#540: Harvard Polymath Noah Feldman — Deep Focus for Hyper-Productivity, Learning 10+ Languages, Predicting the Future with History, the Possibilities (and Limitations) of DAOs, Lessons from the Iraq Invasion, Designing the Supreme Court of Facebook, the Virtue of Scholarship, and the Wild Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Harvard Polymath Noah Feldman — Deep Focus for Hyper-Productivity, Learning 10+ Languages, Predicting the Future with History, the Possibilities (and Limitations) of DAOs, Lessons from the Iraq Invasion, Designing the Supreme Court of Facebook, the Virtue of Scholarship, and the Wild Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | Brought to you by Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover https://www.eightsleep.com/tim sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, Athletic Greens http://athleticgreens.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement, and Headspace http://headspace.com/tim easy-to-use app with guided meditations. More on all three below. Noah Feldman (@NoahRFeldman https://twitter.com/NoahRFeldman) 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. 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 enjoy! This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep http://eightsleep.com/Tim! Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. And now, my dear listeners—that’s you—can get $250 off the Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim. Simply go to EightSleep.com/Tim http://eightsleep.com/Tim or use code TIM. * This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, “If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually 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 Headspace https://www.headspace.com/tim! Headspace is your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations https://www.headspace.com/tim in an easy-to-use app. Whatever the situation, Headspace https://www.headspace.com/tim can help you feel better. Overwhelmed? Headspace has a 3-minute SOS meditation for you. Need some help falling asleep? Headspace https://www.headspace.com/tim has wind-down sessions their members swear by. And for parents, Headspace https://www.headspace.com/tim even has morning meditations you can do with your kids. Headspace’s approach to mindfulness can reduce stress, improve sleep, boost focus, and increase your overall sense of well-being. Go to Headspace.com/Tim https://www.headspace.com/tim for a FREE one-month trial with access to Headspace https://www.headspace.com/tim’s full library of meditations for every situation. * If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. 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/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/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. 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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 Eight Sleep. My God, am I in love with Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. More than 30% of Americans struggle with sleep, and I'm a member of that sad group. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat has always been my nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, putting them back on, and repeating ad nauseam. But now, I am falling asleep in record time, faster than ever. Why? Because I'm using a simple device called the Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep. It's the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced, but most user-friendly solution on the market.

• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

  I polled all of you guys on social media about the best tools for sleep, enhancing sleep, and Eight Sleep was by far and away the crowd favorite. I mean, people were just raving fans of this. So, I used it, and here we are. Add the Pod Pro Cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees Fahrenheit or as hot as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. My girlfriend runs hot all the time. She doesn't need cooling. She loves the heat, and we can have our own bespoke temperatures on either side, which is exactly what we're doing. Now, for me, and for many people, the result: Eight Sleep users fall asleep up to 32% faster,

• 1:28Tim Ferriss?

  reduce sleep interruptions by up to 40%, and get more restful sleep overall. I can personally attest to this because I track it in all sorts of ways. It's the total solution for enhanced recovery, so you can take on the next day feeling refreshed. And now, my dear listeners, that's you guys, you can get $250 off of the Pod Pro Cover. That's a lot. Simply go to eightsleep.com/tim or use code TIM. That's eight, all spelled out, E-I-G-H-T, sleep.com/tim, or use coupon code TIM, T-I-M. Eightsleep.com/tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover.

• 2:11Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Headspace. Headspace is your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations in an easy to use app. Now, you might ask yourself, very reasonably, there are 2,000 plus apps for meditation. Why would I use Headspace? Headspace is one of the only meditation apps advancing the field of mindfulness and meditation through clinically validated research. Headspace is backed by 25 published studies on its benefits, 600,000 five-star reviews, and more than 60 million downloads. So if people keep telling you to try meditation and you're like, when would I do that? When would I possibly have time? You should check out Headspace. If you have 10 minutes, Headspace can change your life.

• 2:51Tim Ferriss?

  Headspace offers a really light lift and a lot of features to keep you going, which is part of the reason that I've used Headspace for years now. So whatever the situation, Headspace can really help you feel better. Overwhelmed? Headspace has a three-minute SOS meditation for you. Need some help falling asleep? Headspace has wind-down sessions their members swear by. And for parents, Headspace even has morning meditations you can do with your kids. Headspace's approach to mindfulness can reduce stress, improve sleep, boost focus, and increase your overall sense of well-being. And it really starts with very, very simple practices. And if you look at my case, for instance, I just went through one of the basics today with the co-founder, Andy.

• 3:36Tim Ferriss?

  I think it's Puttacom, could be Puttycomb, I'm not sure. But former monk turned into co-founder of Headspace has the most soothing hypnotic voice imaginable. And I did a three-minute meditation, something like that. It's easy, it's fundamental, and it always puts me in a better space. So I'm going through the basics. Even though I've meditated for years, I'm going through the basics once again. And I would suggest to anyone that they consider starting there. Headspace makes it easy for you to build a life-changing meditation practice with mindfulness that works for you on your schedule, anytime, anywhere. We all want to feel happier. We all want more peace. And Headspace is meditation made simple. Go to headspace.com/tim. That's headspace.com/tim for a

• 4:19Tim Ferriss?

  Free one month trial with access to Headspace's full library of meditations for every conceivable possible situation. You can break glass in case of emergency in almost any situation and find something on Headspace. This is the best deal offered right now for Headspace. So check it out. Go to Headspace.com/Tim today. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 4:48Speaker 02

  No, it is soon enough.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  What if I give you options? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 4:56Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I am so excited for this episode and I am also intimidated. I have a mess of notes in front of me, which we will discuss. My guest is Noah Feldman. You can find him on Twitter @NoahRFeldman, F E L D M A N. Noah is a Harvard professor, ethical philosopher and advisor, public intellectual, religious scholar and historian, and author of 10 books, including his latest, The Broken Constitution, subtitle, Lincoln Slavery and the Refounding of America.

• 5:39Tim Ferriss?

  He's also a hyper polyglot and we're going to probably talk about that right at the beginning. It tells you something when that can be omitted in the bio. Moving on, Feldman is host of the Deep Background Podcast, a policy and public affairs columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and a former contributing writer for the New York Times. He served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of Iraq's interim constitution. He earned his AB summa cum laude from Harvard, finishing first in his class, selected as a Rhodes Scholar. He earned a D Phil, which I just learned how to pronounce properly, from Oxford University, writing his dissertation on Aristotle's Ethics.

• 6:21Tim Ferriss?

  He received his JD from Yale Law School and clerked for Justice David Souter of the US Supreme Court. Noah's 10 books also include Divided by God. America's church state problem and what we should do about it. What we owe Iraq, War and the Ethics of Nation Building. Cool War, subtitle, The United States, China, and the Future of Global Competition. Scorpions, The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices. And the Three Lives of James Madison, Genius Partisan President. You can find him on Twitter, as mentioned, at Noah R. Feldman, Instagram, at Noah R. Feldman. And all things Noah can be found at Noah-Feldman.com. Noah, welcome to the show. So nice to see you.

• 7:05Speaker 03

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

• 7:07Tim Ferriss?

  And I will begin with the language piece. I'm going to segue there by stating upfront, for people who don't know, that we have a shared, deep interest in languages, although you put me to shame. And what I was thinking as I looked at probably 12 sheets of paper in front of me before we got started. I thought to myself, "Quel lobo, quel lobo?" And at "Quel lobo", I wanted to look it up because I was going to say this on the show. And I was like, you know what, I should really check to see what that means. It's used in Argentina to mean, "What a mess, what a mess." And so I looked it up and it actually comes from what is called "lunfardo", which is this sort of Italian adopted street slang,

• 7:51Tim Ferriss?

  used initially by kind of lower classes and criminals. And "Quel lobo" means "a mess, scandal, uproar, disorder, or conflict." In the past, "Quel lobo" strictly referred to brothels or so-called "houses of ill repute." However, as the term evolved, it began to be applied to disorganized or messy conditions or situations of conflict. Now, I'm just using it to refer to my notes and where to begin. And I highlighted one thing, and that is related to your languages. You are fluent in English, Hebrew, Arabic, French. You can speak and read conversational Korean, read Aramaic, Latin, some Greek, Spanish, Italian, and German. How? Does this happen?

• 8:36Tim Ferriss?

  Where did this start?

• 8:38Speaker 03

  I think it started basically in a kilombo. Thanks, thanks for teaching me that new word. Of a childhood where my parents definitely thought that we should live in a bunch of different worlds. And they, before I was born, had spent time in Afghanistan and had Afghan friends that I knew when I was growing up. And actually had two Afghan teenagers living with us when I was a little kid. And then we went and spent a year in Israel. And I don't remember this because I was too little, but I have the pictures of myself on a backpack on my dad's back in front of the Acropolis in Athens and then in front of the pyramids in Egypt and on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. And so I think I was just being exposed to a million languages, or maybe not a million, but a lot of languages.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  When I was a really, really small kid and my dad would always tell the story about being in Cairo. And I was running around and I was, I think, like one and a half. And I was, I called my dad Abba, which is Hebrew, or actually it's Aramaic for, for dad. And I was saying, Abba, Abba, Abba. And my dad was freaking out because we're like in the middle of Egypt. This kid is speaking Hebrew to his father. And it's a time, literally between the 1967 and 1973 wars, where Israel and Egypt were like, not only at war with each other in the midst of like an actual shooting war over the Suez Canal, but like they were between two mega wars. And people came up to him and were like, so nice. Your son already speaks Arabic and he's only one year old.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  He's saying Abu, Abu, Abu, Abu.

• 10:10Speaker 03

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

• 10:34Tim Ferriss?

  We're definitely going to go deeper on this, but I want to say also as just a backdrop that as I was doing research for this, and I always enjoy the sort of pretext of the interview to do all this Google sleuthing, which would otherwise be really creepy. I just came to realize that perhaps I should think of you as someone who studies the code of human behavior, whether that takes the form of absorbed code, in a sense, through, say, language you assimilate at a super young age, whether that is, say, a constitution

• 11:15Tim Ferriss?

  or some type of consciously constructed code of a sort. Blockchain might also be an example. And certainly, you know, languages is one arena in which you seem to have really cut your teeth. In the beginning, you absorbed languages, but then you began to study languages. Why dedicate so much time and energy? And how did that happen?

• 11:41Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, thank you for that way of putting it, which I love and is better than I could have put it myself. I think I was trying to decode the world around me. So my parents sent me to a Jewish school where they taught us Hebrew, and they also took us to the Middle East when I was old enough to remember it. And I remember being a little kid in Israel and seeing street signs in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, and having really no idea at that age that there was a very complicated, layered history of that with not a lot of getting along and a lot of fighting, but an aspiration via these different languages to try to get along. And I just thought, well, if there's multiple languages, I'm supposed to know them because they were sending me to a school where they taught me this language, and then there it

• 12:26Speaker 03

  was on a street sign. So I thought, okay, I guess I'm supposed to figure these things out. And that actually led me to go and study Arabic. In the kind of naive, childish, and in my defense, I was only 15 years old or 14 years old, aspiration to understand the world. And you know, then I maybe I could bring peace to the Middle East. You know, that didn't work out so well. But the idea was to decode these things that are otherwise unavailable. And when you, there's actually nothing more frustrating in life than hearing someone speak a language that you don't speak. Because you know, there's a whole universe going on there. You can see the animation. You know there are emotions. You can recognize something and you don't know what they're saying. And so for me, the impulse to decode is to sort of get behind there and to know what's

• 13:11Speaker 03

  going on underneath.

• 13:13Tim Ferriss?

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

• 13:55Tim Ferriss?

  But, once you were reasonably competent with Arabic, how did that change your universe?

• 14:04Speaker 03

  It broke it. I mean, it changed my worldview radically and totally. And that's because, when you learn a language, it puts you in the thought world of the people who speak it. And you no longer are seeing them as an outsider, imagining what they might think when they speak to themselves, but you're actually a participant. You may not be a member of the group, but you can participate because you can speak the language. And since I'd been raised in this milieu that was... You know, very Israel focused, very Jewish. There were all kinds of ideas about what Arabic speakers were like, what Arabic was like, what the world of the Arab people was.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  And just to see that from the opposite perspective, it blew my mind at a very early age. And I think very few things have had as big an influence on me because I just realized that things just looked different from an alternative perspective. They weren't necessarily better or worse. They were just really, really fundamentally distinct. And that made me realize that, to put it very bluntly, a lot of what I'd been taught, you could characterize as not having been true from someone else's perspective. It's not that anybody was consciously lying to me. They were just giving me their perspective. And suddenly I was hearing pretty much 180 degrees, the opposite perspective. And that is the most useful lesson you could possibly give a young teenager trying to

• 15:30Speaker 03

  make sense of the world. Someone always sees things the opposite way that you see them.

• 15:34Tim Ferriss?

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

• 15:47Speaker 03

  I've talked to my parents a lot about why they liked to travel the way they did when, when we were little. And they were in Israel for the year. My dad had an academic fellowship there. My mom was in graduate school, so she was working on her dissertation. But wherever you do that, when you're, you've got one little kid and you've got another one on the way, she somehow managed to pull that off. And they were like, we're here. Egypt's not that far away. Let's go check out Egypt. And I guess it was close enough to the 60s that there was still this idea that you just kind of threw your kid in the back of the car, literally, and just went. And, you know, you couldn't go directly from Israel to Egypt at the time. So that meant they had to go via, I think they went via Cyprus, probably by boat, if I remember correctly.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  And, you know, they were just like, what the heck? There were no car seats in that world. Let's, let's put it that way. So I think they just wanted to see what it was like. And then, once they were there, you know, they were also an important element. They were Americans and Americans could go anywhere. We've been incredibly privileged through our lives and also our parents' lives that that passport, that blue passport mostly lets you in almost wherever you want to go. People might not like us very much, but they pretty much always let us in. And then if they don't, we invade them. So that's probably not such a good thing, but it is a habit that we have.

• 17:05Tim Ferriss?

  For people listening, I want you to know we're not going to focus on languages for an hour or anything like that. I do want to spend a little more time on it because, and I want you to stress test, feel free to stress test, anything I say that sounds like BS, but we begin to function, it seems, as adults and interact as a society using words that reflect concepts. And those words and concepts form narratives that drive our lives, right? These are invisible scripts in a way. And I think that's going to tie into a lot of what we end up discussing. So I want to spend a little bit more time

• 17:47Tim Ferriss?

  on language. And the way I want to do that first is by asking you about, and you can correct my pronunciation here, but in English, Dr. Bishai?

• 17:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:59Tim Ferriss?

  And-

• 18:00Speaker 03

  Dr. Wilson Bishai.

• 18:02Tim Ferriss?

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

• 18:29Speaker 03

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

• 19:13Speaker 03

  And he said to me, you wish to study the Arabic language? And I said, yes, Dr. Bisha, I do. He said, you may study the Arabic language. And then I said, but I have a problem, which is that you can't sign up for the summer school unless you're 16, and I'm not 16. And he said, hold on a moment. And he picked up the phone and he called the registrar of the summer school. And they had a conversation. And I didn't think it was going very well, from what I could hear on one end of it. He hung up and he said, I have good news. You will study Arabic. I was like, great. He said, there is only one condition. You may not pay tuition and you may not take the final examination.

• 19:53Speaker 03

  So basically, he had gotten on the phone, he had called the registrar. The registrar had said, no, I'm not going to let you register some like little kid for your class. And he had said, okay, no problem. And then he hung up the phone and just said, okay, you can come to my class. It's my class, you come to my class. You're just not going to pay and you're not going to show up the day of the final exam. And he opened up the world of the Arabic language to me. And he was a very distinctive guy. He had his own book that he used to teach that he had invented. He had his own tapes that we listened to in the old fashioned language lab, where we'd go and listen to them on tape decks.

• 20:23Tim Ferriss?

  I remember that. I did that too.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  And it worked and I loved it and I, you know, worked my tail off. And unlike, I guess, all the other people in Harvard summer school who are old enough to go out and party, I wasn't. So I was home doing my homework every night. And later, when I went to college, I took this class that you were referring to there, which was a kind of amazing class. He was Egyptian and he introduced us to modern standard Arabic, which is what the newscasters speak. But he also had these linguistic tricks. They were literally like a code that he had worked out. And he taught us these tricks in the course. So you could translate in real time, almost like an algorithm, your formal, modern, standard Arabic into Egyptian colloquial Arabic.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  And it was kind of like a bizarre and fascinating thing that it worked so well, but it did. It just, it worked like a charm. And he loved all of the students, who most of us had studied Arabic with him before. And just final story about this. He kept on referring to the exam as the banquet. He would say, you have, you have eaten the meals and now you must attend the banquet. And then when the semester came to an end, he literally did not give us a final exam. He was like, you all have learned very well. And he actually took us out to dinner instead of a final exam. I mean, I was just like, that is what a good teacher is. He knew what each of us knew. It was good enough for him. Boom, we're done here.

• 21:52Tim Ferriss?

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

• 21:57Speaker 03

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

• 22:01Tim Ferriss?

  On the Egyptian Arabic side, for those who don't know, could you just give people an idea of the spectrum of, because this applies to so many languages and it applies to so many things, just like Spanish in Argentina is actually Spanish in the provinces of Argentina is not the same as Spanish in Capital Federal in Buenos Aires. It's not the same. It is not the same Spanish spoken in Spain, et cetera, even though they all fall under this umbrella term of Spanish. What does the spectrum of Arabic look like?

• 22:35Speaker 03

  I think the spectrum of Arabic is maybe the biggest of almost any language that you can still call the same language. And part of the reason for that is when the original Arabs following the prophet Muhammad came out of Arabia in the seventh and eighth centuries, they conquered a large part of the known world and only a small number of them went out there and they brought their Arabic, which was the Arabic of Arabia, which is why it was called Arabic. But then they assimilated into all of the local cultures, ranging all the way from the Iraqi Iran border in the east, all the way to Morocco in the west, and then up all the way into Spain.

• 23:17Speaker 03

  So that's an enormous geographical span and they were encountering different languages wherever they went. And the local languages basically merged to some degree with the formal Arabic that had come along. And so the result is that over the next roughly 1300 years. The daily spoken languages diverged even as the written language remained pretty standard everywhere and as the language, let's say, of the Quran and then later the language of newspapers and newscasters remained pretty stable. So the result is that if you were listening to an Iraqi speaking colloquial, everyday Iraqi Arabic and an Egyptian and a Tunisian and a Moroccan, they are so different that as you get further and further apart, they literally would not be able to understand

• 24:02Speaker 03

  each other. So it's literally the case that someone who only speaks Iraqi dialect would not be able to understand very well someone who only spoke Moroccan or Tunisian dialect. They're almost different languages. And what people do understand comes mostly from watching TV shows that are broadcast all over the region. So for example, in the 50s and 60s, the Egyptian TV stations were the dominant ones. And so actually, people all over the Arab world can still often understand Egyptian Arabic because they just watched it on TV. And over time, they picked it up. So it's like a fascinating aspect of Arabic. And it's also really frustrating because when you land in a country where you don't speak the dialect, and I had this experience in Tunisia, right after the Arab Spring,

• 24:44Speaker 03

  when I spent a lot of time there, you get off the plane, you're talking to people, and everyone can understand modern standard Arabic. So you can make yourself understood really well. You just sound like, you know, you're a newscaster or something. And then they answer you back, and if it's an educated person, they answer you in modern standard Arabic, and then you're having a conversation. But if they answer you in their local colloquial, you're like smiling and you have no idea what they just said, no idea. And then you have to say to them, oh, would you please speak formal Arabic, which you can't always say to someone who hasn't had advanced schooling. And then the most embarrassing part is then uneducated people will say, oh, you speak such a beautiful Arabic. You speak so much better than we do. And you're like, no, I don't speak better than you do. I just speak newscaster Arabic.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  But they're taught that that's somehow better or higher. And so they're really like deferential and respectful, and it makes you feel awful because, in fact, the whole point is you don't actually speak their colloquial, and it will take you months to be able to like even order in a restaurant.

• 25:43Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it makes me think of this time I was watching a boxing match with a friend and one of the boxers was from the UK and he's being interviewed after the fight and my friend said, wow, he's really smart. I said, no, he's not. He just has the Queen's English as an accent.

• 25:59Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm going to ask you about Aramaic, but first I want to just point out to people how interconnected all these things are. So you mentioned tricks, almost like an algorithm for converting this modern standard Arabic into colloquial Arabic, or specifically, I guess colloquial Egyptian Arabic. And even the word algorithm, I believe, comes from like Al-Qadisi or some mathematician slash astronomer who has a statue dedicated to him, I want to say in Uzbekistan, which is where I spent some time with Kevin Kelly.

• 26:38Tim Ferriss?

  So that Al of algorithm is pronounced in English. We see that everywhere in Arabic, Al-Qaida and Al, Al, Al. What does that Al mean?

• 26:50Speaker 03

  Al just means the.

• 26:52Tim Ferriss?

  The definite art.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  You're, you're completely right. And it goes in front of proper nouns and it goes in front of names too. Almost every time you see the AL prefix in a word that we use in English, it comes from Arabic and it almost always comes from Arabic via Spanish because the Arabs were in Spain and then there was this long, complicated, you know, 800 year struggle over whether the Christians or the Muslims would control Spain. And if you're struggling with someone for 800 years, you're sharing a lot of culture and civilization along the way. And there are a lot of high moments when people are getting along. And so it's also true whenever you're in Latin America and speaking Spanish, words that start with AL are all over the language, you know, even more than they are in English. And every

• 27:36Speaker 03

  single one of those words, basically with no exception, is actually an Arabic word. And that's like totally fascinating to me.

• 27:43Tim Ferriss?

  It's super vesting. I mean, you have Arabic words used widely in South America as a result. And who knows, I mean, how the sort of confluence and dispersion of different languages led to, I don't know, the etymology and sort of background of these words, but it's, it's really this crisol, right? This melting pot. And I wanted to give a tip for people just to take this from super intimidating to hopefully approachable. The tricks are a real thing, these algorithms. And I recall, so when you see a list of languages that people know, it's not starting from scratch every time by any stretch of the imagination.

• 28:27Tim Ferriss?

  And I recall going to Brazil for the first time, this is a long time ago, and I spoke a decent amount of Spanish. And there was, in fact, I want to say a State Department guide, and I bought the print copy. It was very hard to get a hold of. It may have been from a different governmental body, but nonetheless, it was from the US government, printed in English, and it was a guide to learning Portuguese for speakers, non-native speakers of Spanish.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  So cool.

• 28:56Tim Ferriss?

  And it just showed you how to convert. It was incredibly helpful, and it allowed me to cheat. But as you said, if you speak portuguese, which is some mongrel hybrid of basic Portuguese and decent Spanish, you can ask questions, but understanding the answers as a whole, a whole separate kettle of fish.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  There's some kind of metaphor there, I always think of like, I can, I know the question to ask, and I can sort of understand your answer, but I don't understand all of your answer. And there's some situations where that's really bad, like when you're a traveler, and the answer involves going right and going left, and you know those words, but you don't exactly know what they mean everywhere in between.

• 29:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  You know, you're like, you think you're following the algorithm, but you actually aren't.

• 29:38Tim Ferriss?

  What does, and I know I'm not pronouncing this properly in Arabic, but what does Al Qaeda mean, or Al Qaeda? I don't know how to say it.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  So if you wanted to say it in formal Arabic, you'd say Al Qaeda, and that means the base. It literally means the base. And it was the name that Bin Laden and those around him gave to their organization after the US began to help.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  People fight the Soviets who had invaded Afghanistan. And what Bin Laden's business was, basically, you know, he was a rich kid, a super rich kid. And he went to Afghanistan and he was trying to organize people from outside of Afghanistan, primarily from the Arabic speaking world, but also from elsewhere, to come to Afghanistan and fight the jihad against the Soviets. And, you know, if this doesn't screw with your mind, nothing will. We supported him. We liked this. We wanted people from all over the Arab world who were inspired by Islam to go and fight against the Soviet Union, which was our enemy. And so the base meant the base of people who got together to fight the Soviets.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  And that's how the organization got its name.

• 30:50Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. You know, I just have to reiterate, I am so excited for this conversation and simultaneously knowing we're going to only cover a fraction. So I'm going to preemptively invite you back for round two and maybe multiple rounds. I'm going to focus on the personal here, not too, too personal, but the personal for a second, and then we're going to dig into some of your other areas of expertise. And this is the basic question. And I think a lot of people will wonder this. All right, you're a law professor. You teach three to four courses. You're a columnist. You write two to three columns a week. You're a podcast host. So you tape two podcasts.

• 31:33Tim Ferriss?

  Book author, on average, one book every two years. Ethical advisor, you advise Facebook, eBay, other tech companies. You're raising two teenage kids while still taking off nights, weekends, Jewish holidays, and as I have it on good authority, occasionally sleeping in until 10 a.m. While not drinking caffeine. So what the hell now? How do you do all of this? And why no caffeine?

• 31:59Speaker 03

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

• 32:43Speaker 03

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

• 33:00Tim Ferriss?

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

• 33:39Speaker 03

  So let me first say, I want to thank you for getting me to think about this systematically, not just in this conversation, but it was actually when I met you and we were sort of starting to chat about this. And I actually had never thought about... How I arrange my life at all. I just kind of did it. But now I've actually thought about it a little bit, and I think the answer, if there is one, is whatever I'm doing in that moment, I really try to be completely focused and present on that moment and never thinking about the thing that comes next. And over time, I think I train myself to be able to do that. So if I get up in the morning and walk my daughter to the bus, she's more than old enough that she does not need me to walk her to the bus. She's maybe even a little embarrassed by it. But I have this theory that if you're there as a parent,

• 34:25Speaker 03

  sometimes in the middle of the routine, like a meaningful moment will happen. And it might not happen most days when it's, you know, seven in the morning, we're bleary eyed and neither of us is in the greatest mood. But if we're both there, one out of 10 days, or even if it's one out of 100 days, something will happen, and I really try to just be present for that. If I sit down in front of my computer and say, okay, I'm going to write a column now, I literally shut out everything except for that column. And I turn on my voice recognition software because I do everything by voice recognition software. And I just focus completely, and I've trained myself to just put myself into flow. And I do it. I don't worry about whether it's good or it's bad.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  I just get it out there, worry about whether it's good or it's bad when I'm done with it. And then it's done, and then I stop, take a deep breath, read it over. I hit send to my editor. Thank God I have an editor so that I'm not reliant on myself to know whether it was any good or not. An editor will tell you this one was terrible. Throw this one out. But I send it to the editor and I put it out of my mind completely. It's gone. And then I do the next thing. And by doing it that way, I think I'm just saving the time waste that we have in. A kind of self-questioning that inevitably sinks in the rest of the time. Now, you might say what's missing from this is self-reflection. And honestly, I think for many years of my life, that's true.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  I think for many years of my life, I was missing genuine self-reflection. Like, I had fake self-reflection, where I had conversations and thought about things, but I wasn't really, really, really doing it. And it wasn't till my late 30s, when I went to see a shrink for the first time, because I was having an early midlife meltdown, that I actually engaged in that kind of self-reflection. And I did not know how to do it. I really didn't know how to do it. And I would say to myself after therapy, oh, my God, I'm failing at therapy. Like, I know I just wasted that whole session. And I kept on saying that for a long time.

• 36:28Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean by failed? What does failing look like? How does one fail at that?

• 36:35Speaker 03

  Well, I guess the reason I thought I was failing is I was mistakenly thinking that therapy was like every other thing that I do. A concentrated 45-minute session where you're supposed to accomplish something. And I would go in and on the way out, I was like, I didn't accomplish anything. I don't feel better. I don't feel worse. I didn't have any deep self-revelation. Like, what the hell did I do? In the sense that I was only doing it wrong because I thought I was doing it wrong. Like, you can't do therapy wrong. But I thought that there was a way to do it right, and therefore, there must be a way that I wasn't doing it. And also, I wasn't getting any better. So then I thought, okay, you know, I really am doing it wrong. And then, over time, it took a long time, I came to realize that just sitting there and being in the moment and letting it happen and not saying, okay, I'm going to go in to achieve this, and I'm going to leave having achieved that,

• 37:21Speaker 03

  was the only way therapy was ever going to do anything. And I wish I could tell you that, like, I thought of that quickly, but I didn't.

• 37:28Tim Ferriss?

  So, for sake of clarity, you ended up viewing therapy as almost a meditative...

• 37:39Tim Ferriss?

  Time for non-accomplishment that and through which you found it therapeutically valuable?

• 37:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's it. I mean, I think it's that I don't know about meditative because you are talking, you know, some of the time. And depending on who your therapist is, the therapist might also be talking because some don't like to say very much. But I think what I realized was that you have to just let things bubble up. You can't force it. You cannot force your way into having successful talk therapy. And that was the takeaway for me. And I know most people listening to this are like, uh, duh, like you have to be pretty dumb not to have realized that like that says it on the bottle. But I was that kind of dumb. And I think it derived from having this approach to everything else where I thought, okay, what am I gonna do? What am I supposed to be doing here? I'm gonna totally do it. And I'm gonna do it in a total

• 38:29Speaker 03

  concentrated way. And I'm gonna know at the end of it that I accomplished it so that I can move on to the next thing.

• 38:37Tim Ferriss?

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• 39:21Tim Ferriss?

  covered my bases if I miss anything I'm not aware of. Of course, I focus on nutrient dense meals to begin with. That's the basis. But Athletic Greens makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available. From travel packets, I always have them in my bag when I'm zipping around. Right now Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all in one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs. With your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I've found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional

• 40:01Tim Ferriss?

  immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com/tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 40:19Tim Ferriss?

  Voice recognition. How long have you used voice recognition?

• 40:24Speaker 03

  Since it wasn't that good. I've used it since 2002. And when I wrote my first book, which I did right after 9/11, I wrote that book on a little laptop.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  And I screwed up my wrists from using the mouse on the laptop. And I remember in the middle of it, I actually went to the doctor because I was like, I'm having this really weird wrist and arm pain, and I have just no idea what this pain is. And I was actually newly married and I was like, I have never really extensively slept in the same bed with another person before. Does it have something to do with that? I mean, it's absurd thing to say. And the doctor was like, okay, describe what you do every day. And I'm like, uh, I sit at my computer. He's like, show me how. I sat down. I put my hands out. He's like, does your arm hurt? I was like, oh, it's really hurting. And he was like, you have an RSI.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  And so I was like, okay, well, what do I do? Because I realized that I

• 41:27Tim Ferriss?

  RSI is repetitive stress injury?

• 41:30Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah. Repetitive stress injury. And it turned out the only real answer was, don't engage in that physical movement. And at the time, there still weren't very many touchscreens. You could maybe get one if you spent a ton of money on it. And most computers required a mouse as your primary interface. And I just couldn't use the mouse. And I couldn't hold my wrists in a good position for typing. So I started using voice recognition software. A very close friend of mine, who had actually, he had a much more admirable injury. He had injured his, his hand lifting. It's an incredibly brilliant guy who was also like incredible shape.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  And he was like, oh yeah, try this voice recognition software. And I started using it and at the time it wasn't so great, but it was much better than being in constant pain. And it actually had a huge influence on me because since then, pretty much every word that I've written comes first in draft form from speech. I talk it, whether it's a column or a book or something in between.

• 42:36Tim Ferriss?

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

• 43:09Speaker 03

  I use a product called Dragon, Naturally Speaking, which I've been really loyal to over the years as they have continued to improve it. And it was just luck that I picked one that turned out to be one of the leading ones in the industry. I think that the company that makes it ended up also licensing their technology to a lot of other voice recognition systems. And for me, the best practices are, and you used to have to have a very good microphone. And now the processing power of the computers is great enough that you don't need as good a microphone because it can handle in precision. I'm sure the quality of the microphones has also really improved. So you can sit in front of your computer and I do it by looking at what appears on the screen when I speak. And I do try to speak not quite as fast as I do the rest of the time,

• 43:53Speaker 03

  even though I do talk pretty fast in general, even when I'm talking to the computer. And I think of it as though I had an audience. I imagine that I'm telling someone what my ideas are.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  And to the extent there's an outline for me, it's only that I think, where do I want to end up? And then I just start talking and try to get there. And if I feel a need for an outline in midstream, I'll say, there are three points that I wish to make. And then I'll start listing them and it might turn out that there's two, or six, or 100, or that they're all stupid. But the great thing is you can delete it all later. And you see the words magically appearing in front of you as you go. And I find it way less intimidating than the blank piece of paper.

• 44:38Tim Ferriss?

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

• 44:51Speaker 03

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

• 44:58Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you.

• 44:59Speaker 03

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

• 45:10Tim Ferriss?

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

• 45:32Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 45:33Tim Ferriss?

  And then just the evolution or revision process?

• 45:36Speaker 03

  And I should just say, it's very variable depending on whether it's a daily column that is going to go out. And in the old days, they would say about newspaper columns, that they wrap fish tomorrow. In the era of the internet, they don't even wrap fish. Like, they're not even as useful as being able to be fish wrapping. So something like that, when I write it, if I'm responding to something in the world, which is usually the way I write a column, then I usually have an argument, a thing I want to say. And I've usually gotten that down on paper. Often I'm missing good examples to prove my point. So often when I look it over at the end of drafting it, I say, well, that's all very well and good, but how do you prove it? So I go back in and I put in-

• 46:19Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give us a concrete example?

• 46:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. I'm done. There I am. It shows you that I need it. So I just, I just wrote a column about Justice Neil Gorsuch, who's the first Supreme Court Justice ever to have a doctorate.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  And I was trying to explain why that mattered for his, what appears to be his real aspiration, which is to be the heir to the late Justice Antonin Scalia as the conservative intellectual leader of the court. So I began by kind of like saying this, that he, you know, he's the first one to have a doctorate and describing how he went back to get it in the middle of his legal career, which is kind of incredibly impressive, and I don't know how in the world he did it. And then I paused and said to myself, okay, but how do I prove that he really wants to be the intellectual leader of the court? And so I said, okay, I'm going to use this really famous decision. He's only got one really famous one so far, so there weren't that many examples that I could use, but this case called the Bostock case from a couple of years ago, where he,

• 47:18Speaker 03

  who's a real deep conservative, ruled that the anti-discrimination laws, Title VII, that prohibit workplace discrimination and that say no workplace discrimination because of sex, extend to discrimination against gay and trans people. So I popped that in as the example, and then I tried to explain why it proved my point, namely that he was saying something that was completely the opposite of what his ideological buddies believe, but he was doing it out of a principle of consistency, and the principle of consistency is supposed to be that he believes you're just supposed to read laws according to their text. You're not supposed to look at their intention, and you're not supposed to look at the purpose of the people who drafted them, you're just supposed to look at the text.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  And he said, if you just look at the text, and it says because of sex, if you're discriminating against a gay person because he's gay, then you're discriminating against him because you're treating him differently because he has sex with men than you would if it were a woman who has sex with men, because that person would be straight, and so therefore you're discriminating based on sex. Wow. Ditto for a trans person. So it's like highly formalistic. But he said, "Well, I'm not going to pay any attention to the intent of the people who wrote this document who were not thinking about gay rights and had probably never heard of trans rights." So, basically, I then used that example to say, "You see, this is how someone who wants to be an intellectual thinks."

• 48:43Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  And as it happens in this instance, I'm really happy with the way it came out, but the form of logic is this highly weird way of talking that a regular person interpreting a law would never, I don't think, hit on.

• 48:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  So then I thought, "Okay, that's not a bad example to show, I hope, that he really wants to be an intellectual leader, and for that, he needs to be consistent, and to be consistent, he has to do something that seems totally non-obvious, and actually makes a lot of people on his side mad at him."

• 49:14Tim Ferriss?

  This example makes me think of scripture debate. And although I haven't read the book, the premise, I believe, of this book called Misquoting Jesus was looking at the linguistic path that various translations and mistranslations have taken. That is such a fascinating, potentially problematic, approach.

• 49:40Speaker 03

  Well, you're making a great point, yeah. I mean, that's a great, great point. The comparison between the interpretation of scripture and the interpretation of the Constitution is a really tight one in US history. And in this book that I've just finished about Lincoln, the broken Constitution, I've actually got great examples of black abolitionists in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s, when we just, if we've heard of an abolitionist who was black from then, we've heard of Frederick Douglass, but there were actually dozens of very serious committed black abolitionists, and they're actually debating the Constitution, and they're discussing explicitly whether it should be compared to scripture or not compared to scripture.

• 50:24Speaker 03

  Because they are discussing whether you should bring your personal beliefs to bear on the interpretation, or whether you should interpret it in the light of what the people who wrote it believed. And that's a very similar debate to the debate that happened around scripture, because Protestants often thought in America that you should interpret scripture partly in the light of your own inspiration. Whereas Catholics historically thought that you should interpret scripture in the light of what the church fathers said that scripture meant, and what the church said that it meant. So those are totally different viewpoints. And so here you have these black abolitionists, who, not for nothing, a lot of them had also studied religion, and some of them were ministers,

• 51:07Speaker 03

  were arguing exactly about, should we interpret the Constitution that way or not? And it really mattered, because if you interpreted the Constitution according to the people who wrote it, they knew it was racist, because it protected slavery. But if you interpreted it according to their beliefs, you could read it against the grain, and you could say that it was actually an anti-slavery document, or an anti-racist document, because you knew, if you were a black abolitionist in the 1830s, 40s, 50s, that racism was evil.

• 51:38Tim Ferriss?

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

• 52:06Speaker 03

  It was Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, which was basically Hebrew, Jewish, Islamic material, basically, from all different historical periods.

• 52:17Tim Ferriss?

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

• 52:35Speaker 03

  I knew at the end of college and then having gone and done a doctorate in medieval Islamic studies, I knew that every morning I'd be thrilled to get up and enter the Middle Ages. I knew it would be fun for me every day. I was a little worried that at the end of the day, when I looked back and said, what contribution have I made to the world? How have I affected the world, I hope, in a positive way? That I wasn't going to be completely satisfied. Not because I believe there isn't something really fundamentally valuable about study for its own sake. I do. I believe the study for its own sake is tremendously valuable.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  But I just thought for my own personality, that I would be frustrated to feel like, okay, you know, you understood some guy who lived a thousand years ago better today. And you helped the five other people in the world who care about this dude to understand it better. And again, I have tremendous honor and respect for people who do that all the time. And I work with them in the university and I'm always telling them like how valuable and important what they do is and telling the rest of the world how important it is. But I knew I would be frustrated with it. And law seemed to me like a domain where you could still try to crack the codes. You could still study things. You could still try to go deep. But where at the end of the day, there's always an output that affects real people in the real world.

• 54:01Speaker 03

  And you can either do it really badly and harm people, or you can try to do it better and perhaps make the world suck a little bit less at the end of the day. And so. And I think that's the aspir- I'm not saying that every lawyer manages to do that every day, but that is the aspiration of of law as a legal system. That's why we have a legal system, to try to enable us to arrange our world in a slightly better way than we'd be able to arrange it without it. So I said, let me try this out and and see if I like it. And on the JD thing, that's actually really funny. If you look at old people's resumes, people who went to law school before the late 60s, it'll say often LLB, which is what the degree used to be called. It used to be called Bachelor of Laws. And now it says JD. And so you look at that and

• 54:44Speaker 03

  you think, oh, they must have really made law school a lot tougher and more serious when they changed it to a JD. No, it was a pure marketing exercise.

• 54:51Tim Ferriss?

  What does JD stand for? Does the people know the significance?

• 54:55Speaker 03

  Jurist Doctor, which means a doctor of laws. And the whole thing was a marketing exercise by the American Bar Association in the late 60s, who they were looking at physicians whose prestige had really gone up. And they had FOMO and they thought, they go to school, we go to school. Then again, they also learned to like cut up a cadaver, which is not something that a lawyer does. And they said, we're going to change the name of this degree. And they pressured all the law schools to change the LLB into a JD. They had a further excuse, which was they said, well, it's not your first degree. You've already gotten a BA. So therefore, your second degree should be something else. But you know, if they were really serious about that, they could have called it a master's. But they didn't. They called it a doctor degree. So yeah, that that happened.

• 55:38Tim Ferriss?

  The rebrand. Rebrand and upgrade. I-

• 55:42Speaker 03

  Lawyers are really, really good at that. You know, lawyers are like, everybody else can't have a monopoly. And we're going to pass a law against monopolies. Oh, but if you want to practice law, you have to pass the bar. Who controls that? A bunch of lawyers. They say you have to go to law school. What's that? It's a monopoly. They're like, it doesn't apply to us. It doesn't apply to us. That's just a necessary professional qualification.

• 56:05Tim Ferriss?

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

• 56:22Speaker 03

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

• 57:06Speaker 03

  And it was a book for kids and it was called You Were Not a Short Adult, which I think is a funny title for a book.

• 57:13Speaker 03

  The irony is the book kind of did treat you like a short adult. And there was like a little sidebar with a drawing. And it was about a Supreme Court case called Tinker against Des Moines School District, which at the time was a pretty fresh case. And it was a case where a family's worth of kids, young teens in Iowa, wore black armbands to their school to protest the Vietnam War. And they got suspended for it. And they went to court and the Supreme Court actually held that they had a free speech right in public school to wear those armbands because the court said it didn't disrupt the school. And even though they were kids, they had a constitutional free speech right. And that also blew me away, like the idea that kids had rights

• 57:57Speaker 03

  seemed incredibly exciting to me. And no one explained to me at the time that since I went to a private religious school, I had no rights. But, but that was, that was a separate matter that I had to learn later on. And so that I think also had a big influence on me. And then last, I would say, when I was in college, I took a class on constitutional law that was offered for college students. And there was a terrific teacher, a guy called H.W. Perry, who went on to teach later at the University of Texas as well. And it was a very intense, great group of, just a great group of students in this class. And we all did constitutional law together, and we were like a little con law

• 58:39Speaker 03

  cult. And it was so much fun. And some of my closest friends are people who were in that class with me. So it was a really important formative experience. And after that, I thought, oh, this is what law school is going to be like all the time, which at its best it was, although it wasn't always like that.

• 58:54Tim Ferriss?

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

• 59:38Speaker 03

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

• 1:00:20Speaker 03

  were giving electroshocks to a person behind a screen. And they basically did it because there was authority there. And my dad was also very influenced by BF Skinner, who was the inventor of modern behaviorism. And so that school of thought held that you could produce any behavior you wanted if you just reinforced it.

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

  They just thought the human being is just a series of inputs and outputs.

• 1:00:44Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:00:47Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:00:48Tim Ferriss?

  Internal experience is a black box, ignore it.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  Exactly, all the way down. Black box entire, this also may explain why it was so hard for me to do therapy. It's not like in that, if you grew up being told that inner experience is a black box, it's kind of hard to delve into your inner experience. So, my dad would never lay down the overt meaning, because that wouldn't work. What worked was just to repeat the point enough that you heard it, and then if you behaved appropriately, give you positive reinforcement, and if you behaved inappropriately, give you negative reinforcement. And it turns out, that is an incredibly effective way, over time, to get your kids to see the world in a certain kind of way, especially if you add to it, an older son, which I was,

• 1:01:37Speaker 03

  who really just worshipped his parents, and in particular, his dad, and really, really, really wanted to make them proud of him. As you can imagine, a lot of fodder there for the therapy later on, too, because it's not all fun and games. So that was basically how he did it, and I would say, measured by what his objectives were, you could only say that it worked.

• 1:02:00Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:02:06Speaker 03

  The positive reinforcements were mostly affirmation, words of affirmation.

• 1:02:11Tim Ferriss?

  What language might he use?

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

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

• 1:02:19Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect.

• 1:02:19Speaker 03

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

• 1:02:40Speaker 03

  And that was the message, very subtly, like, yeah, you're not really supposed to get something wrong, but if you did, we can learn from it, so we do not make that mistake again. And so that like captured both. It's very subtle, but it was, I was in no doubt about what all the components of that meant. So that I think captures both the upside and you can imagine too, the downside, which is that you never really feel like you've done enough. Because if you're always looking for positive reinforcement, you're never going to be perfect. And then you're always going to worry that you're not going to get that positive reinforcement. And so that captures potentially a non-trivial downside alongside the upside, which is like

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  you then work really hard to do as well as you can on whatever you see as the task in that moment.

• 1:03:31Tim Ferriss?

  I think in our round two, I'm going to want to ask you about your own parenting style, but I'll bookmark that, leave the audience wanting more. And I want to go to constitution specifically, I have a note here that I would love for you to expand upon. Actually, I'll do the lead up. Graduated first in his classes Harvard, got his doctorate at Oxford in just two years instead of three. Is that right?

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  I did, yeah.

• 1:03:58Tim Ferriss?

  Reportedly the fast on record, yell law, clerked for Supreme Court, then, it's next bullet, served as an advisor to write the Iraqi and Tunisian constitutions, lived with 50 men in a palace kitchen in Iraq for three months, got shot at, et cetera.

• 1:04:12Speaker 03

  I like the et cetera.

• 1:04:14Tim Ferriss?

  No, I love the, I love the et cetera.

• 1:04:16Speaker 03

  I think that was my brilliant girlfriend who put in the et cetera.

• 1:04:18Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it's great. No, no, the et cetera sort of whets my appetite for diving into this. Please tell the story of the palace kitchen as a way to segue into conversation about the constitution or constitutions in general.

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  The way I found myself sleeping on the floor of the palace kitchen in the Republican Palace in Baghdad with 50 other.

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  Very dirty men was that after nine eleven, I took advantage of the fact that I had studied Islamic political philosophy to write a book arguing for how we as Americans could change our attitude towards the possibility of democracy in the Middle East.

• 1:05:05Tim Ferriss?

  What was the title of that book?

• 1:05:07Speaker 03

  That was called After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy. And I wasn't saying that Islamic democracy would necessarily work, but I was saying no one's ever really tried it, and we Americans have never encouraged anybody to try it. And that was before anyone thought we should invade Iraq and create a circumstance where democracy might be able to emerge, at least that was the aspiration. But when the US then did invade Iraq, there was an immediate rush within the, actually it was the Defense Department, to see if they could find somebody who had studied Islam, could speak Arabic, and was an expert in constitutional law, to go and work on the possible development of a constitution for Iraq that would be democratic.

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  And the bottom line is, there just weren't very many people with that particular skillset. You know, in fact, there may only have been a handful, and the others didn't want to go, maybe because they were smarter than I was about what was likely to happen next. But I was thirty-two years old, and when they asked me, my first reaction was to say to the Defense Department official who called me, listen, I just want you to know, I'm very honored to be asked, I'd love to go, but you're not going to want me because I worked for Al Gore, litigating in the Bush v. Gore 2000 election fight, which was just a few years prior to that, and you're going to find that out when you look me up, and I don't want to waste your time. And the guy was, was a very impressive guy called Ryan Henry, a former Top Gun pilot,

• 1:06:36Speaker 03

  very straight shooter, and he was actually offended. And he said to me, you know, young man, this is not a political appointment, we don't care what your politics are, just go and do the job. And I was thrilled and too naive to realize that that was just a form of words. I mean, it may not have been from him. I think he may have meant it sincerely. It's just that in the reality, once you got there, it turned out it was, of course, profoundly political. But in any case, I was like, great, sign me up. And I went. And I thought it was especially a good opportunity because since I wasn't a Republican, I wasn't going to be trying to advance within the ranks of the Bush administration. So I would just get there, be on the ground and call it like it is, which is in fact what I ended up doing. And so we got to Baghdad about two days or three days after

• 1:07:18Speaker 03

  the statue of Saddam had come down. This is April of 2003. And it was, as you can imagine, just beyond a wreck. And we literally camped out in the Republican Palace. And the kitchen was big. It turned out maybe the kitchen was a poor choice because there were vents in the ground and enormous bugs were constantly coming up out of there. We like put down our, you know, our sleeping bags. And then eventually we got these little cots and we would try to like put mosquito nets over ourselves. It was about, as the summer progressed, it got to be about like 125 degrees in the shade. It never really cooled down in the Republican Palace. You don't even want to know about the bathroom arrangements. You know, your listeners might be a little squeamish around that one, or they should be if they knew what it was like. And it was like a fascinating experience

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  because in the cot right next to me was a full bird Colonel who was on his way to becoming promoted to being a general. And he liked to make fun of me. And he was not much older than I was. He was probably five or six years older than I was, but he liked to call me son. Since he was about six inches taller than I was and a very, you know, distinguished African American, he was getting a lot of pleasure out of this. And I remember the moment when they issued us, all civilians were issued with the up to date flak jackets. But the up to date flak jackets had a slot where you were supposed to put in a ceramic plate that would stop bullets. And they ran out of ceramic plates, which was appropriate because we were not high priority personnel. The ceramic plates needed to go to the frontline soldiers. So we had these vests without the plates. And so I would wear that and then so this

• 1:08:47Tim Ferriss?

  Desert palace couture, I guess.

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah, literally. And he said to me, son, you know what's going to happen to you wearing that vest? And I said, no, sir. I just instinctively called him sir. And he was the kind of guy who inspired that. And he said, well, when you get shot with a nine, you know, nine millimeter bullet, that will slow it down just enough that when it comes through you, it'll be at a nice, easy pace. And then it'll hit the back wall of the vest, and it'll bounce back in, and it'll bounce around a few more times. And you know, you can see the blood draining from my face. And then I said to him, well, what will happen if I'm not wearing the vest? He says, son, then that nine will go right through you. And I was like, okay, that doesn't sound good either. He's like, believe me, it would

• 1:09:33Speaker 03

  be less bad. So I took off the vest and I literally gave it to someone else who had access to a ceramic plate, but not to the vest. And let him use it. And that was the last time I wore a vest. And I just walked around Iraq for the next couple of months, basically wearing civilian clothes, which after all, is what the Iraqis we were meeting with were wearing. You meet with people, it does not, it's not actually a good look if you're all dressed up in battle rattle, and they're just standing there. It sends exactly the wrong, the wrong message. So that was how I got there. And it was a fascinating, fascinating experience because I basically talked to Iraqis from all walks of life, left the green zone every day. Originally, I would just take a cab. I would literally go out in front of what they later came to call the assassin's gate. We didn't call

• 1:10:17Speaker 03

  it that at the time, and just hail a cab. And then at some point, I started taking cars from the motor pool when I got to know my way around a little bit better. And this was before the really bad terrorism began. It started very shortly thereafter. But I was able to travel over the country and talk to many people from different walks of life. And I learned a lot about what people were thinking about their constitutional aspirations. And I learned a lot about what not to do when you invade another country. I mean, everything that you could possibly know about what not to do, I learned because we did every single thing that you should not do when you invade another country. And most of the mistakes we made in Iraq, we made upfront in that very early period of time.

• 1:11:00Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that's a cliffhanger. I do.

• 1:11:04Tim Ferriss?

  Ultimately, want to come back to what was done in that palace kitchen. But if we did sort of an 80 20 analysis on the things not to do, the things that one should be advised against doing when invading a country. What would be at the top of the list from that experience that you observed?

• 1:11:25Speaker 03

  The number one thing is failing to, the number one screw up is failing to tell everybody in the country who's in charge and proving that you're in charge. We never did it and the Iraqis were literally super confused. There had been coup d'etat's in the past, it had been a while, but they knew what would happen. Someone would go on the, on the loudspeakers with trucks and say, you know, there's a new president. Everyone stay home. Then the next day they'd be like, there's a new president. Everyone show up at work and everyone understood that that was like, not a request, but a direct order. We arrived and for weeks and weeks, nobody knew who was in charge. Was there a civilian in charge? Was there a general in charge? Nobody knew who was in charge.

• 1:12:10Speaker 03

  And in fact, at one point on the street in Iraq, someone actually asked me, a group of people actually asked me. First day I wanted to know, when is the electricity coming back on? I didn't know. When's the water going to start running again? I didn't know. When does school reopen? I didn't know. And then someone said to me, who's the government? And I was like shocked by this question. I mean, I understood the words, it was only two words in Arabic, but I, I was like, what are they even asking me? And then I realized what they were saying and I said, oh, you know, Ambassador Bremer is the government. Cause by then President Bush had sent out Ambassador Bremer and they were like, we've never heard of that guy.

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  And I realized that in that moment that, you know, we had really massively screwed it up. So first thing you need to do is tell people who's in charge. And the second thing is you have to prove that it's real. And that means you have to have either police or soldiers on the street. And if you don't have enough of your own, which we didn't, you need to use the local people. So we should have had the local police or the local military, even if they weren't trustworthy, out there on the streets, communicating that someone was in charge. And if no one's in charge. Then you're not safe as an ordinary person. And if you're not safe, you need someone who's going to protect you. And if you're not safe and need someone to protect you, you're going to look for what your local affiliation is in your neighborhood. And you're going to break into groups.

• 1:13:27Speaker 03

  We created a situation that's like if you're in a terrible neighborhood where there are gangs and there's a good person who doesn't want to join a gang, but there's no one else to protect them. You have to join a gang because you need protection from somebody because the state's not protecting you. And that is the situation that we created.

• 1:13:42Tim Ferriss?

  To double click on that, even if they're not trustworthy part, is that because, is that superior to not having them on the street? Because you need, at the very least, security theater, much like some of what happens, say, with the TSA. Not to slight the TSA, very important. But there are some things that, what is it? Edge cases make bad case law. You see some pretty wild things. But is it just to create the perception of a central competent power that has put law enforcement on the street? Is that why you say even if they're not trustworthy?

• 1:14:19Speaker 03

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

• 1:14:23Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:14:24Speaker 03

  And so even if some of the people you were ordering to do things might have occasionally backslid, you'd have to take that risk if your only other option is not having anybody. If we had invaded Iraq with 600,000 troops, the way that Colin Powell thought we should, we would have had enough of our own soldiers on the streets to do that. But we didn't do that. We invaded with a very small force. And when Baghdad fell, the total number of US troops in the country was probably fewer than 100,000. And in Baghdad, it was way beneath that. So we just didn't have the bodies. And so you could drive for, you know, what felt like an hour and a half through the city and not see any representative of any authority.

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  No cops, no US troops, and certainly no Iraqi troops. So you do need to create that perception. And obviously, there has to be some reality behind it because people will try to test it. But the perception is crucial because if people think that there's nobody in charge, they get scared and they're correct to be scared.

• 1:15:26Tim Ferriss?

  Let's go back to the palace. You've taken off your flak jacket, AKA Ricochet Death Machine. You're in civilian clothing and you are working on.

• 1:15:40Tim Ferriss?

  Constitutions, as I understand it, if I'm getting that wrong, please correct me. But let's start with basic, basic, basics. What is a constitution? And then if you could pick up the story.

• 1:15:51Speaker 03

  A constitution is a blueprint for how any group of people wants to govern itself. And it requires collective agreement, not of necessarily every person, but of, let's say, a super majority of the people, a lot more than half. And because human beings, you know, can't get together in the hundreds of thousands to do that, what that practically means is that a smaller number of people have to propose the agreement and then have it validated by the more general public. And if you're trying to build one of these things from scratch, the first thing you need to know is what people could credibly speak on behalf of the general public?

• 1:16:35Speaker 03

  What group of people could propose something that would have a chance of actually being accepted? So you need the right people at the table. And those also have to be people who think in the end that they have more to gain by an agreement than they do by failing to agree. And if they don't have more to gain by it, then they're not going to agree, and then you're going to get a collapse. I would just add one footnote to that, which I learned the hard way in Iraq, which is, you can't really do this if you don't have order. If your situation is, to use the amazing Argentinian Spanish word that you already taught me, it's quilombo, right?

• 1:17:15Tim Ferriss?

  Quilombo, yeah, exactly. That is a perfect example of a quilombo, yes.

• 1:17:19Speaker 03

  If you have quilombo, there's no chance that you're going to be able to build a constitution. You might get a peace treaty to stop people from killing each other, and then you could talk about a constitution when you have order.

• 1:17:31Tim Ferriss?

  Is that just because Maslou's hierarchy of needs, you're sort of skipping a few rungs? Is that why you can't do it?

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  That's definitely part of it. But I also think it's that to reach an agreement about how we're going to govern ourselves collectively, we have to have some general idea of how power is arranged in our society. We have to really know who are the powerful people, who are the weaker people, what are the different capacities of different groups to get what they want? And if I think that tomorrow you're going to come with your neighbors and shoot me...

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  Then, again, we might be able to reach a peace treaty, but I'm not going to trust you enough to reach an agreement about how we would collectively govern in the long run. And if you also simultaneously think that I might do that to you, we're both like eyeing each other and trying to gauge what the potential violence might be that we would do. We're not in a place where we can realistically negotiate a plan for how we're going to self-govern over a long period of time. I do think the hierarchy of needs is relevant there for sure, and safety is of course right up there alongside food, shelter, and water. And when you have a breakdown of safety, there's a extreme uncertainty that follows.

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  And you can't negotiate against the backdrop of that much uncertainty in a realistic way.

• 1:18:57Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:19:14Speaker 03

  Almost no constitutions in the modern world are totally invented from scratch. The same would be if like you were doing a startup. You know, you probably want to invent your corporate culture from scratch, and you probably want to invent a new product, but you don't want to invent the corporate form of government from scratch. There are other people who have done that, and you can pick and choose from a kind of menu of options and then tweak it to your particular set of interests. And that's how most constitutions in the modern world are done. Even when James Madison was trying to originate modern constitutionalism, he looked to the ancient world, to the constitutions of the ancient world as models. And he also looked to the British constitution, even though that one wasn't a single written constitution.

• 1:19:59Speaker 03

  He still looked to aspects of it. So, you know, the idea, for example, that there would be a legislative branch and an executive branch and a judicial branch was not one that was just being invented then. They were borrowing that. That was an idea that had been around. So you do some borrowing from other constitutions. And Then you have to answer some, a handful of really core definitional questions. What are the powerful entities within the society? How can they best trust each other? How should the public be represented? Do you want to have a parliament that represents everybody? And then only have the executive be derived from the parliament, the way you would in a parliamentary system? Do you want a president who's independently elected by all of the people?

• 1:20:41Speaker 03

  How much power should the president have relative to the parliament? Those are the kinds of sort of second order questions that you want to try to answer. You want to answer those questions not in the abstract, but concretely by reference to what the different groups of people in the society want, what their beliefs are, and above all, how they could agree to live together in a way that will share power and ideally where they'll be able to alternate power between different groups of people. Because if you can alternate power, you get a lot of good incentives for everyone treating everybody relatively well. If I think that my group is going to have all the power all the time, there's just no reason to treat your group well. I might as well expropriate you, take away your property, I might enslave you, treat

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  you as second-class citizens. But if I think that, you know, in the next election, you're going to be ruling over me, then I'm not going to do that to you. We have a standoff. And that standoff enables us to say, okay, let's all agree on a system that has equality and rights, because sometimes I'm in charge and sometimes you're in charge, and I'd rather be equal when you're in charge and you'd rather be equal when I'm in charge.

• 1:21:47Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:22:03Speaker 03

  The South African constitution that came into being after Nelson Mandela was let out of prison and the ANC came to power and negotiated a constitution with the former apartheid regime is, at least as written, a kind of best practices, modern constitution. Not that it was perfect, because it guaranteed a lot of rights, which is good.

• 1:22:31Speaker 03

  But it also took recognition of the economic realities of South Africa. And what I mean by that is that the ANC, they knew that the distribution of wealth in the country was fundamentally unjust after generations of apartheid and before that imperialism. But they also knew they didn't want white South Africans with their capital and know-how to flee the country, as had happened, for example, in Zimbabwe when it was no longer Rhodesia. And so they knew that they had to guarantee the rights of the white minority, even at the expense of not redistributing wealth in a way that would have been fair, so as to

• 1:23:15Speaker 03

  enable the country to develop and evolve. And if you talk to contemporary South Africans, they will be very honest with you about the failings of this post-apartheid order as well. It's not as though life in South Africa is perfect by any stretch of the imagination. They've been plagued by a whole range of problems, including serious corruption. But what they did succeed in doing is that there was not massive capital flight. There was not significant violent retribution by formerly oppressed Africans against the white population. There was not civil war. Those are incredible accomplishments.

• 1:23:58Speaker 03

  There was a certain amount of truth and reconciliation achieved through a truth and reconciliation commission. And so that constitutional order, which was a very carefully, subtly negotiated one over a longish period of time, actually is, in many ways, extremely beautiful. Again, notwithstanding that in the real world, it didn't solve every problem. That's the other thing to keep in mind about constitutions. They can't solve every problem. If your society has, say, high unemployment... You can have a beautiful constitution. You can't solve the unemployment that way. Tunisia has that. Tunisia drafted a really elegant constitution, not perfect, but really elegant constitution after the Arab Spring and after they transitioned to becoming a kind of a democracy.

• 1:24:40Speaker 03

  But the Arab Spring started because people were mad that they had no jobs, to oversimplify. And after the democratic government came into play, they still didn't have jobs.

• 1:24:50Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:24:51Speaker 03

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

• 1:25:00Tim Ferriss?

  I'd like to broaden the way, well, really have you broaden the way. I'm not going to do much heavy lifting here. Think about constitutions. And I also want to say, because she was mentioned earlier, I need to thank your girlfriend for a tremendous job of sending lots of well-prepared and juicy jumping off points for exploration. So I want to give her a special shout out because it's been tremendously helpful and exciting for me to have that in my back pocket. So here is one, I'll read this and then I'd love for you to elaborate because I think it'll be of interest to a lot of listeners.

• 1:25:44Tim Ferriss?

  "To know what will happen in crypto, you need to know how constitutions work and how they fail." Please elaborate.

• 1:25:51Speaker 03

  So echoing your point of, I'm tremendously grateful to her for teaching me how to do this and for making me sound a lot more interesting than I actually am. So here's how a crypto platform is like a constitution. Every single cryptocurrency is based on an agreement among the participants in the platform that underlies the currency about how they're going to interact with each other, how they are going to distribute power.

• 1:26:28Speaker 03

  Who's going to be able to decide how many of the coins, if it's a cryptocurrency, how many of the coins are produced? How they're going to be distributed? How the blockchain is going to take account of that distributive process? How decisions are going to be made when there's a conflict among different participants in the platform? Who is capable of forking the platform so that you get a different platform that comes into existence, which, you know, in the world of constitutions, we would call a revolution or a civil war? Those are the kinds of questions that ask, how are we, this group of people, going to govern ourselves in this common enterprise that we have?

• 1:27:11Speaker 03

  And what you have, again, is that beneath every crypto platform is a literal agreement, words written on paper that describe what the rules are going to be. And then what's distinctive about the crypto context is that those rules are then instantiated in a series of algorithmic programs that facilitate making sure that you do follow the rules and that double-check that, or triple-check that, or many larger number than that, check that through the blockchain. And so when a platform goes well, it's because the participants in the platform are following those rules and are in agreement with those rules.

• 1:27:55Speaker 03

  And when it goes south, it's because there's a dispute over those rules. There can be a break over those rules, and at that point, people might abandon the platform, or they might fork and create an alternate platform, or they might actually get into a literal fight over what's supposed to happen. And I should say, just, you know, to give a lot of credit where it's due, someone you've had as a guest on your podcast, and I even managed to get him onto my podcast, which was, I thought, a minor miracle, not surprisingly beyond yours, Vitalik Buterin, who's one of the core figures in the founding of Ethereum, has Got a terrific essay on his own blog about legitimacy, the concept of legitimacy

• 1:28:38Speaker 03

  in the crypto world and on the blockchain that really helped me think these things through and really made me realize the depth of the similarities because legitimacy is a property of constitutional systems when they're working well. It's the property that everybody who's in the system can predict with a high degree of probability how things are going to proceed. And everyone thinks that's basically fair. And if you withdraw either of those components, either the predictability or the fairness, the constitutional system will collapse and the same turns out to be true of a crypto platform.

• 1:29:13Tim Ferriss?

  Vitalik is a smart cookie.

• 1:29:16Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. What a brilliant guy.

• 1:29:18Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:29:40Speaker 03

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

• 1:30:16Tim Ferriss?

  Both, yeah. He's like Nikola Tesla and Bill Nye the Science Guy wrapped into one.

• 1:30:21Speaker 03

  It's really, it's really true.

• 1:30:24Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:30:32Speaker 03

  I think in some way, all of us every day are trying to figure out what's gonna happen tomorrow. And that's true in an obvious way, if you're investing in something, you wanna know what's gonna happen to that asset tomorrow. It's true, though, if you're picking a job, it's true if you're choosing a relationship, it's true in some way if you're just getting up in the morning, that you're trying to predict what's gonna happen in the world. And at the most fundamental level, we do that by looking at the past. And you know, there's always the constant reminder, past performance does not guarantee future results, and that's true. But the reason we have to bother to say that is that the past is our first guide to figuring out what's happened.

• 1:31:11Speaker 03

  What I like to do is to try to see the way that crises and problems and challenges have played out in the past, and then ask whether a change in our arrangements is actually gonna fix those things, or is actually inheriting those problems. And where this is especially useful, I think, is in environments where we know that we're facing some disruptive technology or some disruptive change. So, I don't know, take an example, take Airbnb. Airbnb self-consciously set out to disrupt the hotel industry, and they did it.

• 1:31:47Speaker 03

  If you're trying to figure out when Airbnb was getting started, what challenges will they face? One thing to do would be to look to the history of the hotel industry and ask, what was the biggest challenge the hotel industry faced in, say, the 20th century? And the answer turns out to be racial discrimination. For much of the 20th century in the United States, hotels were racially segregated in the large parts of the country. Integrating, the process of integration had a lot to do with hotels. Some folks may have seen the movie The Green Book, which literally refers to the physical book that African-Americans had to carry with them when they were traveling around the segregated South, so they would know where they were legally allowed to stay. So the process that shows you, you know, the fundamentally, you know, transformative nature of desegregation.

• 1:32:32Speaker 03

  So now you're Airbnb, you've disrupted this industry. It would have been plausible and easy to predict, I would even say, maybe easy is too strong a word, but possible to predict that Airbnb would face challenges around racial discrimination by their users, both by people who are renting out Airbnbs and people who rent them, because they were inheriting this industry. And so the social challenge that had faced that industry wasn't going to disappear when it passed into this new industry. And I think that's a nice, concrete example of how looking at the past can actually help you make predictions about what the challenges are going to be in the future. And then those are actionable predictions. Then you can say, well, if we're going to design a disruptive technology for hotels,

• 1:33:15Speaker 03

  we need to build in protections against forms of racial discrimination that we think are wrong. And Airbnb eventually got around to that and did do that. But that's an example of where you can look to the past and you can learn a lot about what's going to happen in the future. Another concrete example would be political polarization, which is something that I think all of us have had to spend a lot of time thinking about over the last five or six years. And it doesn't really matter whether you're thinking of it because you care about politics or you're thinking about it because your business is a business that inevitably interacts with the public and the public is polarized. We live in a world where it's not just politicians we vote for who are becoming polarized, but our views about science are polarized and views about medicine are polarized and our

• 1:33:59Speaker 03

  brand choices are increasingly polarized in a range of ways. So we all have to think about it one way or another. There, you can look back to past instances of polarization in our society, which have in many cases been devastating, and you can look at the ways we crawled out of those. And you can take advantage of the things that worked when we did crawl out, primarily forms of compromise and forms of recognition of the other side as having more in common than actually separates us. And you can try to self-consciously build on those models to try to figure out how to make the future somewhat better than it otherwise might be. And you can also look at when we failed, the Civil War being the big example where

• 1:34:43Speaker 03

  our polarization just failed and we split in two. And you can try to avoid the problems that helped create that failure.

• 1:34:52Tim Ferriss?

  I have so many questions. I feel like, I feel like a little kid who's like so excited, just like jumping up and down, trying to like tug at a parent's sleeve to get attention because they just, they can't contain what they want to say. I'm just going to try to spit these out one at a time. All right. So the first is, do you have any recommendations for books, they could be your own, for people who want to study? And I'm not sure exactly how to separate or define these things, but the creation of governance and maybe state building? The name Francis Fukuyama comes to mind because a friend has recommended his work over and over and over again.

• 1:35:32Tim Ferriss?

  I know that Patrick Collison, when he was on this podcast, we talked about, I believe I'm getting the name right, Lee Kuan Yew, am I getting that right?

• 1:35:41Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:35:42Tim Ferriss?

  Who transformed Singapore into what it is. I mean, just an incredible, incredible story. But for people who are for practical purposes, trying to get a grasp of this, and I think about, for instance, blockchain and DAOs, right? These new organizations. Man, oh man, our lawyer's going to be busy. But putting that aside, there are people right now who are crafting constitutions. They're doing this with some frequency, especially with the experimentation that is happening en masse right now. If you just look at, say, NFTs and so on, which as much as people might ridicule them

• 1:36:23Tim Ferriss?

  for the surface level appearance of just like silly JPEGs, there's a lot underneath that that I think is deeply interesting and will prove valuable. Any books you might recommend for people who want to roll up their sleeves as possible crafters of constitutions and governments?

• 1:36:43Speaker 03

  I agree with you that Francis Fukuyama, Frank Fukuyama is amazing on this. He's especially good also on how things fall apart. He's very, very good on what he calls decay, as well as being very, very good on the building of such institutions. I actually had him on my podcast recently and he's just totally spectacular on it. And his work is also, even though he's a very scholarly person, the books are written in a very readable and accessible way.

• 1:37:10Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:37:15Speaker 03

  One of his most recent books is this kind of grand, grand book, Political Order and Political Decay. It's an amazing book. It's not a short book. And I don't know if I would recommend it, the whole book as an introduction. But I think you could read the first part of the book, which is sort of a book on its own, and get a really good account of how political order comes into existence. And then take a deep breath and then read the second part of the book about how it all falls apart on the other side. So I think if I was going to pick one of Frank's book, it would be, it would be Political Order and Political Decay. Another book, which is a bit shorter, which I have found incredibly helpful for me, is a book called Democracy and the Market.

• 1:37:58Speaker 03

  And it's by a Polish-born political scientist, whose name is Adam Shaworski. And I'll spell his last name because it's not how it sounds. It's P R Z E W O R S K I. Shaworski, pronounced Shaworski, because that's how languages roll. And Shaworski is just also just a completely fascinating, fascinating person who was very influential on me when I was trying to figure out how you design governments. And one of the things that he talks about in Democracy and the Market is about how the creation of democracies is intertwined with the operation of capitalism.

• 1:38:42Speaker 03

  When we study in school how democracies come into existence, we usually don't really think about how they interface with the organization of capital. But actually, it's centrally important, the big Alexander Hamilton point that Alexander Hamilton was always making when the US was founded. James Madison had designed the Constitution and Hamilton basically said, I don't really care that much about the Constitution. I care about the financial markets. And he literally walked out of the Constitutional Convention halfway through. He was like, whatever, it doesn't matter. I don't care. But then, once there was a government, he devoted everything he had, a Secretary of Treasury, to basically creating the bond markets. And he did it because he thought that by creating a bond market, the government would have somebody it could borrow from.

• 1:39:26Speaker 03

  It would then be able to raise the capital to do stuff and then it would be effective. Then it could have a navy and then it could eventually have infrastructure. You know, you need to borrow money to do this stuff. So you need to create a bond market. So there would be a way to actually do that. And he also wanted the government to need to borrow money so that there would be a bond market, so that wealth could be created, so that you could have capital markets, so that they could build manufacturing. Madison didn't care about any of this, and in fact, he opposed most of it, which was, in retrospect, hopelessly naive. You know, he was like this Virginian gentleman with enslaved people working for him on a plantation, which was not the future, let's just say, with respect to, you know, the economy of the United States.

• 1:40:08Speaker 03

  So Shvorsky is great on that, and I think his book, and it's a short book and very readable, even though it's not a new book, he's got newer books.

• 1:40:16Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, I don't, I don't need new. I kind of like old, if the principles still hold, which it sounds like.

• 1:40:22Speaker 03

  I think that book really, really does.

• 1:40:24Tim Ferriss?

  Shvorsky, you know, Czech and Polish, they're like the opposite of Hawaiian, right? Like, the Hawaiians love vowels and man, oh, man, the Poles and the Czechs just love consonants.

• 1:40:36Speaker 03

  They really do. They hate themselves some vowels.

• 1:40:38Tim Ferriss?

  I'm debating where to go next here.

• 1:40:43Speaker 03

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

• 1:40:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, please.

• 1:40:48Speaker 03

  So just to mention them. So DAOs, and it stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization, are a kind of very interesting, promising, still, I would say, flavor of the month kind of organization that operates on the blockchain, that is supposed to, and when it works well, does, allow for collective decision-making, quote unquote, "from the bottom up." That is to say, they do not have a central authority in the middle. They don't have the centralized decision-maker that most constitutional systems ordinarily do have. They don't have, as it were, a president or a prime minister.

• 1:41:32Speaker 03

  And they also don't have a hierarchical system where, like, a staff or a board of directors that's elected makes decisions about where the assets of the organization should be put. Instead, the idea is that everybody collectively who's in the DAO can vote on how resources are going to be allocated. So they're kind of a strong wisdom of crowds idea. The idea is that if the collective makes the decisions, the odds are better that the collectivity will make good decisions. And that also tells you what the value proposition is. To invest in a DAO is in a way to bet on the wisdom of the crowd and not just the wisdom,

• 1:42:15Speaker 03

  but on the collective capacity of the crowd to work together. And that's a fascinating bet. And you can see from that formulation why it's very attractive and also why it's a bit utopian and why some people remain skeptical of the capacities of DAOs to do all of the different things that people hope that they'll be able to do. Because again, talk about using history to predict the future. If you look at the history of decentralized decision-making organizations, they've often existed, guilds, some labor unions, depending on how they were organized. They can do certain things really well. They can coordinate certain things really well. But there's certain kinds of decision-making that historically are really hard to make in a decentralized way.

• 1:43:00Speaker 03

  So when you're engaged in a conflict with another entity, when you're engaged in direct competition with another entity, when you need to coordinate action beyond the initial purposes and evolve your purposes, historically, it's been really hard for decentralized organizations to pull that off. So you want to pick and choose carefully with respect to what the DAO's purposes are and what its objectives are. And that should be helpful to the process of deciding, how do you want to be involved in a DAO and what will it be capable of accomplishing?

• 1:43:29Tim Ferriss?

  So someone in my household, it may or may not be me, may have become somewhat, I don't want to say infatuated, that's not the right word, but obsessed with researching a lot of the The kind of nitty gritty aspects of DAOs and DAOs. I like saying DAO just because it makes me think of like the Tao Te Ching, right? That that that character is actually Tao in Mandarin, which I think is metaphorically sort of appealing.

• 1:43:58Speaker 03

  Much better branding, no question.

• 1:44:00Tim Ferriss?

  In part because I think of the fact that not all iterations need to work, but you will have massive trial and error over a compressed time period, which is what gets so exciting to me, because if you wanted to create a new corporate entity structure outside of C corp, S corp, LLC, like, good luck. I mean, it's just going to take you forever to get there. But in the case of a DAO, you can really experiment and in a sense, split test, even though it might be two competing parties trying to collectively acquire assets, let's just say. And there are some that have become really interesting and really powerful, like

• 1:44:42Tim Ferriss?

  Flamingo would be an example. I don't know if this has been done yet. Maybe it has, and I'm just getting up to speed on these things. But for instance, I have a foundation and the foundation funds all sorts of research into, say psychedelic therapeutics and so on for different supposedly intractable psychiatric conditions, although I would veto the intractable part at this point. And it's a real pain in the ass to deal with the foundation as a tiny, tiny team. There's a lot of paperwork, all due respect to lawyers, lots of lawyers, lots of hours, lots of filings, lots of, to this day, signatures of multiple people. If I want to accept, say, donations from other people, capital from other people to fund

• 1:45:26Tim Ferriss?

  projects, there are various types of red tape and headache involved. But if there were the potential of bringing people into a DAO, collectively contributing, and then having some type of tax efficient slash tax deductible approach to donating to nonprofit ventures, my God, that would solve a huge pain point for me. I don't like being the centralized control point for this. And I guess that's, that's more of a rant than a question. But are there any particular experiments that you're looking forward to seeing or hoping to see in this space? Doesn't have to be DAO specific, but it could be more broadly speaking?

• 1:46:11Speaker 03

  I mean, you just named a fascinating one. So to the extent that one of the things that these DAOs, I'll use your terminology.

• 1:46:18Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry, I might be corrupting you.

• 1:46:20Speaker 03

  No, no, it's good. That they do is they facilitate decision making about assigning assets, not only acquisition of assets, but assignment of assets. I'm really fascinated to see which things they'll succeed in doing really well and which things they'll do less well at. So take, for example, you know, a foundation where you want to do good in the world, but where you want to devote those assets is, you know, a question that reasonable people could differ about. Part of it will be, would the people who participated in that decentralized autonomous organization be people who shared your worldview enough that you would think that was good? If it's listeners to your podcast and people who

• 1:46:59Speaker 03

  read your books, there might be enough overlap that they would want to, for example, promote psychedelic research, which is having these extraordinary successes today. I don't know if they would have thought that 10 years ago when you started doing this.

• 1:47:14Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:47:15Speaker 03

  Or not. I mean, that's one of the interesting questions. Could a collective be as forward looking and as willing to take certain kind of risks as you were on this issue? We do know that when it comes to certain kinds of factual questions, crowds do really well. So if you ask a factual question, the collectivity might be great. When it comes to predictive questions, it's a more mixed bag.

• 1:47:39Tim Ferriss?

  Totally.

• 1:47:39Speaker 03

  Right? I mean, if the crowd always did well on that, the markets would always make the correct predictions. They don't always make the correct predictions because groups are subject, there are human beings behind there and they're subject to all of the biases and uncertainties that are out there. If the people who bought into the DAO were representative of the world, you might have like a huge number of people who were adherents of the Chinese Communist Party and another large number of people who were deeply committed believing Muslims. I'm just thinking of, you know, groups that have a billion, more than a billion people. They might fight it out within the DAO about what they want to invest in. And so, again, I think it's very much about the purpose and who the participants are. So those are the kinds of experiments that I think that are going to, as you say, in an iterated way, show us what these things are really good at.

• 1:48:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:22Speaker 03

  And show us where these things run into some of the limitations of human coordinated behavior.

• 1:48:25Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely. And, you know, I was thinking of your comments earlier on attempts to create.

• 1:48:35Tim Ferriss?

  I don't want to slight it with utopian implying naive necessarily, but in some cases they were, attempts at creating non-hierarchical, flat, consensus-based communal living. Almost every one of those experiments has failed, as far as I can tell. Typically in spectacular fashion, like there are these catalyzing events. And I remember at some point, I can't remember who wrote this initially, I think it was actually a very old book, maybe in the 1980s on terrorism, believe it or not, that every movement attracts crusaders, criminals, and crazies, it's like the three Cs.

• 1:49:15Tim Ferriss?

  And also, just observing or studying history, you see that if there is a void of concentrated power, eventually someone will come in to capture that void or occupy that void, if that makes sense.

• 1:49:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:30Tim Ferriss?

  And within our sort of historical frameworks, that could be done. What's also interesting to me about DAOs, not just DAOs, but blockchain in general, is that if you have, if you set it up such that you have uneditable smart contracts, that the social engineering that one could impose to fill that void is perhaps more difficult. But at the same time, you have to really get the thinking right upfront, because you could perpetuate bugs all over the place. I don't know if you have any, if that prompts any thoughts?

• 1:50:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think you're making a really deep point about the idea of the upfront, uneditable contract. Smart contracts are awesome because of their enforcement capacities. What makes a smart contract better than other kinds of contracts is it's as close to self-enforcing as you can get. You don't need a whole legal system to do the enforcement side of it. And that's what makes it smart. But the uneditable part means it also has a feature that no real world contract otherwise ever has, pretty much, which is that it's uneditable. You can't evolve it. If you and I ordinarily sign a contract as simple as like, Tim needs me to cut the grass on his lawn, and I start doing it, and then you're like, you know what, it's been raining a lot lately, I want you to come a little more often.

• 1:50:56Speaker 03

  And I say, well, you know, it's true, but when it rains a lot, I have a lot of other customers, I need to charge you a little more when it's just rained. It's the most minor tweak you could possibly imagine in a contract, and we do it every single day, and almost all of the contracts that we're engaged in have some kind of flow like that in them, and you can't do that with an uneditable contract. So, one of the benefits of contracting relationships is that they tend to be evolving relationships in a way that's beneficial to both parties. And so you lose some of that capacity in an uneditable contract. Sure, you can invent a new one that's a variant on it, so it's not impossible to solve this. And maybe over time, we'll even see algorithmically developing contracts where the contracts themselves have the capacity for internal evolution.

• 1:51:42Speaker 03

  So, I don't want to say that it's not solvable. I imagine it probably is solvable, and maybe people are already, in fact, now that I say it, it must be that people are already trying to do this. But then it's not uneditable. And so, what strikes me about it is that the smartness of smart contracts needs eventually to extend not only to the enforcement side of it, but also to the flexibility side of it, in order to capture some of the benefits of what makes the contract such a powerful tool in our universe. And by the way, it's not an accident, the contracts are behind partnerships, and they're behind business transactions, and they're also the central metaphor behind constitutions, which are, in some way, the social contract. That's a contract.

• 1:52:23Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:52:37Speaker 03

  Like a lot of us, I have been struggling in the last few years with a question that is actually really old, but maybe it's to our detriment that we haven't thought about it as much. Namely, is our whole system, from the Constitution on, fundamentally...

• 1:52:57Speaker 03

  Ruined by having racism and slavery in its DNA from the start. Or can we be a lot more optimistic about our capacities as a country by virtue of progress that we've made since our Declaration of Independence was written by a slaveholder and our Constitution was drafted primarily by a slaveholder at a convention where slaveholding states had a huge amount of influence? And that question's been on the front page of a lot of newspapers. It's being debated in terms of what we teach our kids in schools.

• 1:53:39Speaker 03

  It's a fundamental identity question for us as a country, and it matters. And here I am, I'm a constitutions guy, and I had written a book about James Madison, one of the lead drafters of the Constitution, the lead drafter of the Constitution, really its inventor, who was himself a slaveholder. So I'd thought about the question in terms of him. But I hadn't really thought about that question in terms of what we did when we changed, when we broke it all down, and when we smashed the Constitution and the country in the Civil War. And I think the depth of disagreement and polarization over the last handful of years really also made me think, how bad is our situation relative to the situation then?

• 1:54:24Speaker 03

  And I wanted to find out answers to those questions. And that's why I started doing the research for the book, and the book is my attempt to answer those questions.

• 1:54:31Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:54:36Speaker 03

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

• 1:54:59Tim Ferriss?

  It seems like that's also how good Abba Don taught you also, the stories.

• 1:55:03Speaker 03

  It is how, you're absolutely right. That is a very powerful insight, and you can, you can send me the bill for the session. And I will gladly bet that is an excellent and correct insight into my my formation and my character. Yeah, so Lincoln's story is fascinating because Lincoln was a compromiser his whole life. He associated himself with the political party of compromise, which was the Whig Party, which was the party that repeatedly saved the United States from breaking into pieces in 1830 and again in the 1840s and again in the 1850s. And every

• 1:55:46Speaker 03

  time the country was about to fall apart over the slavery question, really, the Whigs saved it. Henry Clay was called the Great Compromiser, who was the founder of the Whig Party, and he was Lincoln's idol, and he was Lincoln's god. And even when he was elected president, Lincoln was still trying to compromise. So when you go to the Lincoln Memorial, you see two speeches written on the wall on the two sides of Lincoln. One is his Gettysburg Address, and the other is his second inaugural. No one ever mentions Lincoln's first inaugural. And it turns out there's a reason for that, which I discovered when I read Lincoln's first inaugural, which is that the opening sentence says, basically, "I have no interest or intention

• 1:56:29Speaker 03

  in ever interfering with slavery. Slavery is in the Constitution, it's permanent. If you Southerners will just reverse this whole secession business, we will make sure you have your slaves forever." So that's the guy's story, running up to the Civil War. And he said that, and then, you know, in just a month, shots were fired and the war began. And Lincoln realized the Constitution was well and truly broken. And he decided to break the Constitution further in order to make it into something new.

• 1:57:03Tim Ferriss?

  Hard fork.

• 1:57:04Speaker 03

  And basically, what he, yeah, hard fork, the hardest possible fork. Exactly. Doesn't get harder than that, right? Sending the troops is the hardest fork you could possibly have. And actually, I mean, to go even further, all of those compromises were founded in the original compromise, which, and we have to be honest about this, was a compromise over slavery. So when people say our Constitution has slavery built into its DNA, they're not lying. Like, that is actually true. The Constitution would never have been agreed to if it hadn't included the three-fifths compromise, and if it hadn't guaranteed the slave trade would continue for at least another 20 years, and if it hadn't had the fugitive slave clause, which committed free states to returning slaves to their masters. That

• 1:57:47Speaker 03

  is to say, it implicated the free states in the practice of slavery. So, you know, those things are pretty awful, and slavery is indistinguishable in that context from the principle of white supremacy. So when people say that slavery and racism were baked into the original Constitution, that's just a fact. And that was preserved with these compromises. But what Lincoln did is, he broke the Constitution in such a way as to end that, and he did it eventually by emancipation, which he himself believed was unconstitutional when he started the presidency. So this is also something that amazed me. He didn't just promise it. When one of his generals, immediately once the war began, started freeing

• 1:58:30Speaker 03

  the slaves of Confederates who came into contact with him in his district, Lincoln ordered him to reverse it, and when he wouldn't reverse it, Lincoln retracted the order himself and fired the general. So Lincoln couldn't be clear, and he wrote in a letter to his friend at the same time, "Listen, to take people slaves is just dictatorship. I'm not going to do that." Fast forward 18 months, he's realized they're not going to win the war easily. He's realized compromise is not going to work. He's realized that he has no basis for convincing people to fight a war to save the Union if the Union isn't moral. And he decides to flip the narrative and to declare that slaves in the Confederacy

• 1:59:15Speaker 03

  are hereby free.

• 1:59:16Tim Ferriss?

  May I interrupt for one second?

• 1:59:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, by all means.

• 1:59:19Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:59:38Speaker 03

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

• 1:59:46Tim Ferriss?

  Oh.

• 1:59:47Speaker 03

  So Lincoln never said at any point up to the Emancipation Proclamation, and he barely ever said afterwards that he was doing it because slavery was immoral. He kind of wanted everyone who hated slavery to think that, but he didn't want to say it. Instead, the rationale that he gave throughout was, "This is a war effort to help us win the war. It will create greater disorder, as you're saying. It will convince slaves to flee their masters. It will send a message to the South that there is no compromise." He said all those things. He said it was necessary to win the war.

• 2:00:31Speaker 03

  He did not like to say that it was for moral reasons. And he was criticized for that at the time by those who thought he should have been more overt in saying that slavery was fundamentally immoral. And historians are divided about whether he secretly thought that it was actually an important moral thing to do, or whether his real motivation was the one that he stated, namely, "This is a war measure to win the war." And in researching it, I actually came to the conclusion that he didn't want to admit to himself that he was doing it because slavery was immoral, because he believed that as president, he was authorized to win the war, but he wasn't authorized to impose his moral

• 2:01:15Speaker 03

  will on the rest of the country. So he insisted even to himself that he was doing it because it was necessary to win the war. But I think unconsciously by then, he had realized that the old slavery compromise could never work and needed to be replaced with something totally new, and that that new thing would be moral. And this is sort of my punchline of the book, which is that today, we all think that our Constitution is a moral blueprint. We think it's a kind of higher law. We might not always follow it. We may screw it up, but we aspire to following it. We had segregation, and now we say, "That was unconstitutional. It was unjust. It was wrong. We didn't live up to our highest aspirations."

• 2:01:59Speaker 03

  Nobody thought that before the Civil War. Nobody thought the Constitution was moral.

• 2:02:06Speaker 03

  The people who supported the Constitution knew it was a compromise with slavery, and a lot of them knew slavery was immoral. And so the Constitution was not a moral document. There might be morals, they were apart from the Constitution and higher than the Constitution. So this was a core transformative moment in our thinking about what it is to govern ourselves, because we shifted from we have to do some practical things to govern ourselves to thinking, no, we should also live morally. And to me, that's fundamentally important for the question of how we want to live together in the future. Because we're not always going to agree on what the right way to live is. We're not always going to agree on what's moral.

• 2:02:50Speaker 03

  But if we all agree that we should be trying to live our lives to make the world somewhat better than it is right now, we actually have something that we can look forward to coming together on. That is a mechanism for compromise, and it's a mechanism for overcoming polarization by saying, okay, we don't agree on what to do right now, but do we agree on where we want to be? Do we agree on that we want to make the country a better, fairer, a more just place? And to me, that is the mechanism we can use to compromise as a country. And I think it's also very practically usable by anybody who's trying to work out the future by looking at the past. You ask yourself, how can I make it better?

• 2:03:32Speaker 03

  And the answer is usually by aspiring to do that and then trying to reach agreement on some concrete steps that we could take to try to make it better.

• 2:03:42Tim Ferriss?

  This makes me think of a story I was told some time ago, probably 10 years ago. And I can't remember the professor's name, but it was a story told to me by a Stanford professor who, at Stanford, was allowed to create an experiment with new classes of pretty much any type. So you could just say, I'm going to teach a class on something I just made up during my nap or after my nap, and we're going to give it a shot. And the class was... Intended to be focused on some aspect of world peace. All right. And students show up. So far, so good. Lots of students show up for this class, register for this class.

• 2:04:26Tim Ferriss?

  And then it turns out, uh oh, we have a problem. Nobody can agree on what world peace means. So you have people from the Middle East on polar opposite ends of the spectrum. You have people from all over. And what this particular professor ended up doing was asking, okay, instead of defining world peace, can we agree upon and define some of the precursors? Or constituent pieces of what world peace might look like? And they were able to do that. So they came up with certain bits and pieces of this puzzle, which they agreed upon. And that's what they ended up spending the semester focused on.

• 2:05:07Tim Ferriss?

  And I bring that up in part because I'd love for you to expand on this word compromise. Because I think when a lot of people hear that word, and sometimes I'm one of those people, particularly someone who, let's just say Lincoln, looks up to this other figure, idolizes him because he's the master of compromise. Now, there are people who will hear that and say, well, that sounds like no firm position. You're the master of waffling.

• 2:05:37Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:05:37Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:05:44Speaker 03

  I love that question. And I love the story too. I never heard that before. That's totally fascinating. So here's how I think about it. I think you can divide compromise into two kinds of compromise. One of which is waffling. And one of which is, let's call it better than waffling. Let's call it real aspiration. So the kind of compromise that is waffling, and sometimes you need this kind of compromise in life, is where there's a zero sum thing that you and somebody else are arguing about, but you know that you need to cooperate in order to keep your part of that zero sum thing. Two partners in a business, each owns 50% of the shares.

• 2:06:29Speaker 03

  You can't have 150% of the shares just by definition. You know, that's just like, not the way it works. And They have to get along with each other and they don't always agree on the right course of conduct for the business. So in that situation, you actually need some degree of, call it flexibility, in agreeing on what you're gonna do, which means that sometimes you're gonna do something you think is wrong. Your partner is saying, "We should do this," and you're like, "Look dude, I know you're wrong. We've been doing this for a long time. I'm wrong, I know when I'm right. I'm right this time, you're wrong." Your friend is like, "Nope, it's the other way around. I know that I'm right." And this is one of the cases where you're wrong. If you can't waffle, that is, if you can't be flexible and say, "Okay, we're gonna do it your way this time, even though I know it's wrong," you're just gonna fail, you're gonna break up.

• 2:07:14Speaker 03

  So, that's the kind of compromise that was happening before the Civil War. That was the waffling compromise, and you can see that it was lousy because it involved a lousy thing, namely slavery. But without it, they wouldn't have been able to build the Union. The United States would not have gone from a tiny little I-95 nation, you know, on the East Coast, eastern seaboard country, to a continental power without this kind of agreement or compromise. Now, there were a few people who were like, "We don't need to be that, let's just stay on the sell-a-car door and that's, that's plenty for us." But, most people were like, "No, we wanna actually expand this thing." And to do that, you had to have that kind of compromise. But here's the other kind of compromise, and this is the one I wanna call "real aspiration."

• 2:07:59Speaker 03

  That's when we actually do look at each other and say, "We agree on a broader objective that involves making the world actively better." And we both want to achieve that objective. Let's say, in the Kaiser Constitution, it's equality. Let's say, in the case of some, of a business, it's transforming some sphere of, or domain of interests. Let's say it's in psychedelic research, it's expanding the capacities of human consciousness and enabling people to be healed better than they are now through that objective. These are big, grand objectives. They're stated at a very high degree of generality because they have to be, but they're really important, and they're hugely important.

• 2:08:43Speaker 03

  And then, what we say, "Listen, I'm gonna go along with what you wanna do in this situation because I see us as involved in a collective experiment to try to get us to this end, and we both want that same end. And I'm gonna try to do it your way now, and you're gonna try to do it my way the next time, and we are gonna do a little bit of compromise." But it's not because, I won't be saying, I know you're wrong. I'll be saying, I think this other route might be faster. Where it's like, we're both hiking up the mountain, and the path forks. We know both forks go up the mountain. And we're trying to figure out like, which one will get us there faster or better. And so I go with you. I still think my way was better. But I know we're still going up the mountain at that same

• 2:09:24Speaker 03

  objective. And that seems to me to be the good kind of compromise that isn't just waffling.

• 2:09:30Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:09:44Speaker 03

  We mentioned Nelson Mandela in passing. He's an example of somebody who was able to convince all South Africans that they actually had a common objective of living together, even though just a short time before, he had been imprisoned and a good part of the country thought their objective was to keep him and people like him subordinated. He's a cliched example, but there's a reason that he's a cliched example. It's because he really did have that kind of a transformative capacity to work together and compromise. I think, you know, in the United States, Martin Luther King Jr. is another great example of someone who was capable of compromise to achieve those sorts of things. And he has got a nice parallel in Malcolm X, who was not so inclined to compromise with injustice.

• 2:10:28Speaker 03

  And they each show you the value of those two different kinds of approaches. I think they were really interesting compare and contrast for that reason. They're each seeking equality, they're each seeking justice. One is saying, we should do this by a collective undertaking of a higher objective. And the other is saying, no, we should do this by the people who are doing bad things should stop doing those bad things. And if not, I will do everything I can. All means necessary are appropriate to getting us there. And I have a great respect for each approach. Those stand out strongly in my mind as forms of the productive, aspirational type of compromise.

• 2:11:08Tim Ferriss?

  Who is Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. And why are you interested in him?

• 2:11:14Speaker 03

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

• 2:11:57Speaker 03

  of the Civil War, which he really liked. He really liked being a hero. He then went back out to battle, got shot a second time. He was so scared of getting shot that he had actually filled his flask with poison. But his sergeant knew he had done this and emptied it and refilled it with gin. And so when he was shot the second time, he drank the flask, thinking that he was going to like commit suicide because he didn't want to have his legs sawn off.

• 2:12:19Tim Ferriss?

  He just got...

• 2:12:21Speaker 03

  He just got super drunk. And the sergeant saved his life. He then went to law school, set himself up as a young lawyer, and actually turned to history to try to understand the future. And when talking about using history to understand the past, I realized just in this moment, I never thought of it before, that Holmes is actually an amazing example of this. And he wrote a little book called The Common Law, which was a total rereading of the history of the law, basically the law of accidents and contracts. And it was a radical rereading of the history, and his central argument was that, as he put it, "The life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience." So his idea was that law presents itself as all logical all the time, and it's bullshit.

• 2:13:07Speaker 03

  Law is actually a set of institutions by which we constantly update and upgrade and up-level our society as we're doing it on the basis of things we've screwed up and in the hopes of doing it better in the future. And in this, he was an archetypal pragmatist. And he actually hung out with a group of people, they called themselves the metaphysical club, who were all pragmatists, and they were famous pragmatists. William James, hugely famous psychologist, also very rightly famous as one of the first people to seriously expand his consciousness using drugs and writing, write it down. He was constantly self-experimenting. He took every drug that was known to him, and he was a pragmatist, a central figure

• 2:13:49Speaker 03

  in pragmatism, because he thought that life was constantly about experimenting, and Holmes agreed with him. C.S. Purse, another contemporary of theirs who formalized pragmatism into a logical system. Henry Adams. Holmes hung out with these guys. He was the best-looking, he definitely slept with the girlfriends of several of the others. There are some historians who speculate that he slept with some of the other members of the club, although that's purely at the level of speculation. So Holmes was very intellectually attracted to this idea of societal pragmatism seen as experiment. To him, pragmatism was seeing that, as he put it later in his life, "it is an experiment, as all life is an experiment." That's his, his real tagline.

• 2:14:28Speaker 03

  Now, this dude, who was an elite, elite, elite Yankee, they called him the Yankee from Olympus. He was what we would call today a high WASP. He got old, he got onto the Supreme Court, and he found himself basically forgotten. Time had passed him by. He still dressed like it was the Civil War. He wore a huge cavalry mustache, a military mustache from the Civil War. And he had an amazing second life, because when he was in his 80s, he was discovered by a group of young progressive lawyers, chief among them Felix Frankfurter, who went on to become a professor at Harvard Law School and then a Supreme Court Justice himself. And they were looking for a poster child for their progressivism.

• 2:15:16Speaker 03

  And they could have picked Louis Brandeis, who was a rough contemporary of Holmes, also a genius, also a Supreme Court Justice. But Brandeis was Jewish and was actually himself a progressive and they wanted a better poster child. And they, they hit on Holmes. And they were able to do it by getting Holmes to basically say something that he believed, which was that the government shouldn't stop you from experimenting. The Supreme Court shouldn't block experiments. So he looked at progressivism and he was like, you want to do a lot of experiments? I'm not sure any of it's gonna work. In fact, I'm cynical and I don't really believe it'll work, but you should be able to do it. Whereas the conservative members of the Supreme Court at the time were like, no, if you're

• 2:15:58Speaker 03

  gonna experiment with progressive laws that limit hours, that give you a minimum wage, we're gonna strike those down. And Holmes, because he believed in experimentation, took the view like, no, we're not gonna strike those down. So he wasn't really a progressive, but they barred him for that purpose and they made him a mega celebrity. And he loved it. And as a consequence, he went down in history as one of the greatest justices of all time, mostly because he was always saying, look, let the experiment run. Let the experiment run. And that was his core judicial philosophy. It also, last thought on this, it also made him a pioneer of free speech, because you can't experiment if you can't share your ideas. So the core idea is we need to have free speech so that we can keep experimenting.

• 2:16:42Tim Ferriss?

  I'm so glad that I asked about the Yankee from Olympus. That's incredible. How did you first get a B in your bonnet about Alfred Wendell Holmes Jr.?

• 2:16:53Speaker 03

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

• 2:17:04Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:17:11Speaker 03

  I'll be honest, he wasn't presented in New Haven, Connecticut, he just wasn't presented as someone we really needed to care about that much. He was kind of old fashioned and I should add, Holmes had plenty of non admirable characteristics. I mean, he thought he was so cool. He thought he was so awesome. And he, of course, had all the prejudices of his day. He supported eugenics and in one Supreme Court decision, notorious decision called Buck Against Bell, where the state of Virginia was forcibly sterilizing people whom it determined to be quote unquote mentally inferior, we would say developmentally challenged, and

• 2:17:56Speaker 03

  though it's not even clear they were, Holmes upheld that practice and he used the following line, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Horrible stuff. So there was plenty not to like. And somehow that was what was always emphasized. And then I came to Harvard, his portrait is everywhere. He like looms over the place in a meaningful way. And I said, "All right, I'm gonna revisit." And I read a book that actually I love called The Metaphysical Club by a person called Louis Manand, who's an amazing, amazing writer. He's a professor at Harvard in the English department. Book won the Pulitzer Prize. It's an amazing, amazing book, The Metaphysical Club. And it's a group biography of those people I was just describing. And one of the chapters is about Holmes. And it's a totally

• 2:18:40Speaker 03

  gripping chapter. And then I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna give this guy some deeper thought." And as I teach constitutional law and the First Amendment, which are two of the classes that I teach, he just emerges as this really fascinating central figure. And that got me much more deeply fascinated by him. Now, I have not yet, he's been a minor character in a book that I wrote. I have not sat down to write a book just about him. And partly it's because I'm scared to. Felix Frankfurter, when he was a professor and then Supreme Court Justice, he assigned his favorite student to write the biography of Holmes.

• 2:19:12Tim Ferriss?

  That's a hell of an assignment, my god.

• 2:19:14Speaker 03

  The guy couldn't do it. He couldn't do it.

• 2:19:16Tim Ferriss?

  Why not?

• 2:19:17Speaker 03

  He had a nervous breakdown and then he died young.

• 2:19:21Tim Ferriss?

  Good lord. What happened?

• 2:19:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. And he was a brilliant, brilliant scholar. So...

• 2:19:25Tim Ferriss?

  Why did it break him? It's not like for Matt's last theorem. I mean, it's writing a biography, but was it just because of with the good, you get the bad and equal intensity? I mean,

• 2:19:36Speaker 03

  I don't really know. I think the grandeur was so significant, the life was so powerful and long that I think it just seemed overwhelming. He's just a human being. He lived a life. He did a lot of stuff, but he spent a lot of the time as a judge. And, you know, frankly, judges' lives are lived. What's interesting about a judge's life is primarily what they write. You know, it's not primarily what they do every day. I mean, Holmes got up, he read all day, then he did some writing. I mean, those were his main life activities. So it's not like the book would be so action packed that you couldn't write it. And there have been lots of other biographies of Holmes over the years. I think it was probably just that Frankfurter was so worshipful of Holmes and he was telling him, his students, to write

• 2:20:20Speaker 03

  something worshipful. And you can't write a good biography if it's worshipful. It's going to be horribly boring. So I haven't done it, but I will write something about Holmes at some point, I'm sure.

• 2:20:30Tim Ferriss?

  Well, another option, Walter Isaacson has been on the podcast a few times. We could go have some drinks with Walter and try to get a bee in his bonnet.

• 2:20:40Speaker 03

  That's a good idea. That's a really good idea. That's a much better idea.

• 2:20:46Tim Ferriss?

  He's not that far from Austin these days. And I have a question. This, this may just be a dead end, but I've always wanted to ask and I've never done the homework myself. Did the Iroquois Confederacy have any impact on our constitution? Because I've heard that as a passing comment before, and I never knew if there was any truth to it.

• 2:21:12Speaker 03

  There is something to it for sure. So the way I think of it is, is the following, and I should say I'm not, I'm not an expert on the Iroquois Confederacy at all, but I'm really interested in it. So the Iroquois Confederacy was a group of tribes, Native American, American Indian tribes, who realized a lot earlier than a lot of other tribes did, that if they were going to, A, defeat other tribes, and B, stand up against the rising tide of European settlement. They could not do it alone.

• 2:21:48Speaker 03

  They had to group themselves together into a broader alliance with some degree of collective governance. Now, they didn't have a full state, so it wasn't as though they had like a central governor who could govern or a central legislature. But they did have a series of decision-making methods through the consultation groups of the individual tribes and the individual bands up to this level of the Confederacy. And the founders knew about the Iroquois Confederacy because it was right there interacting with them, and they dealt with it.

• 2:22:29Speaker 03

  And so when James Madison was trying to work out the ideas that became federalism, which is after all, a similar idea, the idea that you should have a confederation, you should have shared decision-making on some big level things while maintaining your individual sovereignty over some smaller level things. He was interested in every Confederacy he could think of. And in his notes on Confederacies that he created for himself, he went all the way back to the ancient world and looked at some Greek and Roman predecessors. He was particularly interested in one truly obscure thing called the Amphictionic League, which he cared about a lot. I just love saying Amphictionic. He was also interested in modern Confederacies, so he looked in confederations.

• 2:23:12Speaker 03

  He was really interested in Holland, for example, which had a person who sort of functioned as a semi-king. He was called the stadholder, but also was organized into these individual sub-units. And he didn't write about the Iroquois Confederacy in those notes because there weren't very many books written about it. And he was writing notes on the books he was reading. His notes were literally like his reading notes. But he was certainly aware of the Iroquois Confederacy, as were the other framers. And so in that milieu, when they were coming up with federalism, they had a practical example of a version of it directly facing them. So in that sense, I think it is fair to say that it was part of the thought world that they were engaged with.

• 2:23:57Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:24:09Speaker 03

  I'm really excited about some innovations in governance in big tech that I've had a chance to be a little bit involved in that are experiments. We were just talking about experiments and how if you want to try to make the world any better than it currently is, you have to try stuff out and see if it's going to work or not work. And I'm really interested and excited because I want to see if these experiments are going to work and if they do how they work. And if they don't work, I want to see how they don't work. So the one that is directly in front of my eyes right now is the Facebook Oversight Board, which sometimes people call the Supreme Court of Facebook, which launched not quite

• 2:24:50Speaker 03

  a year ago and which I was directly involved in launching and coming up with, which is based on the idea that there's a series of decisions that are too important to be made by the leadership of a platform that has well over 2 billion users, you know, pushing on 3 billion users. And so the core idea behind this Oversight Board was that start with an identifiable set of decisions about what content Facebook allows on its site and what content it takes down and what people it allows on its site and what people it deplatforms. So start with that narrowly defined problem. It's not the only problem Facebook faces by any stretch of the imagination, but it's an important problem.

• 2:25:35Speaker 03

  And take ultimate decision power about that away from the company and put it in an independent group of people who are paid by an independent trust. The money came from Facebook, but it went into an independent trust. A couple hundred million dollars went into this independent trust to administer and run this Oversight Board. And give them genuine oversight by Facebook promising that it will do what it tells them to do. And running the experiment to see if this group can do a better job than Facebook in making the decisions, see if it can hold Facebook to account and try to push Facebook to make its own decisions in a more regularized, rule-based way, and see if it's possible

• 2:26:20Speaker 03

  to show the world, in fact, if it is working, that there's a benefit for private companies to do what governments have long done, namely have some real separation of powers, namely say that there's some things that, you know, we just don't want the president of Congress to decide. We don't want the president of Congress to decide what speech is allowed and what speech isn't allowed because we know they would follow their interests. So we have an independent Supreme Court that has, it's not that it doesn't have interests, but has a different set of interests, and it's more independent. And historically, we haven't really seen companies doing this. Companies are seen as serving the interests of their shareholders, and that interest has traditionally been seen as making a profit for their shareholders while not violating the law. Increasingly, we now see in our

• 2:27:02Speaker 03

  world that's not good enough. We want companies to do more than just make money and not break the law. We want them to actually contribute to the public good. So this is a humongous experiment, and it's still unclear if it will work and how well it will work, but I'm really excited to see how it plays out.

• 2:27:18Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:27:27Speaker 03

  If the Oversight Board rubber stamps everything that Facebook does, it's not working. It needs to make independent decisions that reverse Facebook. If it makes decisions and Facebook doesn't implement them, it's not working. Facebook has to actually implement decisions that Facebook doesn't like. If the public looks at this entity two years from now and says, "This is BS. These people aren't really independent. Their decision-making isn't really making the world better," then it's not working. But on the other hand, if people say, "Oh, that actually, it was an independent decision, and it's not what Facebook necessarily wanted," then that would be a marker of success. So we had an interim marker of success when the Facebook Oversight Board weighed in on

• 2:28:11Speaker 03

  the decision to deplatform Donald Trump. It ultimately said that Facebook had done it wrong, but that if they did it again and did it right, they would be permitted to keep him off the platform for some period of time. And that got reported on, on the front page of every newspaper. And for the most part, the press treated it as an independent decision, which I think in practice it actually was. And that was, I would say, a first step to success. I wouldn't call it success at the end state by any stretch of the imagination, but a first step towards success that was meaningful, because the world treated it as independent, and it was independent, and it wasn't just a rubber stamp. Of course, a lot of people would have been very angry if they had made Facebook put Donald Trump back on.

• 2:28:54Speaker 03

  So inevitably, people were going to be angry no matter what decision they made, and I think the board kind of split the difference by saying, "We're going to tell you you did it wrong, Facebook, but we're also going to tell you that if you do it right, you're allowed to keep him off the platform." So that was a kind of a compromise, a debate whether it was the kind of compromise we're talking about of the best kind or the not best kind. So those are the kinds of landmarks that I think will be testable. And one last thing. If other tech companies think about their own kinds of novel governance solutions, which would not necessarily look like the Oversight Board, but if they adopted other kinds of creative, outside-the-box solutions that share power to show the public that they are trying to do better than they're doing, then that would be yet another marker

• 2:29:37Speaker 03

  of the success of this experiment, because there's no success like imitation is this is here is a form of flattery, because imitation shows you that other people think something is working.

• 2:29:45Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:30:14Speaker 03

  It should.

• 2:30:15Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so what would be...

• 2:30:19Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:30:48Speaker 03

  Right. That would be a disaster. That's a great example of what not to do. So you do need to have genuine independence, and that means compensation has to be from some external entity. It means their reappointment to the board when their term is up, which I think under the Facebook rules can happen once, can't be anything to do with the company. So it can't be that the company has any say in that. So that's another one, an important one. Yet another thing, mistake to avoid, is giving the new entity, the court or the board or whatever it is, giving it so much power upfront that it could make decisions that would break the company.

• 2:31:29Speaker 03

  Because if you want companies to be able to build on this and take the decision seriously, they have to be making decisions that are within the realm of what they could do without betraying the duty that they owe to their shareholders. So you need to, it sounds contradictory, but you have to be modest enough in defining the overall goals that the board won't find itself telling the company to do something the company just can't do, fundamentally can't do. And I've learned the hard way that in tech, sometimes saying you have modest goals doesn't convince everybody. Sometimes people want to hear that your solution will solve every problem. And just like I said earlier, the constitutions can't solve every problem. New governance solutions can't solve every problem, but they can address some of the problems.

• 2:32:14Speaker 03

  Another mistake would be if these entities were making global decisions but were only made up of Americans. If you're making global decisions, you need representation from all over the globe. You need people from all over. If you're making decisions for the US, you could be US-focused. If you're making decisions for Britain, you could be Britain-focused or, you know, and so forth. But if it's going to be truly a global decision-making body, it needs to be global in its orientation. And the last thing is, you need to actually have some Values stated in advance that you're going to try to pursue, and you need to be transparent about how your decisions reach those. I think one of the biggest mistakes you could make would be to make decisions behind

• 2:32:59Speaker 03

  closed doors and not explain why you're making them. I think in this day and age, we're all cynical. We all know how the world works. And so we need to be able to hear you say, this is why I'm making the decision. Here's why I might be wrong, but here's why I made the decision that I made. I think transparency drives transparency and giving reasons drives legitimacy. Non-transparency or failure to give reasons detracts from legitimacy.

• 2:33:29Tim Ferriss?

  Legitimacy is sort of the currency of so many different domains, whether it's a blockchain, whether it's constitution, whether it's the Supreme Court of Facebook. And you talked about this potentially global representation for global business. It makes me think of the potential of, say, the United Nations of Facebook. And then you have these parallel structures that on some level mimic these outside organizations within these larger companies. On the point of transparency, are the decisions of, just for simplicity again, the Supreme

• 2:34:08Tim Ferriss?

  Court of Facebook made public regardless of if or how the company ends up heeding that advice?

• 2:34:16Speaker 03

  Yes. The Oversight Board issues those decisions on its website. It makes them public. And then it tells Facebook to implement them. And if Facebook doesn't implement them right, I expect that the Oversight Board will do what it has the power to do, which is to call out Facebook publicly on that. They can say to Facebook privately first, like, hey, do it. We said do it. But then if Facebook doesn't do it, they can say publicly, you didn't do it. And ultimately, that's where the power of the external entity lies. Its power is that the company has promised to do what they've told them to do. And if they don't, then they're lying. And the board will be able to draw attention to that.

• 2:34:56Speaker 03

  So the baseline idea is that it's in the interests of companies to be seen as doing what they've promised. And, you know, when you're a company like Facebook that has tremendous challenges in terms of how people believe it operates, there's only one way out of that. And that way is to consistently demonstrate over an extended period of time that you are following the rules, that you are disclosing, that you are transparent. And over time, it will take time, no question, you can rebuild a reputation for transparency, honesty, openness, and legitimacy. And no one is disputing that that is a long road. But the only way to make a long journey is to put one foot in front of the other and

• 2:35:41Speaker 03

  start making the damn journey. And so I see the Oversight Board as an experiment that's designed to try to push the company in that direction and enable the company to go in that direction. It can't force it. It opens the possibility of that. And again, that's why I call it an experiment.

• 2:35:59Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:36:13Speaker 03

  Well, an experiment that I wouldn't say exactly that I'm looking forward to it, but I'm watching it with constant fascination, as I think a lot of us are, is how are we as a world going to try to come out of the COVID pandemic? That's an experiment in real time, and real human lives are at stake, and a huge amount turns on how well we do it, not just in the US or in the developed, you know, richer countries, but everywhere. Because a virus does not know borders, and a virus that spreads in one area of the world unchecked is going to evolve, because it's just a principle, basic principle of evolutionary

• 2:36:53Speaker 03

  biology, that if you have a larger and larger quantum of the virus circulating, the probability of it Mutating in such a way as to become more dangerous increases. So it's in everybody's interest for there to be as little COVID out there as there can possibly be. And that means we need world coordination of a kind that we have not yet fully seen. We need sharing of resources in a way that we have seen the beginnings of, but we have not yet fully seen. And we all need that. We need that desperately. So this is a kind of grand global experiment in can we work together? And in a sense, the climate change challenge is similar.

• 2:37:34Speaker 03

  And there we do see results, but we don't necessarily see the results quite as quickly as we're seeing it in the context of COVID. COVID, we're seeing it, you know, very, very much in real time. And COVID is also, I mean, climate is ultimately existential for us as a species. COVID is probably not existential for us as a species, but it is a pretty damn big problem. And real human beings are losing their lives and it has tremendous negative consequences and drag on everything we do, not only as a country, but as a society and as a globe. And so, you know, I think we're all watching that with total fascination and attention and trying to figure out in real time as it goes.

• 2:38:12Tim Ferriss?

  Noah, you're a hell of a guy. I am so constantly, every time we chat, impressed with the breadth and depth of your intellectual curiosity and the way that you're able to tie disparate times, places, people together with pattern recognition. It's really astonishing and really impressive. And I know that you have good hardware, but it's also a trained skill. So I want to just give you a bow for that because it's very, very impressive. And it's a valuable skill that contributes to the collective. Is there anything else you would like to say, ask of my audience, call attention to, anything at all?

• 2:38:54Tim Ferriss?

  Before we wrap up this conversation, I mean, well, I will hopefully do a round two at some point because, I mean, we didn't talk about free speech, really. We did not talk about your new class and thoughts on ethics and power. I didn't get to dive into AI. There are a million other things we could get into, but for this conversation, I didn't get to ask you why the metaphysical club has metaphysical in the title. Just gonna bother me, but I'll figure it out. But for this conversation, is there anything you would like to add as closing comments, requests of the audience, anything at all?

• 2:39:29Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, back at you, Tim. In your work and in your podcast, you're literally interested in everything. I mean, it's such a fascinating podcast to listen to because you never know from week to week what extraordinary topic it will explore. And you know always there'll be something actionable that comes out of it, but you also know that it be associative. And in talking to you, every time I've talked to you, and certainly in this conversation too, you're doing it in real time. You know, you're coming up with connections and ideas and putting it together. So I'm super grateful for that and I benefit from it like all your listeners do. And I loved talking to you in this conversation about that. I'll just say for listeners, I spend a good amount of my time trying to produce ideas and put them out there.

• 2:40:11Speaker 03

  And so I'd love to reach you guys and I'd love to have you tell me what you're interested in because I see it as a dialogue. Huge number of the ideas that I have for things to write about and think about come from, directly from things that people write to me and tell me. You can certainly read my columns on Bloomberg or listen to the Deep Background Podcast or read my books if you happen to come across them. I also have a website, noah-feldman.com, where you can sign up if you want to hear from me on an intermittent basis. I promise not to spam you or irritate you, but primarily gives you the opportunity to communicate with me and that is of tremendous, tremendous value and education for me. So I'd want to just say that to listeners and I love to talk to all of you and engage

• 2:40:56Speaker 03

  with you. And I just want to express deep gratitude, Tim, to you for all the work that you do and for giving me a chance to chat with you.

• 2:41:06Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:41:48Tim Ferriss?

  kinds of compromise when the opportunities arise and thanks for tuning in.

• 2:41:56Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 2:42:38Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Headspace. Headspace is your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations in an easy to use app. Now, you might ask yourself, very reasonably, there are 2,000 plus apps for meditation. Why would I use Headspace? Headspace is one of the only meditation apps advancing the field of mindfulness and meditation through clinically validated research.

• 2:43:18Tim Ferriss?

  Headspace is backed by 25 published studies on its benefits, 600,000 five-star reviews, and more than 60 million downloads. So if people keep telling you to try meditation and you're like, when would I do that? When would I possibly have time? You should check out Headspace. If you have 10 minutes, Headspace can change your life. Headspace offers a really light lift and a lot of features to keep you going, which is part of the reason that I've used Headspace for years now. So whatever the situation, Headspace can really help you feel better. Overwhelmed? Headspace has a three-minute SOS meditation for you. Need some help falling asleep? Headspace has wind down sessions their members swear by. And for parents, Headspace even has morning meditations you can do with your kids.

• 2:44:00Tim Ferriss?

  Headspace's approach to mindfulness can reduce stress, improve sleep, boost focus, and increase your overall sense of well-being. And it really starts with very, very simple practices. And if you look at my case, for instance, I just went through One of the basics today with the co-founder, Andy. It's puticum, could be puticum, I'm not sure. But former monk turned into co-founder of Headspace, has the most soothing hypnotic voice imaginable. And I did a three-minute meditation, something like that. It's easy, it's fundamental, and it always puts me in a better space. So I'm going through the basics. Even though I've meditated for years, I'm going through the basics once again.

• 2:44:43Tim Ferriss?

  And I would suggest to anyone that they consider starting there. Headspace makes it easy for you to build a life-changing meditation practice with mindfulness that works for you on your schedule, anytime, anywhere. We all want to feel happier, we all want more peace, and Headspace is meditation made simple. Go to headspace.com/tim. That's headspace.com/tim for a free one-month trial with access to Headspace's full library of meditations for every conceivable, possible situation. You can break glass in case of emergency in almost any situation and find something on Headspace. This is the best deal offered right now for Headspace. So check it out. Go to headspace.com/tim today.

• 2:45:26Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. My God, am I in love with Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. More than 30% of Americans struggle asleep, and I'm a member of that sad group. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat has always been my nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, putting them back on, and repeating ad nauseam. But now I am falling asleep in record time, faster than ever. Why? Because I'm using a simple device called the Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep. It's the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced, but most user-friendly solution on the market.

• 2:46:11Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:46:54Tim Ferriss?

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