September 7, 2025 • 29 mins
Journalist Tom Nichols (The Atlantic) explains how discrediting expertise is used as a weapon in order to control (mis)information. (ENCORE from Season 3)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
John and I are on break. Now we're on a
secret mission and this before all new Mission Implausible episodes
come out this fall. But for now, we'll bring you
one of our favorite past episodes and we'll soon be
launching our YouTube channel. See you there.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. I was a
CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 2 (00:55):
This is Mission Implausible.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
We're three experts to experts in intelligence, one in journalism,
and we're going to talk about the death of expertise
and why people like us don't maner anymore.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Apparently it sure does feel like all the things that
I devoted my life who are have lost meaning. And
I'm excited for today's guest, Tom Nichols. He has been
monitoring this forever, this collapse of respect for expertise and
what it means to live in a country where that
(01:30):
just doesn't win the day.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Yeah, Tom writes for The Atlantic and he's on social media,
but he wrote a book called The Death of Expertise.
There's really a good study of how we've gotten here.
But we're seeing his thesis playing out at the highest levels. Now.
It's one thing when your uncle thinks he knows better
because he was on Google, but we now have conspiracy
theorists and unqualified people at the top of government.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
It is true.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
I was thinking about my uncle, who when I was
a kid, I was like, how does he know everything?
That guy knows everything, Like whatever topic came up he
to have an opinion on. And then at some point
I came across Newsweek. And this is back in the
eighties when Newsweek was like a maja. I realized he
just read Newsweek.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
It reminds you of my grandpa. My grandmother used to say,
he's not always right, but he's all certain.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
I have a favorite cartoon. It's like this old guy
sitting in a desk with a computer and his wife's
started the other side of the room, and he says, honey,
come look, I found some information. All the world's top
scientists and doctors missed like people think that they people
think that they don't need experts anymore, they can just
do it all themselves.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Might have one word for you, Smoot read Smoot. I
don't know why I know this, but he was elected
to the Senate in nineteen oh eight, and he was
so unqualified. He was one of twenty seven children from
this Mormon polygamous father and he's only voted because the
Mormon community voting for But anyway, he was so unqualified
(02:56):
that the Senate had a special commission they put together
that determined he was uniquely unqualified for this job. But
they couldn't get him kicked out because the Republicans needed
the things, and Smoot came along and he gave us
possibly the worst bit of legislation ever in American history today. Yeah, yeah,
(03:17):
the smooth holly egg that made the recession, a depression
that ended up with thirty percent of banks going out
of business, fifty percent employment. But this cuy was like,
he was not an expert, but he was in charge.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Here's what I love, though, We as human beings, learn
through time, So we now know that one hundred years ago,
some very ignorant people proposed massive tariffs to somehow help
the US economy without ever explaining how it would help
the US economy. No one would ever propose that again
because the expert we now understand. So we should listen
(03:50):
to experts, right, yeah, you should listen to experts.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
We have two CIA guys here and I just want
to throw out on expertise. John, don't know who this is,
but we had a very senior guy in CIA. This
is like decades ago, and he got involved in the
senior most in the operation side, although he had almost
no experience, And there was this operation. I don't remember
what it was going on. I think it was someplace.
(04:13):
It wasn't Piro, but let's just say it was. And
they're planning out exactly where they're going to do this thing, right,
They're going to break into some embassy or something really,
and he's looking at the map and he starts giving directions.
He's never been to Cairo, he has no idea what
the traffics with the police, and he starts giving detailed
instructions in like where people are supposed to stand and
(04:33):
how many they're supposed to be, and then in the
middle of it he stops and goes, maybe I shouldn't
be doing this, right, I've never been there, and everybody
sort of like didn't want to say no shit man,
but they all went, well, sir, we appreciate your input.
And they totally disregarded everything he said, and it went
to the hallways like crazy. It was like, never let
this senior guy near your operation because like my grandfather,
(04:54):
he may not be right, but he's freaking cert.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
When we set up Planet Money. When I created Planet Money,
this was in two thousand and eight, right after the
financial crisis, and we felt that many of the experts
led us astray, and so we didn't want the voice
of the show to be that kind of implied voice
of certainty that you heard on a lot of business reporting.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
The Dale Jones fell today three point eight percent due
to late stage trading and blah blah blah, which is
always bs, and so we deliberately worked on this voice
that was more here's this thing that happened, we're figuring
it out. So we didn't want to be falsely certain.
But that doesn't mean then just anything goes. Like I
remember in Iraq one story I did that first year
(05:35):
of the presence. There are all these newspapers that appeared,
and I did a story about one of the more
popular new newspapers, and I went in and said, basically,
I found a polite way to say, every article is
just a rumor that someone heard, usually a conspiracy. And
he said, yes, we're a free country. Now, we'd print
all the rumors and the reader can decide.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
So I have one more word for you, Adam, and
that is dunning Krueger, which is the cognitive bias.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
It means the less you know, the more certain you are,
and the more you know, the less certain you are
because you understand it's complicated, right, as opposed to like tariffs, like,
oh well, just put them on and everything will be great,
because it's know enough to realize that absolutely.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
All right, let's talk to an expert on the death
of expertise.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
All right, we're lucky today we have Tom Nichols. Tom
is a recently retired professor from the Navy War College,
where he taught national security. He's better known these days
as a writer at The Atlantic and a popular curmudgeon
on television and social media, with a particular skill for
riling up the crazies. He's the author of several books
on Russia, and nuclear weapons. Lastly, I learned when checking
(06:43):
to prepare for this episode that Tom is a five
time Jeopardy champion. WHOA, yeah, man, I've been working on
some pieces related to how the reelection of President Trump
might impact the intelligence community, and I keep coming back
to something former CIA and n NSA Director General Michael
Hayden wrote about the incompatibility of intelligence in the Maga
Embrace of post truth politics. You wrote about much of
(07:05):
this and the death of expertise. Can you help us
understand why people so often embrace conspiracy theories rather than facts? Oh?
Speaker 5 (07:12):
Yeah, Conspiracy theories are a subset of the whole death
of expertise problem, and they can't. I mean, let me
start with the most innocent explanation, which is that people
are just inundated with information. You know, none of our
brains are equipped to handle petabytes of information. We may
be highly evolved, but you know, we're still we still
have brains that sit inside our skull that literally can't
(07:33):
take in that much information. And so what people do
is they start using internal heuristics and relying on prior
knowledge and also using kind of a sorting function to
try and simplify everything. Because once you have to decide
what's true, then you spend all day trying to figure
out what's true, and so you just start taking the
things that are interesting or that peak your interest. That's
(07:56):
kind of a way that people can fall down rabbit
holes innocently because they're like, look, I don't really know
what's true about COVID, and I saw this thing about
how it was released by Bill Gates, so you could
stick Nana bots on our heads. You know, I don't
know what's true and I don't know what's not true.
There's a bigger problem, though, that conspiracy theory are always
(08:16):
concentrated among They tend to rise after terrible events like
a pandemic, like an assassination, like a world war. But
there's also a problem that they tend to arise in
decadent and bored societies. And by decadent I mean a
lot of leisure time, the collapse of kind of moral guardrails,
this sort of erosion of common sense of trust in
(08:38):
other people, very self absorbed, very narcissistic, very hedonistic, and
conspiracy theories are really attractive because they place you at
the center of a great drama. They place you at
the center of your own Jason Bourne movie. You know,
you sheeple, you don't get it that the reason I'm
buying all these bullshit gold coins from the guy on
(09:01):
TV is because I know and you don't. I am
one of the elect who knows that the American dollar
is going to be replaced by the amearo, a North
American concurrency that will be worthless. And when you poor
bastards are coming to me asking for one of my
gold plated buffalo head recreations, you'll be sorry. I am
(09:26):
in the know and powerful. You are weak and stupid.
And that's a very tempting thing for people who feel
like events are out of control. It's simple yet complicated,
and it makes you feel smart even though you're you're
actually very confused. The emergence of a lot of conspiracy
theories at the same time are really the sign of
a society and decline. When I worked in the Senate,
(09:49):
I remember the day I got a call and they said, oh,
you constituent online one, and like I took the call
and h yes, I'm you know calling. I have a
foreign policy question. I want to know about the senator's
relationship to the Trilateralists and the Builderbergers, and the you know,
I can't even remember what the other ones. There was
always one other that used to I think it was
a console on Foreign Relations. I think that one he's
a member of.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
They don't Illuminati.
Speaker 5 (10:11):
We didn't get the Illuminati calls, but we got a
lot of the weird stuff. And that leads me to
my third thing. The conspiracy theories become mainstreamed because now,
unlike in previous times, there are people who can really
make money off of it. There are people in right
wing media and in the right wing ecosystem who can
play thee well, we're just asking questions game, and of
course you're gonna click, You're gonna sit there and stay
(10:33):
on that channel. You're gonna stay glued to your talk
radio station because it's interesting. Because, let's face it, all
of us have worked for the federal government in various
capacities in national defense and intelligence, places that you'd think
would be pretty sexy. But my description of ninety percent
of government work, even when I was in DC, when
(10:54):
I was on the Hill, when I was you know,
consulting with the agency, when I was working for the Pentagon,
ninety percent of it's boring. It's boring. It's incredibly boring.
Government work is tedious and detail oriented. You know, just
before we came on, we were all talking about, you
know what some of these Trump nominees will encounter on
their first day in office, and it's gonna be some
(11:15):
guy with an iPad going, all right, so you need
to sign off on this thing. And the budget's going
to be new on here, and you've got fourteen meetings,
and you got HR and you got the guy from
downstairs and the h and it's it's boring. So rather
than try to explain to American citizens the ins and
outs of how things actually happen in this country, why
would you do that? Just sit there and say, you know,
(11:36):
I'm just asking questions. But sure seems to me like
those vaccines seem to have a lot of you know,
those Star Wars medichlorians in them. And you get people
who want to be entertained listening to you instead of
people who, like our parents used to do, snap open
the newspaper at the end of a long day and say, look,
tell me stuff I need to know so I can
(11:57):
go have a beer and relax.
Speaker 4 (11:59):
Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
People obviously not our audience because they are listening to
expertise by this podcast. But I'm interested in what you
said about trust. So my mom got really sick ten
years ago and died this terrible disease, and we went
to doctors and I trusted them, right, who else am
I gonna trust? And yet I could have gone to
(12:31):
Alex Jones or to someone else and looked up herbal
remedies and things like that. It didn't make sense to
me to do that, to go to people who seem
to care, who have devoted their lives to this as
a general consensus. Doctors may not agree with everything, but
they're doing the best they can. And yet in our society,
people are choosing not to trust professionals and expertise, and instead,
(12:55):
increasingly they're turning to hacks like Alex Jones or even
to RFK Junior. I mean one of his closest corehorts
is this British doctor Andrew Wakefield. Oh yeah, he had
his medical license taken away and he came up with
this paper in the medical journal landst that was rich
reacted claiming that there was a link between autism and MMR,
(13:19):
and his studies proved it and it showed that instead
he manipulated that study and stood to make forty three
million dollars from his test kits. And he's still RFK Junior,
who's going to be running our healthcare, still is saying
that we should be erecting stands to this guy.
Speaker 6 (13:38):
So bid to trust?
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Why would people trust Wakefielder RFK but not like real doctors? Well,
here this is medical license revoked.
Speaker 5 (13:47):
Here's where the magic word comes in, narcissism, because to
trust a real doctor, right, I shepherded a parent through
the hospicing process. I had a loved one that I
had to help get through cancer. It's an intimidating thing,
right that a guy in a white jacket comes in
and says, Okay, I'm going to tell you a lot
of stuff you don't want.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
To hear and maybe don't understand completely.
Speaker 5 (14:10):
And well, if they're good, they'll break it down for you. Maybe,
But you know that they're used to dealing with other
professionals all day long. They may not have the best
bedside manner, and they say, look, here's some terrible things
that you're gonna have to hear, and here's some stuff
you gotta do. There are two things that happen right away.
It feels very disempowering. It makes you feel very helpless,
(14:30):
and it's a little bit offensive. Who are you to
tell me what I have to do? You know to
I have to stick this poison in my veins, or
I have to stick my head in this radiation machine,
or whatever it is. It's the Fredo moment from Godfather Too,
where the outraged ego yells, I'm smart, I can do things,
(14:50):
not like people say no, the fact is you're not
smart enough to know this. That's why these people have
to have these jobs and are vetted by other people
who have these jobs. I mean, the way Wakefield got
caught is other doctors said, hey, well, okay, fine, you're
making this incredible claim. We're gonna look at this. We're
gonna reproduce your data, we're gonna go through this. And
(15:10):
it doesn't stand up. But that belies the the the
great movie that you think you're in. One brave doctor
tells the world this terrible secret. If there was a
connection between vaccines and autism, every doctor in the world
be all over it because most of them are parents.
I'm sorry, they're not gonna stick to stuff in their
own kids, which they do every day. But again that
(15:34):
undermines that narcissistic narrative of only I know and I've
done my research, and you people, and so the other
thing that happens with a kind of an Alex Jones
thing or the other Charlnan's out there who do this stuff.
They say, I'm like you, you and I together are
figuring this out. I remember the late Rush Limbaugh, who
relied on a lot of experts, railing about those white
(15:57):
jacketed creeps who tell us what to do. I'm sure
God rest his soul, but I'm sure when he died
he had a lot of white jacketed guys trying to
extend his life and take care of him. But it's
an easy hit, right, It's an easy kind of bullshit
hit on. Other people say, oh, like jacketed elitists. Well, yeah,
(16:20):
I hope the guy flying my plane is an elitist
with four bars on his shoulder who knows a lot
more about airplanes than I do. I'd like to sit
in the back and have a drink, thank you very much.
I don't want to be, you know, looking up clear
air turbulence and then having to go to the cockpit
and say listen to I want to talk to you
guys about how this flight's going. But that's that narcissistic
(16:42):
sense that we can all know anything, will it hard
enough has become speaking of RFK. It's become a kind
of international brainworm. And I was giving a talk and
I'm just and this brant because I'm you guys are
asking me stuff that makes me ranty. I was giving
a talk about the death of expertise and guy said,
(17:03):
why should I trust doctors when every issue of the
Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine is available
to me now through the internet and online. And he
got really upset when he said, because they were written
for you, because you're not equipped to understand them, and
neither am I. They were written by doctors for doctors.
They were written for people who have a foundational knowledge
(17:23):
of medicine, chemistry, statistics, probability. You know that they weren't
written for a guy who says, oh, uh, I think
I have a lump in my groin or you know,
a sore on my neck, and so I'll just go
study the medical journals because it'll just be there and
I'll use an AI chatbot to summarize it for me.
That's insane. This is literally a form of psychosis where
(17:47):
you just lose touch with reality and just can't process
that there is someone who knows more about this than
you do, and that you should go to them, even
if they make you feel uncomfortable, even if they're talking
down to you, even if they seem to have a
lot more education than you do. Put your big boy
pants on, stop whining and ask them how to save
your life.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
I feel bad for like pilots and doctors because people
probably come to them all the time now and act
like they know stuff and talk to them and try.
Speaker 5 (18:14):
To not just pilots, John, I'll tell you, but I
mean no, seriously, I mean people in the trades. Talk
to plumbers, contractors, electricians, carpenters, you know, anybody with a
specialized knowledge. You know, electricians are telling me. People walk
up though, what are you putting in there? You know what? Oh?
(18:35):
This wire? This is a this is Linguini number seven. Okay,
I got it in the pasta aisle. What difference does it?
You don't understand the difference. Assume that I am a
licensed electrician and that I will explain everything to you
and then bill you. But people feel the need to
get in there and say, uh, you got a three
eighth cent rent. They also like Cliff claven right, you
(18:57):
got a three eighth cent rench in there. I mean,
it's just ridiculous. Not only is it the problem of narcissism,
but it's a way to fight back against feeling helpless.
It's a way to fight back against feeling disempowered.
Speaker 6 (19:09):
More of this after a quick break, and we're back.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
So it sounds like the people who are doing this
aren't the most destitute among us or the lowest education
among us. How does class and education factor into this
since some of it has to do with entertainment and boredom,
not just ignorance.
Speaker 5 (19:36):
Yeah, there is a low information voter problem among people
who are working three jobs and just trying to stay alive.
But the boredom problem, where that becomes a threat to
democracy and to trusting information and not falling off the
rails and into these rabbit holes, tends to be a
middle class phenomenon, in part because again we're a leisure society.
(20:00):
We have a lot of spare time on our hands.
Notice that the people that are the most prone to
these conspiracy theories tend to be in our age because
they're semi retired. They spend a lot of time on
the internet. The craziest conspiracy theorists I've ever heard are
every time I'm on the road and someone talk to
me about this, it's always people that are over fifty five.
(20:20):
Inevitably people over fifty five. Younger people follow this too,
but they ask it as a question. They say like, Tom,
is it true? Or I've heard older people say, listen
to me, Tom, here's what's going on. Eric Hoffer in
nineteen fifty one wrote a book called The True Believer
about how mass authoritarian movements developed, and he said, if
you're hoping to start one of these movements, the best
(20:43):
news you could get is not that people are poor.
It's that the society you're targeting is one that is
riven by unrelieved boredom. This was five years after World
War Two. He was absolutely right. This kind of decadence
and boredom leads you to say life must be more
interesting than this. And let's face it, authoritarians and fascists
(21:04):
and bad guys in general of both the far right
and the far left tell you interesting narratives instead of saying, look,
life is hard, we have to work together. We have
to kind of slog this through. You got to pay
your taxes, you got to vote, get up every day
and go to work. Nobody wants to hear that shit.
They want to hear that you are the central character
fighting against Specter or Thanos or something.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
You can't use the word decadenes without coming to the
Roman empire, right, and so Caligula famously his horse Incitatis.
The story goes that he named his horse as a
senator it was actually smart, and that the Senate had
expertise in how to run the empire and run it effectively.
He wanted loyalty over expertise. Expertise was dangerous to a
(21:52):
guy at the top who wants to run it as
his personal fiefdom. So appointing your horse and making everyone
pledge to support it is a way of stealing their
soul and either destroying or manipulating expertise so that it
doesn't matter. I mean, Stalin did the same thing with Lisenkoism.
Speaker 5 (22:12):
The main reason caligulily did what he did was to
show utter contempt for the Senate. The Senate is so
worthless that I had appoint my horse, and in a
way I mean not to draw strong parallels today, but
in a way, you know, I wrote the other day
that we're being trolled by some of these appointments. To
show how little I think of the justice system, I'm
going to point met gates and screw you by the way.
(22:34):
And fortunately there still seem to be even left in
the GOP. Thank goodness, there still seem to be people saying,
you know, there are limits to the amount of trolling
and Carnie barking we can take while trying to run
the government. But your point about expertise and authoritarians is
really important because authoritarians rely on expertise like everybody else does,
but they do it by command and they don't want
(22:55):
to hear what the most important role in expert performs.
And I did this advising a senator when I was
a young guy. You have to be able to walk
in and tell the boss stuff he doesn't want to hear.
You have to be able to walk in, and if
you're a scientist, Dvean, you have to be able to
walk in and tell Stalin, comrade, the wing covering on
the new jets just it doesn't you know it's not
(23:16):
gonna work. We screwed up. This prototype isn't gonna fly,
because then he could say, okay, thank you, comrade engineer,
or he could say, clearly, you're a saboteur. I told
you to make this work. There's a kind of rule
among political scientists. High coercion systems are low information systems,
specifically because of that problem. And then if you have
a system that relies on a central leader, where there's
(23:39):
a lot of coercion and exercise of control, then those
tend to be very low information systems because nobody wants
to share information, and certainly nobody wants to share information
that could get them killed. We saw this all the
time with Stalinism. And yet the punchline to the stalin
story is that when he looks over he sees the
Americans developing superstar jets and missiles and all this stuff.
(24:00):
He literally takes some of the guys that he's imprisoned
and he tells them to open workshops in prison, you know,
like the tupelev that you know you've seen. These are
Soviet aircraft, the series of aircraft. He had that guy
working on aircraft designs while he was in prison. On
the one hand, he wants to squeeze these guys because
experts are always dangerous in an authority Darian government. But
(24:24):
then when it comes time to design a new bomber,
he's like, where it is that guy? Will you throw
him in prison? All right, We'll send him a bunch
of drafting tables and give them some extra rations to
tell them to get to work. I'm not letting them
out of prison. You understand a lot of.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
His generals came out of prison World War Two.
Speaker 5 (24:38):
Once the war started, Trump Junior said something very revealing.
We don't want anybody in this administration thinks are smarter
than my father. Oh well, you know that rules out
a lot of people. Well, because most people are smarter
than his father. You can see that in this pattern
of appointments. I want loyalists who look good on TV.
I don't want people actually knowing about any of the
(24:58):
stuff we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Let's move into politics a little bit. So politicians obviously
like to use fear and other powerful motions to get support,
and certainly conspiracy theories are something they can weaponize with
voters weren't paying attention. But is there any way to
regain a serious interest in governing, embracing facts are tackling
hard problems.
Speaker 5 (25:17):
I'm gonna step back before everybody yells at us about
both sides of this, because the right is really the
home of this stuff now, but I will say I'm
sorry to have to point this out. I was getting
lots of messages and tweets and posts on social media
saying you have to look into how Trump won. Clearly
it was fraud, and I'm like, no, this whole election
(25:39):
denier thing cannot start on the left after we just
had to deal with it. You notice that Trump wins, right,
and it's, oh, I guess elections are fair.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
I forgot to throw this one.
Speaker 5 (25:48):
Yeah, they forgot it right exactly. The most incompetent, doddering
old man in the White House somehow couldn't rig this election,
but managed to pull it off while Trump was in
office the first time, which just shows you that another
thing to understand about conspiracy theories is that they don't
have to be internally consistent. They just have to explain
whatever they explain at that moment. The conspiracy theories live
(26:11):
in the moment. They're not meant for the long haul
because you have to them over time. If it's there's
going to be mass arrests on just before the election,
Oh that didn't happen. Never mind that. I said that
there's a reason for that, and I'll get to it
in a minute. So how do you get away from this?
How do you get back to it? I think one thing,
and this has really hard for people to do. You
(26:32):
have to stop, even in your personal life, you have
to stop giving oxygen to the people who want to
suck your attention like vampires about this stuff. Because the
other thing that breeds conspiracy theories is loneliness. It makes
people feel part of a community. It gives them something
to talk about to other people.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
You know.
Speaker 5 (26:50):
I tried to explain to it years ago. A CBS
reporter did a story on conspiracy theories and whacked out
thoughts and he said, yeah, we're going to talk to
some flat earthers, and I stopped him. I said, do
you really believe they think the Earth is flat? Or
has it occurred to you that this is the way
that they can get a reporter from CBS News to
talk to them for three hours. Some of these people
(27:12):
are like the intellectual equivalent of like shut who just
want company It's like I'll say the earth is flat,
talk to me online for six hours about it, and
there's a sadness to it. So you have to stop
doing that. If someone says John those Venezuela, you have
to put your hand up and say, look, I'm not
having this conversation not happening. Don't argue with them. The
(27:33):
people who are not prone to these things can't help themselves.
If your kooky uncle says I think Michelle Obama's a
man that one goes around every now and then, just
stop him and say, I don't care what you think
about this, I'm not having this perfectly ridiculous conversation with
you past the potatoes. Look, when you argue with conspiracy theorists,
they take that as evidence of being right. Otherwise, why
(27:56):
would you be arguing so strenuously. I think when you
do the thing you ought to do, which is to
dismiss this as though someone just told you that they
have a leprechaun on their shoulder, which is the way
you ought to dismiss it, I think it does produce
some second thoughts of saying, wow, not only is this
person making me wonder, but it's socially crippling to say no,
(28:16):
I'm not gonna do this with you. The media has
to kind of brush these away. Stop going to diners
and asking people if they thought the election was stolen
it wasn't. And the sooner you stop asking people this,
the sooner they're going to stop trying to sink their
teeth into your neck to suck that attention out of
you for three hours. On a macro level, I don't know, guys,
(28:39):
I think some of this has to burn itself out.
If you're told over and over again that the spaceship
is coming to spare it us all away, and finally,
after the tenth time it doesn't come, maybe some of
those folks will reassess. At some point, they do get
bored and they do start to feel taken, and I
think at that point it's really important for other people
not to say I told you.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
So, Tom, thank you very much for your time. It
was fun, all right, both of you.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
You'll get to talk about horse all the time.
Speaker 7 (29:16):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John C. Seipher,
and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Implausible is a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures
for iHeart podcasts.
John and I are on break. Now we're on a
secret mission and this before all new Mission Implausible episodes
come out this fall. But for now, we'll bring you
one of our favorite past episodes and we'll soon be
launching our YouTube channel. See you there.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. I was a
CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 2 (00:55):
This is Mission Implausible.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
We're three experts to experts in intelligence, one in journalism,
and we're going to talk about the death of expertise
and why people like us don't maner anymore.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Apparently it sure does feel like all the things that
I devoted my life who are have lost meaning. And
I'm excited for today's guest, Tom Nichols. He has been
monitoring this forever, this collapse of respect for expertise and
what it means to live in a country where that
(01:30):
just doesn't win the day.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Yeah, Tom writes for The Atlantic and he's on social media,
but he wrote a book called The Death of Expertise.
There's really a good study of how we've gotten here.
But we're seeing his thesis playing out at the highest levels. Now.
It's one thing when your uncle thinks he knows better
because he was on Google, but we now have conspiracy
theorists and unqualified people at the top of government.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
It is true.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
I was thinking about my uncle, who when I was
a kid, I was like, how does he know everything?
That guy knows everything, Like whatever topic came up he
to have an opinion on. And then at some point
I came across Newsweek. And this is back in the
eighties when Newsweek was like a maja. I realized he
just read Newsweek.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
It reminds you of my grandpa. My grandmother used to say,
he's not always right, but he's all certain.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
I have a favorite cartoon. It's like this old guy
sitting in a desk with a computer and his wife's
started the other side of the room, and he says, honey,
come look, I found some information. All the world's top
scientists and doctors missed like people think that they people
think that they don't need experts anymore, they can just
do it all themselves.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Might have one word for you, Smoot read Smoot. I
don't know why I know this, but he was elected
to the Senate in nineteen oh eight, and he was
so unqualified. He was one of twenty seven children from
this Mormon polygamous father and he's only voted because the
Mormon community voting for But anyway, he was so unqualified
(02:56):
that the Senate had a special commission they put together
that determined he was uniquely unqualified for this job. But
they couldn't get him kicked out because the Republicans needed
the things, and Smoot came along and he gave us
possibly the worst bit of legislation ever in American history today. Yeah, yeah,
(03:17):
the smooth holly egg that made the recession, a depression
that ended up with thirty percent of banks going out
of business, fifty percent employment. But this cuy was like,
he was not an expert, but he was in charge.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Here's what I love, though, We as human beings, learn
through time, So we now know that one hundred years ago,
some very ignorant people proposed massive tariffs to somehow help
the US economy without ever explaining how it would help
the US economy. No one would ever propose that again
because the expert we now understand. So we should listen
(03:50):
to experts, right, yeah, you should listen to experts.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
We have two CIA guys here and I just want
to throw out on expertise. John, don't know who this is,
but we had a very senior guy in CIA. This
is like decades ago, and he got involved in the
senior most in the operation side, although he had almost
no experience, And there was this operation. I don't remember
what it was going on. I think it was someplace.
(04:13):
It wasn't Piro, but let's just say it was. And
they're planning out exactly where they're going to do this thing, right,
They're going to break into some embassy or something really,
and he's looking at the map and he starts giving directions.
He's never been to Cairo, he has no idea what
the traffics with the police, and he starts giving detailed
instructions in like where people are supposed to stand and
(04:33):
how many they're supposed to be, and then in the
middle of it he stops and goes, maybe I shouldn't
be doing this, right, I've never been there, and everybody
sort of like didn't want to say no shit man,
but they all went, well, sir, we appreciate your input.
And they totally disregarded everything he said, and it went
to the hallways like crazy. It was like, never let
this senior guy near your operation because like my grandfather,
(04:54):
he may not be right, but he's freaking cert.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
When we set up Planet Money. When I created Planet Money,
this was in two thousand and eight, right after the
financial crisis, and we felt that many of the experts
led us astray, and so we didn't want the voice
of the show to be that kind of implied voice
of certainty that you heard on a lot of business reporting.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
The Dale Jones fell today three point eight percent due
to late stage trading and blah blah blah, which is
always bs, and so we deliberately worked on this voice
that was more here's this thing that happened, we're figuring
it out. So we didn't want to be falsely certain.
But that doesn't mean then just anything goes. Like I
remember in Iraq one story I did that first year
(05:35):
of the presence. There are all these newspapers that appeared,
and I did a story about one of the more
popular new newspapers, and I went in and said, basically,
I found a polite way to say, every article is
just a rumor that someone heard, usually a conspiracy. And
he said, yes, we're a free country. Now, we'd print
all the rumors and the reader can decide.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
So I have one more word for you, Adam, and
that is dunning Krueger, which is the cognitive bias.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
It means the less you know, the more certain you are,
and the more you know, the less certain you are
because you understand it's complicated, right, as opposed to like tariffs, like,
oh well, just put them on and everything will be great,
because it's know enough to realize that absolutely.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
All right, let's talk to an expert on the death
of expertise.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
All right, we're lucky today we have Tom Nichols. Tom
is a recently retired professor from the Navy War College,
where he taught national security. He's better known these days
as a writer at The Atlantic and a popular curmudgeon
on television and social media, with a particular skill for
riling up the crazies. He's the author of several books
on Russia, and nuclear weapons. Lastly, I learned when checking
(06:43):
to prepare for this episode that Tom is a five
time Jeopardy champion. WHOA, yeah, man, I've been working on
some pieces related to how the reelection of President Trump
might impact the intelligence community, and I keep coming back
to something former CIA and n NSA Director General Michael
Hayden wrote about the incompatibility of intelligence in the Maga
Embrace of post truth politics. You wrote about much of
(07:05):
this and the death of expertise. Can you help us
understand why people so often embrace conspiracy theories rather than facts? Oh?
Speaker 5 (07:12):
Yeah, Conspiracy theories are a subset of the whole death
of expertise problem, and they can't. I mean, let me
start with the most innocent explanation, which is that people
are just inundated with information. You know, none of our
brains are equipped to handle petabytes of information. We may
be highly evolved, but you know, we're still we still
have brains that sit inside our skull that literally can't
(07:33):
take in that much information. And so what people do
is they start using internal heuristics and relying on prior
knowledge and also using kind of a sorting function to
try and simplify everything. Because once you have to decide
what's true, then you spend all day trying to figure
out what's true, and so you just start taking the
things that are interesting or that peak your interest. That's
(07:56):
kind of a way that people can fall down rabbit
holes innocently because they're like, look, I don't really know
what's true about COVID, and I saw this thing about
how it was released by Bill Gates, so you could
stick Nana bots on our heads. You know, I don't
know what's true and I don't know what's not true.
There's a bigger problem, though, that conspiracy theory are always
(08:16):
concentrated among They tend to rise after terrible events like
a pandemic, like an assassination, like a world war. But
there's also a problem that they tend to arise in
decadent and bored societies. And by decadent I mean a
lot of leisure time, the collapse of kind of moral guardrails,
this sort of erosion of common sense of trust in
(08:38):
other people, very self absorbed, very narcissistic, very hedonistic, and
conspiracy theories are really attractive because they place you at
the center of a great drama. They place you at
the center of your own Jason Bourne movie. You know,
you sheeple, you don't get it that the reason I'm
buying all these bullshit gold coins from the guy on
(09:01):
TV is because I know and you don't. I am
one of the elect who knows that the American dollar
is going to be replaced by the amearo, a North
American concurrency that will be worthless. And when you poor
bastards are coming to me asking for one of my
gold plated buffalo head recreations, you'll be sorry. I am
(09:26):
in the know and powerful. You are weak and stupid.
And that's a very tempting thing for people who feel
like events are out of control. It's simple yet complicated,
and it makes you feel smart even though you're you're
actually very confused. The emergence of a lot of conspiracy
theories at the same time are really the sign of
a society and decline. When I worked in the Senate,
(09:49):
I remember the day I got a call and they said, oh,
you constituent online one, and like I took the call
and h yes, I'm you know calling. I have a
foreign policy question. I want to know about the senator's
relationship to the Trilateralists and the Builderbergers, and the you know,
I can't even remember what the other ones. There was
always one other that used to I think it was
a console on Foreign Relations. I think that one he's
a member of.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
They don't Illuminati.
Speaker 5 (10:11):
We didn't get the Illuminati calls, but we got a
lot of the weird stuff. And that leads me to
my third thing. The conspiracy theories become mainstreamed because now,
unlike in previous times, there are people who can really
make money off of it. There are people in right
wing media and in the right wing ecosystem who can
play thee well, we're just asking questions game, and of
course you're gonna click, You're gonna sit there and stay
(10:33):
on that channel. You're gonna stay glued to your talk
radio station because it's interesting. Because, let's face it, all
of us have worked for the federal government in various
capacities in national defense and intelligence, places that you'd think
would be pretty sexy. But my description of ninety percent
of government work, even when I was in DC, when
(10:54):
I was on the Hill, when I was you know,
consulting with the agency, when I was working for the Pentagon,
ninety percent of it's boring. It's boring. It's incredibly boring.
Government work is tedious and detail oriented. You know, just
before we came on, we were all talking about, you
know what some of these Trump nominees will encounter on
their first day in office, and it's gonna be some
(11:15):
guy with an iPad going, all right, so you need
to sign off on this thing. And the budget's going
to be new on here, and you've got fourteen meetings,
and you got HR and you got the guy from
downstairs and the h and it's it's boring. So rather
than try to explain to American citizens the ins and
outs of how things actually happen in this country, why
would you do that? Just sit there and say, you know,
(11:36):
I'm just asking questions. But sure seems to me like
those vaccines seem to have a lot of you know,
those Star Wars medichlorians in them. And you get people
who want to be entertained listening to you instead of
people who, like our parents used to do, snap open
the newspaper at the end of a long day and say, look,
tell me stuff I need to know so I can
(11:57):
go have a beer and relax.
Speaker 4 (11:59):
Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
People obviously not our audience because they are listening to
expertise by this podcast. But I'm interested in what you
said about trust. So my mom got really sick ten
years ago and died this terrible disease, and we went
to doctors and I trusted them, right, who else am
I gonna trust? And yet I could have gone to
(12:31):
Alex Jones or to someone else and looked up herbal
remedies and things like that. It didn't make sense to
me to do that, to go to people who seem
to care, who have devoted their lives to this as
a general consensus. Doctors may not agree with everything, but
they're doing the best they can. And yet in our society,
people are choosing not to trust professionals and expertise, and instead,
(12:55):
increasingly they're turning to hacks like Alex Jones or even
to RFK Junior. I mean one of his closest corehorts
is this British doctor Andrew Wakefield. Oh yeah, he had
his medical license taken away and he came up with
this paper in the medical journal landst that was rich
reacted claiming that there was a link between autism and MMR,
(13:19):
and his studies proved it and it showed that instead
he manipulated that study and stood to make forty three
million dollars from his test kits. And he's still RFK Junior,
who's going to be running our healthcare, still is saying
that we should be erecting stands to this guy.
Speaker 6 (13:38):
So bid to trust?
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Why would people trust Wakefielder RFK but not like real doctors? Well,
here this is medical license revoked.
Speaker 5 (13:47):
Here's where the magic word comes in, narcissism, because to
trust a real doctor, right, I shepherded a parent through
the hospicing process. I had a loved one that I
had to help get through cancer. It's an intimidating thing,
right that a guy in a white jacket comes in
and says, Okay, I'm going to tell you a lot
of stuff you don't want.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
To hear and maybe don't understand completely.
Speaker 5 (14:10):
And well, if they're good, they'll break it down for you. Maybe,
But you know that they're used to dealing with other
professionals all day long. They may not have the best
bedside manner, and they say, look, here's some terrible things
that you're gonna have to hear, and here's some stuff
you gotta do. There are two things that happen right away.
It feels very disempowering. It makes you feel very helpless,
(14:30):
and it's a little bit offensive. Who are you to
tell me what I have to do? You know to
I have to stick this poison in my veins, or
I have to stick my head in this radiation machine,
or whatever it is. It's the Fredo moment from Godfather Too,
where the outraged ego yells, I'm smart, I can do things,
(14:50):
not like people say no, the fact is you're not
smart enough to know this. That's why these people have
to have these jobs and are vetted by other people
who have these jobs. I mean, the way Wakefield got
caught is other doctors said, hey, well, okay, fine, you're
making this incredible claim. We're gonna look at this. We're
gonna reproduce your data, we're gonna go through this. And
(15:10):
it doesn't stand up. But that belies the the the
great movie that you think you're in. One brave doctor
tells the world this terrible secret. If there was a
connection between vaccines and autism, every doctor in the world
be all over it because most of them are parents.
I'm sorry, they're not gonna stick to stuff in their
own kids, which they do every day. But again that
(15:34):
undermines that narcissistic narrative of only I know and I've
done my research, and you people, and so the other
thing that happens with a kind of an Alex Jones
thing or the other Charlnan's out there who do this stuff.
They say, I'm like you, you and I together are
figuring this out. I remember the late Rush Limbaugh, who
relied on a lot of experts, railing about those white
(15:57):
jacketed creeps who tell us what to do. I'm sure
God rest his soul, but I'm sure when he died
he had a lot of white jacketed guys trying to
extend his life and take care of him. But it's
an easy hit, right, It's an easy kind of bullshit
hit on. Other people say, oh, like jacketed elitists. Well, yeah,
(16:20):
I hope the guy flying my plane is an elitist
with four bars on his shoulder who knows a lot
more about airplanes than I do. I'd like to sit
in the back and have a drink, thank you very much.
I don't want to be, you know, looking up clear
air turbulence and then having to go to the cockpit
and say listen to I want to talk to you
guys about how this flight's going. But that's that narcissistic
(16:42):
sense that we can all know anything, will it hard
enough has become speaking of RFK. It's become a kind
of international brainworm. And I was giving a talk and
I'm just and this brant because I'm you guys are
asking me stuff that makes me ranty. I was giving
a talk about the death of expertise and guy said,
(17:03):
why should I trust doctors when every issue of the
Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine is available
to me now through the internet and online. And he
got really upset when he said, because they were written
for you, because you're not equipped to understand them, and
neither am I. They were written by doctors for doctors.
They were written for people who have a foundational knowledge
(17:23):
of medicine, chemistry, statistics, probability. You know that they weren't
written for a guy who says, oh, uh, I think
I have a lump in my groin or you know,
a sore on my neck, and so I'll just go
study the medical journals because it'll just be there and
I'll use an AI chatbot to summarize it for me.
That's insane. This is literally a form of psychosis where
(17:47):
you just lose touch with reality and just can't process
that there is someone who knows more about this than
you do, and that you should go to them, even
if they make you feel uncomfortable, even if they're talking
down to you, even if they seem to have a
lot more education than you do. Put your big boy
pants on, stop whining and ask them how to save
your life.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
I feel bad for like pilots and doctors because people
probably come to them all the time now and act
like they know stuff and talk to them and try.
Speaker 5 (18:14):
To not just pilots, John, I'll tell you, but I
mean no, seriously, I mean people in the trades. Talk
to plumbers, contractors, electricians, carpenters, you know, anybody with a
specialized knowledge. You know, electricians are telling me. People walk
up though, what are you putting in there? You know what? Oh?
(18:35):
This wire? This is a this is Linguini number seven. Okay,
I got it in the pasta aisle. What difference does it?
You don't understand the difference. Assume that I am a
licensed electrician and that I will explain everything to you
and then bill you. But people feel the need to
get in there and say, uh, you got a three
eighth cent rent. They also like Cliff claven right, you
(18:57):
got a three eighth cent rench in there. I mean,
it's just ridiculous. Not only is it the problem of narcissism,
but it's a way to fight back against feeling helpless.
It's a way to fight back against feeling disempowered.
Speaker 6 (19:09):
More of this after a quick break, and we're back.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
So it sounds like the people who are doing this
aren't the most destitute among us or the lowest education
among us. How does class and education factor into this
since some of it has to do with entertainment and boredom,
not just ignorance.
Speaker 5 (19:36):
Yeah, there is a low information voter problem among people
who are working three jobs and just trying to stay alive.
But the boredom problem, where that becomes a threat to
democracy and to trusting information and not falling off the
rails and into these rabbit holes, tends to be a
middle class phenomenon, in part because again we're a leisure society.
(20:00):
We have a lot of spare time on our hands.
Notice that the people that are the most prone to
these conspiracy theories tend to be in our age because
they're semi retired. They spend a lot of time on
the internet. The craziest conspiracy theorists I've ever heard are
every time I'm on the road and someone talk to
me about this, it's always people that are over fifty five.
(20:20):
Inevitably people over fifty five. Younger people follow this too,
but they ask it as a question. They say like, Tom,
is it true? Or I've heard older people say, listen
to me, Tom, here's what's going on. Eric Hoffer in
nineteen fifty one wrote a book called The True Believer
about how mass authoritarian movements developed, and he said, if
you're hoping to start one of these movements, the best
(20:43):
news you could get is not that people are poor.
It's that the society you're targeting is one that is
riven by unrelieved boredom. This was five years after World
War Two. He was absolutely right. This kind of decadence
and boredom leads you to say life must be more
interesting than this. And let's face it, authoritarians and fascists
(21:04):
and bad guys in general of both the far right
and the far left tell you interesting narratives instead of saying, look,
life is hard, we have to work together. We have
to kind of slog this through. You got to pay
your taxes, you got to vote, get up every day
and go to work. Nobody wants to hear that shit.
They want to hear that you are the central character
fighting against Specter or Thanos or something.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
You can't use the word decadenes without coming to the
Roman empire, right, and so Caligula famously his horse Incitatis.
The story goes that he named his horse as a
senator it was actually smart, and that the Senate had
expertise in how to run the empire and run it effectively.
He wanted loyalty over expertise. Expertise was dangerous to a
(21:52):
guy at the top who wants to run it as
his personal fiefdom. So appointing your horse and making everyone
pledge to support it is a way of stealing their
soul and either destroying or manipulating expertise so that it
doesn't matter. I mean, Stalin did the same thing with Lisenkoism.
Speaker 5 (22:12):
The main reason caligulily did what he did was to
show utter contempt for the Senate. The Senate is so
worthless that I had appoint my horse, and in a
way I mean not to draw strong parallels today, but
in a way, you know, I wrote the other day
that we're being trolled by some of these appointments. To
show how little I think of the justice system, I'm
going to point met gates and screw you by the way.
(22:34):
And fortunately there still seem to be even left in
the GOP. Thank goodness, there still seem to be people saying,
you know, there are limits to the amount of trolling
and Carnie barking we can take while trying to run
the government. But your point about expertise and authoritarians is
really important because authoritarians rely on expertise like everybody else does,
but they do it by command and they don't want
(22:55):
to hear what the most important role in expert performs.
And I did this advising a senator when I was
a young guy. You have to be able to walk
in and tell the boss stuff he doesn't want to hear.
You have to be able to walk in, and if
you're a scientist, Dvean, you have to be able to
walk in and tell Stalin, comrade, the wing covering on
the new jets just it doesn't you know it's not
(23:16):
gonna work. We screwed up. This prototype isn't gonna fly,
because then he could say, okay, thank you, comrade engineer,
or he could say, clearly, you're a saboteur. I told
you to make this work. There's a kind of rule
among political scientists. High coercion systems are low information systems,
specifically because of that problem. And then if you have
a system that relies on a central leader, where there's
(23:39):
a lot of coercion and exercise of control, then those
tend to be very low information systems because nobody wants
to share information, and certainly nobody wants to share information
that could get them killed. We saw this all the
time with Stalinism. And yet the punchline to the stalin
story is that when he looks over he sees the
Americans developing superstar jets and missiles and all this stuff.
(24:00):
He literally takes some of the guys that he's imprisoned
and he tells them to open workshops in prison, you know,
like the tupelev that you know you've seen. These are
Soviet aircraft, the series of aircraft. He had that guy
working on aircraft designs while he was in prison. On
the one hand, he wants to squeeze these guys because
experts are always dangerous in an authority Darian government. But
(24:24):
then when it comes time to design a new bomber,
he's like, where it is that guy? Will you throw
him in prison? All right, We'll send him a bunch
of drafting tables and give them some extra rations to
tell them to get to work. I'm not letting them
out of prison. You understand a lot of.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
His generals came out of prison World War Two.
Speaker 5 (24:38):
Once the war started, Trump Junior said something very revealing.
We don't want anybody in this administration thinks are smarter
than my father. Oh well, you know that rules out
a lot of people. Well, because most people are smarter
than his father. You can see that in this pattern
of appointments. I want loyalists who look good on TV.
I don't want people actually knowing about any of the
(24:58):
stuff we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Let's move into politics a little bit. So politicians obviously
like to use fear and other powerful motions to get support,
and certainly conspiracy theories are something they can weaponize with
voters weren't paying attention. But is there any way to
regain a serious interest in governing, embracing facts are tackling
hard problems.
Speaker 5 (25:17):
I'm gonna step back before everybody yells at us about
both sides of this, because the right is really the
home of this stuff now, but I will say I'm
sorry to have to point this out. I was getting
lots of messages and tweets and posts on social media
saying you have to look into how Trump won. Clearly
it was fraud, and I'm like, no, this whole election
(25:39):
denier thing cannot start on the left after we just
had to deal with it. You notice that Trump wins, right,
and it's, oh, I guess elections are fair.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
I forgot to throw this one.
Speaker 5 (25:48):
Yeah, they forgot it right exactly. The most incompetent, doddering
old man in the White House somehow couldn't rig this election,
but managed to pull it off while Trump was in
office the first time, which just shows you that another
thing to understand about conspiracy theories is that they don't
have to be internally consistent. They just have to explain
whatever they explain at that moment. The conspiracy theories live
(26:11):
in the moment. They're not meant for the long haul
because you have to them over time. If it's there's
going to be mass arrests on just before the election,
Oh that didn't happen. Never mind that. I said that
there's a reason for that, and I'll get to it
in a minute. So how do you get away from this?
How do you get back to it? I think one thing,
and this has really hard for people to do. You
(26:32):
have to stop, even in your personal life, you have
to stop giving oxygen to the people who want to
suck your attention like vampires about this stuff. Because the
other thing that breeds conspiracy theories is loneliness. It makes
people feel part of a community. It gives them something
to talk about to other people.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
You know.
Speaker 5 (26:50):
I tried to explain to it years ago. A CBS
reporter did a story on conspiracy theories and whacked out
thoughts and he said, yeah, we're going to talk to
some flat earthers, and I stopped him. I said, do
you really believe they think the Earth is flat? Or
has it occurred to you that this is the way
that they can get a reporter from CBS News to
talk to them for three hours. Some of these people
(27:12):
are like the intellectual equivalent of like shut who just
want company It's like I'll say the earth is flat,
talk to me online for six hours about it, and
there's a sadness to it. So you have to stop
doing that. If someone says John those Venezuela, you have
to put your hand up and say, look, I'm not
having this conversation not happening. Don't argue with them. The
(27:33):
people who are not prone to these things can't help themselves.
If your kooky uncle says I think Michelle Obama's a
man that one goes around every now and then, just
stop him and say, I don't care what you think
about this, I'm not having this perfectly ridiculous conversation with
you past the potatoes. Look, when you argue with conspiracy theorists,
they take that as evidence of being right. Otherwise, why
(27:56):
would you be arguing so strenuously. I think when you
do the thing you ought to do, which is to
dismiss this as though someone just told you that they
have a leprechaun on their shoulder, which is the way
you ought to dismiss it, I think it does produce
some second thoughts of saying, wow, not only is this
person making me wonder, but it's socially crippling to say no,
(28:16):
I'm not gonna do this with you. The media has
to kind of brush these away. Stop going to diners
and asking people if they thought the election was stolen
it wasn't. And the sooner you stop asking people this,
the sooner they're going to stop trying to sink their
teeth into your neck to suck that attention out of
you for three hours. On a macro level, I don't know, guys,
(28:39):
I think some of this has to burn itself out.
If you're told over and over again that the spaceship
is coming to spare it us all away, and finally,
after the tenth time it doesn't come, maybe some of
those folks will reassess. At some point, they do get
bored and they do start to feel taken, and I
think at that point it's really important for other people
not to say I told you.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
So, Tom, thank you very much for your time. It
was fun, all right, both of you.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
You'll get to talk about horse all the time.
Speaker 7 (29:16):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John C. Seipher,
and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Implausible is a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures
for iHeart podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
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