Andrew Doyle (a.k.a. Titania McGrath) - Free Speech: And Why It Matters 

The second half of this Andrew went OFF! 👏 Fantastic stuff

Thanks, Michael, for inviting Andrew & Titania on your show. I did a happy dance when I saw your email arrive yesterday. I watched while cycling as I do with your other shows. (Too much gravel on Calgary roads for me to ride outside yet.) Andrew is another intellect who is fearless in addressing difficult conversations. So glad he is becoming more well known! I have been “promoting” his thoughts to as many people as I have an opportunity to.

One of your very best podcast episodes. I was so impressed by the discussion that I immediately ordered Andrew’s book.

"Lived experience only counts if it's the approved kind."

Love mr Doyle!👍🇬🇧 Three cheers for Michael Shermer😂🙌

I was born and raised in the UK (London) and attended a school in a lower socio-economic area. My "lived experience" backs up the recent findings in the data. My Carribbean friends were much less interested in studying than my African friends. It was clear to me that they had contrasting attitudes towards education and valued different things, which of course led to vastly different outcomes when exam results were revealed. My conclusion: Culture.

Wow, what an excellent interview.

I have recently been terminated from my college because of my comedic and satirical art. These are really tough times. People might think that cancel culture is overblown hype. It most definitely is not.

There is so much projection happening on social media, it's a projection feedback loop, projecting into infinity.

Thank you, Andrew, I’d like you for World Leader! You point out so well our flawed human nature, how deceptive we are and do it through a clear lens of Truth, satirically or not. Everyone needs to read, or audio book History, starting with the ancients. We’d all be better humans if we practiced the virtue of humility and History takes us there.

Great conversation.

I love your podcasts Mr. Shermer! This is the second one that I have listened to but I've seen you in others and you're absolutely fantastic. Mr. Doyle, you have no idea how relieved I feel to have you fighting on this. You do not go unnoticed and I follow you on twitter and re-tweet almost everything Titiana says. Because of these conversations more and more people are feeling more confidant to fight back. Thank you to the both of you and keep up this fight!

I still get “it is just college kids” when I try to alert older boomer friends to all that’s being addressed. Thanks for so clearly articulating my every thought, concern. Great discussion!!

An amazing amount of good sense in this conversation.

This is an amazing interview! 😮😃

Incredibly interesting talk, I'm looking forward to reading your book!

Really smart guy(s)! Thank you. : )

How much are you willing to trust the other people? How much are we willing to be offended and not afraid to be offensive? Debate and disagreement need to be as acceptable as agreement.

The problem I see with social media companies is that they act as judge jury and executioner of what is and isn't allowed, often on a case by case basis with wildly different decisions made based on the identity of the user rather than the content they post. Just like in the justice system we keep those separate, so it should for these companies, if Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others want to be platforms instead of publishers then they have to be made to give up their power to edit, censor and remove content they don't like.

Andrew does an excellent job of describing the *new Puritanism* .

I appreciate Andrew Doyle very much.

Great interview! Andrew Doyle was on a roll!

This man is one of my heroes and I didn't even know he existed till a year ago lol. Been following Titania for a long time though, easily some of the best and most relevant modern satire out there

Auto-generated captions not working on this channel. Unable to follow without them, yt app is crap.

Words cannot "hurt". The important point about the 'sticks and stones' rhyme is that if you throw a stone at someone, the person who was hit by the stone has no control over how his body reacts to the impact of the stone. The stone could knock him unconscious, it could break a bone, it could crack his skull, it could break his flesh and cause him to bleed, none of those things can be controlled by the victim. However, the reaction to something perceived to be offensive, can be controlled. Individuals have the ability to regulate their behaviour. If i am offended, i don't automatically respond by attacking the guy who offended me. I can ignore what he says. No "harm" has been caused or must be caused. Psychological "harm" is only "inflicted" to the extent that the subject allows it to be. They can will it to be otherwise, they can ignore it or place no value on what is said, which should be a central focus of ones character in growing up.

fentanyl is considered to be lethal when someone takes 2 mg (milligrams), according to information published in a report released by the United States Sentencing Commission.

I really like Doyle's distinction between racism and "racial offense" This goes for all "offense groups" of course.

Andrew is so awesome!

Great conversation, Gentlemen. The bit about vengeance. Hearing that makes me feel like a ringside bull regarding a red flag. Because of course it's all about vengeance. Just as all this labeling of everything under the sun as "hate" this and that and the other - Well, change the vernacular structure just a wee bit, and one realizes that of course, if someone finds something hateful, the operating mechanism in the transaction is that they hate (whatever it is.) Which doesn't mean necessarily at all, that whatever it is, speech, writing, expression of any kind - is communicated in the spirit of hate. It's a cute trick, isn't it? But to zero in on the vengeance part: when the pattern emerges that more and more righteously offended people exercise their right to react and respond by doing one thing in particular: they come for the job. They know exactly what that is going to mean to whomever they have targeted. It is going to turn their life upside down. Criminals do this sort of thing all the time. A burglar, rapist, homicidal maniac, psychopathic predator - the thing they all have in common is that they are acutely aware of the consequences of their actions - to the victim. It is curious, is it not? that almost all the actual victims of this sort of progressive mugging - are never actually seen as victims, and especially so in this latter age of holy pathologized victimhood. No doubt the high priests engaged in the Spanish Inquisition felt just as righteous (but I strongly suspect that many of them rather enjoyed the human pain and suffering that their instruments of torture exacted upon their victims). And that bit about words as violence. Silence as violence. More cheap tricks. I can understand the idea that a 180 pound six foot six man screaming vile and vulgar things at a defenseless child - that sure as hell can sound and look like violence. But this invites a cognitive exercise of measuring actions in context. Otherwise, the idea of being so 'offended' by an expression, verbal or otherwise, that one believes themselves to be in great danger - I would hope and pray that such a person never actually has to be confronted by actual and real violence. Which has the potential to be several million times more...'physical' than the aforementioned. The agenda is so bloody obvious. The main purpose is to shut down expression, and in many cases, it matters far less just what the expression is, and far more just who is doing the expressing. Perhaps a large part of the problem with callout culture is that it largely works only one way in any given transaction. In the name of fairness, it is a monstrously unfair thing. The cheap, the vulgar, the vile, the callous, the raw, merciless, unforgiving religiosity of it all. Have we progressed as a society, to the point now where so many can engage in what in a more just time, would have been regarded as criminal acts - only now they are dressed up in elegant finery, rhetoric, performative sleight of hand, linguistic shell games?

I’m currently 49mins in and really enjoying this interview. That comedy skit/video you did a week or so ago Dr.Shermer was funny. Your hustler salesmen voice impersonation is good. Would Dr Sam Harris do an interview with you? I would value hearing an in-depth discussion on the three major religions. Possible discussing the contradictions of the texts?

andrew can´t help himself, has to knock it out of the park every time, great guy

Good interview and the left-right red herring is true. The real dichotomy is establishment vs plebs. The establishment is using culture to maintain control: this is what it has always done.

The taliban did a good job without tanks. They kicked out the soviets and now they rule most of the land and the Americans are confined to their bases. Don't dismiss guerilla warfare.

The 2A argument IS NOT respective to single individuals, or small groups. it's the wider public as a whole.

Will the sad understanding on the issue of guns from intellectuals ever go away?

Vietnam and Iraq insurgents held their own for years against the might of the u.s. army with small arms so yes Shermer I do think Americans could cause a major headache for the U.S. government with their personal fire arms

"Breech" loading guns weren't common during the US Revolutionary War, "Muzzle" loading guns were common.

About Jordan Petersen, I can't imagine him ever being done for hate speech because they would need to unscramble his word salad first.

yes titania 🤣🤣🤩

Wow. I knew it is hilarious parody but I never guessed Titania was actually a guy.

"Hey you Whitehouse, ha ha, charade you are... Mary you're nearly a treat , Mary you're nearly a treat but you're really a cry" - Pink Floyd

I'm sometimes astonished how many people are honestly arguing that an armed population has no real chance of stopping a tyrannical government. Is that why US did so well in Vietnam and is doing so well in Afganistan? History is full of examples of armed populations successfully resisting major powers (literally on every continent). Also, when Europeans have trouble understanding the whole "tyranny argument", I would ask everyone to consider whether or not something like the Rotherham ch1ld abu5e case could have ever happened in Texas? More precisely, can you imagine Texas authorities just totally ignoring the parents? In the UK the government has a total monopoly on violence, and therefore the police and social workers knew those parents were perfectly helpless and unable to intervene themselves (i.e., there would be no consequences from their neglect). Ignoring the valid concerns and even the safety of citizenry is something a government can do only if it's sure that the population can not effectively object/resist. It can be tyranny even without any jackboots.

I'm a northsider. Yes 50 are shot but only half a dozen die. And nearly all of this happens on the SOUTHSIDE. Get someone to explain this to you.

Armed Vietnamese farmers took on a superior US military. The argument that an armed public is not a deturent to a more heavily armed and technicaly superior government military is historically very weak. The British military was superior to the colonial rebellion and we all know how that turned out.

1:27:20 Michael quoting Frank Zappa, "It's like they're just words. They're just words, Sir. You need to get out more. ... and they're like the words are violence, and when you're saying that thing on that rock song, that could lead kids into satanic cults.." Thinking about "words", I consider when Trump referenced Elizabeth Warren as Pocahontas 15 minutes into one of the Oct 2020 presidential debates, I just turned it off. I had no plans of voting for Trump, but I was willing to try to listen to what he had to say, but after that I said, no, I won't listen. I thought after I turned it off, "Does any Republican realize Trump is acting as a role model, teaching young people how someone in power is allowed to act? Does anyone have a problem with this?!" And its not even a question if whether Warren can handle name-calling, and I'm sure she can just fine, YET, it is utterly disrespectful, contemptuous of her, but worse, it is using a historical name of a native American girl who died young as an insult to a 70 year old woman. And historically native Americans have been treated terribly, and here in 2020, a president of the United States is using a Native American historical person as an insult. And on that regard, I admit I have a smaller, but similar reaction to using the word "Karen" to describe an uptight middle aged woman calling the police on minorities for whatever they are doing wrong in her mind. The category exists, but it is still an insult to everyone who is a Karen, or knows a Karen. So all in all, yes "They're just words", and yet we all can and should judge people who use words in demeaning ways, and call them out, or walk away and turn someone off when they use offensive words. And yes, I still understand that "cancel" reaction goes overboard, like needing to rename any street, or building or landmark named after a white man who expressed opinions in the context of our historic slavery, and trying to judge and cancel him for our modern sensibilities, so that's crazy too. It is some form of scapegoating, some strange purity ideal, that shutting out an offensive history will someone make amends in the present. And maybe 5% should be renamed, although clearly not quickly. Like Minneapolis renamed Lake Calhoun to some unpronounceable indian name because Calhoun was apparently canceled. But somewhere there is a balance. People who are assholes, like Trump, intentionally using offensive language to rile people up, and offend, well, anyway, I'm still offended that 74 million fuckers voted for him. Our country is a shitty place, whatever else the SJW are doing in their shithole minds.

Seems like Shermer didn't watch the chauvin trial and instead just read the msm narrative. Kinda stupid when he does a whole show saying how the ideologs in msm is untrustworthy.

On the guns subject... That's what they said about the Viet Cong or the Afghans and the Russians...

He is right. We are quickly approaching an Orwellian age in this country.

1:59:10 Could have been worded slightly better!

Haven't I seen this before?

In order to by a gun you have to pass a background check. Guns are expensive and require discipline and maturity! It is a slap in the face of responsibe, clear thinking adults to restrict the freedom connected to the 2nd amendment!

The word 'race' (not to be confused with ethnicity) and the terms black and white are so abstract and nonsensical.. it's simply impossible to understand how they're seemingly so treasured by C21 society as valid rational ideas.

@40 mins, I'm a big Trump supporter and most of my social network are Trump supporters. I find Q-anon to be abhorrent and so does every Trump supporter I know. I strongly disagree with Michael's comment that pledging to Q is a support for Trump. Huh? I don't know what circles Michael travels in but I almost fell off my chair.

Interesting double barrel anti-liberty arguement there. "The government could crush you, so just surrender" is a common one, but "rich people buy lawyers instead of guns" is one I've not heard before, and has to be the most out of touch elitist argument I've ever heard from someone over the age of 20.

Words are weapons. They need to be used responsibly. (Not like FOX news)

Maybe "where are you really from" might also just be curiosity about your cultural background?

First!

Listening to someone say we need to restrict “clip” size and that the guy who went to the pizza place was carrying an “AR-15 styled assault rifle” is a little annoying. For all of you gun control proponents.....the thing you call a “clip” is actually a magazine. And an AR-15 is NOT an assault rifle. It’s a semi-auto civilian version of a military assault rifle. The two are very different. But hey, who cares about the truth when we’re pushing to restrict constitutionally protected liberties, right?

8 minutes in... does Doyle get to speak? Shorter intros are fine, dude.

.

Mr Shermer, the safest thing for your young child would be homeschool. I can recommend. It allows children protection, freedom to be children, preservation of innocence, broad education, healthy socialisation etc etc

Turns out Andrew Doyle is just as WOKE as the people he satirises.

Talk about "Free speech" yet the comments are heavily moderated? I just made a silly joke (kind of a compliment to Andrew, actually) using the word 'homo' and it got deleted, why?

completely deluded discussion about firearms. first of all, navy seals won't be knocking on your door. second, it's better to have a weapon and not need it than not have a weapon and need it. the argument that your firearms won't do anything against tanks is ridiculous. there won't be a tank at every door if it ever were to come to the point where the government turns completely tyrannical. Even so, there are people who operate tanks and those people aren't immune to firearms. also, you can't sue people who are tyrannical if the people who are tyrannical own the courts. that's the point of protecting yourself. these arguments are truly, truly elementary and quite honestly pathetic coming from people who are supposedly intelligent. quite honestly some of the dumbest things i've ever heard.

Yanks are so bad at pronouncing Irish surnames eg Mahoney like Maloney and here McGrath as -ath not McGrath as McGrath ending ‘-ah’

Your comment on guns is quite off base and extremely detached. Other than that, great cast.👍

This bloke is brexiteer, isn't he!?

When he starts talking about Brexit, Doyle goes completely off track. Yes it was an identity thing. Before 2016 people didn't have to be so overtly pro European. After 2016 they had to stand up and say.. hey, taking away my rights as a European to live, work and retire in 27 other countries is not on. Talk about rationalizing your own views! Also, not all people who voted for Brexit were racist, but you can bet your bottom dollar that everyone who was racist voted for Brexit. Others voted for such stellar reasons as wanting blue passports back, and other similarly idiotic reasons. As the past couple of years have shown, Brexit was a bad idea from start to finish.