The Tim Ferriss Show - #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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Starting point is 00:04:41 listeners at allform.com slash Tim. Make sure to use the code Tim at checkout. That's allform.com slash Tim and use code Tim at checkout. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everyone. I very 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 because that will crush my soul. Rather, I depend on conversations with my smartest friends to find the signal in the noise. The following conversation

Starting point is 00:05:35 with Noah Feldman is an example of such a conversation. And it is very similar to what we would have offline, and I wanted to share it with you. I learned a ton. And as usual, I changed my thinking a lot, which I always do when I chat with Noah. Please let me know what you think of this experimental format by sending me feedback on Twitter at Tferriss, T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S.

Starting point is 00:05:58 Do you love it? Do you hate it? Do you have suggestions for improvement? How to make it better? The usual long form interviews with evergreen questions will still be the default and bread and butter of this podcast. So don't worry about it being replaced. But if you like this format, I could see doing more of these episodes, perhaps once a month or

Starting point is 00:06:14 once every two months. It's just a very easy way to get caught up without drowning in the news. I'm going to have these conversations anyway. So let me know if you would like me to share them. Let me know what you think. And thanks for listening. I'm thrilled to welcome back Noah Feldman. You can find him on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman, F-E-L-D-M-A-N. Noah 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, subtitle, Lincoln's Slavery and the Refounding of America. He's also a hyper polyglot. It tells you something when that can be omitted in the bio. Moving on, Feldman is host of the Deep Background podcast, a policy and public affairs columnist for Bloomberg Opinion,

Starting point is 00:07:05 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 D.Phil, which I just learned how to pronounce properly, 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 U.S. Supreme Court. Noah's 10 books also include Divided by God, America's Church-State

Starting point is 00:07:41 Problem and What We Should Do About It, What We Owe Iraq, War and the Ethics of Nation Building, Cool War, subtitle, 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. You can find them on Twitter, as mentioned, at Noah R. Feldman, Instagram, at Noah R. Feldman. And all things Noah can be found at noah-feldman.com. Our first interview can be found at Tim.blog slash Noah. And thank you for being here, Noah. I was born to be a lab rat. I'm very excited. And we have spec'd out a few different subjects, a few different topics that we'll attempt to navigate. And I use the royal we here because it's going to be mostly you.

Starting point is 00:08:33 I'm sure that won't be true. But I will play the part of audience stand-in, and I'll ask questions. Let's begin with Ukraine. And you can kick this off in any way that makes sense in the micro, the macro or otherwise. How would you like to begin? I think a good place to start is with the question that never really gets asked in all the coverage of this long war. And that is, why do people go to war in the first place? And that might sound like a stupid question, because people like stuff and other people have the stuff. And if I have an army and I can take

Starting point is 00:09:10 your stuff, why not go to war? And that does seem to be sort of at some very basic level what's going on here. Putin just calculated that he had an army and he wanted at least part of Ukraine and maybe more and he could do it. But the real question that's underlying that is a question about whether people who run countries are a little bit rational. You don't have to believe that they're completely rational. You just have to think that when they decide to go to war, they know people are going to die. They know it's going to cost them something. They also know there's something to be gained. And so the assumption that they're rational is just an assumption that they've thought about the pros and cons of doing it. And I think in the case of

Starting point is 00:09:48 someone like Putin, who may have made a tremendous miscalculation with this war, but has been pretty successful in a lot of his other foreign policy undertakings, you can be sure he thought it over. And so the question that raises is, if Tim has a very, very large army, and I have a very small army, and Tim wants my country, and Tim comes to my border, he masses his troops, and says, hey, I want, let's say, your two favorite provinces. And I say, no. And Tim says, well, then I'm going to invade you, and a lot of people are going to die. Some on my side, but a lot on your side. And at the end, I'm going to have the provinces. And I say, huh, holy crap.

Starting point is 00:10:31 I mean, maybe Tim is correct. And if Tim is correct, I should just give up. Because I'm going to lose the provinces anyway. And fewer people will be dead. And I won't have destroyed my army, which I might need another day. And meanwhile, you should only make that threat if you're very confident that you're going to win. So logically speaking, it's a puzzle. Why does anyone actually fight the war? And I'm fascinated by that question, and I think Ukraine really, really raises it.

Starting point is 00:10:59 Well, how would you make an attempt to answer that question? Do you think it was a miscalculation? I have heard stories, and I'm sure I'm going to get the historical details completely wrong, but maybe it was Belgium with the procession of Germans pre or during World War II, but the underdog standing up and having only a snowball's chance in hell, but nonetheless having a snowball's chance in hell and defeating the odds, defying the odds, why do you think we have ended up where we are? Or perhaps even in what some people would consider an irrational calculation. I was thinking about this yesterday. For instance, I think a lot of lower income folks get made fun of by people who are sanctimonious in the higher echelons of society for buying lottery tickets. And they say, well, that's just a tax on the poor, right? It's stupid. But then I was thinking, is it really stupid?

Starting point is 00:12:01 Maybe it's buying hope for a dollar a day. In which case, if having a sliver of hope's buying hope for a dollar a day, in which case, if having a sliver of hope is only costing you a dollar a day, that's actually the bargain of a lifetime. So how would you begin to tease apart how what you just described has played out in Ukraine versus Russia? First of all, let me say I love that example of the lottery tickets. It's one of my favorite examples of how elitists, and I'm perfectly capable of being elitist sometimes, so this is not an argument that all elitists are bad or that everyone's an elitist, but why elitists get it wrong? Because they think, I wouldn't get any joy or pleasure out of spending a buck,

Starting point is 00:12:46 which I'm probably going to lose. So whoever does it must be delusional using a rational actor calculus. And they fail to realize there's what you might call entertainment value, but even entertainment is understating it. Hope is really a feeling that matters. Now, that doesn't mean you should spend hundreds of dollars that you don't have on lottery tickets, but it is an argument. So there's a direct analogy to that in the case of war. You could also think of this in the context of 9-11. One of the fire chiefs, a guy called Ray Downey, who was the chief who had started Rescue One, which was the part of the New York Fire Department that goes to save firemen who are in trouble. And he went back into the buildings when I think it was extremely,

Starting point is 00:13:27 it must have been extremely clear to him that he wasn't going to come out of those buildings. And that's a product of spending your life saving firemen, and there were firemen in harm's way. And he must have, in my imagination at least, made the judgment in that moment, which I deem a heroic judgment, that he didn't want to walk away from those buildings that day. That would have been a violation of everything he stood for. So for sure, there is an element of that. And sometimes if you're standing up and fighting for your country, even against the odds, it should be explained in that way, that you know you're going to lose, but your dignity and your pride matter enough

Starting point is 00:14:04 to sacrifice your life. And so that can be an explanation sometimes for why a side that thinks it's going to lose a war, even it's sure it's going to lose the war, doesn't stand up. So you do need to take that into account. But that probably doesn't cover the decision of all statesmen and stateswomen, you know, the people at the top whose job it is to take into account not just pride, but the interests of their whole nation. And so there's a very interesting theory about why people, even in that situation, go to war, which I've always been fascinated by. I don't think I buy it 100%, but I think it's really valuable to think about it. And it was

Starting point is 00:14:41 introduced by a guy called James Fearon, like fear with an on at the end of it. He's a political scientist. And his argument was the following. Even if everyone's rational, you can still have people go to war when there's genuine uncertainty about who's going to win. Because the two sides don't have the same information about who's going to win. Because the two sides don't have the same information about who's going to win. They have differential ideas. So in his theory, take the Putin example. Putin's thinking, I'm going to win this war, which is what most external observers thought, including a lot of military observers whom I respect a lot. A lot of people thought he would win the war, Putin would win the war, he'd win the war fast. Much bigger army, lots of military experience. But it was also possible that, even if not very

Starting point is 00:15:32 probable, that Ukraine would do a lot better in its own self-defense than anyone thought it would, including Putin. And it may be that the Ukrainian leadership thought that. As it turns out, there's a big advantage to defending as opposed to invading. That always gives you a big advantage. And then the Ukrainian soldiers, had many of them been trained by NATO forces, so they'd had excellent training. And it may just be that the Ukrainian leadership,

Starting point is 00:16:00 apart from their pride and their dignity, which I'm sure were also factors, just had a different opinion about what would happen in the war. And according to 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. So that's a theory according to which you can be rational and still fight the war. And I think that probably explains, at least in part, what happened here. Putin was really confident that he would win and that the Ukrainians would fold. And they said, I'm not so sure. I think we can actually

Starting point is 00:16:31 make a better stand against you. And in this instance, at least at first, with respect to the all-out attack on Ukraine, they were right. I mean, that's the sort of most astonishing fact about the war to date, namely that in the opening weeks, Russia didn't just successfully take down the capital of Ukraine and conquer the whole country and put in a puppet government, which they said they wanted to do more or less at the beginning. And when that didn't go that well, you moved on to the next phase of the war, which is its own fascinating topic, in which they've decided to aim for these two provinces that have lots of Russian speakers in them, and it may have been what they wanted in the first place. And so the phase of the war

Starting point is 00:17:14 that's been continuing is a phase of the war where they've got much more limited objectives. The Russians have much more limited objectives, but they're still fighting, and the Ukrainians are still fighting back. So perhaps those limited objectives are not revisions, but were the objectives from the outset, and that is what the stakes are in this particular conflict in your mind. And then one that is perhaps one topic that may be unique or somewhat unique to this conflict, which is what has made this different? And there are a number of factors I'll just throw out there as plausible elements, factors. One would be the ability to cheaply and broadly broadcast from Ukraine using social media and so on. Borderless and permissionless, in some cases, transfer of cryptocurrency from around the world to support Ukraine. And then also the interplay of private or semi-private players. So for instance, and I haven't tracked this most recently,

Starting point is 00:19:02 so I don't know what has been confirmed or denied or both, but the drone manufacturer DJI disabling certain capabilities of its firmware selectively for the Ukrainian forces. So the two buckets then are stakes, and then separately, what makes this unique or interesting, at least in this time and space? And I'd love you to tackle whichever you think you would like to first. Those are fascinating questions, and they really make us wonder what's unique and special about this war, what makes it different. And, of course, from the Ukrainian perspective, at least at the beginning, the war was existential. They couldn't stop. And from a European perspective, what makes this war really special and the reason that Europe has organized itself so much in support of Ukraine is that they recognize, the rest of Europe recognizes, that if Putin can walk into Ukraine and take over large chunks of it, or the whole thing, that he's a serious threat to the other countries in the

Starting point is 00:20:18 region. And that the basic idea that Europe is a safe and secure place where you can go from place to place without worrying about it, where war has been rendered obsolete, is just false. And so that helps explain why it's so important to them. It also explains why it's important to the US. And all of that gives you some reason to understand why it's constantly still in the news, even though I think a lot of people, some days, I admit to my shame, myself included, just don't follow it anymore. The glib analogy would be, you know, we're used to the playoffs happening. And at the end of the playoffs, there's the finals, doesn't matter what sport you're following. And then you get a break. And this war, you know, it's like they're still having the World Series in October,

Starting point is 00:20:58 and then November, and then December, it's just going on. But the reason the world is continuing to care about it and pay attention to it is at least in part those kinds of global consequences. And the basic question there is, 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? So that's, to me, where I start. And then come the questions that you're raising. How does technology differ here? How does crypto differ here? How does the war social media side expressing itself? And how are those things distinct from the past? So let me say a couple of things about that. There have been some really creative efforts, especially on the Ukrainian side, to try to use crypto, Web 3.0, in order to

Starting point is 00:21:50 kind of link themselves to the zeitgeist, you know, to the moment, and gain some advantages from it. So a really interesting example of that is the Ukraine DAO, which Ukraine kind of came up with, that basically was attempting to enable crypto to be transferred into the country. And then that would enable them to fight their war better, basically, by donors. You know, it's basically a clever way to get people to make direct donations to Ukraine without going through banks. And measured statistically, that's probably not turning the tide in the war. As a percentage of all the aid that Ukraine is getting from countries and governments, especially military aid, it's probably still a drop in the bucket. But the fact that they could do it is what's significant. The fact that they could say, we're going to try to draw on contemporary technology opens the thought that, hey, maybe this is a way for aid to be sent from ordinary citizens to a country more over time.

Starting point is 00:22:55 And we've seen other kind of less exciting hacks like that, sort of at the beginning of the war, lots of people who wanted to send money to individuals in Ukraine were using Airbnb. They were booking Airbnbs in Ukraine that they had no intention of going to and paying for them. And since Airbnb had a payment mechanism in place, that was a way to make donation. Now, it may not be the way to make the most effective donation. It's a subsidy to those Ukrainians who already had Airbnb setups. But it was a symbolic and meaningful way of getting involved, but probably not transformational on its own. It does raise the possibility, though, of how these kinds of tools are going to operate in future wars. I will say one thing

Starting point is 00:23:36 about it, though. 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 and that has the world more or less behind it. Because the main sanctions that the world is putting on Russia now are economic sanctions. I mean, that's the other fascinating thing about this war. It's still really being fought. Sure, arms are being sent to Ukraine, but the West is basically fighting this war economically, trying to cripple Russia. And those sanctions mean, for example, making it hard for Russian banks to operate, making it hard to transfer money into Russia through the international banking system. And those are pretty effective tools and sanctions. In principle, if the Russian

Starting point is 00:24:22 economy could operate via crypto, and crypto were not very heavily regulated the way it is not yet, then Russia would have the capacity to evade a lot of those international sanctions using crypto. And I think from the standpoint of crypto advocates, one of the really important things to do has been to make sure that the narrative of the war doesn't become, look how Russia is using crypto to evade economic sanctions. That would be a very bad look. And it would echo the worries that some government regulators have about crypto, which is that it's not responsible to state control. And of course, that's one of the things a lot of crypto advocates love about crypto, which is that it's not subject to state control. And of course, that's one of the things a lot of crypto advocates love about crypto, which is that it's not subject to state control, or at least at present is not fully

Starting point is 00:25:08 subject to state control. So to shift the narrative to look how cleverly Ukraine is using crypto, it's not exactly PR, but it's a clever spin move, both for the Ukrainians and also probably for crypto advocates. To what extent has the, as I understand it, let's just call it, focus on locking down private banking, certain types of private banking, tax havens for extremely wealthy Russians, let's just say in quotation marks, oligarchs, not all of them would be certainly maybe considered oligarchs, but to some extent, to try to affect the inner circle, those most powerful private citizens, or perhaps not even solely private, within Russia as a means of affecting Putin? Do you think that is pie in the sky? Or do you think that could have some bearing on decision making or internal coups or power dynamics within Russia? The people who've been advocating for that and have been carrying it

Starting point is 00:26:21 out in Western capitals are realistic, I think, for the most part behind closed doors about recognizing that Putin really doesn't care what happens to his rich buddies and that his power over those oligarchs is so great that if he wants to take away their money, at least the money they have in Russia, he does it anyway. And he's not afraid of the oligarchs using that as a tool to bring him down. I mean, he's done it before, right? He has just arrested oligarchs and locked them up, including people who were multi, multi billionaires. And he had zero worry, it seemed, that that would weaken his power or strength. So I am myself very skeptical. And my sense is that a

Starting point is 00:27:07 lot of experts who know much more about the way Russia operates internally than I do are also really skeptical of this really affecting Putin. On the other hand, it comes into the category of it might help. And what's the downside? And the downside for a lot of rich people who are not Russian oligarchs is that they look at this and they say, whoa, wait a minute. Have we entered a moment where a country can freeze all of my assets because they don't like something that the government of the country that I'm from is doing? You know, you can imagine how high net worth individuals would not like that very much because they're thinking, what if some country gets really mad at the United States, which happens? Are they going to engage in these kinds of sanctions that are targeted and directed against us?

Starting point is 00:27:54 You know, we club of poor, starving, oppressed billionaires. To put it a little more seriously, it's not, in my view, a great precedent to be setting worldwide that we're freezing your assets because we don't like your government because you might have an impact on what that government does. So there are some downsides to it. But I think from the standpoint of sending a message that we're doing everything we can, and also that we're not targeting individual Russians who are poor or ordinary people, you can see the kind of policy appeal of it. And last but not least, who, after all, has a lot of sympathy for a Russian billionaire? You know, it's not high on the list of people whom, you know, our hearts going to go out to, you know, we're not going to all jump on board to make donations to them. So, you know,

Starting point is 00:28:41 they're sort of like, almost by definition, they're the James Bond bad guys, and they don't have a powerful advocacy organization drawing sympathy to them. So, you know, I myself have no sympathy for them. But I'm not sure that this kind of targeting, honestly, really works all that well. I think, to a significant degree, it seems that it doesn't so far. But it's relatively relatively easy and it makes headlines. So a couple of points, maybe not points, just observations for folks. So just to paint a picture, and please feel free to fact check this, Noah, if I'm getting things wrong, but if we just take for the sake of discussion Putin as the world's first official trillionaire, and then compare that to billionaires.

Starting point is 00:29:30 It would be like a millionaire putting someone in jail who has a few thousand dollars, right? So just to draw kind of a power contrast, if we use money as a proxy for power, certainly Putin has a lot more behind that as well. And a question I'd like to ask is, could one make a compelling argument that Putin did not miscalculate? And let me explain. And that his decision to invade was rational in so much as, similar to in the US, if we look at the history of re-election, let's just say, in the case of the US, that wartime presidents are frequently re-elected. If domestic support for Putin were waning and he wanted to bolster that, could an argument be made that protracting a battle in Ukraine would actually be to his benefit in some form or fashion? I have read a decent amount about

Starting point is 00:30:34 Putin. He is not stupid. He's very systematic. He's very aggressive. And as easy as it might be on some level for folks to try to paint him as this lunatic who's looking for the red button to smash with his fist because he's lost his marbles or has early onset dementia or fill in the blank, I don't find that immediately compelling. What would you say to any of that? Two great issues there. The first about Putin being more powerful than the oligarchs, and the second about whether there's a rational calculus for continuing the war. And let me take them one at a time, because they're both too good to pass up. So on the first one, you're right that Putin is richer than his oligarchs, but I think that matters zero for his power over

Starting point is 00:31:25 them in the following way. In the United States, where we have a pretty well-functioning property regime, where basically, notwithstanding what a libertarian might say, the government doesn't take all your money for no reason. It does tax you, but it doesn't take all your money for no reason. We do use money as a powerful proxy for overall capacity to do stuff, to have power in our country. It's obviously true. It also is connected to the way our politics works, right? If you have a lot of money, you can fund a lot of political movements.

Starting point is 00:31:55 You can, in fact, affect politicians. You can buy and sell. In the United States, if you want to be powerful, the best thing you could be would be to be super rich. I totally buy that. But it's not exactly like that in a place like Russia, where the president can, with no need to answer to anybody else, just imprison the richest people. If you can lock somebody up, it doesn't matter how rich they are. And it doesn't matter how rich

Starting point is 00:32:18 you are, honestly. I mean, Putin could not have chosen to rob and steal from his countrymen and his country to amass a vast fortune. And he still would be powerful as long as he could lock people up. And so in that sense, for him, the power stems from the barrel of a gun. And I think the takeaway of that point is one that we sometimes forget, especially when we think about crypto. You know, we think to ourselves, well, if I have a lot of money point is one that we sometimes forget, especially when we think about crypto. You know, we think to ourselves, well, if I have a lot of money and it's in crypto and nobody, then nobody can take it away from me. And that's true unless they put you in prison and tell you that they won't let you out of prison unless you give them the key to your wallet.

Starting point is 00:32:58 And then if you don't want to be in prison, which most people don't really want to be, you would give it up, or they could threaten to kill you, in which case you would definitely give it up. So the capacity to govern me as a person by putting me in prison is so powerful that whoever has that power can take whatever I have. So that's my first on, you know, what makes Putin so powerful. It's not that he's rich. He's rich because he's powerful. He's not powerful because he's rich. And there's a, as I said, there's a takeaway for that for, you know, anyone who thinks, oh, you know, the inevitable reality is that money governs all. It's not inevitable. Money only governs all if the government allows it to. Then there's your question about, is there some rational way to explain Putin keeping the war going? And here I would say yes and no. I think that he did probably calculate when he went to war that he thought he'd win the war fast.

Starting point is 00:33:51 But if he didn't, he wasn't going to immediately be overthrown in a coup, because he could regroup and reorient the war to a more achievable objective. And that's exactly what he did. I think his first preference was to take down Ukraine right away and put in a puppet government and have it be an enormous grand victory. And that's why he started the war by going after all of Ukraine. I mean, that's why he made a run for the Capitol. And that explains the military strategy that was adopted at first. And that just didn't work, or it didn't work the way he wanted it to work. But he didn't then say, I'm done, because then he would have

Starting point is 00:34:30 had to admit that he lost the war. And he didn't want to do that, because that would reflect weakness. And so he defaulted to what a lot of people expected him to do in the first place, which is just go after these two provinces in one region and focus on getting those. And then if he wins that, he can say, that's all I ever wanted. And that was a victory. And I think he can reason that at least if he can win that war in some reasonable period of time, the Russian public will either put up with it or ultimately be happy about it. And so he's still, it makes sense for him to keep on fighting with that more limited objective in mind. He also might have in the back of his mind, last of all, that if he does win that

Starting point is 00:35:10 province, then he can consolidate, take a deep breath, and then decide if he wants to go back and do the whole thing again, going for all of Ukraine. And if Ukraine is worried about that, which they should be, the Ukraine would then have reason to say, okay, just take these two provinces and be done with it. And we're willing to resolve the war. And that leads me to my final comment on this, which is a genuine worry, which is what's going to happen if that happens? What's going to happen if Putin says, okay, I want to keep these two provinces. And Ukraine says, Zelensky says, okay, we're done. We lost a lot of people. We know we can't win these provinces back from you. And we're a little scared that you might come after us and we don't want to take that risk. So the war's over. What's the rest of the world going to do? Is the United States

Starting point is 00:35:56 then going to be able to just say, okay, well, it's up to Ukraine. It's your country. Is Europe going to be able to do that? Because the message that that's sending to the world is still, hey, if Putin wants some provinces of your country, he can come and get them. So the rest of the world, the US, Europe, we're in pretty deep on this, arguing that Russia should lose the war. So you could imagine a scenario, it's actually a possible scenario, where the Ukrainians say we're ready to be done with the war, but the West is saying, no, we don't want you to give up because we're, you know, so concerned about the message that this sent. So it's not too soon to start worrying about that end game.

Starting point is 00:36:35 And I, for one, I'm actually really worried about it because I don't want this to be some war that goes on forever. Not because I want Putin to win. I want him to lose. But because if he can win in a limited way, I don't want the whole world to be caught up in this war and Ukrainian people to be caught up in this war longer than the Ukrainians wanted to go on. That seems like a mistake. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. If you're traveling, if you're just busy, if you're not sure if your meals are where they should be, it covers your bases. With approximately

Starting point is 00:37:20 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food source ingredients, you'll be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multimineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an immunity formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens. You get the idea. Right now, Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all-in-one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your

Starting point is 00:38:01 immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com slash Tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash Tim. I have a number of follow-on questions that I would love to get your take on. So first, we talked about freezing assets, or rather you mentioned, and I asked about freezing assets earlier. Do you think any of the decisions by the US could, in terms of negatively affecting USD reserves, US dollar reserves in other countries, end up in some way devaluing the United States dollar as the reserve currency of the world? In other words, do you think any of the decisions that the US government has made or could make could lead central banks and other such groups to change how they think about the

Starting point is 00:39:10 composition of their reserve currencies. There's one decision the US has made that is super high risk in this realm, in my view. And it's the decision to freeze assets that Russia owns in the United States that are dollar assets and not let Russia use them to pay off its own sovereign debt, thereby forcing Russia to default on the money that it owes to its creditors. Now, why is that risky? It's risky because Russia is not the only country that owes money to people in the form of sovereign debt that keeps its money in the United States to pay back some of that debt. And that's, in fact, one of the reasons that the dollar is a reserve currency, because

Starting point is 00:39:55 people are confident that if they hold their money in a U.S. bank in dollars, it'll hold on to its value and they'll be able to use it to pay back their creditors. And so if countries realize that under some circumstances, their dollar assets in the U.S. can be frozen for political moral reasons and that they won't be allowed to pay off their own creditors with that money, that should make them think hard about whether they want to keep their money in dollars in a U.S. bank for purposes of paying other people back. Now, the reason that the people in the Treasury Department who think most deeply and hard about this haven't concluded that the U.S. shouldn't do this, that the U.S. shouldn't freeze these assets in a way that makes Russia default, is that they're calculating,

Starting point is 00:40:57 and you know, they're smart people, they're calculating that the dollar is still so stable and strong relative to other possible currencies that people can hold, that countries will still maintain their large reserves in dollars. They'll just say, okay, well, let's not invade any other countries. And they'll say, oh, that's only happening to Russia because it did this extreme behavior. But the reason I think that's actually a pretty substantial gambit or risk is that once we've done this once and gotten away with it, the temptation is going to be there to do this again to other countries we don't like. Just as Robert Jackson on the Supreme Court said in the famous Korematsu case, which was the case about the internment of Japanese Americans, that if the court upholds that internment, which he didn't want it to do, then the principle that you can do something

Starting point is 00:41:40 like this lies around like a loaded weapon. You don't want a little weapon lying around because someone might use it under other circumstances. And I think that's the worry here, that this kind of freezing assets and not letting countries use them to pay off their own debts is going to be a very tempting thing for U.S. policymakers to use as leverage in the future. And if we were to get into that habit over time under different circumstances, that I think probably would have the effect of undermining confidence in people holding their dollars in the United States. What do you think the base case scenario is?

Starting point is 00:42:16 Let's just call it likely outcome is for Ukraine-Russia conflict? And what do you think some of the worst case scenarios are that aren't one in a million likelihood, but higher probability? So I'm leaving out the best case deliberately because I think the secret to happiness is low expectations. How's that working out for you, Tim? You know, it actually works out pretty well. I asked just a side note.

Starting point is 00:42:46 The reason I say that is I think it's necessary but not sufficient in so much as I read some National Geographic poll. Who knows how reliable that is? But an article that described the happiest countries in the world, and they were Denmark, Costa Rica, and Singapore for different reasons. And I asked a Danish friend of mine why he thought that was the case. And he said, low expectations. So I just have latched on to that. So you went with it. By the way, we should someday have a long conversation about that.

Starting point is 00:43:20 I think that the question of whether this, it's like resolve that, resolve that the secret to happiness is low expectations is a completely fascinating topic to talk about sometime. But anyway, going back to Ukraine and worst case scenarios. And base case, like if you were a betting man, like what would you bet on? All right, good. I'll start with the base case then. Yeah. My base case is that over time, Russia will successfully conquer these two provinces, the Donbass region, which is made up of these two provinces, which have a lot of Russian speakers in them, and that Ukraine will realize that it can't really defend those provinces. And then there'll be a pause, might be a brief pause, it might be a longer pause,

Starting point is 00:43:59 where everyone tries to figure out what happens next. And in that scenario, there will be suggestions of peace talks in which Russia ends up holding on to those provinces. By the way, in the same way that it still has Crimea, which it took over with a lot less trouble years ago, and which Ukraine conceded to, and the rest of the world didn't support Ukraine in fighting back. And the world has already established the principle that Russia can grab substantial parts of Ukraine. So this would just be a little more of Ukraine. So some people will be saying, we're not setting a new precedent because we already have the precedent in place. And so the war should just be ended on these terms. And, you know, I think the base case is that Ukraine's leadership at that point would

Starting point is 00:44:44 say, yeah, you know, we want this war to be over. We survived existentially. There's still a country called Ukraine. And we want to give up those provinces. But we also want to join NATO. And we want to be have the guarantee from NATO that at least the rest of our country will never be taken down. And then negotiations proceed on that basis. Now, what makes that hard, that base case hard in practice, is that the Russians are going to say, you can't be in NATO. And the Ukrainians are going to say, we need to be in NATO. And then the Ukrainians are also going to say, we want to be in the EU, which until now, to be blunt, the Europeans wouldn't have wanted them in the EU. But now, because the Europeans are so worried

Starting point is 00:45:27 about sending a message to Russia, they're suddenly saying, okay, well, now we're willing to talk to you about maybe being in the EU. And Russia's not going to want that either. So Russia's going to say, you can't have these two things that you want. And we want to hold on to this territory. Ukraine's going to say, well, if you want us to let you keep that territory, you have to agree to these other things. And so it may be that those negotiations in which you could imagine a rational person saying, okay, that's what's going to happen. Ukraine in NATO, Ukraine in the EU, but Ukraine no longer has this whole region anymore. And Russia now effectively owns that. You can imagine that being a rational outcome, but actually negotiating to that conclusion is really hard

Starting point is 00:46:06 to pull off on both sides. And for that reason, the sort of, to my mind, next most likely scenario is that the state of war would continue, even if the active hostilities were ongoing. And that could really last a long time. And so that's the not at all implausible variant on the base case that is, to my mind, the scariest. Because it's expensive to run a war. The energy consequences of that have already begun to be felt in Europe and in the rest of the world at a moment when the global economy is looking pretty precarious, keeping energy prices artificially high as a consequence of this ongoing war and of the sanctions associated with it is not good for the global economy at all. And so you could imagine

Starting point is 00:46:58 a scenario where this, as it were, just gets beyond us, where neither side is capable of reaching the compromise that would be the quote-unquote rational compromise. And that as a consequence, this just goes on for a long time. And if you say, oh, that couldn't happen, lots of wars go on for a really, really long time, sometimes at a low level, sometimes at a less low level, because they don't have a clear model for resolving them. And they can go on for years. And so that's the thing that scares me the most. That's my totally plausible variant on the base case. And I will say that some of my friends who are, you know, full time international affairs analysts think that that's the base case. You know, they think that the base case is that it just keeps on going

Starting point is 00:47:40 until somebody blinks. And some of them think that ultimately Putin would blink, but a lot of them think, no, neither side's going to blink, and it could just really go on indefinitely. And so the fact that there's some really thoughtful, smart people who think that's the base case really, really, really scares me. You mentioned international affairs analysts, and I would like to know from your perspective, do any books come to mind or people who you find or that you find particularly interesting or informative with respect to geopolitical strategy brinksmanship on this geopolitical three-dimensional chessboard or warfare in any capacity for people who would like to get a better understanding of how these

Starting point is 00:48:25 games are played, maybe historical precedents, how different conflicts have turned out depending on different stratagems used by opposing parties, for instance, any books or people you find interesting? One is something that a lot of listeners will have heard of, maybe all listeners will have heard of, and some will have read, especially people who are veterans, and definitely people who have been in the service academies will have read. And it's not that long, and it's unbelievably good. And it's this book called On War by von Clausewitz, a German general. It's the single most influential book on war written since Sun Tzu's Art of War. And as I said, it's required reading in military academies in every country in the world. It's shockingly well-written. It's

Starting point is 00:49:13 unbelievably clear. And it has a very specific philosophical view about what war is like and what war is for. And it's famous for the line that war is the continuation of politics by other means. And that's a profound statement because it suggests that war serves the interests of political actors and is prosecuted to achieve those interests. But the other thing about it that's really fascinating is he wrote it from the point of view that says the only smart way to fight a war is to fight it absolutely without holding back. Put all your cards on the table, sorry, put all your chips on the table and, you know, try to win the war. And that maximizes the odds that you will,

Starting point is 00:50:04 and it'll be over faster. And if it's over faster, that's also good for everybody, he says, because then it won't kill more people and eat up more resources. And yet, despite the fact that the first idea of von Clausewitz, the idea that war is politics by other means, is accepted by everybody in the domain of war and politics, there are lots of wars that aren't fought in the extreme, all-out, von Clausewitz way. Tons of them, including a bunch of U.S. wars, which have not been fought that way. Wars which, notably, we haven't won. You know, wars like Vietnam and Iraq, and arguably even Afghanistan. So I would strongly recommend that book. I can't actually recommend it

Starting point is 00:50:43 strongly enough. It really makes you think. And they're, you know, it's easy to buy. I can't actually recommend it strongly enough. It really makes you think. And they're, you know, it's easy to buy. You can buy it in any bookshop, and I'm sure you could buy it on Amazon, you know, in 20 seconds. In terms of contemporary people writing about the geopolitics, you know, I really like to mix and match. I like to read work by people who are thought of as realists, who think that national self-interest is all that matters. And I like to read work by people who are called idealists, who think that moral principles matter as well. And I really like historical perspective. So on anything to do with Ukraine, I love the work of a historian called Tim Snyder,

Starting point is 00:51:23 who teaches at Yale. And he's, first of all, a fantastic historian who's genuinely a Ukraine expert. I mean, his first few books before he got famous were highly technical historical studies of Ukrainian history. And then each book he writes gets a little broader in terms of its audience. And now he writes very broad and general books. And he's a terrific historian, and he's really the person to read on Ukraine and its history. And he also takes you beyond just Ukraine and discusses the relationship between Germany and Russia, and really the whole 20th century's concept of war, which interestingly, he thinks of Ukraine as having been at the middle of, not because Ukraine

Starting point is 00:52:04 was so important, but because the countries, Germany and Russia, that were fighting these wars were fighting in part over the territory that includes Ukraine. So I would strongly recommend any of his books. His grand book is called Bloodlands. It's long and intense, but it's very, very, very beautifully and clearly written. And if you can stomach a book about the wars of the 20th century, you'll learn a ton about geopolitics and the region in the process. Thank you for those recommendations. Sounds like I have some von Clausewitz to read, first and foremost. You're going to love von Clausewitz. He would totally be on your podcast if you were still alive.

Starting point is 00:52:52 I want to mention one, which is going to be a bit of a risk for me to mention simply because I haven't read it, although I have some familiarity with the author and have watched a number of presentations by the author. And the reason I would mention such a book without having read it is that it has come up again and again in conversation with friends of mine who are in intelligence or formerly from intelligence, or let's just call it high-level military, and not just in the US. So this book has been widely translated. And I know it is also read very widely in China, just as an example, by military. And this is a book called Kudeta, a practical handbook by Edward N. Luttwak. I'm imagining that's how you pronounce it, L-U-T-T-W-A-K. And it was originally published in 1968, but here's the description on Amazon. It has 127

Starting point is 00:53:43 ratings. This is not a mainstream, I wouldn't say, book, but it is very well reviewed. I have not read it again, so I can't vouch for it. But the opening description is coup d'etat astonished readers when it first appeared in 1968 because it showed step by step how governments could be overthrown. Translated into 16 languages, dot, dot, dot. It has inspired anti-coup precautions by regimes around the world. So that would be maybe a partial explanation for why the Chinese officials and military would be interested in this. And it goes on and on. So that also, I can't personally recommend, but it has been recommended to me by many, many folks. It's 300 pages, 304 pages long. So about 10 years ago, I wrote a book about US and China, which was called Cool War, which I thought was like the best title of any book title I've ever come up with. And I was convinced that I had come up with the perfect name for the US-China relationship because my whole argument in the book was at the time the US and China were getting along really well. But their geopolitical interests were diverging, even though their economic interests were still overlapping. And so my whole argument was, this is going to change because our geopolitical disagreements are going to get deeper and deeper and deeper. But I said, we're not going to start

Starting point is 00:54:54 shooting at each other because that would literally be insane. And so what we need is a word for a situation where there are two global superpowers that are the two poles, but they still cooperate economically. And there are all kinds of names going on at the time. People were saying, oh, it's not cooperation, it's co-option. People had all kinds of names. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Frenemies with benefits. And a very senior strategist at Harvard wrote a book called The Thucydides Trap, raising the question of whether China and the US would inevitably go to war. And I was like, no, they're not going to inevitably go to war, but it's going to be like the Cold War, but not as cold.

Starting point is 00:55:33 So I came up with this idea of cool war. And it was a very hawkish book at the time, extremely hawkish. It was liked by the hawks on both sides. And that led me to an exchange. Now, could you just, for people wondering, could you explain just in this sense, what do you mean by hawkish? In general, in these kind of foreign affairs situations, if you're saying that two countries should get along and will get along, you're a dove. You may not be a pure peacenik, but you're

Starting point is 00:56:02 a dove in the sense that you're kind of soft and sweet. But if you're saying the two countries are likely to be increasingly opposed to each other and need to treat each other as though they might come to blows and need to build up their militaries to keep an eye on each other, then you're a hawk. That is to say, you know, your talons are out and you're prepared for a conflict. And for me, it was sort of a surprise to find out that I, at the end of writing this book, that I had written a pretty hawkish book, not saying the US and China would go to war, but they had to act towards each other as though their interests were going to increasingly diverge. And I even suggested maybe the economic getting along wasn't going to continue indefinitely either. And I even said in there that there,

Starting point is 00:56:42 imagine a populist leader on either the US side or the China side or both, that would really, I obviously didn't think of Donald Trump in that role, that would really lead to a fundamental divergence. And so I ended up writing this book that sort of was very hard-nosed with respect to geostrategy. And so I got into conversation with Ludvig because he is a strategist strategist. And he had written a lot of really interesting and I thought smart things about US-China relations in exactly this vein. So we had a whole exchange and it was very positive. And I actually thought we were going to end up meeting and talking, but then something went wrong. I can't remember exactly what it was, but I think he just lost interest in the whole

Starting point is 00:57:17 thing. And so that was what I was thinking about. But I've read a lot of his work, and he is a sharp writer, and he is sort of the ultimate rationalist Machiavellian writer. When he's writing about power, he's writing about power, and he doesn't think that moral considerations should come into the conversation when you're doing that power talk. Well, perhaps I'll have to have him on the podcast. He has been nicknamed the Machiavelli of Maryland to explain more of his position. But you're talks that I've seen, I find it interesting and unusual because I haven't been exposed much to that, to hear it so plainly said, if that makes sense. And to be continued. So let's shift to, if you're open to it, our next topic. And I suggest we segue to free speech on social media. This is something you track very closely. And there are a number of notes I have in front of me. Texas and Florida have passed laws banning the platforms, various platforms for moderating content. Elon is against Twitter

Starting point is 00:58:39 content moderation, supposedly. Spotify has taken down some backlist from Joe Rogan. And there are a lot of open questions related to this, and I think a lot of perhaps undefined terms and other issues that we can explore. So where would you like to begin with free speech on social media? Well, let me begin personally just with a disclosure, which is that having helped what was then Facebook make its oversight board, I still advise Meta on free speech issues. And I also sometimes advise other social media companies like TikTok. And so I'm not going to claim to be wholly objective about this. That said, I try very hard, and I think this is why I'm of use when I do advise, to not tell

Starting point is 00:59:23 anybody what they want to hear. So what I'm going to say is just me talking, and it's what I actually believe. So I guess what I think is most fascinating is that we're at a really interesting inflection point about free speech and social media associated with Elon Musk's proposed Twitter takeover. And you and I have been both very fascinated to watch and see whether that would actually happen in the end. And maybe you want to share your grand theory about it, Tim. But in any case, what's fascinating about it is that in saying he's going to take over Twitter and take it private,

Starting point is 01:00:01 Musk has not said, I'm doing this because I think this is a great business and I'm really good at business and I can make a company run well and I think there's a lot of money to be made in it. Nor has he said, you know, I think it'd be really cool to do X, which is one of the things he does say usually. I mean, that's sort of the SpaceX theory. It would be really cool to do X and I can make money at it. Instead, he expressed for, I think the first time, at least in his public business career, a kind of free speech related values based view. He basically said, I don't think it's good that Twitter limits people's free speech, their content moderation. And I want to change that. So that's a pretty substantial reason to spend $40 billion, even if you had at the time, maybe three or four times that.

Starting point is 01:00:48 I'm not sure he still does. But even if he had at the time three or four times that, that's a pretty fascinating motivation. It's a really different kind of motivation. And it's not only unusual for him. It's unusual for anybody. We might expect Jeff Bezos to buy the Washington Post, but that did not cost any $40 billion for him to buy, you know, or to sustain, you know, that's a relatively small purchase from the standpoint of someone with a ton of money. So the moment that we're in is a moment where the idea that content moderation is a problem for free speech is getting a lot of airtime.

Starting point is 01:01:24 And where simultaneously on the other side, you've got the idea that the deplatforming of Donald Trump from effectively all of the major social media outlets at the time was something that remains supported by many, many liberals in the political spectrum, notwithstanding that it's hard to imagine a greater violation of the principle of free speech than that the guy who was president of the United States then and remains, you know, the most popular politician on the Republican side can't speak through these platforms, especially given that the guy, Donald Trump, made his reputation to some significant degree using Twitter. So we've got sort of the two extreme positions arrayed here. And what we don't have is a lot of clarity about the terms on which this fight should be played out. I can say more about that,

Starting point is 01:02:17 by the way, if you want. I was just pausing so I don't go on for too long. Yeah, please say more. And I would also just love to know if we're dealing with a wide spectrum of definitions for free speech or if it's free speech in quotation marks with other motives at play. You don't have to speak to that right now, but I would like to explore that. Totally. That's exactly where I was going to go. Great. Let's go there because I think I, like many people, are like, well, wait a second. What this person is calling free speech is not, I think, what one would find the perhaps legal or constitutional definition to be. And then what this person is calling free speech

Starting point is 01:02:58 is really driven by this motivated reasoning around what they want or some financial outcome or who knows what. So I'd love you to expand on that. Your insight, Tim, is actually, I think, the single most important starting point for figuring out what's going on in this debate right now. And it's that we can't define what free speech is unless we dig down a little bit underneath the slogan. So free speech has two different meanings, basically. One meaning is the ordinary meaning of the term, which means something like, I get to say what I want to whom I want when I want to say it. And that would include my saying it on social media. And if I'm deplatformed from

Starting point is 01:03:37 social media, or if my post is taken away because it violates the terms of service or community standards of a particular social media platform, then under that ordinary meaning of free speech, my free speech has been limited. I can't talk in the place and way that I want to talk. Then there's what you might call the lawyer's definition of free speech or the constitutional definition of free speech. And that's really narrow. What that says is that under the First amendment to the u.s constitution the government can't stop me from speaking but only the government a private party can stop me from speaking so the example i i always use with my con law students though they may be irritated me for doing this is i point out that if you teach constitutional law as your day job like i do your kids at a very early age tell you when you tell them to be quiet that they have free speech rights.

Starting point is 01:04:30 So my son, I don't know how old he was when he said that, but very, very young, you know, maybe five or something. And I explained to him then, and you know, for a couple of years afterwards, that he actually didn't have free speech rights vis-a-vis me. He only had free speech rights relative to the government, but I could tell him to shut up and I could give him consequences if he didn't, you know, close his mouth or not say or do a particular thing. And he didn't like that very much. But I think for my students, it's a good way to remember the constitutional definition. It's the reason you can tell someone to shut up without violating the constitution. And similarly,

Starting point is 01:05:02 under that constitutional definition, so far at least, and I'm going to go there in a moment, but so far at least, if a social media platform, which is a private company, which has its own constitutional rights, tells one of its users, you can't say that, or we're kicking you off the platform, if the social media platform, has a constitutional free speech right to say, we don't want to carry your speech. And you, the user, have zero constitutional rights vis-a-vis the social media platform. So notice right away that that's a completely different definition of free speech, and it's one that's just focused on the government. What's fascinating, what's

Starting point is 01:05:45 really fascinating is that that second constitutional norm is under some pressure, because there are now some Supreme Court justices, at least two, probably three, who have been telegraphing in short opinions, not in full Supreme Court opinions, but in short opinions, that they think that the idea of constitutional free speech should be reinterpreted so that the social media companies can't regulate all of the speech on their platforms and claim the protection of the First Amendment when they do so. And those justices, their conservative justices, have a really interesting set of arguments. Arguments that four or five years ago liberals kind of liked, but then liberals gave up on them. But now conservatives like them.

Starting point is 01:06:36 And those arguments basically say something like this. A ton of our conversation is happening on social media. Maybe we should analogize social media companies to a common carrier, like a telephone company, telephone wire company, which can't pick and choose who's allowed to get a telephone and who isn't going to get a telephone based on what they're going to say over their telephone. Or maybe they should be thought of as public accommodations, sort of like a chain of hotels, which can't say, we're not letting you stay in our hotel because we don't like you. That would be discrimination and it would be unlawful.

Starting point is 01:07:16 And so those justices are saying we should reconceptualize the social media platforms as more like one of those two things, either like a common carrier or like a public accommodation. And we should allow the government to pass laws that say they can't discriminate on the basis of viewpoint. And the state of Texas, because they like to be out ahead, that was a joke, the state of Texas passed such a law. They have, in fact, passed such a law. They passed a law saying, it wasn't a very funny joke, they passed a law saying that social media companies with more than a certain number of users, I think it was 50 million users or something like that, so the big social media companies, cannot take down any content based on the viewpoint expressed by the social media company. And of course, the social media platforms and others immediately went to court to get that law

Starting point is 01:07:59 blocked. And the first court said, okay, we're going to block the law then the court of appeals said we're reinstating the law and then the supreme court by a very close vote by a five to four vote said the law is not going to go into operation while the lower courts figure out if it's constitutional or not so that legal court case is ongoing and it's going to be really really really important because it goes to this core question of whether those two different definitions of free speech should remain poles apart, two different definitions, or whether they should come together and become a single definition of what counts as free speech.

Starting point is 01:08:37 Two questions. The first is, why did liberals, broadly speaking, like the arguments that you described a handful of years ago? How did they differ, perhaps, from what you just described? And why did they give up on them? This is a fascinating and, for liberals, embarrassing story, I would say, for free speech liberals, of whom I am one, by the way. So when I say it's embarrassing for free speech liberals, I'm including myself in this. So take yourself back in time five or six years to when social media was getting extremely powerful as a way of people expressing themselves. But Donald Trump had not yet emerged as a major political phenomenon in the United States. So maybe you have to go back seven years.

Starting point is 01:09:24 At that time, free speech liberals were really worried about the following thing. They, in theory, like free speech. And yet they saw that a lot of the speech that was happening on political subjects and other subjects in the United States was happening on a handful of platforms that were controlled by a handful of very rich people. And they were worried that that meant that Facebook, as it was then, for example, or Twitter, would come close to having a kind of monopoly on public discussion and public discourse. And liberals are worried about monopolies. They don't like monopolies. And they were worried about what would happen if, say, the people who ran Facebook or the people who ran Twitter put a thumb on the scale of public debate and had the effect of pushing public opinion in their favorite direction, whatever that favorite direction would be. So that looks

Starting point is 01:10:18 to liberals like a kind of corporate control, and it scared them. Furthermore, liberals hated a Supreme Court case called the Citizens United case, in which the Supreme Court had said that corporations have free speech rights. Now, for a long time, Citizens United was the most hated case by liberals, because liberals were saying, wait a minute, if corporations have free speech rights, they can spend money on election campaigns and affect the outcomes. And that's terrible because it gives corporations a disproportionate amount of power because corporations exist to amass capital and to make money. And so since liberals hated the Citizens United decision,

Starting point is 01:10:54 and the Citizens United decision was the one that said that corporations have free speech rights, liberals laughed at the idea that corporations like Facebook or Twitter should have free speech rights. So there were multiple reasons for liberals to be super, super, super skeptical of what was going on. Then here's what happened. Some progressive groups started lobbying the social media companies successfully to start doing much more aggressive content moderation and limiting or eliminating hate speech of various kinds and harassment of various kinds. And those groups, again, were coming from a progressive point of view. So they were saying, we don't just want you, Twitter or Facebook, to stop allowing meanness. They were saying, we don't want meanness on the

Starting point is 01:11:45 basis of sex, meanness on the basis of race, meanness on the basis of sexual orientation. So those kinds of concerns were desirable from the standpoint of liberals, and it started to work, and the social media companies upped their degree of content moderation in a way that liberals started to like. Because discourse on those platforms then became in certain ways more civil, less discriminatory, and less nasty than general public discourse, say on internet 1.0, would have been. And at the same time, with the rise of Trump, some extreme conservatives started advocating violence and other things like that. And those are things that the platforms also were taking down. And so liberals were also eager to see those things taken down. And so liberals

Starting point is 01:12:40 reconsidered their prior position that these companies should be subject to regulation and restriction, and maybe even controlled by the First Amendment, because if they were controlled by the First Amendment, they wouldn't be able to take down racist speech or sexist speech, and they wouldn't be able to deplatform people because they were abstractly advocating for violence. So the liberals flipped. And then, wouldn't you know it, the conservatives flipped too. The conservatives who had been saying, whatever, these are corporations.

Starting point is 01:13:15 They have rights. Corporations have rights. They can do whatever they want. It's their business. Let them do whatever they want with it. You know, let the market decide. If you want a different content moderation strategy, let a rich person buy the business like Elon Musk may be buying Twitter. That was the conservative position.

Starting point is 01:13:27 But the conservatives flipped and they started saying, oh, no, these social media platforms are skewing liberal in terms of their content moderation policies. And we don't want that. So we would like to impose the First Amendment on them or impose regulation on them so that they will have to allow the speech that we are promoting, which happens to include speech that they consider to be racist or sexist or advocating violence. So we got this, in my opinion, extremely embarrassing 180 degree flip on both sides about the regulation of social media, which happens sometimes in constitutional affairs. It happens in free speech. And I think everybody should be very embarrassed by people on both sides. So I'd like to bring up maybe the same question that we explored on Ukraine,

Starting point is 01:14:13 and that is the stakes. What is at stake here? And if you flash forward, and I understand that there's no crystal ball here, so it's just guesstimation based on the facts at hand. Three years from now, or five, you can pick the time frame. What's at stake, and what would you say are the base case, and could be best case. You can include best case if you like. I know I'll reverse my Scandinavian orientation on that one. And then possibly worst case, and I'll throw one more element, which you can choose to address or we can leave aside for now. And that is, is there a possibility that the definition of hate speech metastasizes and broadens

Starting point is 01:15:01 in such a way to serve very particular silencing objectives, where there's a certain suppressive effect on desired groups by categorizing as hate speech, even commentary, op-eds, etc., that ask questions related to topics that are deemed sensitive or offensive, fill in the blank, to a particular group. So what are the stakes? And then what do you think things might look like three to five years from now? The stakes are really huge because they go to the question of where we're going to talk to each other, what we're going to say to each other, and how politics is going to interface with the online universe. And the online universe is not going away. You know, it's going to continue to be in expanded ways, the central way that we communicate about tons and tons of subjects. So the stakes couldn't be higher. And they're really high on both sides. They're high for people, broadly speaking,

Starting point is 01:16:05 on the left, who are worried that January 6th style extremism could go from being peripheral in the United States to mainstream, with dire consequences for democracy. And they're consequential to people on the right who are worried, as you were sort of hinting, that principles of limiting speech to avoid what counts as quote-unquote hate speech or political correctness could actually impede public debate and discourse in a way that's really destructive because it means that certain points of view can't be heard, and if they can't be heard, then they're delegitimated and then potentially harmed. So the stakes are huge and they're huge on both sides. Can the definition of hate speech be expanded in a way to suppress certain political points of view? Not only is the answer yes, but that's really why the concept of hate speech was

Starting point is 01:17:01 invented in the first place. In especially Germany, but elsewhere in Europe after World War II, in the aftermath of the rise of Nazism, lots of moderate centrist people thought, wait, what went wrong in our society? I mean, Germany had a liberal constitution in the 1920s, and it had all kinds of economic problems and all kinds of struggle between different political parties, but it had a nominally ordinary liberal constitution. And in that environment, communists were able to express their views, Nazis were able to express their views, and ultimately, that liberal democracy failed and was replaced by the Nazi sting. And so centrist moderates said, we really need to rethink the idea that free speech lets you

Starting point is 01:17:44 express all kinds of views, including Nazi views, because people might believe those views. And so the idea of prohibiting certain kinds of speech, certain kinds of hate speech was based on the worry that in Europe, it could happen here, because it had just happened there, that that kind of talking had led to action and had led to the collapse of constitutional government. So the whole point of outlawing certain kinds of hate speech was to prohibit certain kinds of political views from gaining the kind of foothold that would lead them to take power. It was different in the U.S. In the U.S., the free speech movement in the 20s tended to take

Starting point is 01:18:21 the view in the 30s that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., one of the most famous Supreme Court justices, took, where he said, listen, you can't shout fire in a crowded theater, so there are some limits. If you're about to overthrow the government in the next few moments, yes, we can shut you up. But he said, if through calm, reasonable conversation, the ultimate effect of speech is to bring about, he said, the dictatorship of the proletariat, a victory of Soviet-style communism. He said, I think my job is to let that happen. That's his most extreme formulation in favor of free speech, but it's damn extreme, and he said it in a Supreme Court opinion. And so that was the kind of absolutist

Starting point is 01:19:03 view that said, as long as you're not about to imminently cause violence, you can say whatever you want. And if that undermines our political norms, that's fine. So from that point of view, from that Holmesian point of view, in the US, we really shouldn't want it to be the case that prohibitions on hate speech end up really limiting what you can say in public. That's the kind of strong pro-free speech view. The worry is, are we in a place where Germany was in the 20s? Is January 6th the kind of historical event that shows you that there's a genuine risk that people could try to overthrow the government of the United States. And, you know, as more details come out, not just about January 6, but about Donald Trump's various efforts to

Starting point is 01:19:52 try to reverse the outcome of the election, there is a point of view that says that's not so crazy. Our democracy maybe is in greater danger than it's been at in the past. And maybe for that reason, speech should be limited. So I think what's hardest about this problem is a lot of what you think depends on how you assess a real world situation. Do you actually believe that we're in danger of enough people getting on board with dangerous, bad, crazy ideas and breaking our democracy, that you need to do things like deplatform Donald Trump? Or do you think, look, we're fine? Sure, January 6th was terrible, but that was only a relatively small number of people. And Donald Trump didn't succeed in

Starting point is 01:20:36 overthrowing the outcome of the election. And we shouldn't mess with our basic free speech norms, which have served us so well until now. So that leaves the question of the base case. To me, the most probable outcome is that we continue to have a pretty robust system of private actors, including newspapers and social media platforms and others, limiting speech pretty extensively. But we also have some other social media actors, whether it turns out to be Twitter or some startup social media entity, that have totally different rules that are much closer to ordinary free speech rules, that are much closer to the idea that you can say whatever you want. And then we would get a more

Starting point is 01:21:20 expanded ecosystem in which if you really want to say something to a lot of people, you're going to find some venue in which you can say it. And my guess is, again, more probable than not, that if the market does that, the courts will then back away from speculating about maybe whether they should step in to intervene and allow a limitation of what these social media companies do. And that's because I just don't think it's sustainable in the long run that half or even 35% of the public is supporting someone for president, and that person has no major social media outlet. I just don't think that's practically probable or realistic. Either the social media outlets or some social media outlets

Starting point is 01:22:03 will shift to allow that kind of speech, or new social media outlets will shift to allow that kind of speech or new social media outlets will come into existence or someone will buy one of the existing ones and flip it so in those scenarios there will be some mechanism for all kinds of speech to get out there and then the u.s will probably ultimately preserve at least the core of our free speech tradition probably but that's just the base case. You can imagine it going the other way in that you can imagine the government intervening and saying we're going to have much more aggressive requirements passed by state legislatures or others that say that the social media companies can't silence hate speech. And then what would happen is we would sort of go back to internet 1.0, where you really could say anything you wanted somewhere on the Internet, and you could be as nasty as you wanted, and you could be as dangerous as you wanted.

Starting point is 01:22:50 No one could really do anything about it. That is also a possible scenario that could potentially emerge. dominance over so much of our speech will turn out to have been an artifact of a certain moment in the history of the web, a web 2.0 moment. And in a web 3.0 moment, maybe they just won't matter as much, even if they continue to use the kinds of content moderation standards that they presently have. So I have a number of maybe mundane logistics slash plumbing questions for you. You'll see where this is going. And the two questions are, just asking as a purely naive, politically illiterate person,

Starting point is 01:23:33 if state legislature is passed, let's just say Texas says social media companies passed, X number of users need to behave in the following way. How does that actually play out and work functionally? Is there just geofencing where suddenly Twitter is turned off in Texas like the Great Firewall of China? That's question number one. And then number two is, and I understand that Web3 and decentralization

Starting point is 01:23:59 is a huge topic we could explore separately, and that may be the answer, but how realistic is it to have the free market argument that there will be players who constrain free speech, there will be players who do not constrain free speech, and the fittest will survive if many of those which will begin as startups are dependent on infrastructure that is centralized and rented from a company like Amazon with AWS, for instance, to which a lot of

Starting point is 01:24:33 pressure can be applied as a choke point. So those are the two questions. On the first one, the sort of technical point, if you ask people for the big social media platforms, could you just turn off service in Texas tomorrow? They say no. They say that's too hard for us to do right now. And they, it's not just me saying that they say that, they said that in court papers. My sense is that it is a technically hard problem. It's also my sense that sometimes technically hard problems can find a solution if they're absolutely obligatory. And you do wonder how Texans would feel if tomorrow they couldn't get Twitter or they couldn't get Facebook or Instagram or TikTok in the state of Texas. Now, maybe they would discover that that was a new utopia. In fact, I have a fantasy that if that happened, I think I might move to Texas. It would be kind of great

Starting point is 01:25:23 if I couldn't use any of those things. I had an enforced protection. I just saw, this is relevant to this, I just saw a study in a journal, a scholarly journal, suggesting that just having your phone with you in the room, even if it is off, makes you dumber on a whole bunch of testable criteria. Just having it in the room, not having

Starting point is 01:25:45 it on, not using it, but just having it in the room. And the only way to get that away, apparently, is to keep it in another room. So maybe other people share my fantasy of a world where suddenly we didn't have to do any of those things. But in any case, if Texans didn't feel that way, they might really be unhappy with that law. I mean, I think the reason Texas is passing that law is the state legislature is sort of assuming that it won't be possible to turn off those services in their state and therefore that they could bind the social media platforms. Now, if you're Turkey and you say, listen, we demand that Twitter shut up somebody who's a critic of our government, Twitter reserves the right to say, OK, we're just going to turn off our service in your country. The question is, so if that could be done in Turkey, maybe it can be done in Texas by some means and mechanisms. That might be one way that that plays out. But at present, the social media platforms say it's too hard. So that's the first question. The second question was, how realistic

Starting point is 01:26:38 is it to expect that you could have survival of the fittest with some startups or established incumbent social media companies? With respect to that question, a lot of it turns on how much in Web 3.0 things change versus staying the same. So one thing that we saw in the aftermath of the Trump deplatforming is that sites like 4chan and 8chan and other kinds of social media platforms that were under criticism for allowing various kinds of speech that was considered to be repulsive in the aftermath of January 6th had a problem on their hands, which is that they did have to be hosted by centralized infrastructure. And huge pressure was brought on the centralized infrastructure to cut them off. And so that actually led to the taking down of a bunch of significant services. And so if we were to see a continuation of that structure, then I think the idea of decentralization won't work. The idea that don't worry, there's something that can be said somewhere on the web won't work because it still will be possible to go to whoever controls the infrastructure at different layers.

Starting point is 01:27:53 I mean, it could be Amazon at the AWS service. Apple and Google at the App Store level. Exactly. So as long as that kind of centralized infrastructure remains in place, I think you're 100% correct that it isn't a solution to enabling their speech, if that's what you want to do, to say, well, they can say their views somewhere. However, here's where a kind of Web 3.0 scenario of truer decentralization might make a substantial difference. If those kinds of services, hosting services, and other services were to follow a path that some Web 3.0 analysts and advocates either expect or hope that it will, of radical, radical decentralization, so that there's no one in

Starting point is 01:28:39 the middle controlling the large parts of the infrastructure of the web, then it would be a solution. Because then Amazon could say, look, we can't just take down the sites we want on AWS. We can't just refuse hosting to those companies. We would bring down the whole internet if we did that. You know, the whole internet is dependent upon this decentralized infrastructure. And of course, it's even possible that maybe Amazon Web Services wouldn't be behind the whole infrastructure of the web. Maybe other actors would be because of different forms of decentralization. So through those mechanisms, it is possible to imagine a kind of return to Web 1.0, which

Starting point is 01:29:24 was, after all, radically decentralized. And what's fascinating about that question, and I can't say that I have a strong intuition about what the right answer to it is, I mean, predictably, is that it's really striking that Web 1.0 was constantly being touted, we can remember this wasn't that long ago, as unique and original because it was decentralized, because you could do whatever you wanted, because anyone could be anyone they wanted on the internet, because there were no rules. And then came Web 2.0 and the centralization of the platforms. And a lot of people made a lot more money in that phase than they had done previously, because these centralized platforms were able to provide services that it turned out a lot of people wanted. The internet alone wasn't as desirable to most people as interacting via these platforms. And so the grand question on which this

Starting point is 01:30:10 turns is, will enough people want to go back to the older system? Or will it be possible through decentralization to give people the kinds of things that they liked about Web 2.0? And so one of the places this will play out is the metaverse. This is a grand and fascinating question. Will the metaverse be this radically decentralized thing, a lot like Web 1.0 was? Or will the metaverse come to be dominated by a handful of central platform actors who make money on it, the same way that Web 2.0 operated? And there's a lot of talk, some of it utopian and idealistic, about how we're going to go back to a world of radical decentralization. And maybe that's true. And maybe in certain respects, that would be better.

Starting point is 01:30:50 Probably in certain respects, it would be. But it's just an empirical question of whether that decentralization can give the kind of user experiences that enough people actually want. And I guess that remains to be seen. And I actually don't feel qualified to have a view about whether that's going to happen or not going to happen. Well, I love asking questions that force people to speculate in areas where they may or may not be qualified. So let's take a stab at that if you're open to it. All right, go for it.

Starting point is 01:31:19 Just given your, let's just call it legal fluency, constitutional fluency, given your awareness of various technologies and trend lines, three years from now, if you had to place a bet, it doesn't have to be a large bet, but if you just had to take a position in what things might look like with respect to free speech, what picture would you paint in as much or in as little detail as you would like? I think that in three years, the largest players in whatever platforms emerge, metaverse or other platforms, are going to be under a lot of pressure to do the kind of content moderation and regulation of speech and conduct that happened in web 2.0. And it's not just going to be speech, it's going to be stuff you do. Because if the metaverse turns out to work really well, you're not just going to talk to people there. In theory, everything you're doing on Twitter is talking, right? You're writing, so you're speaking. But if you were in a fully immersive experience, you can also do stuff. You know, you can play games, you can punch people virtually, you can kiss them virtually, you know, every other human activity, presumably,

Starting point is 01:32:33 you can engage in virtually. That's conduct. It's not just talking. And so it's not even clear that free speech would be the normal model to apply to it. I mean, you can imagine someone saying, well, that's all speech because it's virtual. And maybe someone would think that that might turn out to be right. But it actually will, I think, feel a lot more like conduct. I think already some of the, you know, the virtual platforms that people use on the metaverse feel a lot more like doing stuff than they do like saying stuff. So I think there'll be huge pressure for the companies in the first instance to regulate the stuff that people can do and say. And if the companies don't do it, I think there's going to be a lot of pressure on the government to do it. And so I

Starting point is 01:33:09 think that especially if the metaverse in three years is good enough that people are spending a reasonable amount of time doing stuff there, it'll have to be subject to pretty substantial internal private regulation. And given that, I think that the kind of free speech from the government that people want may continue to exist. But I don't think people are going to be able to do whatever they want in every sub part of the metaverse. I think there will be parts where it's do whatever you want. First person shooter against you against the world, do whatever you want to anybody, there'll be places to go and do that. But I think if you want the vast majority of people to spend a lot of time in a space, it has to be pretty orderly. And it would be lovely if human beings could order themselves spontaneously, but we don't

Starting point is 01:33:54 have a lot of evidence that they've ever managed to do that in the past. And the idea that they're going to do that in the next three years in the metaverse seems pretty implausible to me. Yeah, we have a very strong Lord of the Flies history behind us. I'm not sure that human nature will turn on a dime and will turn into the angels of our better nature immediately. One can hope, you know? One can hope. It'd be nice. It'd be nice. Any other, I don't want to call them predictions,

Starting point is 01:34:23 speculations for what we may also see three years from now? I mean, it seems to me, if I had to bet, It'd be nice. It'd be nice. process, the interoperability issues, and so on, may be so thorny. Also, frankly, the policing or moderating of conduct will become such a priority for so many players that for those and other reasons, many will choose centralized companies or organizations rather than decentralized options. That seems inevitable to me. Even within Web3, if you think about a lot of what dictates behavior, you find centralized tastemakers. Why? Because for each individual to have the responsibility to sort through the noise, to read the code, to look at the smart contracts, to audit, to do all of these things themselves is simply not feasible unless you have infinite time on your hands

Starting point is 01:35:26 and the capabilities. So I do think I'm fascinated by decentralization and have invested very heavily in Web3 and related technologies, but nonetheless, I do think people crave centralized authority and standards on some level. At least enough people do that will have strong centralized players. But that's just my speculation. Anything else you see over the next, say, three years

Starting point is 01:35:54 that you would expect to see? There is one other thing that I think will be really fascinating and important. And it's this. When we think about what the next phase of Web 3.0 will look like, we probably still don't fully understand what the AR-VR interplay is going to be. There's still people who say, it's all going to be VR, it's mostly going to be VR. And people say, no, it's going to mostly be AR. And that's a really fascinating and hard debate. My guess is it's going to be something we haven't exactly figured out what it's going to look like yet. But let's assume for a moment that a substantial part

Starting point is 01:36:29 of this is augmented reality. So that it's not just that we live all of our lives in this, to me, dystopian world where we spend eight or 10 hours a day with a headset over our eyes, you know, in a darkened room. We're still going to have a lot of this technology, but it's probably going to go with us in some mechanism when we go out into the world so now what that does is it makes it really hard to work out what it means to be regulated and what it means to be free when you're interacting in real life with other people and simultaneously interacting with those same people or with other people in some kind of virtual reality or augmented reality. So the idea is you and I are having this conversation right now,

Starting point is 01:37:10 and we're connected by the internet, and we're connected by video, and we're connected by audio, and we're creating something. In some sense, we're already doing an augmented reality form of interaction. But if you add in a whole bunch of other layers and imagine that we're walking down the street having a conversation on multiple levels simultaneously, which is not so impossible to imagine since after all, you see people all the time walking down the street, talking to each other, both of them on their phones, which is just a crude version of what presumably we'll be doing in some future moment. So in that environment, the really big challenge that I see coming, and I'm really only just starting to get a sense of this now, and I haven't said this anywhere before, is that the idea that you have one set of

Starting point is 01:37:52 rights and obligations to the person you're talking to in real life, and another set of rules and obligations to the person you're engaged with in augmented reality at the same moment, it's not going to work. It's not going to work. It's not going to work to have two different regulatory regimes involving the two of us at the same time. And 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 kind of space simultaneously, it's going to get really messy and really confusing. What if you insult me or I insult you in some way that we would not be allowed to do on the virtual engagement, but that we're perfectly permitted to do interpersonally?

Starting point is 01:38:36 Or flip it the other way. What if you punch me in augmented reality or virtual reality, which you wouldn't be legally allowed to do on the street because the cops would arrest you. But I feel just as punched, or maybe not just as punched, but very punched in some dimension. So my takeaway here is this. If we really get some complex mixed AR, VR mix, it's not sustainable to have two totally disparate regulatory regimes, one coming from the government and one coming from the private companies. And so this is a little bit in tension with what I said before. What I was

Starting point is 01:39:10 saying before was that my base case is that we are going to have mostly private regulation in these virtual spaces and continue to have mostly government regulation in real life. What I'm saying now is, if we get this kind of really complexly mixed AR VR thing, that that equilibrium will not be sustainable. We'll have to move towards some much more unified, integrated kind of regulatory regime. And that's going to be fascinating. And it's going to be really extremely, extremely complicated. My, oh my, the adventures ahead. Makes me think of the apocryphal Chinese curse. I've actually never heard this in Chinese, so I do doubt that it exists, but it makes for a good story nonetheless,

Starting point is 01:39:59 which is may you live in exciting times. May you live in interesting times, one of the two. And we will certainly have exciting and interesting ahead. Noah Feldman, at Noah R. Feldman on Twitter, noah-feldman.com. How fun. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for taking the time. Is there anything else that you would like to add or ask of the audience, point people to

Starting point is 01:40:26 before we wrap up this first experiment in this format? I love the conversation. And I just want to say to people out there who do have real knowledge of or strong intuitions about the AR, VR question and how we are going to interface with each other and with the rest of the world in the future, send me messages.

Starting point is 01:40:49 You can send me an email on the website. I would love to talk about this. And the deeper that we understand what's going to happen, the more we can start thinking through how to make it somewhat humane when we finally get there. I'm really grateful to you, Tim. It's a fascinating conversation. So fun. And for people listening, I want to just mention that this is pretty close to the type of conversation that you and I would have offline, if not very, very close. So it's been really fun for me. I've taken a ton of notes, and I hope other people have as well. Certainly, we'll link to the names, the resources, books, everything that we've mentioned in the show notes at tibnotblog.com as per usual. And anything else that you would like to add, Noah, or do you feel complete? Just that I love talking to you because it

Starting point is 01:41:37 makes me think of so many fascinating and new things and your ideas are so powerful. It really, it's super fun. Thank you. Oh, thanks Noah. I really look forward to hopefully doing more of these. And I would ask that anybody listening, please let us know what you think of this format. And you can certainly shoot me a note at T Ferris, T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S on Twitter. If you want bonus points, it'd be very helpful to also tag at team,

Starting point is 01:42:04 Tim Ferris, I think it is. It might be team Ferriss, but I think it's team Tim Ferriss. But the easy way, at T Ferriss, and you could just use hashtag Noah, and that will help us sort amongst the thousands or tens of thousands of messages to find the signal in the noise. And until next time, folks, be a little kinder than necessary. Read up on history. It will help you with the future. And thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter,

Starting point is 01:42:48 my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos,

Starting point is 01:43:10 all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short,

Starting point is 01:43:26 a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog.com. Type that into your browser, tim.blog.com. Drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Allform. If you've been listening to

Starting point is 01:43:45 this podcast for a while, you've probably heard me talk about Helix Sleep and their mattresses, which I've been using since 2017. I have two of them upstairs from where I'm sitting at this moment. Helix has gone beyond the bedroom and started making sofas. They launched a company called Allform, A-L-L-F-O-R-M, and they're making premium, customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores. So I'm sitting in my living room right now, and it's entirely Allform furniture. I've got two chairs, I've got an ottoman, and I have an L-sectional couch. I'll come back to that. You can pick your fabric. They're all spill, stain, and scratch resistant. The sofa color, the color of the legs, the sofa size,

Starting point is 01:44:26 the shape to make sure it's perfect for you and your home. Also, all form arrives in just three to seven days and you can assemble it all yourself in a few minutes. No tools needed. I was quite astonished by how modular and easy these things fit together, kind of like Lego pieces. They've got armchairs, love seats, all the way up to an eight seat sectional.

Starting point is 01:44:43 So there's something for everyone. You can also start small and kind of build on top of it if you wanted to get a smaller couch and then build out on it, which is actually in a way what I did because I can turn my L-sectional couch into a normal straight couch and then have a separate ottoman in a matter of about 60 seconds. It's pretty rad. So I mentioned I have all these different things in this room. I used the natural leg finish, which is their lightest color. And I dig it.

Starting point is 01:45:07 I mean, I've been using these things hours and hours and hours every single day. So I am using what I am sharing with you guys. And if getting a sofa without trying it in-store sounds risky, you don't need to worry. All Form sofas are delivered directly to your home with fast, free shipping. And you get 100 days to decide if you want to keep it. That's more than three months. And if you don't love it, they'll pick it up for free and give you a full refund. Your sofa frame also has a forever warranty that's literally forever. So check it out. Take a look. They've got all sorts of cool stuff to choose from. I was skeptical and it actually worked. It worked much better than I could have imagined.

Starting point is 01:45:42 And I'm very, very happy. So to find your perfect sofa, check out allform.com slash Tim. That's A-L-L-F-O-R-M dot com slash Tim. Allform is offering 20% off all orders to you, my dear listeners, at allform.com slash Tim. Make sure to use the code Tim at checkout. That's allform.com slash Tim and use code Tim at checkout. This episode is brought to you by Manscaped, the best in men's below the waist grooming. My girlfriend is sitting next to me with a huge spark on her face. This whole read gives me incredible adolescent glee to include. So here

Starting point is 01:46:15 we go. Manscaped products are precision engineered tools for your family jewels, yours and mine, and their performance package is the ultimate men's hygiene bundle. Now I have a friend, I'm not going to mention him by name, very well-known guy. He does public AMAs and people submit questions and the most common or one of the most common questions he gets that he has never answered is how do I shave my balls? I'm not making this up. So that's where Manscaped comes in. I tested their performance package 4.0.

Starting point is 01:46:40 Among other goodies, you'll find their lawnmower 4.0, trimmer. Yes, I said lawnmower. Weed whacker, ear and nose hair trimmer, crop preserver, ball deodorant, and more. That's right, girlfriend. The Lawn Mower 4.0 is the future of grooming, and dare I say, one of the greatest ball trimmers I've ever used? Yes, I do dare. I do dare say that.

Starting point is 01:46:59 The fourth generation trimmer features a cutting edge ceramic blade to help reduce grooming accidents. Nobody wants those. Think of something about Mary. Nobody wants that. Thanks to their advanced skin safe technology, the Lawn Mower 4.0 is waterproof and also has an LED spotlight if you need a more precise shave. And who wants a sloppy shave? You want precision. This is some Knight Rider technology, my friends, and I can vouch that I'm ready for my centerfold shoot and still fully intact. Was it scary? Yes. Was it worth it? Also, yes. My girlfriend sitting nearby, my main beneficiary,

Starting point is 01:47:30 makes the effort. So I figured it's only fair. And I didn't realize this, but a member of my team has also conveyed to Manscaped the company that it is absolutely, quote unquote, saved his balls. True story. Trimmer also has an IPX7 waterproof rating. No idea what that means, but I'll tell you what it means. Meaning that it's totally safe for use in the shower if you like to get wet and wild. The Performance Package 4.0 also includes the Weed Whacker Nose and Ear Hair Trimmer.

Starting point is 01:47:56 You can follow up your lower trim with the Crop Preserver Ball Deodorant, which provides, and I quote, residue-free chafing barrier. A residue-free chafing barrier, you heathens, pay attention, for your most sensitive parts. It's time to take care of yourself. Time for some basic landscaping. Get 20% off and free shipping with the code TimTim, that's one word, at manscaped.com. That's M-A-N-S-C-A-P-E-D.com. That's 20% off with

Starting point is 01:48:21 free shipping at manscaped.com and use code Tim Tim. Unlock your confidence and always use the right tools for the job with Manscaped.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #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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Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #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

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.