The Future of Free Speech | Harvard Polymath Noah Feldman on The Tim Ferriss Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please enjoy!

NOTE: This episode was recorded on June 22nd.

Connect with Tim Ferriss:

[enessrx]

We already can’t negotiate this dual existence. Our conversations and trains of thought are already regularly hijacked by notifications coming to our phones. Like a spoiled toddler begging for attention.

[veugeler]

The vast majority of individuals not paid in stolen money order themselves rationally, looking from a vast scale you can easily say spontaneously.

[iceyjo]

Question for Tim Ferriss. How much human capital is lost in Western countries by focusing on the advancement of white males? I ask because white males usually represent 30-35% of western countries' populations. Yet represent 60-85% of politicians, CEOs, bankers, and other high-paying prestigious jobs.

If other countries focused on educating, employing, and promoting everyone they could easily outpace the West in the near future (Unfortunately most countries do not do this). This is a glaring problem that I think will be ignored until some other country utilizes all of its people and not just a favored group.

[cosmicfxx]

Just the thought of virtual world makes me want to vomit ... although ... then again, if most the world is there, I might have the real world all to myself

[sebxlopez]

This whole idea of policing the virtual world is a mess. Could you get arrested in real life for a crime you committed in the metaverse? Ridiculous to even think that such a thing is possible

[lilianadoval]

Already in Stephenson's novel " Snow Crash" ( 30 years ago) the concept of metaverse appears, giving us the idea of a protagonist who could be a pizza delivery boy in the real world and a samurai warrior in cyberspace.
The idea of a metaverse where we can even be represented by an avatar that interacts for us, fills us with curiosity and a little fear.
Will we have enough maturity not to further complicate this already distopian world?
Free speech always. But the history has shown us
that human beings have not been able, on countless occasions, to avoid adhering to the hatred contained in some speeches. Have we evolved enough?

[SoCalFreelance]

What if we jack into the Matrix and a virtual punch feels just as real? 🙃