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It has been expanded to include participation by the entire Naval War College extended family, including members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees, colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport, and participants from around the world. Looking ahead on the 27th of July, Dr. Michael Harrow will talk about the future of the war and on 10 August, Dr. John Miller will talk about Winston Churchill. Our 16 lecture series for academic year 2021-2022 will commence on 7 September. We anticipate that three of the lectures will be presented in person on campus and the others will be shown here on Zoom. Okay on with the main event. During the presentation that follows please feel free to ask questions using the chat feature on Zoom and we will get to as many as we can at the conclusion of the presentation. Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. Today everyone knows everything with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia. Average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Today our speaker will discuss how we got where we are and what this situation means for the future of our democracy. Dr. Tom Nichols is a Navy War College Professor and an adjunct at the U.S. Air Force School of Strategic Force Studies and at the Harvard Extension School. He is a specialist on international security affairs including U.S.-Russia relations, nuclear strategy and NATO issues. A nationally known commentator on U.S. politics and national security. He is a columnist for USA Today and a contributing writer at the Atlantic. He served as a staff member in the U.S. Senate and has held fellowships at CSIS and the Kennedy School. He is taught at Dartmouth, LaSalle and Georgetown. And interestingly enough he is also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy champion. So if our category is noted national security educators, our first question is who is the author of the death of expertise? Contestant number one, the digital microphone is yours. Thank you John and thank you all for being here. What I will try to do here is in about for the hour we have, I'll try to spend about half of that giving you an overview of what I wrote in the book and why I think this is a problem and then I'll try and move as quickly as I can to Q&A because I think that usually is where folks really want to participate especially on something as controversial or potentially controversial as this. So let me just put this up and begin sharing some slides and I will take you through it. Oops and yeah some off there we go. Okay so the the book is actually called the death of expertise but that's not a new phrase. That's been around for a little while but I'm also going to add here that I'm not representing the government of the war college on anything I say here as I didn't in the book. And I think the first question is why would I even write something like this? Why would I write a book with such a potentially controversial title? Because we all know that expertise isn't really dead. We're surrounded all most of the people sitting here right now. We're all experts. We all have something we're good at. We know that we can consult experts when we have issues whether it's going to our doctor, car mechanic, plumber, whoever. And really you know is this new? I mean when I first started talking about this I had to admit you know is this just pointy headed college professors complaining that people don't listen to college professors? That part isn't new and that's not why I wrote the book. People have always distrusted experts or intellectuals because it's exclusive. And again whether it's your car mechanic or your doctor you don't know that material so you're a little suspicious. You always want a second opinion. You're not quite sure what you're being told. That's normal and particularly with college professors. I tell a story in the book my late brother got arrested. So I used to run a bar and when I was a young professor I'd drive down to my hometown near New Hampshire. I was teaching at Dartmouth. I grew up in Massachusetts. I'd go down to my brother's bar and hang out. One day I left and my brother told me later a guy at the bar looked over and he said, so your brother's a college professor? My brother said, yeah, my guy says, seems like a good guy anyway. Like that's normal. People just kind of have that image in their heads. What's different and what made me write the book was an emerging problem where people think they're smarter than experts. Where they don't want a second opinion they want to substitute their own opinion. And that's what's really becoming scary. And I interviewed a lot of people across a lot of fields and again it's from doctors to diplomats, ordinary people saying, medicine, let me explain that to you. Nuclear arms trainees, I've got that. How worrisome is this? Well let me give you a few examples because the other part of this that made me write the book is not only that people think they're experts or think that they're smarter than experts but they are super, super confident about that. And yet their knowledge base is pretty low. For example, the Washington Post asked Americans back when the Russians first invaded Crimea and Ukraine what we should do about the Russian invasion. And a lot of Americans had some really strong views on this including putting US troops into Ukraine. Putting actual NATO and US forces into Ukraine or as we political scientists would call it World War III. The problem was that people who said this were people who tended not to know where Ukraine is. And this is a great Jeopardy question by the way. Ukraine is the largest country whose borders are entirely within Europe. And so if you're wondering where it is it's right there. The problem is that the average respondent in this poll was off by about 1800 miles. Which meant that roughly half the people involved couldn't put Ukraine on the right continent. And the further off you were the more likely you were to think military force was a good option. This is a great map and it's one that always blows my mind. See all these little blue dots in front of you? Every one of these dots is the guess of an American adult about where North Korea is. Now think about that for a moment. Only about 32% including college educated respondents. Only about 32%, roughly a third of respondents were able to identify North Korea. And my favorite part of this are the people who got it that it was on the Korean Peninsula if you look up there. But for some reason thought it was in the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula, even though North is right in the name of North Korea. Other people of course thought it was in Sri Lanka, Siberia, Australia, the middle of the Pacific all over the place. And yet people have very definite attitudes about war and peace and what we ought to do about things like the North Korean nuclear program. They just don't have any idea where it is. One of my favorite polls some years ago was a poll that a left-leaning pollster did trying to prove that Republicans were somewhat more war-like than Democrats. And it turns out everybody involved got an ugly surprise. Democrats and Republicans were polled about bombing Agrabah. And Americans of both parties as it turns out did have pretty strong feelings about this and Republicans in fact were much more willing to bomb Agrabah. Democrats as it turned out had very strong feelings about not bombing Agrabah and not using military force. This is Agrabah. It's the fictional character in the movie Aladdin. Roughly half of the respondents had a very strong opinion about whether or not to bomb a cartoon. The book has more examples of this. My favorite and I'll talk about this when we talk about democracy, but I'll just foreshadow this a bit. My favorite are the people who are very insistent on overturning Obamacare but are equally insistent that we should keep the Affordable Care Act because roughly a third of the public doesn't know that they're the same thing. All right, well how did this happen? I identify three culprits. Most people by the way when I think about when I started to talk about how did this happen they said well it's the internet right the internet has made us stupid. No, the internet has made it worse and put it all on steroids as has talk radio and the way we do higher education. And I'll talk about each of these individually but I have to tell you that underlying all of this and I actually talk about this in the next book I've written coming out next month called Our Own Worst Enemy. What's really going on here is that we've been suffering a 40-year-long epidemic of narcissism and that underlies all of these things. For example in higher education and you know I've had a pretty successful career at the War College I've taught at Dartmouth I've taught at Georgetown and I've had a good run all the places I've taught so this is not you know sour grapes about those darn kids but colleges now are heavily and I hate to say even the War College of some extent we spend too much time on what I call a therapeutic model of education where we are constantly asking the students are you okay are you happy did you like this did you enjoy this course did you feel fulfilled does this feel important to you when in fact the students really aren't in a position to answer those questions we're asking them questions is if they're reviewing a restaurant you know did the world religion course have enough spice that the English course wasn't warm enough we spend a huge amount of time particularly with undergraduates making sure they're happy instead of making sure they're uncomfortable which is really what college and higher education should be about and college should make you a little uncomfortable it should be a place where you have to challenge yourself and question whether the things you believe in are really true with the media and talk radio part of the problem here is is the explosion of bandwidth now I'm not going to say that the world was a better place when the news was 28 and actually some of us here are old enough to remember the news used to be 15 minutes long before the Vietnam War so I'm not sure that the world was better informed when the news was only 28 minutes and it was pretty much the same string of news curated by corporate executives and read by old distinguished looking white guys on the other hand the need to constantly fill bandwidth and the need to find and hold an audience has created a lot of nonsense a lot of fake expertise and a lot of tribalistic politics where you can spend all day long watching television and really not be very well informed but feel very much part of a team whether you're watching Fox or MSNBC or whatever you can watch hours and hours of television and and not end up knowing as much as you should probably know and that you could learn from um reading a newspaper for 30 or 40 minutes and finally there is the problem of the internet and and one of the things that I think I'm actually a technological optimist I'm 60 so the internet I kind of came of age when the internet did I was actually the the computer the computer committee at Dartmouth in 1989 in my department was me um because I was 28 and I was the only guy that understood any of that stuff um but the internet has has turned our brains to much in the sense that it provides shortcuts to thinking you know stuff to clicking through pages and saying you know I read up on this I did my research I know things when in fact you you don't know anything you have you know plowed through some algorithms you have gone to one of the you know nearly I think at this point there's a over billion websites um you you really may not have learned anything and some of the things you may have learned you're not equipped to understand I I did a presentation once where a guy um or I was going pretty hard at the anti-vaccine people this was long before the pandemic and um he said well why do I need to take anybody's word for it issues of the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine are available online and I said they weren't written for you you don't understand what you're reading they're written for doctors and experienced researchers and you know this guy got really mad um but I said you know I'm sorry but um you know if you're a high school history teacher the Lancet wasn't written for you it's it's not something you'll understand but people feel very strongly that if it's on the internet it's therefore comprehensible and I think students in particular this is a real danger I've had younger people say to me well but professor you know the internet's just a big library and I say I always say no libraries have um librarians the internet is a dumpster and it has all kinds of stuff on and you may get lucky and find an uneaten filet mignon but mostly what you're going to find is you know garbage and again I think we've created a generation of people who feel very confident in their ability to sort through all this um I've have students tell me over and over and well I'm I'm good at discriminating sources of information and my answer is always the same no you're not almost no one is that's why journals have editors that's why news broadcasts have producers that's why newspapers I work for two major publications I can't I can't fastball anything past USA today or the Atlantic without a fact checker crawling up one side of me down the other that's one of the reasons I stay with edited publications um you know that that's why they exist and the internet has none of that gatekeeping and I think it's really dangerous but here I am throwing this word around who's an expert expert is one of those things when I say that people say oh you mean you guys like you with your phd's you know and your credentials and yeah okay well yeah I have a phd it does Georgetown University you know back in 19 umpty um certified you know back during the stone age certified that I know stuff about government and international relations but there is also there are everyone is an expert um in something I I had a house fire here I live in Middletown um and I had a big house fire about three and a half years ago and uh I learned in a big hurry how completely useless a background in nuclear strategy is when your chimney is about to fall on you um you know and there were guys walking all over my house uh Mr. Nichols can you stand over here Mr. Nichols can you get out of my way Mr. Nichols can you maybe go out for a coffee and get the hell out of your own house because you stupid and you don't know what you're doing and you know that that is training that is pure affirmation how did I know that the guy working here was a master plumber because he has a certificate from other plumbers that say this guy knows what he's talking about um how did I know that the contractor who did my floors and put my living room back together knew what he was doing because I have seen his work um you know there are many forms of expertise and people bristle at this word when they really shouldn't because expert you know your dentist is an expert your um your uh electrician is an expert I am terrified of electrical boxes by the way um you know when I when I had my house fire a guy walked in and he started threw up in the box he started moving wires and I thought I'm going to die just standing near him but he's an expert he knows what he's doing um and so you know there are credentials there is training pure affirmation all of those things count and we dismiss them now I mean the the contractors who were here and I should add this when they asked me when I said geez I feel like the victim of my own book you know and they said they had a couple of the guys asked me about it and they said you would not believe how many times a homeowner stands over them and says so uh what kind of why are you putting in there as if they would have any the guy could say I'm putting in a number nine cavatelli with a side of fettuccine and it wouldn't make any difference because the guy asking a question has no idea but we have become this kind of narcissistic society where we feel the need to be in charge of everything we simply cannot admit that we don't know you know and and I tried to be good about when the electrician said we've got to put in a I forget what a gfp gt whatever it was I finally went jim words words words power lights right and he said yes I said tell me why this is good he said it's safer I said I trust you because I'm not an electrician I'm not certified by the state of Rhode Island I believed him that this is safer and there was no point in harassing them all day long but people do this to each other all day long a doctor I interviewed for this said very soft spoken guy he's a surgeon he said he has gotten to the point where he wants to just put the drugs and the scalpel on a tray and slide it across to the patient say you do it because patients now literally walk in instead of saying I'd like a second opinion or I want a full explanation they say things like here's what's wrong with me and here's what you're going to do this actually happened I was giving a talk in the Midwest and a pediatric surgeon in the paperback version of the book I tell this story a pediatric surgeon came up and said a couple came to him and said here is the procedure we are contracting you to perform on our daughter and he said I don't said that's not how surgery works I am not a contract player I will advise you on whether or not this is a good idea and decide whether or not to do it but he said and then he said look this is very dangerous this this surgery is not warranted if this were my daughter I wouldn't do it and they said okay and they walked out and they found a surgeon who would do it and the child as the doctor told me the end of this story was gravely injured but the parents were like look we've done our research we know what we're doing we don't take any back talk from pediatric surgeons this is the procedure we want and that you know that's that kind of behavior is why I wrote the book but I'm sure everybody's chomping at the bit to say but Tom but but but what about when experts are wrong and they are wrong um experts are human beings we are not omniscient we are not certified to never be wrong um we are also weak human beings who engage in things like fraud and when I say we I mean other people um but you know we experts engage in fraud falsification exaggeration uh doctors doctors have left clamps in people pilots have crashed airliners um the CIA director told president the second president bush weapons of mass destruction of rock is a slam dunk um my point in all this is this is not a case for demissing experts it's a case for bringing in more expertise it's a case for bringing in red teams team b um second opinions it's not a case for saying well experts someone said to me during a talk once um we were talking about eggs I talk about this in the book I like eggs and I gave my own doctor hell because I said oh I can eat eggs now and he kind of hung his head and he said yeah we were wrong about that um of course the people who found out they were wrong about that were other doctors but I kind of you know nudged him and I said thanks doc you know I've been eating carbs when I should have been eating eggs and someone in the audience said well this just proves that doctors don't know anything about heart disease and I said whoa whoa whoa that's a really different issue than doctors misunderstood the mechanism of metabolizing cholesterol in an egg yolk that's a long way to go to get to doctors don't know anything about heart disease um and that leads me to the line I always use about this experts are not always right they're just more likely to be right particularly in their area of expertise than you are that's that's and you know you would think that's a very common sense kind of um assertion and you would be astonished at how people how many people say uh you know no I can I mean the the guy who writes and I quoted him in the book the guy who does the Dilbert comic strip said you can become an expert in an hour by talking to any expert in a field and having them just talk to you and you can absorb it including a present um now you know I was always a fan of the Dilbert comic strip that's just a flatly stupid thing to say um you cannot become an expert in an hour any of you here who are experts in your areas particularly military folks imagine me as a civilian walking up to you and saying god just brief me on how to run a fighter squadron give me an hour and I'll I got it from you you know tell me about uh you know tell me about station keeping and you know how to drive a ship and give me about an hour or two and I can get that down and I'll just practice but this is how I think this and it's not just the United States I'm gonna rag slightly here and say you know when I wrote the book I really thought I was mostly castigating Americans because Americans are the very much the let me tell you kind of guys you know we're we're big talkers um but the death of expertise is now um in 14 languages around the world and I was pretty shocked by that uh you know when the first foreign contracts came in from places like Korea and Japan I was like I'm sorry Japan have a problem with you know expertise but I think it shows that in an advanced post industrial society where there's a lot of education and I um I'll probably have questions about this but I'm going to say maybe too many of us are going to college um for the wrong things and and certainly going to college at all um but I think when you have super high levels of universal college education the internet um a culture that you know is kind of a trophy in achievement culture you get people all over the world I mean I professors in places like um you know Australia and Germany were telling me things like oh yeah my students are like this and I just I was really shocked I mean it was gratifying you know it's nice to brag and say oh my books in this many languages but it also really kind of unsettled me to think that something I thought was mostly a cultural problem in my country turns out to be a global problem but but there is no doubt about it experts and particularly when advising policymakers and I was one of those expert advisors I did make mistakes um we're gonna we're gonna screw up um but you know the policymakers are the policymakers experts are the advisors and um you know a good policymaker does not rely on one expert my I um you know I can talk more about this later but during the first Gulf War um I was working for the senator from Pennsylvania and he asked me for a what what then would have been a very classified estimate of casualties and of course mine were super low because I was getting some really good information from the DOD and working on that with folks at the Pentagon and he blew up he threw me out of it he literally threw me out of his office in a hail of F bombs and um then he went upstairs and checked with some other folks at the senate intelligence committee and after he talked to a bunch of other experts he said okay I see what you guys are about I got it um you know we we turned out to be right um but you know you cannot expect that um and I think this is also part of the very high standard of living we've become used to um you cannot expect a zero defect world of expertise like everybody else we kind of do our best and that brings me to the last point here which is that in a in a democracy and particularly in a republic like ours we have to rely on expertise and delegated decision making we we just cannot all gather in the public square every year and approve the budget you know the the swiss do this night I gave this talk in um switzerland and uh it was an interesting they had invited me because the swiss do have a direct democracy they literally do vote on like everything by referendum and uh there are people in the swiss democracy business who are wondering you know can we go on like this because the swiss public is becoming kind of um lazy and uninformed and there are people in switzerland saying you know can we survive this way but switzerland is a small place with a lot of decentralized local control um the united states cannot survive on ignorance elected representatives cannot just become megaphones for what the people back home say and you've seen this now with um people in congress saying things like well i'm just this is what my people want and the voters back home saying we didn't send them there to make his own decisions we we um we send them there to make our decision you know to do the things we want and you know maybe i'm just an old school berkin conservative here but that is not what democracy is about um that if that's the case then you can just have everything settled by an internet poll and you don't need to gather uh five or six hundred people in the halls of congress and debate it um we we literally cannot go on this way as a democracy no one can you know we can't we can't survive without agreement on basic facts we can't survive without agreement on what constitutes science and knowledge we can't survive um if we simply tell our elected representatives it doesn't matter if we're all wrong and angry just do the thing we're telling you to do um because then we do this this new yorker commercial cartoon that everyone in the world sent me for a while um was uh you know we will become like that these smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us who thinks i should fly the plane um you know things just don't work that way we have an accountability mechanism in a democracy it's called elections and if you don't like the policies that you're getting um vote for people who are going to make different policies um but you you're not going to vote on the nature of reality or what constitutes a fact and unfortunately um we really have reached that point where you know again people say i have very i have very deep thoughts about healthcare but i don't know that the aca and obama care are the same thing um that that's really dangerous that's when um we become not a republic but um you know a mobocracy and that's partly why i wrote the book because i i just in the end i don't think that um you know it's it's entertaining to talk about the things people don't know and it can be kind of funny but in the end um this left me with a very dark and unsettled feeling that democracy cannot survive this way so i'll stop there and i will leave the rest of the time for q and a and um be happy to take your questions okay tom thank you very much uh uh you have generated quite a few issues and quite a few questions uh my personal question is i saw the black cat typing on that computer when does that book come out uh that comes out august and that that will drop august 19 very good sir okay uh question uh you had some pushback on the term dumpster uh as a descriptive term for the internet some said absolutely that's an inappropriate term and others said no i guess that's really what it is you want to expand on why your view is that it's a dumpster and not a library because first of all there is no way to gatekeep the difference between um you know the mentally studies department at princeton university and isis they all you have to do for for any of you can open a website and call it call it news call it opinion call it fax call it whatever you want for six seven ten bucks a month i used to have a blog with my own domain and i finally gave it up because i realized that was part of the problem um you know as i tell my students it's okay to have thoughts you don't express you don't need to keep a running diary on your own you know uh joe blow dot com domain um i i kind of swore that i would always work with editors um and when students ask me what they should trust i say ask is this is this thing you're looking at doesn't have an editorial masthead are there people who will answer for the reporting unit doesn't have a corrections page does it admit mistakes doesn't have some institutional longevity uh which is not to say that you know newspapers get things wrong too i mean i talk in the in the piece about some religion writer at the new york times referred to easter as the day when jesus ascended into heaven um or as many of us christians point out well there are about 50 days in there where he kind of you know took his time and did some other stuff and if you're working at the new york times you know you should know that um but you know just a website there's a billion websites even if 90 percent of them are terrible that's 900 million bad websites and i think the ability to just drop anything on a website on the internet is a problem i and by the way i was approached i i thought about it and i bring down then i still think about it i've been approached by places like sub stack and patreon and others and i am afraid to work without editors i really am i just think it's just too easy to say things that are dumb or not true uh and so i think you know this this notion that the internet is this i love the internet i mean i'm sitting here talking to all of you on it i have a twitter account i have a facebook account but the idea that somehow the internet isn't this giant cesspool is um it's i i think defies empirical reality there are great sites on the internet um but most of them are just dumped there the other thing and i'll get off this soap box is that most people are completely unaware of the notion of algorithms you know if you excuse me if you do a search for um how do you make chicken soup you're going to get ads from camels and progress though the internet is built to drive traffic that way someone made a joke about me a while back that this i usually use a big uh chair when i'm sitting at my desk here and someone said well and it's a guy that's particularly like me very much he saw i'm sorry to see that tom nickles is in a wheelchair now and the algorithm caught fire on the internet and to this day there are people who who think that i am a paraplegic or quadriplegic because the the algorithm seized on disability and my name and just kept putting that together in searches i'm sorry that is a dumpster that's crazy um and i think just like with newspapers or books there is a difference between a book published by random house or the university of kansas press and a book published by joe's garage press in joe's garage i am a big fan of gatekeepers and people taking responsibility for content that's put out there so i i think that that you know is really the idea that the internet has that it does not um someone asked just to hide that up someone asked about wikipedia i talk about wikipedia in the book i actually corresponded with um one of the founders of not jimmy wales but um larry um his name's just one out of my head and you know wikipedia is only as good as the editors who use it wikipedia has endless entries on things like movies and sports and porn stars and stem and is totally awful about things like history literature other stuff it's totally driven by a group of young men mostly men most of the editors are men and so you know it's not an encyclopedia it's a kind of a public chat club that is moderately edited i tell my students don't you unless you're looking at like a simple date or something don't use it tom we got a comment from one of our librarians that perhaps we should stress the difference between information we get from the internet and information we access via the internet yes to a curated site or a library site i and i you know i am a huge booster of librarians i often refer to them as among the last guardians of western civilization and knowledge um you know that's another thing that i tell students all the time both war college and undergrads uh look if you're in doubt go to a librarian go to a reference librarian that's what they're there for they're not like just people who shelve books they know the difference between good books and bad books between reputable presses and bad presses um and but again i have had so much pushback people said listen i know i can i'm good at discriminating among sources when in fact most people have no background in doing this have no idea what they're talking about and it's purely just this feel-good-ism of well i just know what i'm talking about you don't if you think that if you walk into a library and you say i know i can figure all this out then you know i will i'm here to tell you you can't figure that out better than a library and that's they love to be asked questions and that's what they're there for uh comment or a question here that uh basically says okay you did a great job describing the problem could you talk a little bit more about how we fix the problem in part discussion of reading things you don't necessarily want to read because it's important that you have other perspectives yeah i wish you hadn't asked me that because i don't have a good answer i'm a real good social critic i'm not a great social fixer you know when i was on the road in 2018 2017 18 and 19 i said well a war a depression or a pandemic will snap us right out of this and i was wrong i was wrong i mean this pandemic deepened it we now have people that are absolutely committed to the most ignorant possible rejection of science there is and we have turned science into a partisan football game in a way that you know i i find astonishing i mean i i'm old enough that i was vaccinated against smallpox to me you know this is this is you know um so i i don't know what snaps us out of it i think um at this point demography i think younger people are better at this than older people i think the you know one of the things we found is that people 55 and older my generation john years um are at because they have a lot of time and they don't have they have a lot of time on their hands they don't have a lot of experience with technology they are actually the most likely to fall for conspiracy theories and misinformation on the internet and also in part because they're primary um form of interaction with the internet is facebook um and i just don't know what to do about that my advice to younger people is um turn the tv off for an hour and read a newspaper just read one newspaper that's or subscribe to one on the internet and start your day with a cup of coffee and 30 minutes of a reputable major newspaper whether it's new york times the boston globes chicago tribune the LA i don't care what it is something with an editor that is committed to you know news stories um but it shows you how stubborn people are about this i said that to a guy at a book talk once and he said well what do you read i said well okay i said i'm an old washington guy i i have a kind of nostalgic attachment to the washington post because it was the best politics news and it had a had comics in it he said well i'm not that's inside the beltway talking to itself that's the power elite talking to itself i said okay well you know the newspaper of record in america is the new york times and you know as long as you stay away you don't like the editorial slant you know the new york times he said uh east coast cultural elites i said okay the wall street journal is in new york and no one has ever accused them of being lefty east coast cultural elites he said capitalists and i said so what we're really playing here is a game where you want me to find the the bs internet site that you usually go to and then tell you that's okay i said what do you how do you know the things you know and he said why read things i said what things and by the way for all of you wondering how to interact with people who do this ask them questions just say where did you someone says you know i know that um you know joe biden and donald trump are alien lizard people here to steal our water i just say where where did you read that where did you where did you find that out and you'll inevitably say well i've read stuff just keep asking them what's the where how did you find that what source is that and inevitably it's well i was you know i was screwing around on my phone and i read something cool and it flashed and i hit like um other than that i don't know what to do about it and you know journalists i there's all chapter about journalism in the book i think that this slagging of professional journalists is really um nonsense i've worked with a lot of journalists both in government and then as a writer myself you know they actually really do try uh to get things right and yeah they screw up again you know what the washington you know 35 years ago the washington post hired a woman who fabricated a whole story about childhood heroin addicts it happens but 99 percent of the other time you know they are getting things right and they're doing their best to get the story to you and this arrogant narcissistic you know i know things because i'm important and i have secret knowledge you know that you don't you just don't and approaching the all of this stuff with a little more intellectual humility um would serve us all better but that's not what we do in modern america unfortunately i want to get too political on this but what's your reaction to the notion that the the mainstream media is the enemy of the people um i think that is a Stalinist expression that we should stop using in america um the mainstream media is not the enemy of the people the people who work in the media are your sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and people from your hometown just like everybody else turns out i didn't realize this for example um the top national security writer uh at the washington post it not only went to my high school he's from my neighborhood in chicopee massachusetts so if you think that guy or me that we're these you know elitist enemies of the people then you have never been to chicopee massachusetts i'll tell you that right now this is self-serving nonsense that is pushed out by people who don't want you to believe in anything remotely related to a fact and want to create that kind of tribal anger that there's this team and there's my team uh and you know that that is i think just poisonous and i think you know again as a former russia expert i can tell you that vragnar oda it's been the original russian is an expression that the soviet union used enemy of the people and to use that about your fellow citizens simply because you don't happen to like the news you're reading is disgraceful and anyone doing it should be ashamed of themselves could i be any clearer am i leaving anyone for nuance here tell us how you really feel uh tom early on in the discussion there was some pushback on the notion that uh somehow we're coddling our students uh at all levels up to and including the the naval war college would you like to expand on that and they're asking for do you have specific examples anywhere that uh the students are being coddled i talk in the book about the problem of great inflation and how student and how uh schools at um top schools the ivs stanford have all tried to reverse policies uh all tried policies to kind of tamp down great inflation and had to reverse them all when i left dartman in the late 90s the median grade in the government department was an a minus um and so you know this again this notion that uh we live and die i'm one of the things i pushed for and i think that has become better at the war colleges we used to be extremely dependent on student evaluations as one example i and i never had a problem with student evaluations i have one teaching awards at the war college at harvard at other places so again not sour grapes but i don't think that professors should live in fear of uh oh what if the students didn't like me today i'm sometimes the students aren't gonna like you that's how it goes you that's that's the nature of the teaching enterprise and i think that the use of these metrics from grade school all the way through to p me has become pernicious and out of control and it's constantly checking in the temperature of the students are you happy did you feel good to the did you like this um you know there are things that happen in a classroom that students just don't like and it's okay for them not to like it i mean i don't want to i don't want to go down the eating your broccoli road but sometimes you know everything can't be ice cream um but you know examples of coddling safe spaces i mean i'm on this you know i'm totally with the kind of the right wingers complaining about safe spaces i i love what richard dockens uh said years ago if you want a safe space stay at home with your teddy bear and suck your thumb don't come to the university universities are not safe spaces they're not supposed to be safe spaces um they are once you enter that that courtyard you know every as long as you are polite to other people everything is up for grabs um and yet we you know now we're we're concerned and you know was this traumatic did that make somebody uncomfortable um between that and just the the the um i think the dumbing down of curriculum and i will actually say in defense of our institution of the war college that our curriculum has actually gotten harder rather than easier over the years which i'm glad for um but you know for example it used to be the chat to get a phd you had to pass a language example to foreign languages i don't know any place that were i or i shouldn't say any place but i personally don't know many places that require them any um foreign language training went out the window at undergraduate levels basic cultural literacy courses went out the windows your students just don't like them you know it's like i i mean i was i was one of those undergraduate advisors where kids thought i was tough because i wouldn't sign their course card if i thought it was they were taking a lot of junk i'm like well i'm your advisor if you want you know if you want a different advisor to tell you something different but i'm supposed to sign this and say that this is good um we just don't do that and in part and this is something that does not affect the war college because our government institution but at the undergraduate level especially colleges have become client experiences they've become client servicing come here you'll love the dorms the rock climbing the pizza and the quad you know the the the extracurriculars and that i think has become a real problem especially where you have untanured faculty who are afraid to tell students that they're wrong or make them angry because their contracts won't be the most important function one of the most important educational functions of tenure in those schools is to be able to say to a student i know you tried hard you're not good at this that's why you got a d um without worrying that they're going to get fired but in a university where increasingly you have young adjuncts who are on one and two year contracts um they just their thing is keep the clients happy keep the customers happy don't generate bad reviews don't generate bad teaching evaluations and i think that is that's a that's just bad i think that's just bad for the higher education enterprise in general i i'm going to gentlemen to tell one quick story about education just to before you go to the next question i got a fellowship to go to georgshund and i thought i was the cat's ass i thought i was you know i was like finally i got a fellowship to go to georgshund and i had this jesuit philosophy professor and i of course i was going to argue with him all term about play dope because you know he'd read it in ancient greek but i read it too you know in english and at the end of the term um and we became i should just skip to the punch and i said we became fast friends for like 30 years but he did the thing i needed at the end of the term i got an a and i thought i was all that i walk up to him at the christmas party at georgshund and i said hey merry christmas father what do you say peace on earth goodwill towards men he looked over his glasses and he said what i say to you mr nickles is repent and i you know i suddenly like i was like oh my god and what he meant was you're a bright young man i really like you but don't make this mistake you're not there yet and and it just it was one of the most important and valuable things that ever happened this guy used to hand out a an essay that he'd written at the beginning of every term called what a student owes to a teacher now imagine trying to do that today in graduate school by the way i was a third year grad student i was like 24 25 years old and with a master's degree from columbia starting at georgshund and he hands me this essay what a student owes to a teacher and i to this day it's in that it's sitting in that bookcase right behind me but imagine trying to hand that out to undergraduates today or or to graduate students you'd have a rebellion on your hands sorry that was a little long that was great um eisenhower is remembered for his industrial military complex speech but he also warned about domination of technological scholars can you comment on that aspect sure we're we're headed for that we're headed for technocracy because most americans don't care to educate themselves enough about basic issues and their answer is keep the lights on keep the wi-fi strong make sure that i've got 150 channels and there are technocrats at every level of government saying okay that's what you want i in this forthcoming book my argument is that this is happening not by design but by default people are ceding their independence because they are angry and narcissistic and and most government elites cannot make sense of the demand signals they're getting again like you know get rid of obama care but keep the aca get us out of afghanistan but don't surrender um you know get us uh you know stand up to pakistan wherever that is you know that i mean at some point people who actually have to function every day say you know what we'll we'll do the best we can and maybe we're not going to ask you these detailed questions anymore and instead of just reading a newspaper and gaining basic cultural and political literacy you have a bunch of kind of screaming hysterical american citizens who are flooding the zone with noise you know when when roosevelt at the outbreak of world war two started giving radio talks he asked americans he said please go get a map so you can follow so that you can you know follow along with me and stores all over the country ran out of maps american citizens said okay mr president you know i don't know where romania is i don't know where you know the vulgar river is i bought a map people now are like don't talk down to me that's that that is a huge part of the everybody in america thinks you're talking down to them if you say things like what you're wrong i've said to people you know that that thing you just said is not correct it's just wrong they say i can't believe how arrogant you are i'm like well i i can be less arrogant and say i'm sorry you're wrong but if you're not less wrong and that's that is that makes governing literally impossible except for the technocrats who are going to say you know what we'll we'll make sure zoom works we'll make sure the lights are on the air conditioning it's going to function if you think about how quickly you know the people in this country who say i would you know i'm going to stand up for democracy all you have to do is shut off their cell service for three hours and they'll lose their minds and i and i'm just i don't know what to do about that we are not a resilient civic minded society anymore in part because we all think we know everything about what we're doing and i and i i just don't know how to get around that anymore i i i really thought that a national disaster would be the thing that kind of snapped us out of it but i i don't have that same some people who said the greatest advantage of zoom is we get to see the backgrounds of where people live and what they do somebody picked out the fact that there's a copy of your book i believe in chinese has it in fact been translated into mandarin and do you have any comments about the chinese society's approach to these issues it has been translated into both i guess there the two forms of chinese the mainland and hong kong taiwan new and old i can't i don't speak chinese so i don't understand the difference i was a little surprised actually that the chinese translated it at all i think china is i am not a china panic person i i think china is a um authoritarian and unsustainable regime that is eventually i'm going to be able to not be able to sustain the kind of growth and gorging of its citizens on middle class luxuries forever i think that um you know that that's my my big concern is that the way they try and get out of that is through conquest and war um but um they are a more technocratic society than we are most places are more technocratic society than we are at this point um we have become a society that is kind of um you know we have outsourced a lot of our technological knowledge because a lot of our own kids and i know somebody's in a raise their hands and say well wait my kid's a physics major okay but i'm simply saying we have tons of people going to college and yet we're not producing a lot of the kind of technical know-how that that we used to produce a you know after sputnik or after the computer revolution the 60s um that that's just been petering out so we have tons of people with college degrees who really have kind of high school plus degrees and so i i don't think we ought to do it the way the chinese do it i don't even think we ought to do it the way the europeans do it which is they you know the europeans make this very hard cut and say okay 16 you're going to trade school you're going to college um but you know we can't i think they have an unsustainable society and i think so do we and how that ends i'm not sure i used to be more confident about that but not anymore i think we got time for about one more question i see one here from one of my shipmates it says are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future writ large i am pessimistic um i think uh i have never seen a situation part of the reason i wrote the next book and i and i waited by the way just because i you know just to be up front with everyone i didn't like this book didn't come out and then i said great you know now i'll follow it on with this i waited almost three years for writing another book because i was i'm i'm a scholar i was curious about you know how are things going to pan out and um i don't see this getting any better uh and i think without trust without cooperativeness without some sense that you know we have to rely on the division of labor among us um we are going to fall into that technocratic end of democracy not the mob i don't worry about you know mobs taking over they're not they're not capable enough to do it they can cause a lot of damage they can't populist governments suck at running things the people that are really good at running things are technocratic governments and i think you know in the end that's probably what's going to happen is that we will have things things that work and a middle class that lives a pretty good life and you know an impoverished class that we're you know poverty is kind of miserable but not super miserable and a very wealthy class that you know provides support to this you know technocratic kind of regime that we're going to mutate into and i think it's our own the title on my next book is our own worst enemy and i think all this is going to happen because it is on us uh and we're we're the ones that are causing this to happen because we are we are just too narcissistic and lack civic virtue and awareness and and so we're you know i i want i didn't want to believe that four years ago i i actually and i'll just finish by saying i started to write a piece about three years ago i yeah i was working with the editors at foreign affairs and they said what do you think this pandemic is and i said you know this is it this is the thing we're going to start science is coming back respect for expertise about three months into the pandemic i called and the editor and just said you know this isn't i just tore up the article i said and he went yeah i don't see it either and so my optimism at the beginning of the pandemic that maybe this would rally us together about three or four months in i just pulled the piece and and that's why i don't have a piece in foreign affairs but i i pulled it and said it just isn't happening and i think it's it's not going to happen and i'm really worried about the future sorry to be a bummer at the end of the afternoon but okay i'll give you one last opportunity to uh end on an up note if you have one anything you'd like to cover time that you haven't had the chance to do i guess the the optimistic thing i'll say is all of this is within our power to solve and it just requires individual decisions that you know i'm not going to watch four hours of television every night that leaves me in an incoherent rage yes i'm going to read one newspaper a day you know yes i'm going to take a walk and you know go to a farmers market and look at other human beings and think of myself as a member of a community you know i'm going to read a book about something i don't know about and i'm going to start from the assumption that i don't know about it these are all individual decisions that are easy to make and yet we don't do it because we've become so addicted to constantly feeding our own sense of being right about things and um so you know it doesn't it's this is not an impossible problem to solve we have it within us to do it and i i hope that um you know we we choose to do it over time i i have a lot of faith i don't lend optimistically this way actually as for all i am known on the internet for being a terror to millennials and genziers but part of the reason i give them such um you know slag them and give them such perhaps so often is i actually believe in them and i think they're going to be okay and i think they're the ones that are going to save us from ourselves down the line well thank you very much tom uh terrific presentation generated a lot of comments uh and uh we are sure that some people may want to reach out to you directly to continue these discussions so thank you very much uh that'll conclude this session and we invite all of you to come back in two weeks and we're going to hear about the future of warfare uh with dr ohera so thank you very much uh continue to have a good summer