Smart people are better at reasoning. They often come up with good reasons for asinine conclusions. Groups of smart people reason more efficiently and usually generate more and better reasons for those conclusions, independent of what's true. Give smart people academic positions, then jobs for life (tenure), and they are rewarded for reasoning to and justifying asinine ideas.

Peter Boghossian talks with French philosopher Jean-François Braunstein, who has been blacklisted for defending science, about the treason of intellectuals. How did truth come to be treated as a right-wing concept? Why did we abandon objectivity for radical subjectivity? And what happens when power replaces truth as the goal of inquiry?

They dig into epistemology, the confidence we place in our beliefs, and why argumentation and the free exchange of ideas are the only way out.

Can we escape this civilizational catastrophe? Yes. Here's how...

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If we have to sacrifice speech rights to achieve a certain degree of social cohesion, should we make that bargain?

Peter Boghossian talks with sociologist Paul Spoonley about contentious topics in the free speech debate. Should Islamists be demonized? What about other groups? Who decides, and what does a regulatory apparatus for hate speech actually look like in practice?

Peter and Paul also explore a puzzle at the heart of the debate: Why do some people shake off criticism while others are deeply traumatized by it?

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Why can't we have real debates anymore?

Peter Boghossian talks with anthropologist Calum Nicholson about two forces eroding public life. First, we've lost the ability to argue in good faith, because we increasingly assume the other side is acting in bad faith. Second, science itself has become so subjective that it's turning anti-scientific, drifting away from finding truth and toward pushing political narratives. Together, they argue, these two trends have created the low-trust society we live in today.

So how did we get here, and how do we rebuild public trust?

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