Can We Trust the Experts? (with Tom Nichols)

But they couldn't get him kicked out because the Republicans needed the things, and Smoot came along and he gave us possibly the worst bit of legislation ever in American history today. Yeah, yeah, the Smoot holiagg that made the recession, a depression that ended up with thirty percent of bank's going out of business, fifty percent of employment. But this cuy was like, he was not an expert, but he was in charge.

He's never been to Cairo, he has no idea what the traffics with the police, and he starts giving detailed instructions in like where people are supposed to stand and how many they are supposed to be, and then in the middle of it, he stops and goes, maybe I shouldn't be doing this, right, I've never been there, And everybody sort of like didn't want to say no shit, man, but it they all went, well, sir, we appreciate your input, and they totally disregarded everything he said, and it went

to the hallways like crazy. It was like, never let this senior guy near your operation, because like my grandfather, he may not be right, but he's freaking certain.

voice that was more here's this thing that happened. We're figuring it out. So we didn't want to be falsely certain. But that doesn't mean then just anything goes. Like I remember in Iraq one story I did that first year of the presence. There are all these newspapers that appeared, and I did a story about one of the more popular new newspapers and I went in and said, basically, I found a polite way to say, every article is just a rumor that someone heard, usually a conspiracy. And

he said, yes, we are a free country. Now, we'd print all the rumors and the reader can decide.

can't take in that much information. And so what people do is they start using internal heuristics and relying on prior knowledge, and also using kind of a sorting function to try and simplify everything. Because once you have to decide what's true, then you spend all day trying to figure out what's true, and so you just start taking the things that are interesting or that peak your interest.

That's kind of a way that people can fall down rabbit holes innocently because they're like, look, I don't really know what's true about COVID, and I saw this thing about how it was released by Bill Gates, so you could stick nanobots on our heads. You know, I don't know what's true, and I don't know what's not true. There's a bigger problem, though, that conspiracy theories are always concentrated among They tend to rise after terrible events like

a pandemic, like an assassination, like a world war. But there's also a problem that they tend to arise in decadent and board societies. By decadent, I mean a lot of leisure time, the collapse of kind of moral guardrails, this sort of erosion of common sense of trust in other people. Very self absorbed, very narcissistic, very hedonistic. And conspiracy theories are really attractive because they place you at the center of a great drama. They place you at

the center of your own Jason Bourne movie. You know, you sheeple, you don't get it that The reason I'm buying all these bullshit gold coins from the guy on TV is because I know and you don't. I am one of the elect who knows that the American dollar is going to be replaced by the ameo, a North American concurrency that will be worthless. And when you poor bastards are coming to me asking for one of my gold plated buffalo head recreations, you'll be sorry. I am

in the know and powerful. You are weak and stupid. And that's a very tempting thing for people who feel like events are out of control. It's simple yet complicated, and it makes you feel smart even though you're you're actually very confused. The emergence of a lot of conspiracy theories at the same time are really the sign of

a society and decline. When I worked in the Senate, I remember the day I got a call and they said, oh, you can stituent online one and like, I took the call and yes, I'm you know, calling I have a foreign policy question. I want to know about the Senator's relationship to the Trilateralists and the builder Burgers and the you know, I can't even remember what the other ones. There was always one other that used to I think it was a Council on Foreign Relations. I think that one he's a member of.

radio station because it's interesting. Because, let's face it, all of us have worked for the federal government in various capacities in national defense and intelligence, places that you'd think would be pretty sexy. But my description of ninety percent of government work, even when I was in DC, when I was on the hill, when I was you know, consulting with the agency, when I was working for the Pentagon, ninety percent of it's boring. It's boring. It's incredibly boring.

Government work is tedious and detail oriented. You know, just before we came on, we were all talking about, you know what some of these Trump nominees will encounter on their first day in office, and it's gonna be some guy with an iPad going, all right, so you need to sign off on this thing, and the budget's going to be due on here, and you got fourteen meetings, and you got HR and you got the guy from

downstairs and the end and it's it's boring. So rather than try to explain to American citizens the ins and outs of how things actually happen in this country, why would you do that? Just sit there and say, you know, I'm just asking questions. But sure seems to me like those vaccines seem to have a lot of you know,

those Star Wars Metchlorians in them. And you get people who want to be entertained listening to you instead of people who, like our parents used to do, snap open the newspaper at the end of a long day and say, look, tell me stuff I need to know so I can go have a beer and relax.

I mean, one of his closest cohorts is this British doctor Andrew Wakefield. Yeah, he had his medical license taken away and he came up with this paper in the medical journal landst that was retracted claiming that there was a link between autism and MMR and his studies proved it and it showed that instead, he manipulated that study and stood to make forty three million dollars from his

test kits. And he still RFK Junior, who's going to be running our healthcare, still is saying that we should be like erecting stantes to this guy, So then can trust Why would people trust Wakefielder RFK but not like real doctors?

You know, to I have to stick this poison in my veins, or I have to stick my head in this radiation machine or whatever it is. It's the Fredo moment from Godfather Too, where the outraged ego yells, I'm smart, I can do things, not like people say no. The fact is you're not smart enough to know this. That's why these people have to have these jobs and are vetted by other people who have these jobs. I mean, the way Wakefield got caught is other doctors said, hey, well, okay, fine,

you're making this incredible claim. We're gonna look at this, we're gonna reproduce your data, we're gonna go through this. And it doesn't stand up. But that belies the great movie that you think you're in. One brave doctor tells the world this terrible secret. If there was a connection between vaccines and autism, every doctor in the world be all over it because most of them are parents. I'm sorry, they're not gonna stick to stuff in their own kids,

which they do every day. But again, that undermines that narcissistic narrative of only I know and I've done my research, and you people, and so the other thing that happens with a kind of an Alex Jones thing or the other Charlinan's out there who do this stuff. They say, I'm like you, you and I together are figuring this out. I remember the late Rush Limbaugh, who relied on a lot of experts, railing about those white jacketed creeps who

tell us what to do. I'm sure God rest his soul, but I'm sure when he died he had a lot of white jacketed guys trying to extend his life and take care of him. But it's an easy hit, right, It's an easy kind of bullshit hit on. Other people say, oh, white jacketed elitists. Well, yeah, I hope the guy flying my plane is an elitist with four bars on his shoulder who knows a lot more about airplanes than I do. I'd like to sit in the back and have a drink,

thank you very much. I don't want to be, you know, looking up clear air turbulence and then having to go to the cockpit and say, listen to I want to talk to you guys about how this flight's going. But that's that narcissistic sense that we can all know anything, will it hard enough? Has become speaking of RFK, it's become a kind of international brainworm. And I was giving a talk and I just in this rant because I'm you guys are asking me stuff that makes me ranty.

I was giving a talk about the death of expertise, and guys, so why should I trust doctors when every issue of the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine is available to me now through the internet and online. And he got really upset when he said, because they weren't written for you, because you're not equipped to understand them, and neither am I. They were written by doctors for doctors. They were written for people who have a foundational knowledge

of medicine, chemistry, statistics, probability. You know that they weren't written for a guy says, Oh, I think I have a lump in my groin or you know, a sore on my neck, and so I'll just go study the medical journals because it'll just be there and I'll use an AI chat bot to summarize it for me. That's insane.

This is literally a form of psychosis where you just lose touch with reality and just can't process that there is someone who knows more about this than you do, and that you should go to them, even if they make you feel uncomfortable, even if they're talking down to you, even if they seem to have a lot more education than you do. Put your big boy pants on, stop whining and ask them how to save your life.

You don't understand the difference. Assume that I am a licensed electrician and that I will explain everything to you and then bill you. But people feel the need to get in there and say, uh, you got a three eighth cent rent. They also like Cliff claven right, you got a three eighth centrench in there. I mean, it's just ridiculous. Not only is it the problem of narcissism. But it's a way to fight back against feeling helpless. It's a way to fight back against feeling disempowered.

Notice that the people that are the most prone to these conspiracy theories tend to be in our age because they're semi retired, they spend a lot of time on the internet. The craziest conspiracy theorists I've ever heard are every time I'm on the road and someone talks to me about this it's always people that are over fifty five. Inevitably people over fifty five. Younger people follow this too, but they ask it as a question. They say like, Tom, is it true? Or I've heard older people say listen

to me, Tom, here's what's going on. Eric Hoffer in nineteen fifty one wrote a book called The True Believer about how mass authoritarian movements develop, and he said, if you're hoping to start one of these movements, the best news you could get is not that people are poor. It's that the society you're targeting is one that is riven by unrelieved boredom. This was five years after World War Two. He was absolutely right. This kind of decadence and boredom leads you to say life must be more

interesting than this. And let's face it, authoritarians and fascists and bad guys in general of both the far right and the far left tell you interesting narratives instead of saying, look, life is hard, we have to work together. We have to kind of slog this through. You got to pay your taxes, you got to vote, get up every day and go to work. Nobody wants to hear that shit. They want to hear that you are the central character fighting against Specter or Thanos or something.

his personal fiefdom. So appointing your horse and making everyone pledge to support it is a way of stealing their soul and either destroying or manipulating expertise so that it doesn't matter. I mean, Styalin did the same thing with Lisenkoism.

the GOP. Thank goodness, there still seem to be people saying, you know, there are limits to the amount of trolling and Carnie barking we can take while trying to run the government. But your point about expertise and authoritarians is really important because authoritarians rely on expertise like everybody else does, but they do it by command and they don't want to hear what the most important role in expert performs. And I did this advising a senator when I was

a young guy. Do you have to be able to walk in and tell the boss stuff he doesn't want to hear. You have to be able to walk in. And if you're a scientist, Dan, you have to be able to walk in and tell Stalin, comrade, the wing covering on the new jets just it doesn't work. You know, it's not going to work. We screwed up. This prototype isn't going to fly. Because then he could say, okay, thank you, comrade, engineer, or he could say, clearly, you're

a saboteur. I told you to make this work. There's a kind of rule among political scientists. High coercion systems are low information systems specifically because of that problem. And then if you have a system that relies on a central leader, where there's a lot of coercion and exercise of control, then those tend to be very low information systems because nobody wants to share information, and certainly nobody wants to share information that could get them killed. We

saw this all the time with Stalinism. And yet the punchline to the stalin story is that when he looks over he sees the Americans developing superstaric jets and missiles and all this stuff. He literally takes some of the guys that he's imprisoned and he tells them to open workshops in prison. You know, like the tupelev that you know you've seen. These are Soviet aircraft, the series of aircraft. He had that guy working on aircraft designs while he

was in prison. On the one hand, he wants to squeeze these guys because experts are always dangerous in an authoritarian government. But then when it comes time to design a new bomber, he's like, where it is that guy? Well, you throw him in prison, all right? We'll send them a bunch of drafting tables and give them some extra rations to tell them to get to work. I'm not letting them out of prison. You understand, a lot.

just had to deal with it. You notice that Trump wins, right, and it's oh, I guess elections are fair.

you have to revise them over time. If it's there's going to be mass arrests on just before the election, Oh that didn't happen. Never mind that I said that, there's a reason for that, and I'll get to it in a minute. So how do you get away from this? How do you get back to it. I think one thing, and this is really hard for people to do. You have to stop, even in your personal life. You have to stop giving oxygen to the people who want to

suck your attention like vampires about this stuff. Because the other thing that breeds conspiracy theories is loneliness. It makes people feel part of a community. It gives them something to talk about to other people. You know, I tried to explain to it years ago. A CBS reporter did a story on conspiracy theories and whacked out thoughts and he said, yeah, we're going to talk to some flat earthers and I stopped him and I said, do you

really believe they think the Earth is flat? Or has it occurred to you that this is the way that they can get a reporter from CBS News to talk to them for three hours. Some of these people are like the intellectual equivalent of like shut ins who just want company. It's like, I'll say, the Earth is flat, talk to me online for six hours about it, and there's a sadness to it. So you have to stop doing that. If someone says John those Venezuelan, you have to put your hand up and say, look, I'm not

having this conversation not happening. Don't argue with them. The people who are not prone to these things can't help themselves. If your kooky uncle says I think Michelle Obama's a man that one goes around every now and then, just stop him and say, I don't care what you think about this, I'm not having this perfectly ridiculous conversation with you past the potatoes. Look, when you argue with conspiracy theorists, they take that as evidence of being right. Otherwise, why

would you be arguing so strenuously. I think when you do the thing you ought to do, which is to dismiss this as though someone just told you that they have a leprechaun on their shoulder, which is the way you ought to dismiss it, I think it does produce some second thoughts of saying, wow, not only is this person making me wonder, but it's socially crippling to say, no, I'm not gonna do this with you. The media has

to kind of brush these ways. Stop going to diners and asking people if they thought the election was stolen. It wasn't. And the sooner you stop asking people this, the sooner they're gonna stop trying to sink their teeth into your neck to suck that attention out of you for three hours. On a macro level, I don't know, guys. I think some of this has to burn itself out.

If you're told over and over again that the spaceship is coming to spare it us all away, and finally, after the tenth time it doesn't come, maybe some of those folks will reassess. At some point, they do get bored and they do start to feel taken, and I think at that point it's really important for other people not to say I told you.