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- [00:01]
Tom Nichols
So good, so good, so good.
- [00:03]
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- [01:14]
Sean
Well, I'm here with my guest today, Tom Nichols. He is the author of several books, including the one we'll talk about today. He's a staff writer at the Atlantic. And finally, my old job, a professor emeritus of National Security affairs at the U.S. naval War College where he taught for 25 years. Welcome to the show, Tom.
- [01:36]
Tom Nichols
Thanks for having me again, Sean.
- [01:38]
Sean
So you wrote the Death of expertise in 2017, before a lot of what now feels obvious had fully come to pass. In that book, you argued pretty convincingly that there was a growing contempt for knowledge and expertise alongside a culture of narcissism. And as a result of all that, we had a political system that was becoming almost suicidally stupid. So nearly a decade later, I thought, you know what? I'm going to bring him back onto the show to revisit the book and talk about what you think you got right and wrong. And if you believe that we are indeed witnessing the total and complete exhaustion of democratic self government as we know it. How's that?
- [02:27]
Tom Nichols
Yeah, that last one, you know, that that'll take us a little while. But, you know, start with what I got right and wrong. The first thing I ever wrote about the Death of Expertise was pretty much like a blog post in 2013. It was just me kind of venting about people arguing with experts. I mean, it wasn't just that people didn't. I didn't write the book because people distrust experts. That's old, right? That goes way back. White Jacket Anxiety. Right. And people not liking professors and pinheads and the guys in propeller beanies and all that. What pushed me to write it was people then talking to those experts and lecturing back at them about their own area of expertise. And it happened with me for years. I was a Russia guy, I was a Russia expert. I went to the old Soviet Union, I did archival research, I wrote books about Russia. And a young guy says to me one time, you know, Tom, I don't think you really understand Russia. Let me explain this to you. And I thought, wow, how did we get to that point, you know, in, in American culture where people, you know, oh, you're an oncologist, let me tell you about cancer, you know, you're a pilot. Let me talk about flying with you. And, and so I wrote that and, and that's what I got right, that this was happening. And it was, this was a social phenomenon and I gave a name to it. What I got wrong was that when I wrote the book, I said, oh, we've probably reached the high water mark of this craziness. You know, one war or recession or a pandemic and this is over. And that part of the reason I was wrong is that I didn't expect a major American political party to make it a fundamental plank of their entire platform that, you know, that rejecting expertise, I couldn't imagine that that was actually going to lead to confirming Robert Kennedy as the Secretary of Health and Human Service. I mean, I just couldn't see that far. I had a failure of imagination when it came to just how crazy this could get.
- [04:35]
Sean
I take it. So I guess here in the year of our Lord 2026, you think the book, I take it you think the book held up quite well. If anything, the diagnosis was correct, but
- [04:46]
Tom Nichols
understated the diagnosis was correct. I certainly didn't think that it was going to become an existential threat to democracy itself, which it, which it has. But I'm a little more optimistic about it because I think, you know, people, in the end, people rely on expertise every day. That's why I was saying it's not really the death of expertise. It's kind of this political carping about expertise. It really has become a political phenomenon that almost anyone who argues with the know nothings that populate an administration like this one are called elitist and, you know, anti American and looking down on ordinary folks and all that, all that stuff. And that's extremely dangerous.
- [05:30]
Sean
Politics is sort of interesting and tragic in the sense that the, the relationship between cause and effect is not always super clear. Whereas, you know, if the engineer messes up the bridge and it collapses, very clear what happened there.
- [05:45]
Tom Nichols
Right, right.
- [05:46]
Sean
But trying to connect tariffs or in an international monetary policy to, you know, higher prices, you know, for steak and the in the local grocery store is a little bit harder.
- [05:58]
Tom Nichols
And yet there are people, there are children sick with measles. You know, there are literally outbreaks of measles happening, you know, diseases we thought we had tamed, whooping cough and you know, other childhood diseases. There is a direct line that people should be able to see between, you know, somebody like RFK who, you know, I mean, where do you even begin with that sort of crackpot idea stuff that he pushes out and their children getting sick? I think the problem is that people don't want to see that because to, and this is something else I think I kind of underestimated because I, I thought better of Americans, but I think I underestimated the degree to which people feel just out of control and that this kind of approach, you know, where Bobby Kennedy goes on TV and says just eat a lot of raw meat, drink raw milk and eat some nuts and berries and you won't have cancer anymore. You know, or something like that, people go that I'd rather do that than listen to a doctor because that feels empowering to me. And I think I underestimated the degree to which most Americans just want somebody to tell them what to do. That's easy and simple and clear. And that, that was kind of a shock to me.
- [07:16]
Sean
So are there any major threads in that book or any major arguments in that book you, you would write differently today if you are writing it now?
- [07:26]
Tom Nichols
I didn't spend enough time talking about the kind of warping effect of loneliness and social media because I think a lot of what you're seeing are people joining these kind of communities of anti expert cranks because it gives them a sense of community, because it's empowerment and connection. You know, I, I didn't spend a lot of time in the first book, for example, talking about, in the first edition of the Death of Expertise, talking about things like QAnon, you know, because again, I thought, well that's, that's kind of, that kind of came and went. But I, I should have thought through more of kind of the psychology of this that I think has turned out to be really something we need to think about more as a democracy. I mean, we cannot become. I'll steal a line from Peggy Noonan here who warned that we are becoming a nation of sullen paranoids and you can't sustain a democracy on sullen paranoids.
- [08:39]
Sean
Well, let's talk about the mechanism here. For me it's going to come back to the Internet one way or the other. But in your mind at least, how Does a society go from skepticism about elites, which is good and necessary and justified, to outright contempt for competence itself? Like the idea of competence, the idea of expertise, which is stupid and self destructive? How did we get from one to the other?
- [09:13]
Tom Nichols
I think your temptation to go straight for the Internet. I'm going to detour you here a bit.
- [09:18]
Sean
Yeah.
- [09:18]
Tom Nichols
And say that it's partly the response to a modern, highly advanced, technologically adept society where everything just works. And I think people have gotten it into their heads that everybody can be an expert at everything and nothing is that hard to do because they live in a world where things just work. Let me give you an example of what I mean about how this prosperity and high level of technological advancement has made us more prone to this kind of behavior, this kind of rejection of expertise. I was born in 1960, so I grew up in the 1970s. And you know, I had my first car in the 70s. It used to be a pretty common thing to be able to say, oh yeah, sorry, man, my car broke down. My car. In the trunk I carried a quart of oil, a bottle of antifreeze, you know, a leak stopper, the stuff you pour into your radiator if it springs a leak, which I don't think even. I don't even know if they make that stuff anymore because cars were unreliable. You know, even the cheapest car today is this remarkably reliable thing. And it frees up the mental space to think about other stuff. And there's a term that sociologists use for this called hedonic adaptation. That when things get to a certain level, you take that level and you just accept that as the base instead of the ceiling. And then everything that doesn't meet that level becomes a failure or an injury or somebody screwed up. And I think that technological advancement is what opened the door for people to have the time, the leisure and the environment to sit around and bitch about how nothing works and nothing, you know, everything's broken. It drives me crazy talking to people, some of whom are close to my age, but who say things like, you know, I voted for whoever, Trump or Clinton, because we just have to shake things up. Things are just so bad. And I'm like, wait a minute, I lived through the 70s. I lived through 19% interest rates. You know, I lived through 10% inflation and 8, 7 and 8% unemployment. What are you talking about? And they have no, they have no mental horizon for this. They just think if there's the tiniest blip in the road because things have been so good for so long, for most people. And I'm not going to disparage the suffering of people who've gone through bad times, but even in the best economy, there will always be people who go through bad times. But people, I think, have the luxury now to sit back and say, look how screwed up this is. I mean, you know, my car loan is now at 2%, and they think that's like a terrible injury to them.
- [12:22]
Sean
Well, the frustrating thing is it's not really a policy failure. It's just like a kind of natural law of politics. Right. You accumulate enough privilege, and over time, it just produces, like, a very particular species of entitlement and stupidity. It's just sort of a cycle of things.
- [12:41]
Tom Nichols
I think the word. You know, we tend to shy away from this word, but I would even call it decadence. That's a big word I used to tell undergraduate students when I was teaching kids. I would say, every time you turn on your tap in America and drink a glass of cold, clear, clean water, that's a miracle. That's a miracle. There are places where you just can't do that. And I would try to explain to them how teams of experts, from city planners to, you know, elected politicians to engineers all had to get together to make sure that when you turn your tap, you don't die from whatever comes out of that. And people just don't think about that anymore. They take it for granted and then complain that, you know, it wasn't cold enough or, you know, it had a little rust in it or something. And there. There's just that willingness to constantly complain about things and then to say, and here's the kicker. I could do it better. Anybody could do this. I could be a governor. I could be president. Why not let a talk show host run the Defense Department? How hard can it be?
- [13:53]
Sean
Well, what is that about? I mean, being spoiled, being privileged? All of that seems obvious enough. But that deep resistance to learning itself, and then also that tendency to dismiss the idea that authority or expertise is even a thing at all worth desiring or that it even exists at all. It's just a phantom. I mean, what is that about?
- [14:18]
Tom Nichols
Well, you just said the magic word, authority. And this phenomenon, by the way, is global. I mean, you have people in Italy and France and Japan. But the uniquely American part, when you said authority, I mean, the national credo of America is, you're not the boss of me. You can't tell me what to do. I'm independent. I'm fully autonomous. We've really lost. And now we can come Back to your problem about the Internet and loss of community, because we all think we're these fully empowered little islands of people. You are completely capable of everything. And that's very American. You can't tell me what to do. You know, you have to vaccinate your kids before you can put them into school. Fifty years ago, people like my parents would say things like, oh, thank God the government is doing that. Now it's all these parents saying, you're not going to tell me what to put in my kid, you're not going to tell me what to do. And that is again, I would argue that's a kind of an offshoot of decadence because it's very childlike. And that's a big part of rejecting expertise because expertise implies authority and authority implies telling people what to do. And in this country you can't tell anybody what to do.
- [15:41]
Sean
Well, that's, I mean that's sort of the, there's a kind of supercharged Dunning Kruger effect. And for people who don't know, the Dunning Kruger effect is a, a pretty well established psychological phenomenon where people who don't know much about something tend to overestimate with their own knowledge or competence. And, and you know, my God, the Internet is just an absolute carnival for this cognitive bias. And I think we just, we have a lot of people empowered by the Internet who believe they know more than they do and they don't like being told that they're wrong. I mean, it's just, you know, old fashioned Socratic humility is just not a good fit for the smartphone era, Tom. Just not a good fit at all.
- [16:26]
Tom Nichols
And yeah, and the way the Internet really accelerates this, think back to pre Internet days. If anyone can, if anyone can remember time before the Internet, but I can't. My brother used to own a bar, God rest his soul. He owned a dive, right? My brother on this like joint next to the railroad tracks. And you know, it'd be a whole bunch of guys sitting at the bar and if one guy said something stupid, 10 other guys lean down the bar and go, ah, you know, you're an idiot. You know, here's where the Internet gets you out of that. You can say anything you want and go on to your square headed girlfriend or boyfriend here, the computer or your, or your handy phone and someone will say, you're right, that, what a smart thing you just said. Yes, that conspiracy theory that everybody in the bar just told you you're an idiot about. No, it's real. You know, the way I, I Described it is, every town in America has one guy, right, who walks around going, the end is near. And, you know, the. The Donald Trump is a lizard person from Venus, and, you know, Kamala Harris is here to steal your soul, right? The thing with the Internet is each one of Those people in 10,000 towns across America can now reach out to the one other person in each of those towns. And suddenly they're not a bunch of crackpots. They're a movement. They're a community. That's what the Internet can do. And it gives. It confirms you. No matter what stupid thing you believe, someone on the Internet will tell you it's not stupid, because that's just the nature of it. And it takes crazy ideas or conspiracy theories or crackpot pseudoscience, and it creates a movement out of it. And you never have to interact with the people in your community. Like at my brother's bar, who would lean down the bar and say, no, don't be stupid. Get your kids vaccinated.
- [18:30]
Sean
I mean, people don't normally draw a straight line from the loss of community to, you know, mass stupidity, but it's there. And of course, again, the Internet is the. It's the conduit there, right? Because I think part of what that tech has done is remove us more and more from the world, and we're spending more and more of our lives in the virtual space, but we still have that instinct for community. But the kind of community you are more likely to find on the Internet because of the business model that runs the Internet is this combination of idiotic and conspiratorial and also paper thin, Right? And it's not a real community. It's a simulacrum of a community, but you can absolutely derange yourself that way.
- [19:18]
Tom Nichols
Yeah. And there's a couple of things to think about with that. First of all, when people say, well, I have a lot of friends on the Internet. Well, okay, no, you don't. Look. No, you don't. No, you have a lot of connections on the Internet. But I think that model you're talking about, it creates a sense of community that is still. It's not really community because it's all about you. A real community is a diverse group of people, some of whom will not agree with you, but like you anyway. Like, one of the things that's great about a community, about, you know, the local bar or a coffee house or, you know, a bunch of people hanging on the beach or wherever it is, is that you are not all thinking the same thing. The community on The Internet is you as the central player surrounded by people who say, yes, you're right, yes, absolutely, yes, I agree. Because that's the algorithm and I think it's telling that the very online folks and you know, the, the, the kind of Elon Musk types refer to other human beings as NPCs, which comes of course from the gamer world. Non player characters, right, they're just there, they're just props that are set up around you.
- [20:32]
Sean
It was probably maybe three or four years ago I started writing this piece, which I didn't finish, but I was basically going to make the case that this collapse of trust and institutions and authority was basically an existential crisis for our society. And you know, I realize that's like the least punk rock thing a person can possibly say, but I, I think it's correct because a society this large and complicated really cannot function without that trust, or at least a sufficient level of it.
- [21:11]
Tom Nichols
I'll go where you just went. It's a threat to civilization. The reason that we could function, create governments, endow universities, run schools, do all the things that make us a functioning civilization, not just an armed camp in a world of armed camps, was that we, we not only had a certain level of trust, we agreed on basic facts, that we understood the structure of a logical argument. We had general rules for accepting what constituted evidence, we had things like the scientific method. We understood that anecdotes are not data, that exceptions are not rules. We have lost all of that again reverting to this kind of childlike insistence that whatever I happen to think is therefore true, because that is congenial to me. And if you tell me it's not true, then you're calling me stupid and I hate you.
- [22:31]
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- [23:20]
Sean
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- [24:36]
Sean
There is a flip side to this coin, right? We spend a lot of time dumping on, you know, ordinary people, the public and all the other pathologies.
- [24:47]
Tom Nichols
We're ordinary, but I wanna, but I wanna just I'm an ordinary person.
- [24:52]
Sean
No, no, we're all part of the public. But what I'm getting at, right, is it's not just the public, the citizens making bad choices. There's also the reality of the sustained shittiness of the ruling class in lots of ways. I mean, how much of this story is about elites failing time and again and people with good reason saying, I don't know about this?
- [25:22]
Tom Nichols
Well, let's crap on the experts for a while. Because there is a chapter in the book called When Experts are Wrong. But there are several kinds of expert failure and they're not all the same. But let me point out one thing which I have spoken to I keep saying I'm an ordinary person. I grew up a working class kid. I have pretty normal life. I live in a modest home in a small town in New England. But public, intellectuals, elites, the ruling class. I have said to my fellow academics and scholars, they need to engage with the public and they need to engage with the public like normal people and to talk like normal people. Because our client, whether whatever kind of expert you are Lawyer, doctor, engineer, professor, you know, whatever it is, your client is society. In the end, we do claim a certain amount of privilege as experts and knowers, and therefore, we should return that back to society. And to return it back in a way that is that we are speaking to people as our fellow citizens. And that can be uncomfortable because that also means sometimes speaking truth not to power, but to the public. So that's a problem right off the bat. You know, professors. Sometimes professors are the worst spokesman for their subject area because they. They don't. They're like. They're like Martians, you know, they just don't 100%. The other place, I think, where experts have gone off the rails is that they are so worried about the public jumping on them or seizing on their mistakes that they hide their mistakes and they try and kick kitty litter over it when they screw up. And they say, well, I mean, the replicability crisis in science, that's a real thing. I mean, that's a real problem. And I've been. When I was a political scientist guy, I railed against the fake science of political science. And I'm like, look, we can't. We can't rerun the Russian Revolution or World War I three times. We just can't. And so I think that has been a significant problem. Where I think it becomes, where we fall into a really ugly space is when the public views political outcomes as the failure of expertise. Because they don't. Because they think that bad decisions that have happened from political leaders are because of experts sock puppeting them from behind. And they don't realize that I worked for politicians. They listen to our advice. They don't always take it, and they don't always take it in full. When we talk about the failure of expertise and the lack of trust, what are the two great moments we go back to? Vietnam and Watergate. Watergate, exactly. But here's the thing about Vietnam, and maybe this is a public service announcement for people like Steve Bannon who carry around copies of the Best and the Brightest and think that people don't understand that book. In Vietnam, the experts were pushed aside by people who were generically smart, right? They didn't need the old China hands or the Southeast Asia hands from the State Department. They said, well, I went to Harvard. I'm smart. That's how we ended up getting up to our hips in blood in Vietnam.
- [28:58]
Sean
It's business guys, a lot of business
- [28:59]
Tom Nichols
guys, and a lot, no question. But you cannot run the Defense Department the way you run General Motors. You just can't people then say, well, therefore, experts are idiots. And yeah, sometimes we are. We're human beings. We screw up. You know, I think I still cringe at George Tenet telling George bush, slam dunk WMDs. It's our opinion, you know, the WMDs are in Iraq. We're going to find them. You know, there are all kinds of political failures of expertise. What is not a failure of expertise are policies that don't work out the way the public likes them. And that's a different problem. And then that's when they say, as you just did, well, our ruling class is shitty. They don't know what they're doing. I will say this. Let me speak in favor of the ruling class, which I have never been a member of, at least not to my knowledge that when the book first came out, one conservative blogger wrote an op ed about it and he said, what have experts ever done for us really, in the past 50 years? And I'm like, leaving aside the fact that you just live longer and, you know, CAT scanners and things like that, I said, I don't know. NATO, global peace and prosperity, high standard of living in human existence. You know, the end of the Cold War, the reduction of nuclear weapons, all things that were done by political policy experts. I tried to stay away from science, you know, because you say, well, sure, scientists are smart, we all get that. But you know, to say, in the past 50 years, what have experts done for you every time you get on an airplane and decide to jet off to Europe for. I mean, and by the way, I. Elites are not the only people that do this. I have been on airplanes where I've heard graduate students talking about their weekend in Berlin when you can get on a plane and just do that on a grad student, you know, weekend jaunt. Experts made that happen for you.
- [31:12]
Sean
How do you recommend people separate healthy skepticism, which again, is necessary from the more destructive contempt for expertise that, you know, obviously you were warning about in 2017 and. And we're bitching about today.
- [31:29]
Tom Nichols
Yeah, it's very hard to do because it requires you to separate out your emotions from whatever you're reading on a given day. I always tell people that I'm paid to watch the news and write about it and be part of the media ecosystem. And even I don't watch as much news as some of these folks do. I mean, you just have to unplug. The other is to ask yourself, I think, to be. Let me use them. Let me use one of those academic terms to interrogate, to ask Yourself an honest question. Am I being fair? Am I, you know, why am I going down this rabbit hole? Is it because it's interesting and it, and it confirms my priors? My advice to people is to treat information the way they treat food. Reasonable quality and reasonable portions. You know, read a national newspaper, watch your local news. I live here in New England. I can get Providence, Boston. Watch a half hour of local news. Watch an hour to a half hour of national news. If you put those three things together, a newspaper, some local news, and the national news, you're done. And then ask yourself, if you're going to other sources, why are you doing that? I had one of the most revealing conversations I ever had with someone when I gave a talk on this book. Guy comes up to me after the talk. He says, all right, Mr. Smarty Pants. He said, what do you read? How do you stay informed? And I said, well, I said, I used to live in D.C. i like the Washington Post. Of course, this was pre Bezos. I said, I like the Washington Post. Plus it has comics in it. I try and read my kind of local, small town newspaper when I can, but I said, the Washington Post is my go to because I like a lot of political and coverage. And he said, well, I'm not. That's inside the Beltway stuff. I said, okay, fair enough. I said, the New York Times News is paper of record. It's not perfect, a little stiff, but it's worth reading. He said, east coast elites. I said, all right. I said, no one has ever accused the Wall Street Journal of being too left wing. I said, and their reporting on the front end of the paper is the best. I mean, they're just great reporters. And he said, capitalist elites. And I finally, I said, okay, so you didn't really. You're not really asking me a question. You want me to cycle through all the media that you won't read for your reasons until I agree that you ought to go on the Internet until you find stuff you already agree with. And he got kind of a little red. And he was like, well, I said, what are your sources? So I read things when people say that. Amazing. When you talk to people and say, what are your sources? Someone says, oh, you know, we stopped.
- [34:36]
Sean
We some stuff.
- [34:37]
Tom Nichols
The deep state got us into Iran. So where did you read that? Well, I read things. In other words, I. I swim around in this big dumpster of crap until I find something that already agrees with something that I thought, well, look, the
- [34:53]
Sean
reality, Tom, is that again, because of the Internet, I'm A broken record here. News consumption is now indistinguishable from shopping. That's what you're doing. You're shopping, and, boy, you've got a virtual supermarket with unlimited options. And what you want. You want people. I want people to go walk into that store and go straight to the produce aisle and get the eggplant and the broccoli and the celery, all the good, you know, but what they're going to do is go and get the Skittles and the Nerds and all the ultra processed shit in the middle of the store. That's terrible form, but it's cheap and it satisfies an urge and instinct. And, you know, I just think. I think. I think we have all been put in a situation in which our worst impulses are now monetized and incentivized in a way that is increasingly hard to resist. So I'm very sympathetic to the plight of all of us. I think we've been putting a really good.
- [35:57]
Tom Nichols
That's why we have to ask ourselves. That's why the. That's why the answer to all this always starts within us. You know, what are you reading? And why are you reading it? And the biggest problem here is not with kids. It's with older adults. The 55 and over spend all day on Facebook.
- [36:13]
Sean
They're the worst. They're the worst.
- [36:15]
Tom Nichols
I've done this where I've been in front of audiences. I say, how many of you get your news from Facebook? And all these hands go up and I say, stop that. You're old enough to know better. Don't do that. And as you would point out, yeah, but that's fun. Don't. That's tasty. That's consumerism, right? It's giving me what I want. You know, that, that. That is just this kind of toddler, like, infantile narcissism that says, I reject the division of labor. And that's something I do talk about. In the death of expertise that we really have. We used to say, look, I'm. I am not going to build my own house. You know, there's an architect, there's a guy who does windows, or someone who does floors. There's a plumber. We don't think that way anymore. And I've actually had people. It's. The quote is in the book, because people kept throwing it at me over the years about Robert Heinlein, the science fiction writers. Writer who would say, well, you know, a real man can, you know, do all these things, you know, to build a house and change a baby and fire a gun. Like no, that's not, we didn't prosper as a civilization, you know, by lumbering our own houses. We just didn't. And that's a myth that's meant to make you feel good. That's, that's a myth that's meant to make you feel good about yourself and make you feel not so dependent on other people and on modern, modern life.
- [37:54]
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- [40:07]
Sean
All right, so where does all this leave us now, man? I mean, are we, Are we fully post expertise now? If we are fully post expertise, what the hell is on the other side of this?
- [40:16]
Tom Nichols
What's next? I'm going to try and be. Since we're wrapping it up and, you know, we've been doing nothing but doom. Like that scene.
- [40:25]
Sean
Give me some opium. Give me some opium.
- [40:27]
Tom Nichols
Give me some opium. You know, it's like A Christmas carol where, you know, the ghost of Christmas Present opens his robes and there's, you know, the Internet and narcissism, and on their foreheads is written doom. But I'll give you a little bit of hopium. Which is the reason that expertise is going to persist and that people will eventually come back to it is because they inevitably, at some point, people realize they can't live without it. Everybody thinks doctors are quacks until they have a pain in their chest. We always come back to this. I'm thinking, too, it's been interesting how many people have raised their eyebrows about the Iran war, for example, and saying, hey, didn't you guys have anybody who speaks Farsi in there? Don't you have any Iran experts? I mean, even people in MAGA world, you know, are looking at the president saying, what, you did this based on a gut hunch. I hope that now that Trump's been reelected and people understand that tariffs are, you know, inane and are idiotic and stupid and that, you know, going to war based on, you know, the feeling in your tailbone is dangerous, that this fever will at some point break. I also hate to say that a certain amount of human damage may bring us out of this. That, you know, you will never see. The anti vaccine people say we were wrong, but I suspect what you will see is after enough waves of children getting sick that you will see people quietly going back toward science.
- [42:12]
Sean
Well, it's always a question of, all right, so how hard do we have to crash and burn before that reckoning occurs? And Tom, I. I don't know. I really don't know because until or unless we end up on fury Road, you know, like there you will still go into that, that big shopping mall or the big grocery store in the virtual sky, and you will still have the, the nut jobs on aisle eight and nine selling you the, like, paranoid conspiracies and the Engagement, farming and the cynicism and the hatred for, you know, the other side, that stuff is pretty resilient.
- [42:57]
Tom Nichols
I was trying to end on an optimistic note, so thanks for nothing, but,
- [43:01]
Sean
well, you could counter that with even more opium there.
- [43:05]
Tom Nichols
Well, I want to. Now I'm thinking about what you said, and my big worry is that when people come out of that, you know, that the sources that they should go back to are being systematically undermined by a lot of oligarchs who are going to make sure they're not there. You know, Bezos destroying the Washington Post, you know, or, or, you know, the takeover of cbs. And, you know, that, that sources that people should be able to come back to and trust are going to become just as polluted by profit and, you know, crankery and, and all that. I mean, look, you know, your question haunts me and has for a while. How hard do we have to crash before we get it? And the problem is it's both a problem and an advantage. The problem is that modern society is so resilient that we can really absorb the stupid decisions of millions of people. And the system still chugs along because we are such a, you know, complex system now. But the crash can be ugly. And, you know, is there a kind of a dark age ahead of us where it gets worse before it gets better? I, that to come back to the very first thing we talked about, that was the mistake I made in 2017. I thought we were kind of like alcoholics hitting bottom right around then, and that I didn't foresee Trump's election. I, I, I try. I thought somebody like Trump was going to show up. And then once he did show up, I said, well, it's only gonna take a couple of years for people to kind of get it, that you shouldn't have a complete ignoramus trying to run a superpower. But people, people in that first Trump administration put pool noodles and baby bumpers on all the sharp edges of government so that Trump couldn't hurt himself too badly and couldn't really hurt us too badly. That's not the case now. So maybe this is the kind of dark time we have to go through where you have Trump unplugged, taking us into multiple wars, destroying the economy, raising tariffs, blowing up our alliances. Maybe that's what it'll take for people to finally get it. But again, I don't think they will until their standard of living is appreciably impacted by it. And that doesn't happen until things are really getting bad.
- [45:34]
Sean
Well, I have Hope we'll figure it out. The problem is that I can make a very clear and exhaustive case as to why we won't.
- [45:42]
Tom Nichols
I want to believe that we didn't live through World War II and the Cold War and all of the terrible and the AIDS crisis and Covid and all the challenges that were thrown at us over the past 80 years simply to just flush it all away. It's easy to get sucked into that, that tornado of bullshit. It's hard to stay in it, if that makes any sense. I mean, beyond a certain point, that kind of living in the world of conspiracies and bad information and anti science and anti knowledge beliefs really starts to require a huge expenditure of calories from your brain. And I think people do come out of it. The problem is we, we still have a major political movement that encourages you and propagandizes you to stay in it for their own political purposes.
- [46:39]
Sean
Well, I'll say this, Tom. I mean assuming we, we have university somewhere on Fury Road in the future and they're looking back on this period, I think your book will be one of the signals in the noise as one of those pieces of work that captured something that was afoot.
- [46:58]
Tom Nichols
I hope it's not kept in a locked desk as contraband or something, but, you know, but thank you for saying that. I'd like to think that it was more of a warning about what could have happened than a sort of anticipation of the breakdown. But I, you know, we're all still here and I think we can, we can still get out of this. But I think there are challenges ahead of us that will hopefully bring out our better selves again and, and remind us that we're all in this together, that we're all Americans, that we're all fellow citizens and, and not, not strangers and enemies.
- [47:39]
Sean
I'll leave it right there. If people want to follow your work, where can they go to track it? You're doing a lot of really fantastic writing about Iran in particular. But if people want to, want to check out what you're doing, where, where can they get.
- [47:50]
Tom Nichols
Thanks? I mean, you know, it's. One of the trusted sources would be the Atlantic. So, you know, come and subscribe and certainly there's a lot of stuff I put on social media. We gift a lot of articles on both X and, and Blue sky where I am Radio Free, Tom, but I write regularly in the Atlantic where I'm a staff writer. So come and visit us there and
- [48:13]
Sean
go back and, and, and check out or for the first time or revisit Tom's 2017 book the Death of Expertise. It I think it holds up. Tom Nichols thanks for doing this.
- [48:23]
Tom Nichols
Thank you Sean. Foreign.
- [48:42]
Sean
Friends, I hope you enjoyed this episode. It was great to finally get Tom on the show, but as always, we want to know what you think. So drop us a line at the gray area@vox.com or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749 and please, after that, go ahead. Rate Review subscribe to the podcast via that helps us grow our show. This episode was produced by Thor new writer and Beth Morrissey, who also runs the show, engineered by Shannon Mahoney. Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and Emma Munger wrote our theme music. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. The Gray Area comes out on Mondays and Fridays. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. If you watch podcasts while you listen, you can do that too. Go to YouTube.com Vox for video versions of the Gray Area. Episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays and Fridays. Listen and subscribe. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.
- [49:55]
Tom Nichols
Sam.