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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We had segregation, and now we say that was unconstitutional. It was unjust. It was wrong. We didn't live up to our highest aspirations. Nobody thought that before the Civil War. Nobody thought the Constitution was moral. The people who supported the Constitution knew it was a compromise with slavery, and a lot of them knew slavery was immoral. And so the Constitution was not a moral document.”
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 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 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.”
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 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”
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 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. 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. 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.”
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
“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 are hereby free.”
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 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 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's slaves is just dictatorship. I'm not going to do that.”
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
“Actually, I mean, to go even further, all of those compromises were founded in the original compromise, which, 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. if it hadn't had the fugitive slave clause, which committed free states to returning slaves to their masters. That is to say, it implicated the free states in the practice of slavery. So, you know, those things are pretty awful, and slavery is indistinguishable in that context from the principle of white supremacy. So when people say that slavery and racism were baked into the original constitution, that's just a fact. And that was preserved through these compromises. But what Lincoln did is...”
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 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.”
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
“Is his second inaugural. No one ever mentions Lincoln's first inaugural. And it turns out there's a reason for that, which I discovered when I read Lincoln's first inaugural, which is that the opening sentence says basically, I have no interest or intention in ever interfering with slavery. Slavery is in the Constitution. It's permanent. If you Southerners will just reverse this whole secession business, we will make sure you have your slaves forever. So that's the guy's story running up to the Civil War. And he said that and then 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.”
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
“Yeah, so Lincoln story is fascinating because Lincoln was a compromiser his whole life. He associates 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. Every time the country was about to fall apart over the slavery question, really the Whigs saved it. Henry Clay was called the great compromiser. He 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...”
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
“You're absolutely right. That is a very powerful insight, and you can send me the bill for the session. And I will gladly pay. That is an excellent and correct insight into my formation and my character.”
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
“Yeah, I'll give you my sort of top of the line answer to the question via. 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.”
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
“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? 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.”
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
“On the front page of a lot of newspapers, it's being debated in terms of what we teach our kids in schools. It's a fundamental identity question for us as a country. And it matters. And here I am, I'm a constitution's 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”
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
“Like a lot of us, I have been struggling in the last few years with a question that is actually really old, but maybe it's to our detriment that we haven't thought about it as much. Namely, is our whole system from the Constitution on fundamentally... Ruined by having racism and slavery in its DNA from the start. Or can we be a lot more optimistic about our capacities as a country by virtue of progress that we've made since our declaration of independence was written by a slaveholder and our constitution was drafted primarily by a slaveholder at a convention where slave holding states had a huge amount of influence? And that question's been”
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
“Developing contracts where the contracts themselves love the capacity for internal evolution. 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.”
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
“You can't evolve it. If you and I ordinarily sign a contract as simple as 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. And I say, well, 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 unedible 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 algorithmic”
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
“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.”
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
“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. They're 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 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 groups that have 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. And 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.”
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
“Doing this. 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.”
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
“Sorry, I might be corrupting you. 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, a foundation where you want to do good in the world, but where you want to devote those assets is 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 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”
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
“Decision making organizations, they've often existed. 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 are certain kinds of decision-making that historically are really hard to make in a decentralized way. So when you're engaged in a conflict with another entity, when you're engaged in direct competition with another entity, when you need to coordinate action beyond the initial purposes and evolve your purposes, historically it's been really hard for decentralized organizations to pull that off. So you 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?”
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
“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 collective will make good decisions. And that also tells you what the value proposition is. To invest in a DAO is in a way to bet on the wisdom of the crowd and not just the wisdom, but on the collective capacity of the crowd to work together. And that's a fascinating bet. And you can see from that formulation why it's very attractive and also why it's a bit utopian and why some people remain skeptical of the capacities of DAOs to do all of the different things that people hope that they'll be able to do. Because again, talk about using history to predict the future. If you look at the history of decentralized”
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
“So just to mention them 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. 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”
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
“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. 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 needed to create a bond market so there would be a way to actually do that. And he also wanted the government to need to borrow money so that there would be a bond market so that wealth could be created, so that you could have capital markets so that they could build manufacturing. Madison didn't care about any of this. And in fact, he opposed most of it, which was in retrospect hopelessly naive. 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 the economy of the United States. So Szavorsky is great on that. And I think his book, and it's a”
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 Svorsky 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 in the market is about how the creation of democracies is intertwined with the operation of capitalism. 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 as Secretary of Treasury to basically.”
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 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 books, 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 and it's by a Polish-born political scientist whose name is Adam Szavorski. And I'll spell his last name because it's not how it sounds. It's PRZ O R-S-K-I pronounced Shavorsky because that's how languages roll.”
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
“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”
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 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. And his work is also, even though he's a very scholarly person, the books are written in a very readable and accessible way.”
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 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, you know, the Civil War being the big example where our polarization just failed and we split in two. And you can try to avoid the problems that helped create that failure.”
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 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 our views about medicine are polarized and our brand choices are increasingly polarized in a range of ways. So we all have to think about it one way or another. There you can look back to past instances of polarization in our society, which have in many cases been devastating. And you can look at the ways we crawled out of those.”
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
“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, we need to build in protections against forms of racial discrimination that we think are wrong. And, you know, Airbnb eventually got around to that and did do that. 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.”
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 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 the fundamentally transformed nature of desegregation. 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 air”
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
“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's self-consciously set out to disrupt the hotel industry, and they did 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
“Think in some way, all of us every day are trying to figure out what's going to happen tomorrow. And that's true in an obvious way if you're investing in something you want to know what's going to 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 going to happen in the world. And at the most fundamental level, we do that by looking at the past. And 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. 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 going to fix those things or is actually inherently”
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, 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. 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.”
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
“Do 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 surprising to be on yours. Vitalik Butarin, 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 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.”
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
“Going to be. And then what's distinctive about the crypto context is that those rules are then instantiated in a series of algorithmic programs that facilitate making sure that you do follow the rules and that double check that or triple check that or many larger number than that check that through the blockchain. And so when a platform goes well, it's because the participants in the platform are following those rules and are in agreement with those rules. And when it goes south, it's because there's a dispute over those rules. There can be a break over those rules. And at that point, people might abandon the platform, or they might fork and 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”
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
“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 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. 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.”
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
“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 are going to interact with each other, how they are going to distribute 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
“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.”
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
“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. 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”
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
“What they did succeed in doing is that there was not massive capital flight. There was not significant violent retribution by formally oppressed Africans against the white population. There was not civil war. Those are incredible accomplishments. There was a certain amount of truth and reconciliation achieved through a truth and reconciliation commission. And so that constitutional order, which was a very carefully subtly negotiated one over a 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, let's say, high unemployment”
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
“Even at the expense of not redistributing wealth in a way that would have been fair. So as to 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.”
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 South African Constitution that came into being after Nelson Mandela was let out of prison and the ANC came to power and negotiated a constitution with the former apartheid regime is at least as written a kind of best practices modern constitution. Not that it was perfect because it guaranteed a lot of rights, which is good, but it also took recognition of the economic realities of South Africa. And what I mean by that is that the ANC, they knew that the distribution of wealth in the country was fundamentally unjust after generations of apartheid and before that imperialism. But they also knew they didn't want white South Africans with their capital and know-how to flee the country, as had happened, for example, in Zimbabwe. It was no longer And so they knew that they had to guarantee the rights of the white minority.”
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
“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 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.”
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
“Borrowing that, that was an idea that had been around. So you do some borrowing from other constitutions. And then you have to answer 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? 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”
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
“Almost no constitutions in the modern world are totally invented from scratch. The same would be if you were doing a startup. 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. He still looked to ask 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”
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
“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. And you can't negotiate against the backdrop of that much uncertainty in a realistic way.”
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
“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”
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