One of my favourite people in the world, Peter Boghossian.
Thank you for joining me in the trenches again.
My absolute, absolute pleasure. However, so I keep hearing all
this stuff about South Africa, like is it as bad as everybody
says it is? No, I don't believe everything
you see in the media. OK, so let's say that I were
just dropped in in Joburg. Could I just, could I just walk
around by myself at night? Depends where you are in
Johannesburg. Also it's a big city but I
wouldn't really recommend walking alone at night in
Johannesburg like. What would happen?
Like you're laughing, What would happen to me?
Would someone beat me up? Would they shoot me?
Would they? All right.
So the answer is if you're local, you would probably be
streetwise and you would know what to do.
You'd know, you would know the signs and you would know where
to be and all that kind of thing.
But that's only if you're really in the city centre.
If you aren't in the suburbs, you're probably OK.
So if I were in the city centre and I wanted a place to practise
my combat training, Joe Bird would be.
The place at night, yes, that's a that's a good place to be.
Negative to a positive. I've never, I've never been
asked those questions, but but I think you'll, you'll agree that
crime is generally distributed across the world in sort of city
centres anyway. Yeah.
Is there a racial element to those crimes?
Like would it would I be at an increased risk because I was
white? Race relations in South Africa
actually are generally quite good.
What you think is pretty bad is generally on the fringe.
You, for example, will know all about it.
You're from Portland? Yes, says cesspool, if there
ever was one. I can't.
I'm so happy I escaped that, that lunatic asylum, and I'm
really delighted. And you know, I find myself
being a lot less anxious and stressful and so I'll just give
you 2 quick examples. So the president of Portland
State University allowed people to destroy the university at no
contact at no consequence of the people who did the burning, the
pillaging, the looting, the destruction.
And she literally just let them go and had the police.
I mean, it's, it's a terrible situation now.
They did over vandals, did over $1,000,000 damage to the library
with again, with no consequences and the taxpayers paid that.
But I don't give a shit. I don't live there.
They can just burn the whole thing down and build it up 100
times over. I could couldn't care less.
It's there. That's the people they've
elected certain people and you're in a democracy and you
take responsibility. If that's how the way you know,
we have states rights here and and if that's the way that the
governor of Oregon and the mayor of Portland want to deal with
things, that's great. I moved out.
You can burn that fucking whole city to the ground.
Give a shit. You know, I mean that that you
had. So I don't know how it is in
South Africa, but if you don't like something, you just move to
another state. Yeah, yeah, you can do that too.
That's why people have fled blue cities in in blue states to
California. They fled California, they're
leaving Portland, they're go, they're going to Florida and
Texas. But I mean, Peter, the point
that I was making is that the whole BLM thing was fringe.
It wasn't in the main. What do you mean?
You mean the number of people who believed it?
Yes. Yeah, I just, I just read a
Andrew Doyle new book and I can't remember the name.
I sent me the manuscript. I can't remember the name of the
group, but it was estimated that only 8.
And I've seen this figure bandied about quite a bit.
Only 8% of the people were true believers or true adherence to
the ideology. The the problem is, I mean, that
could very well be true, but the problem is when you create a
culture of fear, you have no idea what anybody believes
because it's just falsification. They're going to tell you what
they want you to think and you're going to walk around and
see BLM signs and people's. I mean, that movement was what a
disgrace. What a disgrace.
And I had spoken out about it and and people went crazy on me.
The the leaders were corrupt. They brought bought mansions and
they the you know, what nobody talks about is how the murder
rate of young black men skyrocketed after that.
And I wrote, I think it was on Twitter or subset something that
that was an inevitable consequence to kind of, you
know, what the Ferguson effect is.
You know, when you stop policing areas, oversimplify, but when
you stop policing areas, crime rates go up in those areas,
particularly black areas, Tough guys like middle class white men
like me. I'm I'm largely unaffected.
OK, so you and I have spoken plenty over the last few years
Peter, but for my UK column audience who might not know who
you are quickly what is your what is your background?
What is my background? Education and philosophy and I
yeah, that's pretty much it. I you know how to answer that
question. I don't even know what to say.
When I like education, I say. Well, you've got 22 great
moments, all right. You, you, you, you published a
book that dramatically influenced my life for all the
right reasons, and you involved in a fantastic, fantastic peer
review. Basic prank.
Yeah, yeah, we did the grievance studies affair, which is take
off a Sokol and I was in the new atheist movement.
My first book was a manual for creating Atheist.
Second book. I've written a tonne of popular
pieces and peer review pieces and I, I give lectures, I do
this thing called spectrum St epistemology, where we go around
the world. We, we do it in schools, We're
going to be doing it in prisons and we're going to be doing it
in, you know, with the Maori in New Zealand and, and hopefully
in prisons all around the world. So we help people speak across
divides and then clean up the way they think about things.
And dad and I published a letter like crazy letter of
recommendation that I went viral beyond anything I ever expected.
And I, you know, I just do scientific scepticism, critical
thinking. I fight irrationality in all of
its forms. At least I do my best to do
that. And I have a small non profit.
I'm affiliated with the University of Austin and as a
founding faculty fellow. So I'm, and I'm busy, busy.
I'm in Budapest right now, Hungary.
I love it here. Yeah, so you and I met of, well,
we quote unquote, met in 2019 and that was because of your
book How to Have Impossible Conversations, which is in my, I
consider that one of my Bibles. I've got like maybe two or three
books that I will always keep with me in the year 2025.
Why do we need a book like that? Boy, it seems more pertinent now
than ever. You know, the authoritarian and
illiberal forces are on the decline and so we need a certain
type of criticism. Don't get me wrong, I'm deeply
involved in all kinds of critics.
I think criticism is necessary, but you can't just criticise.
You have to build, you have to make, you have to offer people
and that's what we do it. We're just at Vertex Partnership
Academies in the Bronx and it's a predominantly after African
American school. And we did Spectrum St
Epistemology, which is basically a way to help people speak
across divides and make their ideas clear.
So again, I'm not criticising criticism.
We need criticism. But there has to be a point
where you build and you make and you contribute.
And so How to have Impossible Conversations is a contribution
to that effort of how to teach people to speak across divides
or on their deep, deep chasms, deep gulfs and belief,
political, religious, ideological.
But why though? Well, if you don't do that, you
end up like Iraq. If you don't do that, you end up
like a kind of war torn country or a place where people go to
violence. So either settle your
differences through dialogue or you settle them through
bloodshed. And so people have to be given
that opportunity. The problem is that they have
all the wrong things modelled for them right now.
They don't have the right way to have those conversations.
And you know, you just said you are, you're a father before and
that's an amazing thing. And I, I subjected my kids and I
say subjected on purpose to really, I mean, countless days
and nights of Socratic examination over the dinner
table where I'd invite people in the house.
Don't bring the, don't bring Muhammad to the mountain, bring
the mountain to Muhammad. So I'd bring my friends, I would
bring public intellectuals, I'd bring professors, etcetera, and
make my kids sit through those meals and turn those into kind
of some lovely Socratic evenings.
And I think that's the recipe for how to live a better life,
how to think more thoughtfully about what you believe and
engage other people. It lends to a rich life too, and
rich friendships. Well, that's exactly what I
experienced from from your work. One of the things that I
remember the most is why do you believe what you believe?
Yeah, yeah. And it it's ancient question and
most people don't know how to ask it.
They don't know how to listen. They don't know how to ask the
right follow up questions. The older I get, the more I'm
convinced that. And people have written whole
entire books about this. The problem comes from
listening. And people think that they're
listening, but they're not listening.
And it's very, very difficult to convince.
I call it a reflexive problem. It's it's a problem that that
the very nature of the problem prevents it from being solved.
For example, if someone is defensive and you say to them
while you're being defensive, well, their defensiveness will
prevent them from solving the problem of their defensiveness.
You don't get anywhere. Yeah, you don't you don't get
anywhere. And so we have to we you know,
if if you ever. I went to a relationship
counsellor once, I think it was a complete catastrophe.
But she, she's one of the things that one of the things that she
didn't like me very much. I asked a lot of too many
questions for her, I think. But one of the things that she
she said that that she kind of parroted back a lot of this just
these banal talking points is that, but but it's, it's also
100% correct is that you have to, you can't expect someone
else to change. You have to change, right?
So you, you just can't expect that the other person is going
to do something or be something. You have to model the behaviour
you want to see. And when I go to prisons again,
we're going to be going to prisons again pretty soon.
That's one of the the key ideas. It's a modelling behaviour.
What do you hope to achieve though, by going to prisons?
That's a great question. In a sense, the same thing I
hope to achieve by going to schools with vulnerable
populations in that there are these low to no costs.
And again, I incur all the costs.
I just want to be crystal clear. I don't, not only do I not make
money from this, this actually costs me money.
So we buy them the mats, the Spectrum St Epistemology mats.
I pay for my own hotel, I pay for my own airfare, I pay for
everybody's stuff. So this is not, this is the
opposite of a get rich quick scheme.
This is a get poor fast scheme. But I do it because I believe in
it and what I believe in it, that there are low to no cost
ways to help people think more clearly, to help people engage
ideas, to help people desist from violence and crime, to help
people civilly communicate with each other.
And it doesn't take much. It takes actually very, very
little to nudge people toward. Everybody has the possibility of
leading a better life. They just need the tools.
And they're having the exact opposite things modelled for
them. I almost never see any, you
know, TV shows where people have these really thoughtful
dialogues or the universities have been an abject, unmitigated
catastrophe for that. They're making people more
fragile and more vulnerable, telling them they're victims.
And any colouring books and cookies and balloons and stuffed
dolls and all of the exaggerated caricatures that you have heard,
most of most of which are true at major universities.
So the universities have failed us.
They're not modelling it. They're not so, so who's going
to do it? I mean, how, how we do it?
So that's the other thing that most people don't understand.
They think, oh, well, who cares about prison inmates?
Well, you should because they get released into the community.
Now, maybe you can make that argument that we shouldn't put
in financial investments into prisoners who won't be released
into the community like lifers or something.
OK, well, we can have that conversation, but most people
are not in prison for life. The statistics, it depends on
where you go and what they've incarcerated for.
But they'll be your neighbours, they'll be employees where you
you live and work. So.
So it doesn't take much to help these guys.
And I say guys, because I mostly work with violent men to live
better lives. You alluded to the Socratic
method earlier, and Socrates lived thousands of years ago.
I'm getting the impression that this is an ongoing battle.
Yeah, it's a, it's a never ending battle.
Once you you grind down some irrationality, another one pops
up. Once you grind down some fad,
you know it. But it's really interesting.
It's really interesting. If I may, you know, if you look
at Mensa in the 70's, the high IQ society, I can't remember the
statistics, but the majority of people believe in things like
Tele telepathy and telecommunicate, remote viewing
and a clear audience and clairvoyance.
Those statistics have been been published every every decade or
so. We have fads for what people
believe. I had an interesting
conversation with Mia Hughes, the Canadian, I think she's
based in Ottawa, a researcher about gender issues.
And she, she was telling me that, you know, bulimia was a
trend among young girls, then cutting was a trend, and now
trans is a trend. And so these things are all,
they're just social contagions. We're just, of course, this most
recent social contagion is orders of magnets.
I mean, almost infinitely worse. That's a misuse of the word.
But so, you know, once you stomp one out, some other derangement
syndrome comes back. So we have to kind of look at
like a prophylactic. How do we give people the tools
to protect against dangerous, harmful pseudoscience and
nonsense? I mean trans is probably
deranged idea of them all. Yes, but Peter, what the point
that I was making is that if if this was being spoken about, you
know, thousands of years ago with the Greeks and you and I
speaking about them now. I mean, this is a forever war.
Correct. That's that's the substitution
hypothesis. The substitution hypothesis.
I don't know if I coined that or who coined that, but see the ME
or Peterson. I can't, I can never remember.
But your substitution hypothesis is the basically the idea that
once you stomp out one irrationality, another one takes
its place. So there's a kind of homeostasis
among irrationalities. And so the norm is that people
believe crazy shit, you know, just weird, bizarre.
Now, there are different schools of thought on this.
One school is that we need to accept that this is human nature
and nudge them into benign delusions, benign forms of
Christianity, for example. Another belief is, no, we have
to kind of extirpate it from the soil of belief entirely and just
uproot all of it. I tend, I tend to toward that
camp. But it would be naive to say
that. I mean, you're correct, We've
been labouring under various delusions for a long time.
I will say that I will concede that certain delusions are far
more pernicious than others. And Western Europe is seeing the
effect of some of those delusions of citizens now.
But I mean, I think it's Nassim Taleb who made the argument that
if you just remove, for example, religion from society, society
will just collapse. That's clearly that's
historically demon. That's just demonstrably false.
They've done that in Scandinavia.
Scandinavia hasn't collapsed. If anything, it's the injection
of of Islam into those societies that's causing the community to
go on shaky ground. So I mean, it's historically
that just seems completely false, unless you want to argue
that there's some kind of a history historicity, it's a
historical. No, I think that is yeah, sorry.
I think what Taleb is, is arguing that it's human nature
to form a belief in something. It's that Lord of the Flies
scenario where you will always create meaning and purpose.
Yeah, so that's the question. Do we nudge people to more
benign delusions, you know, more benign forms of Christianity?
Love everybody. Some guy walked on water,
therefore he had these metaphysical truths, so
therefore his ethical truth must be the case.
Turn the other cheek, etcetera. Or because if we don't do that,
people go to crazy town. I mean, I think, you know,
that's the question with the New Atheist movement.
And I think why a lot of people are one of the main many reasons
many people are upset with me because New Atheists were so
successful. I think you know, Melissa Chan
tweeted out something I told her at a party once and that was
it's better to believe that a man walked on water once than it
is to believe that all men can get pregnant.
How do you arrive at that point, Peter, where you think that a
man can have a baby? What happened?
I mean, what must happen? Yeah, well, that's it's actually
an easy question to answer. Your moral mind overrode your
rational mind. So you think good people, I
believe I'm a good person. Good people believe this,
Therefore I should believe this, right?
There's no, no sane person could ever believe that There's a
great meme. Just if you can put it in in
post production would be great of like, you know, the the meme
of the bus going down and then it hits another bus and it's
something like, you know, new atheism or Christianity,
Everyone's going to be rational and sane.
And then the bus that hits it like pregnant men and the whole
bus derail the train derails. Yeah.
So, so that's the problem. The problem is that.
Is a rationality just a default because it's a tremendous amount
of work to, to stay sane. And it just especially with
social media, you know, I had a, I've made that mistake before of
not listening. I mean a lot before, but I had a
conversation, I don't know, like a less than a year ago maybe, I
don't know. But with Jonathan Prejue, he's
the Super Christian dude. I, I really like him.
I met him in London, hung out, we had a great time, a few
drinks together. Good dude, but I could not
possibly give you an example of someone who has beliefs,
particularly metaphysical beliefs, that I find.
I'm not going to be pejorative about it, but suffice is to say
considerably different from my own.
But I, he was very kind and he invited me on the show, which is
infinitely more than I can say for the people I've been trying
to have a conversation with, which I want to talk to you on a
second. And it was a really interesting
conversation. I got more emails about that
conversation than I did from almost anything except my second
Rogan and my hard talk interview.
I was stunned at how many people interviewed emailed me about
that interview. But I wanted to, you know, throw
something out I've been really trying to have.
And I'm going to admit pretty soon on Twitter that I was wrong
about something. I think it's important when you
move in the public space and you make a mistake to say you're
wrong. And I was wrong about this.
I thought it'd be far easy to get an easier to get an Islamist
on the show than a leftist. I've been reaching out to tonnes
of Islamists. I can't get anybody to talk to
me. They have to have somewhat of a
platform and they can't be just a random dude off the street,
you know, preferably they have an academic position or
something. I date.
I can't get anybody to talk to me.
That's weird. Yeah, I'm very surprised by
that. And and and I was wrong to think
that that would be the case. Why though?
Well, that's the question. I don't know.
I mean, in terms of, you know, I got a tremendous amount of shit
for having Destiny. I did I think 3 or 4I.
Have to go and listen to that. Tremendous amount of shit.
I mean, I like the guy, I get along great with the guy, but I
could that people like lost their minds about that.
Whatever you want to say about him or his beliefs, let me tell
you something in no uncertain terms.
He will talk to anybody, he will talk to people.
Do that alone. Just that one quality makes him
light years, legions above his. I don't even know what you want
to say. His his fellow leftist, although
he is not an identitarian and that could be that could be why.
But that's an important thing though, the the ability to talk
to anybody. This is a trend that I've
noticed in the last, well, at least since I've been doing this
sort of thing, that there are people who simply do not want to
be associated with you because they don't like some of your
views. And they, they use terms like,
well, we're not going to platform that person or, or
whatever. But I mean that in itself falls
into wokeness. Yeah, it's interesting.
I've also been thinking about this.
There's a lot of criticism about this quote unquote.
I was just asking, I can't see my own fingers.
I was just asking questions thing I I understand how some
people that could rub people the wrong way, but I also think that
something it's really important to ask questions.
I mean, it's and I understand that some people ask questions
when an agenda I public published a piece about that,
but that's. And I'll try and assist you up.
Yeah. And I actually have no, no
problem with that. I mean, you remember that guy
who? Peter Hotez?
Who? Yes, I remember him.
Yeah. And so I think, wasn't he?
Yeah, and he refused to have a debate with somebody.
OK. So if he did not move in the
public space, that's totally reasonable, 100% reasonable.
It's totally reasonable to not expect a scientist will go on a
major podcast if they've never done it before and if they just
want to do science. But he didn't.
He moved. He already moved in the public
space. And he made some claims that
affected public policy and public health.
And he absolutely he was wrong not to do so.
Yeah. So.
Yeah. And, and I do think it there is.
That's why I told you about the Islamists.
Like I don't or like some say, well, I'm a leftist, have me on.
No, no. So you have to have look, if you
just have a random person on the street, right and there is some
legitimacy to like why you platforming this guy?
But if somebody is, you know, they're a professor, they have,
you know, high h-index, they've published multiple books on the
subject, they have peer review, they have popular pieces, maybe
they have a semi successful podcast, etc.
I think that's fine. You know, that that's the kind
of person you want to hear from because they have some
expertise. They've demonstrable expertise
in a subject area. So, you know, I got a tremendous
amount of shit because I had Mark Sargent come speak to my
class. He's the guy.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got a tremendous amount of
shit for that. But I stand by that decision
100%. I read his book.
I stand by that because it was a science and pseudoscience class.
You know, if it were like, you know, the history of Aristotle
or something, that would have been inappropriate.
But what? I mean, at the end of the day,
Peter, So what? The guys got a different
opinion? So what?
Yeah. So don't you want to teach kids
how to ask better questions? Yes.
Don't, don't. Don't you want to teach kids
that they're you live in a world in which people have beliefs,
some of which are very bizarre, and you will encounter those and
you, you're going to have to need to know how to navigate
that reality. I mean, of course you do.
I mean, and and it's people say, well, the science is settled.
Well, no shit, the fucking science is settled, Sherlock.
I mean, but that's not the point that the science is settled.
So there's that other. It's just that general.
Anyway, go ahead. No.
No, no, no, no. I was just going to, I was just
going to say that, you know, over the last two years, I mean,
I've done what, over 1000 interviews and I found that some
of the best conversations I ever had were with people that I had
diametrically. 100% views. Like a communist, I never
thought in my life that I would have so many agreements with a
self declared communist 100. Percent, yeah.
And the other thing is the, the audience, you, you know, it will
get you clicks and views, etcetera.
And, and there's nothing wrong with that.
You people have said to me like, well, why don't you have, you
know what? So I go around, I used to go to
parks all the time. I try not to do that anymore.
Now we try to have experts. The the thing I can't control, I
speak to people all over the world, literally Taiwan, just
all over the world on Budapest. I'm doing here.
I can't control the people who volunteer like I don't the
nobody I do this with. Nobody's acting.
Nobody's. I mean, they may be.
And one guy said that once and he's like, well, I'm an actor.
Yeah, but I mean, I'm not paying you to act here.
You're telling me what you believe.
So there are no actors in what I do.
So the thing that you only you, you only know the the beliefs of
the people who come up, you don't know the beliefs of the
people who don't. And the problem with that is you
don't. The people who will come up by
and large are not older. Older people are camera shy.
So you can't really, it's very difficult to get those people to
have conversations on camera. Off camera is pretty easy.
You also learn a lot about yourself.
Yeah, totally what you believe. You know, I made a I made a
mistake. I it, it takes a lot to be
neutral, especially when people say stupid shit.
But you have to be neutral when you do this or else if you're
not neutral, it doesn't work. Right?
This the street epistemology stuff doesn't work.
The people are extraordinarily good at sniffing on an agenda.
And once they sniff on an agenda, it invokes A defensive
posture. Once the defensive posture is
invoked, it compromises the whole project.
But so I had been doing four or five of these and then I was the
subject in one of them and I was a Dick, you know, and I was just
really, I mean, I, I apologise and I said I wouldn't release
the video. But you do what you can do, but
you do learn about yourself. And everybody has their own, I
have my own breaking point. I can only listen to nonsense
for so long hours of listening to total nonsense.
But that's the other one. It's hard.
So it's like when you're in a conversation with one person, if
someone says something ridiculous, you can kind of junk
it. But if you're doing spectrum St
epistemology and there are, you know, six or seven people or
even 3 people and they're each giving different reasons with
different objections, you have to hold all of those in your
head. I notice how I do that when I
come home at night, I sleep like a rock.
It's incredible amount of intellectual exercise to keep
bad ideas resident in your head. But you said it's difficult to
be neutral. So my question to you is, why do
you want to be neutral? Why is it important to be
neutral? The the you You can't moderate
or mediate or facilitate A discourse among people who
disagree if you take a side. OK, you seem.
To be yeah, I mean, I obviously have my own beliefs about lots
of stuff that I've formulated over the years, but that you
have to do your best not to come to, you know, re nice one to
travel out with him. He did one of the best ones
we've ever done. He facilitated, it was on
surrogacy and it was in Budapest.
And it was just an just a masterful example of how to have
conversations across dialogues across divides.
One thing we've noticed from the comments that we've listened to
people is people like it not when you have random people off
the streets, but when you have experts.
So when we have experts who disagree, those conversations
are super interesting. So did you see the the debate
between Sean Carroll and Eric Weinstein?
No. Piers Morgan No, it was really
interesting. It was.
And I know I am. I don't know if you get the
reference. You might be too young.
I'm the Sergeant Schultz of like, physics.
Like I know nothing about physics.
Like just not. And these guys are just like way
hyper educated about math and math PhDs from Harvard.
And not that Harvard anything means anything anymore.
It used to, but well, if you haven't seen it, the reference
will be lost. But I do think that that there's
a way to engage with people to increase the likelihood of
certain outcomes. And so one thing is that I
always advocate is Rappaport's rules, listening, repeating back
to somebody to make sure you know what they mean.
That's probably one of the most important things in all
conversation. You know, not attacking somebody
personally is, is vital. You saw that with the Dave
Murray and Douglas Murray and Dave Smith.
Yeah. And, you know, Smith was kind of
making some personal attacks there.
But you know, you've seen lots of examples.
It's, you know, I think it was Toynbee who said there are many
ways for a family to be dysfunctional, few to be
functional. There are many ways for a
conversation to go wrong, very few for a conversation to go
right. And and you have to be the one
who's who's unfazed in that conversation.
And usually people expose themselves more than you ever
could. Yeah.
I mean, in your book you talk about the importance of rapport
and it's it's something that seems to be lost in the social
media generation. I think Jordan Peterson,
actually, I mean, he's he's he's gone off the rails in many ways,
but he did say some pertinent things a few years ago.
And one of them being he thinks that social media has increased,
you know, the sort of sociopathic tendency of people.
I think he's right. What do you think?
Yeah, I mean, Peterson has made indelible contributions,
particularly to young men and others.
And, and I, I do think he's right.
Did you, did you see the trigonometry episode with the my
my buddies Constantine and Francis work with the feminist,
The crazy feminist. I I've seen a few of them, they
were on my show also, but I I I'm not quite sure which one you
talk you're referring to. Yeah, they're super good guys.
And again, you know, hats off to her because almost no one who
has her beliefs will go on any podcast and speak to people.
I don't think I saw it you. Know it's really interesting
because it gets to rapport and it gets to it just yet another
example of two smart, sincere people dealing with somebody who
is not used to having somebody ask them difficult questions.
So that's the thing that people really about and that's what you
should do with your kid, you know, set these demarcated times
where like we're going to have people over and we're going to
ask tough questions and we're going to model that.
It's not something that's explicit, but if you go long
enough, I don't know if you saw the Jubilee recently with
Peterson and they changed the title from was it 25 people or
something versus 1 Christian or something, whatever it is.
It's a disaster. Yeah, it wasn't it, It wasn't
particularly good, but but the IT, it is an indispensable
intellectual virtue to know how to feel very complex, very
difficult ideas and scale up. A buddy, a buddy of mine was
telling me a few years ago, somebody said to me, this has
haunted me germ. So I hope it's false.
But I'm I'm I'm just an example of something I'm trying to
convince myself that's false and I'm almost sure it's true.
The less intelligent you are, the less possible it is that you
can entertain a hypothetical. And a buddy of mine was telling
me that's one of the things that he asks a woman when he's on a
date. He just told me this like 2
nights ago. He said he he'll ask the
questions what would happen if you didn't have breakfast today?
And if she says, well I did have breakfast today, he said well
what would happen if you didn't Then if she can't entertain a
hypothetical about that, it's kind of a litmus test.
Somebody was recently telling me that his boyfriend, he didn't
know his boyfriend didn't give him what he needed
intellectually, and he's trying to navigate that because his
boyfriend was incredibly kind to him when he got sick.
And I, I told him that when I was younger.
I think it's I do. I don't profess by any stretch
of the imagination to be an expert in gay relationships.
I could have made a joke about me being an expert in lesbian
relationships, but I won't make that joke.
But, you know, when you're younger, you know, and you're
heterosexual, at least you're, you're looking for, you know,
someone to be the mother of your children.
You're looking for a kind of different set of, of the
different suite of attributes. A buddy of mine only dated women
who didn't wear eyeglasses because he believed it was kind
of good genetic stock. But I think as, as you get
older, I, I just, that means like very little to me, you
know, and maybe because that my whole life is surrounded by, you
know, I'm here, I'm here at the Danube Institute.
I'm just surrounded by think tank people.
I'm constantly talking to literally some of the world's
smartest people in the Anglesphere.
So it doesn't, doesn't mean it just I, I guess it's, you know,
how do you balance kindness and compassion in a relationship
with somebody who is, you know, thoughtful?
Or maybe I don't really like the term intellectual, but you know,
an intellectual or has, you know, reads and, and thinks
about things. I don't, I don't necessarily
think there's a, there's a right answer to that question.
But as I get older, I I I value kindness more and more.
Yeah, but you brought up wearing glasses.
Yeah, the idea is if you wear glasses.
I'm not saying this is true. I'm saying this is what he said.
The idea is if you wear glasses. When he was dating he was
looking for a woman to have kids with and he thought she'd be
better genetic stock if she didn't wear glasses.
That's so interesting. Yeah.
So I was, I think I, I think the hypothetical of what would
happen if you didn't have breakfast.
And if she says I would, I had breakfast, he just gets rid of
her immediately. I think that's fascinating.
But that is. Very fascinating.
I was in China last year and every third person wears glasses
and I have no idea why. Yeah, I don't know, an artefact
of insane pollution or the dismantling of the regulatory
apparatus. I I have no idea.
Or maybe, maybe more people wear glasses here, but you don't know
because they wear contact lenses.
Or I've actually met people who wear glasses with no, with fake
lenses because I think it makes them look intelligent.
So who? Or maybe they maybe they study
so much by the dim light or something.
I knew I met. I was a buddy of mine who
recruited people from Intel. And he had.
He was telling me about a guy in China who had this indelible
mark in his forehead because he fell asleep on the candle over
and over because they didn't have enough money for
electricity. Yeah, but.
I mean. How we went.
The the moral of the story here is that what you're actually
alluding to is that this is about the art of asking
questions, the art of listening, the art of creating rapport,
ultimately, isn't it? Yeah.
And it's about it. It's it is about figuring out
what you want, but it's about figuring out if what you want is
what you should want. Because we want things that are
often not in our best interests are not what we should want.
Why? We have different starting
information. We're imperfect beings.
Lots of reasons. Also, I mean the title of your
book is How to Have Impossible Conversations.
Why impossible? Because many people think those
conversations are impossible. You know, I just another guy who
will have a conversation with you if he disagrees with you.
And there again, there are not many of these people on the left
at all. I think there's like a maybe 2,
maybe 3. I should say I'm thinking of
someone else, but it's David Pack.
Oh yeah, and destiny. And yeah, that's about it.
And maybe a couple of other people.
PS Morgan Who? PS Morgan.
Oh, yeah, he will. I haven't, I haven't spoken to
him, but I had, I had David Pak man on.
It was it was a perfectly fine conversation.
We agreed and we disagreed. And you know, a lot of people
said, oh, he moderated or he mediated what he said.
I don't know. Maybe I don't know, but but, but
there is those people think those conversations are
impossible. They're not.
I mean, they're really not, you know, That's why it's so
disturbing to me. If anybody watches the stuff I
do, I never really attack anybody.
I never go for anybody's jugular.
I never really. I just ask hard questions and
they aren't even that hard really, but they're just
questions to help me. I only ask.
My golden rule is I only ask a question if I genuinely want to
know the answer. And so I'll ask questions, help
me figure something out. And so you would think if you
are an Islamist, and then I'll say one more thing.
You would think if you're an Islamist, this would be an
incredible opportunity to, to share your message with the
world. And if you really believe that
you are correct, then it should be effortless for you to feel
difficult conversations. The, the reason I think many
leftists initially didn't have conversations, it's because they
controlled the main institutions and they basically won already.
So if you won already, you don't want to take any risks like
presidential debates if you're losing and if you think you're
going to, if you're down in the polls, you want to ask for as
many debates as you can. If you're winning, you don't
want to have any. And if you're really far ahead,
you definitely don't want to have any because you don't want
to risk your chance. Now that woke is going into
Hospice, I think I for a while I thought, well, geez, maybe these
people have conversations, but I think it's too late.
They've already been damaged. Their thinking is damaged.
They've lived in these echo chambers where they've made a
virtue of not having conversations with people.
And now I think they're incapable of even basic
rudimentary thought. I think they have like simian
recognition of things like, you know, Ugg food or what have you
or but I don't I don't think that they're capable of
entertaining. Not only do I not think that
they're incapable, not only do I not think that they're capable
of defending their beliefs, but I think that if you live that
way long enough, all of your belief apparatus becomes damaged
and you start to not think clearly about other things, even
if you attempted to mean a dialectic in those other arenas.
Well, what matters more, changing your own views or
changing the views of somebody else?
In the Gorgias, Plato says it's better to to be refuted than it
is to to refute. That's clearly true.
It's it's clearly true to correct a mistaken perception
that you have about the world. I mean, I don't know why I think
the reason people don't want to do that is because they have
this idea of saving face. You know, the hostage
negotiation literature, they talk a lot about that.
They, the hostage negotiators always give and the best guys
and the best people are the best at this.
Give people an opportunity to save face, to not look bad.
But I think it actually makes you look good if you say, hey,
you know, I thought this before I had this piece of information.
But no, I don't. I think that's just part of the
human condition. You know, our, our ego is, is
overriding certain considerations.
So we, we think, you know, we, we think we're going to gain
status in our tribe. But if that's your tribe, man,
your tribe is fucked up. I'd say escape that tribe.
But why do we find it so important then, Peter, to change
the minds of other people? I think it's a kind of way to
reinforce what we already believe.
Like, oh, I'm maybe I'm having a little doubt.
I'm unsure. So if this, these people would,
they'll agree with me, they'll make me feel better about
myself. I think ultimately it comes down
to morality. People want to be viewed and
seen as good people and they want to think of themselves as
good people. And so, I mean, Pinker talks
about that people. Don't do.
Best, Yeah, yeah. Among among other places, people
don't do bad things because they're bad people, whatever
that means. They they do it because they're,
they kind of want to be good people.
You don't start throwing juice in ovens because you say I'm
going to wake up and be a bad person today.
You do that because you think that's a good thing to do.
So you think you're acting morally.
I mean, you're grossly mistaken, obviously, but that's it's not
no one wakes up and be, I should say virtually no one's like,
yes, I'm going to be a horrible human being today.
It inflicts, you know, the maximum amount of suffering.
They they think they either other people and look at them as
not humans like, you know, Jews is not humans or what have you,
or they have other kind of accoutrements of belief.
People look for these adversary relationships.
Some people even thrive off of them.
And I will admit I'm I'm personally incredibly
comfortable and adversarial situation when people are
threatening me physically or verbally, I just find my it's my
happy place. I go to a place of great
comfort. I don't know why it is I can't
really answer that, but the idea is as a general rule, it's
pretty easy to defuse those situations.
And I have, I don't know, 10 or 8 or 10 videos online showing of
people freaking out at me and keeping my cool.
That that's the one thing people always ask me is like, how do
you just just, I was in New York last week and two, two people on
the same day ran into me in the street and said, you know, how
do you, how do you keep your cool in those situations?
It's actually super easy to keep your cool.
It's just, you just have to ask yourself, like you have to ask
yourself and sincerely want. And if you sincerely want to
know the answer to this question, you should never be.
You should. You won't lose your cool.
Why does somebody believe that? Like what causes someone to
believe that? And once you centre that
question in your mind, then every subsequent question is
oriented to figuring out why someone believes that.
And once you figure out why they believe, you can figure out why
they're upset. And once you figure out why
they're upset, it's very easy to diffuse.
Not universally, but almost universally, whatever it is they
believe. So then, Peter, why do you you
Peter Boghossian belief? What do you believe?
Well, I mean, I could certainly be mistaken.
I believe what I believe because I think I have sufficient
evidence. I think I've thought about many,
but certainly not most of my beliefs.
But I think I have AI, think I have AI.
Don't want to say a safety valve, but I have, I, I always
say to myself, OK, so I'm willing to change my mind about
something. And the moment that you have
that undergirding all of your thoughts, it's like a safety
mechanism that prevents you from lapsing into, you know,
basically becoming an ideologue. I had a guy in my class many
years ago, he said, I'm I'm willing to question anything
except my religion. And I was just, I found that to
be fascinating. It's like, or I often find
people to be fascinating after finding it to be fascinating
when religious people say, oh, you know, this, they're, they're
it's a religion. So they can see that somebody
else's belief is a religion and that's bad, but they can't take
the same tool and turn it on their religious belief.
So I think as long as you're willing to reconsider what it
is, you believe you, it's kind of a safety mechanism to
prevent, prevent you from becoming an ideologue.
But then again, we don't, we don't teach that in schools.
Like that's not valuing our educational process, you know,
Oh, revise your belief. Won't find me someone who who
who, you know, heard I was in Dartmouth recently starting
trip. And then I asked this kid how he
could be wrong about something who's a junior, and he said,
wow, no one's ever asked me that.
And I was like, really? You're at an Ivy League school?
Nobody is. And I shouldn't, you know,
Dartmouth is probably the best of the Ivy's.
I realise that's not saying much.
I don't mean that to be an underhanded compliment, but
Dartmouth is a grade school, unlike the other Ivs, and I
couldn't believe that no one said to this kid in three years
of education, oh, how could that belief be wrong?
I mean, the whole system should be this geared up to this kind
of Paparian falsification of merciless falsification of every
fucking thing you believe, but this kid didn't even get the
question once. But compartmentalization of
ideas doesn't make you necessarily a stupid person.
I mean, you can be the best dentist in the world and you
might believe something that seems ludicrous.
Sure. And, and ideally what we should
do is, you know, you asked the question before about belief.
But if someone asks me a question and I don't know the
answer to the question, I say I don't know.
I don't pretend to know something I don't know.
And so we've created these cultures and what particularly
in universities, James Randi used to say when someone gets a
PhD, they they never say who's the, the famous sceptic who died
few years ago. They never say I don't know
anymore. And so that should always be a
virtue to say I don't know. It's never a bad thing.
I mean, you never see that in, in, in, in high competency or
skill based things. You never see people in jiu
jitsu. For example, when you, I was at
a jiu jitsu seminar and I asked this guy something, he said, I
don't know, he's a fourth degree of black belt.
This guy was not a man to be trifled, an extraordinarily
dangerous human being. And I so respected him for
saying that. Usually in in high competence
areas that's what you'll find. I live on the African continent
and the people around me, by and large, without being degrading,
are fairly simple people and are very, very spiritual people,
very tribal, thousands of years of belief and and all that sort
of thing. Yet they are very happy and
fulfilled. Now, if I go to Europe, which I
was recently in, I see a lot of empty people, but supposedly
intelligent, deeply thoughtful people.
What's going on there? Oh boy, that, that that's a,
that's a huge question. That is a massive question.
So I'm not necessarily buying the explanation.
I said not necessarily. I could buy it to a certain
extent that certain cultures are just more thoughtful as a
general rule than others. I know people are going to
cringe when they hear that. I could give data on that, but
this type of person who would cringe at that is not interested
in data. They're interested in being
right and attacking someone for a belief because they think it
makes them moral. So there's no point in giving
data. So, so I'm, I'm not look, if if
you live, if you had an idea in an ideal world and you could
wave a wand, what would you make it?
Would you make people thoughtful and happy?
Part of the response to that would be if you're genuinely
thoughtful, it's difficult to believe you could be truly happy
to the the ancient question better be a Socrates
dissatisfied or a pig satisfied. And so there is a certain degree
of leading a thoughtful and examined life that makes someone
unhappy. Let me jump in there and ask it.
I've just, I've just come up with a better way of asking it.
Is a Bushman poor? Depends.
Depends what you mean by a poor look.
So, so again, that's why the conversation is complicated.
So in the United States, I'm completely convinced that we're
heading to bankruptcy right now. We, we passed this bill.
I've been tweeting about it incessantly.
No one gives a fuck. People don't care.
We're we're, we're literally the, the end of the empire,
which is I've just, I usually don't talk about this, but I'm
now a Bitcoin. I'm super bullish on Bitcoin
because I don't think we can save ourselves.
Our empire is over and I think this was, I think Doge offers us
a glimmer of hope. But when you ask most Americans,
they don't give a fuck. They couldn't care less.
They truly don't care less. Even if they're just laying on a
beach, they still don't care. Business people don't care.
They will care pretty soon, don't care big time.
And then they'll be pissed off because no one ever warned them.
But they don't. They don't.
So, so, so there's a kind of, there is a kind of cultivated
apathy and and happiness. There's a kind of being happy at
not knowing. It's the whole Adam and Eve
problem. I don't think it's possible.
I could be completely wrong about this.
And the way to know if I'm wrong, it's just an empirical
question. Can you find society that's like
super simple and super happy where everybody's like, you
know, the one you live in, They're just dancing around and
everything and they've developed technologies to ameliorate
suffering. Have they developed dental
technologies? Probably not.
OK, so, but they have no problem taking dental technologies from
the people who you perceive as miserable.
OK, so maybe they're the smarter ones after all.
I mean, that's your thing. You what?
Western Europe is completely fucked.
I mean, it's over. It's over.
The empire, their empire is over.
I mean, I was in Amsterdam, Peter.
I was in Amsterdam not too long ago and I just saw individuals
walking around with headphones on, looking at their cell
phones, completely disconnected from reality.
It doesn't bother me at all. In fact, I, I, I would argue
it's better than that, than causing mayhem and pandemonium.
It's, it's, it's, it's better to be neutral and indifferent in a
society than to be lecherous. Yeah.
Western Europe is toast. England's UK is toast and all
these places are toast of their own making.
You need to come to my continent.
Particularly to the South and come experience some some
Africanization. I don't know if.
I'm a fan of that. I'm really a fan of the first
world. You know you need you need hair
on your arms. Yeah, I, I, I don't know, I
mean. I2 people offered me to some guy
want him to send me on his boat in in South Africa but I I
politely declined. I have no desire to go to South
Africa whatsoever in spite of wanting to see you and and your
wife and your son because we've never met in person.
But you know, I don't know, maybe.
I mean I can't imagine it. My buddy has a jiu jitsu studio
out there so who knows ultimately.
Your argument, fundamentally is that to solve things around us,
you need to start by talking and by talking, not talking at but,
but talking with. Yeah, I wouldn't even say.
Talking. I'd say just listening, trying
to figure. Out trying to figure things.
Out, you know, so the, the people who seem miserable, just
you know, hey, this whole I would just say I and I and I,
I'm a big fan of being forthright.
You have to be forthright in the right way.
But hey, I'm from South Africa and people around.
Me are singing and. Dancing.
And they're all happy and they're not the sharpest tools
in the drawing. They're a simple bunch, but they
seem super happy and they're living their best lives.
And I come up here and people seem thoughtful but fucking
miserable. What's up with that?
Most people. Say it exactly like that.
In the right context, will will think about it and they'll give
you an honest answer. Very few people, you know, it
always amazes me. I ask people all around the
world. The most intimate, crazy,
intense. Questions like about.
Eating their friends if they were stranded on an island.
I mean, just, you know, cannibal, the craziest shit.
And almost never, almost never do I have someone say once I had
one time I had someone say, what kind of question is that?
And then even she answered it, like almost always when you ask
someone a question and you're sincere, people will answer the
question. Almost always, even if it's a
stupid, some people would say God, that's a stupid question,
but that's on them. And almost always they still
answer the question. So what's the moral?
Yeah, what's the mortal of the? Story.
Well, I think there's like an Achilles.
Heel In our cognitive architecture, when you're asked
a question, people answer it. It's just really.
Weird and I think now even more so I'm amazed the kind of things
that people tell me like totally me guys tell me he's like and
have had sex with his brother. And I mean I'm just amazed the
kind of shit that people tell me like literally on a regular
basis, the things they and it's not even a confession.
It's just that, you know, we do the street epistemology and this
guy's telling me he gets off to this kind of porn and all this
stuff and this other guy's telling about his erections.
Like so they're like all of the taboos that we used to be in
place, particularly about sexual things or they don't seem to
hold anymore. So you know I.
I think that the. The, the deliverable is when
you're in doubt, if like you're having a difficult conversation
and you're in doubt, assuming you have some kind of rapport,
just revert to asking questions. If you're ever stressed or stuck
or just ask questions. It's just, and if you watch the
confrontation video at PSU, that's what I did.
And if you're surrounded by people, I always do this.
I, I try to single one person out and then ask them questions.
That's a technique from the literature as well.
But impossible conversations are really, they're almost never.
I mean, I haven't, I have never. I don't think I've had a single
one. That's been impossible.
There's just a. There's also a way.
I don't really. Worry about write about this
because it's a difficult thing to write about.
I wrote about a little bit in the book, but of just a way to
pause after you ask a question. So don't fill in the lacuna, you
know, don't fill in that little gap.
Just wait. And that's a period where people
can think about ideas. And if you, you get good, some
people, comedians, good comedians in particular, are
really good at pauses. You know, when to pause and then
when to resume. And it's a it's a key art.
And and one more thing is so if you're thinking like, Oh my God,
like, I don't know if I could ever do this or well, just go to
a bar and start talking to random people or wherever you go
where it doesn't mean anything. You won't see them again.
Just start. And you'll be amazed when you
ask people a question that they'll answer.
They'll answer it like, oh, hey, how's it going?
You know, you know, Hey, my name's my name's Jerome.
I'm from, you know, wherever the fuck you're from, you know, Hey,
what, what is there dude around here?
And then I you know, I always a good a good thing is if you ever
you ever too, you can find commonalities.
In music and. Movies and TV, and that will
break you in to have more difficult conversations.
And it's a way to build rapport with people.
Again, this stuff is not particularly complicated.
You know, it's not like your physics equation, one of the
things that bugs. Me a lot these days is that when
I see a YouTube video that says so and so destroys so and so,
and I'm thinking I don't get it. Why are you?
Do you get excited by humiliating somebody?
Yeah, it's interesting. You know when.
When we do these videos in the prisons, if if.
If you really wanted to do. Something you just throw these
guys in there and just see what happens.
But the goal, that's not the goal.
The the goal isn't to see bloodshed.
The the goal is to teach people how to have better
conversations, right? The, the goal is to move the
needle. And you know, I'm always amazed.
There's this guy in a few people do this, these quote unquote
influencers. I hate that term.
But there's this one guy, he's a black guy and he goes around in
Korea and Japan to another guy and they harass people in
streets and in supermarkets and shopping malls.
And it's just I, I just it is. Just insanely.
Disrespectful and maybe I live in a bubble, I don't know, like
maybe I really do live in a in a weird world.
I just assume everybody knows how to fight.
But I'm always amazed that like he doesn't run into some guy
who's like really good at MMA and the guy just kicks the shit
out of his bodyguard 1st and dispenses with him in like a
second and just breaks few of his bones.
Like I'm just amazed by that. But but I do think that we have
a lot of pernicious, just bad actors and they're doing it for
clicks. They're doing it for views.
Almost universally. They're young men.
Young women do a different kind of thing that that are not
provocative in the same way or do an attempt to demean or
humiliate, but attempt to draw attention to themselves.
Give me a nugget of wisdom. About what I have.
Someone to give at $58 about what?
Gardening. Gardening.
OK, that's one thing. I have nothing.
To nothing reminds me of that of that movie in the 70s with Peter
Sellers. Well, I'll give you nugget
nugget wisdom I gave you about parenting, I think is really
important. I think teaching your kids a
second language and making it so they they don't think about it,
teaching them how to defend themselves.
You know, Matt Thornton, I wrote the foreword to the gift of
violence. He says this is such an
important nugget of wisdom, a goal.
Should be to make good people. Dangerous to bad people?
Cannot hope. That the government is.
Going to put I don't have to. Convince you of this from South
Africa. But you cannot just hope that
the government is going to step in and protect you.
You cannot hope that so. So teach your kid some self
defence. Ask your kid difficult questions
but in a way that you don't take personally.
Have them see you. Revise your beliefs, have them
see you in these conversations with other people that are that
are engaging. And when people, people can have
genuine differences of opinion and they don't lose their mind.
So that that's what I would say as a as a parent, like you need
to make certain things normative.
It's just normal that we do jiu Jitsu and and keep your kids out
of the striking arts. They're very good for functional
martial arts. They they work.
There's no question. No, nobody's denying that.
But they also give head trauma and head damage.
So and if they're they're hell bent on doing it, tell them they
need to get a black belt in jiu jitsu before they do any
striking arts. That will that will delay that
will delay that problem for for at least 9:50 to 12 years.
Yeah. But I think, you know, I think
one of the things we're not talking about, you know, I'm
going to do an event. When I go back to New York.
In a couple of months about young men and masculinity and
we're also not talking about what does it mean to be a young
man in society. That's probably probably a
second talk. But along with that, I think
we're not talking about what does it mean to be a father.
What does it mean to be a parent?
What skills can you give to you know, we know that when there's
an adult male in the home. Matt also writes, Matt Thornton
also writes about this in his book, When there's an adult male
in the home, that that's one of the main criminogenic factors.
Sex men are more likely males are more likely age, certain
ages. I think it's 16 and 26.
I could be off on that and whether or not there's an adult
male in the home. So if you have issues with your
girl, try to work them out until they're, they're grown.
The kids are grown. So that would be another little
tidbit. Marriage is increasingly
becoming a class based thing as well.
Oh, and if you want your kids to to have a behaviour, don't tell
them to do the behaviour. Have them watch you do the
behaviour. So if you want your kids to
learn how to defend themselves, it's insufficient to put them in
jiu jitsu. It's good, but it's not
sufficient. Even better would be for you to
do jiu jitsu and then they watch and then they so it's normative
for them. OK, Peter, how can?
I follow you and your work. I'm on X at.
Peter Boghossian PETERBOGHOSSIN I'm on YouTube, I have a sub
stack. I'm all over the place, so I
have no plans to go to Salt Lake.
If I would though, if I would, it'd be I'd go to see you, we'd
have a good time. Peter Boghossian, Thank you for
joining. Me in the trenches.
Pleasure. Thanks, Jim.