Goody, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. I love it when I get to have my ideas tested and challenged and disentangled.

When I get to wrestle with somebody who's wrestling on the same turf as I am, who doesn't necessarily disagree with me, but has different angles on things that I hadn't thought of.

Ah, there is no greater juice than the intellectual juice of noticing things that you hadn't noticed before,

hearing arguments you hadn't quite heard before, or hearing someone put their finger on something

that you kind of vaguely felt, but hadn't quite identified.

In this crazy culture war that we call modern civilization,

Sarah Hayter is such a refreshing voice.

It's also lovely to reconnect with someone who you only know peripherally

and whose work you've only vaguely kept an eye on

and find that they have grown into someone even more sophisticated and nuanced and ferocious in their insights than when you last met them.

Sarah initially came to my attention as a sort of a skeptic, a dissident of Islam, an ex-Muslim.

She's a Pakistani American writer and political activist who created a group called ex-Muslim. She's a Pakistani-American writer and political activist who created a group

called ex-Muslims of North America, which was trying to encourage religious dissent and make it

okay to blaspheme and just to help former Muslims leave the religion by linking them into

support networks and so on. I didn't want to talk to her

about that. That's not the focus of her career anymore. She's much more focused on the bigger

Western cultural battles and the fate of smaller liberalism. In this conversation, we talk about

liberal and liberalism, needless to say,

not in the Australian political context where the Liberal Party is the Conservative Party,

but in the traditional classical liberal ideal of respecting one another and encouraging

vibrant debate and having uncomfortable conversations and being

open to other people's ideas and believing that you reach truth through dialogue and

...