What Radicalized Me
If you won’t engage rigorously with people who disagree with you, don’t be surprised when those people stop treating your ideas with deference.
The Bus Stop
Two weeks ago, in Seattle, I was waiting at a makeshift bus stop. The original bus stop had been moved due to construction, and I found myself surrounded by ~40 protesters who were chanting and holding signs. After a few minutes, I struck up a conversation with a protester standing next to me. He was white, in his late 40s, angry, and he held a large sign demanding, “End War NOW.”
I asked him what he was protesting and he said, “War, oppression, fascism.” He asked me what I’m doing, and I told him the truth: “I’m waiting for the bus. The bus stop was moved due to construction.” He nodded and got back to yelling at cars and signaling them to honk in support, which many did.
I asked him how long he’d been protesting and he responded, “Two hours, today.” Then I asked him where he got his news, and he said, “YouTube and podcasts.” I said, “Cool, what podcasts do you listen to?” He stopped yelling, looked at me, and said, “A lot of different ones.” “Cool,” I said, “I listen to a lot of podcasts, too. What are your favorites?” He froze, stared at me, and said, “I don’t have to tell you shit.” Then he got back to yelling at cars.
I asked, “Why are you upset? Was my question unreasonable?” He responded, “I think you don’t believe what I do.” I said, “Even if that’s true, isn’t that more and not less reason to talk to me? You’re out here with signs yelling at people in cars and I assume it’s because you want support for your message. I’m just a guy waiting for the bus. Isn’t this a great opportunity for you and for me to learn?”
He ignored me and began screaming at cars again.
Other protesters then surrounded me, not in a threatening way, but they physically encircled me. They asked me what was going on and I told them. They agreed with the protester, “He doesn’t have to tell you anything,” a young man told me, to which I responded, “That’s true. He certainly does not. And yet, I truly don’t understand the hostility. Is my question unreasonable? Why is that question so disturbing?”
Then the bus arrived.
That refusal to engage, even when the cost was zero, struck me as a small but telling example of the same pattern I had seen for decades in academia.
Questions Without Answers
For over three decades, I’ve been respectfully asking people questions. When I taught at a university I will not name, I saw bizarre claims (“citation justice,” the claim that in peer-reviewed papers, academics should cite minorities more than non-minorities; racial disparities in outcomes are entirely caused by systems; it is possible to change biological sex) increasingly creeping into policy decisions. I politely and respectfully asked supporters and administrators what the rationale and evidence for the new policies were, and instead of providing clear answers, I was consistently met with hostility, formal complaints, anger, and accusations of microaggressions.
Nobody would respond this way to claims about electricity or gravity. They’d just provide evidence. And yet otherwise intelligent and highly educated people were making really strange claims about reality that up until very recently almost everyone would think were completely absurd if not morally suspect. One of the reasons why questioning these claims was important is that once they became institutionalized, the policies would govern how people behaved, including the threat of sanction, punishment, and even loss of employment.
One of the things that was so striking to me about this hostility was that years prior I was involved in the New Atheist movement. When I would ask Christians or those of other faiths about their reasoning and evidence, they were more than happy to speak with me at length about why they believed what they believed. While spirited, these conversations were almost universally friendly and often ended in one of us taking the other to dinner or drinks. I still maintain many of these friendships.
My First Mistake
For years, I’ve attempted to get leftists on my show. I’ve largely failed. (We’ve recently begun making our invitation list public. As to why, see here.)
Only three leftists have accepted my invitation (Destiny, David Pakman, and Jonathan Rauch). These were not particularly interesting conversations, and that’s entirely my fault. I made the mistake of softballing questions in the hope that eventually I’d get more leftists on the show. This approach was grossly mistaken and ultimately failed. It made the conversations less robust than they could have been and I shortchanged my guests. For that, I am sorry.
One reason I did this was that I was particularly susceptible to the criticism that Conversations with Peter Boghossian (Apple, YouTube, Amazon) was a center-right show that did not have leftists on. I was and am someone who values the truth, and I am not egotistical enough to believe the truth lies entirely with those in the same tribes as me.
But most of the individuals who are in service to opposing tribes and ideologies have shown little willingness to add substantive arguments to the conversation when challenged. If they did have such a willingness, quite simply, they’d have already added it. We’d see them routinely appear on longform shows where they substantively engage people who hold opposing views or who question their views. Think Kamala Harris going on Joe Rogan. (Destiny is the exception to this, but while Destiny is a self-described leftist he’s not an identitarian.)
This used to be the standard among disagreeing tribes in the United States. Christians and atheists did this for decades prior. Specific examples include Richard Dawkins debating John Lennox and Alister McGrath, Sam Harris debating William Lane Craig, and Christopher Hitchens debating Frank Turek. But this was neither new nor confined to the realm of culture wars. Politically, William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal engaged in similar public dialogues and debates in the late 60s. As a bare minimum, they’d furnish their reasoning and evidence in writing and invite others to a back-and-forth.
It’s important to not “what about” the issue of an unwillingness to engage those with whom one disagrees. Unwillingness to engage opposing views in good faith has become especially pronounced on the contemporary left, particularly within academic and activist institutions. With the exception of a few isolated examples on the right, those on the center and to the right of center are more than willing to engage those they disagree with.
Think Charlie Kirk, who was willing to debate people across the political spectrum. Reactions to his assassination in 2025 revealed how many on the left celebrated political violence rather than condemning it. Although this is ahistorical, unwillingness to engage opposing views in good faith remains a notable feature of the modern left. Saying otherwise is profoundly dishonest.
I Was Wrong, Again
Realizing my mistake, that I could get leftists on the show if I softballed people with similar worldviews, I decided to change course. On June 24, 2026, I tweeted:
“I miscalculated. Softballing leftists did not draw more leftists to the show. That approach ends now.
All future in-person interviews on Conversations with Peter Boghossian will be hardball. Guests will face direct pressure and rigorous examination of their claims.
Edited interviews already in progress remain unchanged.”
Consequently, I was confident that it would be more difficult for me to get noteworthy people of any political orientation to come on the show. After all, who would want to endure a sustained Socratic grilling? It turns out, quite a few people.
After I posted the above tweet, we were deluged with requests to come on the show. While we rarely accept self-invitations, the fact still stands: More, and not fewer, people wanted to come on the show. And, as far as I can tell, not a single person on the left was among them.
Potential guests’ enthusiasm did not wane when we informed people we’d already invited on the show about the new format change. One person even responded, “Great! I was looking forward to it before but now I can’t wait!!”
This reaction confirmed something I had already begun to suspect: Avoiding rigorous disagreement doesn’t just limit conversation, it actively damages people’s ability to think clearly.
Cognitive Pits
Failure to engage people with whom you have significant disagreements will, eventually, deepen and entrench your delusions about the nature of reality. This does not mean that engaging others will necessarily lead you to truth, but by not engaging others you’ll have no way to figure out if what you believe corresponds to reality. You’ll have no corrective mechanism or way to falsify what you believe.
But it’s even worse than this. Over time, you’ll come to believe you’re a better person because you’ve not engaged others. You believe the true things, which makes you a good person, and so those who disagree must be bad people. (You’ll do this because the confidence you have that your beliefs are true will increase because your beliefs have not been stress tested. A similar phenomenon can be found in fantasy-based martial arts, where practitioners do not engage resisting opponents.)
The solutions sound simple: “Engage people you disagree with. Listen with the goal of understanding. Really understand why someone believes what they believe. Be willing to revise your beliefs,” but they’re not easy to achieve. Complicating your ability to do this are institutional structures, tribalism, and our evolved moral systems. Briefly, here are a few obstacles that put conversations across divides into hard mode:
Thinking that because one has a different political orientation, engaging them morally sullies you
Failing to understand that not being exposed to people who hold different views causes you to “other” them and thus view them as bad or immoral
Avoiding engage long enough, and you’ll not know how to engage and cease to understand why you should
Thinking you can immediately write off a person or an idea because of a particular label (“far right,” “racist,” “bigot,” “[something]phobic,” etc.)
Thinking that not revising your beliefs makes you a better person
Using the fact that you don’t engage others as an excuse to not do the intellectual work to understand the reasoning behind their positions
Fearing ostracism or outcast from your moral community if you engage different beliefs, and fear of losing moral status if you’re verbally bested
Believing that being offended is a justified response to your beliefs being challenged
These can be mitigated to a certain extent, but not entirely. My number one recommendation for how to start is to just listen. That’s it, listen. Listen to someone whose beliefs don’t align with yours, and focus on why they believe what they believe. I’d also suggest keeping these interactions brief, to start. Eventually you can work yourself up to listening for longer periods of time and asking targeted epistemological questions.
To entirely mitigate these obstacles, you need a certain disposition. Basically, the willingness to lose friends, to lose the respect of those in your community, and to be lonely. Indeed, a heavy price to pay when truth is not guaranteed and when you prioritize other, more primal instincts.
There Are No Guarantees
If someone does not want to talk to you, there’s not a lot you can do about it. The protester at the bus stop was hellbent on not talking to me, despite my best efforts to build rapport and be mindful of my tone. But this doesn’t prevent you from engaging others. It just means that it’s not always possible.
I’ll be 60 this month, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. One of those mistakes was believing that softening my approach would encourage more and better engagement. I will not make that mistake again.
Peter
One of the odd things about the Social Justice faith is that there are essentially no fixed leaders or institutions or a single holy book. What rules them all is DOCTRINE, which is somehow both fluid, malleable and subject to various tweaks depending upon political urgencies yet at the same time an angry god that demands total obedience and has no mercy for heretics or apostates.
I think this helps explain why its disciples are all so angry and anxious all the time, as they are essentially Sinners in the Hands of a Crowdsourced God who is never not watching them and reading their thoughts inside the digital panopticon that's our modern home.
True believers in the Social Justice faith know deep in their bones that one misstatement of dogma, one kind yet disloyal word about a tribal enemy, any phrase that makes the marginalized feel "unsafe", or in this case, even entertaining heretical thoughts—and that's that, they will experience a swift yet total social death and lose their careers and friends and be cast into the outer darkness.
There's just too much risk in them debating, any single conversation is not worth the possible penalty. Of course the biggest irony here is that this is most pronounced the more "educated" someone is, which really means the more processed and conditioned they've become by our Social Justice seminaries. We are living through a top-down ideological mass mania, and there's no end in sight.
Unfortunately some of these people actively don’t want to test their ideas against reality.