Who Are the Real Experts Now?

Q&A on the people I trust—and why

The scarcest thing in the world right now is trust. Institutions and organizations live and die by this single metric.

This problem is everywhere right now. Just take a look around, and you can see the crisis playing out in real time.

There’s plenty of noise and spin. But people want something rock solid, and as reliable as a Swiss watch.

But where can you find it now? Who can you really trust? Who do I really trust?

I try to answer that question in the Q&A below.

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You write a lot about outsiders and people on the fringes of culture—and you often criticize established institutions. Do you distrust experts?

TED: No, the exact opposite is true. I respect expertise. But I think that some outsiders have more expertise than insiders.

What makes you think that?

TED: Maybe it started with my childhood and teen years. I grew up in a working class neighborhood, and I met people with tremendous expertise—but they had few credentials and no impressive institutional affiliations.

There really are working class intellectuals—at least there were in my life. They were my role models.

“Expertise is the credential. The credential is not the expertise.”

When I finally showed up at college, I made an effort to take classes from the smartest professors I could find. But this was only an extension of my experiences at home.

So I never make distinctions on the basis of titles and degrees. Sometimes they correlate with expertise, but many times they don’t.

Who were those intellectual influences in your home town?

TED: Some were members of my family.

I’ve talked elsewhere about my older brother Dana—who was a phenom even as a teenager. He taught me more about arts and culture than any of my professors. I also had two uncles—one on the Italian side of my family, and the other on the Mexican side—who were genuine working class intellectuals. They were as formidable as any professor you will meet.

I also had several high school teachers who were exceptional. And I also had a best friend—he was like me, from a working class family, but was a super intellectual. I could talk to him about Proust or Picasso or post-structuralism or whatever.

These people really do exist outside of academia—even in working class towns. If you haven’t been in those environments, you might not believe it. But it’s true.

But trained academics must have more expertise than these homegrown thinkers?

TED: I’m not so sure about that. I’ve certainly learned from brilliant professors—but in my own field, music, I’ve met freelancers and fans who know as much, or even more, than scholars with doctorates.

I fall into that category myself. I don’t have a degree in music, and never took a single lesson or class in jazz—and that’s the area in which I’m best known, and consulted for my expertise.

How did you get hired by Stanford’s Department of Music if you don’t have a music degree?

TED: It’s an unusual story. I doubt that it could happen nowadays.