Free Speech And Why It Matters - Andrew Doyle - #283

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, hello, friends in Podcastland. Welcome back. My guest today is Andrew Doyle, the man behind the Titania McGrath Twitter account, a comedian and a writer. We're talking about his new book, Free Speech and Why It Matters. Free speech is one of the core tenets of a modern liberal society, and yet we're seeing restrictions being placed on it across the West. In the UK, hate speech laws have been introduced, and even America is looking at amending the amendment. So today, expect to learn what Andrew thinks about Donald Trump being removed from Twitter, where the cancel culture exists, why Miley Cyrus' genital preference is dangerous, what future humans will think when they look back on this period of history, and much more. I always love having Andrew on the show. He speaks an awful lot of sense, and if you enjoyed this, then I highly recommend that you go and pick up his book. It's a really easy, very accessible read. It's super short. I finished it in a couple of days. And yeah, if you like the things that Andrew does on the internet, you will love his new book. Also, other news, I made some promises around saying, I'll do a 100k subscriber, ask me anything Q&A on YouTube and live streams and we'll start these solo episodes and all this sort of stuff. What happened was a couple of videos that we made about a week and a half, two weeks ago, exploded the channel and we went from under 100 to 120,000 subs. So the balloons that had ordered to arrive so that we could do like this really cool picture and have a backdrop for the episode and all that, they're still not even here. They haven't arrived yet. And we're now about to be closer to 150 than we are to 100 So I don't really know how I'm going to play this, but thank you for the support and thank you for the patience as well. There will be a lot of new things coming. There will be these solo episodes. There will be Q and A's. There will be more stuff. But being honest, we're just kind of trying to keep up with the workload of publishing a ton of videos to take advantage of this momentum. Apparently when the algorithm on YouTube likes you, the goal is just to keep on producing content. So that's what we're spending our time doing. All that new stuff will be coming. It's just on the other side of a period of quite intense work for me and old video guy Dean. In other other news, this episode is brought to you by uncommoncoffee.co.uk. I keep on getting tagged in people's stories of their morning coffee. It's so good to see so many people enjoying British homegrown, born and bred independent coffee roasters that have been found through uncommoncoffee.co.uk. If you are a coffee lover, you have to go and check them out. They are a premium on-demand coffee service whose priority is on making their customers as happy as possible, accompanied with the cheapest prices around when it comes to literally the best tasting and most popular coffees from the number one independent coffee houses and roasters in the UK. Plus, you get 20% discount off everything site-wide at uncommoncoffee.co.uk using the code MW20. That includes, they always have really nice fancy chocolates and different types of shortbread and stuff on there. They've also started a membership service where they'll regularly deliver you different types of coffee and you get 5% off plus 25% with that as well. So 25% off caffeine. But yeah, the ozone is fantastic. We had something to do with like military, there's something to do with a gun the other day. My housemate made it for me. Phenomenal uncommoncoffee.co.uk. If you are a coffee lover, you have to go and check them out and use the code MW20 for 20% off. Go and try it today, you will not regret it. And now, please give it up for the wise and wonderful Andrew Doyle.
That doesn't look like the Amalfi Coast.

**Andrew Doyle** (4:07)
No, well, that's where I was last time.

**Chris Williamson** (4:09)
Not there anymore.

**Andrew Doyle** (4:10)
I don't live in the Amalfi Coast.

**Chris Williamson** (4:12)
I thought you were just a gentleman of leisure now, just swanning around.

**Andrew Doyle** (4:17)
I was visiting there for a while, while I could. I got in just before, just after they lifted the lockdown, and then just before the lockdown happened again. So I literally got in just at the right time. And I'd have to say, if anyone wants to visit the Amalfi Coast, wait for a pandemic. It's the only time to see it, because if you're there at any other point, it's absolutely heaving, it's impossible to negotiate. I went over to Capri, the island of Capri, and it's horrendous. But during a pandemic, it's fine. You can meander about, it's not too oppressive, there's not too many people, it's great.