Kevin Kelly, Noah Feldman, Josh, Maggie, and Tim Ferriss — An experimental panel: Kevin Kelly (Wired co-founder, author) facilitates; Noah Feldman (Felix Frankfurter Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard); Josh (married to a mediator); Maggie (indigenous anthropologist); and host Tim Ferriss, each presenting a contrarian belief.
The gist
In this experimental format, the panel uses Kevin Kelly's definition of heresy: a belief that the people you most admire would find shocking, arrived at through independent thinking. Each participant presents a personal heresy and the group works to refine, understand, and challenge it rather than simply debate it. Topics range from teaching listening over debate, to written constitutions being overrated, to American middle-class culture damaging the country, to imminent animal communication, to the acceptability of human cloning. The conversation repeatedly returns to themes of culture, community, relationship over rules, and the limits of language and standardization.
Big reveals
- Josh's heresy: we should de-emphasize teaching debate and public speaking and instead teach people how to listen well, framing listening as a teachable skill rather than an inherited trait.
- Noah Feldman's heresy: written constitutions are seriously overrated, even though he has spent his career studying and helping write them.
- Feldman argues the British constitution and unwritten, evolving agreements show that nations can govern through living, mutable understanding rather than fixed text, and that countries like the US 'do all that same stuff too, we just lie about it.'
- Maggie's heresy: American middle-class culture, the post-WWII American Dream of leaving home and chasing mobility, is ruining America by producing extreme social isolation.
- Tim Ferriss's heresy: within roughly five years we will be able to meaningfully communicate with animals, via AI/machine learning, sensory augmentation, and psychedelic compounds.
- Kevin Kelly's heresy: human clones are fine and should not be prohibited, because we already have clones, identical twins, and only object to 'serial twins' versus simultaneous ones.
- Noah offers a counter-heresy: successfully communicating with animals could make us worse, eroding the human line that gradually expanded equal rights, rather than extending ethics to animals.
- Tim predicts the issue will get stranger with plants and fungi, citing research suggesting plants are far more sentient and sensitive than plant-only eaters would like to believe.
Things worth remembering
- Josh distinguishes listening from waiting to talk and offers the phrase 'curious not furious' as a path from anger to empathy.
- Josh learned active listening at home from his wife Antoinette, who retrained from a nonprofit interpersonal-violence litigator into a mediator for low-income couples.
- Feldman notes the US barely amends its 1787 Constitution and instead changes its meaning through official and unofficial processes.
- When the US wrote its constitution almost no other country had a written one; now nearly every country does except Britain and Saudi Arabia.
- Maggie cites the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois League) Confederacy's living spoken constitution, recorded in figural wampum belts, which has survived for hundreds of years.
- Josh jokingly references Noah developing his constitution heresy 'at Burning Man last year.'
- Tim references Aza Raskin's work using AI to decode species communication, plus whale-song research, and a 'whale guy' author.
- Tim cites neuroscientist David Eagleman's sensory-substitution suits that let blind or deaf users map their environment through tactile feedback.
- The panel discusses 'dog buttons' for speech, noting a dog (Stella) trained on up to 34 word-buttons to construct fairly complex sentences.
- Maggie reveals she is currently pregnant and 'pretty far along,' joking that gestation 'all sucks and we shouldn't do any of it.'