Speaker 1: I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a
Speaker 1: CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
Speaker 1: in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2: And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and.
Speaker 3: In war zones.
Speaker 2: We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Speaker 1: Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories large and small.
Speaker 3: Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1: This is mission implausible.
Speaker 2: We're three experts to experts in intelligence, one in journalism,
Speaker 2: and we're going to talk about the death of expertise
Speaker 2: and why people like us don't miner anymore.
Speaker 4: Apparently it sure does feel like all the things that
Speaker 4: I devoted my left who are have lost meaning. And
Speaker 4: I'm excited for today's guest, Tom Nichols. He has been
Speaker 4: monitoring this forever, this collapse of respect for expertise and
Speaker 4: what it means to live in a country where that
Speaker 4: just doesn't win the day.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Tom writes for The Atlantic and he's on social media.
Speaker 1: But he wrote a book called The Death of Expertise.
Speaker 1: There's really a good study of how we've gotten here.
Speaker 1: But we're seeing his thesis playing out at the highest levels. Now.
Speaker 1: It's one thing when your uncle thinks he knows better
Speaker 1: because he was on Google, but we now have conspiracy
Speaker 1: theorists and unqualified people at the top of government.
Speaker 4: It is true. I was thinking about my uncle, who
Speaker 4: when I was a kid, I was like, how does
Speaker 4: he know everything? That guy knows everything, Like whatever topic
Speaker 4: came up he to have an opinion on. And then
Speaker 4: at some point I came across Newsweek. And this is
Speaker 4: back in the eighties when Newsweek was like a mad
Speaker 4: I realized he just read Newsweek.
Speaker 2: It reminds me of my grandpa. My grandmother used to say,
Speaker 2: he's not always right, but he's always certain.
Speaker 1: I have a favorite cartoon. It's like this old guy
Speaker 1: sitting in a desk at a computer and his wife
Speaker 1: started the other side of the room, and he says, honey,
Speaker 1: come look, I found some information. All the world's top
Speaker 1: scientists and doctors missed. People think that they people think
Speaker 1: that they don't need experts anymore. They can just do
Speaker 1: it all themselves.
Speaker 2: Might have one word for you, smoot read smoot. I
Speaker 2: don't know why I know this, but he was elected
Speaker 2: to the Senate in nineteen oh eight, and he was
Speaker 2: so unqualified. He was one of twenty seven children from
Speaker 2: this Mormon polygamous father and he's only voted because the
Speaker 2: Mormon community voted for him. But anyway, he was so
Speaker 2: unqualified that the Senate had a special commission they put
Speaker 2: together that determined he was uniquely unqualified for this job.
Speaker 2: But they couldn't get him kicked out because the Republicans
Speaker 2: needed the things, and Smoot came along and he gave
Speaker 2: us possibly the worst bit of legislation ever in American
Speaker 2: history today. Yeah, yeah, the Smoot holiagg that made the recession,
Speaker 2: a depression that ended up with thirty percent of bank's
Speaker 2: going out of business, fifty percent of employment. But this
Speaker 2: cuy was like, he was not an expert, but he
Speaker 2: was in charge.
Speaker 4: Here's what I love, though, We as human beings learn
Speaker 4: through time. So we now know that one hundred years ago,
Speaker 4: some very ignorant people proposed massive tariffs to somehow help
Speaker 4: the US economy without ever explaining how it would help
Speaker 4: the US economy. No one would ever propose that again
Speaker 4: because the expert we now understand. So we should listen
Speaker 4: to experts, right, Yeah, you should listen to experts.
Speaker 2: We have two CIA guys here and I just want
Speaker 2: to throw out on expertise. John don't know who this is,
Speaker 2: but we had a very senior guy in CIA. This
Speaker 2: is like decades ago, and he got involved in the
Speaker 2: senior most on the operation side, although he had almost
Speaker 2: no experience. And there was this operation. I don't remember
Speaker 2: what it was going on.
Speaker 3: I think it was someplace.
Speaker 2: It wasn't Cairo, but let's just say it was. And
Speaker 2: they're planning out exactly where they're going to do this thing, right,
Speaker 2: They're going to break into some embassy or something really,
Speaker 2: and he's looking at the mayp and he starts giving directions.
Speaker 2: He's never been to Cairo, he has no idea what
Speaker 2: the traffics with the police, and he starts giving detailed
Speaker 2: instructions in like where people are supposed to stand and
Speaker 2: how many they are supposed to be, and then in
Speaker 2: the middle of it, he stops and goes, maybe I
Speaker 2: shouldn't be doing this, right, I've never been there, And
Speaker 2: everybody sort of like didn't want to say no shit, man,
Speaker 2: but it they all went, well, sir, we appreciate your input,
Speaker 2: and they totally disregarded everything he said, and it went
Speaker 2: to the hallways like crazy. It was like, never let
Speaker 2: this senior guy near your operation, because like my grandfather,
Speaker 2: he may not be right, but he's freaking certain.
Speaker 4: When we set up Planet Money. When I created Planet Money,
Speaker 4: this was in two thousand and eight, right after the
Speaker 4: financial crisis, and we felt that many of the experts
Speaker 4: led us astray, and so we didn't want the voice
Speaker 4: of the show to be that kind of implied voice
Speaker 4: of certainty that you heard on a lot of business reporting.
Speaker 4: The Dale Jones fell today by three point eight percent
Speaker 4: due to late stage trading and blah blah blah, which
Speaker 4: is always bs, and so we deliberately worked on this
Speaker 4: voice that was more here's this thing that happened. We're
Speaker 4: figuring it out. So we didn't want to be falsely certain.
Speaker 4: But that doesn't mean then just anything goes. Like I
Speaker 4: remember in Iraq one story I did that first year
Speaker 4: of the presence. There are all these newspapers that appeared,
Speaker 4: and I did a story about one of the more
Speaker 4: popular new newspapers and I went in and said, basically,
Speaker 4: I found a polite way to say, every article is
Speaker 4: just a rumor that someone heard, usually a conspiracy. And
Speaker 4: he said, yes, we are a free country. Now, we'd
Speaker 4: print all the rumors and the reader can decide.
Speaker 2: So I have one more word for you, Adam, and
Speaker 2: that is dunning Krueger, which is the cognitive bias.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: It means the less you know, the more certain you are,
Speaker 2: and the more you know, the less certain you are
Speaker 2: because you understand it's complicated, right, as opposed to like tariffs,
Speaker 2: like oh, we'll just put them on and everything will
Speaker 2: be great, because you don't know enough to realize that absolutely.
Speaker 4: All right, let's talk to an expert on the death
Speaker 4: of expertise.
Speaker 1: All right, We're lucky today we have Tom Nichols. Tom
Speaker 1: is a recently retired professor from the Navy War College,
Speaker 1: where he taught national security. He's better known these days
Speaker 1: as a writer at The Atlantic and a popular curmudgeon
Speaker 1: on television and social media, with a particular skill for
Speaker 1: riling up the crazies. He's the author of several books
Speaker 1: on Russia and nuclear weapons. Lastly, I learned when checking
Speaker 1: to prepare for this episode that Tom is a five
Speaker 1: time Jeopardy champion.
Speaker 5: WHOA yeah, man, I've been.
Speaker 1: Working on some pieces related to how the reelection of
Speaker 1: President Trump might impact the intelligence community, and I keep
Speaker 1: coming back to something former CIA and n NSA Director
Speaker 1: General Michael Hayden wrote about the incompatibility of intelligence and
Speaker 1: the maga embrace of post truth politics. You wrote about
Speaker 1: much of this and the death of expertise. Can you
Speaker 1: help us understand why people so often embrace conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: rather than facts?
Speaker 5: Oh? Yeah, Conspiracy theories are a subset of the whole
Speaker 5: death of expertise problem, and they can't. I mean, let
Speaker 5: me start with the most innocent explanation, which is that
Speaker 5: people are just inundated with information. You know, none of
Speaker 5: our brains are equipped to handle petabytes of information. We
Speaker 5: may be highly evolved, but you know, we're still we
Speaker 5: still have brains that sit inside our skull that literally
Speaker 5: can't take in that much information. And so what people
Speaker 5: do is they start using internal heuristics and relying on
Speaker 5: prior knowledge, and also using kind of a sorting function
Speaker 5: to try and simplify everything. Because once you have to
Speaker 5: decide what's true, then you spend all day trying to
Speaker 5: figure out what's true, and so you just start taking
Speaker 5: the things that are interesting or that peak your interest.
Speaker 5: That's kind of a way that people can fall down
Speaker 5: rabbit holes innocently because they're like, look, I don't really
Speaker 5: know what's true about COVID, and I saw this thing
Speaker 5: about how it was released by Bill Gates, so you
Speaker 5: could stick nanobots on our heads. You know, I don't
Speaker 5: know what's true, and I don't know what's not true.
Speaker 5: There's a bigger problem, though, that conspiracy theories are always
Speaker 5: concentrated among They tend to rise after terrible events like
Speaker 5: a pandemic, like an assassination, like a world war. But
Speaker 5: there's also a problem that they tend to arise in
Speaker 5: decadent and board societies. By decadent, I mean a lot
Speaker 5: of leisure time, the collapse of kind of moral guardrails,
Speaker 5: this sort of erosion of common sense of trust in
Speaker 5: other people. Very self absorbed, very narcissistic, very hedonistic. And
Speaker 5: conspiracy theories are really attractive because they place you at
Speaker 5: the center of a great drama. They place you at
Speaker 5: the center of your own Jason Bourne movie. You know,
Speaker 5: you sheeple, you don't get it that The reason I'm
Speaker 5: buying all these bullshit gold coins from the guy on
Speaker 5: TV is because I know and you don't. I am
Speaker 5: one of the elect who knows that the American dollar
Speaker 5: is going to be replaced by the ameo, a North
Speaker 5: American concurrency that will be worthless. And when you poor
Speaker 5: bastards are coming to me asking for one of my
Speaker 5: gold plated buffalo head recreations, you'll be sorry. I am
Speaker 5: in the know and powerful. You are weak and stupid.
Speaker 5: And that's a very tempting thing for people who feel
Speaker 5: like events are out of control. It's simple yet complicated,
Speaker 5: and it makes you feel smart even though you're you're
Speaker 5: actually very confused. The emergence of a lot of conspiracy
Speaker 5: theories at the same time are really the sign of
Speaker 5: a society and decline. When I worked in the Senate,
Speaker 5: I remember the day I got a call and they said, oh,
Speaker 5: you can stituent online one and like, I took the
Speaker 5: call and yes, I'm you know, calling I have a
Speaker 5: foreign policy question. I want to know about the Senator's
Speaker 5: relationship to the Trilateralists and the builder Burgers and the
Speaker 5: you know, I can't even remember what the other ones.
Speaker 5: There was always one other that used to I think
Speaker 5: it was a Council on Foreign Relations. I think that
Speaker 5: one he's a member of.
Speaker 6: They don't Illuminati.
Speaker 5: We didn't get the illuminati calls, but we got a
Speaker 5: lot of the weird stuff. And that leads me to
Speaker 5: my third thing. The conspiracy theories become mainstreamed because now,
Speaker 5: unlike in previous times, there are people who can really
Speaker 5: make money off of it. There are people in right
Speaker 5: wing media and in the right wing ecosystem who can
Speaker 5: play thee Well, we're just asking quite game, and of
Speaker 5: course you're gonna click, You're gonna sit there and stay
Speaker 5: on that channel. You're gonna stay glued to your talk
Speaker 5: radio station because it's interesting. Because, let's face it, all
Speaker 5: of us have worked for the federal government in various
Speaker 5: capacities in national defense and intelligence, places that you'd think
Speaker 5: would be pretty sexy. But my description of ninety percent
Speaker 5: of government work, even when I was in DC, when
Speaker 5: I was on the hill, when I was you know,
Speaker 5: consulting with the agency, when I was working for the Pentagon,
Speaker 5: ninety percent of it's boring. It's boring. It's incredibly boring.
Speaker 5: Government work is tedious and detail oriented. You know, just
Speaker 5: before we came on, we were all talking about, you
Speaker 5: know what some of these Trump nominees will encounter on
Speaker 5: their first day in office, and it's gonna be some
Speaker 5: guy with an iPad going, all right, so you need
Speaker 5: to sign off on this thing, and the budget's going
Speaker 5: to be due on here, and you got fourteen meetings,
Speaker 5: and you got HR and you got the guy from
Speaker 5: downstairs and the end and it's it's boring. So rather
Speaker 5: than try to explain to American citizens the ins and
Speaker 5: outs of how things actually happen in this country, why
Speaker 5: would you do that? Just sit there and say, you know,
Speaker 5: I'm just asking questions. But sure seems to me like
Speaker 5: those vaccines seem to have a lot of you know,
Speaker 5: those Star Wars Metchlorians in them. And you get people
Speaker 5: who want to be entertained listening to you instead of
Speaker 5: people who, like our parents used to do, snap open
Speaker 5: the newspaper at the end of a long day and say, look,
Speaker 5: tell me stuff I need to know so I can
Speaker 5: go have a beer and relax.
Speaker 4: Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 6: People obviously not our audience because they are listening to
Speaker 6: expertise by this podcast, but I'm interested in what you
Speaker 6: said about trust. So my mom got really sick ten
Speaker 6: years ago and died this terrible disease, and we went
Speaker 6: to doctors and I trusted them, right, who.
Speaker 3: Else am I gonna trust?
Speaker 6: And yet I could have gone to Alex Jones or
Speaker 6: to someone else and looked up herbal remedies and things
Speaker 6: like that. It didn't make sense to me to do that,
Speaker 6: to go to people who seem to care, who have
Speaker 6: devoted their lives to this as a general consensus. Doctors
Speaker 6: may not agree with everything, but they're doing the best
Speaker 6: they can. And yet in our society, people are choosing
Speaker 6: not to trust professionals and expertise, and instead increasingly they're
Speaker 6: turning to hacks like Alex Jones, or even to RFK Junior.
Speaker 6: I mean, one of his closest cohorts is this British
Speaker 6: doctor Andrew Wakefield. Yeah, he had his medical license taken
Speaker 6: away and he came up with this paper in the
Speaker 6: medical journal landst that was retracted claiming that there was
Speaker 6: a link between autism and MMR and his studies proved
Speaker 6: it and it showed that instead, he manipulated that study
Speaker 6: and stood to make forty three million dollars from his
Speaker 6: test kits. And he still RFK Junior, who's going to
Speaker 6: be running our healthcare, still is saying that we should
Speaker 6: be like erecting stantes to this guy, So then can
Speaker 6: trust Why would people trust Wakefielder RFK but not like
Speaker 6: real doctors?
Speaker 3: Well, here this is medical license revoked.
Speaker 5: Here's where the magic word comes in, narcissism, because to
Speaker 5: trust a real doctor. Right, I shepherded a parent through
Speaker 5: the hospicing process. I had a loved one that I
Speaker 5: had to help get through cancer. It's an intimidating thing,
Speaker 5: right that a guy in a white jacket comes in
Speaker 5: and says, Okay, I'm going to tell you a lot
Speaker 5: of stuff you don't want to.
Speaker 6: Hear and maybe don't understand completely.
Speaker 5: And well, if they're good, they'll break it down for you. Maybe,
Speaker 5: but you know that they're used to dealing with other
Speaker 5: professionals all day long. They may not have the best
Speaker 5: bedside manner. It makes it look here's some terrible things
Speaker 5: that you're going to have to hear, and here's some
Speaker 5: stuff you got to do. There are two things that
Speaker 5: happen right away. It feels very disempowering. It makes you
Speaker 5: feel very helpless and it's a little bit offensive. Who
Speaker 5: are you to tell me what I have to do?
Speaker 5: You know, to I have to stick this poison in
Speaker 5: my veins, or I have to stick my head in
Speaker 5: this radiation machine or whatever it is. It's the Fredo
Speaker 5: moment from Godfather Too, where the outraged ego yells, I'm smart,
Speaker 5: I can do things, not like people say no. The
Speaker 5: fact is you're not smart enough to know this. That's
Speaker 5: why these people have to have these jobs and are
Speaker 5: vetted by other people who have these jobs. I mean,
Speaker 5: the way Wakefield got caught is other doctors said, hey, well, okay, fine,
Speaker 5: you're making this incredible claim. We're gonna look at this,
Speaker 5: we're gonna reproduce your data, we're gonna go through this.
Speaker 5: And it doesn't stand up. But that belies the great
Speaker 5: movie that you think you're in. One brave doctor tells
Speaker 5: the world this terrible secret. If there was a connection
Speaker 5: between vaccines and autism, every doctor in the world be
Speaker 5: all over it because most of them are parents. I'm sorry,
Speaker 5: they're not gonna stick to stuff in their own kids,
Speaker 5: which they do every day. But again, that undermines that
Speaker 5: narcissistic narrative of only I know and I've done my research,
Speaker 5: and you people, and so the other thing that happens
Speaker 5: with a kind of an Alex Jones thing or the
Speaker 5: other Charlinan's out there who do this stuff. They say,
Speaker 5: I'm like you, you and I together are figuring this out.
Speaker 5: I remember the late Rush Limbaugh, who relied on a
Speaker 5: lot of experts, railing about those white jacketed creeps who
Speaker 5: tell us what to do. I'm sure God rest his soul,
Speaker 5: but I'm sure when he died he had a lot
Speaker 5: of white jacketed guys trying to extend his life and
Speaker 5: take care of him. But it's an easy hit, right,
Speaker 5: It's an easy kind of bullshit hit on. Other people say, oh,
Speaker 5: white jacketed elitists. Well, yeah, I hope the guy flying
Speaker 5: my plane is an elitist with four bars on his
Speaker 5: shoulder who knows a lot more about airplanes than I do.
Speaker 5: I'd like to sit in the back and have a drink,
Speaker 5: thank you very much. I don't want to be, you know,
Speaker 5: looking up clear air turbulence and then having to go
Speaker 5: to the cockpit and say, listen to I want to
Speaker 5: talk to you guys about how this flight's going. But
Speaker 5: that's that narcissistic sense that we can all know anything,
Speaker 5: will it hard enough? Has become speaking of RFK, it's
Speaker 5: become a kind of international brainworm. And I was giving
Speaker 5: a talk and I just in this rant because I'm
Speaker 5: you guys are asking me stuff that makes me ranty.
Speaker 5: I was giving a talk about the death of expertise,
Speaker 5: and guys, so why should I trust doctors when every
Speaker 5: issue of the Lancet and the New England Journal of
Speaker 5: Medicine is available to me now through the internet and online.
Speaker 5: And he got really upset when he said, because they
Speaker 5: weren't written for you, because you're not equipped to understand them,
Speaker 5: and neither am I. They were written by doctors for doctors.
Speaker 5: They were written for people who have a foundational knowledge
Speaker 5: of medicine, chemistry, statistics, probability. You know that they weren't
Speaker 5: written for a guy says, Oh, I think I have
Speaker 5: a lump in my groin or you know, a sore
Speaker 5: on my neck, and so I'll just go study the
Speaker 5: medical journals because it'll just be there and I'll use
Speaker 5: an AI chat bot to summarize it for me. That's insane.
Speaker 5: This is literally a form of psychosis where you just
Speaker 5: lose touch with reality and just can't process that there
Speaker 5: is someone who knows more about this than you do,
Speaker 5: and that you should go to them, even if they
Speaker 5: make you feel uncomfortable, even if they're talking down to you,
Speaker 5: even if they seem to have a lot more education
Speaker 5: than you do. Put your big boy pants on, stop
Speaker 5: whining and ask them how to save your life.
Speaker 1: I feel bad for like pilots and doctors because people
Speaker 1: probably come to them all the time now and act
Speaker 1: like they know stuff and talk to them and try.
Speaker 5: To Not just pilots, John, I'll tell you, but I
Speaker 5: mean no, seriously, I mean people in the trades. Talk
Speaker 5: to plumbers, contractors, electricians, carpenters, you know, anybody with a
Speaker 5: specialized knowledge. You know, electricians were telling me. People walk
Speaker 5: up though, what are you putting in there? You know what?
Speaker 5: Oh this wire, this is a this is Linguini number seven. Okay,
Speaker 5: I got it in the pasta aisle. What difference does it?
Speaker 5: You don't understand the difference. Assume that I am a
Speaker 5: licensed electrician and that I will explain everything to you
Speaker 5: and then bill you. But people feel the need to
Speaker 5: get in there and say, uh, you got a three
Speaker 5: eighth cent rent. They also like Cliff claven right, you
Speaker 5: got a three eighth centrench in there. I mean, it's
Speaker 5: just ridiculous. Not only is it the problem of narcissism.
Speaker 5: But it's a way to fight back against feeling helpless.
Speaker 5: It's a way to fight back against feeling disempowered.
Speaker 3: More of this after a quick break, you're back.
Speaker 1: So it sounds like the people who are doing this
Speaker 1: aren't the most destitute among us or the lowest education
Speaker 1: among us. How does class and education factor into this
Speaker 1: since some of it has to do with entertainment and boredom,
Speaker 1: not just ignorance.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there is a low information voter problem among people
Speaker 5: who are working three jobs and just trying to stay alive.
Speaker 5: But the boredom problem, where that becomes a threat to
Speaker 5: democracy and to trusting information and not falling off the
Speaker 5: rails and into these rabbit holes, tends to be a
Speaker 5: middle class phenomenon, in part because again, we're a leisure society.
Speaker 5: We have a lot of spare time on our hands.
Speaker 5: Notice that the people that are the most prone to
Speaker 5: these conspiracy theories tend to be in our age because
Speaker 5: they're semi retired, they spend a lot of time on
Speaker 5: the internet. The craziest conspiracy theorists I've ever heard are
Speaker 5: every time I'm on the road and someone talks to
Speaker 5: me about this it's always people that are over fifty five.
Speaker 5: Inevitably people over fifty five. Younger people follow this too,
Speaker 5: but they ask it as a question. They say like, Tom,
Speaker 5: is it true? Or I've heard older people say listen
Speaker 5: to me, Tom, here's what's going on. Eric Hoffer in
Speaker 5: nineteen fifty one wrote a book called The True Believer
Speaker 5: about how mass authoritarian movements develop, and he said, if
Speaker 5: you're hoping to start one of these movements, the best
Speaker 5: news you could get is not that people are poor.
Speaker 5: It's that the society you're targeting is one that is
Speaker 5: riven by unrelieved boredom. This was five years after World
Speaker 5: War Two. He was absolutely right. This kind of decadence
Speaker 5: and boredom leads you to say life must be more
Speaker 5: interesting than this. And let's face it, authoritarians and fascists
Speaker 5: and bad guys in general of both the far right
Speaker 5: and the far left tell you interesting narratives instead of saying, look,
Speaker 5: life is hard, we have to work together. We have
Speaker 5: to kind of slog this through. You got to pay
Speaker 5: your taxes, you got to vote, get up every day
Speaker 5: and go to work. Nobody wants to hear that shit.
Speaker 5: They want to hear that you are the central character
Speaker 5: fighting against Specter or Thanos or something.
Speaker 6: You can't use the word decadence without coming to the
Speaker 6: Roman Empire, right, And so Caligula famously his horse Incitatas
Speaker 6: the story goes, that he named his horse as a senator.
Speaker 6: It was actually smart, and that the Senate had expertise
Speaker 6: and how to run the empire and run it effectively.
Speaker 6: He wanted loyalty over expertise. Expertise was dangerous to a
Speaker 6: guy at the top who wants to run it as
Speaker 6: his personal fiefdom. So appointing your horse and making everyone
Speaker 6: pledge to support it is a way of stealing their
Speaker 6: soul and either destroying or manipulating expertise so that it
Speaker 6: doesn't matter. I mean, Styalin did the same thing with Lisenkoism.
Speaker 5: The main reason Caligula did what he did was to
Speaker 5: show utter contempt for the Senate. The Senate is so
Speaker 5: worthless that I had appoint my horse. And in a way,
Speaker 5: I mean not to draw strong parallels today, but in
Speaker 5: a way, you know, I wrote the other day that
Speaker 5: we're being trolled by some of these appointments. To show
Speaker 5: how little I think of the justice system, I'm going
Speaker 5: to point met Gates and screw you by the way.
Speaker 5: And fortunately there still seem to be even left in
Speaker 5: the GOP. Thank goodness, there still seem to be people saying,
Speaker 5: you know, there are limits to the amount of trolling
Speaker 5: and Carnie barking we can take while trying to run
Speaker 5: the government. But your point about expertise and authoritarians is
Speaker 5: really important because authoritarians rely on expertise like everybody else does,
Speaker 5: but they do it by command and they don't want
Speaker 5: to hear what the most important role in expert performs.
Speaker 5: And I did this advising a senator when I was
Speaker 5: a young guy. Do you have to be able to
Speaker 5: walk in and tell the boss stuff he doesn't want
Speaker 5: to hear. You have to be able to walk in.
Speaker 5: And if you're a scientist, Dan, you have to be
Speaker 5: able to walk in and tell Stalin, comrade, the wing
Speaker 5: covering on the new jets just it doesn't work. You know,
Speaker 5: it's not going to work. We screwed up. This prototype
Speaker 5: isn't going to fly. Because then he could say, okay,
Speaker 5: thank you, comrade, engineer, or he could say, clearly, you're
Speaker 5: a saboteur. I told you to make this work. There's
Speaker 5: a kind of rule among political scientists. High coercion systems
Speaker 5: are low information systems specifically because of that problem. And
Speaker 5: then if you have a system that relies on a
Speaker 5: central leader, where there's a lot of coercion and exercise
Speaker 5: of control, then those tend to be very low information
Speaker 5: systems because nobody wants to share information, and certainly nobody
Speaker 5: wants to share information that could get them killed. We
Speaker 5: saw this all the time with Stalinism. And yet the
Speaker 5: punchline to the stalin story is that when he looks
Speaker 5: over he sees the Americans developing superstaric jets and missiles
Speaker 5: and all this stuff. He literally takes some of the
Speaker 5: guys that he's imprisoned and he tells them to open
Speaker 5: workshops in prison. You know, like the tupelev that you
Speaker 5: know you've seen. These are Soviet aircraft, the series of aircraft.
Speaker 5: He had that guy working on aircraft designs while he
Speaker 5: was in prison. On the one hand, he wants to
Speaker 5: squeeze these guys because experts are always dangerous in an
Speaker 5: authoritarian government. But then when it comes time to design
Speaker 5: a new bomber, he's like, where it is that guy? Well,
Speaker 5: you throw him in prison, all right? We'll send them
Speaker 5: a bunch of drafting tables and give them some extra
Speaker 5: rations to tell them to get to work. I'm not
Speaker 5: letting them out of prison. You understand, a lot.
Speaker 1: Of his generals came out of prison World War Two
Speaker 1: once the war started.
Speaker 5: Trump Junior said something very revealing. We don't want anybody
Speaker 5: in this administration thinks are smarter than my father. Oh well,
Speaker 5: you know that rules out a lot of people, because
Speaker 5: most people are smarter than his father. You can see
Speaker 5: that in this pattern of appointments. I want loyalists who
Speaker 5: look good on TV. I don't want people actually knowing
Speaker 5: about any of the stuff we're talking about.
Speaker 1: Let's move into politics a little bit. So politicians obviously
Speaker 1: like to use fear and other powerful motions to get support,
Speaker 1: and certainly conspiracy theories are something they can weaponize with
Speaker 1: voters weren't paying attention. But is there any way to
Speaker 1: regain a serious interest in governing and embracing facts or
Speaker 1: tackling hard problems.
Speaker 5: I'm going to step back before everybody yells at us
Speaker 5: about both sides of this, because the right is really
Speaker 5: the home of this stuff now. But I will say
Speaker 5: I'm sorry to have to point this out. I was
Speaker 5: getting lots of mes and tweets and posts on social
Speaker 5: media saying you have to look into how Trump won.
Speaker 5: Clearly it was fraud, and I'm like, no, this whole
Speaker 5: election denier thing cannot start on the left after we
Speaker 5: just had to deal with it. You notice that Trump wins, right,
Speaker 5: and it's oh, I guess elections are fair.
Speaker 1: You forgot to throw this one.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they forgot it right exactly. The most incompetent, doddering
Speaker 5: old man in the White House somehow couldn't rig this election,
Speaker 5: but managed to pull it off while Trump was in
Speaker 5: office the first time, which just shows you that another
Speaker 5: thing to understand about conspiracy theories is that they don't
Speaker 5: have to be internally consistent. They just have to explain
Speaker 5: whatever they explain at that moment. Conspiracy theories live in
Speaker 5: the moment. They're not meant for the long haul because
Speaker 5: you have to revise them over time. If it's there's
Speaker 5: going to be mass arrests on just before the election,
Speaker 5: Oh that didn't happen. Never mind that I said that,
Speaker 5: there's a reason for that, and I'll get to it
Speaker 5: in a minute. So how do you get away from this?
Speaker 5: How do you get back to it. I think one thing,
Speaker 5: and this is really hard for people to do. You
Speaker 5: have to stop, even in your personal life. You have
Speaker 5: to stop giving oxygen to the people who want to
Speaker 5: suck your attention like vampires about this stuff. Because the
Speaker 5: other thing that breeds conspiracy theories is loneliness. It makes
Speaker 5: people feel part of a community. It gives them something
Speaker 5: to talk about to other people. You know, I tried
Speaker 5: to explain to it years ago. A CBS reporter did
Speaker 5: a story on conspiracy theories and whacked out thoughts and
Speaker 5: he said, yeah, we're going to talk to some flat
Speaker 5: earthers and I stopped him and I said, do you
Speaker 5: really believe they think the Earth is flat? Or has
Speaker 5: it occurred to you that this is the way that
Speaker 5: they can get a reporter from CBS News to talk
Speaker 5: to them for three hours. Some of these people are
Speaker 5: like the intellectual equivalent of like shut ins who just
Speaker 5: want company. It's like, I'll say, the Earth is flat,
Speaker 5: talk to me online for six hours about it, and
Speaker 5: there's a sadness to it. So you have to stop
Speaker 5: doing that. If someone says John those Venezuelan, you have
Speaker 5: to put your hand up and say, look, I'm not
Speaker 5: having this conversation not happening. Don't argue with them. The
Speaker 5: people who are not prone to these things can't help themselves.
Speaker 5: If your kooky uncle says I think Michelle Obama's a
Speaker 5: man that one goes around every now and then, just
Speaker 5: stop him and say, I don't care what you think
Speaker 5: about this, I'm not having this perfectly ridiculous conversation with
Speaker 5: you past the potatoes. Look, when you argue with conspiracy theorists,
Speaker 5: they take that as evidence of being right. Otherwise, why
Speaker 5: would you be arguing so strenuously. I think when you
Speaker 5: do the thing you ought to do, which is to
Speaker 5: dismiss this as though someone just told you that they
Speaker 5: have a leprechaun on their shoulder, which is the way
Speaker 5: you ought to dismiss it, I think it does produce
Speaker 5: some second thoughts of saying, wow, not only is this
Speaker 5: person making me wonder, but it's socially crippling to say, no,
Speaker 5: I'm not gonna do this with you. The media has
Speaker 5: to kind of brush these ways. Stop going to diners
Speaker 5: and asking people if they thought the election was stolen.
Speaker 5: It wasn't. And the sooner you stop asking people this,
Speaker 5: the sooner they're gonna stop trying to sink their teeth
Speaker 5: into your neck to suck that attention out of you
Speaker 5: for three hours. On a macro level, I don't know, guys.
Speaker 5: I think some of this has to burn itself out.
Speaker 5: If you're told over and over again that the spaceship
Speaker 5: is coming to spare it us all away, and finally,
Speaker 5: after the tenth time it doesn't come, maybe some of
Speaker 5: those folks will reassess. At some point, they do get
Speaker 5: bored and they do start to feel taken, and I
Speaker 5: think at that point it's really important for other people
Speaker 5: not to say I told you.
Speaker 1: So, Tom, thank you very much for your time.
Speaker 3: It was fun.
Speaker 5: All right, we'll watch the meeting, both of you. Thank you.
Speaker 3: We'll get to talk about Colligili's horse all the time.
Speaker 7: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher,
Speaker 7: and Jonathan Stern.
Speaker 3: The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Speaker 7: Mission Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable
Speaker 7: pictures for iHeart Podcasts.