Altered States

Signal Over Noise with Noah Feldman — The War in Ukraine (Recap and Predictions), The Machiavelli of Maryland, Best Books to Understand Geopolitics, The Battles for Free Speech on Social Media, Metaverse Challenges, and More (#608)

Illustration via 99designs

“According to [James D.] Fearon, if the two sides have different opinions about what’s going to happen, then you go to war because you don’t have perfect information about the outcome.”

— Noah Feldman

I rarely cover current events on this podcast, but this is a new experiment.

To avoid overwhelm, I do not track the news 24/7 with doom scrolling. Rather, I depend on conversations with my smartest friends to find the signal in the noise. The following exchange with Noah Feldman (@NoahRFeldman) is an example of such a conversation, very similar to what we would have offline, and I wanted to share it with you. I learned a ton and changed my thinking a lot, which I always do.

Noah Feldman is a Harvard professor, ethical philosopher and advisor, public intellectual, religious scholar and historian, and author of 10 books, including his latest, The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America. You can find my interview with him at tim.blog/noah.

Noah is the founder of Ethical Compass, which helps clients like Facebook and eBay improve ethical decision-making by creating and implementing new governance solutions. Noah conceived and designed the Facebook Oversight Board and continues to advise Facebook on ethics and governance issues.

Feldman is host of the Deep Background podcast, a policy and public affairs columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, and a former contributing writer for The New York Times. He served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of Iraq’s interim constitution.

He earned his A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard, finishing first in his class. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a DPhil from Oxford University, writing his dissertation on Aristotle’s Ethics. He received his JD from Yale Law School and clerked for Justice David Souter of the US Supreme Court.

He is the author of 10 books, including Divided by God: America’s Church-State Problem—and What We Should Do About ItWhat We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation BuildingCool War: The United States, China, and the Future of Global CompetitionScorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices; and The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President.

Please let me know what you think of this experimental format by sending me feedback on Twitter @tferriss. Do you love it? Do you hate it? Have suggestions for improvement? The usual long-form interviews with evergreen questions will still be the default and bread and butter of this podcast, but if you like this, I could see doing more of them, perhaps once a month or once every two months. It’s just an easy way to get caught up without drowning in news.

Please enjoy!

NOTE: This episode was recorded on June 22nd.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Musicor on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch the conversation on YouTube here.

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#608: Signal Over Noise with Noah Feldman — The War in Ukraine (Recap and Predictions), The Machiavelli of Maryland, Best Books to Understand Geopolitics, The Battles for Free Speech on Social Media, Metaverse Challenges, and More

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Want to hear my first conversation with Noah Feldman on this show? Listen here as we discuss achieving post-childhood language fluency, caffeine-free existence, “failing” at therapy, pre-Civil War interpretation of the US Constitution, circumstances that require trusting the untrustworthy, why a futurist needs to understand the past, the pros and cons of uneditable smart contracts on a blockchain, productive compromise, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the Iroquois Confederacy, and much more.

#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.

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

  • Connect with Noah Feldman:

Website | Twitter | Bloomberg | Facebook | Instagram | Harvard

SHOW NOTES

Note from the editor: Timestamps will be added shortly.

  • Russia vs. Ukraine: why?
  • The first Web3 war?
  • Will punishing Russian oligarchs make Putin blink?
  • Did Putin miscalculate, or is he just playing a longer game?
  • Could this conflict affect the US dollar’s status as a reserve currency?
  • Exploring base/best/worst possible outcomes of the conflict.
  • Recommended reading.
  • Free speech in the age of social media.
  • What’s at stake as free speech is legally reevaluated?
  • Enforcement, decentralization, and free market considerations.
  • Where Noah sees the free speech conversation in three years.
  • Will the future be colored predominantly in AR or VR?
  • Parting thoughts.

MORE GUEST QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“Money only governs all if the government allows it to.”
— Noah Feldman

“According to [James D.] Fearon, if the two sides have different opinions about what’s going to happen, then you go to war because you don’t have perfect information about the outcome.”
— Noah Feldman

“The Russians have much more limited objectives, but they’re still fighting, and the Ukrainians are still fighting back. So that just deepens the puzzle. What are they each fighting for now?”
— Noah Feldman

“Can Europe be a stable place or is Europe going back to the olden days where a government that had a serious army could just take over countries that it didn’t like?”
— Noah Feldman

“It’s entirely possible that in the long run, crypto would be to the advantage of an aggressor like Russia rather than being to the advantage of a state like Ukraine that’s defending itself.”
— Noah Feldman

“If the government regulates what we can do to each other in real life, and a private company regulates what we can do to each other in this AR-VR space simultaneously, it’s going to get really messy and really confusing.”
— Noah Feldman

PEOPLE MENTIONED

The Tim Ferriss Show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world with more than 700 million downloads. It has been selected for “Best of Apple Podcasts” three times, it is often the #1 interview podcast across all of Apple Podcasts, and it’s been ranked #1 out of 400,000+ podcasts on many occasions. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page.

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1 Comment

  1. Hi there! Just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed reading this post. Your approach to the subject was unique and informative. It’s clear that you put a lot of effort into your writing. Keep up the great work, and I can’t wait to see what else you have in store.

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