This episode is brought to you by Pepsi Max. Christmas is great, but there's loads of ways to make it better.

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Christmas. Better with Pepsi Max. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry I'm Francis Foster I'm Constantine Kitten and this is a show for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about.

At Trigonometry we don't pretend to be the experts. We ask the experts.

Our fantastic guest this week is the deputy editor of Spike magazine.

Tom Slater, welcome to Trigonometry.

Thanks so much. It's great to have you here. The

first question we always always ask is tell us a little bit about how you got to be where you are today.

Yeah, sure. So I found out about spiked, where I currently work quite young actually so when I was about

17 I was involved in a program that Spiked set up to give state school kids in London a kind of

leg up into journalism so I met a lot of them through doing that and basically just kind of kept in contact.

Originally I was got into kind of cultural journalism things like that but slowly over the years got more and more interest in politics got more and more radicalized and I think especially

my kind of experience at university as far as looking around for what sort of politics

I'd like to sign up for and not really finding much of interest on either left or right,

spite to increasingly seem to make a lot of sense to me and seem to be something I wanted to be a part of basically.

And for those people who don't know Spikes who haven't encountered it, what is Spiked and how could you sum up them politically?

So I think our political bent is really we come out of the left and yet increasingly find

ourselves raging against the left, which I think actually a lot of people increasingly are finding

themselves insofar as some of our foundational principles are things like freedom of speech which I know we'll be talking about. Democracy the idea that societies that are constantly striving to produce more and to produce a kind of higher standard of living for everyone is something that should be the main goal and yet increasingly it feels like the left are incredibly

censorious, incredibly environmentalists in the worst kind of way

which seems to be mainly about kind of dampening down production saying

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