Thank you for braving the weather. Today we have a book event, the death of expertise and the author tom nichols here, a professor in the department of Security Affairs at u. S. Naval college where he worked with u. S. Air force to create a program for Nuclear Deterrent studies. However, we are not going to be talking about Nuclear Deterrence today. Previously he was chairman of the Strategy Policy Department at the naval work college and before coming to new port, he taught International Relations in soviet Russian Affairs at georgetown university. Distinguished career in wash too. Fellow of the csis and currently senior associate of the council of International Affairs in new york city. He was recently a fellow at the john. F kennedy and hes really experts of experts and im really looking forward to the presentation. Thank you. [applause] thank you all for coming on this cold rainy day and for being here. Thank you so much for having me. Im honored to be here with you. I will start my usual, nothing i say represents the u. S. Government, the United States navy, harvard, my wife, my cat, just me. And, yes, we are not going to talk about nuclear but we are going to one day. I looked forward to it. [laughter] ive been asked many times why would i even do this, write this book with obnoxious title and in your face thesis about expertise, because it immediately rubs people the wrong way. An expert stepping forward in saying, the real subtitle could have been everyone be quiet and thereon me. And people get that and it rubs them the wrong way immediately. Let me tell you about the genesis to have book, why i wrote it, how i wrote it and the problem i think ive identified and where i think it comes from and we will leave the second half for questions and discussion, okay . It had nothing to do with the election. Let me start by saying that even though most of the questions are about the election and the role of fake news and the problem of the low information voter which is something ive been banging the podium about for years. It really didnt have much to do with that. The genesis of this book probably began around the time i began my career in washington which was over 30 years ago as a russian and russianspeaking, soviet expert at the time and people were willing to give you advice about what they ought to do about arms control. They ought to do the following thing, who is they and its ewe. But i understood that at the time and as i say in the opening of the book, i get that, that was the cold war, people were scared. , they wanted to have some kind of avenue that could kill them and destroy their lives and they wanted to converse with the people they thought were taking part in this. I sort of accepted that as the price of being academic, specialist, writer, policy adviser, that people would come up to you and say, you i worked for capitol hill. Here is what you ought to tell the senator. Thats a normal thing. What i found that was different over time was the increasing not just skepticism toward experts but a hostility toward expert and absolute celebration of ignorance as a virtue and that surprised me as time this shows you the way in longer timelines, when i say recently, in the past 20 years, but thats always been there, the skepticism about intellectuals, its part of american culture. I think its a healthy part of american culture. We are not europe, we simply do not absorb those kinds, automatic credentials or titles and that makes us a great country but we did respect achievement. We did respect intelligence and intellectual and that seems to be lost and with almost the hostility to it. I told a story earlier in the book that the first time it occurred to me that intellectuals are not only his trusted but perhaps disliked was that i grew up, to give you some idea of my background, i grew up in factory in massachusetts, i do not come from an educated family, my mom and dad were depressionera kids that dropped out of high school and the whole successful story there and one of my older brothers ran a bar and as i would say, complement to call it a bar, it was like a joint. Next to railroad tracks, a tinny place but next to a factory where people worked in shifts and was open all of the time and i would go down there when i first started teaching in my 30s, i would go out and hang out my brother and one day i was there and i left and my brother told me a story later that one of the people in the bar after i left, he turn today my brother, your brother is a professor, and my brother said, yeah, seems like a good guy anyway. Like that was the assumption by definition if you are a professor, you probably arent a good guy anyway. That has become everybody, epidemic throughout our society and i described this not to im sure we will talk about this, not major policy failures or to any particular cause that has to do with academic credentialing or anything like that. I say many times, if you cant take insults being an intellectual, youre in the wrong day. I think its epidemic of narcissism. Americans not just in election cycle, have extremely thinskinned, extremely obsessed with their own their sense of themselves, their own selfact wallization, their own knowledge, not just being skeptical, skeptics as replacing intellectuals. Im not just questioning my doctor, im replacing my doctor because im as smart as professor, Nuclear Strategists or anybody else. This came back during snowden business, now seems pedestrian observation that wikileaks was fronting for the russians and the whole thing stank of russian operation. To me with a russia background that was obvious years ago. I would engage people on social media, i know you speak russia, let me explain russia to you and i would no, i will not let you explain russia to me. We may be friends or colleagues but we are not peers. I found that other friends of mind were having the same problem, a friend working at the National Security agency was trying to explain people, this is how the nsa does things, this is why this part of the story cant correct, people were saying, i dont think you really understand how the nsa works. People who until six months ago had not been aware of the Security Agency are now lectures vet reaps, i dont think you really understood this. So i sat down one evening and like many people i kept a blog for years. Mostly to try ideas and mostly therapy. I never did call it this but its titled get off my lawn because thats what most of my posts were about. It was strange and start today get a little traction. It was noticed by the federalist magazine and sean and ben asked me if they could have it and i said, sure, who would i dont know anybody that wants to read this guy yelling because, again, blogs and this has come in the writing of blogs, blogs to me are not particularly academic or intellectually rich sources. I saw your blog, can i cite it, dont cite that, the editor is an idiot, he publishing anything. That guy has no standards but they took it, we edited it and turned it into Something Else and oxford suggested to me that this could be a book and even then i was still skeptical, the social sciences folks said, this could be a good, does anybody really want to argue about this, it turns out that by the time the book entered the works, the piece itself had been read by over a Million People around the world and i started getting all kinds of mail, i started getting not just from intellectuals like myself, people who is bloated, academic egos had been annoyed but rather everyone in particular, i got a letter from a molecular biologist. I want to put in door of the lab to which i said in my best friend, sure. Started turning up in german, started turning up in italian and suddenly there was this thing going on where experts around the world were saying finally, you know, we are kind of getting a chance to talk back. All right, so what is the problem that i think that ive actually done here, i think we are going to a cycle of no nothingism that prices. This is a populist cycle. This is not related to the election. This has been brewing for at least a decade or maybe more, experts dont know anything, they screw up the world. I get that a lot. Someone sent me a message. All major institutions have failed and why should we trust you . Thats called civil war and chaos, i dont think we are quite there yet. And i think the teenager here, the reason ive identified as a problem is that people are starting to act on it in ways that are unhealthy for themselves and unhealthy for our society. You know, people who think theyre smarter than doctors about vaccinations are endangering themselves and endangering your child and yours, people who think they are smarter than lawyers or parliamentarians or political advisers about the constitution, ive had arguments with people who have insisted to me that the house can impeach the president alone because they believe this. That makes them poor voters and poor voters make poor choices about important decisions at the ballot box. Now, why do i think this is happening . In the book i identify three major culprits, sure, there are more but i singled out higher education, i actually left a side, theres a chapter on the media , excuse me on the internet but i do not believe this is an internet internetenabled but i dont think it originated on the internet. And then theres a chapter on the media. All of these three things are enablers of narcissism that has been growing on since the 1960s that theres a longer argument to be made and i didnt want to make nit the book because im not enough of a historian or social itself, my gut feeling here andgu from talking to sociologists that this is the kind of flowering of Youth Culture that prizes a lot of things besides patience and a lot of other things, but for whatever reason the enablers of those, let me talk about higher education. I did not write about k12 because i did not want to violate star trek spoiler coming. I did not want to violate the prime directive of experts talking about something theyve never done. Ive never taught k12 was but i have a sense that k12 share the same problem when the students get to us which is a they are therapeutic culture of education, affirming students, making them comfortable, theres a great moment in the book where i talk about the just disgusting moment at yale where the infamous Halloween Costume explosion or group of students surrounded the house master and started dropping and the professor thankfully said, i dont agree with that and i said, neither do i. College is not a home, its a place to go and be uncomfortable, college is supposed to be uncomfortable. Now, with that said, let me just say, i enjoyed college, i had a great time in college, we all do, we also found that it was a very uncomfortable time. The time you let go of childhood, its the time you learn to think about things that you dont perhaps want to believe are true. The that you hear things that accept as gospel from your parents, for example, or growing up in your society that you want to believe are true. I think that schenl no longer in that model. Now, obviously there are exceptions, excuse me, great books, rigorous programs available out there but as i say in the book, college has become a clientservicing model. Come the college and have a college experience. We have rockclimbing, we have pizza, we have foreign study, we have all kinds of things and the professors will never be mean to you and its okay let me just say i dont have any ax to grind, ive had a successful career of teaching, my students dont generally think im mean. I dont walk into the classroom with the assumption that we are peers. I assume that theres a reason that theyre sitting on that side of the desk and im sitting on this one and i conduct my classes appropriately that way. I told the story more than a few times and i will tell it again, very informative time in my life when i started college at georgetown and i had imposing jesuit priest and he walked and did something that the 21st century would be unthinkable. He the first thing he did first day of class handed us an essay he had written called, what a student owes a teacher. And it included things like trust, humility, we all kind of read this and went, youre kidding, right . You know, to look at father shaw, man in black, came in his roman collar, thick glasses, no he was quite serious and i argued with him and i fought and struggled to that class and i got an a. I was very proud of myself and i thought now im in a much more collegial relationship with the rofsor and i walked up to him and i never forgot, it took me down a peg that i never recovered from and i walked up to him, what do you say, father, merry christmas, what do you say peace on earth, good will toward men, he said, you mr. Nichols is repent. [laughter] okay, i enjoyed your class, father. We became best friends and to this day is somebodys advice i treasure. It was an important moment that we were not peers and that i had a lot yet to learn and part of the problem with the modern university, students come in thinking they know plenty and they leave thinking that they dont need to learn much more because theres been a lot of affirmation in between and i think as well that while there are wonderful i still think american universities are the best in the world. Its not an attack on the university which i am a representative and i have great deal of faith. It is a bit like being able to go and just four, five, or increasing six years buffet of junk food. College, as we called, magical seven years between high school and first warehouse job. Expensive proposition and when that bubble breaks or bursts, we are going to have to rethink why we go to college and what we are doing there and how we educate people. I talk about the media. This is not an attempt to slag journalists because ive had a lot of good experiences with journalists. By in large, you know, despite their human feelings like everybody else, they actually want to do a good job and want to get the story and want to tell the story, yes, they are bias and yes, they are human beings, by in large they are trying to do the job that they see is court of their profession. Problem is the American Consumer with all of this bandwidth now available has decided that what we really want is to segment each of these Media Outlets so narrowly and tailored to our own taste that we can live in an echo chamber. We dent really want real debates. Lets face it, most of the debates on cable news are about real as prowrestling. Theyre just not real debates. For the next 15 minutes these ten people are going to argue something incredibly complex. And turns into youre wrong, youre wrong, youre the puppet, youre stupid. These arent real debates. But thats what people want. They want entertainment and the news programs are giving it to them. I was asked the first three times somebody asked me, are you saying, do you mean to say, sir, that you think people were better informed when they were three nightly newscasts for half an hour, you know, i think im reaching that conclusion. Yes, those nightly newscasts were cure rated, edited, cure curated on what the old white guys thought were important. No idea about it. Was far more important than who a kardashian was sleeping with it and i dont think that was the worst world because weve gone from a limited left diverse world and i do think the news is not read by middleaged white males like me. I think it is more important to have a more diverse representation of people involved in making the news and reporting it and bringing different viewpoints to it but weve gone from that to a free for all massive buffet of junk food. Treat the media, portion control, healthy choices and a varied diet. Dont i do a lot of hits on talk radio. I think talk radio is a Great Institution of democracy but not three hours a day. Dont live on the news like video wall paper. If youre going watch the news, Pay Attention to it. One thing that strikes me thats different about the modern era is that in my family, my dad was really, he was a dictator about the news. He was a man with a tenth grade education, he was just very well informed when the news would come on, he tried to talk to my father, this was like a running joke in my family, he would point at the screen, you just cant talk, the news is on, period. For those 30 minutes, he concentrated and he absorbed everything that came through there and he would he would watch newscast, we watched nbc and abc. People now think that walking past a monitor in an airport is i watched the news. You walked by, yeah, i watched the news. My dad used to watch the news aerobically if that was even possible. Finally the internet. I have turned on the internet. I am a as many of you know, im a joyful practitioner of social media, i enjoy it, im there in the scrum every day, i was an early adopter of facebook and i had my little the first websites appeared when i was in late 20s, early 30s, i was one of those guy who is thought it was cool watching a website loading on my old 10inch monitor line by line, modem next to my desk, i would say, wow, this is the coolest thing ever. I thought, this is the beginning of a new age of enlightenment. Unfortunately its not. Unfortunately what it has done is create a huge polluted swamp full of intellectual sabators who are making people stupider. We are actually starting to do study, people who spent time clicking through web pages are actually dumber than when they started because they are sr. The illusion of gained knowledge, the example i often use, after clicking and browsing the student walks away, i know a lot about fossil fuels, all of the pages they have blown through, they believe that they internalized that and many times they dont realize theyve been testing people to ask them, did they know before you searched for them and they cant tell the difference between acquired knowledge and inherent knowledge and thats really scary because it also raises the question of how much you can manipulate people with search results. The other thing we are finding that people believe that the first ten results are truer than the next page. Now think about that for a minute. Think about that when it comes to public policy. Thats how we sell soup. You manipulate the search engine, campbells or pogresso has paid enough that pops up in the right order. Start doing that with political candidates or important Foreign Policy issues. This is one of the reasons, i will finish by getting this issue about fake news off of my chest, thats why the russians have prospered at this because they are really good at it, they are really, really good at this manipulation and i really dont like the way that the president and everybody else, all from the president on down that uses fake news. Im a russia. It means lie deliberately pollute the public debate intentionally, knowingly a lie, it is not a bias story, it is not an erroneous story, it is not an error that can be retracted, it is not a story that was spun in a way you happened to not like, none of that is fake news, fake news is an intentional lie created to mislead people and place out into the information sphere so you will find it. You make it look like an issue real grass but you find out its astroturf. I did a speaking tour for the state department where i talked about the story about how nato was moving Nuclear Weapons to romania, after, you didnt know that nato was moving Nuclear Weapons to romania, well, they are not, we are here to tell you, they are not. That was a concocted. Tell me about the rome anian Nuclear Weapons, thats fake news. A story by the New York Times reporter that you dont happen to like is not fake news. People will come back to relying on experts when they have no choice. Take the antivaccine movement. That is a movement thats almost entirely a effective affluence in good health. Arguing about whether vaccines are dangerous are thing people do when nobody is sick, a pandemic will bring an end to that in a heart beat. Real economic collapse, not the 2008 recession, a real economic problem, that could bring people back to saying, maybe we ought to talk to somebody that knows economics. A war, maybe we ought to talk to diplomats, people that speak the languages of other countries. I dont want it to get to that and thats why i wrote the book. Let me stop there and i will be glad to take your questions. [applause] please wait for the microphone and introduce yourself before asking the question. Yes, my name is mark and trashing the media with the exception of myself, 1937 cbs sends edward to europe to organize news coverage, he hires william, eric and two scholars, shire writes rise and fall, is there anyone in the media who could write that book and is there anyone in the media who has read it . Whether theyve read it, i dont know. There are people out there that good. For years, i got raised eyebrows from academic colleagues. I used to teach russian and soviet affairs and i assigned linens tomb which i thought was better than any academic work. I think there are reporters out there that are that good. Whether other reporters are reading, its another question. I think that journalists are aware of the problem in their own profession. One journalist who, of course, several of them i interviewed, they remain anonymous for obvious reasons, as one said to me, look, im dealing with young people who dont know the difference between blogging and journalism. Thats a progress. Journalism, this is where we thread this problem into the universities again because the other thing that happens in journalism, now instead of being apprenticed as a reporter or being a every time i say that i feel like im doing an old sometimes you know, im being clever and snotty. Part of it because what made it more interesting is that if you put a lot of energy into writing a post a lot of people would take it seriously and read it with same attentiveness. Im going to try to make this point and people say to you, so youre just a globalist i am. Im sorry that i spent an hour of my life trying tokes plain something extremely complicate today you. I still think im on twitter, i enjoy it, i think its fun, a lot of funny people on twitter, but i also think i do think responsibility of public intellectual to be out there questions, questions that are posed, the ones people say you dont answer my question, well, i answer the ones that are posed, someone who wants a real answer and i do my best to do that. I think thats part of what being a good public intellectual is about. Theres a whole character in the book on when experts are wrong and what experts need to own and i think that we are open to the charge that we tend and want to kick and i think we are we do lack in empathy sometimes because we live in that world of data and abstraction and i think we need to engage with the public and speak to truth and to power. It sounds very similar to what science has been dealing for a long time, they are often called the demarcation problem. Whats science versus pseudoscience. You can major a weight and you have a broad kind of principal if it makes what difference what country you did it or religion, its still, theres been many pages and books written about it and i think on the best that people have is they have like bread crumbs, humorous list of if you see capital letters and all kinds of ways of saying things that look more pseudoscience than real but theres less clarity about it and the other thing the thing that i think makes your problem more difficult is do you have values also going into it . Yeah, science is not going to solve the problem for us no matter what nyle tells you. That is about the problems of how we live together as a community of people are not amenable to scientific answer. We cannot weigh democracy. We can try to see it and know when its working. We can weigh the kinds of things, when do we know, when it fails, i guess deterrence isnt operating anymore. But, the other problem for science is that and i think this is where experts make a mistake, scientific experts make a mistake, they say the science is clear and therefore the policy choice i advocate is equally clear. Thats where i draw a line and say, no, no science is science, policy is policy. If the people of climate change, i hate this whole subject. It makes me gives me a migraine. Do i want to establish the point that if the people of boston want the make the crazy decision to let the city slide into the harbor in 70 years, thats their choice. A scientist cant say this will happen and therefore you might not. Experts and i will cop to this, experts do present their advice prejudicially. Option a, surrender immediately, option b, immediate launch of thermal nuclear war, option c, my idea. [laughter] well, yeah, experts do that and i think scientific experts have a tendency to mobilize science to do that even with even greater gusto and people have a right to be wrong, experts are servants not masters. We are here to serve the rest of the society. We are not here to make those decisions. We are here to make the people who are supposed to make shoes decisions smarter about those problems so i worry that the left which claims to be the party of science says, well, here my answers are obvious but i worry equally that the right says, well, science doesnt matter if it conflicts with things i dont like and its a dialogue of the death at this point and we all have to stop violating those basic rules because one thing we can take from science is not the conclusions but the rules and the process and argue with each other in according to agreed upon rules and standards and evidence and thats something that no one seems to know how to do anymore. Confirmation bias is a problem and someone says, yeah, but i knew a guy once. So its a problem. [laughter] go ahead. Ted, ter heritage foundation. You mentioned Neil Degrasse tyson, bill gates, all sort of play a role now of public expert and insert any subject and social conscious, yeah. Can you talk about bounded expertise, youre expert, deterrence, russia, the soviet union and Nuclear Weapons, i dont think you claim any expertise in astro physics, for example but a lot of people out there once you get expert license in one area, expert in everything and use that license to opine. The public plays into this in a way, you know, i find it frustrating, the public say you experts and your credential, but then somebody comes along and says, im Neil Degrasse tyson, what do you think about child care, who cares what he thinks about child care or doctors. Who cares . There was a gap fly and i talk about her at some length in the book, had serious ideas about Nuclear Weapons, silo issues, she used to talk about the ability of our silos to withstand first strike. He was a pediatrician but had doctor in front of her name. People and were like, shes a doctor. American swing wildly between these. You experts and your credentials take all of that nonsense and tell your story walking. On the other hand, somebody says, well, im a doctor, go ahead. Usually about anything with medicine. If a doctor says i want to talk about vaccines, forget that, i want to talk about social justice in america. Now you got me, doc. Its insane. One of the people i spent a lot of time and i have to give credit lawrence freedman, cross expertise violation, you know what, i do it too. Im a smart guy, im smart person, i have doctorate and i have deep thoughts about health care. I can tell you the other day privately with a colleague expounding on deep thoughts on health care and i learned a lesson that we all should learn, this person said, tom, youre wrong. He said, ive worked in this field for years and the thing you believe and i wont go it was about the now blessed memory the ryan bill that is gone and he said, youre just wrong. It doesnt, thats a great idea, lets think of it. Youre just wrong and i worked on this for years. I did what i think what other people should do in the situation. This is a Good Opportunity for me to shut up and listen for a change because i really am not an expert in health care and by closing my trap and listening i learned a lot of things. Most people are not comfortable doing that. If you say youre joust wrong, im an expert, yeah, well, who do you think you are . People said to me, what do you think you are . Im an expert. Experts do this all of the time and public intellectuals, the science guy and the rest of them say because im smart you should listen to me on any number of issues. Part of the argument here i would say is that that happens because so many other public intellectuals have cleared the field and dont go out there anymore. I would like to see that public space filled up again with people that responsibly talk about child care, drug abuse and whatever it is and pull some of the issues away from a physicist. But, again, experts, i think, have pulled back to say, its too difficult to talk to the public, theyre their temper is too short and i will write my position papers on opioids in the rust belt and not deal with the angry moms and dad that want to talk to me about it and i will let some physicist talk to me about it instead. I think thats not i think its unhealthy. But, again, i understand it, most intellectuals, most people with deep background in things are not naturally extraverted. These are people whose model, not come at me, bro. Its difficult. I think more and more of them have to do it. Should we go over to this side of the room. Hi, kate, bureaucrat. My question is, one thread that goes through your discussion in talking about the role, you know, Consumer Choice basically that people are approaching dealings with expertise and authority from the lens of consumers who are entitled to have their wants met rather than from the point of view of learners or, you know, anything else and could you talk a little bit about if or how you see the role of emphasis on Market Forces playing into that . You know, you were talking about early in the discussion, you know, the consumer lens of the students and i know that in the medical profession, for example, they are finding that outcomes in hospitals where, the Customer Service of hospital stays are rated more highly, are tending to come out worst actually because people are getting what they want rather than what they medically need. Right. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about if we know that the invisible hand or the market is not working in favor of necessarily the best outcomes in all of these cases, how do we address that . Yeah. Im concerned about that because, you know, the trap that conservatives can fall into, these Market Forces arent working, you shouldnt buggy people what they want and a lot of the colleagues on the left say its exactly why we need a much more regulatory state and its just you step right into that bear trap of, you know, we want to be more cooperative and talk to people about health care and what they say is give me more painkillers until theyre addicted and, you know, the conservative says, dont do that, and the liberal says, now i have to regulate doctors. Im not quite sure what to do about it in every field because youll notice im get get away from medicine because i dont know anything on medicine. I had students come in over the years and say, hey, are we going to talk about x because i really want to talk about that and i say, no. [laughter] you know, well, dont you think we ought to study what we are all interested in, no, we are going to study what im interested in thats because its my class and, you know, students what i found that people after they get over initial response to it, they say, yeah, maybe, i dont want to have a million choices that i cant make sense of, maybe i need somebody to help guide me through this. The danger in that is that it does meet the difference to experts which im not arguing for. And one of the things i found so so frustrating the minute this camera is off, we should obey experts and do whatever they say, of course not. I listen to my doctor, if he walks in the office with a big needle with his hand, dont even tell me, doc, anywhere where you think is good, hit me, dont tell me whats in it. Of course, i ask those questions. I want other people to ask those questions, but this its not just a market problem, its this overemphasis on a cooperativeness, we have to make your partner, no, we cant all be partners in everything. Sometimes the doctor is going to say, here are the things i have to do, sometimes the teacher says, here are the things i believe we have to cover to to the exclusion of other things and i think that this issue of cooperativeness and peer to peer, there are two sayings common american that i declared on in this book, one lets agree to disagree, an expression i hate to the very fiber of my being and the other is teachers. Im had a real scrum. If thats true, you stink as a teacher. That is an Unfair Exchange of knowledge if its even. It should be a lot more in this direction than the other. I think that professionals just have to put that marker down. I can tell you that one of the biggest constituencies were doctors that were coming out of the wood work to contact. A surgeon finally said to me, i interviewed a very topflight sports surgeon, you know, ive gotten to the point where i want to put all the stuff on a tray, all the instruments, all medications on a tray and push them across the table and say, you do it. You know, you figure it out, you consulted dr. Google, go ahead, fix your own knee and the world might be better if more doctors did that, but a lawyer who said to me, yeah, there are people sitting in jail because they said, ive got this. Maybe not in front of the judge, dont to this. There you go. How many have you seen kind of the disturbing move, classic character study, people versus larry flint, he fires his own lawyer right in the courtroom. This has happened to other lawyers, he fires his own lawyer and the judge start pounding gavel, youre in contempt, the lawyer says, ask for bill, counselor, i dont know. That happens in courtroom. I will handle this and they end up in jail and people end up sick and in jail, miseducated, they end up broke whatever it is because a professional didnt say to them, listen, you need to listen to me on this, if you dont trust me, talk to another professional and check my work and see how you feel about it there but we are not doing enough. Thats what i think we ought to do but i dont know if the market will tolerate that because that pressure will always go somewhere else and somebody is going to tell you what you want. You see it in the medical ads. You come from the medal professional . I worry about the ads that i see for medical institutions that basically amount to, hey, has everyone else told you no, hey, we will tell you, yes. Right . In the small print, this will never happen to you, this is totally impossible, this is completely 1 in a million shot and people do it anyway. So we have time one or two more questions. One more question. Somebody in the back. Somebody who hasnt asked a question yet. Sorry, debra jones, recent retired from the department of state and serving as embassador twices. Imim sorry i was late. Perhaps you addressed this already, how do you deal with the thorny, muddy divide on expertise between career Civil Servants who have a regulatory expertise and experimental and the policy the bumps and grinds we are seeing right now where the public feels this is a democracy, you know, how do you know anything more than i do, i have a right, i vote and, you know, it gets into what you said earlier, i always said i would never climb into f15 but there is a difference between the technical fields where people do respect a good surgeon. Or sports. They can see the physical competence. I dont know what you would call it, its now a policy competence per say but an expertise i think its a policy competence and i think its invisible to most people. Lets face it. Here is a couple of expressions, people treat Foreign Policy like plumbing. Your comment about not cliebing in climbing in the cockpit. When i retire i would like to be a general, that takes years of training and you have to be captain, major, the diplomat says, exactly. And i think people look at things like diplomacy and because it mostly works all of the time, how hard can this be, how hard can it be, how hard can it be to talk to mexico, this election, just tell them to get their act together and stop sending us drugs and keep their people and we will get this all ironed out, one way i do this to try to explain to lay people is that i take them through the process how many experts are involved and what it takes to mail a letter, something everybody takes for granted. They address it to a friend in i dont know pick a country and they say, in about somebody closer, belgium, 2 or 3 days it will be in brussels. Wait a minute, theres a lot of people not just airline pilots, not just the guys who decided that a size x envelope is the right size envelope, it took diplomats, it takes embassy, people allowing travel through each others air spaces and by the time im done with that, people, wow, i can get all of that for 50 cents, yes, its a bar gain, you stick it in a box and goes across the world and you dont even think about it but thats part i will close with this. Part of our problem is that this depth of expertise that ive been talking about is a problem, its really going to rub a lot of people the wrong way, a disease of affluence, things you do when things are going right and not when things are going wrong. Part of the problem is that people are convincing themselves that experts dont know what theyre doing because they convinced themselves that things are going wrong and ive pushed back on this all of the time. My students, younger students, professor, i mean, i see your point but this is the worst time ever. My eyes bulge. Its okay. Its the worst economy ever. When i graduated from college, 11 , look at me, almost if they give me the side eye, he might be lying, hes trying the win the argument by lying. They just i think we have convinced ourself that is the world doesnt work, that everything is terrible, that experts are to blame for our lives, whatever is wrong in our lives that we dont happen to like and its the kind of thing we can only do when things are actually going pretty well and i think again i dont want to see us go back to 1930s where this kind of populist response to a real crisis, depression, leads us into world war ii and experts have to reconstruct the whole world after 1945, thats an extreme example and i dont want us to end up back at that. Im hopeful, i wrote the book, again, get people talking about it, all around themselves without even thinking about it and why theyve become so hostile to it and i dont im not sure that i have an answer but means to start the problem and i hope i started the debate. Thank you so much, the book is available outside for purchase and professor nichols will be signing it if youre interested. Its a very good book. Thank you for coming to heritage and please join me in thanking him. [applause] [inaudible conversations] cspan where history unfolds daily. In 1979 cspan was created as a Public Service by americas Cable Television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. And representative marsha