Ep 381 | Our Institutions Are Killing Conversations | Guest: Peter Boghossian

Summary

KIBBE ON LIBERTY — EPISODE 381
"Our Institutions Are Killing Conversations"
Guest: Peter Boghossian
Date: April 15, 2026
Host: Matt Kibbe

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Episode Overview

In this episode, libertarian author and economist Matt Kibbe is joined by philosopher and free speech advocate Peter Boghossian to discuss the decline of real conversations in a polarized, institutionally corrupted culture. Together, they explore why genuine dialogue is so rare, how institutions—from universities to public discourse—have become hostile to open inquiry, and the urgent need to rebuild the social and philosophical infrastructure of free speech from the ground up. Boghossian shares his hands-on experiences teaching critical thinking and "street epistemology" on the road, aiming to equip people—especially young people—with the tools to think clearly and disagree civilly.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Peter Boghossian’s Background & Mission

• Teaching Free Speech & Critical Thinking in New Zealand:
  [01:04] Peter is on tour with the Free Speech Union, working with Black Power gang leaders, Maori children, and educators to teach critical thinking through games like "Spectrum street epistemology".
  • “We do have this game that we play with them, Spectrum street epistemology, to help them have civil conversations across divides and kind of help them clean up the way they think.” (Peter Boghossian, 01:14)
• University Experiences & Resignation:
  [03:05] He recalls resigning from his position at Portland State University in protest of the suppression of ideas and ideological conformity, referencing the "Grievance Studies Affair" as a key moment.
• Current Work:
  [05:14] Now, Boghossian runs a nonprofit traveling globally to teach civil dialogue, often for free, driven by a sense that academia and schools are no longer fulfilling this role.

The Breakdown of Civil Disagreement

• Cancel Culture as Human Instinct and Institutional Practice:
  [01:48, 07:30] Kibbe notes that the urge to silence opposition transcends political divides and is rooted in human nature, but institutions have magnified and incentivized this impulse.
  • “The institutions have exacerbated... the worst parts of the human condition. And they've actually made a virtue out of not listening to people.” (Peter Boghossian, 07:30)
• Role of Institutions in Crushing Speech:
  [05:14–07:16] Discussion on how universities and K–12 systems teach students to avoid opposing ideas, making people "emotionally brittle and more prone to be offended or insulted.”
• Brittlenness and Epistemology:
  [05:14] Boghossian uses the hygiene analogy: "We think a lot about dental hygiene and less about epistemological hygiene... The longer people don’t do this ... the more brittle they become...”.

The Podcasting Revolution vs. Sclerotic Academia

• Podcasts as the New Universities:
  [08:20] Kibbe and Boghossian agree that platforms like podcasts and Substack allow intellectual curiosity and honest disagreement, replacing universities as sites of open discussion.
  • “It’s a phenomenon—not listening, not even wanting to understand the other side. But now that’s all lent legitimacy by these institutions.” (Peter Boghossian, 10:00)

Certainty, Uncertainty & Hayekian Insights

• Dangers of Absolute Certainty:
  [12:16] Kibbe draws from the Austrian School and Hayek: Life is "a radically uncertain future," and dogmatic certainty is both false and dangerous—both in knowledge and morality.
• Institutions of Cooperation:
  [13:01] Tolerance and social cooperation arise from mutual ignorance and the humility to accept difference; this requires open channels for discussion.

Teaching Street Epistemology: Methods and Challenges

• Spectrum Street Epistemology Explained:
  [14:08, 28:37] Boghossian describes a conversational tool where people physically align themselves along a spectrum from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree" on hot topics, then attempt to articulate and guess each other's reasons for their positions.
  • “The first order of business is ... write down the best reason you have for standing on that mat ... More often than not, people do not understand ... why someone would disagree ...” (Peter Boghossian, 30:28)
• Biggest Barrier: Unwillingness to Engage:
  [28:37, 33:22] The greatest practical challenge is that some groups—"identitarian leftists" in particular—refuse even to converse, believing the conversation itself is oppressive.
  • “You will not get the people who are pro immigration to talk to you to have a conversation. So already the experiment is doomed.” (Peter Boghossian, 28:37)

Immigration as a Case Study in Honest Disagreement

• A Messy, Taboo Discussion:
  [14:18–27:35] The hosts explore how mass migration, especially from cultures antagonistic to liberal values, stresses the limits of classical liberalism itself.
  • “I'm wondering if a mechanism for Western democracies is not similar [to a punch card]: after so many punches [of incompatible cultural influx], the card just couldn't sustain itself.” (Peter Boghossian, 15:05)
• Immigration Policy Complexity and Institutional Failure:
  Kibbe points to economic and political factors corrupting immigration debates, and both participants lament an inability to talk about inconvenient truths or data openly.

Institutional Decay, Reform, or Abandonment

• Universities Are "Irredeemably Corrupt":
  [39:12, 41:23]
  “Well, there are none. They should be all burned to the ground. They've been fundamentally compromised.” (Peter Boghossian, 39:12)
  Both agree a bottom-up, parallel institution-building process (e.g., University of Austin, Ralston College) is necessary.
• Credentialing & Systemic Discrimination in Elite Schools:
  [42:30] Boghossian provides data on how Harvard and others structurally undermine Asian applicants while publicly decrying similar forms of discrimination.
  • “The left has been screaming about systematic oppression and they've been 100% correct and it's been about against Asians at elite universities…” (Peter Boghossian, 43:00)

The Future of Civil Conversation

• Hope in Decentralized & Digital Learning:
  [41:46] Kibbe expresses optimism that young people are "self-curriculating," i.e., learning outside of corrupt systems via podcasts, YouTube, and emerging parallel institutions.
• Assessment and Certification of Knowledge:
  [44:58] Possible future models of decentralized verification, perhaps with AI or standardized tests.

The White Pill: Rebuilding a Culture of Humility and Curiosity

• The Call to Intellectual Humility:
  [38:25] Both men urge honesty about what we don't know, seeing humility as a lost American virtue.
  • “Be honest with yourself about what you know and to be more humble about what you think you know.” (Peter Boghossian, 38:25)
• Self-Reflection in Conversation:
  [50:38] Boghossian: "With that is also how could we be persuaded to think about things a little differently. Right. So it's just... It’s fundamentally Socratic, so the method itself allows for that idea of belief revision, demanding evidence, thinking through what it would take to change your mind either way, talking to people.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Trouble With Institutions:

  “Our institutions have betrayed us in such a profound way. The engines of knowledge production have been fundamentally compromised.”
  — Peter Boghossian [05:24]

• On Street Epistemology:

  “It’s pretty easy to teach people. And we have, literally, we do this for free... if we don't do this, what kind of society are we going to have?”
  — Peter Boghossian [05:50]

• On Conversation Barriers:

  “There's one group of people who are utterly unwilling to have a conversation... they think that even having that conversation is a kind of bigotry and oppression. So that's the real challenge...”
  — Peter Boghossian [33:22]

• On Institutional Reform:

  “They should be all burned to the ground. They've been fundamentally compromised.”
  — Peter Boghossian [39:12]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:04] — Peter’s work in NZ, street epistemology, background on resignation
• [05:14] — How they teach conversation, cognitive brittleness
• [07:30] — Not a new phenomenon; institutions have made things worse
• [08:20] — The rise of podcasts as replacement for university forums
• [12:16] — Hayek, uncertainty, the problem with certainty and dogma
• [14:18] — Immigration and classical liberalism’s limits
• [28:37] — The spectrum street epistemology method and barriers to conversation
• [33:22] — The Achilles heel: unwillingness to even talk
• [39:12] — Institutional corruption: "they should be all burned to the ground"
• [41:46] — The rise of self-directed and digital/decentralized learning
• [43:00] — Systemic discrimination and elite university malfeasance
• [50:38] — Real-time belief revision and commitment to being open-minded

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Takeaways & Final Thoughts

This episode vividly diagnoses the collapse of America’s “infrastructure” for honest discussion, laying much blame at the feet of ideologically captured institutions but ending with practical hope. Peter Boghossian’s grassroots, Socratic approach to conversational hygiene is presented as a model for cultural renewal, with Kibbe and Boghossian agreeing: the future lies in humility, openness, and building new spaces for free inquiry from the ground up. Even the art of disagreement, they argue, must be taught—and is the key to rebuilding a free, tolerant society.

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For more from Peter Boghossian:

• Twitter/X: @peterboghossian
• YouTube/Instagram/Facebook: peterboghossian

For Kibbe on Liberty and Free the People:

• freethepeople.org

Transcript

[Matt Kibbe]

Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. I'm talking with Peter Boghossian about Cancel Culture and the antidote to that, which is real conversations based on humility and openness and your willingness to be persuaded by someone that you think you absolutely disagree with. This is how we fix politics in America. Check it out.

[Peter Boghossian]

Foreign.

[Matt Kibbe]

Welcome to kibby on liberty. Peter, how's it going?

[Peter Boghossian]

It's doing great. I'm feeling fantastic. How are you, Matt?

[Matt Kibbe]

I'm great. And you're in Auckland, New Zealand right now?

[Peter Boghossian]

I am. I'm on my second tour, actually, for the Free Speech Union, and I was on tour last year for them and I loved it so much that they. It worked out well. They invited me back and so we've been having some. We just got back from Hawks Bay and we talked to the Black Power gang leaders. That was fascinating. We're going into the school to teach Maori children and teachers and Pacifica and more broadly, critical thinking skills. And we do have this game that we play with them, Spectrum street epistemology, to help them have civil conversations across divides and kind of help them clean up the way they think. Epistemology is the fancy word for that. So, yeah, I love it here. It's incredibly civilized, especially after coming from Paris, which is kind of a dump.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, Yeah. I want to get into that because I thought we'd talk about. About rescuing the philosophy of free speech in practice. And that's precisely what you've been working on. And I've made this observation. I think it's not only the far left that has embraced canceling voices that they don't like. It almost feels like it's a natural human instinct to want to shut up people that are saying something that really triggers you. And I don't think it's a left or right thing. It's just a human thing. And yet when you ask people, they very much, certainly Americans, most Americans at least very much embrace the idea of free speech and the First Amendment. And certainly people right of center do that. But in practice it seems to be more difficult to achieve. We'll get into that. But for people that don't know your work, just remind people of what happened at Portland State University and even what happened at Berkeley, so that they have some context for why you do what you do.

[Peter Boghossian]

Wow, that is something that I never think about anymore. But the university where I taught and I had this thing called continuous employment. It's a nice gig. It's like kind of like a job for life. Not quite tenure, but I taught philosophy in the Philosophy department at a university I will not name. And as I wrote in my resignation letter, I resigned at the height, the peak of insanity. It was just. They. They weren't doing students. They were doing students an injustice. They were not doing students any justice. By prohibiting certain ideas, certain concepts, they had a stranglehold. The goal was to replicate the dominant ideology as opposed to help people think issues, give them tools, et cetera. So I resigned. It's a long story, but on the back of the grievance studies scandal, where we publish my James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, and I published intentionally broken, deranged, vile papers and journals, that's another story. I've talked about that to death. And so now I have a small nonprofit, and I've been on the road since 2021, more or less. And I go around the world and I teach in the schools. I. I give talks. I. My life is awesome. I, like. I don't think. I think I've had, like, one bad day, and that was in Paris, by the way. I think I've had, like, one bad day since 2021. My life is awesome. So I'm living my dream, doing what I. Exactly what I want to do. Making a contribution. I think. You know, I'm almost 60, so I think this is a good time in my life for that.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, yeah. And. And people that are interested in. I'm guessing most of my audience actually knows those stories. But if you're interested, you should go check it out, because it's a bit of a hero's journey that you've been through. But I'm fascinated by this idea that we, meaning you, have decided that you actually have to teach people how to have conversations and how to listen. So let's. Let me give you some time to talk about your notion of street epistemology.

[Peter Boghossian]

Yeah, thanks for asking about that. That's one of the main things we do. So my last book was, with James Lindsay was How to have Impossible Conversations. And so we do. We give people the tools that the university isn't giving them. And I've often speculated that's why the podcast space is so popular, because people are talking and honestly engaging ideas that they simply can't do. In the university, you have one party line, if you will, and you have to tow that party line. And there's a. It's really, It's. I mean, our institutions have betrayed us in such. Such a profound way. The engines of knowledge production have been fundamentally compromised. So that's what we do. We teach people how to speak across divides, how to clean up, the way they think about issues. You know, we think a lot about dental hygiene and less about epistemological hygiene. You know, how, you know, what, you know, and, and it's, it's pretty easy, it's pretty easy to teach people. And we have, literally, we do this for free. So we go around the world, we do this for free. I don't make any money on this. We have resources that we post on. In fact, it actually costs us money to do this, a lot of money. But if we don't do this, what kind of society we're going to have? And that's the other thing, Matt. The longer people don't do this, and they've been told in school or in the university in particular, but also in the K12 system in an American context, that they don't look at ideas on the other side or they don't know why people believe what they believe. The more brittle they become. Both as kind of cognitive agents, if you will. Emotionally brittle, more prone to be offended or insulted. That's because they have. It's really, it's like a fantasy based martial arts. I don't want to go down that rabbit hole necessarily. But you think you can do things that you simply cannot do. And so that's one of the things we do is we try to help people align their beliefs with reality and have civil conversations across divides. It's actually pretty cool when you watch those exercises and the videos have been doing quite well as of late.

[Matt Kibbe]

Do you think it's. Is this a new phenomenon that we don't know how to listen and communicate with people that we disagree with? And do you think it's this institutional corruption that you're referencing? Is that how we got here?

[Peter Boghossian]

That's a great question. No, it's absolutely not a new phenomenon. But the institutions have exasperated. The institutions have exacerbated the existing, if you want to call it the human condition, the worst parts of the human condition. And they've actually made a virtue out of not listening to people. Oh, we don't want to. Platform Nazis. They have a whole linguistic infrastructure for this. So the institutions have made this far worse, to use a fancy word. They've kind of reified these, these notions and institutionalize them. So it's really, it's really a. It's a mess that I'm not sure. I mean, look, I'm doing what I can, but I'm just one guy. I got Reid over here. We're a small team. It really takes a lot of people to want to change the culture. And I do think things are slowly changing now. But the damage is this is going to take a generation to grow out of this damage.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, you mentioned podcasters. And you know, not all podcasters are equal, but I think, I think the more successful ones are probably driven. And I'll talk about Rogan. I assume you've been on Rogan. Is that twice? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I feel like Joe generally lets his guest talk and lets his audience listen without sort of being dictated to. And I think I've always thought that that was probably part of the attraction that people can, can go to podcasts, they can go to substacks, and they can curate ideas that they find interesting without being told that they have to believe a certain thing. And to me, that's probably replacing the sclerotic nature of one sided, top down universities who have somehow gotten into this position where you're not allowed to think anything except the one true belief. Is that.

[Peter Boghossian]

Yeah.

[Matt Kibbe]

Is that overstated?

[Peter Boghossian]

Yeah, yeah. No, I don't think so. I think sclerotic is a good word. I think that's, that's what it's become. You know, the best podcast we've done. And again, I. Not to beat a dead horse, but we have invited countless people who disagree and they simply won't come on. And by and large they're not. They're only people on the identitarian left who won't come on. So there's something within the ideology that, that acts as a prophylactic to prevent it from being dislodged. It's a really pernicious ideological virus that seems to have taken root and then anyone who does try to fight it, Offices of diversity and inclusion, for example, are weaponized against people. I was constantly in the office of diversity at an institution I will not name. So we're almost, in a sense, we're at a crossroads now with where we are with artificial intelligence. We're going to see people are talking about the death of the laptop class. People are talking about, I don't know if you saw the new Claude technologies that are coming out that compromise critical infrastructure in the United States particularly. Everything's digital now. And so if we do not, if we do not take advantage or. Sorry, I got to move the mic here. This is not our setup here. But if we do not take advantage and really seize this bull by the horns, I guarantee you other people will. Our main competitors, economic competitors, the Chinese. And you know, I do agree with you. I do think it's A phenomenon not listening, not even wanting to understand the other side. But now that's all lent legitimacy by these institutions. And people get degrees from elite universities in particular, that give them the imprimatur of knowing something. And these are just. I would just never hire these people. These are the. It's like a. It's like a backward stamp. It's like a backward legitimacy. These are probably the most illegitimate people to hold positions because they have these deranged ideas that they learn from a bunch of ideologues and then they take them into the workforce. And almost. No, everybody who's standing up to this, talking about Jay Bhattachary the other day, everybody who's standing up to this, you know, they've made it clear, if you stand up to this, we will come for you.

[Matt Kibbe]

Thank you for joining me today on

[Kibbe on Liberty Announcer]

Kibbe on Liberty and for being part of our fiercely independent audience. Every week, my organization, Free the People, partners with BlazeTV to bring you this show. My guests bring smart perspectives on everything from colonel events to timeless philosophical debates. If you like what you hear, go to freethepeople.org kol and support Kibbe on Liberty so we can continue to produce these honest conversations with interesting people. Now, let's get back to it.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, yeah. So I, I come from. I'm an economist by training and I come from keen interest in the Austrian School of Economics and particularly Friedrich Hayek. So when I see people speak with absolute certainty, it fundamentally runs against the entire idea of what Hayek was talking about. The entire reason that people act is that they don't know very much and they live in a radically uncertain future. And the entire market process is the process of people trying to figure out what's going on. And you can't do that if you think you got everything figured out.

[Peter Boghossian]

Yeah. Imagine that morally too.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, yeah. And to me, like, I don't know if you've looked into Hayek, but you know, the evolution of the kinds of institutions that enshrine free speech and social cooperation and mutual respect and tolerance for people that have different religion or different ethnic background. It is that process of trying to figure stuff out that sort of normalizes all of our differences. And to me, that encapsulates the classical liberal project. Like, how would you actually have a tolerant society that allows people to work through their differences in ways that might create something bigger than either one of them could have accomplished on their own? But that's kind of high minded. Like, you're literally in the streets trying to reteach Young people how to do this, talk about that process. Give me an example. You don't need to name names, obviously, but give me an example of how this works in practice.

[Peter Boghossian]

Sure. And I was going to ask you something about what you just said, so maybe we can come back later because I've been rethinking. Oh, you want me to do that now?

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, sure.

[Peter Boghossian]

So I've been thinking about this for a few years now when we. I've been thinking about Islamic immigration and I've been thinking about the degree to which a society, a secular liberal society. I'm thinking of Western Europe, but I'm also thinking of the United States. Does that call into question for you classical liberalism or liberal principles? If an increasing number of people into the society, and, and we should probably disambiguate that and unpack what those words mean. An increasing number of people in the society not only don't accept the core values of the society, but are openly hostile to them.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah.

[Peter Boghossian]

Because it would seem, it would seem. It would seem to me that there's a. I, I just, if I may, years ago, before anybody had phones, I used to have these like group. They, they were called groupons and they were like this card with a hundred numbers on the card and each number was a different restaurant. And you go to the restaurant, you get. I can't remember, it's like half price on meals or something. This is when I lived in New Mexico and it was a super cool deal, but it was interesting. So I used to use those. I was a poor student, so I used to use that card all the time. And there was a certain point in which the structural integrity of the card would no longer be. It would just fall apart because they punched the holes. It was pre digital, you know, so it's analog. And after so many punches, the card just couldn't sustain itself. And I'm wondering if a mechanism for Western democracies is not similar with, with the wide scale invitation of people who are overtly hostile to the fundamental values that are constitutive of civil society.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, I think it's. As someone that you would probably call a doctrinaire libertarian. I think it's a very important question and what I used to say to my conservative friends. I used to be a Tea Party organizer and I would also go on Geraldo Rivera's show and the two things in some ways could not meet in the middle. But I feel like I would make what I believe was a persuasive argument about immigration, which is, if you want to come to our country and you want to work and you want to follow the rules. We'd love to have you. And those are two very fundamental provisos to that question of whether or not we welcome immigrants. And I would add to that the dynamic of some of these 20 plus year wars that we've been engaged in that create refugees. And I think refugees create mass migration. And mass migration in itself is disruptive, but it's particularly disruptive if they're pissed off at the country that just bombed theirs. So I think it's a wildly complicated issue that needs to be unpacked. But I stick to that principle and some sort of simple vetting process hopefully would solve those two questions. Are you here to work and do you want to follow the rules?

[Peter Boghossian]

Yeah, I guess I'm going to. If I may, I didn't anticipate talking about that. Can I push back on that?

[Matt Kibbe]

Sure, of course, yeah.

[Peter Boghossian]

So in an ideal world, if you could wave a wand where there was no Takeya, nobody lied for the faith, and there was no, you know, my buddy a few years ago was telling me that to get into Germany you have to fill out. One of the things at the time was you had to fill out a card. And, you know, there are all these questions about homosexuals and beating your wife. And if you even have to ask that, it's too late. Like you're looking at the wrong kinds of people coming into your country. And so you, you know, if, you know. And again, I'm just thinking out loud here because I've been thinking about this quite a bit and if my thinking is in error, let me know. In an ideal world, if you waved a wand, I would be totally with you 100%. Like, you want to come to this country or any country and you want to work hard. And I would also add to assimilate to a reasonable degree. It doesn't mean you have to toss out your traditions, but you speak the language. Ideally, you wouldn't live in an enclave. You'd have friends, race or a different, you know, they, what ethnicities or, or what have you. But it really is a numbers game though, right? Like if you know that a certain number of people from a culture, and let's say Somalia are, have a detrimental effect on the society through recidivism or penal incarceration rates or contributions to the treasury or what have you, fraud or then is not the rational thing to do to limit people from that country just wholesale, like writ large. It would seem to me that the answer to that would be, yes, that's my current thinking, but I'm totally willing to entertain another argument. And then I have another thing that piggybacks off of that I want to ask you about.

[Matt Kibbe]

I think the Somalian instance is relevant to my other point about mass migration because we spent quite a bit of time blowing up Somalia. So I think you can make judgment calls like that. But I also think that immigration, like all public policy, the most important things that the government does is corrupted by political incentives. And the way I look at it is Republicans and Democrats both want to game the system. It strikes me that the Democrats are quote, unquote, open borders because they want to recruit voters that they can register and change the numbers of how they control Congress and Republicans want to demonize in the other way. So to me, it's got to be a rational, predictable process by which you could come to this country, if you can, can prove that you're legitimate. Maybe because the process is broken, we suspend immigration from Somalia and countries that hate us. But I think that's a political judgment and it's not a good policy.

[Peter Boghossian]

But what if the. I'm not sure. Is it a. Yeah, I guess in the broadest sense it's a political judgment. But isn't that just a data driven. Like if you look at Jan Van Der Beek's work or Eric Kaufman's work, and he's a Canadian political science out of the UK right now, if you look at their body of work, we know we have data now. Now in some countries you can't get the data. Like in France, it's literally illegal to know the religion of immigrants. Sorry. Of people who are incarcerated. They use secondary or tertiary metrics. Like they look at the name, the names primarily Muhammad or what have you. But I'm not sure that would be a political decision. It would be a decision that. And again, I'm just thinking out loud here, it would be a decision that's in the best interest of the country. Look, if we can agree on certain basics, it is better to have fewer people incarcerated. It's better to have fewer people committing crimes. It is better have. And that we could just go down that list and then we know that people from these countries violate those basic principles, then it wouldn't really be a political. I mean, I guess in the broadest sense it would be, but it would just be something, a series of public policies that you optimize for the public good. Right?

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah. Well, you're assuming that that's what the policy process would actually do and that's yeah, that's my critique of everything. But it's funny that you bring up France because I remember, I guess it's 15 years ago now. One of the fundamental problems with any immigrant coming to France is your ability to actually get a job and feed your family.

[Peter Boghossian]

Correct? 100%.

[Matt Kibbe]

Because of sort of the hardest core of unions that very much discriminate against immigrants. And if you can't get a job, you're going to become a criminal because you still have to feed your family. So I'd want to look at all of these things from a rational perspective. Like the immigrants that are coming in, are they allowed to work? Are they able to have access to all of the things that would allow them to be good citizens, self sufficient and all of that. And I think barring that, maybe the kinds of immigration policies you're suggesting make more sense. But at the same time, I think I like the fact that America has always been a melting pot and we were able to integrate all of these different cultures and ethnicities and even religions. Is Islam different? Maybe it is, I don't know.

[Peter Boghossian]

Well, it's interesting that you mentioned France in that sense because they don't call them colonies, I call them colonies. Everybody's getting mad at me. But they call them offshore territories. And we went into cliche de savoie. Sorry, I'm mispronouncing that. I don't speak French. And some other. They don't call them slums, but they're basically slums. And we ask people what are some of the challenges you face? What are some of the problems? And overwhelmingly, in fact, without exception, there's no upward economic mobility. So they don't have economic mobility. So why that is, I don't, that's. You would probably know better than I, but that's another conversation. And I think that comports with the reality. They don't have economic mobility. They can't buy a house or even a very tiny apartment in a nice section of Paris. And so then you, you've created a kind of permanent underclass while not restricting immigration and having people who have, I don't want to say fundamentally different values, but certainly in income compatible, if not incommensurable religious values. The other thing is, you know, I had Raymond Ibrahim on the show and he said that when I was in la, he said that two churches a day are desecrated or burned or what have you in France. And I was just shocked by that. I called BS on that immediately and it turns out that he was wrong. It was 2.5.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah.

[Peter Boghossian]

And I didn't even know France had that many churches. But. And again, I'm not saying it's Muslims. I'm not saying we don't know who the, who the groups are. And I don't even think in this case it would be socially appropriate to make inferences about who's doing that. But I do think that immigration is a problem and the type of. You're also correct. The type of immigrants they get in Western Europe or they've taken in are vastly different from the type of immigrants, by and large, Muslim immigrants here in particular, they're skilled, they're more educated, they're more affluent. I mean, that. The data on that is real. But I think that's an example of something. I'm bringing this up because we are not having an honest conversation about it. It's been hijacked by the left and the right. I've heard that hypothesis that the left is only doing this in Joe Biden to import voters. I just cannot. Maybe it's a failure of imagination, but conceive that some people hate the country so much and are so power hungry they would actually do something as demented as that. Again, maybe that's my, my conspicuous naivete. But, but I do think that we need to have. Start having honest conversations about immigration in general and Islamic immigration in particular. And I think that we need to do that. We need to separate the fact that we have different types of immigrants in the United States and our culture of assimilation and integration and Western Europe. And to be blunt, Matt, I think Western Europe is totally toast right now. I think it's done, they're over. But we're not having those conversations. You're not having those conversations in the classroom. And if you are, then they're only one side of the issue. There's a certain line that you have to tow. People are oppressed, they have to get in. I mean, you know the line. So that's one of the reasons we do what we're doing now, because people aren't having those conversations. Yeah, I mean, how do you function as a democratic society if you don't have the infrastructure to do that, the moral infrastructure, if you haven't had conversations. I mean, that's the whole thing about voting and I mean, that's the essence of civil democratic society. And we've just intentionally abdicated that. And that's fucking insane to me.

[Matt Kibbe]

Sorry.

[Peter Boghossian]

I swore.

[Matt Kibbe]

No, we're allowed to do anything we want on this show. And I guess that whole rabbit hole started off with Me asking the question, like how do we teach people again, like say you and I took on the project. We're gonna, we're going to try to figure out a political consensus on immigration that makes sense for America. And right now the two sides, at least politically, maybe it's all kabuki theater and maybe no one really believes what they're saying, but the two sides are so far apart. How would you start a conversation about a reasonable, rational immigration policy that doesn't get everybody screaming at you that you're either bigot or your pro amnesty or whatever. The worst thing that a conservative would call a libertarian, like me.

[Peter Boghossian]

Yeah, the analog of that. Well, I love this thought experiment and I'm going to play it, but I'm going to tell you that it has a fatal flaw in it right from the get go before we even begin the thought experiment. But I will answer the thought experiment and that is you will not get the people who are pro immigration to talk to you to have a conversation. So already the experiment is doomed. You're already doomed. Right before you start off, you know, we've put out innumerable calls for people who want more Islamic immigration, for people who think immigration. Now you'll get the libertarians like the Cato guys we had on the show, but you won't get the hardcore people who vote like the identitarian leftists. You'll never get them to have a conversation. So already this conversation, this thought experiment is completely doomed. But I'll play along because I think it's important. I think it's important. Okay, so the first order of business, this is what we do. We. So we put people on mats. So you make a claim and let's say this is the spectrum street epistemology. And they're literally. I don't even know read how many videos are there? Thousands. I don't even know. Over a thousand videos in total. Hundreds of us doing this. And it's. There's neutral in the middle. Slightly agree, agree strongly agree and absolutely on one side and then on the other side to the disagrees. Now we just added the absolutely to give a little more gradation on that likert scale. And so then we'll make a claim and the claim will be. So let's see, immigration, what would it be? There should be. There's no upper limit on the number of immigrants or there should be more immigration or something like that. So you make a claim, people walk open borders. Yeah, we should have. Yeah, great. We should have open borders. Perfect. We should have united and then you should probably specify the way. So the United States should have open borders. And again, I really do think it's important to Western Europe. United States, we think of those things as broadly similar because we're in the Western tradition, but they're not. Okay. And so then people will walk to a mat, and let's say that somebody walks on, strongly agree, and then someone else walks on. I absolutely disagree. The first order of business is we have boards that we have and we have them write down, and I always tell people close to your chest so no one can see it. We have them write down the best reason they have or standing on that mat, what is the best reason and don't let anybody see it. So then they write that down on the boards. And then what we do is we give the other person an opportunity to guess what their best reason is. And we'll go back a couple of times. Now, if there are people on other mats like neutral or slightly agree or slightly disagree, and after a couple of guesses, they don't get it, then we'll give the other person on a mat an opportunity to guess. And more often than not, people do not understand. They don't even have a clue as to why someone would disagree with that policy. And it's fascinating to watch. I mean, it's truly interesting to see why that is. So that would be my first order of business if I were doing. If I were putting this in a street epistemology, kind of a spectrum, street epistemology venue. Is that clear so far?

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Peter Boghossian]

Okay. So then the second order of business is you can either ask, well, why do you believe that? Like, why do you think this is a good thing? And you always make people not tell you, but tell the other person, tell the people on the opposite. That's why they're in a horseshoe. That's why those mats are curved, so they can look at people. And then we'll say to them, say someone stands on the strongly agree so that there's agree on the right and absolutely agree on their left. And then I'll say, okay, what would it take you to move one line to the left, one mat to the left. What would it take you to move one mat to the right? Now when they tell the person, oh, for me to go from strongly agree that there should be open borders to agree, this is what I would need to hear. And then I'll walk over to the person who's standing opposite them who doesn't believe it, and I'll say, is that reasonable? Is That a reasonable thing, a reasonable person would say, and then I'll facilitate that conversation. And if they say it's reasonable, I'll say, okay, can you give them that data, that evidence, that facts or maybe they don't have any data, evidence or facts, but they do have reason, like you can reason to these conclusions and so you can facilitate a conversation that way. But again, the Achilles heel, the weakness in all of this is you people have to be willing to have a conversation.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah.

[Peter Boghossian]

And, and by and large there's one group of people who are utterly unwilling to have a conversation. And, and so when that happens, you don't develop a buy in and a moral infrastructure by which you can make sane, sound public policies and build a consensus because there are people who don't want to have those conversations, who think that even having that conversation is a kind of bigotry and oppression. So that's the real challenge that you face if someone wants to have the conversation. It's effort, almost effortless to facilitate. It's getting people to the table that's the problem.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah. It strikes me that we're either having this conversation or not really having a conversation. I'll say right of center. I'm not a big fan of the left right spectrum, but on foreign policy and immigration and maybe it's the libertarian leaning right versus the mass deportation right in the context of immigration. But, but you, you can have a conversation there, I think.

[Peter Boghossian]

Yeah. I mean it depends who wants to come to the table. Right. It depends. So you can have conversations with policy experts. And those videos always do better, they're always more interesting. Viewers love those. But there is something about getting the views of college students who basically parrot back views of professors. That's not a criticism. It's just. I was that way. I'm sure it's just the way life is. Random people on the streets. Those are quite interesting as well. But ideally you would use this method with experts. Yeah, that would be the ideal. And you would say, okay, what would it take? So I also think, to be blunt, now that you told me, I can swear on your show this is the ultimate bullshit detector. I can tell you, and I've predicted to read with great accuracy which public intellectuals will do this and which public intellectuals will do. Will not do this. Because to do this you can't. You have to really be able to think on your feet and be. You can still be ideological, but you have to see windows beyond your own ideology. And many people, they simply can't. They're captured by their own Audiences or they, they think that they have something to prove, they want to be the smartest person in the room or what have you. So with them, that's another kind of problem. But in an ideal world, you would do this with experts. You could do school board meetings. You could do this instead of a presidential debate.

[Kibbe on Liberty Announcer]

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[Matt Kibbe]

Don't you think that Americans generally, until recently were far more comfortable with the kind of thing you're talking about though? Because I mean, everybody has their biases and everybody depends on appeals to authority. And particularly if you're not an expert, you may have strongly held opinions, but you may not be particularly capable of sort of explaining why exactly you feel that way, except that that's the community you grew up in and those are the shows you watched. And that's what my parents thought. But.

[Peter Boghossian]

And that's a great response. That's a wonderful response. You know what? I really don't have any evidence for this. I grew up in this and I, I hope it's true. I feel that it is, but I've never really examined anything else. I'm going to stand on the neutral mat. I don't really know. I. That's a great response when someone's honest like that. The problem isn't when people are claiming to know things they don't know, but aren't.

[Matt Kibbe]

Don't all of us not know a lot of things that we. Everybody doesn't know everything.

[Peter Boghossian]

Yeah, 100%. And we should be honest about what we don't know.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah. I mean, so I don't know the

[Peter Boghossian]

first thing about ice hockey. So if you ask, I don't even know if I know a team in ice hockey with the Bruins. Are they still around? Is that ice hockey? I don't even know. So some kind of a team in ice hockey and who's going to win the. I don't even know what the name is it. Finals? The Stanley Cup.

[Matt Kibbe]

Stanley Cup.

[Peter Boghossian]

Is that what it. Yeah. So it would be absurd for me to have a strong opinion about that now. I Can hope that the. The Bruins win, assuming that. That. That they're still around. I don't know. They were. I think they were when I was a kid, but. Yeah. So it's basically a call to be honest with yourself about what you know and to be more humble about what you think you know.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah. I guess what I'm wondering is, like, so these. These are informal institutions that humility, core. Core values that. That I would have ascribed to. To American culture have. Knowing enough that, you know, that you don't know nearly as much as you thought you did. Excellent. That strikes me as sort of an American value. And humility and listening. How would you rebuild those institutions? Is it literally going door to door, group to group, and trying to get it restarted from the bottom up? But what would be the institutions that would allow us to actually listen again?

[Peter Boghossian]

Well, there are none. They should be all burned to the ground. They've been fundamentally compromised.

[Matt Kibbe]

So the new institutions. Putting my Hayekian hat back on. Have to come from the bottom up.

[Peter Boghossian]

Yeah. I'm a founding faculty fellow for the University of Austin. That's a new institution. Ralston College is a new institution. I don't view those as competitors in any way. I think that it's like a restaurant row. If anything, they're competing with the traditional legacy universities and institutions. But you have people who have tenure, who have jobs for life, who are ideologues, who view the classroom as their personal ideology mill. They publish in these niche journals that serve not to find the truth, to figure out what's true, but to forward certain narratives about reality. Often those narratives are completely divorced from reality. So we have to. We have to start creating new institutions. I don't think the institutions are capable of reforming themselves. And Chris Rufo, for example, has a different opinion on that. You should invite him on, have that. We've had that. That conversation. I actually want him to succeed. What he's doing at New College in Florida and his initiatives and at other institutions. But he's also on the warpath, too. You know, he's on the warpath with Claudine Gay, the serial plagiarist who plagiarized the acknowledgments of dissertation, also retained her $900,000 a year salary. So that'd be a litmus test, right? Do the people who plagiarize, are they kept on? Are they kept on because they're black and they don't say, et cetera? So that would be one. One litmus test for that. But I don't think the institutions are capable of reform. I think we have to build new ones. But I think that we need to be sober about the reality that this is not an overnight process, that this is going to take a long time. And I'll add one more thing to that. It is better that the institutions do not exist than that they teach people false things. I think as Dan Dennett popularized a the phrase I'm trying to blank if it's not worth doing, it's not worth doing well.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, yeah. Well when I use institutions, I'm using it with a small eye and just thinking about cultural traditions and means by which people figure stuff out. And you mentioned very early on in this conversation why the explosion of podcasts and substacks and places where people are. I've made up a word for this self curriculating.

[Peter Boghossian]

I like that.

[Matt Kibbe]

In lieu of spending 200 grand on an education that's just at best worthless and perhaps actually going to rot your brain a little bit. I feel like the institutions that you are suggesting shouldn't exist are on their way out. Like sure, the endowments are huge and they're still going to do their zombie like thing, but I think more and more young people are going to find a different way to learn how the world works. And to me that's my white pill. I think that's actually happening. I hope you're right. I think it's happening spontaneously. And in this, this process you're talking about, like you could kind of formalize something that they're sort of stumbling their way through.

[Peter Boghossian]

Yeah. And if you look at the institutions, the danger they're doing to society, they're actually anti salubrious in a sense. I mean it's veridical to what they're teaching. And so many of the institutions, if you just look at and Trump administration has been on the warpath against suing. If you look at racial gaps, who gets in? Why don't Asians get in? The left has been screaming about systematic oppression and they've been 100% correct and it's been about against Asians at elite universities, would they themselves have been perpetrating that? And then if you look at the rates of students by race, I think Harvard is 13% and if you just did it by metrics without incorporating race, it'd be 0.9%. I think they rank, they have these, they've invented these scales to punish Asians. You know, personality tests say Asian score lower on personality. So it's been a system that people have been playing by the rules, and they've been just actually have been systemically discriminated against by the very people who are screaming from the roof about systemic discrimination. It really, it truly is. It's. I don't like to use the word, but I'll use it in this context. It's the iron larval projection. It's just every single time, every single time the people perpetrating these things are accusing you of. They themselves are behind it. I mean, it's really. It's just. It's just monstrous. But I have zero hope in the institutions. And I just give you a quick example. For example, how do you. How do you get around that? I'm sure listeners thinking like, wow, geez, well, how do we get around that? Why can't we really be race blind? There must be a way to be race blind. There is. Good for you. For people thinking that at the University of Austin, for example, there's one number, just one. It's your SAT scores or your, you know, standardized test. They don't care if you speak 50 languages, if you have 20 Nobel prizes. They don't care if you think you're born in the wrong body. They don't care how, who of what genitalia you sleep with. It's totally irrelevant. What is your standardized test score? That's it. So that would be a way to cut through the noise and to guarantee that there's no discrimination on the basis of race in the application process who matriculates into the institution.

[Matt Kibbe]

So I have a friend, Brian Kaplan, who has argued that higher education serves no purpose. He's a professor of economics. It serves no purpose other than credentialing, but it's a gateway to get your first internship. And those relationships that you develop are still unfortunately, quite useful way to get into the field that you wish to pursue. But I feel like I'll ask you about the University of Austin, and obviously you're a fan of that, but do you think that the Path is building new institutions, or do you think the path is something more decentralized? Something that.

[Peter Boghossian]

Oh, that could be. Yeah, that could be as well. Yeah, that's entirely possible. AI Trump also wants to have a independently certified system. He's trying to break up the accreditation cartel, which is a little afield from the conversation, but it plays a role. I don't. I don't know. I think technology, as Musk has said, we are in the singularity. Things are evolving so quickly. AI is evolving so quickly. It could be the self autonomous, these just autonomous learning modules that people get through customized AI. I don't know what the future will hold. I think anybody who does is just kidding you or kidding someone else. But I'm totally open to that idea that it's decentralized. I would think there have to be, there has to be or should be some kind of a certification process, you know, analogous to boards, board certification for. For physicians. I don't know what that would look like. I do know that the certification process that we have now is utterly and irredeemably corrupt. We could talk about things like citation justice, forwarding. When you write a paper, a peer reviewed paper. Peer reviewed meaning what? Your experts in the field. And then it becomes part of that corpus of literature, citation justice. I've spoken about this years and years ago. Is the idea that you want to forward citations from people from certain minority groups. And that is such a monstrously chilling idea because it puts a stop sign in the middle of any kind of knowledge you hope to discover. So I don't know, it could be decentralization. I don't know what the solution is. Up until very, very recently, the solution was either build new things or try to reform the existing institutions. I'm completely convinced for multiple reasons, the institutions are incapable of being reformed. But in the spirit of my own asking people, I will answer my own question. What would it take for you to change your mind? What would it take for you to move from absolutely disagree that the institutions are capable of reforming themselves down to neutral? If they fired plagiarists, that's it. That's what it would take. They're not firing plagiarists, by and large, particularly if they're like Claudine Gay. You fire Claudine Gay, then we can have a. Then I'm willing to have that conversation.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah. Plagiarism doesn't seem to be part of the matrix, the boxes that they check.

[Peter Boghossian]

No. And I published a piece in Lawrence Krauss's a book, the War on Science, about this. I think it's. Again, these are not my rules. These are rules the institution has had from its genesis. And it's a stain on the institution. And I actually argued that Claudine Gay should remain, have remained as the president, even though she plagiarized. Because I think that the perfect, the perfect symbol of an utterly corrupt and bankrupt institution is somebody who's a plagiarist, someone who's attained their credentials by fraud. I think that's. She would be the perfect person for that role. And I was vehemently opposed to her leaving her position.

[Matt Kibbe]

Let's wrap up on this. I have an idea, and I had no idea we're going to go down the immigration rabbit hole. But it sounds like you've talked to some of the Cato guys. But I'd love to get my friends who openly espouse open borders. And we should create some sort of intellectual experiment to see if the mass deportation guys on one end and the open borders guys on the other end could actually have a conversation that might lead to some light and not just more anger.

[Peter Boghossian]

Okay. So, you know, the open border people will have a conversation. The Cato guys. Do you know anyone? The mass deportation people will have a conversation.

[Matt Kibbe]

I. I volunteer to find some.

[Peter Boghossian]

Reed. Reed's shaking his head. So if you want to do that, we can probably get to Washington. Huh? Nodding. Nodding. Yeah, sorry. Nodding his head. If you know people who do that or be willing to do that, we can probably get to D.C. and have those extensive. Like, we can do this extensively examine these claims, get people who. Who are educated, informed, knowledgeable, preferably written books or at least articles on this. And I'm more than happy to facilitate that conversation.

[Matt Kibbe]

All right, cool. Let's do it. Because I'm curious, as an economist who has all sorts of strong opinions about things, my whole project is how would we persuade people to think about things a little bit differently? And it sounds like you're on the ground trying to figure this stuff out.

[Peter Boghossian]

Yeah. And with that, I think with that is also how could we be persuaded to think about things a little differently. Right. So it's just. And the method itself allows that. It's fundamentally Socratic, so the method itself allows for that idea of belief revision, demanding evidence, thinking through what it would take to change your mind either way, talking to people. So, yeah, we're totally into that. I'm busy from now until September, but, yeah, we're completely open to. I think that would be a fascinating conversation.

[Matt Kibbe]

Very cool. Didn't know where.

[Peter Boghossian]

And I appreciate you willing to. Yeah, I appreciate you willing to have that conversation as well. Very much so. Thank you.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, I've been thinking about ideas as we speak, so I will take that on and we will follow up. And I appreciate this conversation, particularly since you're phoning in from New Zealand. And I thank you for your time.

[Peter Boghossian]

Your pleasure. Thank you.

[Matt Kibbe]

Matt, I forgot to ask you. Usually what I do at the end is tell people how to find your stuff. Like if people want to check out your. Your podcast, your work, that. Your foundation.

[Peter Boghossian]

Okay. So Twitter or X eterbozian P E T E R B O G H O. Did I forget how to spell my name? That's pretty funny.

[Matt Kibbe]

It's on the screen. You're fine, Peter.

[Peter Boghossian]

B O G H O S S I n and then the same on YouTube or on Instagram, Facebook, everything. We're all over the place and we have these conversations. We have conversations like this and then we have the street epistemology and you know, as I told you, we have some really cool conversations about we try to talk about things and facilitate conversations not only with people who disagree but about taboo subjects, about the most difficult subjects.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, I love it. I love it. Okay, thank you, sir.

[Peter Boghossian]

Thanks, Matt.

[Matt Kibbe]

Thanks for watching. If you liked the conversation, make sure to like the video, subscribe and also ring the bell for notifications.

[Kibbe on Liberty Announcer]

And if you want to know more about free the people, go to freethepeople.org.