“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 It; What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building; Cool War: The United States, China, and the Future of Global Competition; Scorpions: 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 Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch the conversation on YouTube here.

Brought to you by MANSCAPED premium grooming products, Athletic Greens all-in-one nutritional supplement, and Allform premium, modular furniture. More on all three below.

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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.

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

• The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America by Noah Feldman | Amazon
• Deep Background with Noah Feldman Podcast | Pushkin Industries
• 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. | The Tim Ferriss Show #540
• What Does Russia Want in Ukraine? A Full Guide. | The New York Times
• Military Victories Against the Odds | Wikipedia
• Is the Lottery Really Just a Poor Person’s Tax? | Quora
• Polish Cavalry Myth Debunked: CNBC vs. the Polish Embassy | Warfare History Network [Note: This is a myth and has been debunked.]
• New York City Fire Department Rescue Company 1 | Wikipedia
• Rationalist Explanations for War by James D. Fearon | International Organization
• DJI Denies Throttling Ukrainian Army Drone Tech Amid Rumors | PetaPixel
• How Starlink Scrambled to Keep Ukraine Online | Wired
• The Big Exodus of Ukrainian Refugees Isn’t an Accident – It’s Part of Putin’s Plan to Destabilize Europe | The Conversation
• Preventing a Wider European Conflict | Council on Foreign Relations
• What DAOs Can Do: $6.75M in Ethereum for Ukraine | Decrypt
• Airbnbs in Ukraine: People Are Booking Them but Don’t Plan to Check In | CNN Travel
• Sanctions Against Russia: A Timeline | S&P Global Market Intelligence
• Forget the Obsession with Sanctions against Oligarchs. I Have a Better Way to Hurt Putin | The Guardian
• US-Backed Task Force Seizes More Than $30B of Russian Oligarch Assets | VOA
• Ukraine War: Russia Defaults on Foreign Debt for First Time Since 1918 | Bloomberg
• The US Dollar May Be the Next Casualty of the Ukraine War | Jacobin
• Korematsu v. United States: 323 US 214 (1944) | Justia US Supreme Court Center
• What the Happiest Places Have in Common | The Atlantic
• Snubbed By NATO, Zelensky-Led Ukraine Likely to Become EU Member Soon. Should Putin’s Russia Worry? | Crux
• Why Ukraine’s Longshot Bid to Join the EU Is Likely to Enrage Putin | CNN
• Appraising the War in Ukraine and Likely Outcomes | Foreign Policy Research Institute
• On War by Gen. Carl von Clausewitz | Amazon
• The Art of War by Sun Tzu | Amazon
• Why America Doesn’t Win Wars Anymore | Vox
• Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder | Amazon
• Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook by Edward N. Luttwak | Amazon
• Cool War: The United States, China, and the Future of Global Competition by Noah Feldman | Amazon
• Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? by Graham Allison | Amazon
• What “Machiavellian” Really Means | TED-Ed
• Free Speech Challenges to Florida and Texas Social Media Laws | Congressional Research Service
• Elon Musk Says Relaxing Content Rules on Twitter Will Boost Free Speech, but Research Shows Otherwise | Fast Company
• Spotify Pulls 70 Joe Rogan Episodes, Host Apologizes for Saying N-Word | Variety
• Four Plausible Reasons Bezos Bought Washington Post | Convince & Convert
• What Happened When Trump Was Banned on Facebook and Twitter | The New York Times
• In the Age of Social Media, Expand the Reach of the First Amendment | American Bar Association
• Citizens United Explained | Brennan Center for Justice
• Germany’s Balancing Act: Fighting Online Hate While Protecting Free Speech | Politico
• Was Oliver Wendell Holmes Right About Free Speech? | Publishers Weekly
• Do Bots Have First Amendment Rights? | Politico
• Jan. 6 Capitol Hill Riot Forced Social Networks to Look at Their Ugly Side | CNET
• Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity | Journal of the Association for Consumer Research
• Decentralized Social Networks Sound Great. Too Bad They’ll Never Work | Wired
• AWS Is the Internet’s Biggest Single Point of Failure | Vice
• Web1, Web2, and Web3 with Their Differences | GeeksforGeeks
• What Is the Metaverse? | The New York Times
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding | Amazon
• Augmented Reality (AR) vs. Virtual Reality (VR) | Splunk

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

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