Conversations with Peter Boghossian · Peter Boghossian

Belief vs. Truth: Can You Exit a Bad Idea? | Hunter Ash

March 28, 2026·1 hr 7 min·5 clips

Hunter Ash explains how you can build a dishonest worldview without ever technically lying — just apply skepticism selectively.

Hunter begins with values. He says progressivism appealed to him through consequentialism, rationalism, and a childhood in conservative Oklahoma, where religious arguments filled much of the local political air. That background matters. His early politics sound less like inherited team loyalty than a reaction to the arguments around him. The conversation keeps tightening. Biography turns into a harder question: can someone leave a bad idea without acting as if the old values were fake? Hunter says yes. He rejects epistemological relativism and says there is a fact of the matter, something a person can know. That becomes shared ground pretty quickly. Culture is messier. Hunter does not treat every tradition as equal. He argues that some cultures work better than others, while leaving room for context and local practice. Then the exchange gets sharper. A passage about Muslims, historical achievement, and the far future pushes the talk past tolerance and into civilizational capability. The moment is not waved away. A Star Trek anecdote gets bracketed, then the discussion comes back to whether Hunter rejects relativism in both knowledge and culture. His answer is yes, with caveats. He reaches for mathematical language, calling it a partial ordering rather than a flat ranking. Liberalism sits under the final stretch. The ending keeps circling one question: can liberal premises survive pressure? The close is quick, with both sides interested in continuing.

As heard by us

A sharp conversation about truth, culture, and whether liberalism can sustain its own premises.

Hunter Ash frames his break from progressivism less as a change in values than in judgment: he points to a long-standing consequentialist streak and a desire to know what is true, then traces the shift through Oklahoma, college, and other intellectually charged settings.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a straight fight over truth, culture, and liberalism's limits, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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