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Tom Nichols could impress anyone by the fact that he is a five-time Jeopardy! champion, and ranks as one of the best who has played the TV game. Add to it that he is a professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor at the Harvard Extension School, and the resume impresses even more.

But Nichols says he has had occasions where people have tried to diminish his expertise on several subjects, and in fact have attempted to impress him with their own expertise in areas where they had no training whatsoever. And it wasn’t an isolated incident.

“These are dangerous times,” says Nichols, who adds that he only speaks for himself, and not the college or the federal government. “Never have so many people had access to so much knowledge, and yet been so resistant to learning anything.”

Loyalty360’s Mark Johnson recently had a lively discussion with Tom Nichols about his bestselling book, The Death of Expertise, which Publishers Weekly says that “The crux of the book's argument is that ... the American public has grown increasingly hostile to expertise.”