Gahe humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Dangerous ideas are a dime a dozen

on the interwebs, floating around all over the place, hate speech, bigotry, misinformation,

disinformation. But the most dangerous idea of them all, perhaps, is the idea that we should

let those dangerous ideas float around

willy-nilly without trying to crack down on them via governments.

Andrew Lohenthal, today's guest, has spent his life fighting for free speech, mostly from

the left, mostly in developing countries around Southeast Asia, where he's defended dissidents and dissenting opinions from the purview of the state and from being suppressed.

And now he's found himself kind of flipped onto the opposite side of politics in many people's minds because he worked with Matt Taibi on five of the Twitter files investigating what was going on inside

Twitter when they were essentially cooperating, collaborating with the US government during the

pandemic and that era to suppress or kind of secretly blacklist or gray list certain ideas and

certain speech. With Michael Schellenberger, Andrew has created

something called the Westminster Declaration, which is signed by many, many, an illustrious, sort of

heterodox thinker, saying that social media companies should not be putting their thumb on the scales

of particular ideas, but should allow all ideas to flourish

and should have a commitment to the greatest number of ideas in the widest possible sphere.

Andrew now runs a digital civil liberties initiative called Libbonnet.

He doesn't live in Australia, but he is Australian.

He was back in town.

He saw me on Q&A on national

television arguing with Australia's E-Safety Commissioner and thought, you know what, we should

have a chat. And I found it fascinating to dig into exactly where the boundaries of, I don't

know, appropriate discourse should be on social media and in real life. Enjoy as much as I did.

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