SPECIAL: Noah's New Book

production company that makes this show. He's also the person who had the idea for Deep Background in the first place and called me and said, hey, Noah, maybe you want to try a podcast. And the reason that I asked Jacob to come on the show and take my job is that the conversation we're going to have is about a new book that I've wrote that's being published

today called The Arab Winter, A Tragedy. For those of you who've been writing in to say that it's time for us to add some non COVID topics alongside our COVID coverage, this one's for you, and I promised that we'll return to COVID coverage in our very next episode later this week. Jacob, thank you so much for coming to Deep Background. Well, Noah, thanks for inviting me to play you on your show for an episode. It's a

tall order. And I also want to thank you for prompting me to read your new book, Or Winter, which I really enjoyed. I mean, it's a very short book, which made it easy, but it's so packed with ideas about what happened in the Arab Spring and challenging I guess the conventional wisdom that the Arab Spring was a complete disaster. Let's go back to the beginning. What was the Arab Spring? Where did it happen, Why did it happen?

What was it? The Arab Spring was a kind of single episode that then read into a region wide contagion. But the contagion was, at least in the first instance, a really good one. It started in Tunisia, which is a tiny little country barely ten million people, and which is not usually thought of as hugely influential in the Middle East. In fact, most of the time, even most people in the Arab world never think about Tunisia at all.

And what set it off initially was that a poor frustrated fruit seller who had been subject to abuse from government officials and whose money supply was running out killed himself in a very dramatic way. He set himself on fires, a horrible tragedy, and in response to the sense that

he had quite literally ignited a sense of protest. Hundreds of thousands of Tunisians, ordinary Tunisians, from all different social classes, all different backgrounds, started going into the streets and protesting their governments, and they developed a couple of key slogans. The most famous of one was the people want the

overthrow of the regime. And they chanted it, and they chanted it, and remarkably and incredibly, within a couple of weeks, the regime gave way and the guy who had been the dictator of the country for almost twenty years left the country, and suddenly people were realizing that they had the opportunity to remake their political system almost entirely. So that's how it started. But then if that be the

only story would have been an incredible story. It would have been a huge success story of one tiny little country. But what happened is that it was contagious, and so what you got were what started as copycut demonstrations in much bigger and more consequential countries, most famously Egypt, and then in Egypt, the same story played out again, at least initially, and people were chanting the same chance, and they were watching each other on Arabic speaking satellite TV,

so they knew what the other people were saying. In the other countries, each of these protests had some local flavor. They were substrating the name of their own dictator, but basically the script was repeated, and in Egypt it seemed to work too. The dictator left there too, and then it was tried in other countries as well, and so it was a kind of sweeping contagion of attempts at political self determination in a bunch of Arabic speaking countries.

So let's talk about Egypt a little bit as the place where the Arab spring seemed to turn dramatically into what you call the Arab winter. You know, first you had this moment in Tarier Square where protesters were out demanding the end of the autocratic regime, democratic replacement, and they got it, they got the more Sea government elected. And then people turned out in Terior Square again and demanded if it or the end of democracy? Why did

that happen? And what do you make of it? These two events, which I called for short in the book Tarier one in Tarier two were bookends to a very very intense year and three quarters in which which a lot of things happened, some of which seemed to follow the correct way that we in democratic countries imagine things should go when a dictator comes down, and some of

which went wildly the other way. So the first thing is that it took some time, but after the army had ordered the old dictator hosting Mubarak to leave, there eventually were big, pretty free public elections, and they were imaginations. Along the way. There was a question of who would be allowed to run for office, and could old regime people run for office, and what about members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was the largest social slash political organization

in the country. But ultimately there was an election. It was pretty free, and what happened is that the Brotherhood candidate won the presidency narrowly. The Brotherhood won a plurality, not a majority of but a plurality in parliamentary elections, and the Brotherhood won the chance to craft a new constitution.

And that panicked a lot of people who were of what used to be called one person, one vote, one time, people who said, look if the Muslim Brotherhood writes the constitution, if they become the people who are the dominant political party, they're going to abolish democracy. Now, to be sure, that wasn't their claim. They said we're going to be democratic,

We're going to write a constitution. But that was the word that a lot of people had, and slowly but surely, various things happened that left those folks more and more concerned and worried. But it was a very complicated dant. So you just give you the most prominent example. The Constitutional Court of Egypt, which was made up at the time still of people from the old regime, disbanded the legislature. It said the elections had been illegitimate, and it disbanded

the legislature. That left Morsey, who was the newly elected president, in a position where he couldn't govern through the legislature. And so then his critics started saying, he's an autocrat,

he's an autocratic, he's governing autocratically. Well, of course he was governing autocratically because there was no legislature, and there was a deep word they were going to do the same thing with a constitutional assembly and disbanded that too, and so the Muslim Brotherhood rammed through a constitution very very fast, without listening to dissenters, and Morsey himself, afraid that the Constitutional Court would block that, issued an edict where he said, nobody can put me out of office.

The Constitutional Court can't put me out of office until the constitution is in place. Now, in practice, that was only going to be a week or two. But then his opponent said, look now he's made himself a dictator.

And ultimately what that led to is that opponents of the Brotherhood and opponents of the regime came back into the streets and they replicated what they had done in January and February and March of twenty eleven, and they demanded, with the same slogans and the same chance, with a comparable number of people in the square, that the army get rid of the elected democratic president. And after some delay,

the army did. And so what happened was that the first time they were getting rid of a dictator, the second time they were getting rid of the guy who had been elected president, and that led to the army taking over again, and that was the end of democracy in Egypt. So that's the real conundrum Noah, and you talk about this at the level of democratic theory and political philosophy. But can there be a democratic decision to eliminate democracy? And if so, why is a democratic decision

to do that valid? I mean, by making such a decision, as it were democratically, you're invalidating the idea of the democratic decision should be the ones account. I agree with you. It's a super hard problem and I really struggled with it, and I try to show that struggle in the book and try to lay out both sides of the possible view.

I mean, you could take the view I don't take this, but you could take the view that when the people with a capital P get together and demand democracy, that's legitimate. That's democratic because they're asking for democracy. But when the same people get together and say we don't want democracy anymore, we want to get rid of a democratic leader, it's undemocratic.

And in the end, I don't buy that. And the reason I don't buy it is that what makes the choice of democracy in their first place legitimate isn't that there's some fair process or fair procedure for democracy. I mean, what it really amounts to is a lot of people going to the public square and saying get rid of the dictator. And in Egypt, they didn't even say give us democracy. They just said get rid of the dictator.

And then they held elections. And so what made that legitimate was that, in some sense, the Egyptian people as a collective were saying what they wanted, and they weren't doing a through a procedure, and you couldn't count them all up and figure out if they were a majority of the public, which of course they weren't. It was legitimate because it was an expression of genuine popular sentiment.

And then when the same number of people or maybe even more do the same thing and call for the changing of the democratic system, they're not operating within the ordinary rules of democracy. But you have to believe. I think that what they're doing is just as legitimate as when people called to get rid of the dictator. Otherwise

the first one isn't legitimate. I think whatever rules you apply to figure out whether the demand to get rid of a dictator is legitimate are going to give you the same result when people do the same thing to say they want to get rid of a government which was democratically elected. So you know, I think The upshot of that is that we forget that democracy is something that the people choose, and therefore democracy is something that people could choose not to choose. It's not inevitable, it's

not necessary. It's not the only system of government that's fair or legitimate. But in advance of a legitimate constitutional system which lets people have votes with equal weight, you do have this problem of being back to you the general will. I mean, that's who constitutes the people and

what determines which people and whose views predominate. We didn't count the people into rear square, and why, for that matter, should only people in Cairo and the nation's capital who have the ability to turn out in the biggest public square have a say in determining what the general will is. I totally agree, and you know, I try to use a thought experiment to get people to ask themselves what

their own intuitions are about this. What I say is, think of what it felt like to you if you were watching when you saw people in dictatorships going out into the streets in hundreds of thousands and saying, you know, leave or we want the end of the regime, or you know, we demand social justice. What happened in Ukraine, or what happened in so many countries in Eastern Europe when authoritarian governments were brought down by public protests. Exactly

in all of these places. You can ask yourself, what do you feel when you see on TV thousands or hundreds of thousands of people making this demand. And if you feel, and I think most people do, feel wow,

you know, that's great, that's real. Those people are taking charge and the world should listen to them, then you share in some way the intuition I think that there is such a thing as a people which is capable of speaking for itself, even though in none of those cases is there a formal vote, is there a census, Are there districts with ballots? The whole apparatus that we associate with the democracy that's up and running only exists

when a democracy is up and running. You know, at that initial moment of demand, there's something about the core collective political action of the people that's motivating people, and it's motivating us to think that that is legitimate and that is democratic. And that is hard because we're so used in thinking of democracy in terms of vote counts and districts, but democracy is more than that. It's bigger than that, and it's also much more vulnerable than just

the kind of democracy that plays by the rules. Democracy doesn't always play by the rules. We'll be back in just a moment. The book seems to be very much an attempt to salvage something positive from the Arab Spring, and you focus a lot on this idea of these Arab countries taking political response ability for themselves the first time after centuries of imperialism and then these autocracies that gave the people no say You say, basically, you know,

at least they're taking responsibility for their own destinies. And the really hopeful example you talk about is Tunisia, where you mentioned the Arab Spring began. You were involved in the effort at constitution writing there, giving some advice to the Constitutional Commission. Talk a little bit about both your experience and why Tunisia remains the one real bright spot to come out of the Arab Spring. So, yeah, I

was very lucky. I was in Tuonesia's six times during the process of their constitutional negotiations, and partly because it was a small country with a relatively small political elite, partly because I kept on coming back. What began as an opportunity just to show up and learn turned into an opportunity to collaborate a little bit with people who

are actually drafting the constitution. And you know, I and my research associate who went with me made I don't know, I think a couple of hundred suggestions, all of them at the request of people on the Constituent Assembly, and a whole bunch of them got incorporated into the constitution. I have no idea if they were incorporated because we recommended them or because they were just good ideas that

everybody would have thought of. Any Way, you can never quite measure those things, and that's probably a good thing into their constitution. But yeah, I was very fortunate to be sitting there in the drafting rooms, in the Delicates dining rooms, and I got to observe up close and personal why their negotiation process worked when constitution negotiations didn't

work in other countries. And the reason was that everybody in the room knew, no matter whether they liked each other or hated each other, and no matter how much they distrusted each other, and they did distrust each other, that no one was coming to save them, No one really cared enough about Tunisia to intervene in a big way in their constitutional process. The US wasn't coming to save them, you know, the European countries were not coming

to save them. They were on their own. The other Arab countries weren't coming to save them, and so they had to compromise, and they compromised like crazy. All sides made compromises that their own political core supporters thought were terrible compromises, and they made them anyway. And I think that is really what got them ultimately through, and it's why they developed a consensus that enabled them to draft

and successfully ratify a constitution. And just to add one more point to that, the thing that they realized is that a constitutional negotiation is by definition all about giving

the other side more than it deserves. If you think, well, we've won a plurality or a majority, and so we're not going to give you what you want, your constitution will fail because if enough people are unhappy with a constitutional draft, then they'll go into the streets, they'll protest, they might even use violence, and then the whole constitutional deal will fall through, sort of like what happened ultimately in Iraq, where Sunnies were cut out of the constitutional process.

They partly cut themselves out and then they just used violence, and that deeply under caught the constitution. So you have this one North African Arab country that has a functioning, effective, seemingly sustainable constitutional democratic system. Why aren't its neighbors and the other Arab countries looking at it and saying, yeah, that's what we wanted, We want what they have. People in some of those countries did say that initially, as in Egypt, but then Egypt wasn't able to produce the

kind of compromise and consensus that Tunisia did. So the elected government, the Muslim Brotherhood backed government, did not successfully compromise with secularists on the other side. They made some initial gestures in that direction, but they were paranoid, not without good reason, but they were paranoid that if they let in too many liberals they would undercut themselves. They were paranoid that if they let in too many of

the old regime they would undercut themselves. So they actually tried to do it all without compromise, and that failed.

They just couldn't get sufficient buy in. And in a much more extreme way, in Syria, What happened there is that we never even got to the moment of the formation of a new government because we never got the ultimate collapse of basharl Assad's regime because Asad fought back with violence, and instead of the protests which began pretty peacefully leading to regime change, they actually created circumstances where

the government started a civil war. And once that started, people in lots of countries around the Arabic speaking world started saying, whoa wait a minute, the structure of our

countries may not be capable of surviving regime change. And once people start thinking that and looking at worst case scenarios like civil war such as we also have in Libya and such as exists now in Yemen, both in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, that starts making people really think long and hard about whether it's worth it to try to stay in the streets and remove the regime.

At the other end of the spectrum from Tunisia's liberal democratic state, you have of Isis's medieval theocratic state, and you say that that too was a product of the Arab Spring. In a strange way, why was Isis part of what came out of the original protests in Tunisia in two ways. The Arab Spring first of all, created the conditions for the civil war in Syria, which created a political vacuum, a power vacuum, which allowed isis to

emerge and call itself a caliphate. So that was the first immediate way that the Arab Springs set the conditions for the emergence of the Islamic State. But the more profound similarity between the Islamic State and the peaceful uprisings is that the people who founded the Islamic State were aspiring to create a new form of political order which they themselves would control, where they would be sovereign, and in which they could effectuate a system of government that

they believe. Now, what's sad, horrifying, and indeed tragic, and this is one of the reasons I call the book The Artwinter a tragedy, is that the form of government that the Islamic State supporters wanted was not utopian, although they thought it was utopian, but it was dystopian. It

was the opposite. You know. It involved murder on a huge scale, It involved rape on a huge scale, forced sexual slavery, and for the people who were engaged in this movement, those were fulfillments and authentic manifestations they believed of Islamic tradition going back to the Middle Ages, which

did exist on the books. If you read the classical Islamic legal sources from the Middle Ages, you do have tech saying, you know, you can do these things in wartime, but they were not practiced on a comparable scale to this, certainly in the Middle Ages. And also nobody's really tried in the Muslim world to govern in anything like this way in hundreds of years. So they were doing something that was a throwback, self conscious throwback, and it was worse than it ever had in fact been in history

almost certainly. So it was horrifying and deeply deserved the condemnation that we've all given to it. And the world had to take action, slowly but surely to go and get rid of the Islamic state, and I'm super glad that they did get At the same time, we shouldn't forget that the folks who were doing this were engaged in the process of trying to self determine. They were just doing it in a way that turned out to

be pretty evil. I mean, I was mystified as a lot of people were how this barbaric sort of cult, as it seemed, was attracting volunteers from all over the world, including from Western countries. In the thousands. You talk about it as a utopian revolutionary movement, but why was it that young people, including young women in many cases, went to join the Islamic State completely of their own volition.

I really think it was the opportunity that they perceived to build something new, to build a new society, to build a utopian society on what they saw as a classically authentic Islamic model. In that sense, the Islamic State was really different from Alkaida. People did come from around the world to join Alkaida in much smaller numbers, but to join Alkaieda basically meant you were going to fight

and probably die in the jihad. You weren't building something new for the most part, you were just trying to break something, namely what is imagined to be the occupation of Muslim lands by non Muslim invaders. In contrast, once the Islamic State was a caliphate, that it had territory, that it was building a society that was a chance for people to say much the way that young people from around the world wanted to go to Cuba after the Cuban Revolution, or some people from around the world

wanted to go to Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. You say, well, here's a new world being created, and I want to be a part of that. And so they didn't come for the spectacular violence, but they also were willing to tolerate and participate in even that kind of violence, which also happens after other revolutions that partake of this kind of millennialist religious, revivalist, reformist idea. And they don't have to be religious. That could just be communism, which is

itself a kind of religion. In a certain respect, people will do unbelievably radical things that are horrifying in circumstances like those when they feel that they're in a revolutionary moment, all bets are off. The end times in some way are there. And again it doesn't have to be end times in a religious sense. It could be that we're just creating a new society. And that's why a lot of revolutions end in brutal violence or entail a lot

of brutal violence in their aftermath. And otherwise normal people will do abnormal things under those conditions. So your book with written pre pandemic, but obviously now all of these countries are having their varying experiences with COVID nineteen pandemic can either bond people to their government if a government seems to respond to it well, or can alienate people

from their government if it handles it badly. What are we seeing in the countries you write about in the book, in Egypt and Syria and Tunisia, is there another Arab spring that could come out of the pandemic? So far, and knock on wood, COVID hasn't had the kind of transformative social impact in the former Arab Spring countries that it's had in Europe or in the United States or

even in some Asian countries. And it's still too soon to know whether that's because there aren't that many cases or whether because the case it just aren't being recorded or acknowledged or recognized. So there's great worry, especially in Tunisia about whether the rapid economic decline that's going to hit Tunisia very hard. Tunisia is very dependent on tourism

is going to destabilize the social fabric even further. And it remains to be seen whether autocracy is like those in Egypt are robust enough to withstand social pressure around that. Although I think they probably are. I think Egyptians have really learned the lesson that they can't get out and do it again. That said, you know, when I was just getting the book into press, there were two events in the Arabic speaking world that were weirdly like after

images of the Arab Spring. There was a kind of Arab Spring like uprising in Algeria, which is extit Tunisia, and then there was a similar one simultaneously in Sudan. And in both cases they all knew about the Arab Spring. They were using somewhat similar slogans, they knew the script, and the dictators also knew the script, and in each case it led to some meaningful change in who was governing the country, But in neither case as it led

to a fundamental transformation in the form of government. They're moving in both cases more slowly, there's more give and take, and although there are transitions in who's governing, there aren't fundamental societal transformations like we've seen in Tunisia. And what's fascinating about that is, on the one hand, it shows you that even though everyone's seeing the Arab Spring movie, it still has power. People are still looking to use

those principles of self determination to change their lives. On the other hand, if the bad guys know that too, you know, the autocratic regimes, if you think they're the bad guys as I tend to, they also understand that they can give a little bit and then reconsolidate power.

And so what that suggested me is, even though I think we're in a winter in the Arab world where we're not going to see huge or substantial transitions to self government in future years, there is always the possibility for spring to break out again, and we've seen that in a more limited way in those countries. And so that's one slightly less pessimistic conclusion. You know, we're in a winter, there is an Arab winter, but eventually seasons are cyclical and this winter will give rise to a

new spring. Yeah, so what if you'll indult me as the temporary occupant of the Noah Feldman chair. I want to ask one to Noah Feldman questions, And the first is about the range of stuff you write about. Your previous book was a huge intellectual biography of James Madison, a wonderful book with seemingly very little to do with the Arabic linguistic analysis you do in the Air Winter. Your book before that was about US China relations. Now

in the podcast world, we welcome polymaths like you. It's terrific. You can talk to anybody about anything. But in academia, don't they hate people like you? Well, I think hate might be strong. I think the way that academics usually express their disdain as they just don't read your book, And that's fair enough. I don't know that it's polymathic though.

I mean for me, there is a central theme that runs through all of the books that I've written and a lot of my other work, and that is constitutions, the deep question being how to human beings get together to govern themselves when they pick the structures of how they're going to govern themselves, not just the day to day who's up who's down in partisan politics, but how

are they going to organize power? And you know, my book about Madison was about the single greatest genius in the last five hundred years in the world on that question. So that was the central theme for me there and even when I was writing about the US and China. I wrote extensively about whether China was developing a set of constitutional norms with a new method for transitioning for government in and out, they would enable it to compete

globally as a governing model with the United States. So that's the theme that's in all of the stuff that I write, and I try to hope that my colleagues will recognize that I do have that theme going, so they won't think that I'm too all over the place. And well, I guess. And my last question is sort of about your involvement and constitution making. In a way, here's this guy, Noah Feldman in Tunisia giving advice about how much Shariah should influence the writing of the constitution.

And I do wonder about someone of Jewish heritage in this Islamic country and dealing with this topic generally, what's it like for you and what's it like for them? I know Tunisia is one of many North African countries that used to have a big Jewish population, doesn't anymore. Did they welcome you? My experience is it ninety nine percent of the time, nobody cares if you're Jewish. For the most part. On an ordinary basis, people don't think

that religious background matters all that much. Your primary identity if you're there from abroad, is as an American. But that one percent can make a difference, and where it

makes a difference is when things go south. So Saudi Arabian newspaper published a completely invented fictional article that basically made me into an international man of mystery, you know, a spy for Dick Cheney and a spy for the you know, Israeli intelligence, and attributed to me all kinds of travels and constitutional accomplishments all over the Arabic's being

world Clinton hunters I'd never been to. And actually I got the Saudi paper with the help of a Saudi lawyer friend of mine, to actually retract the story, although I don't think it really made much difference. And then I didn't think about it much until my very last

trip to Tunisia. And so I had this crazy experience of being in the Constituent Assembly watching the debates and ratification of the constitution and then hearing my name and there was a delegate from a very minor party who was just trying to make trouble for the various majority parties, and he brought up my name on the floor in order to criticize the parties I was working with, and basically repeated some version of this old idea that I

was a spy of some kind. And I very quietly got up and walked out of the observation deck and headed for my car with my briefcase. But unfortunately, by the time I got out the door, you know, the press was out there. There was a gaggle and they were calling out to me and asking me if I

was a spy. And I stopped and told them that I wasn't a spy, and you know, I headed for my car, and I went to my hotel and I packed my bag, and I, moving as slowly and calmly as I could, went to the airport and literally bought a ticket on the very first flight out of the country. It felt that threatening. It felt like it was not a good moment to be on national television being denounced as a Jewish slash Israeli. Obviously, I'm not Asraeli slash

American spy, and I'm on a spy. And when I came home, I showed the video, which was then showed on national television to my kids, and I said, so, does it look like a plausible denial? And my son said to me, are you crazy? Like you look like a complete spy. You know, I realized there isn't any good way to deny being a spy. And then the last coda to it was on the evening news that night there was a debate about you know, was I a spy? Was I a perfectly normal guy who had

been there six times helping out with a constitution. And it was an intense debate, and I was being defended by a really impressive woman who was a member of the Constituent Assembly, a young woman who belonged to the Islamist political party, you know, wearing it a job. And it got a little heated, and I sent the clip to my mother, who doesn't speak Arabic, and she said, oh my gosh, you know, like, is that person coming after you? And I said, no, you got it backwards.

You know, the Islamist woman is the one saying, Felma is just a constitutional law professor who's been here a bunch of times to help out, and you know, this is completely paranoid and crazy. It was the secularists who

were trying to embarrass the Islamists. So to me, the takeaway was there, in a democratic country, which Tunisia had become by then, you could actually have a public debate where someone from a major party with a political future would go on television and defend the Jewish American constitutional law professor and tell the people who were being paranoid and crazy, you're being paranoid and crazy. That could not have happened in any other Arabic speaking country in the

modern period. So I walked away from mid feeling positive. And although I haven't been back to Tunisia since, I would happily go back now. I mean, Tunisia is a functioning democracy. It's not a paradise, but it is really a functioning democracy in the Middle East with good basic rights. And that's not nothing. That's an incredible accomplishment. You know, we're used to hearing people saying, oh, Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. That's just not true.

You know, Tunisia is a functioning democracy and it has been for some years now. And if the dominoes were to start falling back the other way, what would be next? I mean, what's the next country where you could imagine giving some behind the scenes advice about how to have a good constitution. I wish I could say, oh, I know where it'll be. You know, it'll be in Beirut, you know, or it'll be an Amman. I don't think

it's as simple as that. There's a good reason for that, which is that, in the end, this is the central theme of the book, it's actually up to the people in these Arabic speaking countries to decide for themselves that they're ready to self govern. It's not something which an external actor can make happen. You know, the United States invaded Iraq, we help them draft a constitution, participated in that.

It wasn't enough. In fact, we left Iroq worse off than we found it, which is a terrible moral responsibility that we have and that I feel my own proportionate share in because it wasn't chosen by them. They need to make that determination for themselves, and to me, that's the ultimate takeaway here. People will try. They may not succeed all the time, but that's also part of what makes the effort noble. You know, if you know you can succeed in doing something, it's nice that you're doing it.

But it's not that noble to try. Nobility is where you take a major risk in life and you try to make something work and it can fail. And so to me, the fact that the Arab Spring failed to achieve its goals in a lot of places is not a reason to discount the nobility of the effort. It was still noble, and although the results were tragic in a lot of places, there's still Tunisia to remind you that they didn't have to end in tragedy. Well, no, I just want to end by recommending the book again.

It is absolutely as interesting as you are talking about it. And I guess since the point where I get to say thank you for joining me on your show, thank you for joining me on my show, to be me on my show, I really appreciate it, Jacob, Thanks babe. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Gencott, with research help from zooe Wynn. Mastering is by Jason Gambrel and Martin Gonzalez. Our showrunner

is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Loebell. I'm Noah Feldman. I also write a regular column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. Discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash Podcasts. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah har Feldman. This is deep background