Hey, everybody, it's Reed. I need you to go to Substack. I need you to go to the home front on Substack and subscribe today. I'm out there. I'm writing every day. I'm doing Substack lives. I need you to help me join that community to this community. Let's make sure we're getting the good word on America's future out there. Go to Reed Galen at Substack. And now on with the show. Welcome back to the home front. I'm your host,

Reed, go to Reed Galen at Substack. And now on with the show.

Welcome back to the Homefront.

I'm your host, Reid Galen.

Today, I'm joined by Tom Nichols, a staff writer at the Atlantic and a specialist on international security affairs, including Russia, nuclear strategy, and NATO.

In addition to his work at the Atlantic, he has authored a number of books, including our own worst enemy and the death of expertise, available wherever fine books are sold. He is a professor emeritus of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, where he taught for 25 years. And as always, we cannot have Tom back on the show without mentioning that he is a five-time returning Jeopardy champion. Tom, welcome back. Yeah, good to see you, Reid. Thanks for having me. Thanks for joining me. So I've been thinking

about this idea of expertise lately, which you are an expert in amongst other things. And if your book was

the death of expertise, now we're like well into the post-mortem or maybe the afterlife of expertise.

So give us a sense of where you think we are. Is it possible to get people who actually know what they're doing

back to a level of esteem where they can do the work they need to do? And then I want to talk a little

bit about Russia and Ukraine and everything else. One of the things that interesting, one of the first objections to the title of the book

was that people said, but expertise isn't dead.

We use it every day.

And it's true.

What seems to be dead is respect for expertise, even though people rely on it constantly.

And that's the part that I think is such a paradox, that you are surrounded

every day by decisions and practices where you rely on experts. So really the question is,

do we ever get back to a point where people kind of realize that and respect it and trust in it

again? And I think it happens in cycles. I mean, remember,

one of the great political movements of the 19th century were called the know nothings, which was both

them claiming not to know things, but also sort of be a pridefully saying we don't know anything.

I suspect that a big part of this is that the disdain for experts is so wedded to the Republican

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