WTH Do Americans Not Trust Experts? AEI President Robert Doar Explains
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2024
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Americans have lost faith in the expert class, and in some cases, for good reason. So-called “experts” didn’t just destroy livelihoods during the COVID pandemic or make China rich through normalized trade relations, they also looked down upon and antagonized the American people in the process. What role will experts play in the second Trump administration? And how can the expert class begin to regain the trust of the American people?
Robert Doar is the president of the American Enterprise Institute. While at AEI, Mr. Doar has served as a co-chair of the National Commission on Hunger and as a lead member of the AEI-Brookings Working Group on Poverty and Opportunity. He first joined AEI in 2014 to lead the Institute’s opportunity and mobility studies program after serving for more than 20 years in leadership positions in the social service programs of New York State and New York City. He is the host of the podcast One on One with Robert Doar.
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.0 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on? |
| 0:01.1 | Who in God's name knows what it's all about. |
| 0:29.4 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pletco. |
| 0:31.2 | And I'm Mark Tiesin. |
| 0:32.1 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:33.5 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:35.5 | Mark, what the hell of this week? |
| 0:37.2 | Well, what the hell is going on is that there is a major crisis in America of confidence in experts. The American people don't trust experts. And there's a number of reasons for it. But the most recent one is the pandemic, the COVID pandemic, where the public health experts told us repeatedly |
| 0:56.8 | that we needed to wear masks and we needed to keep our kids out of school, and we needed to get |
| 1:04.0 | multi—they told us that the vaccines would prevent us from getting COVID, and they told us |
| 1:09.6 | that a whole bunch of things that ended |
| 1:11.4 | six-foot distancing, which turned out to be not real and not based on science. And a lot of this |
| 1:16.5 | stuff was exposed. And a lot of people are very resentful about how their lives were, to this |
| 1:21.7 | day, disrupted. I mean, we've had multiple podcasts here about the costs of the pandemic lockdowns in terms of mental health, |
| 1:29.1 | in terms of educational outcomes and all the rest of it. |
| 1:32.3 | And I think there's been a major reaction in this country where people just don't trust experts anymore. |
| 1:38.2 | What do you think, Danny? |
| 1:39.5 | So I agree with that. |
| 1:40.9 | And I think it's a huge problem. |
| 1:43.2 | And we're talking today to the head of our |
| 1:45.2 | think tank, Robert Dorr, who is the father expert of all of the experts at AEI. I think that the |
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