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

“Well, I guess the reason I thought I was failing is I was mistakenly thinking that therapy was like every other thing that I do, a concentrated 45 minute session where you're supposed to accomplish something. And I would go in and on the way out, I was like, I didn't accomplish anything. I don't feel better. I don't feel worse. I didn't have any deep self-revelation. Like, what the hell did I do in the sense that I was only doing it wrong because I thought I was doing it wrong? Like you can't do therapy wrong, but I thought that there was a way to do it right and therefore there must be a way that I wasn't doing it. And also I wasn't getting any better. So then I thought, okay, you know, I really am doing it wrong. And then over time took a long time. I came to realize that just sitting there and being in the moment and letting it happen and not saying, okay, I'm going to go in to achieve this and I'm going to leave having achieved that was the only way therapy was ever going to do anything. And I wish I could tell you that like I thought of that quickly, but I didn't.”
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
“Completely, it's gone. And then I do the next thing. And by doing it that way, I think I'm just saving the time waste that we have in a kind of self-questioning that inevitably sinks in the rest of the time. Now, you might say what's missing from this is self-reflection. And honestly, I think for many years of my life, that's true. I think for many years of my life, I was missing genuine self-reflection. Like I had fake self-reflection where I had conversations and thought about things, but I wasn't really, really, really doing it. And it was until my late 30s when I went to see a shrink for the first time because I was having an early midlife meltdown that I actually engaged in that kind of self-reflection. And I did not know how to do it. I really didn't know how to do it. And I would say to myself, after therapy, oh my God, I'm failing at therapy. Like I know I just wasted that whole session.”
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, one out of 10 days, or even if it's one out of 100 days, something will happen. And I really try to just be present for that. If I sit down in front of my computer and say, okay, I'm going to write a column now. I literally shut out everything except for that column. And I turn on my voice recognition software because I do everything by voice recognition software. And I just focus completely and I've trained myself to just put myself into flow. And I do it. I don't worry about whether it's good or it's bad. I just get it out there. Worry about whether it's good or it's bad when I'm done with it. And then it's done. And then I stop, take a deep breath, read it over. I hit send to my editor. Thank God I have an editor so that I'm not reliant on myself to know whether there was any good or not. An editor will tell you this one was terrible. Throw this one out. But I send it to the editor and I put it out of my mind.”
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 let me first say I want to thank you for getting me to think about this systematically, not just in this conversation, but it was actually when I met you and we were sort of starting to chat about this. And I actually had never thought about how I arranged my life at all. I just kind of did it. But now I've actually thought about it a little bit. And I think the answer, if there is one, is whatever I'm doing in that moment, I really try to be completely focused and present on that moment and never thinking about the thing that comes next. And over time, I think I train myself to be able to do that. So if I get up in the morning and walk my daughter to the bus, she's more than old enough that she does not need me to walk her to the bus. She's maybe even a little embarrassed by it. But I have this theory that if you're there as a parent, sometimes in the middle of the routine, like a meaningful moment will happen. And it might not happen most days when it's, you know, seven in the morning and we're bleary-eyed and neither of us isn't the greatest mood. But if we're both...”
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
“Extremely intense. And I can actually feel my heart beating too fast when I use it. I can literally put my hand on my chest and feel the vibration and realize that doesn't sound good.”
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 really like caffeine, but I think I'm unbearable to myself on it, and I'm sure I'm unbearable to others on it too. I think it's just metabolic luck. I wake up and I have a lot of energy to do stuff. And I like doing stuff that's fun. I do get plenty of sleep, which I think helps a lot. I'm one of these people who believes that, and I've heard you say this on your show too, that if you undersleep yourself, sure, then you're going to need caffeine or some other substance to get you going. But if you get enough sleep, you don't need the caffeine, and you can just blast hard the rest of the time and sort of suck all of the juice out of life. So I think that's the reason that I don't use caffeine. Also, as I said, I think it makes me super irritating. I get extremely up in everybody else's face”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #540: Harvard Polymath Noah Feldman — Deep Focus for Hyper-Productivity, Learning 10+ Languages, Predicting the Future with History, the Possibilities (and Limitations) of DAOs, Lessons from the Iraq Invasion, Designing the Supreme Court of Facebook, the Virtue of Scholarship, and the Wild Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We like this. We wanted people from all over the Arab world who were inspired by Islam to go and fight against the Soviet Union, which was our enemy. And so the base meant the base of people who got together to fight the Soviets. And that's how the organization got its name.”
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, if you wanted to say it in formal Arabic, you'd say al-Haida. And that means the base. It literally means the base. And it was the name that bin Laden and those around him gave to their organization. After the US began to help people fight the Soviets who had invaded Afghanistan. And what bin Laden's business was basically, you know, he was a rich kid, a super rich kid. And he went to Afghanistan and he was trying to organize people from outside of Afghanistan, primarily from the Arabic-speaking world, but also from elsewhere, to come to Afghanistan and fight the jihad against the Soviets. You know, if this doesn't screw with your mind, nothing will. We support.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #540: Harvard Polymath Noah Feldman — Deep Focus for Hyper-Productivity, Learning 10+ Languages, Predicting the Future with History, the Possibilities (and Limitations) of DAOs, Lessons from the Iraq Invasion, Designing the Supreme Court of Facebook, the Virtue of Scholarship, and the Wild Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's some kind of metaphor there. I always think of like, I know the question to ask and I can sort of understand your answer, but I don't understand all of your answer. And there's some situations where that's really bad, like when you're a traveler and the answer involves going right and going left, and you know those words, but you don't exactly know what they mean everywhere. We're in between. You know, you're like, you think you're following the algorithm, but you actually aren't”
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
“Definite article. You're completely right. And it goes in front of proper nouns and it goes in front of names too. Almost every time you see the AL prefix in a word that we use in English, it comes from Arabic and it almost always comes from Arabic via Spanish because the Arabs were in Spain and then there was this long, complicated 800 year struggle over whether the Christians or the Muslims would control Spain. And if you're struggling with someone for 800 years, you're sharing a lot of culture and civilization along the way. And there are a lot of high moments when people are getting along. And so it's also true whenever you're in Latin America and speaking Spanish, words that start with AL are all over the language, you know, even more than they are in English. And every single one of those words basically with no exception is actually an Arabic word. And that's like totally fascinating to 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
“Uneducated people will say, Oh, you speak such a beautiful Arabic. You speak so much better than we do. And you're like, no, I don't speak better than you do. I just speak newscaster Arabic, but they're taught that that's somehow better or higher. And so they're really like deferential and respectful. And it makes you feel awful because, in fact, the whole point is you don't actually speak their colloquial. And it will take you months to be able to even order in a restaurant”
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 just sound like you're a newscaster or something. And then the answer you back, and if it's an educated person, they answer you in modern standard Arabic, and then you're having a conversation. But if they answer you in their local colloquial, you're like smiling and you have no idea what they just said. No idea. And then you have to say to them, oh, would you please speak formal Arabic, which you can't always say to someone who hasn't had advanced schooling. And then the most embarrassing part is then.”
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 different that as you get further and further apart, they literally would not be able to understand each other. So it's literally the case that someone who only speaks Iraqi dialect would not be able to understand very well someone who only spoke Moroccan or Tunisian dialect. They're almost different languages. And what people do understand comes mostly from watching TV shows that are broadcast all over the region. So, for example, in the 50s and 60s, the Egyptian TV stations were the dominant ones. And so actually people all over the Arab world can still often understand Egyptian Arabic because they just watched it on TV. And over time, they picked it up. So it's like a fascinating aspect of Arabic. And it's also really frustrating because when you land in a country where you don't speak the dialect, and I had this experience in Tunisia right after the Arab Spring, when I spent a lot of time there, you get off the plane, you're talking to people, and everyone can understand modern standard Arabic. So you can make yourself understood really well.”
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 then they assimilated into all of the local cultures, ranging all the way from the Iraq-Iran border in the east all the way to Morocco in the west, and then up all the way into Spain. So that's an enormous geographical span, and they were encountering different languages wherever they went. And the local languages basically merged to some degree with the formal Arabic that had come along. And so the result is that over the next roughly 1300 years, the daily spoken languages diverged even as the written language remained pretty standard everywhere and as the language, let's say, of the Quran and then later the language of newspapers and newscasters remained pretty stable. So the result is that if you were listening to an Iraqi speaking colloquial everyday Iraqi Arabic and an Egyptian and a Tunisian and a Moroccan, they are”
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 spectrum of Arabic is maybe the biggest of almost any language that you can still call the same language. And part of the reason for that is when the original Arabs following the Prophet Huhmad came out of Arabia in the 7th and 8th centuries, they conquered a large part of the known world. And only a small number of them went out there and they brought their Arabic, which was”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #540: Harvard Polymath Noah Feldman — Deep Focus for Hyper-Productivity, Learning 10+ Languages, Predicting the Future with History, the Possibilities (and Limitations) of DAOs, Lessons from the Iraq Invasion, Designing the Supreme Court of Facebook, the Virtue of Scholarship, and the Wild Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This. He kept on referring to the exam as the banquet. He would say, You have eaten the meals, and now you must attend the banquet. And then when the semester came to an end, he literally did not give us a final exam. He was like, you all have learned very well. And he actually took us out to dinner instead of a final exam. I mean, I was just like, that is what a good teacher is. He knew what each of us knew it was good enough for him. Boom, we're done here”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #540: Harvard Polymath Noah Feldman — Deep Focus for Hyper-Productivity, Learning 10+ Languages, Predicting the Future with History, the Possibilities (and Limitations) of DAOs, Lessons from the Iraq Invasion, Designing the Supreme Court of Facebook, the Virtue of Scholarship, and the Wild Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it worked, and I loved it and I worked my tail off. And unlike, I guess all the other people in Harvard Summer School who are old enough to go out and party, I wasn't. So I'm doing my homework every night. And later when I went to college, I took this class that you were referring to there, which was a kind of amazing class. He was Egyptian. And he introduced us to modern standard Arabic, which is what the newscasters speak. But he also had these linguistic tricks that were literally like a code that he had worked out. And he taught us these tricks in the course so you could translate in real time almost like an algorithm your formal modern standard Arabic into Egyptian colloquial Arabic. And it was kind of like a bizarre and fascinating thing that it worked so well, but it did. It just worked like a charm. And he loved all of the students, who most of us decided Arabic with him before. And just final story about 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
“And he opened up the world of the Arabic language to me. And he was a very distinctive guy. He had his own book that he used to teach that he had invented, he had his own tapes that we listened to in the old-fashioned language lab where we'd go and listen to them on tape de”
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 he said, hold on a moment. And he picked up the phone and he called the registrar of the summer school. And they had a conversation. And I didn't think it was going very well from what I could hear on one end of it. He hung up and he said, I have good news. You will study Arabic. I was like, great. He said, there is only one condition. You may not pay tuition and you may not take the final examination. So basically, he had gotten on the phone, he had called the registrar, the registrar had said, No, I'm not going to let you register some little kid for your class. And he had said, okay, no problem. And then he hung up the phone and just said, okay, you can come to my class. It's my class. You come to my class. You're just not going to pay, and you're not going to show up at the table of the final exam.”
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 he was very formal. He spoke in this very mellifluous, deep bass kind of voice. And he said to me, you wish to study the Arabic language? And I said, yes, Dr. Bisha, I do. He said, you may study the Arabic language. And then I said, but I have a problem, which is that you can't sign up for the summer school unless you're 16. And I'm not 16”
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, Dr. Bishai, Wilson Bishai, who's kind of a hero of mine, was a major important person in my life, even before I took that class, because he was the one who, when I showed up and wanted to enroll at the Harvard Summer School as a young teen, I was just finished ninth grade, and I wanted to take Arabic, let me take his class. And I had the following experience. I went into his office to discuss this with him. And he was a very formal guy. So it was like the summer and he was wearing a full suit. In my memory, he even had a vest on, although I might be a magic vest. And like a big tie.”
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 like, we're here. Egypt's not that far away. Let's go check out Egypt. And I guess it was close enough to the 60s that there was still this idea that you just kind of threw your kid in the back of the car, literally, and just went. And you couldn't go directly from Israel to Egypt at the time. So that meant they had to go via, I think they went via Cyprus probably by boat, if I remember correctly. And they were just like, what the heck? There were no car seats in that world. Let's put it that way. So I think they just wanted to see what it was like. And then once they were there, you know, they were also an important element. They were Americans. And Americans could go anywhere. We've been incredibly privileged through our lives and also our parents' lives that that passport, that blue passport mostly lets you in almost wherever you want to go. People might not like us very much, but they pretty much always let us in. And then if they don't, we invade them. So that's probably not such a good thing.”
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've talked to my parents a lot about why they like to travel the way they did when we were little. And they were in Israel for the year. My dad had an academic fellowship there. My mom was in graduate school, so she was working under dissertation. But wherever you do that, when you've got one little kid and you've got another one on the way, she somehow managed to pull that off.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #540: Harvard Polymath Noah Feldman — Deep Focus for Hyper-Productivity, Learning 10+ Languages, Predicting the Future with History, the Possibilities (and Limitations) of DAOs, Lessons from the Iraq Invasion, Designing the Supreme Court of Facebook, the Virtue of Scholarship, and the Wild Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, really fundamentally distinct. And that made me realize that, to put it very bluntly, a lot of what I'd been taught Could characterize as not having been true from someone else's perspective. It's not that anybody was consciously lying to me. They were just giving me their perspective. And suddenly I was hearing pretty much 180 degrees the opposite perspective. And that is the most useful lesson you could possibly give a young teenager trying to.”
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 broke it. I mean, it changed my worldview radically and totally. And that's because when you learn a language, it puts you in the thought world of the people who speak it. And you no longer are seeing them as an outsider imagining what they might think when they speak to themselves, but you're actually a participant. You may not be a member of the group, but you can participate because you can speak the language. And since I'd been raised in this milieu that was very Israel focused, very Jewish, there were all kinds of ideas about what Arabic speakers were like, what Arabic was like, what the world of the Arab pupil was. And just to see that from the opposite perspective, it blew my mind at a very early age. And I think very few things have had as big an influence on me because I just realized that things just looked different from an alternative perspective. They weren't necessarily better or worse. They were just...”
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
“Only 15 years old or 14 years old, aspiration to understand the world. And then maybe I could bring peace to the Middle East. That didn't work out so well. But the idea was to decode these things that are otherwise unavailable. And there's actually nothing more frustrating in life than hearing someone speak a language that you don't speak because you know there's a whole universe going on there. You can see the animation. You know there are emotions. You can recognize something and you don't know what they're saying. And so for me, the impulse to decode is to sort of get behind there and to know what's going on underneath.”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #540: Harvard Polymath Noah Feldman — Deep Focus for Hyper-Productivity, Learning 10+ Languages, Predicting the Future with History, the Possibilities (and Limitations) of DAOs, Lessons from the Iraq Invasion, Designing the Supreme Court of Facebook, the Virtue of Scholarship, and the Wild Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, thank you for that way of putting it, which I love, and it's better than I could have put it myself. I think I was trying to decode the world around me. So my parents sent me to a Jewish school where they taught us Hebrew. And they also took us to the Middle East when I was old enough to remember it. And I remember being a little kid in Israel and seeing street signs in Hebrew, Arabic, and English and having really no idea at that age that there was a very complicated layered history of that with not a lot of getting along and a lot of fighting, but an aspiration via these different languages to try to get along. And I just thought, well, if there's multiple languages, I'm supposed to know them because they were sending me to a school where they taught me this language. And then there it was on a street sign. So I thought, okay, I guess I'm supposed to figure these things out. And that actually led me to go and study Arabic in the kind of naive, childish, and in my defense.”
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
“My dad was like, oh, thank goodness these languages are basically all the same. And I remember being told that story from an early, early age. And I think the takeaway, all of my dad's stories had takeaways. And I think the takeaway was, A, language matters. B, even people who are really, really mad at each other have a lot of overlap, including overlap of language. And I think that always stayed with me.”
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 my dad was freaking out because we're like in the middle of Egypt. This kid is speaking Hebrew to his father. And it's a time literally between the 1967 and 1973 wars where Israel and Egypt were like not only at war with each other in the midst of like an actual shooting war over the Suez Canal, but like they were between two megawars and people came up to him and were like, so nice your son already speaks Arabic and he's only one year old. He's saying Abu Awabu Abu”
2021-10-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #540: Harvard Polymath Noah Feldman — Deep Focus for Hyper-Productivity, Learning 10+ Languages, Predicting the Future with History, the Possibilities (and Limitations) of DAOs, Lessons from the Iraq Invasion, Designing the Supreme Court of Facebook, the Virtue of Scholarship, and the Wild Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it started basically in a Kilombo. Thanks for teaching me that new word. Of a childhood where my parents definitely thought that we should live in a bunch of different worlds. And before I was born had spent time in Afghanistan and had Afghan friends that I knew when I was growing up and actually had two Afghan teenagers living with us when I was a little kid. And then we went and spent a year in Israel. And I don't remember this because I was too little, but I have the pictures of myself on a backpack on my dad's back in front of the Acropolis in Athens and then in front of the pyramids in Egypt and on the Temple Mountain Jerusalem. And so I think I was just being exposed to a million languages, or maybe not a million, but a lot of languages when I was a really, really small kid. And my dad would always tell the story about being in Cairo. And I was running around and I was, I think, like one and a half. And I called my dad ABBA, which is Hebrew or actually it's Aramaic for dad. And I was saying, Abba, Baba.”
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