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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“You have Kilombo, there's no chance that you're going to be able to build a constitution. You might get a peace treaty to stop people from killing each other, and then you could talk about a constitution when you have order.”
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 if you're trying to build one of these things from scratch, the first thing you need to know is what people could credibly speak on behalf of the general public. What group of people could propose something that would have a chance of actually being accepted? So you need the right people at the table. And those also have to be people who think in the end that they have more to gain by an agreement than they do by failing to agree. And if they don't have more to gain by it, then they're not going to agree, and then you're going to get a collapse. I would just add one footnote to that, which I learned the hard way in Iraq, which is you can't really do this if you don't have order. If your situation is to use the amazing Argentinian Spanish word that you already taught me, it's quilombo, right?”
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 constitution is a blueprint for how any group of people wants to govern itself. And it requires collective agreement, not if necessarily every person, but of, let's say, a super majority of the people, a lot more than half. And because human beings can't get together in the hundreds of thousands to do that, what that practically means is that a smaller number of people have to propose the agreement and then have it validated by the more general public.”
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, you can't create a situation where people think there's anarchy. And so even if some of the people you are ordering to do things might have occasionally backslid, you'd have to take that risk if your only other option is not having anybody. If we had invaded Iraq with 600,000 troops the way that Colin Powell thought we should, we would have had enough of our own soldiers on the streets to do that. But we didn't do that. We invaded with a very small force. And when Baghdad fell, the total number of U.S. troops in the country was probably fewer than 100,000. And in Baghdad, it was way beneath that. So we just didn't have the bodies. And so you could drive for what felt like an hour and a half through the city and not see any representative of any authority. No cops, no U.S. troops, and certainly no Iraqi troops. So you do need to create that perception. And obviously there has to be some reality behind it because people will try to test it. But the perception”
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 the government because by then President Bush had sent out Ambassador Bremer and they were like, We've never heard of that guy And I realized that in that moment that we had really massively screwed it up. So, first thing you need to do is tell people who's in charge. And the second thing is you have to prove that it's real. And that means you have to have either police or soldiers on the street. And if you don't have enough of your own, which we didn't, you need to use the local people. So we should have had the local police or the local military, even if they weren't trustworthy out there on the streets communicating that someone was in charge. And if no one's in charge, then you're not safe as an ordinary person. And if you're not safe, you need someone who's going to protect you. And if you're not safe and need someone to protect you, you're going to look for what your local affiliation is in your neighborhood. And you're going to break into groups. We created a situation that's like if you're in a terrible neighborhood where there are gangs and there's a good person who doesn't want to join a gang, but there's no one else to protect them. You have to join a gang because you need protection from somebody because the state's”
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 had been coup d'etats in the past. It had been a while, but they knew what would happen. Some would go on the loudspeakers with trucks and say, you know, there's a new president, everyone stay home. Then the next day, they'd be like, there's a new president, everyone show up at work. And everyone understood that that was like not a request, but a direct order. We arrived, and for weeks and weeks, nobody knew who was in charge. Was there a civilian in charge? Was there a general in charge? Nobody knew who was in charge. And in fact, at one point, on the street in Iraq, someone actually asked me, a group of people actually asked me. First, they wanted to know, when is electricity coming back on? I didn't know. When's the water going to start running again? I didn't know. When does school reopen? I didn't know. And then someone said to me, who's the government? And I was like shocked by this question. I mean, I understood the words. It was only two words in Arabic. But I was like, what are they even asking me? And then I realized what they were saying. And I said, oh, you know, Ambassador Bremen.”
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 number one thing is failing to, the number one screw up is failing to tell everybody in the country who's in charge and proving that you're in charge. We never did it, and the Iraqis were literally super confused.”
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
“About what people were thinking about their constitutional aspirations. And I learned a lot about what not to do when you invade another country. I mean, everything that you could possibly know about what not to do, I learned because we did every single thing that you should not do when you invade another country. And most of the mistakes we made in Iraq, we made upfront in that very early period of time.”
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 let him use it. And that was the last time I wore a vest. Then I just walked around Iraq for the next couple of months, basically wearing civilian clothes, which, after all, is what the Iraqis we were meeting with were wearing. You meet with people, it's not actually a good look if you're all dressed up in battle rattle and they're just standing there. It sends exactly the wrong message. So that was how I got there. And it was a fascinating, fascinating experience because I basically talked to Iraqis from all walks of life, left the green zone every day. Originally, I would just take a cab. I would literally go out in front of what they later came to call the Assassin's Gate. We didn't call it that at the time and just hail a cab. And then at some point, I started taking cars from the motor pool when I got to know my way around a little bit better. And this was before the really bad terrorism began. It started very shortly thereafter, but I was able to travel over the country and talk to many people from different walks of life. And I learned a lot.”
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 she said, well, when you get shot with a nine, nine millimeter bullet, that will slow it down just enough that when it comes through you, it'll be at a nice easy pace. And then it'll hit the back wall of the vest, and it'll bounce back in, and it'll bounce around a few more times. And you can see the blood draining from my face. And then I said to him, Well, what will happen if I'm not wearing the vest? He says, son, then that nine will go right through you. And I was like, okay, that doesn't sound good either. He's like, believe me, it would be less bad. So I took off the vest and I literally gave it to someone else who had access to a ceramic plate, but not to the vest.”
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
“Exactly. Yeah, literally. And he said to me, son, you know what's going to happen to you wearing that vest? And I said, no, sir. I just instinctively called him sir. And he was the kind of guy who inspired that.”
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 up to date flak jackets, but the up to date flak jackets had a slot where you were supposed to put in a ceramic plate that would stop bullets. And they ran out of ceramic plates, which was appropriate because we were not high priority personnel. The ceramic plates needed to go to the frontline soldiers. So we had these vests without the plates. And so I would wear them. And then so this gentleman.”
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
“Republican palace. You don't even want to know about the bathroom arrangements. Your listeners might be a little squeamish around that one, or they should be if they knew what it was like. Who was on his way to becoming promoted to being a general? And he liked to make fun of me. And he was not much older than I was. He was probably five or six years older than I was, but he liked to call me son since he was about six inches taller than I was and a very distinguished African-American. He was getting a lot of pleasure out of this. And I remember the moment when they issued us, all civilians were issued with”
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
“Political. But in any case, I was like, great, sign me up. And I went. And I thought it was especially a good opportunity because since I wasn't a Republican, I wasn't going to be trying to advance within the ranks of the Bush administration. So I would just get there be on the ground and call it like it is, which is in fact what I ended up doing. And so we got to Baghdad about two days or three days after the statue of Saddam had come down. This is April of 2003. And it was, as you can imagine, just beyond a wreck. And we literally camped out in the Republican palace and the kitchen was big. It turned out maybe the kitchen was a poor choice because there were vents in the ground and enormous bugs were constantly coming up out of there. We put down our sleeping bags and then eventually we got these little cots and we would try to like put mosquito nets over ourselves. It was about as the summer progressed, it got to be about like 125 degrees in the shade. It never really cooled down in the”
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 was about what was likely to happen next. But I was 32 years old. And when they asked me, my first reaction was to say to the Defense Department official who called me, listen, I just want you to know, I'm very honored to be asked. I'd love to go, but you're not going to want me because I worked for Al Gore litigating in the Bush v. Gore 2000 election fight, which was just a few years prior to that. And you're going to find that out when you look me up. And I don't want to waste your time. And the guy was a very impressive guy called Ryan Henry, a former top gun pilot, very straight shooter. And he was actually offended. And he said to me, you know, young man, this is not a political appointment. We don't care what your politics are. Just go and do the job. And I was thrilled and too naive to realize that that was just a form of words. I mean, it may not have been from him. I think he may have meant it sincerely. It's just that in reality, once you got there, it turned out it was, of course, profoundly.”
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 was called After Jihad, America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy. And I wasn't saying that Islamic democracy would necessarily work, but I was saying no one's ever really tried it, and we Americans have never encouraged anybody to try it. And that was before anyone thought we should invade Iraq and create a circumstance where democracy might be able to emerge. At least that was the aspiration. But when the U.S. then did invade Iraq, there was an immediate rush within the, actually it was the Defense Department to see if they could find somebody who had studied Islam, could speak Arabic, and was an expert in constitutional law to go and work on the possible development of a constitution for Iraq that would be democratic. And the bottom line is there just weren't very many people with that particular skill set. You know, in fact, there may only have been a handful and the others didn't want to go, maybe because they were smarter than them.”
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 way I found myself sleeping on the floor of the palace kitchen in the Republican palace in Baghdad with 50 other very dirty men was that after 9-11, I took advantage of the fact that I had studied Islamic political philosophy to write a book arguing for how we as Americans could change our attitude towards the possibility of democracy in the Middle East.”
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 that, I think, captures both the upside, and you can imagine, too, the downside, which is that you never really feel like you've done enough. Because if you're always looking for positive reinforcement, you're never going to be perfect. And then you're always going to worry that you're not going to get that positive reinforcement. And so that captures potentially a non-trivial downside alongside the upside, which is like you then work really hard to do as well as you can on whatever you see as the task in that moment.”
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
“Let's say I came home from school with a test. And let's say I got a 99 on the test. They would say, what'd you get on the test? I got a 99. I got a 99. And then he would say, that's great. That would be the positive affirmation. Then there would be a bead. One, two, three. What'd you get wrong? And that was the message very subtly wrong. But if you did, we can learn from it so we do not make that mistake again. And so that captured both. It's very subtle, but I was in no doubt about what all the components of that meant.”
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, I'll give you an example that includes both the positive and the negative at once, and that'll give you the whole thing in one sentence.”
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 not like that. If you grew up being told that inner experience is a black box, it's kind of hard to delve into your inner experience. So my dad would never lay down the overt meaning because that wouldn't work. What worked was just to repeat the point enough that you heard it. And then if you behaved appropriately, give you positive reinforcement. And if you behaved inappropriately, give you negative reinforcement. And it turns out that is an incredibly effective way over time. to get your kids to see the world in a certain kind of way, especially if you add to it an oldest son, which I was, who really just worshipped his parents and in particular his dad, and really, really, really wanted to make them proud of him. As you can imagine, a lot of fodder there for the therapy later on too, because it's not all fun games. So that was 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
“Modern behaviorism. And so that school of thought held that you could produce any behavior you wanted if you just reinforced it. They just thought the human being is just a series of inputs and outputs.”
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 had done his dissertation with Stanley Milgram, the guy of the famous Milgram experiment, where he managed to get people to, they weren't actually doing this, but they thought they were giving electroshocks to a person behind a screen. And they basically did it because there was authority there. And my dad was also very influenced by B.F. Skinner, who was the inventor 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
“Well, to answer that question, I have to explain that both of my parents were social scientists. So their parents were one of my grandfathers went to a pharmaceutical college. The other went to a teacher's college. So they went to some kind of college. But my parents were the generation that made it to fancy universities. So my parents both had PhDs. My dad in social psychology and my mom in political science. And so they were social scientists and they were really interested in the question of what causes people to do stuff. And my dad in particular as a social psychologist”
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 so that, I think, also had a big influence on me. And then last, I would say, when I was in college, I took a class on constitutional law that was offered for college students. And there was a terrific teacher, a guy called H.W. Perry, who went on to teach later at the University of Texas as well. And it was a very intense, great group of just a great group of students in this class. And we all did constitutional law together. And we were like a little conlock cult. And it was so much fun. And some of my closest friends are people who were in that class with me. So it was a really important formative experience. And after that, I thought, oh, this is what law school is going to be like all the time, which at its best it was, although it wasn't always like that.”
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 irony is the book kind of did treat you like a short adult, and there was like a little sidebar with a drawing, and it was about a Supreme Court case called Tinker Against Des Moines School District, which at the time was a pretty fresh case. And it was a case where a family's worth of kids, young teens in Iowa wore black armbands to their school to protest the Vietnam War. And they got suspended for it. And they went to court. And the Supreme Court actually held that they had a free speech right in public school to wear those armbands because the court said it didn't disrupt the school. And even though they were kids, they had a constitutional free speech right. And that also blew me away. Like the idea that kids had rights seemed incredibly exciting to me. And no one explained to me at the time that since I went to a private religious school, I had no rights. But that was a separate matter that I had to learn later on.”
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 definitely were. I would say it started like a lot of things in my life started with my dad who had himself been a social psychologist, not a lawyer, but was always interested in law and legal institutions. And he used to take me actually to the courthouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I grew up when I was a little kid just to like watch the court cases and gave me books about law. And I think he was making it pretty clear that he wanted me to at least look into this as an option. I also remember reading as a kid I had a very kind of 1970s Cambridge, Massachusetts book, which was written for kids. It was a paperback book written on this brown kind of whole wheat colored paper, you know, designed to tell you that it was by hippies for hippies. And it was a book for kids. And it was called, you were not a short adult, which I think is a funny title for a book.”
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
“Lawyers are really, really good at that. You know, lawyers are like everybody else can't have a monopoly. And we're going to pass a law against monopolies. Oh, but if you want to practice law, you have to pass the bar. Who controls that a bunch of lawyers? They say you have to go to law school. What's that? It's a monopoly. It doesn't apply to us. It doesn't apply to us. That's just a necessary professional qualification.”
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
“Jurist doctor, which means a doctor of laws. And the whole thing was a marketing exercise by the American Bar Association in the late 60s, who they were looking at physicians whose prestige had really gone up. And they had FOMO, and they thought they go to school, we go to school. Then again, they also learn to cut up a cadaver, which is not something that a lawyer does. And they said, we're going to change the name of this degree. And they pressured all the law schools to change the LLB into a JD. They had a further excuse, which was they said, well, it's not your first degree. You've already gotten a BA. So therefore, your second degree should be something else. But, you know, if they were really serious about that, they could have called it a master's. But they didn't. They called it a doctor degree. So yeah, that happened.”
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 think that's the aspiration. I'm not saying that every lawyer manages to do that every day, but that is the aspiration of law as a legal system. That's why we have a legal system to try to enable us to arrange our world in a slightly better way than we would be able to arrange it without it. So I said, let me try this out and see if I like it. And on the JT thing, that's actually really funny. If you look at old people's resumes, people who went to law school before the late 60s, it'll say often LLB, which is what the degree used to be called. It used to be called Bachelor of Laws. And now it says JD. And so you look at that and you think, oh, they must have really made law school a lot tougher and more serious when they changed it to a JD. No. It was a pure marketing exercise.”
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 affects real people in the real world. And you can either do it really badly and harm people, or you can try to do it better and perhaps make the world suck a little bit less at the end of the day. And so.”
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 wasn't going to be completely satisfied. Not because I believe there isn't something really fundamentally valuable about study for its own sake. I do. I believe the study for its own sake is tremendously valuable. But I just thought from my own personality that I would be frustrated to feel like, okay, you understood some guy who lived a thousand years ago better today. And you helped the five other people in the world who care about this dude to understand it better. And again, I have tremendous honor and respect for people who do that all the time. And I work with them in the university. And I'm always telling them how valuable and important what they do is and telling the rest of the world how important it is. But I knew I would be frustrated with it and law seemed to me like a domain where you could still try to crack the codes. You could still study things. You could still try to go deep. But where at the end of the day, there's always an output.”
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 knew at the end of college and then having gone and done a doctorate in medieval Islamic studies, I knew that every morning I'd be thrilled to get up and enter the Middle Ages. I knew I would be fun for me every day. I was a little worried that at the end of the day, when I looked back and said, what contribution have I made to the world? How have I affected the world?”
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
“Was Near Eastern languages and civilizations, which was basically Hebrew, Jewish, Islamic material, basically, from all different historical periods.”
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
“According to their beliefs, you could read it against the grain and you could say that it was actually an anti-slavery document or an anti-racist document because you knew if you were a black abolitionist in the 1830s, 40s, 50s, that racism was evil.”
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
“They are discussing whether you should bring your personal beliefs to bear on the interpretation or whether you should interpret it in the light of what the people who wrote it believed. And that's a very similar debate to the debate that happened around scripture because Protestants often thought in America that you should interpret Scripture partly in the light of your own inspiration. Whereas Catholics historically thought that you should interpret scripture in the light of what the church fathers said that Scripture meant and what the church said that it meant. So those are totally different viewpoints. And so here you have these black abolitionists who, not for nothing, a lot of them had also studied religion and some of them were ministers, were arguing exactly about should we interpret the Constitution that way or not. And it really mattered because if you interpret the Constitution according to the people who wrote it, they knew it was racist because it protected slavery. But if you interpret”
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, you're making a great point. Yeah. I mean, that's a great, great point. The comparison between the interpretation of Scripture and the interpretation of the Constitution is a really tight one in U.S. history. And in this book that I've just finished about Lincoln, the Broken Constitution, I've actually got great examples of black abolitionists in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s when we just, if we've heard of an abolitionist who's black from then, we've heard of Frederick Douglass, but there were actually dozens of very serious, committed black abolitionists, and they're actually debating the Constitution. And they're discussing explicitly whether it should be compared to scripture or not compared to Scripture.”
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 he said, well, I'm not going to pay any attention to the intent of the people who wrote this document who were not thinking about gay rights. And who probably never heard of trans rights? So basically, I then used that example to say, you see, this is how someone who wants to be an intellectual thinks. And as it happens in this instance, I'm really happy with the way it came out, but the form of logic is this highly weird way of talking that a regular person interpreting a law would never, I don't think, hit on. So then I thought, okay, that's not a bad example to show, I hope, that he really wants to be an intellectual leader, and for that, he needs to be consistent and to be consistent, he has to do something that seems totally non-obvious and actually makes a lot of people on his side mad at him.”
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
“Extend to discrimination against gay and trans people. So I pop that in as the example, and then I try to explain why I proved my point, namely that he was saying something that was completely the opposite of what his ideological buddies believe, but he was doing it out of a principle of consistency and the principle of consistency is supposed to be that he believes you're just supposed to read laws according to their text. You're not supposed to look at their intention and you're not supposed to look at the purpose of the people who drafted them. You're just supposed to look at the text. And he said, if you just look at the text and it says because of sex, if you're discriminating against a gay person, because he's gay, then you're discriminating against him because you're treating him differently because he has sex with men than you would if it were a woman who has sex with men because that person would be straight. And so therefore, you're discriminating based on sex to go for a trans person. So it's like highly formalistic.”
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 was trying to explain why that mattered for his, what appears to be his real aspiration, which is to be the heir to the late Justice Anthony Scalia as the conservative intellectual leader of the court. So I began by kind of like saying this, that he's the first one to have a doctorate and describing how he went back to get it in the middle of his legal career, which is kind of incredibly impressive. And I don't know how in the world he did it. Then I paused and said to myself, okay, but how do I prove that he really wants to be the intellectual leader of the court? And so I said, okay, I'm going to use this really famous decision. He's only got one really famous one so far. So there weren't that many examples that I could use. But this case called the Bostock case from a couple years ago, where he, who's a real deep conservative, ruled that the anti-discrimination laws, Title VII, that prohibit workplace discrimination and that say no workplace discrimination because of sex.”
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, exactly. I'm done. There I am. He shows you that I need it. So I just wrote a column about Justice Neil Gorsuch, who's the first Supreme Court justice ever to have a doctorate.”
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 should just say it's very variable depending on whether it's a daily column that is going to go out. And in the old days, they would say about newspaper columns that they wrap fish tomorrow. In the era of the internet, they don't even wrap fish. Like they're not even as useful as being able to be fish wrapping So, something like that, when I write it, if I'm responding to something in the world, which is usually the way I write a column, then I usually have an argument, a thing I want to say. And I've usually gotten that down on paper. Often I'm missing good examples to prove my point. So often when I look it over at the end of drafting it, I say, well, that's all very well and good, but how do you prove it? So I go back in and I put in.”
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
“Wow. I mean, that's incredible to hear because you obviously have been such an extraordinary writer, and you also write in a very fluid, accessible way. That's actually really, really fascinating. I remember one streeting, Tim, that you talked about maybe it was your senior essay that you had a hard time getting into that, but then once you got into it, you did it.”
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 my ideas are And to the extent there's an outline for me, it's only that I think, where do I want to end up? And then I just start talking and try to get there. And if I feel a need for an outline in midstream, I'll say there are three points that I wish to make. And then I'll start listing them. And it might turn out that there's two or six or 100 or that they're all stupid. But the great thing is you can delete it all later. And you see the words magically appearing in front of you as you go. And I find it way less intimidating than the blank piece of paper.”
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 use a product called Dragon, naturally speaking, which I've been really loyal to over the years as they have continued to improve it. And it was just luck that I picked one that turned out to be one of the leading ones in the industry. I think that the company that makes it ended up also licensing their technology to a lot of other voice recognition systems. And for me, the best practices are, and it used to have to have a very good microphone, and now the processing power of the computers is great enough that you don't need as good a microphone because it can handle imprecision. I'm sure the quality of the microphones is also really improved. So you can sit in front of your computer. And I do it by looking at what appears on the screen when I speak. And I do try to speak not quite as fast as I do the rest of the time, even though I do talk pretty fast in general, even when I'm talking to the computer. And I think of it as though I had an audience. I imagine that I'm telling someone.”
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
“Since then, pretty much every word that I've written comes first in draft form from speech. I talk it, whether it's a column or a book or something in between.”
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
“Exactly, yeah, repetitive stress injury. And it turned out the only real answer was don't engage in that physical movement. And at the time, there still weren't very many touchscreens. You could maybe get one if you spent a ton of money on it. And most computers required a mouse as your primary interface. And I just couldn't use the mouse and I couldn't hold my wrists in a good position for typing. I started using voice recognition software. A very close friend of mine who had actually, he had a much more admirable injury. He had injured his hand lifting. It's an incredibly brilliant guy who was also like an incredible shape. And he was like, oh yeah, try this voice recognition software. And I started using it. And at the time it wasn't so great, but it was much better than being in constant pain. And it actually had a huge influence on me because.”
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
“Since it wasn't that good, I've used it since 2002. And when I wrote my first book, which I did right after 9-11, wrote that book on a little laptop. And I screwed up my wrists from using the mouse on the laptop. And I remember in the middle of it, I actually went to the doctor because I was like, I'm having this really weird wrist and arm pain. And I have just no idea what this pain is. And I was actually newly married and I was like, I have never really extensively slept in the same bed with another person before. Does it have something to do with that? I mean, it's absurd thing to say. And the doctor was like, okay, describe what you do every day. And I'm like, I sit on my computer. He's like, show me how. I sat down. I put my hands out. He's like, does your arm hurt? I was like, oh, it's really hurting. And he was like, you have an RSI. And so I was like, okay, well, what do I do? Because I realized then I drank a book. RSI is right.”
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
“Have to just let things bubble up. You can't force it. You cannot force your way into having successful talk therapy. And that was the takeaway for me. And I know most people listening to this are like, duh. Like you have to be pretty dumb not to have realized that. Like that says it on the bottle. But I was that kind of dumb. And I think it derived from having this approach to everything else where I thought, okay, what am I going to do? What am I supposed to be doing here? I'm going to totally do it. And I'm going to do it in a total concentrated way. And I'm going to know at the end of it that I accomplished it so that I can move on to the next thing.”
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 think that's it. I mean, I think it's that, I don't know about meditative because you are talking some of the time. And depending on who your therapist is, the therapist might also be talking. Some don't like to say very much. But I think what I realized was”
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