The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Why Authoritarians Despise Experts

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

In 2017, Tom Nichols wrote, "The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters". The book has been translated into 14 languages and has proved to be, unfortunately, quite prescient. Nichols has recently come out with a second edition of the book. He joins to discuss the on-going attack on expertise, why Elon Musk is cutting thousands of government jobs, and why authoritarians always go after the experts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello everybody in the Hammer and Beyond. We are coming your way. May 10th at the Music Hall in downtown Hamilton. We're recording a new episode of TVO Today Live and we'd love to see you there. We're talking to the amazing and multi-award winning Canadian musicians, Sarah Harmer, Cadence Weppen, and Tom Wilson,

about the power of music and musicians in our culture, and especially during tumultuous political times. Tickets are free, thanks to the Wilson Foundation. Go to tvo.org slash tvotodaylive or search it directly on Eventbrite. So join us May 10th, 7 p.m. in Hamilton. In 2017, Tom Nichols wrote The Death of Expertise, the campaign against established knowledge and why it matters. The book has been translated into 14 languages

and has proved to be, unfortunately, quite prescient. Nichols has recently come out with a second edition of the book, and we thought we'd bring him back to help us understand the ongoing problem with the death of expertise. He's also a staff writer at The Atlantic, and he joins us on the line from Middletown, Rhode Island. Tom, great to have you back on the program.

How are you doing these days? I'm good, Steve. Thanks for having me on again. Glad to hear it. Well, you, of course, wrote about in your last book the economic downturn, how a pandemic might snap us back into our senses and get us to trust experts again. Both of those things happened. Are we any more in love with expertise

today than we were when you first wrote that book? Well, what an uncomfortable thing to say that I wrote a book about expertise and I made a big prediction in it that turned out to be wrong. I thought that an economic downturn, a war, or some other international crisis, like a pandemic, might snap us out of it because normally those are the times when people turn to experts. We've had a war in Ukraine going on for three years that has been kept contained to Europe through, I think, pretty agile international diplomacy.

We avoided the gigantic recession that everyone was certain was going to happen after COVID by wise policy and adept policy making, particularly here in the United States. And we defeated a pandemic in a year with a vaccine. And yet, after all this, people are angrier than ever at experts because they don't draw any link between the life around them, the fact that vaccines appeared in a year, that the economy never fell off a cliff, that we are not in the middle of World War III.

They don't draw any connection between that and the actual activity of experts who are advising policymakers about how to get through these dangerous things. Instead, they focus understandably on things that they feel aren't working to their satisfaction. But I really underestimated the degree to which high standards of living and a kind of general social boredom would really contribute to this ongoing kind of narcissistic rejection of expertise where people simply say I can figure this out, I can do my own research, I know enough to grasp all of these issues.

In which case are you prepared to conclusively say right here right now that the value of expertise is dead, at least to the greatest percentage of society. It's not dead, but it has a really bad cold from now. You know, when I wrote the death of expertise, I always made a point to tell people it's not the death of actual expert ability. I mean, there are still surgeons and there are still diplomats and there are still scientists and military officers and other expert teachers in every field. But the real problem is respect for expertise. People is dying and in pretty critical condition.

People walk into their doctors and they don't say, okay, tell me what's wrong with me and if I don't like what I'm hearing, I'll get a second opinion, which every doctor would encourage you to do. Instead, they walk in and they say to their doctors, here's what's wrong with me and here's what you're going to do. Here's what you're going to prescribe me. Here's the procedure I'm hiring you. I've actually had doctors say this to me where patients have come in and said I am engaging your Services here to do this procedure That is the real problem and I think that's where Society especially a democratic society just can't function that way

We can't function without a sensible division of labor But Tom surely you know that a half an hour of research on the web has got to be equivalent to 10 years of med school. You know, my father used to, my father, who was a working guy, didn't finish high school, worked in a factory, he used to nudge me and when I was younger and full of myself, and he'd say, remember, it takes about two decades

to get 20 years of experience, which he thought was really funny. But look, there are things that you can inform yourself about. I don't want people to walk away from this and say, well, I should just do whatever I'm told. Doctors, to go back to doctors, an obvious target of this kind of distrust after the pandemic. Doctors are very happy to talk to informed patients. Doctors, in my experience, love answering questions

and in fact will answer them at length if you ask them. But I think the bigger problem here is that people have so many competing claims about expertise that they cherry pick the ones that they're comfortable with. You pick the guy who says, you don't need to get a vaccination. I know vaccinations scare you. So I found this one doctor who said, eh, don't get vaccinated for measles.

Um, you know, that's, that, that is not how science works. That's not how, that's not how we got to this high standard of living here in the 21st century. I should add, look, there are, I'm sure there are people watching this saying, but experts do fail. Experts make huge mistakes. And I talk about that, there's a whole chapter in the, in both the first and second edition of this book about, you know, howlingly bad calls by experts.

We will get to that. Yeah, we will get to that. Don't, don't give up the plot yet, because I'm not ready to go there yet. There is an interesting couple of points that you make in your book though, as it relates to reasons why you think we have a distrust in experts right now.

And a couple of the reasons you've pointed to are boredom and high living standards. We need to know more about that. Go ahead. Well, part of the double-edged short of high living standards. We need to know more about that. Go ahead. Well, part of the double-edged sort of high living standards is that everything looks easy. When I was, I'm 64, so I grew up as a small child in the 1960s, and it's funny, people would say to me,

the 60s, wow, that must have been really cool. And my wife and I, who are the same age, we always tell younger people that the thing we remember about the 1960s is no air conditioning and people smoking in hospitals. People smoking around oxygen tents. And then of course, you got my younger students back when I was teaching undergraduates, they would say, hmm, what's an oxygen tent, professor? I think when you've reached a certain standard of living, you just take it for granted that of course a heart attack only lands you in the hospital for three days.

Of course everything is air conditioned. Of course nobody smokes in school because these are all things that are now woven into your life and seem easy to do. And I would argue that this is replicated at the level of national policy that since the end of the cold war, where we don't really think about things like World War III, nuclear weapons, we look and we say, well, how hard can it be to be a president or a prime minister? Anybody can do this. The world kind of runs on autopilot. nuclear weapons. We look and we say, well, how hard can it be to be a president or prime minister?

Anybody can do this. The world kind of runs on autopilot. Interest rates are low and they're always low because they're supposed to be. And peace is the default state of the world and so on. And I think that's the problem with high living standards. The problem with boredom is that people have lots of leisure time to spend plowing through kind of the dumpsters of the internet. Now I'm a huge nerd and fan of the internet.

I'm even a video gamer even at my age. But to simply sit on your Facebook page or going through Reddit or whatever your social media of choice is, and simply plowing through stuff that hasn't been vetted, hasn't been edited, could have been put there by malicious actors, really, I think, has been frying people's brains. And they need to unplug both from the internet and I think from a lot of cable television, I mean, I'm paid to have opinions and I probably don't watch as much cable news as the average American does. People really need, I know it's a cliche, but people really need to disconnect

and touch grass for a while. Well, I'm six months older than you, so I certainly know where you're coming from as it relates to all these things you just referenced, but I do want to circle back to the comments you made about the economy. Because I suspect that if you ask people today about the state of the economy, and certainly the economic power they feel they have, I suspect 90% of society would say,

it's way worse now than it was 20 years ago, and it's far more chaotic than it was. Are things actually better than we think? Of course they are. There's a thing called, that sociologists call hedonic adaptation. That is, that when things get to a certain standard, that becomes the new floor. And as an example, if you grew up sleeping in a twin bed, as I did in the 1960s, if you then sleep in a full-size bed or queen-size bed, it's hard for you to go back.

The next time you sleep in a twin bed, you say, it's really uncomfortable, it's too small, because you're used to the new higher standard. I am amazed, especially when younger people say to me how terrible they think the economy is. I had a student say to me some years ago, he said, this is just the worst economy ever, probably in 30 or 40 years. And I said, spoken like someone who didn't live

through the 1970s. And Steve, you and I are the same age. And I went on to tell these younger folks about why I remembered my license plate number, because I could only buy gas on even numbered days. And it was a great moment because some of these students kind of looked at each other, you know, with this sort of look, and said, is he lying about this? That couldn't have happened.

That did happen. You know, when I graduated from college into double digit unemployment and inflation and 18% interest rates. If we had the economic situation today that we had 40, 45 years ago, people would be burning bonfires in the streets. I mean, they wouldn't even be able to conceive of it, but we've accepted as the new normal that unemployment is always between, you know, 3 and 4 percent. That interest rates, if they get to 7 percent, are high, even though historically that's where they've usually been.

We think that 3 or 4 percent inflation is disastrous when in fact we lived for years with eight, nine, ten percent inflation. So it's very hard to get people to accept that experts have made the world better if they don't think the world is better. Understood. Let me ask you about DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, and whether you believe the laying off of tens of thousands of government employees in your country represents an attack on expertise. What do you think?

Oh, it's absolutely an attack on expertise because it's hand in hand with the Trump administration's attempt to politicize the American civil service. You know, experts are always the default enemies of authoritarianism because an expert is the person who has to whether he or she wants to an an expert is the person who has to whether he or she wants to an expert is always the person who has to say no you know if somebody comes in and says listen we need you know we need water to boil at a higher temperature today you know that we just can't do that that's not how water works you know I need this hurricane to move over here. Well, you know, we don't have that

power. So Doge, I think, was just an experiment in social revenge from people who felt that they'd been kept out of jobs that they wish they'd had. And so they decided that the right answer to this was to wade in and start firing people simply because it felt good and because it looked like activity. The fact that we've had to hire back so many of those people tells you about the role of expertise and the need for an apolitical civil service, but make no mistake, this administration, the Trump administration, really hates experts and doesn't want to hear from them. Because when the president says, tariffs work,

trade wars are easy to win, I can solve Ukraine in a day, the experts are the ones that, by their duty to society and to their profession, have to sit in the back of the room and shake their heads and say, that's not going to happen. It's interesting that we seem to, or many people at least, seem to imbue in the very rich like Elon Musk, like Peter Thiel, a sense of, well, if they're brilliant enough to have created this incredible car company or this space company or this computer company, then

clearly they must have the ability to organize a government department or know a great deal about politics and history. In your experience, can you connect those two things? It's a peculiar, I shouldn't say peculiar because I'm sure it happens in other nations, but it is a, in the United States, it has long been a conceit that if you are good at business, you're good at everything. Because Americans being the go-go capitalists that we are, you know, and let me just say for the record, I love capitalism, but I don't believe it solves every problem in the world. Unfortunately, even going back to say the Kennedy administration, when

Robert McNamara is pulled from General Motors into run the Defense Department, we make this mistake in the United States over and over and over again, that we don't realize that business and politics are two different skill sets. We did it again, bringing in Donald Rumsfeld, right? He ran a big pharmaceutical company. Of course he can save money at the Defense Department. It really is, it's just, I don't want to say it's a dumb idea, but it's a terrible misapprehension that Americans simply refuse to let go of.

They figure if you got rich selling books at Amazon or making cars at Tesla or, you know, buying real estate, then you must be good at everything. And that is, that is really a pernicious and dangerously uninformed idea. Let me set up this next question by playing a clip of a guy who millions of Americans, and I suspect a lot of Canadians as well, really like. His name's Joe Rogan. He's got a show that millions of people watch and listen to. And he has amateur historians on his program, including someone who argued that it was actually Winston Churchill and not Adolf Hitler, who was responsible for World War II. The writer Douglas Murray, who was recently on the Rogan podcast, tried to take on that

view. Here's a clip and then we'll come back and chat. Sheldon, if you would. I'm still slightly bemused about this move from, I'm an expert on this, and I have views, to I'm a comedian. I've never claimed to be an expert on anything. This is the problem, Joe. I mean, if somebody says- You have to claim to be an expert on something

to have an opinion on something? No, you don't have to be. You don't have to be. So what's the issue? I'm not a historian, but I'm pumping out history. But wait a minute, what about- I'm not an expert, but I'm talking all the time about this thing. But you're not even talking about specifically on what he just said. No, I'm saying this is my point about this. You say I'm not an expert.

So what's the solution? To not talk about it? No, it's to have more experts around. Are we living in a time now where it seems as if those with strong opinions who are good behind a big fat microphone are more prized than people who actually know stuff? Yeah they're more interesting it's more fun. I mean who wants to listen to facts and experts you know explaining history to you when two guys can sit around and kind of you know just BS their way you, when two guys can sit around and kind of, you know, just BS their way through a conversation.

I mean, who doesn't like that? That's why we go to bars and hang out and talk with our friends over beers, right? But Murray's point is really important. You don't have to be an expert, but you have to have at least some foundational knowledge. You have to have, there has to be some reason that you are sitting behind that microphone

pumping out your opinion Potentially to millions of people and guys like Rogan who have done so much damage. They jump back and forth They saw I'm just asking questions. Okay, you are but you're asking stupid questions. You're asking uninformed questions You're doing it to get people hooked on, you know, the scary secrets that supposedly, you know, you're plowing into here. And the reason this is happening, and I talk about this in the book, is that there is just so much bandwidth available that there's no longer any gatekeeping whatsoever. There was once a time where if Joe Rogan, and I don't even know who the other guy was, walks in and say, oh, we don't't know we're talking about we're not experts we're just a couple of guys

a television station or a radio station would say well that's all very nice but we don't usually televise you know Cliff and Norm at the end of the bar cheers talking about stuff you know we need to reserve the viewers time for people who know what they're talking about But literally now we are taking the equivalent, you know of putting a camera, you know and saying hey you two guys Gun just talk because we have all the bandwidth and this goes back to the boredom problem We have a public that has all the leisure time in the world You know the same people that say I am too busy to read a newspaper for 30 minutes will

listen to this junk for hours. And it's just destructive, but it helps people find it comforting because people don't go to these sources for information. They go to them for confirmation. And that they cherry pick and then find people they already agree with and say yeah I'm I now feel informed. Well now here's where as promised we're going to circle back and I'm gonna come at you Tom Nichols and say yeah but wasn't it your experts that got us into Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq and so much

expertise was so awful in all of those cases that it has begat all of what we've just been discussing. What about that? Let me put in a special pleading here about Vietnam because people really misunderstand that one because of the title of the book, The Best and the Brightest. People who often cite that book haven't read it. What happened in Vietnam was that there were experts, China, Indochina, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia experts, and they were pushed aside by people who thought of themselves, people like McNamara, right?

I ran a car company. I'm smart too. They were pushed aside by people who had good educations and thought of themselves as very smart, but they weren't really experts. The tragedy of Vietnam is that the experts were the ones saying, this is not a good idea. So on this, I will say Vietnam's an important case where people get that wrong, that if we had listened to more experts, we may not have even gone down

that road. With Iraq and Afghanistan, whether or not to topple a regime that you think is a threat to American national security is a political judgment call. The experts, however, bent their expertise on the issue of WMD. When the CIA director said, slam dunk, that there are WMD there, I think a lot of us really felt betrayed by George Bush when he gave a medal to George Tennant for that instead of firing him. And it happens.

It happens in politics. Now, again, let me throw this back to the voters and say, and yet in 2004, George Bush won a larger majority as president than he did in 2000. He actually won an outright victory in 2004. So the people who complain about these things often are the voters who refuse to hold their own people responsible. But again, let me just point out that we've also now, as of this year, it has been 80 years since the end of World War II and people doing their best.

World War II and people doing their best and I think successfully, despite Vietnam, despite Afghanistan, despite Iraq, we have managed to keep a world peaceful without the use of nuclear weapons and without a global war for 80 years. People I think most people don't realize what an astonishing achievement that is when compared to the bloody history of the 20th century. I think they take the world they live in for granted without realizing that it was constructed, that the system of free trade, high living standards, peace, cooperation, free travel, the freedom to travel, were all constructed by experts. They live in a world built by experts and I think sometimes people don't, they

fail to appreciate that because of the, again, admitted and astonishingly large mistakes that some experts have made in the past. In which case, let's finish up on this. Eight years ago you brought this book out. Eight years later, we're having a conversation in which so many of the things you hoped would happen have not happened. If we have this similar conversation eight years from now, do you have any reason to be any more optimistic about where we'll be in eight years' time?

I guess I wonder if finally getting what you want, if the people who really deplore expertise and really want to punish the experts and push them out of public life, I sometimes wonder if getting what you want is the path to realizing how wrong you are. We had these arguments bubbling around about vaccines that came to a fever pitch, no pun intended, during COVID, but now we're having major outbreaks of measles in the United States. You know, and I hate to think this way, but maybe after enough

measles cases, maybe after enough children are sick, that people will step back and say, you know, I have my issues and questions, but maybe I had to get my kid vaccinated because this is bad. So maybe after all this economic chicanery about tariffs, I mean, the president and his chief trade advisor are pretty much the only two people in the Western world left among economists who believe in this theory about tariffs.

Maybe after prices get high enough and inflation gets bad enough that people will say, you know, maybe we ought to listen to sensible economists and not do this. Maybe some suffering and seeing things go wrong is the path to people adopting a more accepting view of expertise. But remember, that's what I thought seven years ago too, and I turned out to be wrong. So I hope I'm not wrong this time. Well, I tell you and our viewers parenthetically

that we have as many measles cases here in the province of Ontario, we have 10 times as many this one year than we have had in the previous decade altogether. So for people who think this is only an American phenomenon, no, we gotta pay attention too. Tom, it's always great to have you join us on our program. The name of the book one more time

is The Death of Expertise, the campaign against established knowledge and why it matters. And it always matters when Tom Nichols shows up on TVO. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you, Steve.