YouSaid · the spoken record

Noah Feldman

lines on the record: 180
first: 2021-10-21
most recent: 2021-10-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“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 slash Tim. That's headspace.com slash 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 slash Tim today. This episode is brought to you by Aceleep, my god.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 is approached 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 Puddicom, could be Puticom, 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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 to a 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 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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite. 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”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 have read.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of fun for 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 sorts of sorts.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, NOAA-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 in education for me. So I want to just say that to listeners and I love to talk to all of you and engage 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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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're coming up with connections and ideas and putting it together. 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. 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”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The results quite as quickly as we're seeing it in the context of COVID. COVID, we're seeing it very, very much in real time. And COVID is also, I mean, climate is ultimately existential for us as a species. COVID's probably not existential for us as a species, but it is a pretty damn big problem. And real human beings are losing their lives. And it has tremendous negative consequences. And so I think we're all watching that with total fascination and attention and trying to figure out in real time as it goes.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 biology, that if you have a larger and larger quantum of the virus circulating, the probability of it mutating in such a way as to become more dangerous increases. So it's in everybody's interest for there to be as little COVID out there as there can possibly be. And that means we need world coordination of a kind that we have not yet fully seen. We need sharing of resources in a way that we have seen the beginnings of, but we have not yet fully seen. And we all need that. We need that desperately. So this is a kind of grand global experiment in can we work together? And in a sense, the climate change challenge is similar. And there we do see results, but we don't necessarily see”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 richer countries, but everywhere because”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. So the baseline idea is that it's in the interest of companies to be seen as doing what they've promised. And when you're a company like Facebook that has tremendous challenges in terms of how people believe it offers.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 in giving reasons drives legitimacy. Non-transparency or failure to give reasons detracts from legitimacy”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 U.S., you could be U.S. 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 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...”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Giving the new entity, the court or the board, or whatever it is, giving it so much power up front that it could make decisions that would break the company. 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 govern solutions can't solve every problem, but they can address some of the problems. Another mistake would be...”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Example. 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”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think about their own kinds of novel governance solutions, which would not necessarily look like the oversight board. But if they adopted other kinds of creative outside the box solutions that share power to show the public that they are trying to do better than they're doing, then that would be yet another marker of the success of this experiment because there's no success like imitation assist here as a form of flattery because imitation shows you that other people think something is working”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 have been very angry if they had made Facebook put Donald Trump back on. 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 them off the platform. So that was a kind of a compromise debate whether it was the kind of compromise we were talking about of the best kind or the not best kind. So those are the kinds of landmarks that I think will be testable. And one last thing. If other tech team companies”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 that 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 wasn't an independent decision. And it's not what Facebook necessarily wanted, then that would be a marker of success. So we had an intramarker of success when the Facebook Oversight Board weighed in on the decision to deplatform Donald Trump. It ultimately said that Facebook had done it wrong, but that if they did it again and did it right, they would be permitted to keep him off the platform for some period of time.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Them to do. And running the experiment to see if this group can do a better job than Facebook in making the decisions, see if it can hold Facebook to account and try to push Facebook to make its own decisions in a more regularized, rule-based way, and see if it's possible to show the world. In fact, if it is working, that there's a benefit for private companies to do what governments have long done, namely have some real separation of powers. Namely, say that there's some things that, you know, we just don't want the president and Congress to decide. We don't want the president and congress to decide what speech is allowed and what speech isn't allowed because we know they would follow their interests. So we have an independent Supreme Court that has, it's not that it doesn't have interest, but has a different set of interests and it's more independent.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The leadership of a platform that has well over 2 billion users 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. And take ultimate decision power about that away from the company and put it in an independent group of people who are paid by an independent trust. The money came from Facebook, but it goes into an 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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 a year ago, 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”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was also interested in modern Confederacies, so he looked in confederation, so 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 subunits. 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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is something to it for sure. So the way I think of it is the following. And I should say 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. 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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 to overwhelming. He's just a human being. He lived a life. He did a lot of stuff, but he spent a lot of 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 are 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 the student to write something worshipful. And you can't write a good biography if it's worshipful. It's going to be horribly boring.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's a totally gripping chapter. And then I was like, okay, I'm going to give this guy some deeper thought. And as I teach constitutional law in 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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A person called Louis Menand, 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”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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. Not great. 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 going to revisit. And I read a book that actually I love called the metaphysical club by...”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. Hold on. Pause one second.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 going to 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 going to experiment with progressive laws that limit hours that give you minimum wage, we're going to strike those down. And Holmes, because he believed in experimentation, took the view like, no, we're not going to 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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He got old, he got into the Supreme Court, and he found himself basically forgotten. Time had passed him by. He still dressed like it was the Civil War. He wore a huge cavalry mustache, a military mustache from the Civil War. And he had an amazing second life because when he was in his 80s, he was discovered by a group of young progressive lawyers, chief among them Felix Frankfurter, who went on to become a professor at Harvard Law School and then a Supreme Court justice himself. And they were looking for a poster child for their progressivism. And they could have picked Louis Brandeis, who was a rough contemporary of Holmes, also a genius, also a Supreme Court justice. But Brandeis was Jewish and was actually himself a progressive, and they wanted a better poster child. And they hit on Holmes. And they were able to do it by getting a Holmes to basically say,”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 real tagline. 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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's better in the future. And in this, he was an archetypal pragmatist. And he actually hung out with a group of people. They call 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 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 in pragmatism because he thought that life was constantly about experimenting and Holmes agreed with him. CS Perce, another contemporary of theirs who formalized pragmism 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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Auverland 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 fetid in every salon in Massachusetts as this hero 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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think in the United States, Martin Luther King Jr. is another great example of someone who was capable of compromise to achieve those sorts of things. And he has got a nice parallel in Malcolm X, who was not so inclined to compromise with injustice. And they each show you the value of those two different kinds of approaches. I think they 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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Experiment to try to get us to this end, and we both want that same end. And I'm going to try to do it your way now, and you're going to try to do it my way the next time. And we are going to 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. 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 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 objective. And that seems to me to be the good kind of compromise that isn't just waffling.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But here's the other kind of compromise, and this is the one I want to call real aspiration. That's when we actually do look at each other and say, we agree on a broader objective that involves making the world actively better. And we both want to achieve that objective. Let's say in the Chaisler Constitution, it's equality. Let's say in the case of a business, it's transforming some sphere of 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. And then what we say, listen, I'm going to go along with what you want to do in this situation because I see us as involved in a collective.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 seller corridor. And that's plenty for us. But most people were like, no, we want to actually expand this thing. And to do that, you had that have that kind of compromise.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some degree of call it flexibility in agreeing on what you're going to do, which means that sometimes you're going to 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 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 going to do it your way this time, even though I know it's wrong. You're just going to fail. You're going to break up. So that's the kind of compromise that was happening before the Civil War. That was the waffling compromise. And you can see that it was lousy because it involved a lousy thing, namely slavery. But without it, they wouldn't have been able to build a 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.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 to partners in a business, each owns 50% of the shares. You can't have 150% of the shares just by definition. 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...”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A more just place. And to me, that is the mechanism we can use to compromise as a country. And I think it's also very practically usable by anybody who's trying to work out the future by looking at the past. You ask yourself, how can I make it better? And the answer is usually by aspiring to do that and then trying to reach agreement on some concrete steps that we could take to try to make it better.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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, fair?”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT