Making Sense with Sam Harris - #108 — Defending the Experts

Episode Date: December 14, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Tom Nichols about his book The Death of Expertise. They discuss the “Dunning-Kruger Effect,” the growth of knowledge and reliance on authority, when experts fail, the repudiation of expertise in politics, conspiracy thinking, North Korea, Trump, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming So today I'm speaking with Tom Nichols. Tom is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor at the Harvard Extension School. He's a former aide in the U.S. Senate. He's also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion. And as one of the all-time top players in the game, he was invited to the Ultimate Tournament of Champions

in 2005. He's the author of several works on foreign policy and international security, including The Sacred Cause, No Use, Nuclear Weapons, and U.S. National Security, Eve of Destruction, The Coming Age of Preventive War. And his most recent book, which is the focus of our conversation, is The Death of Expertise, The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. And we talk about the death of expertise, talk about the Dunning-Kruger effect, which many of you have probably heard about. We talk about the growth of knowledge and our inevitable reliance on authority, all the while superseding it. We talk about what to do when experts fail or how to think about the failure of expertise in various areas, medicine in particular. failure of expertise in various areas, medicine in particular. We talk about the repudiation of expertise that we now see all around us in politics. We get into conspiracy thinking a little bit.

Then we hit topics that are very much in Tom's area of expertise, North Korea, politics, Trump, politics, Trump, and related matters. Tom is a lifelong Republican, but you will find that he is also among the never-Trumpers and has a few things to say on that topic. So, without further delay, I bring you Tom Nichols. Hi, I'm here with Tom Nichols. Tom, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Sam. I appreciate it. So I've had several guests on the show who have written books without any awareness of what was coming, and what was coming was the Trump presidency, but their books have been almost perfectly timed for the moment. The book we're going to discuss here is your book,

The Death of Expertise. When did you write the book? When were you working on it? Actually, I started writing the book about three years ago. It was originally a kind of a blog rant that then got picked up as an article that ran in late 2013, early 2014. So I ran it well in advance of the election. Actually, I had no idea that Trump was going to run. And to include some stuff about the election, actually to pull the galleys at the last minute and include some discussion of that and Brexit. Yeah, well, so we're not going to focus on Trump per se. I mean, we'll talk about him, but he really is the walking distillation of much of what you write in the book, and it could not come at a better time. So before we get into your argument and the issues you discuss, just tell us for a couple

of minutes about your background as an academic, a person who has served in government in the Navy. What are the kinds of problems you have focused on up until now? Sure. Well, I actually began my life, I'm going to date myself here by admitting this, but I was actually a Soviet specialist back in the day. That could be pretty relevant now as well. Yeah. Unfortunately, it's a skill that's coming back into vogue. It's a skill that's coming back into vogue. So I began my academic career as a Russian-speaking Kremlinologist type.

I worked on Soviet foreign and defense policy. I kind of went through a standard policy and academic track. I taught at Dartmouth for a lot of years. I taught at Georgetown. I worked in the United States Senate for the late Senator John Hines of Pennsylvania. I did a lot of consulting in Washington, which, you know, back during the Cold War, if you could speak Russian, there was a lot to do there. And then I, over time, I kind of moved on to broader international security stuff. And I ended up at the Naval War College, which I should add, I don't represent the government or the Navy or anybody in the discussion, where I teach military officers during the day. And I go up

to the Harvard Extension School at night where I teach national security affairs at both places, international relations, nuclear weapons, international humanitarian stuff. So I kind of moved away from the Russia thing. And ironically enough, like everybody else, I sort of thought the Russia thing was not going to be kind of a lasting skill set, but yet here we are. Yeah, really. It really seemed completely gone. And all of a sudden, we're back in something like the Cold War. All right, so there's so much I want to talk to you about here, but let's focus on the book for the moment. There's one topic you raise in the book, which many people will have heard of, and it's the Dunning-Kruger effect. Describe that effect. Well, the Dunning-Kruger effect, as I always like to tell people, it's a frustrating thing that you've experienced at,

Thanksgiving dinner, that finally has a scientific name, which is that the less competent you are at something, that the dumber you are, the less likely you are to realize that you're dumb, which is why the least informed person at dinner sort of spools off the longest. Or the other analogy I always use is like the guy who goes up and butchers a song during karaoke night, steps off the stage and says, nailed it, because he just doesn't get it. He can't hear it. And so the Dunning-Kruger, these two social psychologists, Dunning and Kruger, did a series of tests where they figured out that the people who are least competent at something tend to be the most likely to overestimate their competence at whatever they're doing. So, you know, people that are bad writers think that they're terrific writers. And that's why they're bad writers, because they can't recognize it. They can't mobilize this skill called metacognition, which is the ability to step back from what

you're doing and evaluate it kind of outside of yourself a bit. Yes. and evaluate it kind of outside of yourself a bit. Yes. Unfortunately, the Dunning-Kruger effect as a meme has spread so widely online that now I've begun to notice that mentioning the Dunning-Kruger effect is often a symptom that one is suffering from it.

I don't know if you've noticed this, that people are throwing this around and they do it more or less in the direction of any ideas they don't like. Right. Well, and it's become a synonym for stupid, which it isn't. Right. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a very specific thing of thinking you're good at something

when you're not good at something and that the worse you are at it, the less likely you are to be able to recognize it. Yeah. It should be obvious why that would be the case, at least in one respect, because it's not until you really know a lot about a discipline that you come to recognize how much more there is to know, the gradations of expertise. It takes a mathematician of some level to appreciate the most brilliant products of mathematics, and therefore the feats of mathematicians better than him or herself, if you don't have all the

tools necessary to have the conversation, you can't even appreciate the high wire act that's going on over your head. I think, too you know, that, um, the other word I use a lot in the book that I think creates a synergy with the Dunning-Kruger effect is narcissism. Um, because people, as you say, you know, when you become an expert at something, uh, and I, and this is, this is kind of ironic because of course I don't exactly have a reputation for being a self-effacing, humble guy, but it's a very humbling thing to become an expert because you start to realize that what you thought might be interesting and relatively something you could get your arms around turns out to be immensely complex.

It's sort of like deciding that you... I think C.S. Lewis has a great metaphor for it, when you love the stories of Homer as a boy, and then you start studying ancient Greek and say, wow, this is really difficult. There are a few paradoxes here, however. There's really this paradox of knowledge acquisition that cuts against this thesis of honoring expertise? Because the advancement of our knowledge really is the result of distrusting and defying received opinions. You have scientists who find that there's something wrong with the consensus on any given topic, and they begin to defy it.

And you need to have the tools of your discipline in order to do that. begin to defy it. And you need to have the tools of your discipline in order to do that. But it is just a fact that the growth of knowledge is a process where experts are continually unhorsed by a new generation of experts. And that's key. That's a key thing that I think lay people don't understand. They say, well, you know, experts have to be challenged all the time because they get things wrong. Yes, they do have to be challenged, but by other experts who understand that field and who understand the rules of evidence in that field

and who understand what's already been accomplished in that field. You know, an example that people often bring up when I talk about this, they say, well, you know, doctors, what do they know? They got it wrong about eggs. And I talk about this in the book because I happen to love eggs. But, you know, who figured out that eggs aren't so bad for you?

Well, other doctors did by peer reviewing and testing the assertions of an earlier generation of medical specialists. It wasn't, you know, the guy next to you in the diner who says, you know, I ate eggs all my life and I feel great. And I think that's where people make that mistake. Another variable here is that there's the problem of specialization. There's just too much to know. It's just impossible to know everything about everything or really even anything about everything. And so we all, no matter how well-educated we become, we all rely on authority in general because there's just not enough time to gather all the tools you would need to verify every

claim to propositional knowledge that you want to make. And so you have even the most accomplished scientists, say, to speak of one area, who can't help but rely on the authority of their peers in areas where they're not competent to investigate. And yet, the algorithm of knowledge acquisition is to, when the time is right or when given sufficient reason, to distrust authority and move the boundary of our knowledge slightly further in one direction. And there's also this issue with respect to authority where you can't argue on the basis of your authority.

You can't cite your credentials as a reason that you should be taken seriously. I mean, either your argument and your data survive scrutiny or they don't. This reliance on authority is a little fishy. Once you shine the light on it, it seems to disappear. But then when you're not looking at it, it's there and it's actually constraining, and rightfully so, it's constraining how the conversation should run and who should be listened to. Well, let me give you an example, because I think it depends on who's doing the challenging. One of the worst stories I've ever heard from my own field in the study of

politics, I don't even want to say political science, the study of government. Years ago, a colleague of mine wrote a piece where he thinks he found a kind of mistake or a misinterpretation in a body of work done by a very famous scholar. And the journal sent the piece back to him saying, look, that scholar doesn't make mistakes like this. Now, that is exactly the kind of fishy appeal to authority that you're talking about. I mean, here was a young man. He's a professor. He had the credentials to enter the debate. He'd put the work in. He'd written up his findings. And the answer was, this person is a giant of our field. It is a priori impossible that he could have made that kind of mistake. And I think that's where peer review fails. I think though, the notion of being skeptical

of authority is something as someone trained in science myself, I actually began in the natural sciences and I moved on to the social sciences. I think it's really important to the furtherance of knowledge, but I don't believe in skepticism for its own sake. An appeal to authority, as one of my friends, I wish I could claim this quote, but a friend of mine came up with a great quote. He said, the answer to an appeal to authority is not an appeal to ignorance. And when people say, well, I distrust eggheads merely by the fact that they are eggheads, that solves nothing. I think the kind of research, you know, where I was talking about in this other article where somebody said, huh, Isaac Asimov always said the greatest discoveries in science are not attended by words like E eureka. They're attended by words like,

gee, that's funny. One of my colleagues looked at this piece and said, gee, that's funny. I don't think that's right. And he brought all the skills and tools to bear. Now, as it turns out, over time, his argument has, in fact, won the day. But 25 years ago, while this major scholar was still alive, yeah, there was a closing of, you know, circling of the wagons. And that can happen and science and knowledge fail when that happens. But I would argue that the daily successes of scholarly interaction, expert, you know, cross-checking, peer review, that those successes are far more numerous than the failures. And I think people concentrate on the failures in the same way that they concentrate on spectacular plane crashes, that they think that these magnificent expert failures on occasion kind of negate, it's just like people being afraid of a plane crash, thinking that it negates the safety of air travel. I think people don't realize, and you pointed this out when you talk about the division of labor, I think people don't realize how much around them goes right every

single day because of expert knowledge. Right. Well, let's talk a little bit about when experts fail and how to think about that. As your friend suggested, the answer to bad science and failed science or even scientific fraud is just more science and better science. It's never the promotion of ignorance or superstition or conspiracy theory. Burn down the library. Yeah. I mean, so, you know, or, you know, witch doctors, or, I mean, it's like the movements away from scientific orthodoxy are almost never taken in the realm of health. You have the fact that it is just this galling fact of medicine that there are differences of opinion about what is healthy to eat or what treatments are appropriate for various conditions.

You can get doctors that disagree. You can get failed protocols that frustrate everyone. that disagree. You can get failed protocols that frustrate everyone. All of this is a domain where we are groping in the dark for the facts, to keep death away in this case. But the appropriate response to that uncertainty is not to just start giving your kids unpasteurized milk because your chiropractor told you to do it. Not every departure from received opinion is getting you closer to the goal. But so how should we think about some of these glaring failures? What would you have people be running in the background on their hard drive to kind of help them emotionally respond when there is a sort of, you know, plain crash of knowledge that happens on a fairly regular basis? I think that's a great question. And, you know, the first thing

I'll say is that, look, I share that same distrust. I mean, look, I go to a doctor, I take things, one of my, I still remember when I was a younger guy and I was prescribed something and I just, and I made the drastic mistake of reading that, you know, like when you open up that thing that comes inside the box and it opens up into, you know, a big 16-page thing. Right, the notice from hell. Right, right. You know, that this has been known to turn people into wolverines. And so I started reading it, and I still remember the phrase that stuck out. The action of this drug on this issue is not well understood.

Right. You know, and they just said it point blank. They said, look, this drug, we think it works. We're not quite sure why it does. And I found it both alarming and refreshing at the same time to say the action of this drug is not well understood, but we've done enough clinical tests that it seems to solve the problem and it doesn't cause any other problems. And I think that image that you're talking about of what should be running on the hard disk in the background is a basic level of trust that you would extend to most other people. I mean, you don't get on a bus and breathalyze

the driver. You assume it. You assume that the driver, you know, you don't assume that your letter carrier is stealing your packages. You assume that he or she is a professional who has been delivering packages for a long time, knows how to do it. You don't walk into your children's school assuming that everybody faked their teaching credentials. And I think what's really struck me about these attacks on expertise is both how, again, I'm going to use that word again, narcissistic and cynical they are, that has really led

people to their going in position with certain classes of experts is, I know you're lying and I know you're incompetent, so let me just take charge of this right now. A big constituency for the book, although, again, I write a lot about foreign policy, and we've had some major failures in foreign policy because of expertise. But a big constituency for the book was medical doctors who kept reaching out to me while I was writing it and telling me stories of people literally walking in and saying, look, I don't want to hear your mumbo jumbo. Here's what I have, and here's what you're going to do. look, I don't want to hear your mumbo jumbo. Here's what I have and here's what you're going to do. Which is really not, I consider myself a very lucky man. I have a great relationship with a doctor who takes good care of me and answers all my questions. But I also make sure to show him that I trust him and that I ask him those questions and that I'll listen when he talks to me. I think with the larger issue of policy failure, there's a somewhat different thing that I think people should bear in mind, which is if your immediate reaction is that a policy is going

wrong, whether it's the war in Iraq or an economic downturn or whatever it is, I always turn this question back to people to say, how much of what you're objecting to is something you wanted? Because experts don't dispose. Experts propose. I was an advisor both to the Defense Department, to the CIA. I did some work talking with people with state. I did some work with talking with people with state. I've, you know, I've done a lot in the executive branch and I advised both a state representative.

I worked in state politics for two years and in the federal level in the Senate for a year. And you'd be surprised at how much of the policy outputs that experts work on are on problems that the people, the voters want done. And I, while I will certainly grant, you know, that George Tenet walking out there and saying, hey, WMDs in Iraq slam dunk, you know, he should have been held accountable for that. That was just, that was a lousy call by, you know, by the politicization of expert opinion. On the other hand, people always talk about things like Vietnam or the Iraq War or the housing crisis.

And I always point out, these were all things that were popular with the public that experts were told to go fix. And that some of the less expert opinions, Vietnam, I talk about briefly in the book, but you know, it's important to remember, the popular answer to Vietnam in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was running was use nuclear weapons. You know, one of the reviews in my book said, what have you experts done for us in the last 50 years? And my answer immediately was, well, you're not rooting around in radioactive ashes looking for canned goods. So I think we'll take that one as a win.

Yeah, well, everything that didn't go wrong was also secured by some form of expertise, right? So every plane that didn't crash is a triumph of engineering. If I can just add with every plane that doesn't crash, it's not just a triumph of engineering, it's a triumph of diplomacy. It's a triumph of public policy about managing the airways, of making sure, you know, de-conflicting flights. I mean, there's a million things that go right every time you take a successful airplane flight. It's not just the pilot being skillful. And I think people just don't think about that. No one, unless you've really trained in this area, has great intuitions for probability and risk. And I mean, just take the election of Donald Trump as an

example. The polls on the eve of the election, I think he had a 28% chance of winning. And many people assumed that he was more or less guaranteed not to win with a 28% chance. I was somewhat guilty of that in that I really just could not imagine him winning and was certainly going to relish the moment when he didn't. But looking at those polls, I was always worried. Given what I understand about probability. I understand how often a 28% chance comes up in one's life. You know, it's very high probability of something happening that you think could be a kind of civilizational catastrophe. Well, I think it was Nate Silver who said something when people were jumping all over

the pollsters. He said, look, I said that, you know, Hillary had a two and three chance of winning. He said, people remember that means every third time you run the election, Donald Trump wins. And I likened it to weather forecasters. You know, when a weather forecaster says there's a 25% chance of rain and then people don't bring an umbrella and it rains on them, they say stupid forecasters, they don't know anything, which is poor understanding of probability, as you point out. Well, so before we dive into politics and war and foreign policy and all of these other issues where you are an expert, I guess there's just a couple of other points about medicine because they seem this obviously affects people's lives continuously. I've begun to feel

that this is one of these areas where having more information is very often a bad thing. And it can be a bad thing even for someone who is fairly well-educated in the area. I mean, so I'm not a doctor, but I have a PhD in neuroscience. I understand a lot of the relevant biology. I can work my way through more or less any medical document, but I find that when I get sick or one of my kids gets sick and there's something on the menu that seems potentially terrible, the answer to that problem for me is less and less my getting onto Google or into scientific journals and doing more research on my own. I find that it's just, and if this is true for me, it has to be doubly true for someone who does not have a scientific background. I mean, now, you know, when something goes wrong, I want to know that I have a good doctor. I want to know that I have another good doctor for a second opinion. But at the end of the day, I have to find somebody who

I can ask the question, what would you do if you were me? And trust that behind that answer is much more expertise in this area than I have or than I'm going to get by an endless number of Google searches. I think this issue of Googling symptoms is really creating a kind of global wave of hypochondria. And I've often said to people, look, because they always come back to me as, well, this is about the democratization of knowledge. Look at all these medical journals. I can go to JSTOR. I can go to Medscape or whatever it is.

And I say, yes, but you can't understand them. And people get very offended by this. I said, look, these journal articles in medicine, they're not written for you. They're written for people who already have a deep knowledge of the foundational issues, who understand what it means to say, you know, this is the, you know, N equals this, and therefore the lethality is that. You're not going to understand that, and it's probably going to do more harm than good. And again, I sympathize, I empathize with people about this. I had to have an emergency appendectomy.

And, you know, after a night of tests and pain and all that stuff, about five in the morning, surgeon comes to me and she says, we really have to get, you could die. We need to do this. And I said, well. Well, let me get my smartphone. Yeah. Well, this was before smartphones, but I was a young guy with a PhD. And I said, well,

is there stuff I need to know? What are the risks here? And she kind of sighed and said, well, here's all the things that could happen. And I started to literally feel panic. And I said, is this really, I literally said, is this something we need to do? And my wife just kind of looked at me and the doctor kind of looked at me. And of course, by then I'm just not making a rational decision. And, you know, I, but I, part, part of what, and I went through this with my father as well. He was a gambler. And he needed a heart. He needed heart surgery. And he, I put it in gambler terms, you know, because they said, well, here's what happens if you don't have the surgery. And instead of bombarding him with all this information, I said, Dad, if you're holding this kind of a hand, you know, and you've got these kind of odds, what would you do? And he kind of nodded and he got it. And I think it was a great case of taking a very intelligent, but older man, and just explaining it as a matter of probability. If you don't do this, here's your chance of dying. If you do do this, here's your chance of not dying.

And I think people need to do that more often and say, look, I don't need that level of detail because it takes a certain humility to say to yourself, because if you give it to me, I won't understand it. But that runs can be a fairly subtle problem because you can understand it in the context of reading it online. I mean, so for instance, if I read a paper in a medical journal that details, you know, all of the recent research on a condition and, you know, the probability that it's X, Y, or Z in severity and all the rest, I will understand all of it. But given that I have no clinical experience, I still am not receiving that information the way someone who's been treating patients with this range of conditions for

decades. And there's just so much more information available to that person than I have. And again, it's not to say that your doctor can never be wrong, hence the reliance on further opinions. But it's just you don't. She's more likely to be right than you are. Yes, exactly. That's the problem.

That's crucial. Yeah. The doctor is more likely to be right than you are yes exactly that's the problem that's crucial yeah the doctor is going to be more likely to be right you know and i think people phrase this as a binary and foolish choice well either either i'm right or the doctor's right well the doctor could be wrong but the doctor is just going to be more likely uh to be right than you are and again i think partly people have gotten spoiled by living in a world where they can get a lot of definite answers very quickly. And I think they comfort themselves. One of the things I think you're getting at with, you know, being able to read something as opposed to be able to intuitively understand it is the kind of magic dust of experience where, you know, people really believe that there are shortcuts to knowledge that make them equal

to experienced practitioners of various things. Um, that if they just, you know, Scott Adams, the guy who the Dilbert guy, I know him well. Uh, well, you know, Adam said, he's been on the podcast. Tell me any problem. I can't understand, you know, in an hour of discussion with an expert, as though it's just a matter of the way I put it in the book. It's as if it's just a matter of copying from one hard disk to another and transferring the data and expertise doesn't work that way. It's it's like it's you know, it's almost like exercise. I mean, you don't you can't go on a crash diet and develop six packs overnight by talking to, you know, a personal trainer. Yeah. I'm glad you brought up Scott Adams. We won't talk about him further, but,

you know, he was on this podcast for two hours defending Trump in some form. And you'll understand how frustrating I found that conversation. Politics does offer, kind of unique case where people have been led to believe that they actually don't want experts of any kind. It's like if you're talking about medicine, say, very few people will tell you that they don't want their doctor to be extraordinarily well-trained or, you know, the best doctor in the hospital. Or, you know, if they have to have brain surgery, they don't want their uncle just kind of winging it with them. They want somebody who is fully qualified to get into their head. And in politics, this breaks down just spectacularly.

And the first moment where I realized this, this has probably been obvious for much longer than this, but it wasn't until the sudden appearance of Sarah Palin on the scene and her appearance at the Republican National Convention as McCain's running mate, as McCain's running mate, where I just for the first moment realized how horribly backwards all of this was in politics. I wrote an article titled In Defense of Elitism, which then got retitled, I think, by John Meacham when he was at Newsweek as When Atheists Attack. So my point was completely lost and buried. But I made a point there that many people have made elsewhere, which is, again, to the most basic case of the pilot flying the plane, no one's first criterion is whether they would want to have a beer with that person or whether

the person is just like you in being completely uncontaminated by any kind of experience with that skill set. You want someone who's truly qualified. How has this broken down in politics where there's a kind of credibility that comes from having no credibility? Well, I think there's several sources of this. One is we have come, and I usually trace this back to the 1992 election with the stunning triumph of Bill Clinton, who, however you may feel about him, is clearly one of the more gifted natural politicians of the age. And what happened in the early 90s, once the Cold War receded, and again, we were the sole superpower, we were living very affluent lives, authenticity became the end all and be all of American politics. It didn't really

matter if the guy was any good. Do you like him? As you said, do you want to have a beer with him? You look back, nobody wanted to have a beer with Richard Nixon, or LBJ for that matter. And I suppose you could trace this even earlier to Reagan, where Reagan kind of just emanates this charisma and people just kind of love him. But I think this notion of being empathetic, because Reagan was a lot of things, but he didn't demonstrate a lot of empathy. He was kind of bigger than life, but Clinton really cornered the market on this notion that in order to govern you effectively,

I have to be just like you. I have to feel just like you. I used to use it when I would give talks in the 90s. I would always seize on Clinton's statement that I want a cabinet that looks just like America. And I would always push back on this and say, no, America watches talk shows. I want a cabinet much smarter than America, much better than America. And like you, I've been accused of being a defender of elitism. Well, so be it. I don't want the cabinet to be people just like me. I want the cabinet to be people much more competent, smarter, and of higher character and steady-mindedness than most of the rest of us. And I think when we get into the early 21st century and you're talking about people like Sarah Palin, one of the things that I think has become really pernicious and cynical has been the flogging of ignorant populism by people who are smart enough to

know better. It's one thing to have Sarah Palin up there blathering because Sarah Palin is just dumb and that's just the way it is. And that was a disastrous, I mean, John McCain's public record of wonderful public service will always be marred by choosing Sarah Palin. But surrounding her and going into the kind of Tea Party period and the early 21st century, even around Obama as well, there were people pushing simplistic populist slogans who knew better. You could always argue that people like Sarah Palin don't know any

better. Now we're dealing, I mean, if you look at the current administration, you have a bunch of people that are the elite of the elite. I mean, this is Hollywood and Wall Street, pretty much running the government saying, we're here to do the bidding of the people of rural Louisiana. Well, that's a lie. That's nonsense. And I think that has really become part of the attack on expertise, is that it's being led by people who actually have quite a lot of knowledge and education themselves and are just cynically mobilizing this for political purposes. And I think that's new. That isn't even like Huey Long or the populists of the 30s responding to the depression.

This is just a cynical attempt to basically tell people that the world is a simple place, nothing is your fault, bad people hurt you, all answers can be solved with hats and banners. And yet deep down when they close the door, I'm sure they shrug and say, well, you know, that went over well, knowing that what they're putting forward really is nonsense. And that scares me more than anything. Yeah. Yeah. And with Trump, you have a kind of lack of kind of moral core that seems to be new to, at least is new to me here, which is with someone like Palin, I don't think anyone could pretend to believe that she was a genius or incredibly well-informed on the issues,

but I don't think anyone was celebrating her rise while also thinking that she's the most dishonest person anyone had ever seen or actually just not a good person, right? And reveling in that lack of any kind of commitment to ethics. And so with Trump, I mean, what we have here, which is, I think, genuinely new is that we have this kind of monster of incompetence and self-regard, which has been made possible by the fact that tens of millions of people in this country seem to revel in his incompetence and self-regard. It's not a bug, it's a feature for

them. And then when he, you know, winds people like me up, when I complain or members of the press complain about just how uncanny all this is, all of these departures from normalcy are, just how uncanny all this is, all of these departures from normalcy are, that is just to the delight of all of these people who love Trump. It's kind of like it's the character of the internet troll, really, that has become ascendant here. We have a troll as president, and that has enabled what is essentially a Dunning-Kruger presidency of a sort that I don't think we've ever had. And your reference to singing, the karaoke reminded me of those ghastly performances in the audition phase of American Idol, where you have these people come out who literally cannot sing a note, but for whatever reason and whatever has conspired in their lives to make them think they can, they go out there and humiliate themselves. And they're genuinely astonished that they have failed. They thought

they were great singers somehow. I mean, often this just seems to be selecting for mentally ill people. But essentially what's happened here is we had an election that was like that, where we have a candidate who could not sing a presidential note, and yet 60 million people leapt to their feet and applauded after he finished. And that's where we are. It's astonishing. I think there's a couple of things going on here. First, I think you have to separate Trump out from his enablers around him.

I have come to, you know, I've sort of gone back and forth for about a year of how much I think this is a political strategy and how much of it I think that Trump is just genuinely, that the president is just genuinely clueless. And I think, you know, he just lives in a, Senator Burr said it the other day, I mean, you know, where he basically admitted the president sort of constructs his own reality and lives there. And that's, you know, terrifying in and of itself. But then there's that added question of, as you say, 62 million people jump into their feet and applauding for it. And I think there we have to bring in another word, which is resentment. That we're now in a politics of resentment because we live in a politics of resentment

because we live in the age of information where the people that are most privileged, the people that do the best are people who can comprehend the world around them. They can gain an understanding of a certain amount of complexity. They can manipulate information and work in that environment.

And the people who can't, who feel left behind by it, who are not necessarily poor, by the way. This is a big myth that this is just, you know, Appalachian, desperate Appalachian opioid addicts praying that Trump will help them. There's a lot of people who are doing perfectly well in America who are, you know, cackling over the complete implosion of the government who aren't doing poorly. And I think it's this sense that, you know, the smarty pants are finally getting theirs

somehow, because this age of information has meant that the world has changed so fast that people feel bewildered and angry by it. And rather than saying, you know, as kind of my generation of parents did, my dad, my mom and dad were depression era people, not educated. My parents were high school dropouts. But they said, wow, you know, my dad once said, I lived from the Model T to the space station. And his assumption was, I will never understand the space station, but I'm glad I live in a country where there are people who do. That's now lost where, you know, you say, you know, as long as Trump triggers the libtards or angers the college professors or, you know, ticks off the smart people, then I'm good with it. Then I don't really care if everything burns because then we're all kind of back at the same level. And there's really an ugly social resentment under that that has

been spearheaded by an attack on experts because the cynical group of enablers around Trump have convinced ordinary people that anything they don't like in their lives, and I don't mean just hollowed out towns from globalization, I mean anything they don't like in their lives, and I don't mean just hollowed out towns from globalization. I mean anything they don't like is the result of some expert giving advice to some elite, and Trump and others use those terms interchangeably, by the way, experts and elites, to convince them that it's just a big conspiracy and everyone's out to get them. I mean, it's amazing to me that people who control, who voted and who gained control of all three branches of government and three-fifths

of the state houses in America still think they're an embattled minority suffering under the hands of the man somehow. And so because they can't demonstrate that politically, they assume that it's because of secret knowledge that the rest of us have, that we're somehow conspiring to control their lives around them, even though they have the political power that they've craved. And it's really, you know, this is why we're also living through a revival of conspiracy theories in America today, unlike any in my lifetime, because that's comforting to people. Yeah, conspiracy theories are fascinating because most of them are structured around a very different sense of expertise. There's this adage, I don't know if you maybe know where this came from, you never described a conspiracy. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes

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