Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where Free Thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself,

associate editor Toby Young and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

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Hi, my name's Toby Young and I'm one of Quilat's London-based editors.

Dr Michael Sherman is an American science writer, founder of the Skeptics Society and editor-in-chief of its magazine Skeptic.

He's also a long-standing contributor to Quillette, a prolific author, and according to Barry Weiss's famous New York Times magazine story

of a couple of years ago, a member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

I spoke to him about his new book giving the devil his due reflections of a scientific

humanist.

Are you worried about publishing a book at this particular time and not just worried

that it won't get the attention it deserves but it's also hard to make the argument for free speech when people are worried

about dying from coronavirus. Yeah both I mean it's kind of a bummer as an author

to have this come out at this time because I sort of feel

guilty like I shouldn't be promoting a book I should be promoting social distancing

or something although we've all been doing that on social media. So all I could do is press forward. I mean I had a 12 city book tour all canceled in a UK and in Germany book tour all canceled and yeah I mean I feel like you know this is the wrong time to do it and I don't know what else to do the

publisher wants to bring it out and you know they have their schedule and so here we go.

As for free speech well well, you know, I think there's a few points there where, you know, it's become

politicized and, you know, like calling it the Chinese virus and that you know became a

...