Now, I'm just using it to refer to my notes and where to begin, and I highlighted one thing, and that is related to your languages. You're fluent in English, Hebrew, Arabic, French. You can speak and read conversational Korean, read Aramaic, Latin, some Greek, Spanish, Italian, and German. How does this happen? Where did this start?

   8. NFNoah Feldman3:50

      I think it started basically in a quilombo, so thanks- thanks for teaching me that new word-

   9. TFTim Ferriss3:54

      [laughs]

   10. NFNoah Feldman3:55

       ... um, of a, of a childhood where my parents definitely thought that we should live in a bunch of different worlds. And they, before I was born, had spent time in Afghanistan and had Afghan friends that I knew when I was growing up, and actually had two Afghan teenagers living with us when I was a little kid. And then we went and spent a year in Israel, and I, I o- I don't remember this, 'cause I was too little, but I have the pictures of myself on a backpack on my dad's back in front of the Acropolis in Athens, and then in front of the pyramids in Egypt, and on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. And so I think I was just being exposed to a million languages, or maybe not a million, but a lot of languages, when I was a really, really small kid. And my dad would always tell the story about being in Cairo, and I was running around, and I was, I think, like, one and a half. And I was-- I called my dad Aba, which is Hebrew, or actually it's Aramaic, for, for Dad. And I was saying, "Aba, Aba, Aba." And my dad was freaking out, 'cause we're, like, in the middle of Egypt [laughs]

   11. TFTim Ferriss4:55

       [laughs]

   12. NFNoah Feldman4:55

       And, uh, this kid is speaking Hebrew to his father. And, you know, it's as a time literally between the 1967 and 1973 wars, where Israel and Egypt were, like, not only at war with each other in the midst of a, like, an actual shooting war over the Suez Canal, but, like, they were between two mega wars. And people came up to him and were like, "So nice. Your son already speaks Arabic, and he's only one year old. He's saying, 'Abu, Abu, Abu, Abu.'" [laughs]

   13. TFTim Ferriss5:23

       [laughs]

   14. NFNoah Feldman5:23

       So my dad was like, "Oh, thank goodness." You know? Like, these languages are basically all the same. And I remember being told that story from an early, early age, and I think the takeaway, all of my dad's stories had takeaways, and I think the takeaway was, A, language matters, B, even people who are really, really mad at each other have a lot of overlap, including overlap of language. And I think I- that always stayed with me.

   15. TFTim Ferriss5:47

       We're definitely going to go deeper on this, but I want to say also as just a backdrop that as I was doing research for this, and I always enjoy the sort of pretext of the interview to do all this Google sleuthing, which would otherwise be really creepy- I just came to realize that perhaps I should think of you as someone who studies the code of human behavior, whether that takes the form of absorbed code, in a sense, through, say, language you assimilate at a super young age, whether that is, say, a constitution, uh, or some type of sort of consciously constructed code of a sort. Blockchain might also be an example. And certainly, you know, languages is one arena in which you seem to have really cut your teeth. In the beginning, you absorbed languages, but then you began to study languages. Why dedicate so much time and energy, and how did that happen?

   16. NFNoah Feldman6:59

       Well, first of all, thank you for that way of putting it, which I love, and is better than I could have put it myself. I think I was trying to decode the world around me. So my parents sent me to a Jewish school where they taught us Hebrew, and they also took us to the Middle East when I was old enough to remember it. And I remember being a little kid in Israel and seeing street signs in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, and having really no idea at that age that there was a very complicated, layered history of that, with not a lot of getting along [laughs] and a whole lot of fighting, but an aspiration via these different languages to try to get along. And I just thought, "Well, if there's multiple languages, I'm supposed to know them," because they were sending me to a school where they taught me this language, and then there it was on a street sign. So I thought, "Okay, I guess I'm supposed to figure these things out." And that actually led me to go and study Arabic in the kind of naive, childish, and in my defense, I was only, you know, 15 years old or 14 years old, aspiration to understand the world. And, you know, then, uh, maybe I could bring peace to the Middle East. [laughs] You know, that didn't work out so well. Um, but, you know, the idea was to decode these things that are otherwise unavailable. And when you... There's actually nothing more f- frustrating in life than hearing someone speak a language that you don't speak. Because you know there's a whole universe going on there. You can see the animation. You know there are emotions. You can recognize something, and you don't know what they're saying. And so for me, the impulse to decode is to sort of get behind there and to know what's going on underneath.

   17. TFTim Ferriss8:32

       Hm.

3. 8:33 – 13:35

   How Arabic Changed His Worldview

   1. TFTim Ferriss8:33

      So I just want to highlight 14, 15, because there is this myth, I certainly think it's a myth, that to learn a language, speak it fluently, we could debate what fluent means, but let's just say conversationally at a reasonably high level, that you need to learn it when you are in the single digits, and that is patently false. Uh, [laughs] certainly has been my experience. I really started learning languages at 15 or 16. And you have a long list, but let's start with Arabic. So 14, 15, you set out to learn Arabic, and there are many different flavors of Arabic. But once you were reasonably competent with Arabic, how did that change your universe?

   2. NFNoah Feldman9:26

      It broke it. I mean, it changed my worldview radically and totally, and that's because when you learn a language, it puts you in the thought world of the people who speak it, and you no longer are seeing them as an outsider imagining what they might think when they speak to themselves, but you're actually a participant. You may not be a member of the group, but you can participate because you can speak the language. And since I'd been raised in this milieu that was, you know, very Israel-focused, very Jewish, there were all kinds of ideas about what Arabic speakers were like, what Arabic was like, what the world of, uh, you know, of the Arab p- people was. And just to see that from the opposite perspective, it blew my mind at a very early age, and I think very few things have had as big an influence on me, because I just realized that things just looked different from an alternative perspective. They weren't necessarily better or worse. They were just really, really fundamentally distinct. And that made me realize that, to put it very bluntly, a lot of what I'd been taught you could characterize as not having been true from someone else's perspective. It's not that anybody was consciously lying to me. They were just giving me their perspective, and suddenly I was hearing pretty much 180 degrees the opposite perspective [laughs] . And that is the most useful lesson you could possibly give a young teenager trying to make sense of the world. Someone always sees things the opposite way that you see them.

   3. TFTim Ferriss10:58

      Why did you end up in Egypt with potential, I imagine, you know, conflict, risk with your parents? How did... Why, why were you there?

   4. NFNoah Feldman11:14

      You know, I've talked to my parents a lot about why they liked to travel the way they did when, when we were little. And, you know, they were in Israel for the year. My dad had an academic fellowship there. My mom was in graduate school, so she was working on her dissertation. But, uh, however you do that when you're, you've got one little kid and you've got another one on the way. Um, she somehow managed to pull that off. And they were like, "We're here. Egypt's not that far away. Let's go check out Egypt." [laughs] And, you know, I mean, I guess it was close enough to the '60s that there was still this idea that you just kind of threw your kid in the back of the car, literally, and just went. And, you know, you couldn't go directly from Israel to Egypt at the time, so that meant they had to go via... I think they went via Cyprus, probably by boat, um, if I remember correctly. And, you know, they were just like, "What the heck?" There were no, there were no car seats in that world, let's just put it that way. So I think they just wanted to see what it was like. And then once they were there, you know, they were also an important element. They were Americans, and Americans could go anywhere. We were-- We've been incredibly privileged, you know, through our lives and also our parents' lives, that that passport, that blue passport mostly lets you in almost wherever you wanna go. People might not like us very much, but they pretty much always let us in. And then if they don't, we invade them, so that's probably not such a good thing.

   5. TFTim Ferriss12:31

      [laughs]

   6. NFNoah Feldman12:31

      But that i- is a habit that we have.

   7. TFTim Ferriss12:35

      For people listening, I, I want you to know we're not going to focus on languages for an hour or anything like that. I do wanna spend a little more time on it because-- And I want you to stress test. Feel free to stress test anything I say that sounds like BS, but we begin to function, it seems, you know, as adults and interact as a society using words that reflect concepts, and those words and concepts form narratives that drive our lives, right? These are invisible scripts in a way. And I think that's gonna tie into a lot of what we end up discussing, so I wanna spend a little bit more time on language. And the way I wanna do that first is by asking you about, and you can correct my pronunciation here, but in English, Dr. Bishai?

   8. NFNoah Feldman13:32

      Yes.

   9. TFTim Ferriss13:33

      And-

   10. NFNoah Feldman13:33

       Dr. Wilson Bishai. Yeah.

4. 13:35 – 26:47

   Dr. Bishai and the Spectrum of Arabic

   1. TFTim Ferriss13:35

      Okay. Bishai. So I wanna read something from wordsmithsblog.com, and I believe these are your words. So, "At Harvard, I studied Biblical Hebrew and a great deal of medieval philosophical Hebrew. I also studied Arabic, primarily medieval philosophical Arabic, but I did take a course on modern colloquial Arabic given by Dr. Bishai." How did he end up teaching you colloquial Arabic?

   2. NFNoah Feldman14:05

      So Dr. Bishai, Wilson Bishai, who's kind of a hero of mine, was a major important person in my life even before I took that class. Because he was the one who, when I showed up and wanted to enroll at the Harvard Summer School as a young teen, I was just finished ninth grade, and I wanted to take Arabic, let me take his class, and I had the following experience. I went into his office to discuss this with him, and he, he was a very formal guy, so it was like the summer and he was wearing a full suit. In my memory, he even had a vest on, although I might be imagining the vest.

   3. TFTim Ferriss14:38

      [laughs]

   4. NFNoah Feldman14:39

      And like a big tie, and he was very formal. He spoke in this very mellifluous, deep bass kind of voice. And he said to me, "You wish to study the Arabic language?" And I said, "Yes, Dr. Bishai, I do." He said, "You may study the Arabic language." And then I said, "But I have a problem-

   5. TFTim Ferriss14:58

      [laughs]

   6. NFNoah Feldman14:58

      "... which is that you can't sign up for the summer school unless you're 16, and I'm not 16." And he said, "Hold on a moment." [laughs] And he picked up the phone and he called the registrar of the summer school, and they had a conversation, and I didn't think it was going very well from what I could hear on one end of it. He hung up and he said, "I have good news. You will study Arabic." I was like, "Great." He said, "There is only one condition. You may not pay tuition, and you may not take the final examination." [laughs]

   7. TFTim Ferriss15:27

      [laughs]

   8. NFNoah Feldman15:28

      So basically, he had gotten on the phone, he had called the registrar. The registrar had said, "No, I'm not gonna let you register some, like, little kid for your class." And he had said, "Okay, no problem." And then he hung up the phone and just said, "Okay, you can come to my class. It's my class. You come to my class. You're just not gonna pay [laughs] and you're not gonna show up the day of the final exam."

   9. TFTim Ferriss15:44

      [laughs]

   10. NFNoah Feldman15:45

       And he opened up the world of the Arabic language to me, and he was a very distinctive guy. He had his own book that he used to teach that he had invented. He had his own tapes that we listened to in the old-fashioned language lab where we'd go and listen to them on, you know, on tape decks.

   11. TFTim Ferriss15:59

       I remember that. I did that too.

   12. NFNoah Feldman16:02

       And it worked, and I loved it, and I, you know, worked my tail off. And unlike, I guess, all the other people in Harvard Summer School who were old enough to go out and party, I wasn't, [laughs] so I was home doing my homework every night. And later when I went to college, I took this class that I, that you were referring to there, which was a kind of amazing class. He was Egyptian, and he introduced us to modern standard Arabic, which is what the newscasters speak. But he also had these linguistic tricks that were literally like a code that he had worked out, and he taught us these tricks in the course so you could translate in real time, almost like an algorithm, your formal modern standard Arabic into Egyptian colloquial Arabic. And it was kind of like a bizarre and fascinating thing that it worked so well. But it did. It just, it worked like a charm. And he, he loved all of the students who most of us had studied Arabic with him before. And just final story about this, he kept on referring to the exam as the banquet. He would say-

   13. TFTim Ferriss17:02

       [laughs]

   14. NFNoah Feldman17:03

       ... "You have, you have eaten the meals, and now you must attend the banquet." And then when the semester came to an end, he literally did not give us a final exam. He was like, "You all have learned very well," and he actually took us out to dinner instead of a final exam. I mean, I was just like, "That is what a good teacher is." He knew what each of us knew. It was good enough for him. Boom. We're done here.

   15. TFTim Ferriss17:28

       That is such an incredible story. What a character. What a personality.

   16. NFNoah Feldman17:34

       He really was, and he taught a whole generation of, of Harvard students to speak Arabic.

   17. TFTim Ferriss17:38

       And on the Egyptian Arabic side, for those who don't know, could you just give people an idea of the spectrum of Arabic, right? Be- uh, because this applies-

   18. NFNoah Feldman17:49

       Yeah

   19. TFTim Ferriss17:50

       ... to so many languages, and it applies to so many things, just like Spanish in Argentina is... Actually, Spanish in the provinces of Argentina is not the same as Spanish in Capital Federal, in Buenos Aires. It's not the same. It is not the same Spanish spoken in Spain, et cetera, even though they all fall under this umbrella term of Spanish. What does the spectrum of Arabic look like?

   20. NFNoah Feldman18:14

       I think the spectrum of Arabic is maybe the biggest of almost any language that you can still call the same language. And part of the reason for that is, you know, when the original Arabs, you know, following the prophet Muhammad, came out of Arabia in the 7th and 8th centuries, they conquered a large part of the known world. And, uh, only a small number of them went out there, and they brought their Arabic, which was the Arabic of Arabia, which is why it was called Arabic. But then they assimilated into all of the local cultures, ranging all the way from, you know, the Iraq-Iran border in the east all the way to Morocco in the west, and then up all the way into Spain. So that's an enormous geographical span, and they were encountering different languages wherever they went, and the local languages basically merged to some degree with the formal Arabic that had, that had come along. And so the result is that over the next, you know, roughly 1,300 years, the daily spoken languages diverged even as the written language remained pretty standard everywhere, and as the language, let's say, of the Quran and then later the language of newspapers and newscasters remained pretty stable. So the result is that if you were listening to an Iraqi speaking colloquial everyday Iraqi Arabic, and an Egyptian, and a Tunisian, and a Moroccan, they are so different that as you get further and further apart, they literally would not be able to understand each other. So it's literally the case that someone who only speaks Iraqi dialect would not be able to understand very well someone who only spoke Moroccan or Tunisian dialect. They're almost different languages. And what people do understand comes mostly from watching TV shows that are, you know, that are broadcast all over the region. So for example, in the '50s and '60s, the Egyptian TV stations were the dominant ones. And so actually people all over the Arab world can still often understand Egyptian Arabic because they just watched it on TV, and over time they picked it up. So it's, like, a fascinating aspect of Arabic, and it's also really frustrating because when you land in a country where you don't speak the dialect, and I had this experience in Tunisia, uh, you know, in the early ... right after the Arab Spring when I spent a lot of time there. You know, you get off the plane, you're talking to people, and everyone can understand modern standard Arabic, so you can make yourself understood really well. You just sound like, you know, you're a newscaster or something.

   21. TFTim Ferriss20:38

       [laughs]

   22. NFNoah Feldman20:38

       And then they answer you back, and if it's an educated person, they answer you in modern standard Arabic, and then you're having a conversation. But if they answer you in their local colloquial, you're, like, smiling and you have no idea what they just said. [laughs] No idea. And then you have to say to them, "Oh, would you please speak, you know, formal Arabic?" Which you can't always say to someone who hasn't had, you know, advanced schooling. And then the most embarrassing part is then uneducated people will say, "Oh, you speak such a beautiful Arabic. You speak so much better than we do." And you're like, "No, I don't [laughs] speak better than you do. I just speak, you know, newscaster Arabic." But they're taught that that's somehow better or higher, and so they're really, like, deferential and respectful, and it makes you feel awful because, in fact, the whole point is you don't actually speak their colloquial, and it will take you-

   23. TFTim Ferriss21:22

       [laughs]

   24. NFNoah Feldman21:22

       ... months to be able to, like, even, you know, order in a restaurant.

   25. TFTim Ferriss21:25

       [laughs] Well, it makes me think of this time I was watching a, a boxing match with a friend, and one of the boxers was, uh, from the UK, and he's being interviewed after the fight, and my friend said, "Wow, he's really smart." I said, "No, he's not. He just has the queen's English as an accent." [laughs]

   26. NFNoah Feldman21:43

       [laughs]

   27. TFTim Ferriss21:45

       And I'm going to ask you about Aramaic, but first I want to just point out to people how interconnected all these things are. So you mentioned tricks, almost like an algorithm, right, for converting this modern standard Arabic into colloquial Arabic, or specifically, I guess, colloquial Egyptian Arabic. And even the word algorithm, I believe, comes from, like, Al-Khwarizmi or s- or some mathematician/astronomer who has a statue dedicated to him, I want to say, in Uzbekistan, which is where I spent some time with Kevin Kelly. So that Al of algorithm, as it's pronounced in English, we see that everywhere in Arabic, right? Al Qaeda and al, al, al. What does that al mean?

   28. NFNoah Feldman22:36

       Al just means the.

   29. TFTim Ferriss22:38

       The. It's like a definite article.

   30. NFNoah Feldman22:40

       You're completely right, and it goes in front of proper nouns, and it goes in front of names, too. And so almost every time you see the A-L prefix in a word that we use in English, it comes from Arabic, and it almost always comes from Arabic via Spanish because the Arabs were in Spain, and then there was this long, complicated, you know, 800-year struggle over whether the Christians or the Muslims would control Spain. And if you're struggling with someone for 800 years, you're sharing a lot of culture and civilization along the way, and there was, there are a lot of high moments when people are getting along. And so it's also true whenever you're in Latin America and speaking Spanish, words that start with A-L are all over the language, you know, even more than they are in English. And every single one of those words, basically with no exception, is actually an Arabic word, and that's, like, totally fascinating to me.
5. 26:47 – 34:53

   Hyper-Productivity, Presence and Therapy

   1. TFTim Ferriss26:47

      Wow. You know, I just have to reiterate, I'm, I'm so excited for this conversation, and simultaneously knowing we're gonna only cover a fraction, so I, I'm gonna preemptively invite you back for round two, and maybe multiple rounds. I'm gonna focus on the personal here, not too, too personal, but the, the personal for a second, and then we're going to dig into some of your other areas of expertise. And this is the basic question. [laughs] And, uh, I think a, a lot of people will wonder this. All right. You're a law professor. You teach three to four courses. You're a columnist. You write two to three columns a week. You're a podcast host, so you tape two podcasts. Book author, on average one book every two years. Ethical advisor, you advise Facebook, eBay, other tech companies. Uh, you're raising two teenage kids, while still taking off nights, weekends, Jewish holidays, and as I have it on, on good, uh, good authority, [laughs] occasionally sleeping in till 10:00 AM.

   2. NFNoah Feldman27:54

      [laughs]

   3. TFTim Ferriss27:55

      While not drinking caffeine. So what the hell, Noah? How do you do all of this? And why no caffeine?

   4. NFNoah Feldman28:03

      I really like caffeine, but I think I'm unbearable to myself on it, and I'm sure I'm unbearable to others on it, too.

   5. TFTim Ferriss28:10

      [laughs]

   6. NFNoah Feldman28:11

      I think it's just metabolic luck. You know, I have... I wake up and I have a lot of energy to, to do stuff, and I like doing stuff that's fun. I do get plenty of sleep, which I think helps a lot. I mean, I do... I'm one of these people who believes that, and I've heard you say this on your show too, that if you under-sleep yourself, sure, then you're gonna need caffeine or some other substance to get you going. But if you get enough sleep, you don't need the caffeine, and you can just blast hard the rest of the time and sort of, you know, suck all of the juice out of life. So I think that's the reason that I, that I don't use caffeine. Also, as I said, I think it makes me super irritating. Like, I-

   7. TFTim Ferriss28:50

      [laughs]

   8. NFNoah Feldman28:51

      ... you know, I, I get extremely up in everybody else's face, and extremely intense. And I can actually feel my heart beating too fast when I, when I use it. I can literally, like, put my hand on my chest and feel the vibration and realize, "That doesn't sound good."

   9. TFTim Ferriss29:07

      [laughs] So that still leaves the question of how you structure your time or think about, I don't wanna say time management, because maybe that's not it, life management such that you can do all of these things. Because there are plenty of people who have, let's just call it good, good genetics, good metabolism, who have an abundance of energy, who nonetheless cannot harness that energy to do one of these things, let alone this long list that I just provided, while, wh- while having time off.

   10. NFNoah Feldman29:50

       So let me first say, I, I wanna thank you for getting me to think about this systematically, not just in this conversation, but it was actually when I met you and we were sort of starting to chat about this, and I actually had never thought about how I arrange my life at all. I just kinda did it. But now I've actually thought about it a little bit.

   11. TFTim Ferriss30:06

       [laughs]

   12. NFNoah Feldman30:06

       And I think the answer, if there is one, is whatever I'm doing in that moment, I really try to be completely focused and present on that moment, and never thinking about the thing that comes next. And over time, I think I trained myself to be able to do that. So, you know, if I get up in the morning and walk my daughter to the bus, she's more than old enough that she does not need me to walk her to the bus. She's maybe even a little embarrassed by it. But I have this theory that if you're there as a parent, sometimes in the middle of the routine, like, a meaningful moment will happen, and it might not happen most days when it's, you know, 7:00 in the morning and we're bleary-eyed and neither of us is in the greatest mood. But if we're both there, you know, one out of 10 days, or even if it's one out of 100 days, something will happen, and I really try to just be present for that. If I sit down in front of my computer and say, "Okay, I'm gonna write a column now," I literally shut out everything except for that column, and I turn on my voice recognition software because I do everything by voice recognition software, and I just focus completely, and I've trained myself to just put myself into flow. And I do it. I don't worry about whether it's good or it's bad. I just get it out there. I'll worry about whether it's good or it's bad when I'm done with it, and then it's done, and then I stop, take a deep breath, read it over. I hit send to my editor. Thank God I have an editor so that I'm not [laughs] reliant on myself to know whether it was any good or not. An editor will tell you, "This one was terrible. Throw this one out." But I send it to the editor, and I put it out of my mind completely. It's gone. And then I do the next thing. And by doing it that way, I think I'm just saving the time waste that we have in a kind of self-questioning that inevitably sinks in the rest of the time. Now, you might say what's missing from this is self-reflection, and honestly, I think for many years of my life, that's true. I think for many years of my life, I was missing genuine self-reflection. Like, I had, I had fake self-reflection where I had conversations and thought about things, but I wasn't really, really, really doing it, and it wasn't till my late 30s when, um, I went to see a shrink for the first time 'cause I was having a, you know, a kind of little early me- you know, early midlife meltdown, that I actually engaged in that kind of self-reflection, and I did not know how to do it. I really didn't know how to do it. And I would say to myself after therapy, "Oh my God, I'm failing at therapy. Like, I know I just wasted that whole session." And I kept on saying that for a long time.

   13. TFTim Ferriss32:42

       What do you mean by [laughs] failed? What does failing look like? How, how, how does one fail at that?

   14. NFNoah Feldman32:50

       Well, I guess the reason I thought I was failing is I was mistakenly thinking that therapy was like every other thing that I do. You know, a concentrated 45-minute session where you're supposed to accomplish something. And I would go in, and on the way out, I was like, "I didn't accomplish anything. I don't feel better."

   15. TFTim Ferriss33:05

       [laughs]

   16. NFNoah Feldman33:05

       "I don't feel worse. I didn't have any deep self-revelation. Like, what the hell did I do?"

   17. TFTim Ferriss33:09

       [laughs]

   18. NFNoah Feldman33:10

       You know, I was... And I, in the sense, I was only doing it wrong because I thought I was doing it wrong. Like, you can't do therapy wrong, but I thought that there was a way to do it right and therefore there must be a way that I wasn't doing it, and also I wasn't getting any better, so [laughs] then I thought, "Okay, you know, I really am doing it wrong." And then over time, took a long time, I came to realize that just sitting there and being in the moment and letting it happen and not saying, "Okay, I'm gonna go in to achieve this, and I'm gonna leave having achieved that" was the only way therapy was ever gonna do anything. And I wish I could tell you that, like, I thought of that quickly, but I didn't.

   19. TFTim Ferriss33:45

       So for sake of clarity, you ended up viewing therapy as a, almost a meditative time for non-accomplishment through which you found it therapeutically valuable?

   20. NFNoah Feldman34:01

       Yeah, I think that's it. I mean, I think it's that... I, I don't know about meditative, 'cause you are talking, you know-

   21. TFTim Ferriss34:07

       Right

   22. NFNoah Feldman34:07

       ... some of the time, and depending on who your therapist is, the therapist might also be talking [laughs] 'cause some don't like to say very much. But I think what I realized was that you have to just let things bubble up. You can't force it. You cannot force your way into having successful talk therapy, and that was the, the takeaway for me, and I know most people listening to this are like, "Uh, duh." Like, you have to be pretty dumb not to have realized that. Like, it says it on the bottle, you know? But I, I was that kinda dumb, and I think it derived from, you know, having this approach to everything else where I thought, "Okay, what am I gonna do? What am I supposed to be doing here? I'm gonna totally do it, and I'm gonna do it in a total concentrated way, and I'm gonna know at the end of it that I accomplished it so that I can move on to the next thing."

6. 34:53 – 46:32

   Writing by Voice Recognition

   1. TFTim Ferriss34:53

      Voice recognition.

   2. NFNoah Feldman34:55

      Yeah.

   3. TFTim Ferriss34:55

      How long have you used voice recognition?

   4. NFNoah Feldman34:58

      Since it wasn't that good. [laughs]

   5. TFTim Ferriss34:59

      [laughs]

   6. NFNoah Feldman35:00

      I, I've used it since, uh, 2002, and when I wrote my first book, which I did right after 9/11, I wrote that book on a little laptop, and I screwed up my wrists from using the mouse on the laptop. And I remember in the middle of it, I actually went to, like, the doctor 'cause I was like, "I'm having this really weird wrist and arm pain, and I have just no idea what this pain is." And I was actually newly married, and I was like, "I don't know. Like, I'm newly married. Like, I have never really extensively, you know, slept in the same bed with another person before. Does it have something to do with, with that?" I mean, it's a absurd thing to say. And the doctor was like, "Okay, sh- describe what you do every day." And I'm like, "Uh, I sit at my computer." He's like, "Show me how." I sat down. [laughs] I put my hands out. He's like, "Does your arm hurt?" I was like, "Oh, it's really hurting." And he was like, "You have an RSI." And so I was like, "Okay, well, what do I do?" Because, you know, I, I realized then I'd written a book. I was like-

   7. TFTim Ferriss36:05

      RSI is repetitive stress injury?

   8. NFNoah Feldman36:07

      Exactly, yeah, a repetitive stress injury. And it turned out the only real answer was don't engage in that physical movement. And at the time, um, there still weren't very many touchscreens. Um, you could maybe get one if you spent a ton of money on it.

   9. TFTim Ferriss36:23

      Mm-hmm.

   10. NFNoah Feldman36:26

       Most computers required a mouse as your primary interface, and I just couldn't use the mouse, and I couldn't hold my wrists in a good position for typing. So I started using voice recognition software. A very close friend of mine, um, who had actually-- he had a much more admirable injury. He had injured his, his hand lifting. [laughs] He's an incredibly brilliant guy who was also, like, in incredible shape, and he was like, "Oh, yeah, try this voice recognition software." And I started using it, and at, at the time it wasn't so great, but it was much better than being in constant pain. And it actually had a huge influence on me, because since then, pretty much every word that I've written comes first in draft form from speech. I, I talk it, um, whether it's a column or a book or something in between.

   11. TFTim Ferriss37:16

       What technology do you use now? What does the setup look like? And, and what are best practices? Because I-- when I hear voice recognition, I think sitting down and best as you can, stream of consciousness, speaking out a rough draft. Is there an outlining that comes beforehand, et cetera, et cetera? So c- if you could just speak to the c- the current day best practices for you.

   12. NFNoah Feldman37:43

       I use a product called Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which I've been really loyal to over the years as they have continued to improve it. And it was just luck that I picked one that turned out to be one of the leading ones in the industry. I think that the company that makes it ended up also licensing their technology to a lot of other voice recognition systems. And for me, the best practices are-- And it used to have to have a very good microphone, and now the processing power of the computers is great enough that you don't need as good a microphone 'cause it can handle imprecision. I'm sure the quality of the microphones has also really improved. So you can sit in front of your computer, and I do it by looking at what appears on the screen when I speak. And I do try to speak not quite as fast as I do the rest of the time, even though I do talk pretty fast in general, um, even when I'm talking to the computer, and I think of it as though I had an audience. I imagine that I'm telling someone what my ideas are. And to the extent there's an outline, for me, it's only that I think, "Where do I wanna end up?" And then I just start talking and try to get there. And if I feel a need for an outline in midstream, I'll say, "There are three points that I wish to make," you know, and then I'll start listing them, and it might turn out that there's two or six or a hundred or, you know, that they're all stupid. But the great thing is you can delete it all later. And you see the words magically appearing in front of you as you go, and I find it way less intimidating than the blank piece of paper, 'cause you've always got something to say.

   13. TFTim Ferriss39:16

       This is my current problem. This is my current hangup, which might just be a failing of moral character and strength on my side. But yeah, the, the blank page, I've, I've sort of psyched myself out for the last year, year and a half.

   14. NFNoah Feldman39:30

       Wow. It's-- I mean, that's incredible to hear because you obviously have been such an extraordinary writer, and you also write in a very fluid, accessible way.

   15. TFTim Ferriss39:37

       Thank you.

   16. NFNoah Feldman39:37

       That's, that's actually really, really fascinating. And I, I f- I remember once reading, Tim, that you talked about, maybe it was your senior essay, that you had a hard time getting into that, but then once you got into it, you did it.

   17. TFTim Ferriss39:49

       Yeah. It's something, it's something I've, I've struggled with. So the idea of using voice recognition as a lower friction way into a first draft is very interesting to me. Could you give an example of, say, a column or something you've done recently, what it looked like when you finished that first draft?

   18. NFNoah Feldman40:13

       Sure.

   19. TFTim Ferriss40:13

       And then just the evolution or revision process.

   20. NFNoah Feldman40:18

       Sure, yeah. And I should just say, it's very variable depending on whether it's a, you know, a daily column that, you know, is gonna go out and... You know, in the old days, they would say about newspaper columns that they wrap, yesterday wrap fish tomorrow. In the era of-

   21. TFTim Ferriss40:33

       [laughs]

   22. NFNoah Feldman40:33

       ... the internet, they don't even wrap fish. Like, they're not even as useful as being able to be fish wrapping.

   23. TFTim Ferriss40:38

       [laughs]

   24. NFNoah Feldman40:38

       Um, so something like that, you know, if I-- when I write it, I'll-- If I'm responding to something in the world, which is usually the way I write a column, then I usually have an argument, a thing I wanna say, and I've usually gotten that down on paper. Often, I'm missing good examples to prove my point. So often, when I look it over at the end of drafting it, I say, "Well, that's all very well and good, but how do you prove it?" So I go back in and I put in examples.

   25. TFTim Ferriss41:06

       Could you give us a concrete example?

   26. NFNoah Feldman41:08

       Yeah, exactly. I'm d- There I am. It sh- shows you that I need it. Um, so I just-

   27. TFTim Ferriss41:12

       [laughs]

   28. NFNoah Feldman41:12

       ... I just wrote a column about, uh, Justice Neil Gorsuch, um, who's the first Supreme Court justice ever to have a doctorate. And I was trying to explain why that mattered for his, what appears to be his real aspiration, which is to be the heir to the late Justice Antonin Scalia as the conservative intellectual leader of the court. And so I began by kind of, like, saying this, that he, you know, he's the first one to have a doctorate and describing how he went back to get it in the middle of his legal career, which is kind of incredibly impressive, and I don't know how in the world he did it. And then I said-- Then I paused and said to myself, "Okay, but how do I prove that he really wants to be the intellectual leader of the court?" And so I said, "Okay, I'm gonna use this really famous decision." He's only got one really famous one so far, so there weren't that many examples that I could use. But this case called the Bostock case from a couple years ago, where he, who's a real deep conservative, ruled that the anti-discrimination laws, Title VII, that prohibit workplace discrimination and that say no workplace discrimination because of sex extends to discrimination against gay and trans people. And so I pl- popped that in as the example, and then I s- tried to explain why it proved my point. Namely that he was saying something that was completely the opposite of what his ideological buddies believe, but he was doing it out of a principle of consistency, and the principle of consistency is supposed to be that he believes you're just supposed to read laws according to their text. You're not supposed to look at their intention, and you're not supposed to look at the purpose of the people who drafted them. You're just supposed to look at the text. And he said, if you just look at the text and it says because of sex, well, if you're discriminating against a gay person because he's gay, then you're discriminating against him because you're treating him differently because he has sex with men than you would if it were a woman who has sex with men, because that person would be straight, and so therefore you're discriminating based on sex.

   29. TFTim Ferriss43:12

       Wow.

   30. NFNoah Feldman43:12

       Ditto for a trans person. So it's, like, highly formalistic, but he said, "Well, I'm not gonna pay any attention to the intent of the people who wrote this document who were not thinking about gay rights, and who probably never heard of trans rights." So basically, I then use that example to say, "You see? This is how someone who wants to be an intellectual thinks." Right?
7. 46:32 – 54:07

   Why Law and His Father's Influence

   1. TFTim Ferriss46:32

      We're gonna come back to The Broken Constitution, 100%. I- and i- in part, I'm spending my time or taking my time meandering through different topics because you very graciously informed me, or maybe foolishly informed me, that we do not have a hard stop, so I have a million and one questions. We are gonna come back to The Broken Constitution, but before we get to that, I think it's important to ask a few questions. What was your major undergrad?

   2. NFNoah Feldman47:01

      It was Near Eastern languages and civilizations, which was basically Hebrew, Jewish, Islamic, uh, material basically, from all different historical periods.

   3. TFTim Ferriss47:13

      Why law school? And maybe as a two-for-one bonus, since I, I mentioned w- before we started recording, I was like, "Oh, JD, I'm familiar with that one." [laughs] If you could just give people a little trivia on JD. But why law?

   4. NFNoah Feldman47:31

      I knew at the end of college and then having, you know, gone and done, you know, a doctorate in medieval Islamic studies, I knew that every morning I'd be thrilled to get up and enter the Middle Ages. I knew it would be fun for me every day. I was a little worried that at the end of the day when I looked back and said, "What contribution have I made to the world? How have I affected the world, I hope in a positive way?" That I wasn't gonna be completely satisfied, not because I believe there isn't something really fundamentally valuable about study for its own sake. I do. I believe that study for its own sake is tremendously valuable. But I just thought for my own personality, that I would be frustrated to feel like, okay, you know, you understood some guy who lived 1,000 years ago better today, and you helped the five other people in the world who care about this dude to understand it better. And again, I b- I have tremendous honor and respect for people who do that all the time. And I work with them in the university, and I'm always telling them, like, how valuable and important what they do is, and telling the rest of the world how important it is. But I knew I would be frustrated with it. And law seemed to me like a domain where you could still try to crack the codes, you could still study things, you could tr- still try to go deep, but where at the end of the day, there's always an output that affects real people in the real world, and you can either do it really badly and harm people, or you can try to do it better and perhaps make the world, you know, suck a little bit less at the end of the day.

   5. TFTim Ferriss49:05

      [laughs]

   6. NFNoah Feldman49:07

      So, and I think that's the aspi- I'm not saying that every lawyer manages to do that every day, but that is the aspiration of, of law as a legal system. That's why we have a legal system, to try to enable us to arrange our world in a slightly better way than we'd be able to arrange it without it. So I said, "Let me try this out and, and see if I like it." And on the JD thing, that's actually really funny. If you look at old people's resumes, people who went to law school before the late '60s, it'll say often LLB, which is what the degree used to be called. It used to be called Bachelor of Laws, and now it says JD. And so you look at that and you think, "Oh, they must have really made law school a lot tougher and more serious when they changed it to a JD." No. It, it was a pure marketing exercise.

   7. TFTim Ferriss49:49

      What does JD stand for? Just so people know the significance. [laughs]

   8. NFNoah Feldman49:52

      It stands for Juris Doctor, which means a Doctor of Laws. And it wa- the whole thing was a marketing exercise by the American Bar Association in the late '60s, who they were looking at physicians whose prestige had really gone up, and they had FOMO, and they thought, you know, "Well, the, you know, they go to school, we go to school." You know, then again, they also learned to, like, cut up a cadaver, which is not something that a lawyer, a lawyer does. And they said, "We're gonna change the name of this degree," and they pressured all the law schools to change the LLB into a JD. They had a further excuse, which was they said, "Well, it's not your first degree. You've already gotten a BA, so therefore your second degree should be something else." But, you know, if they were really serious about that, they could've called it a master's, but they didn't.

   9. TFTim Ferriss50:32

      [laughs]

   10. NFNoah Feldman50:32

       They called it a, they called it a doctor degree. So yeah, that, that happened.

   11. TFTim Ferriss50:36

       [laughs] The rebrand. Rebrand and upgrade.

   12. NFNoah Feldman50:43

       Lawyers are really, really good at that. You know, lawyers are like, "You, everybody else can't have a monopoly, and we're gonna pass a law against monopolies." Oh, but if you wanna practice law, you have to pass the bar. Who controls that? A bunch of lawyers. They say you have to go to law school. What's that? It's a monopoly.

   13. TFTim Ferriss50:58

       [laughs]

   14. NFNoah Feldman50:59

       But they're like, "It d- doesn't, doesn't apply to us. It doesn't apply to us. That's just a necessary professional qualification."

   15. TFTim Ferriss51:04

       [laughs] What other forces or people contributed to your decision to go to law school? Or was that just from self-study and decision-making on your own? Were there other inputs that really swayed you to take that path?

   16. NFNoah Feldman51:23

       There definitely were, and I would s- I would say it started, like a lot of things [chuckles] in my life started, with my dad, who had himself been a social psychologist, not a lawyer, but was always interested in law and legal institutions. And he used to take me actually to the courthouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I grew up, when I was a little kid, just to like watch the court cases and, you know, gave me books about law, and I think he, you know, was making it pretty clear that, you know, he wanted me to at least look into this [chuckles] as an option. I also, uh, remember reading as a l- as a kid, I had a, a very kind of 1970s Cambridge, Massachusetts book, which was written for kids. It was a paperback book written on this very kind of brown, kind of whole wheat-colored paper, you know, designed to tell you that it was, you know, by hippies, for hippies. And it was a book for kids, and it was called You Are Not a Short Adult, which I think is a funny title for a book.

   17. TFTim Ferriss52:17

       [laughs]

   18. NFNoah Feldman52:19

       And the irony is the book kind of did treat you like a short adult, and there was like a little sidebar with a drawing, and it was about a Supreme Court case called Tinker against Des Moines School District, which at the time was a pretty fresh case. And it was a case where a family's worth of kids, uh, young teens in Iowa wore black armbands to their school to protest the Vietnam War, and they got suspended for it. And they went to court, and the Supreme Court actually held that they had a free speech right in public school to wear those armbands because the court said it didn't disrupt the school, and even though they were kids, they had a constitutional free speech right. And that also blew me away. Like, the idea that kids had rights seemed incredibly exciting to me, and no one explained to me at the time that since I went to a private religious school, I had no rights. [laughs] But, but that was a, that was a separate matter that I had to learn later on. And so that, I think, also had, had a big influence on me. And then last, I would say when I was in college, I took a class on constitutional law that was offered for college students, and there was a terrific teacher, a guy called H.W. Perry, who went on to teach later at the University of Texas as well, and it was a very intense, great group of, just a great group of students in this class. And we all did constitutional law together, and we were like a little con law cult, and it was so much fun. And some of my closest friends, uh, are people who were in that class with me. So it was a really important formative experience, and after that I thought, "Oh, this is what law school's gonna be like all the time," which at its best it was, although it wasn't always like that. [laughs]

8. 54:07 – 1:06:52

   Iraq: The Palace Kitchen and What Not to Do

   1. TFTim Ferriss54:07

      I, I'd like to ask a bit more about your dad. Uh, so you, so you, you mentioned that he was not so subtly sort of wink, wink encouraging the consideration of the legal profession, and that he also had a moral to the story, I think you said, as he always did. Uh, why do you think he wanted to encourage you in the direction of law, and What did it look like? How did he present those morals? Would he just say, "You know, Noah, I've been thinking," and tell you some random story and say, "The point of the story is X," or maybe it's not that on the nose. I'd just be curious to know how he sort of instilled those, those morals in you.

   2. NFNoah Feldman54:56

      Well, to answer that question, I have to explain that both of my parents were social scientists. So their parents were the people who ... Their, their grandparents had immigrated. Their parents, you know, one, one of my, one of my grandfathers went to a pharmaceutical college. The other went to a teacher's college. So they went to some kind of college. But my parents were the generation that, like, made it to fancy universities. So my parents both had PhDs, my dad in social psychology and my mom in political science. And so they were social scientists, and they were really interested in the question of what causes people to do stuff. And my dad in particular, as a social psychologist, he had done his dissertation with Stanley Milgram, the guy of the famous Milgram experiment, where, you know, he managed to get people to, uh, they didn't, they weren't actually doing this, but they thought they were giving electroshocks to a person behind a screen.

   3. TFTim Ferriss55:48

      Right.

   4. NFNoah Feldman55:48

      And they basically did it because there was authority there. And my dad was also very influenced by B.F. Skinner, who was the inventor of modern behaviorism. And so that school of thought held that you could produce any behavior you wanted if you just reinforced it. They just thought the human being is just a series of inputs and outputs.

   5. TFTim Ferriss56:09

      It's just, just classical and operant conditioning. That's it.

   6. NFNoah Feldman56:12

      Exactly.

   7. TFTim Ferriss56:13

      In- In- Internal experience is a black box. Ignore it.

   8. NFNoah Feldman56:16

      Exactly. All the way down.

   9. TFTim Ferriss56:18

      Mm-hmm.

   10. NFNoah Feldman56:18

       Black box the entire ... This also may explain why it was so hard for me to do [laughs] therapy.

   11. TFTim Ferriss56:21

       [laughs]

   12. NFNoah Feldman56:22

       Because it's not like in that ... If, if you grew up being told that inner experience is a black box, it's kinda hard to, like, d- delve into your inner experience. So my dad would never, like, lay down the overt meaning, 'cause that wouldn't work. What worked was just to repeat the point enough that you heard it, and then if you behaved appropriately, give you positive reinforcement, and if you behaved inappropriately, give you negative reinforcement. And it turns out that is an incredibly effective way, over time, to get your kids to [laughs] see the world in a certain kind of way, especially if you add to it, you know, a, an older son, which I was, who really just worshiped his parents, and in particular his dad, and really, really, really wanted to make them proud of him. As you can imagine, a lot of, a lot of fodder there [laughs] for the therapy later on too-

   13. TFTim Ferriss57:16

       [laughs]

   14. NFNoah Feldman57:17

       ... 'cause it's not all fun and games. But, um, so that was basically h- how he did it. And, you know, I would say measured by what his objectives were, could only say that it, that it worked.

   15. TFTim Ferriss57:29

       Hmm. What were some of the positive and negative reinforcements, if you're willing to share, that were ... that, that worked best for you?

   16. NFNoah Feldman57:37

       Well, I would say the, the positive reinforcements were mostly affirmation. You know, words of affirmation.

   17. TFTim Ferriss57:43

       What ... Like what?

   18. NFNoah Feldman57:44

       And-

   19. TFTim Ferriss57:44

       What language might he use?

   20. NFNoah Feldman57:46

       Well, I'll give you an example that includes both the positive and the negative at once, and that'll give you the whole thing in one, one sentence.

   21. TFTim Ferriss57:52

       [laughs] Perfect.

   22. NFNoah Feldman57:53

       So I, let's say I came home from school with a test, and let's say I got a 99 on the test. He would say, "What'd you get on the test?" I would say, "I got a 99, yeah. I got a 99." And then he would say, "That's great." That would be the positive affirmation. Then there would be a beat. One, two, three. "What'd you get wrong?"

   23. TFTim Ferriss58:10

       [laughs]

   24. NFNoah Feldman58:14

       And that was the message, very subtly, like, "Yeah, you're not really supposed to get something wrong, but if you did, we can learn from it so we do not make that mistake again."

   25. TFTim Ferriss58:23

       [laughs]

   26. NFNoah Feldman58:24

       And so that, like, captured both. It's, it's very subtle, [laughs] but it was ... I was in no doubt about what all the components of that meant.

   27. TFTim Ferriss58:33

       Mm-hmm.

   28. NFNoah Feldman58:33

       Um, so that I think captures both the upside, and you can imagine, too, the, the downside, which is that you never really feel like you've done enough.

   29. TFTim Ferriss58:43

       Hmm.

   30. NFNoah Feldman58:44

       Because if you're always looking for positive reinforcement, you're never gonna be perfect, and then you're always gonna worry that you're not gonna get that positive reinforcement. And so that captures potentially a non-trivial downside alongside the upside, which is, like, you then work really hard to, you know, get, do as well as you can on whatever you see as the task in that, in that moment.
9. 1:06:52 – 1:21:21

   What a Constitution Is and How It's Drafted

   1. TFTim Ferriss1:06:52

      Well, that's a cliffhanger. Uh, I do ultimately wanna come back to what was done in that palace kitchen, but what we're-- If we did sort of an 80/20 analysis on the things not to do, the [laughs] the things that one should be advised against doing when invading a country, what would be at the top of, of the list from that experience that you observed?

   2. NFNoah Feldman1:07:18

      The number one thing is failing to-- The number one screw-up is failing to tell everybody in the country who's in charge and proving that you're in charge. We never did it, and the Iraqis were literally super confused.

   3. TFTim Ferriss1:07:34

      Hmm.

   4. NFNoah Feldman1:07:34

      They expected-- There, there had been coup d'états in the past. It had been a while, but they knew what would happen, right? Someone would go on the, on the loudspeakers with trucks and say, "You know, there's a new president. Everyone stay home." Then the next day they'd be like, "There's a new president. Everyone show up at work." And everyone understood that that was like not a request, but a direct order. We arrived, and for weeks and weeks, nobody knew who was in charge.

   5. TFTim Ferriss1:07:58

      Hmm.

   6. NFNoah Feldman1:07:58

      Was there a civilian in charge? Was there a general in charge? Nobody knew who was in charge. And in fact, at one point on the street in Iraq, someone actually asked me, a group of people actually asked me, first they wanted to know, "When is the electricity coming back on?" I didn't know. "When's the water gonna start running again?" I didn't know. "When does school reopen?" I didn't know. And then someone said to me, "Who's the government?" And I was, like, shocked by this question. I mean, I understood the words. It was only two words in Arabic. But I, I was like, "What are they even asking me?" And then I realized what they were saying, and I said, "Oh, you know, Ambassador Bremer is the government," 'cause by then, uh, President Bush had sent out Ambassador Bremer. And they were like, "We've never heard of that guy." And I realized that in that moment that, you know, we had really massively screwed it up. So first thing you need to do is tell people who's in charge, and the second thing is you have to prove that it's real. And that means you have to have either police or soldiers on the street. And if you don't have enough of your own, which we didn't, you need to use the local people. So we should have had the local police or the local military, even if they weren't trustworthy, out there on the streets communicating that someone was in charge. And if no one's in charge, then you're not safe as an ordinary person. And if you're not safe, you need someone who's gonna protect you. And if you're not safe and need someone to protect you, you're gonna look for what your local affiliation is in your neighborhood, and you're gonna break into groups. You're like-- You're creating a situation, we created a situation that's like if you're in a terrible neighborhood where there are gangs and there's a good person who doesn't want to join a gang, but there's no one else to protect them, you have to join a gang 'cause you need protection from somebody 'cause the state's not protecting you, and that is the situation that we created.

   7. TFTim Ferriss1:09:38

      To double-click on that, even if they're not trustworthy part, is that because-- is that superior to not having them on the street because you need, at the very least, security theater, much like some of what happens, say, [laughs] with the TSA? Not to slight the TSA, very important. But there are some things that, you know, sort of, uh, what is it? Edge cases make bad case law. [laughs] Whatever. You see some-

   8. NFNoah Feldman1:10:01

      Yep

   9. TFTim Ferriss1:10:02

      ... pretty wild things. But is it just to create the perception of a central, competent power that has put law enforcement on the street? Is that why you say even if they're not trustworthy?

   10. NFNoah Feldman1:10:16

       Yeah. You can't create a situation where people think there's anarchy.

   11. TFTim Ferriss1:10:20

       Right.

   12. NFNoah Feldman1:10:21

       And so even if some of the people you are ordering to do things might have occasionally backslid, you know, you'd have to take that risk if your only other option is not having anybody. I mean, if we had invaded Iraq with six hundred thousand troops the way that Colin Powell thought we should, we would have had enough of our own soldiers on the streets to do that. But we didn't do that. We invaded with a very small force. And when Baghdad fell, the total number of US troops in the country was probably fewer than a hundred thousand. And in Baghdad, it was way beneath that. So we just didn't have the bodies. And so you could drive for, you know, what felt like an hour and a half through the city and not see any representative of any authority. No cops, no US troops, and certainly no Iraqi troops. So you do need to create that perception. And obviously, there has to be some reality behind it 'cause people will try to test it. But the perception is crucial, 'cause if people think that there's nobody in charge, they get scared. They, they're-- and they're correct to be scared.

   13. TFTim Ferriss1:11:23

       Hmm. Let's go back to the palace. You have-- You've taken off your flak jacket, AKA ricochet death machine. You're in civilian clothing, and you are working on constitutions, as, as I understand it. If I'm getting that wrong, please correct me. But let's start with basic, basic, basics. What is a constitution? And then if you could pick up the story.

   14. NFNoah Feldman1:11:55

       A constitution is a blueprint for how any group of people wants to govern itself. And it requires collective agreement, not of necessarily every person, but of, let's say, a super majority of the people, a lot more than half. And because human beings, you know, can't get together in the hundreds of thousands to do that, what that practically means is that a smaller number of people have to propose the agreement and then have it validated by the more general public. And if you're trying to build one of these things from scratch, the first thing you need to know is what people could credibly speak on behalf of the general public. What group of people could propose something that would have a chance of actually being accepted? So you need the right people at the table, and those also have to be people who think in the end that they have more to gain by an agreement than they do by failing to agree. And if they don't have more to gain by it, then they're not gonna agree, and then you're gonna get a, kind of a collapse. I would just add one footnote to that which I learned the hard way in Iraq, which is you can't really do this if you don't have order. If your situation is, to use the amazing Argentinian Spanish word that you already taught me, it's quilombo, right?

   15. TFTim Ferriss1:13:21

       Quilombo, yeah. [laughs] Exactly. That is a perfect example of a quilombo, yes.

   16. NFNoah Feldman1:13:26

       If you have quilombo, you, there's no chance that you're gonna be able to build a constitution. You might get a peace treaty to stop people from killing each other, and then you could talk about a constitution when you have order. But if you don't have that-

   17. TFTim Ferriss1:13:37

       Now, is, is that just because Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you're, you're n- you're sort of skipping a few rungs? Is that why you can't do it?

   18. NFNoah Feldman1:13:45

       That's definitely part of it, but I also think it's that to reach an agreement about how we're gonna govern ourselves collectively, we have to have some general idea of how power is arranged in our society.

   19. TFTim Ferriss1:13:59

       Mm-hmm.

   20. NFNoah Feldman1:13:59

       We have to really know who are the powerful people, who are the weaker people, what are the different capacities of different groups to get what they want. And if I think that tomorrow you're gonna come with your neighbors and shoot me, then again, we might be able to reach a peace treaty, but I'm not gonna trust you enough to reach an agreement about how we would collectively govern in the long run. And if you also simultaneously think that I might do that to you, we're both, like, eyeing each other and trying to gauge what the potential violence might be that we would do. We're not in a place where we can realistically negotiate a plan for how we're gonna self-govern over a long period of time. I do think the hierarchy of needs is relevant there, for sure, and safety is, of course, right up there alongside, you know, food, shelter, you know, and, and water. And when you have a s- breakdown of safety, there's a extreme uncertainty that follows, and you can't negotiate against the backdrop of that much uncertainty in a realistic way.

   21. TFTim Ferriss1:15:05

       How do you draft a constitution? When you, when you have ... Let's just say y- you, you are not operating in a worst case environment. How do you approach drafting a constitution? How did you approach drafting a constitution?

   22. NFNoah Feldman1:15:24

       Almost no constitutions in the modern world are totally invented from scratch, right? It's, the same would be if, like, you were s- doing a startup. You know, you probably wanna invent your corporate culture from scratch, and you probably wanna invent a new product, but you don't want to invent the corporate form of government from scratch. There are other people who have done that, and you can pick and choose from a kind of menu of options, and then tweak it to your particular set of interests. And that's how most constitutions in the modern world are done. Even when James Madison was trying to originate modern constitutionalism, he looked to the ancient world, to the constitutions of the ancient world as models, and he also looked to the, the British constitution, even though that one wasn't a single written constitution. He still looked to aspects of it. So, you know, the idea, for example, that there would be a legislative branch and an executive branch and a judicial branch was not one that was just being invented then. They were borrowing that. That was an idea that had been around. So, you do some borrowing from other constitutions. And then you have to answer some, a handful of really core definitional questions, you know. What are the powerful entities within the society? How can they best trust each other? How should the public be represented? Do you wanna have a parliament that represents everybody, and then only have the executive be derived from the parliament the way you would in a parliamentary system? Do you want a president who's independently elected by all of the people? How much power should the president have relative to the parliament? Those are the kinds of sort of second order questions that you wanna try to answer, and you wanna answer those questions not in the abstract, but concretely by reference to what the different groups of people in the society want, what their beliefs are, and above all, how they could agree to live together in a way that will share power, and ideally, where they'll be able to alternate power between different groups of people. Because if you can alternate power, you get a lot of good incentives for everyone treating everybody relatively well. If I think that my group is gonna have all the power all the time, there's just no reason to treat your group well. I might as well expropriate you, take away your property. I might enslave you, treat you as second-class citizens. But if I think that, you know, in the next election you're gonna be ruling over me, then I'm not gonna do that to you. You know, we have a kind of like, you know, we have a standoff, and that standoff enables us to say, "Okay, let's all agree on a system that in- has equality and rights, 'cause sometimes I'm in charge, and sometimes you're in charge, and I'd rather be equal when you're in charge, and you'd rather be equal when I'm in charge."

   23. TFTim Ferriss1:18:03

       Hmm. This might be a strange question, but are there any particular constitutions or the equivalent of a constitution, past or present, that you find particularly beautiful or elegant?

   24. NFNoah Feldman1:18:19

       The South African constitution that came into being after Nelson Mandela was let out of prison and the ANC came to power and negotiated a constitution with the former apartheid regime is, at least as written, a kind of best practices modern constitution. Not that it was perfect. Because it guaranteed a lot of rights, which is good, but it also took recognition of the economic realities of South Africa. And what I mean by that is that the ANC, they knew that the distribution of wealth in the country was fundamentally unjust after generations of apartheid and before that, imperialism. But they also knew they didn't want white South Africans with their capital and know-how to flee the country, as had happened, for example, in Zimbabwe when it, it was no longer Rhodesia. And so they knew that they had to guarantee the rights of the white minority, even at the expense of not redistributing wealth in a way that would've been fair, so as to enable the country to develop and evolve. And, you know, if you talk to contemporary South Africans, they will be very honest with you about the failings of this post-apartheid order as well. It's not as though life in South Africa is perfect by any stretch of the imagination. They've been plagued by a whole range of problems, including serious corruption. But what they did succeed in doing is that there was not massive capital flight. There was not significant violent retribution by formerly oppressed Africans against the white population. There was not civil war. Those are incredible accomplishments. There was a certain amount of truth and reconciliation achieved through a truth and reconciliation commission. And so that constitutional order, which was a very carefully, subtly negotiated one over a long-ish period of time, actually is in many ways extremely beautiful. Again, notwithstanding that in the real world it didn't solve every problem. That's the other thing to keep in mind about constitutions. They can't solve every problem. You know, if your society has, let's say, high unemployment, you can have a beautiful constitution. You can't solve the unemployment that way. You know, Tunisia has that. Tunisia drafted a really elegant constitution, not perfect, but really elegant constitution after the Arab Spring and after they transitioned to becoming a kind of a democracy. But the Arab Spring started because people were mad that they had no jobs, to oversimplify, and after the democratic government came into play, they still didn't have jobs.

   25. TFTim Ferriss1:21:08

       [laughs] Right.

   26. NFNoah Feldman1:21:09

       And they were still mad because you can have a perfect constitution. It doesn't solve the fundamental economic, you know, struggles that a, that a society faces. Constitutions can't do everything.

   27. TFTim Ferriss1:21:20

       Hmm.

10. 1:21:21 – 1:26:54

    Constitutions, Crypto and DAOs

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:21:21

       I'd like to broaden the way... Well, really have you broaden the way. [laughs] I'm not gonna do much heavy lifting here. Think about constitutions. And I also wanna say, because she was mentioned earlier, I, I need to thank your girlfriend for a tremendous job of sending lots of well-prepared and juicy jumping-off points for exploration. So I wanna give her a special shout-out because, uh, it's, it's, it's been tremendously helpful and exciting for me to have that in my back pocket. So here, here's one. I'll read this, and then I'd love for you to elaborate because I think it'll be of interest to a lot of listeners. "To know what will happen in crypto, you need to know how constitutions work and how they fail." Please elaborate.

    2. NFNoah Feldman1:22:13

       So echoing your, your point of I'm tremendously grateful to her for teaching me how to, [laughs] how to do this and for making me sound a lot more interesting than I, [laughs] than I actually am. So here's how a crypto platform is like a constitution. Every single cryptocurrency is based on an agreement among the participants in the platform that underlies the currency about how they're going to interact with each other, how they're going to distribute power, who's gonna be able to decide how many of the coins, if it's a cryptocurrency, how many of the coins are produced, how they're gonna be distributed, how the blockchain is gonna take account of that distributive process, how decisions are gonna be made when there's a conflict among different participants in the platform, who is capable of forking the platform so that you get a different platform that comes into existence, which, you know, in the world of constitutions we would call a revolution or a, or a civil war. Those are the kinds of questions that ask how are we, this group of people, going to govern ourselves in this common enterprise that we have? And what you have, again, is that beneath every crypto platform is a literal agreement, words written on paper, that describe what the rules are going to be. And then what's distinctive about the crypto context is that those rules are then instantiated in a series of algorithmic programs that facilitate making sure that you do follow the rules and that double-check that or triple-check that or many larger number than that check that through the blockchain. And so when a platform goes well, it's because the participants in the platform are following those rules and are in agreement with those rules. And when it goes south, it's because there's a dispute over those rules. There can be a break over those rules, and at that point, people might abandon the platform or they might fork and, you know, create an alternate platform, or they might actually get into a, a literal fight over what, what's supposed to happen. And I, I should say, just, you know, to give a lot of credit where it's due, someone you've had as, as a guest on your podcast, and I even managed to get him onto [laughs] my podcast, which was I thought a minor miracle, um, not, not surprisingly be on yours, um, Vitalik Buterin, who's one of the core figures in the founding of Ethereum, has got a terrific essay on his own blog about legitimacy, the concept of legitimacy on, uh, in the crypto world and, and on the blockchain that really helped me think these things through and really made me realize the depth of the, of the similarities Because legitimacy is a property of constitutional systems when they're working well. It's the property that everybody who's in the system can predict with a high degree of probability how things are gonna proceed, and everyone thinks that's basically fair. And if you withdraw either of those components, either the predictability or the fairness, the constitutional system will collapse, and the same turns out to be true of a crypto platform.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:25:41

       Vitalik is a smart cookie.

    4. NFNoah Feldman1:25:44

       Oh, wow. What a, what a brilliant guy.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:25:45

       Uh, to make, to make [laughs] to make a huge understatement. Are there any other thinkers and/or practitioners, if that makes sense, they could be computer scientists, they could participate in some other capacity, but any thinkers or practitioners in the, in the space of, uh, blockchain, cryptocurrency who you find interesting outside of Vitalik?

    6. NFNoah Feldman1:26:09

       I mean, there are many, and I, I am often in the position of, of just trying to understand what the new innovations are that people are, are coming up with in, in real time. I think one reason that I'm so drawn to Vitalik is that he does something a lot of others don't do. He spends a lot of his time explaining stuff in terms that are accessible to people who aren't already on the inside. And not infrequently, I'll read something by somebody else and I think there's something really important, I don't totally get it. Then I go to Vitalik's [laughs] blog and I see him engaging with it, and he actually explains it. And e- explaining things well is a different skill from inventing stuff, and he happens to have both of those [laughs] skills. So that's-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:26:46

       Yeah. He's, he's like, uh, Nikola Tesla and, uh, Bill Nye the Science Guy wrapped into one. [laughs]

    8. NFNoah Feldman1:26:52

       It's really, it's really true.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:26:53

       [laughs]

11. 1:26:54 – 1:50:18

    Using History to Predict the Future and Book Recommendations

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:26:54

       I'd like to... We're gonna bounce around a little bit, but it, this is all interrelated. How does understanding of history allow you to be a futurist?

    2. NFNoah Feldman1:27:03

       I think in some way, all of us every day are trying to figure out what's gonna happen tomorrow. And, you know, that's true in an obvious way if you're investing in something, you wanna know what's gonna happen to that asset tomorrow. It's true, though, if you're picking a job. It's true if you're choosing a relationship. It's true in some way if you're just getting up in the morning, that you're trying to predict what's gonna happen in the world. And at the most fundamental level, we do that by looking at the past. And, you know, there's always the constant reminder, past performance [laughs] does not guarantee future results, and that's true. But the reason we have to bother to say that is that the past is our first guide to figuring out what's happened. What I like to do is to try to see the way that crises and problems and challenges have played out in the past, and then ask whether a change in our arrangements is actually gonna fix those things or is actually inheriting those problems. And where this is especially useful, I think, is in environments where we know that we're facing some disruptive technology or some disruptive change. So, I don't know, take an example. Take Airbnb. You know, Airbnb self-consciously set out to disrupt the hotel industry, and they did it. If you're trying to figure out when Airbnb was getting started, what challenges will they face? One thing to do would be to look to the history of the hotel industry and ask, "What was the biggest challenge the hotel industry faced in, say, the 20th century?" And the answer turns out to be racial discrimination, right? You know, for much of the 20th century in the United States, hotels were racially segregated in the large parts of the country. Integrating, and the process of integration had a lot to do with hotels. You know, some folks may have seen the, the movie The Green Book, which literally refers to the physical book that African Americans had to carry with them when they were traveling around the segregated South so they would know where they were legally allowed to stay, right? So the process, that shows you, you know, the fundamentally, you know, transformative nature of desegregation. So now you're Airbnb, you've disrupted this industry. It would've been plausible and easy to predict, I would even say, maybe easy is too strong a word, but possible to predict that Airbnb would face challenges around racial discrimination by their, uh, users, both by people who are renting out Airbnbs and people who rent them, because they were inheriting this industry. And so the social challenge that had faced that industry wasn't gonna disappear when it passed into this new industry. And I think that's a nice concrete example of how looking at the past can actually help you make predictions about what the challenges are gonna be in the future, and then those are actionable predictions. You know, then you can say, "Well, if we're gonna design a disruptive technology for hotels, we need to build in protections against forms of racial discrimination that we think are wrong." And, you know, Airbnb eventually got around to that and did do that. Um, but that's an example of where you can look to the past and you can learn a lot about what's gonna happen in the future. Another concrete example would be political polarization, which is something that I think all of us have had to spend a lot of time thinking about over the last, you know, five or six years. And it doesn't really matter whether you're thinking of it because you care about politics, or you're thinking about it because, you know, your business is a business that inevitably interacts with the public, and the public is polarized. You know? I mean, we live in a world where it's not just the politicians we vote for who are becoming polarized, but our views about science are polarized, and our views about medicine are polarized, and our brand choices are increasingly polarized in a range of ways. So we all have to think about it one way or another. There, you can look back to past instances of polarization in our society, which have in many cases been devastating, and you can look at the ways we crawled out of those. And you can take advantage of the things that worked when we did crawl out, primarily forms of compromise and forms of recognition of the other side as having more in common than, than actually separates us. And you can try to self-consciously build on those models to try to figure out how to make the future somewhat better than it otherwise might be. And you can also look at when we failed You know, the Civil War being the big example where our polarization just failed and we split in two, and you can try to avoid the problems that helped create that failure.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:31:29

       I have so many questions [laughs] . I feel like, I feel like a little kid who's like s- like so excited, just like jumping up and down, trying to like tug at a parent's sleeve to get attention because they just, they, they can't contain, they can't contain what they wanna say. Uh, I, I, I'm just gonna try to spit these out one at a time. All right, so the first is, do you have any recommendations for books, they could be your own, for people who want to study, and I'm not sure exactly how to separate or define these things, but the creation of governance and maybe state-building? Uh, the name Francis Fukuyama comes to mind because a friend has recommended his work over and over and over again. I know that Patrick Collison, when he was on this podcast, we talked about, I believe I'm getting the name right, Lee Kuan Yew. Am I getting that right?

    4. NFNoah Feldman1:32:24

       Sure. Yeah.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:32:24

       Uh, who transformed Singapore into what it is. I mean, just an incredible, incredible story. But for people who are, for practical purposes, trying to get a grasp of this, uh, and it, and, and I think about, for instance, blockchain and DAOs, right? These, uh, these, these, uh, new organizations. Man, oh, man, are lawyers gonna be busy [laughs] . But putting that aside, there are people right now who are crafting constitutions. Right? They're, they're doing this with some frequency, especially with the experimentation that is happening en masse right now, if you just look at, say, NFTs and so on, which a- as much as people might ridicule them for the surface-level appearance of just, like, silly JPEGs, there's, there's a lot underneath that, that I think is ex- deeply interesting and will prove valuable. Uh, any books you might recommend for people who wanna roll up their sleeves as possible crafters of constitutions and governments?

    6. NFNoah Feldman1:33:31

       Yeah. So I, I agree with you that Francis Fukuyama, Frank Fukuyama, is amazing on this. He's especially good also on how things fall apart. Um-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:33:42

       Mm-hmm

    8. NFNoah Feldman1:33:43

       ... he's very, very good on what he calls decay, as we- well as being very, very good on, on the building of such institutions. I actually, uh, had him on my podcast recently, and he's just totally spectacular on this. And so hi- and his work is also, even though he's a very scholarly person, the books are written in a very readable and accessible way.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:34:02

       Is there a starting point you might recommend of his books?

    10. NFNoah Feldman1:34:06

        Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting. One of his most recent books is this kind of grand, grand book, Political Order and Political Decay. It's an amazing book. It's not a short book. [laughs] Um-

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:34:21

        [laughs]

    12. NFNoah Feldman1:34:21

        ... and I don't know if I would recommend it, the whole book, as an introduction, but I think you could read the first part of the book, which is sort of a book on its own, and get a really good account of how political order comes into existence. And then, you know, take a deep breath, and then read the second part of the book about how it all falls apart on the other side. Um, so I think if I was gonna pick one of Frank's book, it would be, it would be Political Order and Political Decay. Another book which is a bit shorter, and which I have found incredibly helpful, uh, for me, is a book called Democracy and the Market.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:34:56

        Mm.

    14. NFNoah Feldman1:34:56

        And it's by a Polish-born political scientist whose name is Adam Przeworski, and I'll spell his last name because it's not how it sounds. Uh-

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:35:07

        [laughs]

    16. NFNoah Feldman1:35:08

        ... it's P-R-Z-E-W-O-R-S-K-I. Przewor- pronounce Przeworski, because that's how languages roll. Um, uh-

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:35:20

        [laughs]

    18. NFNoah Feldman1:35:21

        ... and Przeworski is just also just a completely fascinating, fascinating person who was very influential on me when I was trying to figure out how you design governments. And one of the things that he talks about in Democracy and the Market is about how the creation of democracies is intertwined with the operation of capitalism. You know, we, when we study in school how democracies come into existence, we usually don't really think about how they interface with the organization of capital, but actually it's centrally important. Um, this is sort of the big Alexander Hamilton point that Alexander Hamilton was always making when the US was founded. Right? James Madison had designed the Constitution, and Hamilton basically said, "I don't really care that much about the Constitution. I care about the financial markets." And he literally walked out of the Constitutional Convention halfway through. He was like, "Whatever. It doesn't matter. I don't care." But then once there was a government, he devoted everything he had as Secretary of Treasury to basically creating the bond markets, and he did it 'cause he thought that by creating a bond market, the government would have somebody it could borrow from. It would then be able to raise the capital to do stuff, and then it would be effective. Then it could have a navy, and, you know, then it could eventually, um, have infrastructure. You know, you need to borrow money to do this stuff, so he needed to create a bond market so there would be a way to actually do that. And he also wanted the government to need to borrow money so that there would be a bond market, so that wealth could be created, so that you could have capital markets, so that they could build manufacturing. Madison didn't care about any of this and, in fact, he opposed most of it, which was, in retrospect, hopelessly naive. You know, he was like this Virginian gentleman with enslaved people working for him on a plantation, which was not the future, let's just say, with respect to, you know, the economy of the United States. So Przeworski is, like, great on that, and I think his book, and it's a short book and very readable, e- even though it's not a new book. Um, he's got newer books, but I- that's the one that I, I come back to.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:37:20

        Oh, I don't, I don't need new. I kinda like old, if the principles still hold, which it sounds like.

    20. NFNoah Feldman1:37:25

        I think, I think that book re- really, really does

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:37:28

        Szczeworski. You know, the, it's, Czech and Polish, they're like the opposite of Hawaiian, right? Like, the Hawaiians love vowels, and man, oh, man, [laughs] do, like, the, the Poles and the Czechs just love consonants. Uh-

    22. NFNoah Feldman1:37:40

        They really do.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:37:40

        [laughs]

    24. NFNoah Feldman1:37:41

        They hate, they hate those, they hate, they hate themselves some vowels.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:37:43

        [laughs] Uh, you know, I'm, I'm debating where to go next here.

    26. NFNoah Feldman1:37:51

        I could talk about the DAOs a little bit if you want. I didn't answer that part of the question.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:37:54

        Yes, please.

    28. NFNoah Feldman1:37:55

        Yeah. So just to mention them. So DAOs, and it stands for decentralized autonomous organization, are a kind of very interesting, promising, still, I would still say flavor-of-the-month kind of organization that operates on the blockchain, that is supposed to, and when it works well, does, allow for collective decision-making, quote-unquote, "from the bottom up." That is to say, they do not have a central authority in the middle. They don't have the centralized decision-maker that most constitutional systems ordinarily do have. They don't have, as it were, a president or a prime minister, and they also don't have a hierarchical system where, like a staff or a board of directors m- that's elected makes decisions about where the assets of the organization should be put. Instead, the idea is that everybody collectively who's in the DAO can vote on how resources are going to be allocated. So they're kind of a strong, um, wisdom-of-crowds idea. The idea is that if the collective makes the decisions, the odds are better that the collectivity will make good decisions. And that also tells you what the value proposition is. To invest in a DAO is in a way to bet on the wisdom of the crowd, and not just the wisdom, but on the collective capacity of the crowd to work together. And that's a fascinating bet, and you can see from that formulation why it's very attractive, and also why it's a bit utopian, and why some people remain skeptical of the capacities of DAOs to do all of the different things that people hope that they'll be able to do. Because again, talk about using history to predict the future, if you look at the history of decentralized decision-making organizations, they've often existed, guilds, some labor unions, depending on how they were organized. They can do certain things really well. They can coordinate certain things really well, but there's certain kinds of decision-making that historically are really hard to make in a decentralized way. So when you're engaged in a conflict with another entity, when you're engaged in direct competition with another entity, when you need to coordinate action beyond the initial purposes and evolve your purposes, historically it's been really hard for decentralized organizations to pull that off. So you wanna pick and choose carefully with respect to what the DAO's purposes are and what its objectives are, and that should be helpful to the process of deciding, you know, how, how do you wanna be involved in a DAO and what will it be capable of accomplishing?

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:40:39

        [laughs] So someone in my household, it may or may not be me, may have, uh, become somewhat, uh, I don't wanna say infatuated, that's not the right word, but obsessed with researching a lot of the, the kinda nitty-gritty aspects of, of DAOs and DAOs. I like saying DAO just because it makes me think of like the Tao-

    30. NFNoah Feldman1:41:02

        Sounds better
12. 1:50:18 – 2:01:54

    The Broken Constitution: Lincoln and Slavery

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:50:18

       I can't think of a better place to segue back, as promised, to The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America. Why did you write this book?

    2. NFNoah Feldman1:50:32

       Like a lot of us, I have been struggling in the last few years with a question that is actually really old, but maybe it's to our detriment that we haven't thought about it as much. Namely, is our whole system, from the Constitution on, fundamentally ruined by having racism and slavery in its DNA from the start? Or can we be a lot more optimistic about our capacities as a country by virtue of progress that we've made since our Declaration of Independence was written by a slaveholder and our Constitution was drafted primarily by a slaveholder at a convention where slaveholding states had a, had a, you know, a huge amount of influence? And, you know, that question's been on the front page of a lot of newspapers. It's being debated in terms of what we teach our kids in schools, and it's a, it's a fundamental identity question for us as a country, and it matters. And, uh, here I am, I'm a constitutions guy, and I had written a book about James Madison, you know, one of the lead drafters of the Constitution, the lead drafter of the Constitution, really, its inventor, who was himself a slaveholder. So I'd thought about the question in terms of him, but I hadn't really thought about that question in terms of what we did when we changed, when we broke it all down, and when we smashed the Constitution and the country in the Civil War. And I think the depth of disagreement and polarization over the last handful of years really also made me think, you know, how bad is our situation relative to the situation then? And I wanted to find out answers to those questions, and that's why I started doing the research for the book, and the book is my attempt to answer those questions.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:52:28

       Please say more. Can you provide some more, some more context?

    4. NFNoah Feldman1:52:34

       Yeah. I'll give you my, my sort of top-of-the-line answer to the question via a story. And, uh, in all of my books, I try to have a story because that's how I think. I can make sense out of bigger and more abstract ideas better if I do them through the human beings who actually thought them, and Lincoln's got a hell of a story.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:52:57

       It seems like that's also how good Aba Don taught you also.

    6. NFNoah Feldman1:53:01

       It is how-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:53:01

       The stories. [laughs]

    8. NFNoah Feldman1:53:02

       You're absolutely right. That is a very powerful insight, and you can, you can send me the bill for the session. [laughs]

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:53:09

       [laughs]

    10. NFNoah Feldman1:53:10

        And I, I will, I will gladly pay. That is an excellent and correct, correct insight into my, uh, my formation and my character. So Lincoln's story is fascinating because Lincoln was a compromiser his whole life. He associated himself with the political party of compromise, which was the Whig party, which was the party that repeatedly saved the United States from breaking into pieces in 1830, and again in the 1840s, and again in the 1850s. And every time the country was about to fall apart over the slavery question, really the Whigs, the Whigs saved it. Uh, Henry Clay was the, called the Great Compromiser, who was the founder of the Whig Party, and he was Lincoln's idol, and he was Lincoln's god. And even when he was elected president, Lincoln was still trying to compromise. So, you know, when you go to the Lincoln Memorial, you see two speeches written on the wall on the two sides of Lincoln. One is his Gettysburg Address, and the other is his second inaugural. No one ever mentions Lincoln's first inaugural. And it turns out there's a reason for that, which I discovered when I read Lincoln's first inaugural, which is that the opening sentence says basically, "I have no interest or intention in ever interfering with slavery. Slavery is in the Constitution. It's permanent. If you Southerners will just reverse this whole secession business, we will make sure you have your slaves forever." So that's the guy's story running up to the Civil War. And, you know, he said that, and then, you know, in just a month, shots were fired and the war began. And Lincoln realized the Constitution was well and truly broken, and he decided to break the Constitution further in order to make it into something new.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:55:04

        Hard fork.

    12. NFNoah Feldman1:55:06

        Yeah, hard fork. The hardest possible fork. Exactly. Doesn't get harder than that, right?

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:55:11

        [laughs]

    14. NFNoah Feldman1:55:11

        Sending the troops is the hardest fork you could possibly have. And actually, I mean, I, to go even further, all of those compromises were founded in the original compromise, which, and we have to be honest about this, was a compromise over slavery. So when people say our Constitution has slavery built into its DNA, they're not lying. Like, that is actually true. The Constitution would never have been agreed to if it hadn't included the Three-Fifths Compromise, you know, and if it hadn't guaranteed the slave trade would continue for at least another 20 years, and if it hadn't had the fugitive slave clause, which committed free states to returning slaves to their masters. That is to say, it implicated the free states in the practice of slavery. So, you know, those things are pretty awful, and slavery is indistinguishable in that context from the principle of white supremacy. So when people say that slavery and racism were baked into the original Constitution, that's just a fact. And that was preserved through these compromises. But what Lincoln did is he broke the Constitution in such a way as to end that, and he did it eventually by emancipation, which he himself believed was unconstitutional when he started the presidency. So this is also something that amazed me. He didn't just promise it. When, um, one of his generals immediately once the war began started freeing the slaves of Confederates who were, um, in his-- who came into his con- came into contact with him in his d- in his district, Lincoln ordered him to reverse it, and when he wouldn't reverse it, Lincoln retracted the order himself and fired the general. So Lincoln was-- couldn't be clear, and he wrote in a letter to his friend at the same time, "Listen, to take people's slaves is just dictatorship. I'm not gonna do that." Fast-forward 18 months, he's realized they're not gonna win the war easily. He's realized compromise is not gonna work. He's realized that he has no basis for convincing people to fight a war to save the Union if the Union isn't moral. And he decides to f- flip the, the narrative and to declare that slaves in the Confederacy are hereby free even though he believed that-

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:57:22

        May I interrupt for one second?

    16. NFNoah Feldman1:57:23

        Yeah, by all means.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:57:25

        So this is, as a non-historian, uh, this, this may just show how ignorant I am. But was it in the service of morality or was it to cripple or cause dis- cripple the South or cause so much disorder, so much quilombo that the North could capitalize on it effectively?

    18. NFNoah Feldman1:57:46

        It's a great, great question, and the reason it's such a good question is that the answer is actually not totally clear 'cause Lincoln himself obscured the answer.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:57:55

        Oh.

    20. NFNoah Feldman1:57:56

        So Lincoln never said at any point up to the Emancipation Proclamation, and he barely ever said afterwards, that he was doing it because slavery was immoral. He kinda wanted everyone who hated slavery to think that, but he didn't wanna say it. Instead, the rationale that he gave throughout was, "This is a war effort to help us win the war. It will create greater disorder," as you're saying. "It will convince slaves to flee their masters. It will send a message to the South that there is no compromise." He said all those things. He said it was necessary to win the war. He did not like to say that it was for moral reasons, and he was criticized for that, you know, at the time by those who thought he should have been more overt in saying that slavery was fundamentally immoral. And historians are divided about whether he secretly thought that it was actually an important moral thing to do or whether his real motivation was the one that he stated, namely, this is a war measure to win the war. And in researching it, I actually came to the conclusion that he didn't wanna admit to himself that he was doing it because slavery was immoral because he believed that as president, he was authorized to win the war, but he wasn't authorized to impose his moral will on the rest of the country. So he insisted even to himself that he was doing it because it was necessary to win the war. But I think unconsciously by then, he had realized that the old slavery compromise could never work and needed to be replaced with something totally new, and that that new thing would be moral. And this is sort of my punchline of the book, which is that today we all think that our Constitution is a moral blueprint. We think it's a kind of higher law. We might not always follow it, and we, we may screw it up, but we aspire to following it, right? We had segregation, and now we say that was unconstitutional. It was unjust. It was wrong. We didn't live up to our highest aspirations. Nobody thought that before the Civil War. Nobody thought the Constitution was moral. The people who supported the Constitution knew it was a compromise with slavery, and a lot of them knew slavery was immoral. And so the Constitution was not a moral document. There might be morals. They were apart from the Constitution and higher than the Constitution. So this was a core transformative moment in our thinking about what it is to govern ourselves because we shifted from we have to do some practical things to govern ourselves to thinking, "No, we should also live morally." And to me, that's, like, fundamentally important for the question of how we wanna live together in the future because we're not always gonna agree on what the right way to live is. We're not always gonna agree on what's moral. But if we all agree that we should be trying to live our lives to make the world somewhat better than it is right now, we actually have something that we can look forward to coming together on. That is a mechanism for compromise, and it's a mechanism for overcoming polarization by saying, "Okay, we don't agree on what to do right now, but do we agree on where we wanna be? Do we agree on that we wanna make the country a better, fairer, a more just place?" And to me, that is the mechanism we can use to compromise as a country, and I think it's also very practically usable by anybody who's trying to work out the future by looking at the past. You ask yourself, "How can I make it better?" And the answer is usually by aspiring to do that and then trying to reach agreement on some concrete steps that we could take to try to make it better.

13. 2:01:54 – 2:09:40

    Two Kinds of Compromise

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:01:54

       This makes me think of a story I was told Some time ago, probably 10 years ago, and I can't remember the professor's name, but there, it was, it was a story told to me by a Stanford professor who, at Stanford, was allowed to create and experiment with new classes of pretty much any type [laughs] . So you could just say-

    2. NFNoah Feldman2:02:17

       Cool

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:02:17

       ... "I'm, I'm gonna teach a class on something I just made up during my nap or after my nap, and we're gonna give it a shot." And the class was intended to be focused on some aspect of world peace. All right. And students show up. So far, so good. Lots of students show up for this class, register for this class. And then it turns out, uh-oh, we have a problem. Nobody can agree on what world peace means. And so you have, you have [laughs] people from the Middle East on polar opposite ends of the spectrum. You have people from all over. And what this particular professor ended up doing was asking, "Okay, instead of defining world peace, can we, can we agree upon and define some of the precursors or constituent pieces of what world peace might look like?" And they were able to do that. So they came up with certain bits and pieces of this puzzle which they agreed upon, and that's what they ended up spending the semester focused on. And I bring that up in part because I'd love for you to expand on this word compromise, because I think when a lot of people hear that word, and sometimes I'm one of those people, particularly someone who, uh, l- let's just say Lincoln looks up to this other figure, idolizes him because he's the master of compromise. Now, there, there's-- there are people who will hear that and say, "Well, that sounds like no firm position." Right?

    4. NFNoah Feldman2:03:56

       Mm-hmm.

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:03:57

       You're, you, you're the master of waffling.

    6. NFNoah Feldman2:03:59

       Yep.

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:04:00

       And it has a negative connotation. How do you think of this, this word, compromise?

    8. NFNoah Feldman2:04:06

       I love that question, and I, I love the story, too. I never heard that before. That's totally fascinating. So here's how I think about it. I think you can divide compromise into two kinds of compromise. One of which is waffling, and one of which is, let's call it better than waffling [laughs] .

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:04:24

       [laughs]

    10. NFNoah Feldman2:04:24

        Um, let's call it, um, real aspiration. So the kind of compromise that is waffling, and sometimes you need this kind of compromise in life, is where there's a zero sum thing that you and somebody else are arguing about, but you know that you need to cooperate in order to keep your part of that zero sum thing, right? Two partners in a business, each owns 50% of the shares. You can't have 150% of the shares just by definition. You know, that's just, like, not the way it works. And they have to get along with each other, and they don't always agree on the right course of conduct for the business. So in that situation, you actually need some degree of, call it flexibility, in agreeing on what you're gonna do, which means that sometimes you're gonna do something you think is wrong, right? The other-- Your partner is saying, "We should do this," and you're like, "Look, dude, I know you're wrong. I've been-- We've been doing this for a long time. I'm r- I know when I'm right. I'm right this time. You're wrong." Your friend is like, "Nope. It's the other way around. I know that I'm right, and this is one of the cases where you're wrong." If you can't waffle, that is, if you can't be flexible and say, "Okay, we're gonna do it your way this time even though I know it's wrong," you're just gonna fail. You're gonna break up. So that's the kind of compromise that was happening before the Civil War. That was the waffling compromise, and you can see that it was lousy because it involved a lousy thing, namely slavery. But without it, they wouldn't have been able to build the Union. The United States would not have gone from a tiny little I-95 nation, you know, on the East Coast, you know, Eastern seaboard country, to a continental power without this kind of agreement or compromise. Now, there were a few people who were like, "We don't need to be that. Let's just stay on-- Let's just, you know, let's just stay on the, uh, Selah Corridor, and that's, that's plenty for us." But most people were like, "No, we wanna actually expand this thing." And to do that, you had to have that kind of compromise. But here's the other kind of compromise, and this is the one I wanna call real aspiration. That's when we actually do look at each other and say, "We agree on a broader objective that involves making the world actively better, and we both want to achieve that objective." Let's say in the case of the Constitution, it's equality, right? Let's say in the case of some, you know, of a business, it's transforming some sphere of do- or domain of interests. You know, let's say it's in psychedelic research, it's expanding the capacities of human consciousness and enabling people to be healed better than they are now through that objective. These are big, grand objectives. They're stated at a very high degree of generality 'cause they have to be, but they're really important, uh, and they're hugely important. And then w- we say, "Listen, I'm gonna go along with what you wanna do in this situation because I see us as involved in a collective experiment to try to get us to this end, and we both want that same end. And I'm gonna try to do it your way now, and you're gonna try to do it my way the next time, and we are gonna do a little bit of compromise," but it's not because I, I won't be saying, "I know you're wrong." I'll be saying, "I think this other route might be faster." Right? It's like we're both hiking up the mountain and there, the path forks. We know both forks go up the mountain, and we're trying to figure out, like, which one will get us there faster or better. And so I go with you. I still think I-- my way was better, but I know we're still going up the mountain at that same objective. And that seems to me to be the good kind of compromise that isn't just waffling.

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:07:59

        Hmm. Are there any, alive or dead, any figures who stand out to you as particularly good at crafting- ... productive compromise who we haven't talked about already?

    12. NFNoah Feldman2:08:15

        I mean, we mentioned Nelson Mandela in passing. He's an example of somebody who was able to convince all South Africans that they actually had a common objective of living together, even though just a short time before he had been imprisoned and, you know, a good part of the country thought their objective was to keep him and people like him subordinated. So he's, you know, he's a cliched example, but there's a reason that he's a cliched example. It's because he really did have that kind of a transformative capacity, um, to, to work together and compromise. I think, you know, in the United States, Martin Luther King Jr. is another great example of someone who was capable of compromise to achieve those sorts of things, and he has got a nice parallel in Malcolm X, who was not so inclined to compromise with injustice, and they each show you the value of those two different kinds of approaches. I think they're a really interesting compare and contrast for that reason. They're each seeking equality. They're each seeking justice. One is saying, "We should do this by a collective undertaking of a higher objective," and the other is saying, "No, we should do this by the people who are doing bad things should stop doing [chuckles] those bad things, and if not, I will do everything I can. All means necessary are appropriate to, to getting us there." And I have a great respect for each approach. Those stand out strongly in my mind as, you know, forms of the productive, aspirational type of compromise.

14. 2:09:40 – 2:23:05

    Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and the Iroquois Confederacy

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:09:40

       Who is Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and, uh, why are you interested in him?

    2. NFNoah Feldman2:09:46

       So Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was most famous as a Supreme Court justice who served for a long time between the very, very early years of the 20th century, uh, and into the very early 1930s. Before that, he was the son of a nationally famous writer who volunteered the day the Civil War began, when he was in college, to go to war, got shot in his very first battle. Luckily for him, got shot in the front and not in the butt, and went back to Massachusetts, where he was already a bit of a celebrity because his father was famous and he was very tall and good-looking, and he was feted in every, um, you know, salon in Massachusetts as this hero of the Civil War, which he really liked. He really liked being a hero.

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:10:35

       [laughs]

    4. NFNoah Feldman2:10:35

       He then went back out to battle, got shot a second time, and was so-- He was so scared of getting shot that he had, um, he had actually filled his flask with poison. But his sergeant knew he had done this and emptied it and refilled it with gin. And so when he was shot the second time-

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:10:52

       [laughs]

    6. NFNoah Feldman2:10:52

       ... he drank the flask thinking that he was gonna, like, commit suicide because he didn't want to have his legs sawn off.

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:10:56

       [laughs] Oh, my God.

    8. NFNoah Feldman2:10:57

       But he just got super, he just got super drunk.

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:10:59

       [laughs]

    10. NFNoah Feldman2:11:01

        And the sergeant saved his life. He then, he then went to law school, set himself up as a young lawyer, and actually turned to history to try to understand the future. And when talking about using history to understand the past, I realized just in this moment, I never thought of it before, that Holmes is actually an amazing example of this. And he wrote a bo- little book called The Common Law, which was a total rereading of the history of the law, basically the law of accidents and contracts. And it was a radical rereading of the history, and his central argument was that, as he put it, "The life of the law has not been logic. It has been experience." So his idea was that law presents itself as all logical all the time, and it's bullshit. Law is actually a set of institutions by which we constantly update and upgrade and uplevel our society as we're doing it on the basis of things we've screwed up and in the hopes of doing it better in the future. And in this, he was an archetypal pragmatist, and he actually hung out with a group of people, they called themselves the Metaphysical Club, who were all pragmatists, and they were famous pragmatists. William James, hugely famous psychologist, also very rightly famous as one of the first people to seriously expand his consciousness using drugs and writing, write it down. Um, he was constantly self-experimenting. He took every drug that was known to him. Um, and he was a pragmatist and a central figure in pragmatism 'cause he thought that life was constantly about experimenting, and Holmes agreed with him. C.S. Peirce, another contemporary of theirs who formalized pragmatism into a logical system. Uh, Henry Adams. Holmes hung out with these guys. He was the best looking. He definitely slept with the girlfriends of several [chuckles] of the others.

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:12:47

        [laughs]

    12. NFNoah Feldman2:12:50

        There, there are some historians who speculate that he slept with some of the other members of the club, although that's purely at the level of speculation. So Holmes was very intellectually attracted to this idea of societal pragmatism seen as experiment. To him, pragmatism was seeing that, as he put it later in his life, "It is an experiment as all life is an experiment." That's his, you know, his, his real tagline. Now, this dude, who was an elite, elite, elite Yankee, they called him the Yankee from Olympus.

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:13:18

        [laughs]

    14. NFNoah Feldman2:13:19

        He was what we would call today a high WASP. Um, he got old, he got onto the Supreme Court, and he found himself basically forgotten. Time had passed him by. He still dressed like it was the Civil War. He wore a huge cavalry mustache, a military mustache from the Civil War. And he had an amazing second life because when he was in his 80s, he was discovered by a group of young progressive lawyers, chief among them Felix Frankfurter, who went on to become a professor at Harvard Law School and then a Supreme Court justice himself. And they were looking for a poster child for their progressivism. And they could have picked Louis Brandeis, who was a rough contemporary of Holmes, also a genius, also a Supreme Court justice. But Brandeis was Jewish and was actually himself a progressive, and they wanted a better poster child.

    15. TFTim Ferriss2:14:10

        [laughs]

    16. NFNoah Feldman2:14:11

        And they, they hit on Holmes, and they were able to do it by getting Holmes To basically say something that he believed, which was that the government shouldn't stop you from experimenting. The Supreme Court shouldn't block experiments. So he looked at progressivism, and he was like, "You wanna do a lot of experiments? I'm not sure any of it's gonna work. In fact, I'm cynical and I don't really believe it'll work, but you should be able to do it." Whereas the conservative members of the Supreme Court at the time were like, "No, if you're gonna experiment with progressive laws that limit hours, that, you know, that give you a minimum wage, we're gonna strike those down." And Holmes, because he believed in experimentation, took the view like, "No, we're not gonna strike those down." So he wasn't really a progressive, but they borrowed him for that purpose, and they made him a mega celebrity, and he loved it.

    17. TFTim Ferriss2:14:59

        [laughs]

    18. NFNoah Feldman2:15:00

        And as a consequence, he went down in history as one of the greatest justices of all time, mostly because he was always saying, "Look, let the experiment run. Let the experiment run." Um, and that was his core judicial philosophy. It also, last thought on this, it also made him a pioneer of free speech because you can't experiment if you can't share your ideas. So the core idea is we need to have free speech so that we can keep experimenting.

    19. TFTim Ferriss2:15:28

        I'm so glad that I asked about the, the Yankee from Olympus. [laughs]

    20. NFNoah Feldman2:15:35

        Yeah.

    21. TFTim Ferriss2:15:35

        That's incredible. How did you first get a bee in your bonnet about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.?

    22. NFNoah Feldman2:15:42

        You know, when I went to law school, I went to Yale Law School, no one ever talked about Holmes. It was like, I mean, I wouldn't say he didn't exist, but no one was interested in him. Then I came to teach at Harvard Law School, and-

    23. TFTim Ferriss2:15:53

        Hold on. Pause one second. How could you not be interested in this person? Why is that? That seems so odd to me.

    24. NFNoah Feldman2:16:00

        I mean, I, I'll be honest, he wasn't presented, you know, in New Haven, Connecticut, he just wasn't presented as someone we really needed to care about that much. He was kind of old-fashioned. And I should add, Holmes had plenty of non-admirable characteristics.

    25. TFTim Ferriss2:16:21

        [laughs]

    26. NFNoah Feldman2:16:21

        I mean, he thought he was so cool. He thought he was so awesome. And he, of course, had all the prejudices of his day. So he, you know, he supported eugenics. And in one Supreme Court decision, notorious decision called Buck against Bell, where the state of Virginia was forcibly sterilizing people whom it determined to be, quote-unquote, you know, mentally inferior, we would say developmentally challenged, and though it's not even clear they were, Holmes upheld that practice, and he used the following line: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." I mean, horrible stuff.

    27. TFTim Ferriss2:17:03

        Yeah, it's not-

    28. NFNoah Feldman2:17:03

        So there was plenty not to like.

    29. TFTim Ferriss2:17:05

        Not great.

    30. NFNoah Feldman2:17:05

        And somehow that was what was always emphasized. And then I came to Harvard. His portrait is everywhere, and it's like, he like looms over the place in a meaningful way. And I said, "All right, I'm gonna revisit." And I read a book that actually I love called The Metaphysical Club by a person called Louis Menand, who's an amazing, amazing writer. He's a professor at, at, at Harvard in the English department. Book won the Pulitzer Prize. It's an amazing, amazing book, The Metaphysical Club. And it's a group biography of those people I was just describing, and one of the chapters is about Holmes. And it's a totally gripping chapter. And then I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna give this guy some deeper thought." And as I teach constitutional law and the First Amendment, which are two of the classes that I teach, he just emerges as this really fascinating central figure, and that got me much more deeply fascinated by him. Now, I have not yet-- He's been a minor character in a book that I wrote. I have not sat down to write a book just about him, and partly it's 'cause I'm scared to. Felix Frankfurter, when he was a professor and then Supreme Court justice, he assigned his favorite student to write the biography of Holmes. And-
15. 2:23:05 – 2:37:47

    Experiments in Big Tech Governance and COVID

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:23:05

       What are you most excited about right now? Looking forward over the next six to 12 months, you could pick any timeframe really. What are you, what are you excited about?

    2. NFNoah Feldman2:23:16

       I'm really excited about some innovations in governance in big tech that I've had a chance to be a little bit involved in that are experiments. We were just talking about experiments and how if you wanna try to make the world any better than it currently is, you have to try stuff out and see if it's gonna work or not work. And I'm really interested and excited because I wanna see if these experiments are going to work, and if they do, how they work. And if they don't work, I wanna see how they, they don't work. So the one that, um, is directly in front of my, my eyes right now is the Facebook Oversight Board, which sometimes people call the Supreme Court of Facebook, which, uh, launched not quite a year ago, and which I was directly involved in, in launching and coming up with, and which is based on the idea that there's a series of decisions that are too important to be made by the leadership of a platform that has, you know, well over two billion users, you know, pushing on three billion users. And so the core idea behind this oversight board was that start with a identifiable set of decisions about what content Facebook allows on its site and what content it takes down, and what people it allows on its site and what people it deplatforms. So start with that narrowly defined problem. It's not the only problem Facebook faces by any stretch of the imagination, but it's an important problem. And take ultimate decision power about that away from the company and put it in an independent group of people who are paid by an independent trust. The money came from Facebook, but it goes into an, it went into an independent trust. A couple hundred million dollars went to this independent trust to administer and run this oversight board. And give them genuine oversight by Facebook promising that it will do what it tells them to do. And running the experiment to see if this group can do a better job than Facebook in making the decisions, see if it can hold Facebook to account, and try to push Facebook to make its own decisions in a more regularized, rule-based way, and see if it's possible to show the world, in fact, if it is working, that there's a benefit for private companies to do what governments have long done, namely have some real separation of powers, right? Namely say that there's some things that, you know, we just don't want the president and Congress to decide. We don't want the president and Congress to decide what speech is allowed and what speech isn't allowed, because we know they would follow their interests. So we have an independent Supreme Court that has-- It's not that it doesn't have interests, but has a different set of interests, and it's more independent. And historically, we haven't really seen companies doing this. Companies are seen as serving the interests of their shareholders, and that interest has traditionally been seen as making a profit for their shareholders wh-while not violating the law. Increasingly, we now see in our world that's not good enough, right? We want companies to do more than just make money and not break the law. We want them to actually contribute to the public good. So this is a humongous experiment, and it's still unclear if it will work and how well it will work, but I'm really excited to see how it plays out.

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:26:30

       How will you know if the experiment has worked? What would be indications, evidence to point to it working?

    4. NFNoah Feldman2:26:39

       If the oversight board rubber stamps everything that Facebook does, it's not working. It needs to make independent decisions that reverse Facebook. If it makes decisions then Facebook doesn't implement them, it's not working. Facebook has to actually implement decisions that Facebook doesn't like. If the public looks at this entity two years from now and says, "This is BS. You know, these people aren't really independent. Um, their decision-making isn't really making the world better," then it's not working. But on the other hand, if people say, "Oh, that actually, it was an independent decision, and it's not, not what Facebook necessarily wanted," then that would be a marker of success. So we had an interim marker of success when the, the Facebook oversight board weighed in on the decision to deplatform Donald Trump. It ultimately said that Facebook had done it wrong, but that if they did it again and did it right, they would be permitted to keep him off the platform for some period of time. And that got reported on on the front page of every newspaper, and for the most part, the press treated it as an independent decision, which I think in practice it actually was. And that was, I would say, a first step to success. I wouldn't call it success at the end state by any stretch of the imagination, but a first step towards success that was meaningful because the world treated it as independent, and it was independent, and it wasn't just a rubber stamp. But it was also not... And of course, a lot of people would've been very angry if they had made Facebook put Donald Trump back on, right? So inevitably, people were gonna be angry no matter what decision they made, and I think the board kind of split the difference by saying, "We're gonna tell you you did it wrong, Facebook, but we're also gonna tell you that if you do it right, you're allowed to keep him off the platform." So that was a kind of a compromise. Debate whether it was the kind of compromise we were talking about of the best kind or the not best kind. So those are the kinds of landmarks that I think will be testable. And one last thing. If other tech companies think about their own kinds of novel governance solutions, which would not necessarily look like the oversight board, but if they adopted other kinds of creative outside the box solutions that share power to show the public that they are trying to do better than they're doing, then that would be yet another marker of the success of this experiment because, you know, there's no, there's no success like, you know, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery 'cause imitation shows you that other people think something is working.

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:29:04

       Let's go back to the invasion of Iraq. You mentioned that [laughs] not to compare the two things, but I will. You mentioned that there, there were best practices clearly visible, uh, or I should say worst practices clearly visible, right? If you, if you want to invade a country, here are the five things you shouldn't do. As you're looking at the Supreme Court of X, that could be the Supreme Court of Facebook, could be the Supreme Court of Google. Now, some people could argue the Supreme Court of any of these companies should actually stand outside of these companies completely. But if we-

    6. NFNoah Feldman2:29:36

       It should.

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:29:37

       Okay. So what would be foreseeable common mistakes, uh, that you think people should pay attention to avoiding when trying to create these types of, of boards? For instance, just what comes to mind is, and I think about this in the realm of science as well, potential conflicts of interest, right? So if the board of Facebook i- or the Supreme Court of Facebook is comprised of members who are incentivized with Facebook stock, how do we think about that, right, as an example?

    8. NFNoah Feldman2:30:08

       Right. That would be a disaster. That's a great example of what not to do. So you do need to have genuine independence, and that means compensation has to be from some external entity. It means their reappointment to the board when their term is up, which I think under the Facebook rules, uh, can happen once, can't be anything to do with the company. So it can't be that the company has any say in that. So that's another one, an important one. Uh, yet another thing, mistake to avoid is giving the new entity, the court or the board or whatever it is, giving it so much power up front that it could make decisions that would break the company, right? I mean, because if you want companies to be able to build on this and take the decision seriously, they have to be making decisions that are within the realm of what they could do without betraying the duty that they owe to their shareholders. So you need to-- It's kind of, it's kind of, it sounds contradictory, but you have to be modest enough in defining the overall goals that the board won't find itself telling the company to do something that the company just can't do, you know, fundamentally can't do. And I, I've learned the hard way that in tech, sometimes saying you have modest goals doesn't convince everybody. Sometimes people wanna hear that your solution will solve every problem. And just like I said earlier, the constitutions can't solve every problem. New governance solutions can't solve every problem, but they can address some of the problems. Another mistake would be if these entities were making global decisions but were only made up of Americans. If you're making global decisions, you need representation from all over the globe. You need people from all over. If you're making decisions for the US, you could be US-focused. If you're making decisions for Britain, you could be Britain-focused or, you know, and so forth. But if it's gonna be truly a global decision-making body, it needs to be global in its orientation. And the last thing is you need to actually have some values stated in advance that you're gonna try to pursue, and you need to be transparent about how your decisions reach those. I think the bigg- one of the biggest mistakes you could make would be to make decisions behind closed doors and not explain why you're making them. I think in this day and age, we're all cynical. We all know how the world works, and so we Need to be able to hear you say, "This is why I'm making the decision. Here's why I might be wrong, but here's why I made the decision that I made." I think transparency drives, transparency and giving reasons drives legitimacy. Non-transparency or failure to give reasons detracts from legitimacy.

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:32:55

       And legitimacy is sort of the, the currency, right, of so many different domains, whether it's a blockchain, whether it's constitution, whether it's the Supreme Court [laughs] of Facebook. And you talked about this, this potentially global representation for global business. It's, it's makes me think of the potential of, say, the [laughs] United Nations of Facebook, and then you have these parallel structures that on some level mimic these outside organizations within these larger companies. Uh, and on the point of transparency, are the decisions of, just for simplicity again, the Supreme Court of Facebook made public regardless of if or how the company ends up heeding that advice?

    10. NFNoah Feldman2:33:45

        Yes. The oversight board issues those decisions on its website, it makes them public, and then it tells Facebook to implement them. And if Facebook doesn't implement them right, I expect that the oversight board will do what it has the power to do, which is to call out Facebook publicly on that. You know, they, they can say to Facebook privately first like, "Hey, do it. We said do it." But then if Facebook doesn't do it, they can say publicly, "You didn't do it." And ultimately, that's where the power of the external entity lies, right? I mean, its power is that the company has promised to do what they've told them to do, and if they don't, then they're lying, and the board will be able to draw attention to that. So the baseline idea is that it's in the interests of companies to be seen as doing what they've promised. And, you know, when you're a company like Facebook that has tremendous challenges in terms of how people believe it operates, there's only one way out of that, and that way is to consistently demonstrate over an extended period of time that you are following the rules, that you are disclosing, that you are transparent. And, you know, over time, it will take time, no question, you can rebuild a reputation for transparency, honesty, openness, and legitimacy. And no one is disputing that that is a long road, but the only way to make a long journey is to put one foot in front of the other and start making the damn journey. And so I see the oversight board as an experiment that's designed to try to push the company in that direction and enable the company to go in that direction. It can't force it. You know? It, it opens the possibility of that. And again, that's why I call it an experiment.

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:35:30

        Are there any other experiments, it could be outside of this particular example, any other experiments that you're looking forward to, whether you are a part of them or they are outside of yourself?

    12. NFNoah Feldman2:35:43

        Well, an experiment that I wouldn't say exactly that I'm looking forward to it, but I'm watching it with constant fascination as I think a lot of us are, is how are we as a world gonna try to come out of the COVID pandemic? I mean, that's an experiment in real time and real human lives are at stake, and a huge amount turns on how well we do it, not just in the US or in the developed, you know, richer countries, but everywhere. Because, you know, I mean, a virus does not know borders, and a virus that spreads in one area of the world unchecked is going to evolve, 'cause it's just a principle, basic principle of evolutionary biology that if you have a larger and larger quantum of the virus circulating, the probability of it mutating in such a way as to become more dangerous increases. So it's in everybody's interest for there to be as little COVID out there as there can possibly be, and that means we need world coordination of a kind that we have not yet fully seen. We need sharing of resources in a way that we have seen the beginnings of, but we have not yet fully seen. And we all need that. We need that desperately. So this is a kind of grand global experiment in can we work together? And in a sense, the climate change challenge is similar, and there we do see results, but we don't necessarily see the results quite as quickly as we're seeing it in the context of COVID. COVID we're seeing it, you know, very, very much in, in real time. And, you know, COVID is also... I mean, climate is ultimately existential for us as a species. COVID's probably not existential for us as a species, but it is a pretty damn big problem.

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:37:27

        [laughs]

    14. NFNoah Feldman2:37:27

        And real human beings are, you know, losing their lives, and it has tremendous negative consequences and drag on everything we do as a s- as, not only as a country, but as a society and as a globe. And so, you know, I think we're all watching that with like total fascination and attention and trying to figure it out in real time as it goes.

16. 2:37:47 – 2:41:40

    Closing Thoughts

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:37:47

       Noah, you're a hell of a guy. I am so constantly every time we chat impressed with the breadth and depth of your intellectual curiosity and the way that you're able to tie disparate times, places, people together with pattern recognition. It's really astonishing and really impressive. And I know it's-- I, I know that you have good hardware, but it's also a trained skill, so I wanna just give you a bow for that because it's very, very impressive, uh, and it's a valuable skill that contributes to the collective. Is there anything else you would like to say, ask of my audience, call attention to, anything at all before we wrap up this conversation? I mean, we'll-- I-- we'll, we'll hopefully do a round two at some point because, I mean, we didn't talk about free speech really. Uh, we did not talk about your new class and thoughts on ethics and power. I didn't get to dive into AI. There are a million other things we could get into, but for this conversation, I didn't get to ask you why The Metaphysical Club has metaphysical in the title [laughs]

    2. NFNoah Feldman2:38:55

       Yeah

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:38:55

       ... which is gonna bother me, but I'll figure it out. Uh, but, but for this conversation, is there anything you would like to add as closing comments, requests of the audience, anything at all?

    4. NFNoah Feldman2:39:07

       Well, first of all, back at you, Tim. You know, in your work and in your podcast, you're literally interested in everything. I mean, it's such a fascinating podcast to listen to because you never know from week to week what extraordinary topic it will explore, and you know always there'll be something actionable that comes out of it. Um, but you also know that it, it'll be associative. And in talking to you every time I've talked to you, and certainly in this conversation too, you're doing it in real time. You know, you're coming up with connections and ideas and putting it together. So I'm super grateful for that, and I benefit from it like all your listeners do, and I loved talking to you in this conversation about that. I'll just say for, for listeners, I spend a good amount of my time trying to produce ideas and, and put them out there. And so, uh, I'd love to reach you guys, and I'd love to have you tell me what you're interested in because I see it as a dialogue. A huge number of the ideas that I have for things to write about and think about come from, directly from things that people write to me and, and tell me. So, um, you know, you can certainly read my columns on, on Bloomberg or listen to the Deep Background podcast or, you know, read my books, uh, if you happen to come across them. I also have a website, noah-feldman.com, where you can sign up if you want to, uh, hear from me on a, on an intermittent basis. I promise not to spam you or irritate you. But primarily it gives you the opportunity to communicate with me, and that is of tremendous, tremendous value and education for me. So I'd wanna just say that to listeners, and I love to, love to talk to all of you and engage with you. And I just wanna express deep gratitude, Tim, to you for all the work that you do and for giving me a chance to chat with you.

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:40:51

       What a gift to have this time with you, Noah. Thank you so much. Noah Feldman, ladies and gentlemen. On Twitter, @NoahRFeldman. As he mentioned, noah-feldman.com. We will link to everything in the show notes as usual at tim.blog/podcast. The new book, check it out, is The Broken Constitution, subtitle Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America. What fun to be able to explore so many topics. I can't wait for the next time we get to hang in person. And, uh, to everybody listening, till next time, be safe, experiment well, look for the good kinds of compromise when the opportunities arise, and thanks for tuning in.

Episode duration: 2:42:01