Who needs experts?

Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.

New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Well, I'm here with my guest today, Tom Nichols. He is the author of several books, including the one we'll talk about today. He's a staff writer at the Atlantic and finally my old job, a professor emeritus of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, where he taught for 25 years.

Welcome to the show, Tom. Thanks for having me again, Sean. So you wrote the death of expertise in 2017. before a lot of what now feels obvious had fully come to pass. In that book you argued, pretty convincingly, that there was a growing contempt for knowledge and expertise alongside a culture of narcissism, and as a result of all that we had a political system that was becoming almost suicidally stupid.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (48 minutes, 7,814 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.