#608: Signal Over Noise with Noah Feldman — The War in Ukraine (Recap and Predictions), The Machiavelli of Maryland, Best Books to Understand Geopolitics, The Battles for Free Speech on Social Media, Metaverse Challenges, and More

Tim Ferriss and Noah Feldman on The War in Ukraine (Recap and Predictions), The Machiavelli of Maryland, Best Books to Understand Geopolitics, The Battles for Free Speech on Social Media, Metaverse Challenges, and More | Brought to you by MANSCAPED http://manscaped.com premium grooming products, Athletic Greens http://athleticgreens.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement, and Allform http://allform.com/tim premium, modular furniture. More on all three below. I rarely cover current events on this podcast, but this is a new experiment. To avoid overwhelm, I do not track the news 24/7 with doom scrolling. Rather, I depend on conversations with my smartest friends to find the signal in the noise. The following conversation with Noah Feldman https://tim.blog/noah (@NoahRFeldman https://twitter.com/NoahRFeldman) is an example of such a conversation, very similar to what we would have offline, and I wanted to share it with you. I learned a ton and changed my thinking a lot, which I always do. Noah Feldman 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: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Constitution-Lincoln-Slavery-Refounding/dp/0374116644/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. You can find my interview with him at tim.blog/noah https://tim.blog/noah. Noah is the founder of Ethical Compass, which helps clients like Facebook and eBay improve ethical decision-making by creating and implementing new governance solutions. Noah conceived and designed the Facebook Oversight Board https://oversightboard.com/ and continues to advise Facebook on ethics and governance issues. Feldman is host of the Deep Background https://www.pushkin.fm/show/deep-background/ podcast, a policy and public affairs columnist for Bloomberg Opinion https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/AFZ_b1F72Xw/noah-feldman, 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 A. B. summa cum laude from Harvard, finishing first in his class. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a DPhil 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. He is the author of 10 books, including Divided by God: America’s Church-State Problem — and What We Should Do About It https://www.amazon.com/Divided-God-Americas-Church-State-Problem/dp/0374530386/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20; What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building https://www.amazon.com/Feldman-Noah-Princeton-University-Hardcover/dp/B00E2RGWOA/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20; Cool War: The United States, China, and the Future of Global Competition https://www.amazon.com/Cool-War-United-States-Competition/dp/081298255X/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20; Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices https://www.amazon.com/Scorpions-Battles-Triumphs-Supreme-Justices/dp/0446699284/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20; and The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President https://www.amazon.com/Three-Lives-James-Madison-President/dp/1250267005/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. Please let me know what you think of this experimental format by sending me feedback on Twitter @tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss. Do you love it? Do you hate it? Have suggestions for improvement? The usual long-form interviews with evergreen questions will still be the default and bread and butter of this podcast, but if you like this, I could see doing more of them, perhaps once a month or once every two months. It’s just an easy way to get caught up without drowning in news. Please enjoy! NOTE: This episode was recorded on June 22nd. * This episode is brought to you by MANSCAPED http://manscaped.com! MANSCAPED http://manscaped.com is bringing you the total package to ensure your package is the perfect package. No, I didn’t come up with that line… but I tested and loved their products, so I can vouch that I’m still intact and ready for my centerfold shoot. Was it scary? Yes. Was it worth it? Also yes. My girlfriend makes the effort, so I figured it was only fair. MANSCAPED http://manscaped.com is the most effective way to keep clean, pristine, and looking like a dream through the sweatiest summer months. The Perfect Package 4.0 http://manscaped.com is the ultimate grooming kit that includes everything you need for optimal below-the waist hygiene. Use their precision-engineered Lawn Mower 4.0—yes, “Lawn Mower”—electric trimmer to remove excess and avoid the dreaded swamp crotch. Feel confident in trimming hard-to-reach areas with MANSCAPED’s SkinSafe technology, which helps reduce the risk of nicks and snags. It’s time to take care of yourself; time for some basic landscaping. Get 20% off and free shipping with the code TIMTIM at Manscaped.com http://manscaped.com. * This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product. * This episode is also brought to you by Allform http://allform.com/tim! If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you’ve probably heard me talk about Helix Sleep mattresses, which I’ve been using since 2017. They also launched a company called Allform http://allform.com/tim that makes premium, customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door—at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores. You can pick your fabric (and they’re all spill, stain, and scratch resistant), the sofa color, the color of the legs, and the sofa size and shape to make sure it’s perfect for you and your home. Allform http://allform.com/tim arrives in just 3–7 days, and you can assemble it yourself in a few minutes—no tools needed. To find your perfect sofa and receive 20% off all orders, check out Allform.com/Tim http://allform.com/Tim. * [08:40] Russia vs. Ukraine: why? [17:31] The first Web3 war? [25:24] Will punishing Russian oligarchs make Putin blink? [29:06] Did Putin miscalculate, or is he just playing a longer game? [38:19] Could this conflict affect the US dollar’s status as a reserve currency? [42:11] Exploring base/best/worst possible outcomes of the conflict. [47:56] Recommended reading. [58:15] Free speech in the age of social media. [1:14:07] What’s at stake as free speech is legally reevaluated? [1:23:18] Enforcement, decentralization, and free market considerations. [1:31:09] Where Noah sees the free speech conversation in three years. [1:35:50] Will the future be colored predominantly in AR or VR? [1:39:45] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors http://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, and many more. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Manscaped, the best in men's below the waist grooming. My girlfriend is sitting next to me with a huge smirk on her face. This whole read gives me incredible adolescent glee to include, so here we go. Manscaped's products are precision engineered tools for your family jewels, yours and mine, and their performance package is the ultimate men's hygiene bundle. Now, I have a friend, I'm not going to mention him by name, very well-known guy. He does public AMAs and people submit questions. And the most common, or one of the most common questions he gets that he has never answered is, "How do I shave my balls?" I'm not making this up. So that's where Manscaped comes in. I tested their Performance Package 4.0. Among other goodies, you'll find their Lawn Mower 4.0, trimmer, yes, I said lawnmower, weed whacker, ear and nose hair trimmer, Crop Preserver Ball Deodorant, and more.

• 0:45Tim Ferriss?

  That's right, girlfriend. The Lawn Mower 4.0 is the future of grooming and, dare I say, one of the greatest ball trimmers I've ever used. Yes, I do dare, I do dare say that. The fourth generation trimmer features a cutting-edge ceramic blade to help reduce grooming accidents. Nobody wants those. Think of Something About Mary, nobody wants that. Thanks to their advanced SkinSafe technology, the Lawn Mower 4.0 is waterproof and also has an LED spotlight if you need a more precise shave. And who wants a sloppy shave? You want precision. This is some Knight Rider technology, my friends, and I can vouch that I'm ready for my centerfold shoot and still fully intact. Was it scary? Yes. Was it worth it? Also, yes. My girlfriend, sitting nearby, my main beneficiary, makes the effort, so I figured it's only fair.

• 1:29Tim Ferriss?

  And I didn't realize this, but a member of my team has also conveyed to Manscaped the company that it has absolutely, quote unquote, "saved his balls." True story. The trimmer also has an IPX7 waterproof rating. No idea what that means, but I'll tell you what it means. Meaning that it's totally safe for use in the shower if you like to get wet and wild. The Performance Package 4.0 also includes the Weed Whacker Nose and Ear Hair Trimmer. You can follow up your lower trim with the Crop Preserver Ball Deodorant, which provides, and I quote, "residue-free chafing barrier." A residue-free chafing barrier, you heathens, pay attention, for your most sensitive parts. It's time to take care of yourself, time for some basic landscaping. Get 20% off and free shipping with the code TIMTIM, that's one word, at manscaped.com.

• 2:13Tim Ferriss?

  That's M-A-N-S-C-A-P-E-D.com. That's 20% off with free shipping at manscaped.com and use code TIMTIM. Unlock your confidence and always use the right tools for the job with Manscaped.

• 2:30Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Allform. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you've probably heard me talk about Helix Sleep and their mattresses, which I've been using since 2017. I have two of them upstairs from where I'm sitting at this moment. Helix has gone beyond the bedroom and started making sofas. They've launched a company called Allform, A-L-L-F-O-R-M, and they're making premium customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores. So I'm sitting in my living room right now, and it's entirely Allform furniture. I've got two chairs, I've got an ottoman, and I have an L-sectional couch. And I'll come back to that. You can pick your fabric. They're all spill, stain, and scratch resistant. The sofa color, the color of the legs, the sofa size,

• 3:13Tim Ferriss?

  the shape to make sure it's perfect for you in your home. Also, Allform arrives in just three to seven days, and you can assemble it all yourself in a few minutes. No tools needed. I was quite astonished by how modular and easy these things fit together, kind of like Lego pieces. They've got armchairs, love seats, all the way up to an eight-seat sectional. So there's something for everyone. You can also start small and kind of build on top of it. If you wanted to get a smaller couch and then build out on it, which is actually, in a way, what I did, because I can turn my L-sectional couch into a normal straight couch and then with a separate ottoman in a matter of about 60 seconds. It's pretty rad. So I mentioned I have all of these different things in this room. I use the natural leg finish, which is their lightest color, and I dig it.

• 3:54Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, I've been using these things hours and hours and hours every single day. So I am using what I am sharing with you guys. And if getting a sofa without trying it in-store sounds risky, you don't need to worry. Allform sofas are delivered directly to your home with fast, free shipping, and you get 100 days to decide if you want to keep it. That's more than three months. And if you don't love it, they'll pick it up for free and give you a full refund. Your sofa frame also has a forever warranty. That's literally forever. So check it out. Take a look. They've got all sorts of cool stuff to choose from. I was skeptical, and it actually worked. It worked much better than I could have imagined, and I'm very, very happy. So to find your perfect sofa, check out allform.com/tim. That's A-L-L-F-O-R-M.com/tim.

• 4:38Tim Ferriss?

  Allform is offering 20% off all orders to you, my dear listeners, at allform.com/tim. Make sure to use the code TIM at checkout. That's allform.com/tim and use code TIM at checkout.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 4:58Speaker 03

  Now would seem an appropriate time.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 5:15Tim Ferriss?

  Ohayou gozaimasu. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everyone. I very rarely cover current events on this podcast, but this is a new experiment. To avoid overwhelm, I do not track the news 24/7 with doom scrolling because that will crush my soul. Rather, I depend on conversations with my smartest friends to find the signal in the noise. The following conversation with Noah Feldman is an example of such a conversation. And it is very similar to what we would have offline, and I wanted to share it with you. I learned a ton, and as usual, I changed my thinking a lot, which I always do when I chat with Noah. Please let me know what you think of this experimental format by sending me feedback on Twitter at T Ferris. T F E R R I S S. Do you love it? Do you hate it? Do you have suggestions for improvement?

• 6:00Tim Ferriss?

  How to make it better? The usual long-form interviews with evergreen questions will still be the default and bread and butter of this podcast. So don't worry about it being replaced. But if you like this format, I could see doing more of these episodes, perhaps once a month or once every two months. It's just a very easy way to get caught up without drowning in the news. I'm going to have these conversations anyway, so let me know if you would like me to share them. Let me know what you think, and thanks for listening.

• 6:30Tim Ferriss?

  I'm thrilled to welcome back Noah Feldman. You can find him on Twitter at Noah R Feldman, 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 hyper polyglot. 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

• 7:15Tim Ferriss?

  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 D Phil, 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: 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

• 7:57Tim Ferriss?

  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. Our first interview can be found at tim.blog/Noah, and thank you for being here, Noah.

• 8:17Speaker 04

  I was born to be a lab rat. I'm very excited.

• 8:22Tim Ferriss?

  And we have specked out a few different subjects, a few different topics that we'll attempt to navigate, and I use the royal "we" here because it's going to be mostly you.

• 8:33Speaker 04

  I'm sure that won't be true.

• 8:34Tim Ferriss?

  But I will play the part of audience stand-in, and I'll ask questions. Let's begin with Ukraine, and you can kick this off in any way that makes sense, in the micro, the macro, or otherwise. How would you like to begin?

• 8:49Speaker 04

  I think a good place to start is with the question that never really gets asked in all of the coverage of this long war, and that is, why do people go to war in the first place?

• 9:04Speaker 04

  And that might sound like a stupid question because people like stuff and other people have the stuff and if I have an army and I can take your stuff, why not go to war? And that does seem to be sort of at some very basic level, what's going on here? Putin just calculated that he had an army and he wanted at least part of Ukraine and maybe more and he could do it. But the real question that's underlying that is a question about whether people who run countries are a little bit rational. You don't have to believe that they're completely rational. You just have to think that when they decide to go to war, they know people are going to die, they know it's going to cost them something, they also know there's something to be gained. And so the assumption that they're rational is just an assumption that they've thought about the pros and cons of doing it.

• 9:47Speaker 04

  And I think in the case of someone like Putin, who may have made a tremendous miscalculation with this war, but has been pretty successful in a lot of his other foreign policy undertakings, you can be sure he thought it over. And so the question that that raises is, if Tim has a very, very large army, and I have a very small army, and Tim wants my country, and Tim comes to my border, he masses his troops, and says, hey, I want, let's say, your two favorite provinces. And I say, no. And Tim says, well, then I'm going to invade you, and a lot of people are going to die, some on my side, but a lot on your side, and at the end, I'm going to have the provinces. And I say, huh, holy crap.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  I mean, maybe Tim is correct. And if Tim is correct, I should just give up because I'm going to lose the provinces anyway, and fewer people will be dead, and I won't have destroyed my army, which I might need another day. And meanwhile, you should only make that threat if you're very confident that you're going to win. So logically speaking, it's a puzzle. Why does anyone actually fight the war? And I'm fascinated by that question, and I think Ukraine really, really raises it.

• 10:59Tim Ferriss?

  Well, how would you make an attempt to answer that question? Do you think it was a miscalculation? I have heard stories, and I'm sure I'm going to get the historical details completely wrong, but maybe it was Belgium with the procession of Germans pre or during World War II. But the underdog standing up and having only a snowball's chance in hell, but nonetheless having a snowball's chance in hell and defeating the odds, defying the odds. Why do you think we have ended up where we are? Or do you think there was a rational calculation? Or perhaps even in what some people would consider an irrational calculation?

• 11:43Tim Ferriss?

  I was thinking about this yesterday. For instance, I think a lot of lower income folks get made fun of by people who are sanctimonious in the higher echelons of society for buying lottery tickets. And they say, well, that's just a tax on the poor, right? It's stupid. But then I was thinking, is it really stupid? Maybe it's buying hope for a dollar a day, in which case, if having a sliver of hope is only costing you a dollar a day, that's actually the bargain of a lifetime. So how would you begin to tease apart how what you just described has played out in Ukraine versus Russia?

• 12:24Speaker 04

  First of all, let me say I love that example of the lottery tickets. It's one of my favorite examples of how elitists and, you know, I'm perfectly capable of being elitist sometimes, so this is not an argument that all elitists are bad or everyone's an elitist, but why elitists get it wrong? Because they think, I wouldn't get any joy or pleasure out of spending a buck, which I'm probably going to lose. So whoever does it must be delusional, using a rational act or calculus. And they fail to realize there's what you might call entertainment value, but even entertainment is understating it. Hope is really a feeling that matters. Now, that doesn't mean you should spend hundreds of dollars that you don't have on lottery tickets, but it is an argument. So there's a direct analogy to that in the case of war.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  You could also think of this in the context of 9/11. One of the fire chiefs, a guy called Ray Downey, who had, was the chief who had started Rescue One, which was the part of the New York Fire Department that goes to save firemen who are in trouble. And he went back into the buildings when I think it was extremely, it must have been extremely clear to him that he wasn't going to come out of those buildings. And that's a product of spending your life saving firemen, and there were firemen in harm's way. And he must have, in my imagination at least, made the judgment in that moment, which I deem a heroic judgment, that he didn't want to walk away from those buildings that day. That would have been a violation of everything he stood for.

• 13:52Speaker 04

  So for sure, there is an element of that. And sometimes if you're standing up and fighting for your country, even against the odds, it should be explained in that way, that you know you're going to lose, but your dignity and your pride matter enough to sacrifice your life. And so that can be an explanation sometimes for why a side that thinks it's going to lose a war, even it's sure it's going to lose the war, doesn't stand up. So you do need to take that into account. But that probably doesn't cover the decision of all statesmen and stateswomen. You know, the people at the top, whose job it is to take into account not just pride, but the interests of their whole nation. And so there's a very interesting theory about why people, even in that situation, go to war, which I've always been fascinated by.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  And I don't think I buy it 100%, but I think it's really valuable to think about it. And it was introduced by a guy called James Firon, like fear with an on at the end of it, and he's a political scientist. And his argument was the following: even if everyone's rational, you can still have people go to war when there's genuine uncertainty about who's going to win. Because the two sides don't have the same information about who's going to win. They have differential ideas. So in his theory, take the Putin example. Putin's thinking, I'm going to win this war, which is what most external observers thought, including a lot of military observers whom I respect a lot.

• 15:19Speaker 04

  A lot of people thought he would win the war, Putin would win the war, he'd win the war fast. Much bigger army, lots of military experience.

• 15:28Speaker 04

  But it was also possible that, even if not very probable, that Ukraine would do a lot better in its own self-defense than anyone thought it would, including Putin. And it may be that the Ukrainian leadership thought that. But as it turns out, there's a big advantage to defending as opposed to invading. That always gives you a big advantage. And then the Ukrainian soldiers, many of them, had been trained by NATO forces, so they'd had excellent training. And it may just be that the Ukrainian leadership, apart from their pride and their dignity, which I'm sure were also factors, just had a different opinion about what happened in the war. And according to Firon, if the two sides have different opinions about what's going to happen,

• 16:11Speaker 04

  then you go to war, because you don't have perfect information about the outcome. So that's a theory according to which you can be rational and still fight the war. And I think that probably explains, at least in part, what happened here. Putin was really confident that he would win and that the Ukrainians would fold. And they said, "I'm not so sure. I think we can actually make a better stand against you." And in this instance, at least at first, with respect to the all-out attack on Ukraine, they were right. I mean, that's the sort of most astonishing fact about the war to date, namely that in the opening weeks, Russia didn't just successfully take down the capital of Ukraine and conquer the whole country and put in a puppet government,

• 16:55Speaker 04

  which they said they wanted to do, more or less, at the beginning. And when that didn't go that well, you moved on to the next phase of the war, which is its own fascinating topic, in which they've decided to aim for these two provinces that have lots of Russian speakers in them, and it may have been what they wanted in the first place. And so the phase of the war that's been continuing is a phase of the war where they've got much more limited objectives. The Russians have much more limited objectives, but they're still fighting, and the Ukrainians are still fighting back. So that just deepens the puzzle. What are they each fighting for now?

• 17:32Tim Ferriss?

  So I'd love to jump in with a few questions and bookmarks just for discussion. The first is, and you and I have spoken about this, but perhaps those limited objectives are not revisions, but were the objectives from the outset, but they can be viewed then as a concession or a secondary now, even though it's been part of the plan all along. And I'd love to explore two things with you that I think could apply, well, one could apply certainly to multiple conflicts, and that is what the stakes are in this particular

• 18:11Tim Ferriss?

  conflict in your mind. And then one that is perhaps, one topic that may be unique or somewhat unique to this conflict, which is what has made this different? And there are a number of factors I'll just throw out there as plausible elements, factors. One would be the ability to cheaply and broadly broadcast from Ukraine using social media and so on. Borderless and permissionless, in some cases, transfer of cryptocurrency

• 18:50Tim Ferriss?

  from around the world to support Ukraine. And then also the interplay of private or semi-private players. So for instance, and I haven't tracked this most recently, so I don't know what has been confirmed or denied or both, but the drone manufacturer DJI disabling certain capabilities of its firmware selectively for the Ukraine forces. And then on the opposite side, Starlink, which has been a godsend for Ukrainian forces. So the two buckets then are stakes, and then separately, what makes this

• 19:31Tim Ferriss?

  Unique or interesting, at least in this time and space. And I'd love you to tackle whichever you think you would like to first.

• 19:40Speaker 04

  Those are fascinating questions, and they really make us wonder what's unique and special about this war, what makes it different. And of course, from the Ukrainian perspective, at least at the beginning, the war was existential. They couldn't stop. And from a European perspective, what makes this war really special and the reason that Europe has organized itself so much in support of Ukraine is that they recognize, the rest of Europe recognizes, that if Putin can walk into Ukraine and take over large chunks of it, or the whole thing, that he's a serious threat to the other countries in the region, and that the basic idea that Europe is a safe and secure place, where you can go from

• 20:23Speaker 04

  place to place without worrying about it, where war has been rendered obsolete, is just false. And so that helps explain why it's so important to them. It also explains why it's important to the US. And all of that gives you some reason to understand why it's constantly still in the news, even though I think a lot of people, some days, I admit to my shame, myself included, just don't follow it anymore. The glib analogy would be, you know, we're used to the playoffs happening, and at the end of the playoffs, there's the finals, doesn't matter which sport you're following. And then you get a break. And this war, you know, it's like they're still having the World Series in October, and then November, and then December. It's just going on. But the reason the world is continuing to care about it and pay attention to it is at least in part those kinds of global consequences.

• 21:08Speaker 04

  And the basic question there is, can Europe be a stable place? Or is Europe going back to the olden days, where a government that had a serious army could just take over countries that it didn't like? So that's, to me, where I start. And then come the questions that you're raising. How does technology differ here? How does crypto differ here? How does the war social media side expressing itself? And how are those things distinct from the past? So let me say a couple of things about that. There have been some really creative efforts, especially on the Ukrainian side, to try to use crypto, Web 3.0, in order to kind of link themselves to the zeitgeist,

• 21:53Speaker 04

  you know, to the moment, and gain some advantages from it. So a really interesting example of that is the Ukraine Dow, which Ukraine kind of came up with, that basically was attempting to enable crypto to be transferred into the country, and then that would enable them to fight their war better, basically by donors. You know, it's basically a clever way to get people to make direct donations to Ukraine without going through banks. And measured statistically, that's probably not turning the tide in the war. You know, as a percentage of all the aid that Ukraine is getting from countries and

• 22:36Speaker 04

  governments, especially military aid, it's probably still a drop in the bucket. But the fact that they could do it is what's significant. The fact that they could say, "We're going to try to draw on contemporary technology," opens the thought that, hey, maybe this is a way for aid to be sent from ordinary citizens to a country more over time. And we've seen other kind of less exciting hacks like that. Sort of at the beginning of the war, lots of people who wanted to send money to individuals in Ukraine were using Airbnb. They were booking Airbnbs in Ukraine that they had no intention of going to and paying for them. And since Airbnb had a payment mechanism in place, that was a way to make donations. Now, it may not be the way to make the most effective donation, it's a subsidy to those

• 23:20Speaker 04

  Ukrainians who already had Airbnb setups, but it was a symbolic and meaningful way of getting involved, but probably not transformational on its own. It does raise the possibility, though, of how these kinds of tools are going to operate in future wars. I will say one thing about it, though. It's entirely possible that, in the long run, crypto would be to the advantage of an aggressor like Russia, rather than being to the advantage of a state like Ukraine that's defending itself and that has the world more or less behind it. Because the main sanctions that the world is... Putting on Russia now are economic sanctions. I mean, that's the other fascinating thing about this war. It's still really being fought. Sure, arms are being sent to Ukraine, but the West is basically fighting this war economically.

• 24:05Speaker 04

  Trying to cripple Russia. And those sanctions mean, for example, making it hard for Russian banks to operate, making it hard to transfer money into Russia through the international banking system. And those are pretty effective tools and sanctions. In principle, if the Russian economy could operate via crypto and crypto were not very heavily regulated, the way it is not yet, then Russia would have the capacity to evade a lot of those international sanctions using crypto. And I think from the standpoint of crypto advocates, one of the really important things to do has been to make sure that the narrative of the war doesn't become, look how Russia

• 24:48Speaker 04

  is using crypto to evade economic sanctions. That would be a very bad look. And it would echo the worries that some government regulators have about crypto, which is that it's not responsible to state control. And of course, that's one of the things a lot of crypto advocates love about crypto, which is that it's not subject to state control, or at least at present is not fully subject to state control. So to shift the narrative to look how cleverly Ukraine is using crypto, it's not exactly PR, but it's a clever spin move, both for the Ukrainians and also probably for crypto advocates.

• 25:24Tim Ferriss?

  To what extent has the, as I understand it, let's just call it focus on locking down private banking, certain types of private banking, tax havens for extremely wealthy Russians, let's just say in quotation marks oligarchs, not all of them would be certainly maybe considered oligarchs, but to some extent to try to affect the

• 25:54Tim Ferriss?

  Inner circle, those most powerful private citizens, or perhaps not even solely private, within Russia as a means of affecting Putin. Do you think that is pie in the sky? Or do you think that could have some bearing on decision making or internal coups or power dynamics within Russia?

• 26:18Speaker 04

  The people who've been advocating for that and have been carrying it out in Western capitals are realistic, I think, for the most part, behind closed doors, about recognizing that Putin really doesn't care what happens to his rich buddies. And that his power over those oligarchs is so great that if he wants to take away their money, at least the money they have in Russia, he does it anyway. And he's not afraid of the oligarchs using that as a tool to bring him down. I mean, he's done it before, right? He has just arrested oligarchs and locked them up, including people who were multi, multi, multi billionaires.

• 26:57Speaker 04

  And he had zero worry, it seemed, that that would weaken his power or strength. So I am myself very skeptical. And my sense is that a lot of experts who know much more about the way Russia operates internally than I do are also really skeptical of this really affecting Putin. On the other hand, it comes into the category of it might help. And what's the downside? And the downside for a lot of rich people who are not Russian oligarchs is that they look at this and they say, whoa, wait a minute. Have we entered a moment where a country can freeze all of my assets because they don't like something that the government of the country that I'm from is doing?

• 27:39Speaker 04

  You know, you can imagine how high net worth individuals would not like that very much because they're thinking, what if some country gets really mad at the United States, which happens? Are they going to engage in these kinds of sanctions that are targeted and directed against us? You know, we, club of poor, starving, oppressed billionaires. And to put it a little more seriously, it's not, in my view, a great precedent to be setting worldwide. That we're freezing your assets because we don't like your government because you might have an impact on what that government does. So there are some downsides to it, but I think from the standpoint of sending a message that we're doing everything we can and also that we're not targeting individual Russians

• 28:22Speaker 04

  who are poor or ordinary people. You can see the kind of policy appeal of it. And last but not least, who after all has a lot of sympathy for a Russian billionaire? You know, it's not high on the list of people whom, you know, our hearts is going to go out to, you know, we're not going to all jump on board to make donations to them. So, you know, they're sort of like by, almost by definition, they're the James Bond bad guys and they don't have a powerful advocacy organization drawing sympathy to them. So, you know, I myself have no sympathy for them, but I'm not sure that this kind of targeting honestly really works all that well. I think to a significant degree, it seems that it doesn't so far, but it's relatively easy and it makes headlines.

• 29:05Tim Ferriss?

  So a couple of points, maybe not points, just observations for folks. So just to paint a picture and please feel free to fact check this Noah if I'm getting things wrong, but if we just take for the sake of discussion Putin as the world's first official trillionaire and then compare that to billionaires, it would be like a millionaire putting someone in jail who has a few thousand dollars, right? So just to draw kind of a power contrast, if we use money as a proxy for power, certainly Putin has a lot more behind that as well.

• 29:50Tim Ferriss?

  And a question I'd like to ask is, could one make a compelling argument that Putin did not miscalculate? And let me explain. And that his decision to invade was rational in so much as similar to in the US. If we look at the history of reelection, let's just say, in the case of the US, that wartime presidents are frequently reelected. If domestic support for Putin were waning and he wanted to bolster that, could an argument be made that protracting a battle in Ukraine would actually be to his benefit in some form or fashion? I have read a decent amount about Putin.

• 30:35Tim Ferriss?

  He is not stupid. He's very systematic. He's very aggressive. And as easy as it might be on some level for folks to try to paint him as this lunatic who's looking for the red button to smash with his fist because he's lost his marbles or has early onset dementia or fill in the blank, I don't find that immediately compelling. What would you say to any of that?

• 31:04Speaker 04

  Two great issues there. The first about Putin being more powerful than the oligarchs and the second about whether there's a rational calculus for continuing the war. And let me take them one at a time because they're both too good to pass up. So on the first one, you're right that Putin is richer than his oligarchs, but I think that matters zero for his power over them in the following way. In the United States, where we have a pretty well-functioning property regime, where basically, notwithstanding what a libertarian might say, the government doesn't take all your money for no reason. It does tax you, but it doesn't take all your money for no reason. We do use money as a powerful proxy for overall capacity to do stuff, to have power in our country. It's obviously true.

• 31:49Speaker 04

  It also is connected to the way our politics works, right? If you have a lot of money, you can fund a lot of political movements. You can affect politicians. You can buy and sell. In the United States, if you want to be powerful, the best thing you could be would be to be super rich. I totally buy that. But it's not exactly like that in a place like Russia, where the president can, with no need to answer to anybody else, just imprison the richest people. If you can lock somebody up, it doesn't matter how rich they are, and it doesn't matter how rich you are, honestly. I mean, Putin could be not, could not have, he could have not chosen to, you know, rob and steal from his countrymen in his country to amass a vast fortune, and he still would be powerful as long as he could lock people up.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  And so in that sense, for him, the power stems from the barrel of a gun. And I think the takeaway of that point is one that we sometimes forget, especially when we think about crypto. You know, we think to ourselves, well, if I have a lot of money and it's in crypto and nobody, then nobody can take it away from me. And that's true unless they put you in prison and tell you that they won't let you out of prison unless you give them the key to your wallet. And then, if you don't want to be in prison, which most people don't really want to be, you would give it up. Or they could threaten to kill you, in which case you would definitely give it up. So the capacity to govern me as a person by putting me in prison is so powerful that whoever has that power can take whatever I have.

• 33:17Speaker 04

  So that's my first, my first on, you know, what makes Putin so powerful. It's not that he's rich. He's rich because he's powerful. He's not powerful because he's rich. And there's a, as I said, there's a takeaway for that for, you know, anyone who thinks, oh, you know, the inevitable reality is that money governs all. It's not inevitable. Money only governs all if the government allows it to. Then there's your question about, is there some rational way to explain Putin keeping the war going? And here I would say yes and no. I think that he did probably calculate when he went to war, that he thought he'd win the war fast, but if he didn't, he wasn't going to immediately be overthrown in a coup because he could regroup and reorient the war to a more achievable objective.

• 34:02Speaker 04

  And that's exactly what he did. I think his first preference was to take down Ukraine right away and put in a puppet government and have it be an enormous grand victory. And that's why he started the war by going after all of Ukraine. I mean, that's why he made a run for the capital and that explains the military strategy that was adopted at first. And that just didn't work, or it didn't work the way he wanted it to work. But he didn't then say, I'm done, because then he would have had to admit that he lost the war. And he didn't want to do that because that would reflect weakness. And so he defaulted to what a lot of people expected him to do in the first place, which is just go after these two provinces in one region and focus on getting those.

• 34:47Speaker 04

  And then if he wins that, he can say, that's all I ever wanted, and that was a victory. And I think he can reason that at least if he can win that war in some reasonable period of time, the Russian public will either put up with it or ultimately be happy about it. And so he still, it makes sense for him to keep on fighting with that more limited objective in mind. He also might have in the back of his mind, last of all, that if he does win that province, then he can consolidate, take a deep breath, and then decide if he wants to go back and do the whole thing again, going for all of Ukraine. And if Ukraine is worried about that, which they should be, the Ukrainians would then have reason to say, okay, just take these two provinces and be done with it, and we're willing to resolve the war. And that leads me to my final comment on this, which is a genuine worry, which is,

• 35:32Speaker 04

  what's going to happen if that happens? What's going to happen if Putin says, okay, I want to keep these two provinces? And Ukraine says, Zelensky says, okay, we're done. We lost a lot of people. We know we can't win these provinces back from you, and we're a little scared that you might come after us, and we don't want to take that risk. So the war is over. What's the rest of the world going to do? Is the United States then going to be able to just say, okay, well, it's up to Ukraine. It's your country. Is Europe going to be able to do that? Because the message that that's sending to the world is still, hey, if Putin wants some provinces of your country, he can come and get them. So the rest of the world, the US, Europe, we're in pretty deep on this, arguing that Russia should lose the war.

• 36:17Speaker 04

  So you could imagine a scenario, it's actually a possible scenario, where the Ukrainians say, we're ready to be done with the war, but the West is saying, no, we don't want you to give up because we're, you know, so concerned about the message that this sent. So it's not too soon to start worrying about that endgame, and I for one am actually really worried about it. Because I don't want this to be some war that goes on forever, not because I want Putin to win, I want him to lose, but because if he can win in a limited way, I don't want the whole world to be caught up in this war and Ukrainian people to be caught up in this war longer than the Ukrainians want it to go on. That seems like a mistake.

• 36:58Tim Ferriss?

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• 37:42Tim Ferriss?

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• 38:20Tim Ferriss?

  I have a number of follow on questions that I would love to get your take on. So first, we talked about freezing assets, or rather you mentioned and I asked about freezing assets earlier. Do you think any of the decisions by the US could, in terms of negatively affecting USD reserves, US dollar reserves in other countries, end up in some way devaluing the United States dollar as the reserve currency of the world? In other words, do you think any of the decisions that the US government has made or could make?

• 39:01Tim Ferriss?

  Could lead central banks and other such groups to change how they think about the composition of their reserve currencies.

• 39:14Speaker 04

  There's one decision the US has made that is super high risk in this realm, in my view, and it's the decision to freeze assets that Russia owns in the United States that are dollar assets and not let Russia use them to pay off its own sovereign debt, thereby forcing Russia to default on the money that it owes to its creditors. Now, why is that risky? It's risky because Russia's not the only country that owes money to people in the form of sovereign debt that keeps its money in the United States to pay back some of that debt. And that's, in fact, one of the reasons that the dollar is a reserve currency, because people are confident that if they hold their money in a US bank in dollars, it'll hold

• 39:59Speaker 04

  on to its value and they'll be able to use it to pay back their creditors. And so if countries realize that under some circumstances their dollar assets in the US can be frozen for political, moral reasons, and that they won't be allowed to pay off their own creditors with that money, that should make them think hard about whether they want to keep their money in dollars in a US bank for purposes of paying other people back. Now, the reason that the people in the Treasury Department, who think most deeply and hard

• 40:40Speaker 04

  about this, haven't concluded that the US shouldn't do this, that the US shouldn't freeze these assets in a way that makes Russia default, is that they're calculating, and you know, they're smart people, they're calculating that the dollar is still so stable and strong relative to other possible currencies that people can hold, that countries will still maintain their large reserves in dollars.

• 41:08Speaker 04

  They'll just say, okay, well, let's not invade any other countries. And they'll say, oh, that's only happening to Russia because it did this extreme behavior. But the reason I think that's actually a pretty substantial gambit or risk is that once we've done this once and gotten away with it, the temptation is going to be there to do this again to other countries we don't like. Justice Robert Jackson on the Supreme Court said in the famous Korematsu case, which was the case about the internment of Japanese Americans, that if the court upholds that internment, which he didn't want it to do, then the principle that you can do something like this lies around like a loaded weapon. You don't want a loaded weapon lying around because someone might use it under other circumstances. And I think that's the worry here, that this kind of freezing assets and not letting them

• 41:53Speaker 04

  countries use them to pay off their own debts, is it going to be a very tempting thing for US policymakers to use as leverage in the future? And if we were to get into that habit over time, under different circumstances, that I think probably would have the effect of undermining confidence in people holding their dollars in the United States.

• 42:12Tim Ferriss?

  What do you think the base case scenario is, let's just call it likely outcome, is for Ukraine-Russia conflict? And what do you think some of the worst case scenarios are? That aren't one in a million likelihood, but higher probability. So leaving out the best case deliberately, because I think the secret to happiness is low expectations.

• 42:40Speaker 04

  How's that working out for you, Tim?

• 42:41Tim Ferriss?

  You know, it actually works out pretty well. I asked, just a side note, the reason I say that is I think it's necessary but not sufficient in so much as I read some National Geographic poll, who knows how reliable that is, but an article that described the happiest countries in the world, and they were Denmark, Costa Rica and Singapore for different reasons. And I asked a Danish friend of mine why he thought that was the case. And he said, "Low expectations." So I just have latched on to that.

• 43:16Speaker 04

  So you went with it. By the way, we should someday have a long conversation about that. I think that the question of whether this, it's like, resolve that. Resolve that the secret to happiness is low expectations is a completely fascinating topic to talk about sometime. But anyway, going back to Ukraine and worst case scenarios.

• 43:32Tim Ferriss?

  And base case, like if you were a betting man, like what would you bet on?

• 43:36Speaker 04

  All right, good. I'll start with the base case then, yeah. My base case is that over time, Russia will successfully conquer the, these two provinces, the Donbass region, which is made up of these two provinces, which have a lot of Russian speakers in them. And that Ukraine will realize that it can't really defend those provinces. And then there'll be a pause, might be a brief pause, it might be a longer pause, where everyone tries to figure out what happens next. And in that scenario, there will be suggestions of peace talks in which Russia ends up holding on to those provinces. By the way, in the same way that it still has Crimea, which it took over with a lot less trouble years ago, and which Ukraine conceded to, and the rest of the world didn't

• 44:21Speaker 04

  support Ukraine in fighting back. And the world has already established the principle that Russia can grab substantial parts of Ukraine. So this would just be a little more of Ukraine. So some people will be saying, "We're not setting a new precedent because we already had the precedent in place. And so the war should just be ended on these terms." And, you know, I think the base case is that Ukraine's leadership at that point would say, "Yeah, you know, we want this war to be over. We survived existentially. There's still a country called Ukraine. And we want to give up those provinces, but we also want to join NATO. And we want to be, have the guarantee from NATO that at least the rest of our country will never be taken down."

• 45:04Speaker 04

  And then negotiations proceed on that basis. Now, what makes that hard, that base case hard?

• 45:12Speaker 04

  in practice is that the Russians are going to say you can't be in NATO and the Ukrainians are going to say we need to be in NATO and then Ukrainians are also going to say we want to be in the EU which until now to be blunt the Europeans wouldn't have wanted them in the EU but now because the Europeans are so worried about sending a message to Russia they're suddenly saying okay well now we're willing to talk to you about maybe being in the EU and Russia's not going to want that either so Russia's going to say you can't have these two things that you want and we want to hold on to this territory Ukrainians going to say well if you want us to let you keep that territory you have to agree to these other things and so it may be that those negotiations in which you could imagine rational person saying okay that's what's going to happen Ukraine in NATO Ukraine in the EU but Ukraine no longer has this whole region anymore and Russia now effectively

• 45:57Speaker 04

  owns that you could imagine that being a rational outcome but actually negotiating to that conclusion is really hard to pull off on both sides and for that reason the sort of to my mind next most likely scenario is that the state of war would continue even if the active hostilities were ongoing and that could really last a long time and so that's the not at all implausible variant on the base case that is to my mind the scariest because it's expensive to run a war the energy consequences of that have already begun to

• 46:39Speaker 04

  be felt in Europe and in the rest of the world at a moment when the global economy is looking pretty precarious keeping energy prices artificially high as a consequence of this ongoing war and of the sanctions associated with it is not good for the global economy at all and so you could imagine a scenario where this as a word just gets beyond us where neither side is capable of reaching the compromise that would be the quote unquote rational compromise and that as a consequence this just goes on for a long time and if you say oh that that couldn't happen lots of wars go on for a really really long time sometimes at a low level sometimes at a less low level because they don't have

• 47:20Speaker 04

  a clear model for resolving them and they can go on for years and so that's the thing that scares me the most that's my totally plausible variant on the base case and I will say that some of my friends who are you know full-time international affairs analysts think that that's the base case You know, they think that the base case is that it just keeps on going until somebody blinks. And some of them think that ultimately Putin would blink, but a lot of them think, no, like neither side is going to blink and it could just really go on indefinitely. And so the fact that there are some really thoughtful, smart people who think that's the base case really, really, really scares me.

• 47:56Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned international affairs analysts and I would like to know from your perspective, do any books come to mind or people who you find or that you find particularly interesting or informative with respect to geopolitical strategy, brinksmanship on this geopolitical three dimensional chessboard or warfare in any capacity? For people who would like to get a better understanding of how these games are played, maybe historical precedents, how different conflicts have turned out depending on different stratagems used by opposing parties, for instance, any books or people you find interesting?

• 48:38Speaker 04

  One is something that a lot of listeners will have heard of, maybe all listeners will have heard of and some will have read, especially people who are veterans and definitely people who have been in the service academies will have read. And it's not that long and it's unbelievably good. And it's this book called On War by von Clausewitz, a German general. It's the single most influential book on war written since Sun Tzu's Art of War. And as I said, it's required reading in military academies in every country in the world. It's shockingly well-written. It's unbelievably clear and it has a very specific philosophical view about what war is like and what war is for.

• 49:22Speaker 04

  And it's famous for the line that war is the continuation of politics by other means. And that's a profound statement because it suggests that war serves the interests of political actors and is prosecuted to achieve those interests. But the other thing about it that's really fascinating is he wrote it from the point of view that says the only smart way to fight a war is to fight it absolutely without holding back. Put all your cards on the table, sorry, put all your chips on the table and, you know, try to win the war and that maximizes the odds that you will and it'll be over faster

• 50:05Speaker 04

  and if it's over faster, that's also good for everybody, he says, because then it won't kill more people and eat up more resources. And yet, despite the fact that the first idea of von Clausewitz, the idea that war's politics by other means, is accepted by everybody in the domain of war and politics, there are lots of wars that aren't fought in the extreme, all-out von Clausewitz way, tons of them, including a bunch of US wars, which have not been fought that way, wars which, notably, we haven't won, you know, wars like Vietnam and Iraq and arguably even Afghanistan. So I would strongly recommend that book. I can't actually recommend it strongly enough. It really makes you think and they're, you know, it's easy to buy.

• 50:48Speaker 04

  You can buy it in any bookshop and I'm sure you could buy it on Amazon, you know, in 20 seconds. In terms of contemporary people writing about the geopolitics, you know, I really like to mix and match. I like to read work by people who are thought of as realists, who think that national self-interest is all that matters, and I like to read work by people who are called idealists, who think that moral principles matter as well. And I really like historical perspective. So on anything to do with Ukraine, I love the work of a historian called Tim Snyder, who teaches at Yale. And he's, first of all, a fantastic historian who's genuinely a Ukraine expert.

• 51:29Speaker 04

  I mean, his first few books before he got famous were highly technical historical studies of Ukrainian history. And then each book he writes gets a little broader in terms of its audience and now he writes very broad and general books. And he's a terrific historian and he's really the person to read on Ukraine and its history. And he also takes you beyond just Ukraine and discusses the relationship between Germany and Russia and really the whole 20th century's concept of war, which interestingly, he thinks of Ukraine as having been at the middle of, not because Ukraine was so important, but because the countries Germany and Russia that were fighting these wars were fighting in part over the territory that includes Ukraine. So I would strongly recommend any

• 52:13Speaker 04

  of his books. His grand book is called Bloodlands. It's long and intense, but it's very, very, very beautifully and clearly written. And if you can stomach a book about the wars of the 20th century, you'll learn a ton about geopolitics and the region in the process.

• 52:32Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for those recommendations. Sounds like I have some von Clausewitz to read. First and foremost-

• 52:38Speaker 04

  You're gonna love von Clausewitz.

• 52:39Tim Ferriss?

  I just like saying the name.

• 52:41Speaker 04

  He would totally be on your podcast if he were still alive.

• 52:44Tim Ferriss?

  I wanted to mention one, which is gonna be a bit of a risk for me to mention simply because I haven't read it, although I have some familiarity with the author and have watched a number of presentations by the author. And the reason I would mention such a book without having read it is that it has come up again and again in conversation with friends of mine who are in intelligence or formerly from intelligence, or let's just call it high-level military, and not just in the US. So this book has been widely translated. And I know it is also read very widely in China, just as an example, by military. And

• 53:25Tim Ferriss?

  this is a book called Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook by Edward N. Luttvak. I'm imagining that's how you pronounce it, L-U-T-T-W-A-K. And it was originally published in 1968, but here's the description on Amazon. It has 127 ratings. This is not a mainstream, I wouldn't say, book, but it is very well-reviewed. I have not read it again, so I can't vouch for it. But the opening description is coup d'etat astonished readers when it first appeared in 1968 because it showed step by step how governments could be overthrown. Translated into 16 languages, dot, dot, dot. It has inspired anti coup precautions by regimes around the world. So that would be maybe a partial explanation for why the Chinese officials and military would be interested in this.

• 54:10Tim Ferriss?

  And it goes on and on. So that also, I can't personally recommend, but it has been recommended to me by many, many folks. It's 300 pages, 304 pages long.

• 54:20Speaker 04

  So about 10 years ago, I wrote a book about US and China, which was called Cool War, which I thought was like the best title of any book title I've ever come up with. And I was convinced that I had come up with the perfect name for the US-China relationship because my whole argument in the book was at the time, the US and China were getting along really well, but their geopolitical interests were diverging, even though their economic interests were still overlapping. And so my whole argument was this is going to change because our geopolitical disagreements are going to get deeper and deeper and deeper. But I said, we're not going to start shooting at each other because that would literally be insane. And so what we need is a word for a situation where there are two global superpowers that are the two poles,

• 55:05Speaker 04

  but they still cooperate economically. And there are all kinds of names going on at the time. People were saying, oh, it's, it's not cooperation, it's

• 55:14Tim Ferriss?

  Friendlies with benefits.

• 55:16Speaker 04

  People had all kinds of names. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Friendlies with benefits. And very senior strategist at Harvard wrote a book called The Thucydides Trap, raising the question of whether China and the US would inevitably go to war. And I was like, no, they're not going to inevitably go to war, but it's going to be like the Cold War, but not as cold. So I came up with this idea of Cool War. And it was a very hawkish book at the time. Extremely hawkish. It was liked by the hawks on both sides. And that led me to an exchange with

• 55:43Tim Ferriss?

  Could you just, for people wondering, could you explain just in this sense, what do you mean by hawkish?

• 55:51Speaker 04

  In general, in these kind of foreign affairs situations, if you're saying that two countries should get along and will get along, you're a dove. You may not be a pure peacenik, but you're a dove in the sense that you're kind of soft and sweet. But if you're saying that two countries are likely to be increasingly opposed to each other and need to treat each other as though they might come to blows and need to build up their militaries to keep an eye on each other, then you're a hawk. That is to say, you know, your talons are out and you're prepared for a conflict. And for me, it was sort of a surprise to find out that I, at the end of writing this book, that I had written a pretty hawkish book. Not saying the US and China would go to war, but they had to act towards each other as though their interests were going to increasingly diverge.

• 56:35Speaker 04

  And I even suggested maybe the economic getting along wasn't going to continue indefinitely either. And I even said in there that there, imagine a populist leader on either the US side or the China side or both, that would really, I obviously didn't think of Donald Trump in that role, that would really lead to a fundamental divergence. And so I ended up writing this book that sort of was very hard-nosed with respect to geostrategy. And so I got into conversation with Ludwig because he is a strategist strategist. And he had written a lot of really interesting and I thought smart things about US-China relations in exactly this vein. So we had a whole exchange and it was very positive and I actually thought we were going to end up meeting and talking, but then something went wrong. I can't remember exactly what it was, but I think he just lost interest in the whole thing.

• 57:18Speaker 04

  And so, you know, that was what I was thinking about. But I've read a lot of his work and he is a sharp writer and he is sort of the ultimate rationalist Machiavellian writer. When he's writing about power, he's writing about power and he doesn't think that moral considerations should come into the conversation when you're doing that power job.

• 57:39Tim Ferriss?

  Well, perhaps I'll have to have him on the podcast. He has been nicknamed the Machiavelli of Maryland to explain more of his position. But you're right, he is very cut and dry, pure power strategy on some levels. I haven't read his books, so I shouldn't say that definitively, but in the talks that I've seen, I find it interesting and unusual because I haven't been exposed much to that, to hear it so plainly said, if that makes sense. And to be continued. So let's shift to, if you're open to it.

• 58:19Tim Ferriss?

  Our next topic, and I suggest we segue to free speech on social media. This is something you track very closely. And there are a number of notes I have in front of me. You know, Texas and Florida have passed laws banning the platforms, various platforms for moderating content. Elon is against Twitter content moderation supposedly. You know, Spotify has taken down some backlist from Joe Rogan. And there are a lot of open questions related to this. And I think a lot of perhaps undefined terms and other issues that we can explore. So where would you like to begin with free speech on social media?

• 58:59Speaker 04

  Well, let me begin personally just with a disclosure, which is that having helped what was then Facebook make its oversight board, I still advise Meta on free speech issues. And I also sometimes advise other social media companies like TikTok. And so I'm not going to claim to be wholly objective about this. That said, I try very hard, and I think this is why I'm of use when I do advise, to not tell anybody what they want to hear. So what I'm going to say is just me talking, and it's what I, what I actually believe. So I guess what I think is most fascinating is that we're at a really interesting inflection point about free speech and social media, associated with Elon Musk's proposed Twitter

• 59:44Speaker 04

  takeover. And you and I have been both very fascinated to watch and see whether that would actually happen in the end. And maybe you want to share your grand, your grand theory about it, Tim. But in any case, what's fascinating about it is that in saying he's going to take over Twitter and take it private, Musk has not said, I'm doing this because I think this is a great business, and I'm really good at business, and I can make a company run well, and I think there's a lot of money to be made in it. Nor has he said, you know, I think it'd be really cool to do X, which is one of the things he does say usually. I mean, that's sort of the SpaceX theory. It would be really cool to do X, and I can make money out of it. Instead, he expressed, for I think the first time, at least in his public business career,

• 1:00:29Speaker 04

  A kind of free speech related values based view. He basically said, I don't think it's good that Twitter limits people's free speech through content moderation, and I want to change that. So that's a pretty substantial reason to spend $40 billion, even if you had at the time, maybe three or four times that, I'm not sure he still does, but even if he had at the time three or four times that, that's a pretty fascinating motivation. It's a really different kind of motivation. And it's not only unusual for him, it's unusual for anybody. We might expect, you know, Jeff Bezos to buy the Washington Post, but that did not cost any $40 billion for him to buy, you know, or to sustain. You know, that's a relatively small purchase from the standpoint of someone with a ton of money.

• 1:01:12Speaker 04

  So the moment that we're in is a moment where the idea that content moderation is a problem for free speech is getting a lot of airtime. And where simultaneously, on the other side, you've got the idea that the deplatforming of Donald Trump from effectively all of the major social media outlets at the time was something that remains supported by many, many liberals in the political spectrum, notwithstanding that it's hard to imagine a greater violation of the principle of free speech than that a guy who was president of the United States then and remains, you know, the most popular

• 1:01:53Speaker 04

  politician on the Republican side can't speak through these platforms, especially given that the guy, Donald Trump, made his reputation to some significant degree using Twitter. So we've got sort of the two extreme positions arrayed here. And what we don't have is a lot of clarity about the terms on which this fight should be played out. I can say more about that, by the way, if you want. I was just pausing so I don't go on for too long.

• 1:02:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, please say more, and I would also just love to know if we're dealing with a wide spectrum of definitions for free speech, or if it's free speech in quotation marks with other motives at play. You don't have to speak to that right now, but I would like to explore that because...

• 1:02:42Speaker 04

  Totally. That's exactly where I was gonna go.

• 1:02:44Tim Ferriss?

  Great. Let's go there because I think I, like many people, are like, well, wait a second. Like, what this person is calling free speech is not, I think, what one would find the...

• 1:02:54Tim Ferriss?

  Perhaps legal or constitutional definition to be. And then what this person is calling free speech is really driven by this motivated reasoning around what they want, or some financial outcome, or who knows what. So I'd love you to expand on that.

• 1:03:09Speaker 04

  Your insight, Tim, is actually, I think, the single most important starting point for figuring out what's going on in this debate right now. And it's that we can't define what free speech is unless we dig down a little bit underneath the slogan. So free speech has two different meanings, basically. One meaning is the ordinary meaning of the term, which means something like, I get to say what I want, to whom I want, when I want to say it. And that would include my saying it on social media. And if I'm deplatformed from social media, or if my post is taken away because it violates the terms of service or community standards of a particular social media platform, then under that ordinary meaning of free speech, my free speech has been limited. I can't talk in the place and way that I want to talk.

• 1:03:53Speaker 04

  Then there's what you might call the lawyer's definition of free speech, or the constitutional definition of free speech. And that's really narrow. What that says is that, under the First Amendment to the US Constitution, the government can't stop me from speaking.

• 1:04:09Speaker 04

  But only the government. A private party can stop me from speaking. So the example I always use with my con law students, though they may be irritated at me for doing this, is I point out that if you teach constitutional as your day job, like I do, your kids, at a very early age, tell you, when you tell them to be quiet, that they have free speech rights. So my son, I don't know how old he was when he said that, but very, very young, you know, maybe five or something. And I explained to him then, and, you know, for a couple of years afterwards, that he actually didn't have free speech rights vis a vis me. He only had free speech rights relative to the government. But I could tell him to shut up, and I could give him consequences if he didn't, you know, close his mouth, or not say or do a particular thing. And he didn't like that very much, but I think for my students, it's a good way to

• 1:04:54Speaker 04

  remember the constitutional definition. It's the reason you can tell someone to shut up. Without violating the Constitution. And similarly, under that constitutional definition, so far at least, and I'm going to go there in a moment, but so far at least, if a social media platform, which is a private company, which has its own constitutional rights, tells one of its users, "You can't say that," or "We're kicking you off the platform," it, the social media platform, has a constitutional free speech right to say, "We don't want to carry your speech." And you, the user, have zero constitutional rights vis a vis the social media platform.

• 1:05:37Speaker 04

  So, notice right away that that's a completely different definition of free speech, and it's one that's just focused on the government. What's fascinating, what's really fascinating, is that that second constitutional norm is under some pressure, because there are now some Supreme Court justices, at least two, probably three, who have been telegraphing in short opinions, not in full Supreme Court opinions, but in short opinions, that they think that the idea of constitutional free speech should be reinterpreted so that the social media companies can't regulate all of the speech on their platforms and claim the protection of the First Amendment when

• 1:06:22Speaker 04

  they do so. And those justices, the conservative justices, have a really interesting set of arguments, arguments that four or five years ago liberals kind of liked, but then liberals gave up on them, but now conservatives like them. And those arguments basically say something like this: "A ton of our conversation is happening on social media. Maybe we should analogize social media companies to a common carrier, like a telephone company, telephone wire company, which can't pick and choose who is allowed to get a telephone and who isn't going to get a telephone based on what they're going to say over their telephone." Or maybe they should be thought of as public accommodations, sort of like a chain of hotels, which can't say, "We're not letting you stay in our hotel

• 1:07:07Speaker 04

  because we don't like you." That would be discrimination and it would be unlawful. And so those justices are saying, "We should reconceptualize the social media platforms as more like one of those two things, either like a common carrier or like a public accommodation, and we should allow the government to pass laws that say they can't discriminate on the basis of viewpoint." And the state of Texas, because they like to be out ahead, that was a joke, the state of Texas passed such a law, they have in fact passed such a law. They passed a law saying, it wasn't a very funny joke, they passed a law saying that social media companies with more than a certain number of users, I think it was 50 million users or something like that, so the big social media companies, cannot take down

• 1:07:49Speaker 04

  any content based on the viewpoint expressed by the social media company. And of course, the social media platforms and others immediately went to court to get that law blocked. And the first court said, "Okay, we're going to block the law." Then the Court of Appeals said, "We're reinstating the law." And then the Supreme Court, by a very close vote, by a five to four vote, said, "The law is not going to go into operation while the lower courts figure out if it's constitutional or not." So that legal court case is ongoing, and it's going to be really, really, really important because it goes to this core question of whether those two different definitions of free speech should remain poles apart, two different definitions, or whether they should

• 1:08:31Speaker 04

  come together and become a single definition of what counts as free speech.

• 1:08:37Tim Ferriss?

  Two questions. The first is, why did liberals, broadly speaking, like the arguments that you described a handful of years ago? How did they differ, perhaps, from what you just described? And why did they give up on them?

• 1:08:54Speaker 04

  This is a fascinating and, for liberals, embarrassing story, I would say, for free speech liberals, of whom I am one, by the way. So when I say it's embarrassing for free speech liberals, I'm including myself in this. So... Take yourself back in time five or six years to when social media was getting extremely powerful as a way of people expressing themselves, but Donald Trump had not yet emerged as a major political phenomenon in the United States. So maybe you have to go back seven years. At that time, free speech liberals were really worried about the following thing. They, in theory, like free speech, and yet they saw that a lot of the speech

• 1:09:37Speaker 04

  that was happening on political subjects and other subjects in the United States was happening on a handful of platforms that were controlled by a handful of very rich people. And they were worried that that meant that Facebook, as it was then, for example, or Twitter, would come close to having a kind of monopoly on public discussion and public discourse. And liberals are worried about monopolies. They don't like monopolies. And they were worried about what would happen if, say, the people who ran Facebook or the people who ran Twitter put a thumb on the scale of public debate and had the effect of pushing public opinion in their favored direction, whatever that favored direction would be. So that looks to liberals like a kind of corporate control, and it scared

• 1:10:21Speaker 04

  them. Furthermore, liberals hated a Supreme Court case called the Citizens United case in which the Supreme Court had said that corporations have free speech rights. Now, for a long time, Citizens United was the most hated case by liberals, because liberals were saying, wait a minute, if corporations have free speech rights and they can spend money on election campaigns and affect the outcomes, and that's terrible, because it gives corporations a disproportionate amount of power, because corporations exist to amassed capital and to make money. And so since liberals hated the Citizens United decision, and the Citizens United decision was the one that said that corporations have free speech rights, liberals laughed at the idea that corporations like Facebook or Twitter should have free speech rights. So there were multiple reasons for liberals to be

• 1:11:06Speaker 04

  super, super, super skeptical of what was going on. Then here's what happened.

• 1:11:13Speaker 04

  Some progressive groups started lobbying the social media companies successfully to start doing much more aggressive content moderation and limiting or eliminating hate speech of various kinds and harassment of various kinds. And those groups, again, were coming from a progressive point of view. So they were saying, "We don't just want you, Twitter or Facebook, to stop allowing meanness." They were saying, "We don't want meanness on the basis of sex, meanness on the basis of race, meanness on the basis of sexual orientation."

• 1:11:52Speaker 04

  So those kinds of concerns were desirable from the standpoint of liberals, and it started to work, and the social media companies upped their degree of content moderation in a way that liberals started to like, because discourse on those platforms then became, in certain ways, more civil, less discriminatory, and less nasty than general public discourse, say, on Internet 1.0 would have been. And at the same time, conservatives, with the rise of Trump, some extreme conservatives started advocating violence and other things like that, and those are things that the

• 1:12:33Speaker 04

  platforms also were taking down, and so liberals were also eager to see those things taken down. And so liberals reconsidered their prior position that these companies should be subject to regulation and restriction and maybe even controlled by the First Amendment, because if they were controlled by the First Amendment, they wouldn't be able to take down racist speech or sexist speech, and they wouldn't be able to deplatform people because they were abstractly advocating for violence.

• 1:13:05Speaker 04

  So the liberals flipped, and then, when you know it, the conservatives flipped too. The conservatives, who had been saying, whatever, these are corporations. They have rights, corporations have rights, they can do whatever they want, it's their business, let them do whatever they want with it. You know, let the market decide. If you want a different content moderation strategy, let a rich person buy the business, like Elon Musk may be buying Twitter. That was the conservative position, but the conservatives flipped, and they started saying, oh no, these social media platforms are skewing liberal in terms of their content moderation policies, and we don't want that. So we would like to impose the First Amendment on them, or impose regulation on them, so that they will have to allow the speech that we are promoting, which happens to include speech that they consider to be racist, or sexist, or advocating violence.

• 1:13:50Speaker 04

  So we got this, in my opinion, extremely embarrassing 180-degree flip on both sides about the regulation of social media, which happens sometimes in constitutional affairs, it happens in free speech, and I think everybody should be very embarrassed by people on both sides.

• 1:14:06Tim Ferriss?

  So I'd like to bring up maybe the same question that we explored on Ukraine, and that is the stakes. What is at stake here? And if you flash forward, and I understand that there's no crystal ball here, so it's just guesstimation based on the facts at hand, three years from now, or five, you can pick the timeframe, what's at stake? And what would you say are the base case? And could be best case, you can include best case if you like, I know I'll reverse my Scandinavian orientation on that one. And then possibly worst case, and I'll throw one more element, which you can choose to

• 1:14:51Tim Ferriss?

  address, or we can leave aside for now, and that is... Is there a possibility that the definition of hate speech metastasizes and broadens in such a way to serve very particular silencing objectives, where there is a certain suppressive effect on desired groups by categorizing as hate speech, even commentary, op-eds, et cetera, that ask questions related to topics that are deemed sensitive or offensive, fill in the blank, to a particular group? So what are the stakes? And then what do you think things might look like three to five years from now?

• 1:15:32Speaker 04

  The stakes are really huge because they go to the question of where we're going to talk to each other, what we're going to say to each other, and how politics is going to interface with the online universe. And the online universe is not going away. It's going to continue to be, in expanded ways, the central way that we communicate about tons and tons of subjects. So the stakes couldn't be higher, and they're really high on both sides. They're high for people, broadly speaking, on the left, who are worried that January 6th-style extremism could go from being peripheral in the United States to mainstream with dire

• 1:16:17Speaker 04

  consequences for democracy. And they're consequential to people on the right, who are worried, as you were sort of hinting, that principles of limiting speech to avoid what counts as quote-unquote "hate speech" or political correctness could actually impede public debate and discourse in a way that's really destructive, because it means that certain points of view can't be heard. And if they can't be heard, then they're delegitimated and then potentially harmed. So the stakes are huge, and they're huge on both sides. Can the definition of hate speech be expanded in a way to suppress certain political points of view? Not only is the answer yes, but that's really why the concept of hate speech was invented

• 1:17:02Speaker 04

  in the first place. In especially Germany, but elsewhere in Europe after World War II, in the aftermath of the rise of Nazism, lots of moderate centrist people thought, wait, what went wrong in our society? I mean, Germany had a liberal constitution in the 1920s, and it had all kinds of economic problems, and had all kinds of struggle between different political parties, but it had a nominally ordinary liberal constitution. And in that environment, communists were able to express their views, Nazis were able to express their views, and ultimately, that liberal democracy failed and was replaced by the Nazi state. And so centrist moderates said, we really need to rethink the idea that free speech lets you express all kinds of views, including Nazi views, because people might believe those

• 1:17:47Speaker 04

  views. And so the idea of prohibiting certain kinds of speech, certain kinds of hate speech, was based on the worry that in Europe, it could happen here, because it had just happened there, that that kind of talking had led to action and had led to the collapse of constitutional government. So the whole point of outlawing certain kinds of hate speech was to prohibit certain kinds of political views from gaining the kind of foothold that would lead them to take power. It was different in the US. In the US, the free speech movement in the 20s tended to take the view in the 30s that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., one of the most famous Supreme Court justices took, where

• 1:18:27Speaker 04

  he said, listen, you can't shout fire in a crowded theater, so there are some limits. If you're about to overthrow the government in the next few moments, yes, we can shut you up. But, he said, if through calm, reasonable conversation, the ultimate effect of speech is to bring about, he said, the dictatorship of the proletariat, a victory of Soviet-style communism, he said, I think my job is to let that happen. That's his most extreme formulation in favor of free speech, but it's damn extreme, and he said it in a Supreme Court opinion. And so that was the kind of absolutist view that said, as long as you're not about to imminently cause violence, you can say whatever you want, and if that undermines our political

• 1:19:11Speaker 04

  norms, that's fine. So from that point of view, from that Holmesian point of view in the US, we really shouldn't want it to be the case that prohibitions on hate speech end up really limiting what you can say in public. That's the kind of strong pro-free speech view. The worry is, are we in a place where Germany was in the 20s? Is January 6th the kind of historical event that shows you that there's a genuine risk that people could try to overthrow the government of the United States? And, you know, as more details come out, not just about January 6th, but about Donald Trump's various efforts to try to reverse the outcome of the election, there is a point

• 1:19:55Speaker 04

  of view that says, that's not so crazy. Our democracy maybe is in greater danger than it's been at in the past, and maybe for that reason, speech should be limited. So I think what's hardest about this problem is a lot of what you think depends on how you assess our real world situation. Do you actually believe that we're in danger of enough people getting on board with dangerous, bad, crazy ideas and breaking our democracy that you need to do things like deplatform Donald Trump? Or do you think, look, we're fine. Sure, January 6th was terrible, but that was only a relatively small number of people, and Donald Trump didn't succeed in overthrowing the outcome of the election, and we shouldn't

• 1:20:38Speaker 04

  mess with our basic free speech norms, which have served us so well until now. So that leaves the question of the base case. To me, the most probable outcome is that we continue to have a pretty robust system of private actors, including newspapers and social media platforms and others, limiting speech pretty extensively.

• 1:21:05Speaker 04

  But we also have some other social media actors, whether it turns out to be Twitter or some startup social media entity, that have totally different rules, that are much closer to ordinary free speech rules, that are much closer to the idea that you can say whatever you want. And then we would get a more expanded ecosystem in which, if you really want to say something to a lot of people, you're going to find some venue in which you can say it. And my guess is, again, more probable than not, that if the market does that, the courts will then back away from speculating about maybe whether they should step in to intervene and allow a limitation of what these social media companies do. And that's because I just don't think it's sustainable in the long run

• 1:21:47Speaker 04

  that half or even, you know, 35% of the public is supporting someone for president and that person has no major social media outlet. I just don't think that's practically probable or realistic. Either the social media outlets or some social media outlets will shift to allow that kind of speech, or new social media outlets will come into existence, or someone will buy one of the existing ones and flip it. So in those scenarios, there will be some mechanism for all kinds of speech to get out there. And then the US will probably ultimately preserve at least the core of our free speech tradition, probably. But that's just the base case. You can imagine it going the other way in that you can imagine the government intervening

• 1:22:30Speaker 04

  and saying, "We're going to have much more aggressive requirements passed by state legislatures or others that say that the social media companies can't silence hate speech." And then what would happen is we would sort of go back to Internet 1.0, where you really could say anything you wanted somewhere on the Internet, and you could be as nasty as you wanted, and you could be as dangerous as you wanted. No one could really do anything about it. That is also a possible scenario that could potentially emerge. It may be that the social media platforms, with their central dominance over so much of our speech, will turn out to have been an artifact of a certain moment in the history of the web, you know, a Web 2.0 moment. And in a Web 3.0 moment, maybe they just won't matter as much, even if they continue to use the kinds of content moderation standards

• 1:23:15Speaker 04

  that they presently have.

• 1:23:18Tim Ferriss?

  So I have a number of maybe mundane logistics/ plumbing questions for you. You'll see where this is going. And the two questions are, just asking as a purely naive, politically illiterate person. If state legislature is passed, let's just say Texas says, social media companies passed X number of users need to behave in the following way. How does that actually play out and work functionally? Is there just geo-fencing where suddenly Twitter is turned off in Texas like the Great Firewall of China? That's question number one. And then number two is, and I understand that Web 3 and decentralization is a huge

• 1:24:00Tim Ferriss?

  topic we could explore separately, and that may be the answer, but how realistic is it to have the free market argument that there will be players who constrain free speech, there will be players who do not constrain free speech, and the fittest will survive if many of those which will begin as startups are dependent on infrastructure that is centralized and rented from a company like Amazon with AWS, for instance, to which a lot of pressure can be applied as a choke point? So those are the two questions.

• 1:24:37Speaker 04

  On the first one, the sort of technical point, if you ask people for the big social media platforms, could you just turn off service in Texas tomorrow? They say no. They say that's too hard for us to do right now. And it's not just me saying that they say that, they said that in court papers. My sense is that it is a technically hard problem. It's also my sense that sometimes technically hard problems can find a solution if they're absolutely obligatory. And you do wonder how Texans would feel if tomorrow they couldn't get Twitter, or they couldn't get Facebook, or Instagram, or TikTok in the state of Texas. Now, maybe they would discover that that was a new utopia. In fact, I have a fantasy that if that happened, I think I might move to Texas.

• 1:25:21Speaker 04

  It'd be kind of great if I couldn't use any of those things, I had enforced protection. This is relevant to this. I just saw a study in a journal, a scholarly journal, suggesting that just having your phone with you in the room, even if it is off, makes you dumber on a whole bunch of testable criteria. Just having it in the room, not having it on, not using it, but just having it in the room. And the only way to get that away apparently is to keep it in another room. So maybe other people share my fantasy of a world where suddenly we didn't have to do any of those things. But in any case, if Texans didn't feel that way, they might really be unhappy with that law. I mean, I think the reason Texas is passing that law is the state legislature is sort of assuming that it won't be possible to turn off those

• 1:26:06Speaker 04

  services in their state, and therefore that they could bind the social media platforms. Now, if you're Turkey and you say, listen, we demand that Twitter shut up somebody who's a critic of our government, Twitter reserves the right to say, okay, we're just going to turn off our service in your country. The question is, so if that could be done in Turkey, maybe it can be done in Texas by some means and mechanisms. That might be one way that that plays out. But at present, the social media platforms say it's too hard. So that's the first question.

• 1:26:36Tim Ferriss?

  The second question was, how realistic is it to expect that you could have survival of the fittest with some startups or established incumbent social media companies?

• 1:26:47Speaker 04

  With respect to that question, a lot of it turns on how much in Web 3.0 things change versus staying the same. So one thing that we saw in the aftermath of the Trump deplatforming is that sites like 4chan and 8chan and other kinds of social media platforms that were under criticism for allowing various kinds of speech that was considered to be repulsive in the aftermath of January 6th, had a problem on their hands, which is that they did have to be hosted by centralized infrastructure, and huge pressure was brought on the centralized infrastructure to cut them off. And so that actually led to the

• 1:27:30Speaker 04

  taking down of a bunch of significant services. And so if we were to see a continuation of that structure, then I think the idea of decentralization won't work.

• 1:27:44Speaker 04

  The idea that "don't worry, there's something that can be said somewhere on the web" won't work because it still will be possible to go to whoever controls the infrastructure at different layers. I mean, it could be Amazon at the AWS service.

• 1:27:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Apple and Google at the App Store level.

• 1:27:59Speaker 04

  Exactly. So as long as that kind of centralized infrastructure remains in place, I think you're 100% correct that it isn't a solution to enabling their speech, if that's what you want to do, to say, "Well, they can say their views somewhere." However, here's where a kind of Web 3.0 scenario of truer decentralization might make a substantial difference. If those kinds of services, hosting services and other services, were to follow a path that some Web 3.0 analysts and advocates either expect or hope that it will, of radical, radical decentralization, so that there's no one in the middle controlling the large

• 1:28:41Speaker 04

  parts of the infrastructure of the web, then it would be a solution. Because then, Amazon could say, "Look, we can't just take down the sites we want on AWS. We can't just refuse hosting to those companies. We would bring down the whole internet if we did that." You know, the whole internet is dependent upon this decentralized infrastructure. And of course, it's even possible that maybe Amazon Web Services wouldn't be behind the whole infrastructure of the web. Maybe other actors would be because of different forms of decentralization. So through those mechanisms, it is possible to imagine a kind of return to Web 1.0, which

• 1:29:24Speaker 04

  was, after all, radically decentralized. And what's fascinating about that question, and I, you know, I can't say that I have a strong intuition about what the right answer to it is, I mean, predictively. Is that it's really striking that Web 1.0 was constantly being touted, we can remember this wasn't that long ago, as unique and original because it was decentralized, because you could do whatever you wanted, because anyone could be anyone they wanted on the Internet, because there were no rules. And then came Web 2.0 and the centralization of the platforms, and a lot of people made a lot more money in that phase than they had done previously because these centralized platforms were able to provide services that it turned out a lot of people wanted. The Internet alone wasn't as desirable to most people as interacting via these platforms.

• 1:30:08Speaker 04

  And so the grand question on which this turns is, will enough people want to go back to the older system? Or will it be possible through decentralization to give people the kinds of things that they liked about Web 2.0? And so one of the places this will play out is the metaverse. This is a grand and fascinating question. Will the metaverse be this radically decentralized thing, a lot like Web 1.0 was? Or will the metaverse come to be dominated by a handful of central platform actors who make money on it, the same way that Web 2.0 operated? And there's a lot of talk, some of it utopian and idealistic, about how we're going to go back to a world of radical decentralization. And maybe that's true, and maybe in certain respects that would be better. Probably in certain respects it would be.

• 1:30:52Speaker 04

  But it's just an empirical question of whether that decentralization can give the kind of user experiences that enough people actually want. And I guess that that remains to be seen. And I don't, I actually don't feel qualified to have a view about whether that's going to happen or not going to happen.

• 1:31:09Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I love asking questions that force people to speculate in areas where they may or may not be qualified. So let's take a stab at that if you're open to it.

• 1:31:18Speaker 04

  All right, go for it.

• 1:31:19Tim Ferriss?

  Just given your, let's just call it legal fluency, constitutional fluency, given your awareness of various technologies and trend lines, three years from now, if you had to place a bet, it doesn't have to be a large bet, but if you just had to take a position in what things might look like with respect to free speech, what picture would you paint?

• 1:31:47Tim Ferriss?

  In as much or in as little detail as you would like.

• 1:31:50Speaker 04

  I think that in three years, the largest players in whatever platforms emerge, Metaverse or other platforms, are going to be under a lot of pressure to do the kind of content moderation and regulation of speech and conduct that happened in Web 2.0. And it's not just going to be speech, it's going to be stuff you do, because if the Metaverse turns out to work really well, you're not just going to talk to people there. In theory, everything you're doing on Twitter is talking, right? You're writing, so you're speaking. But if you were in a fully immersive experience, you can also do stuff. You know, you can play games, you can punch people virtually, you can kiss them virtually, you know, every other human activity presumably you can engage in virtually.

• 1:32:34Speaker 04

  That's conduct, it's not just talking. And so it's not even clear that free speech would be the normal model to apply to it. I mean, you can imagine someone saying, well, that's all speech because it's virtual. And maybe someone would think that, that might turn out to be right. But it actually will, I think, feel a lot more like conduct. I think already, some of the, you know, the virtual platforms that people use on the Metaverse feel a lot more like doing stuff than they do like saying stuff. So I think there'll be huge pressure for the companies in the first instance to regulate the stuff that people can do and say. And if the companies don't do it, I think there's going to be a lot of pressure on the government to do it. And so I think that especially if the Metaverse in three years is good enough, that people are spending a reasonable amount of time doing stuff there, it'll have to be subject

• 1:33:17Speaker 04

  to pretty substantial internal private regulation. And given that, I think that the kind of free speech from the government that people want may continue to exist, but I don't think people are going to be able to do whatever they want in every sub-part of the Metaverse. I think there will be parts where it's do whatever you want, first-person shooter against you, against the world, do whatever you want to anybody, there'll be places to go and do that. But I think if you want the vast majority of people to spend a lot of time in a space, it has to be pretty orderly. And it would be lovely if human beings could order themselves spontaneously, but we don't have a lot of evidence that they've ever managed to do that in the past. And the idea that they're going to do that in the next three years in the Metaverse seems pretty implausible to me.

• 1:34:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, we have a very strong Lord of the Flies history behind us. I'm not sure that human nature will turn on a dime and will turn into the angels of our better nature immediately. One can hope, you know, one can hope.

• 1:34:20Speaker 04

  It'd be nice, it'd be nice.

• 1:34:22Tim Ferriss?

  Any other, I don't want to call them predictions, speculations for what we may also see three years from now? I mean, it seems to me, if I had to bet, I think there's going to be a strong centralized nature to what many would hope would be decentralized metaverses or a metaverse. I simply think the discovery process, the interoperability issues and so on, may be so thorny. Also, frankly, the policing or moderating of conduct will become such a priority for so many players that, for those and other reasons, many will choose centralized companies or organizations rather than decentralized options. That seems inevitable to me, even within Web 3.

• 1:35:07Tim Ferriss?

  If you think about a lot of what dictates behavior, you find centralized tastemakers. Why? Because for each individual to have the responsibility to sort through the noise, to read the code, to look at the smart contracts, to audit, to do all of these things themselves, is simply not feasible unless you have infinite time on your hands and the capabilities. So I do think, I'm fascinated by decentralization and I have invested very heavily in Web 3 and related technologies, but nonetheless, I do think people crave centralized authority and standards on some level, at least enough people do that will have strong centralized players. But that's just my speculation.

• 1:35:50Tim Ferriss?

  Anything else you see over the next, say, three years that you would expect to see?

• 1:35:56Speaker 04

  There is one other thing that I think will be really fascinating and important. And it's this. When we think about what the next phase of Web 3.0 will look like, we probably still don't fully understand what the AR/VR interplay is going to be. There are still people who say, "It's all going to be VR, it's mostly going to be VR." And other people say, "No, it's going to mostly be AR." And I don't, you know, that's a really fascinating and hard debate. My guess is it's going to be something we haven't exactly figured out what it's going to look like yet. But let's assume for a moment that a substantial part of this is augmented reality, so that it's not just that we live all of our lives in this, to me, dystopian world where we spend eight or 10 hours a day with a headset over our eyes, you know, in a darkened room.

• 1:36:41Speaker 04

  We're still going to have a lot of this technology, but it's probably going to go with us in some mechanism when we go out into the world. So now what that does is it makes it really hard to work out what it means to be regulated and what it means to be free when you're interacting in real life with other people and simultaneously interacting with those same people or with other people in some kind of virtual reality or augmented reality. So the idea is you and I are having this conversation right now, and we're connected by the internet, and we're connected by video, and we're connected by audio, and we're creating something. In some sense, we're already doing an augmented reality form of interaction. But if you add in a whole bunch of other layers and imagine that we're walking down

• 1:37:25Speaker 04

  the street having a conversation on multiple levels simultaneously, which is not so impossible to imagine, since after all, you see people all the time walking down the street, talking to each other, both of them on their phones, which is just a crude version of what presumably we'll be doing in some future moment. So in that environment, the really big challenge that I see coming, and I'm really only just starting to get a sense of this now, and I haven't said this anywhere before, is that The idea that you have one set of rights and obligations to the person you're talking to in real life, and another set of rules and obligations to the person you're engaged with in augmented reality at the same moment, it's not going to work. It's not going to

• 1:38:05Speaker 04

  work to have two different regulatory regimes involving the two of us at the same time. And if the government regulates what we can do to each other in real life, and a private company regulates what we can do to each other in this AR/VR kind of space simultaneously, it's going to get really messy and really confusing. What if you insult me, or I insult you, in some way that we would not be allowed to do on the virtual engagement, but that we're perfectly permitted to do interpersonally? Or flip it the other way, what if you punch me in augmented reality or virtual reality, which you wouldn't be legally allowed to do on the street because the cops would arrest you, but I feel just as punched, or maybe

• 1:38:48Speaker 04

  not just as punched, but very punched in some dimension? So my takeaway here is this: if we really get some complex, mixed AR/VR mix, it's not sustainable to have two totally disparate regulatory regimes, one coming from the government and one coming from the private companies. And so this is a little bit in tension with what I said before. What I was saying before was that my base case is that we are going to have mostly private regulation in these virtual spaces, and continue to have mostly government regulation in real life. What I'm saying now is, if we get this kind of really complexly mixed AR/VR thing, that equilibrium will not be sustainable. We'll have to move towards some much more

• 1:39:33Speaker 04

  unified, integrated kind of regulatory regime. And that's going to be fascinating, and it's going to be really, extremely, extremely complicated.

• 1:39:46Tim Ferriss?

  My oh my, the adventures ahead. Makes me think of the apocryphal Chinese curse. I've actually never heard this in Chinese, so I do doubt that it exists, but it makes for a good story nonetheless, which is "May you live in exciting times." "May you live in interesting times," one of the two. And we will certainly have exciting and interesting ahead. Noah Feldman, @NoahRFeldman on Twitter, noah-feldman.com.

• 1:40:17Tim Ferriss?

  Have fun. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for taking the time. Is there anything else that you would like to add or ask of the audience, point people to before we wrap up this first experiment in this format?

• 1:40:30Speaker 04

  I loved the conversation and I just want to say to people out there who do have real knowledge of or strong intuitions about the ARVR question and how we are going to interface with each other and with the rest of the world in the future, send me messages. You know, you can send me an email on the website. I would love to talk about this and the deeper that we understand what's going to happen, the more we can start thinking through how to make it somewhat humane when we finally get there. I'm really grateful to you Tim. This is a fascinating conversation.

• 1:41:00Tim Ferriss?

  So fun. And for people listening, I want to just mention that this is pretty close to the type of conversation that you and I would have offline, if not very, very close. So it's been really fun for me. I've taken a ton of notes and I hope other people have as well. Certainly we'll link to the names, the resources, books, everything that we've mentioned in the show notes at twoblog/podcast as per usual. And anything else that you would like to add Noah, or do you feel complete?

• 1:41:35Speaker 04

  Just that I love talking to you because it makes me think of so many fascinating and new things and your ideas are so powerful. It really, it's super fun. Thank you.

• 1:41:43Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks Noah. I really look forward to hopefully doing more of these and I would ask that anybody listening, please let us know what you think of this format and you can certainly shoot me a note @tferriss, T F E R R I S S on Twitter. If you want bonus points, it'd be very helpful to also tag @teamtimferriss, I think it is. It might be Team Ferriss, but I think it's Team Tim Ferriss. But the easy way, @tferriss and you could just use hashtag Noah and that will help us sort amongst the thousands or tens of thousands of messages to find the signal in the noise. And until next time,

• 1:42:25Tim Ferriss?

  folks, be a little kinder than necessary. Read up on history. It will help you with the future and thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between 1.5 and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books

• 1:43:06Tim Ferriss?

  I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Allform. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you've probably heard me talk about Helix Sleep and their mattresses, which

• 1:43:50Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:44:35Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:45:18Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:46:02Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:46:52Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:47:33Tim Ferriss?

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