Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

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So today I'm speaking with Tom Nichols. Tom is a professor of national security affairs at the

U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor at the Harvard Extension School. He's a former aid

in the U.S. Senate. He's also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy champion. And as one of the all-time

top players in the game, he was invited to the ultimate tournament of champions in 2005.

He's the author of several works on foreign policy and international security,

including the sacred cause, no use, nuclear weapons, and U.S. national security,

eve of destruction, the coming age of preventive war. And his most recent book, which is the focus

of our conversation, is the death of expertise, the campaign against established knowledge,

and why it matters. And we talk about the death of expertise,

we talk about the Dunning Kruger effect, which many of you have probably heard about. We talk about

the growth of knowledge and our inevitable reliance on authority, all the while superseding it.

And we talk about what to do when experts fail or how to think about the failure of expertise

in various areas, medicine in particular. And we talk about the repudiation of expertise that we

now see all around us in politics. We get into conspiracy thinking a little bit.

Then we hit topics that are very much in Tom's area of expertise, North Korea, politics, Trump,

...