The Two Matts Q&A: Harry and Meghan, Dolly Parton… and blockbuster books

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0:19I think in different circumstances, Wes treating could have been prime minister. I think he's a very good politician. It didn't work out for him. But the idea that somehow because he's gay, he can't be defense secretary. I mean, come the fuck on. I'm not naive enough to think that there's some position where we can all row back and press a big red button and it's like social media never existed anymore. But just the basic fundamental idea that we acknowledge, we definitively acknowledge that these platforms are harmful, but the solution is to say, well, we'll make them a bit less harmful. That seems to me to be wholly wrong.

1:01What fills me with this sort of, you know, slightly modern despair is the feeling that I'm now going to have to read even more about them. You know, sort of like, why was Megan at this restaurant? What was she plotting? And the sort of the comparisons with Kate Perfect versus Megan Evil will become, in the Daily Mail, will become even more, you know, look at the way she's eating her pasta. Who does she think she is?

1:30Hello and happy Sunday everybody. Happy Sunday one and all. Hope you're all having a superb weekend. This is the Two Mats podcast brought to you by the subscribers of the New World magazine. Do join them. Join them actually and get a free copy of Paul Mason's terrific new book, Reds. What a treat. You can get a signed copy free. It's a brick. There's a lot of it. So go to the newworld.co.uk forward slash to mats right first question from judy in lincoln i was shocked perhaps i shouldn't have been to learn that west streeting has been inundated with online homophobic hate since he became defense secretary i'm sadly used to if not resigned to the growth of bigotry in this populist age but i wasn't actually ready for things to start going backwards what do the Matt's reckon is progress doing a U-turn it's such a good question it's so interesting um I mean I thought Wes was a really good appointment the MOD because he's tough he's a good communicator he's got a he's got an instinctively strategic mind all of which is ideal you know um and this shows how again I might you know I'm just I miss things that hadn't occurred to me that this would be an issue um you know and i i'm proud to say i played a very small part very small part but i did in in the marriage equality act of 2013 and and and i i cut but the mistake i made was kind of thinking not quite job done but well that's the you know we've now moved into a different phase of of the way that we treat tell us what did you what was your i wasn't aware of well i was just i mean you know i was at that time it was a very don't forget it was a very different time in terms of the Conservative Party and the Lib Dems being co-missions.

3:17So I was advising people who were putting the act together because there was a big debate about civil partnerships had already been legislated for. And so there was a big debate about, well, do you really need marriage equality? To which the answer was, yeah, because, you know, you don't go halfway down the bus. You know, you've got to kind of, it's equality or nothing, right? Yeah, yeah. And it seemed to me, as an observer, but sort of friendly, that this was the moment because I didn't know what would follow the coalition and I didn't know if it would last and the Lib Dems were pushing for it and in the end Cameron did this not ideal carve out so that churches didn't have to abide by it but it but it meant that gay couples can get married to you know to this day in in civil situations and they have all and this is the key they have all the rights of married people as they should in regards to pensions and so on so So it was a big moment.

4:15But I should have remembered my own one of my own mantras, which is that history has no direction or right side. Right. There's no inevitability about progress. And crucially, I'm all the fool me. If you're not vigilant, gains can be reversed. And then you start thinking, well, look, what's happened recently. Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. I would argue, as I think you would, that Brexit was a step back. A regression, yeah. You know, the social housing ideal has been pretty much torn down. We hope it will be revived. But, you know, I noticed that the Equality and Human Rights Commission handed the government a low rating, its lowest rating on the rights of asylum seekers and immigrants.

5:01You know, this, you know, the Labour government. You think about what happened to Afghan women after the return of the Taliban in 2021. one and so on and so on in other words there's no law that says once a progressive uh reform has been made it you can't go backwards and i think what's happened to wes although it hasn't impacted legislation it does speak of a culture that's getting uglier and and and virulent and in many ways bigoted and i i'm appalled by it but i think it's it's a it's a wake-up call certainly to me Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely the right phrase to use. I mean, when I saw that question, I was thinking back to when I was a kid or a young man, just how prevalent homophobic abuse was.

5:52Amazing. And actually then had a sort of quietly proud sensation, which was that it was our generation that pushed back against that, really. It was. and it's and it's much less in the open god knows the amount of football uh games that i've been to where there's been overt racist and homophobic abuse just shouted out and nobody batting an eyelid well these days you'd get thrown out of the ground a lot of the time not all the time so of course there's been massive progress but then you do you hear stories like this and yeah i think you're absolutely right the fragility of that progress is manifest and you know so you've got homophobic abuse a residue of it bubbling up at any opportunity but you've also got you know the legitimization of pure racism from from populist parties and they do it that nobody's saying and you know all of our listeners will recognize this instantly i almost don't have to say it nobody's saying look at all those black people look at all those well i mean some people will be saying look at all getting very close to it look at these muslims they say they say that so what they say they say islamists right and people say oh okay they're being specific about islamist terrorists but of course a lot of the people saying stuff like that are using it as a as a whitewash to to blanket a whole and and that that does get legitimized and And then suddenly being what is actually objectively a racist bigot is seen as a political position.

7:31And we know where that bloody road goes. We've seen it. We don't need to look too far back in history to see where that goes and how extensive and absorbed it can become and normalized it can become. you know and i think i think matt you know it's it's it's not even so much a wake-up call as it's like a wake up and smell the coffee that we're already we're already in there we're already there yeah no i i couldn't agree more and then it's sad question it makes me annoyed and angry that and disgusted actually because i think you know west i think in different circumstances west treating could have been prime minister i think he's a very good politician it didn't work out for him but he certainly you know the idea that somehow because he's gay you know he can't be defense secretary i mean come the fuck on yeah no a hundred percent a hundred percent right next question from dr dan metro is paying 18 billion dollars in damages to settle claims its social media platforms harm children and yet last time i looked its platforms are still very much up and running how does this game work well it it works very badly and it works the same way that uh i mean just to go through some of the sorts of elements to the story they were being sued i think it was by 29 us states i don't know where the other 21 were asleep for but anyway they were being sued that their platforms were driving obsessive addictive behavior with with young children one thing i would say is it's not just kids it's you know the amount of people who are affected by the way these platforms the insidious nature of how these platforms are engineered is appalling all of us you know i mean i i spend time scrolling sometimes catch myself scrolling and then realizing that 25 minutes has gone by and which i will never get back and i've accomplished absolutely nothing and i didn't even want to be there you know so there is a phone is that is a pack of cognitive Doritos it really is it really is exactly that's the best description I've heard of it from for a long time but they have been called to account they've voluntarily agreed to pay this enormous settlement over 10 years but put it into put it into the context of their annual revenues which are 200 billion plus and it's you know it's a very affordable little payoff off and they are adapting their platforms so that there'll be time limits and there'll be this that and the other so it'll be less uh less damaging now what i thought the the immediate analogy i thought was that the great invention of the cigarette filter which was you know when cigarettes went from being like the old-fashioned woodbines that didn't have any filter and suddenly these health concerns about tar in your lungs so don't worry about it keep smoking but we've put a filter on it and you can actually see in the filter the bad stuff that would have been in your lungs it's there now in the filter so keep smoking relax and i think somebody needs to ask a fundamental question about what is the net value of all of these platforms and i'm not i'm not naive enough to think that there's some position where we can all row back and press a big red button it's like social media never existed anymore but just the basic fundamental idea that we acknowledge we definitively acknowledge that these platforms are harmful but the the solution is to say well we'll make them a bit less harmful that seems to me to be wholly wrong it's not luddite to put a seat belt in a car right it's not it's not luddite to put uh you know filters on cigarettes and ban them from public spaces that's not luddism you know it's silliness that um i mean what worries me a lot about this one is that there's a lot of conditionality but you know and unless five billion of it is held back unless other platforms do the same so yeah incredible basically what you see is them building a measure of settlement because they've admitted no wrongdoing yeah you know into their business model because they've got so much money um another bit of it that worries me is and i think this is this is actually true around the world is that lawsuits are starting to plug the gap that should be filled by government regulation right you know that that look i mean all you know hat tip to the states that did this it was a very complicated piece of litigation and it came off and good for them but really it shouldn't be left to ambitious attorneys and so on i mean this should be stuff that the people that we elect should be doing and i think that the the word in the question that was kind of leapt out at me is game right because the game is well what is the game let's not forget that kind of chilling picture of all the tech tycoons at trump's inauguration let's not forget that elon musk gave 291 million dollars in the last electoral cycle and has put 90 million into the i didn't know this until i looked it up musk has put 90 million dollars into the midterms which i see really yeah which i very much doubt are going to you know nice democrats okay yeah yeah you know peter teal put 15 million into jd vance's 2022 senate rate run right and and and an interesting and relevant figure in this which is is is again news to me because meta has tended to stay out of of elections but this time for the midterms they've they've put 65 million dollars into a bunch of super PACs not just the Republicans but nonetheless Meta is getting into the game yeah back and clearly the fact they've done both parties is because they're hedging yeah for a Democrat victory in 2028 right now that's the game yeah yeah that's right the chilling thing for me is that all of these agreements have been made in these 29 us states but it's not none of the modifications that are the filters on the cigarette if you like are are applicable to the uk or we've now we've got to go and demand it ask for it plead for it whatever a government does to these mega corporations and i just think you know you're absolutely right that the longer it's left between lawyers and claimants and defendants it misses the point that if something is is definitively bad for the community that it's involved in then that's that is the precise job of the government to resolve you know and and we need to make legislation but then you enter into the reality of life and the complications of of trying to get these people to um one act as though they care about what you think uh which many of and do not they see they see themselves as almost independent autonomous um bodies that are above and beyond national legislation um and i know that for a fact i know google thought that for a long time that it was like you know it was totally above and beyond um mere law and um and get and you know and get them to um respond in a in a responsible way that still allows them to have their business model but doesn't fuck up kids brains you know that would be absolutely and it's interesting in this context there's um uh a movie to look forward to in i think october is aaron sorkin has made a sequel to the social network called the social reckoning which has the great jeremy strong taking over as mark zuckerberg and i was i was checking out some of the the trailers and whatnot and there's a line in it not spoken by the zuckerberg character but by Facebook there as that was then was executive saying we're post-government yeah totally yeah that is really I mean typical talking to nail it but I thought that's the problem yeah these people think of themselves as basically states you know they are they're supranational entities who have more power than most countries which they kind of do and this is a kind of this is a problem that no one at the moment seems i mean trump sees it as no trump doesn't see it as an issue you know he just wants the money the kudos he wants to beat china in the ai race and that's it yeah europe i think has a role to play europe plus uk uh but it's difficult okay uh thank you for that question dr dan and the next one comes from oscar and oscar wants to know will the mats be welcoming harry and megan back to britain well i i found it impossible to look at harry and megan in the same light since the absolutely classic south park episode in which they were on their worldwide privacy tour and which just is just one of the great south park episodes um and i i before i joined the new world actually i had to it fell to me um in another life to labor through his memoirs overnight in which he talked at length about his feelings um and you know and then and now and then there was this sort of squall last week about whether or not megan had a role in guy ritchie's amazingly terrible series the gentleman uh turns out she didn't um and and there's a series of irrelevant issues like are they good at podcast i don't care if they're good at podcasting and by the way if they want to live here fine you know i'm not i'm not sort of i mean they should not be allowed through the the borders they've they've cut their ties they've made their decision you know god save the king no no no that's fine um but but you know i don't i i equally i mean they they left with huge fanfare and look they have had some real i mean the particularly megan has had some really nasty media attention right i get yeah no question but you know where they live is in 2026 not my main priority i i have to admit i'll be honest i couldn't care less where they are i mean i wish them all i wish them all the very best but i take no no real interest i'm i'm i'm unconvinced of of harry's value to the royal family and therefore to the national purse you know should should we be jumping up you know five million quid a year or whatever it's going to cost for personal security well i don't know um i don't think so but um perhaps we won't have to you know and i think that if we do then he should be obliged as the late queen said you know you can't be half in or half out you're either yeah full full royal or you're not um and he should do that i i quite like i like both of them as people i have certainly haven't got this kind of pathological obsessive hate that some some in the media do for them and i don't quite get it well i get i get why people hate harry from the daily mail of course you know because he's he's he's gone after them in a way and it's yeah and it's but and that's backfired on him quite horribly with with enormous costs but look you know if they if if they want to come back then um i certainly wouldn't object to them being neighbors but um neither uh is it something that i'm going to get excited about one way or the other no and and i think i mean what what fills me with this sort of you know slightly mordant despair is a feeling that i'm now going to have to read even more about them you know you know sort of like why was megan at this restaurant yeah was she plotting it and and the sort of the comparisons with kate perfect versus Megan evil will become, in the Daily Mail, will become even more, you know, look at the way she's eating her pasta.

19:41Who does she think she is? You know, I just don't want to know. Fine. Okay. Well, listen, let's take a very quick break and we'll be back with more of your wonderful questions in just a moment, dear listeners.

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20:30right welcome back welcome back dear listeners this is the two matt q a brought to you by the subscribers of the new world magazine so and you know what's coming from name withheld due to fear of reprisals from weepy rhinestone clad nutcases am i alone in being somewhat bewildered by the outpouring of national grief for dolly parton i don't tell my co-workers that i actually found her a bit tiresome and disliked her music. What is it about death that turns people into obsessive groupies? And should the military band outside Buckingham Palace really be playing nine to five in tribute? Bit of a royal theme this week, Matt.

21:10Well, just to answer that final point, I really did cringe when I saw.

21:19I was kind of wondering what the Russian army was making of it all, you know, as they were plotting their invasion plans. you know yeah exactly yeah they are they haven't got any ships but they're very good at playing nine to five um no i i mean look dolly parton um i i i i'm gonna sound like a miserable git who doesn't who's not interested in anybody right now but i wasn't interested in her either and um i didn't feel i didn't feel particularly affected at her death um i recognized that she was very nice and influential lots of people really liked her but i think at the heart of this question is this idea that death or the death of celebrities does have a sort of weird impact on people who suddenly discover that they are they've been huge lifelong fans all this time and they're never going to be able to quite cope with this tragedy well yeah not sure i think i guess most of them will manage who knows um i mean i must i mean you know who am i to say um oh first of all we should say that just for the counter case people should take a look at james the great jamie klingler's written a very good piece on she has why she why she on the new world it's on site yeah it's a very broad church new york if you're a dolly parton fans out there you know yeah calm down you know enjoy right yeah however i i was a bit surprised that the king and queen posted a heart emoji and said we will always love you now this seems to me a bit of an overcorrection right because there was a time and again this was not good either from the days when the royal family had to be literally physically prized out of balmoral when a print when a princess died in a car crash in Paris right yes so we seem to have swung the pendulum has swung a little too far um so you know in answer the question of the the the terrified unnamed uh uh listener look there are of course there are plenty of people who don't feel quite so moved or rather don't feel the need to pretend that they all met her or knew her or personally received the Moderna a vaccine from her in a you know hall in south all right and i always think of um one of the meanest and best stand-up cootiers anthony giselnik who says that when people use the word thoughts and prayers what they're really saying is look at me don't forget about me and i think there's a bit of truth in that and so was that anthony giselnik he is fantastic by the way if people don't know he is remarkably good he's just so funny um a very very nice person by the way whose stage persona is yeah he does a sort of book group doesn't he where he's kind of very good a fantastic book he's a great but he's a great stand-up hilarious um so i think grief can be collective and i think it's fair to say that you know we were both very upset by david bowie and you know i you know and all that sort of thing and so yeah but what it shouldn't be is a sort of matter of social pressure and conformity you know yeah yeah celebrities are going to keep dying i I think that's the one thing we can be sure of.

24:29Like all of us, right? We're all of us going to eventually throw a seven, right? And this idea that every time someone, you know, who kind of is above D-list in the celebrity thing, you know, anyone who's appeared on Strictly Come Dancing, there has to be a moment of silence and, you know, everyone at football matches has to take the knee. I think we just need to calm it down. I think, you know, if people want to be upset, then they should have the space and all that, right? But the idea that if you don't feel sorry about Dolly Parton, you're a heartless bastard, right? I think this is kind of ridiculous.

25:09All right, fair enough. Well, anyway, the next question comes from Steve Thomas. As journalists that are thoughtful, thorough, and incredibly experienced, thank you very much, Steve, how does it feel to write for an online publication that has below-the-line comments? it's a genuine question i'm a cameraman and editor but for the last few years i've been working on youtube content and honestly i cannot read the comments it only takes one i know what you mean what do you think matt well i would distinguish between social media um so of which youtube is one uh though rarely classified as such but it is um and in my case it's a bad day at the office when i'm not called both a fascist and a communist so you know i don't normally draw stumps until i've ticked off but um but i think um in terms of the the more narrow question of um below the line comments from our subscribers yeah i i do take that seriously and i think you owe it to your subscribers to read it and and at minimum take note and you know sometimes i i'll respond you know i don't always do that but i i don't think you can run away from that responsibility as a journalist and i know when btl below the line became a thing uh about just under 20 years ago a lot of journalists felt this was deeply deeply suspect and you know really the readers should get back in their box well those days are long past i agree completely and it used to be a thing where people would say don't read below the line you know to journalists one to another and i always thought that was that was a massive mistake even if the even if what was underneath was you know horrible and reprehensible then at least you sort of knew where your audience was coming from or some sectors of it i mean on our on our on the new world only subscribers can comment which i that was a decision i made because i thought one i really like our subscribers and i want to know what they've got to say so i want i want them to to be able to engage in the conversation and I want them to tell us when we've got it wrong and when we get it right and all of this stuff and unlike you I occasionally go in and will argue my corner or thank somebody for a nice comment and that's all great but I did have experience in a previous life at the Daily Mirror of that more open forum we used to call them forums if you remember and it was at the time of the terrible Madeline McCann story and for whatever reason the Daily Mirrors Forum happened to become the home of Madeleine McCann conspiracy theorists.

27:52And the whole thing was so beyond the pale that eventually I was running the digital business there at the time and decided to close the whole forum business down. Right, right, right. Because people may not know this, but the way the law works is that if somebody makes a comment, the publisher of the comment is not held responsible if that comment is defamatory or obscene or anything unless somebody complains about it at which point the publisher can take it down and the reason for that is if the publisher went in themselves and took down posts on an arbitrary basis that they thought were offensive or defamatory or whatever a judge could then come in a subsequent case and say well you took down those two posts but why why didn't you take down that post so purely from a legal defensibility point of view the only way you can operate is is by what what is called post moderation so after after somebody alerts you you can then go in and moderate not pre-moderation which is which is much more legally fraught with problems but um so i really really value uh comments on our stories um yeah me too you know and to be quite honest with you i value the ones that are giving me a ticking off or pulling me up more than i do the ones that are saying that's great because it does make me think and and i think it improves you as a journalist but i totally know what ste means about youtube comments oh my God, sometimes you look at it and you think, well, the law's wrong when they're that consistently offensive and abusive and racist and homophobic and just vile.

29:37Somebody needs to step in and turn the whole bloody thing off. Yeah, I mean, my sort of taste of this when the two converged, if you like, is when I was a colonist at The Guardian, which is essentially free. And so there wasn't a paywall. I mean, people can contribute to The Guardian. but but you know you don't have to and so all guardian colonists this wasn't me at all and my my traction was not anywhere near as big as some of the the other people but you know it would literally be thousands every column and uh what i found extraordinary about it was that i'd kind of look at some of them and then go off and have a life and come back sometimes the day after and they'd all have turned on each other yes yes you know you'd be up to no seriously you'd be up to comment 2000 yeah and they were saying no you're a bastard no you're a bastard no you're a corbynite no you're a tank you know and it was just incredible and there is something you know absolutely deranged about btl that does so what about what amounts to you know anything goes btl but i you know i think that the duty to listen to your readers is is very i mean as as it has always been in the press a paramount one well that's a very good moment to plug our email address to give us feedback dear listeners it's two mats at tne publishing.com that's the number two m-a-t-t-s tne publishing.com tell us anything you want uh good or bad we are very receptive and we've got time for one more question right from phil in brighton um at matt k's suggestion i took a crack at unisease a book that had always scared me off and i loved it talk about entering a weird and wonderful world all of its own i want to keep going do the mats have tips for a classic i can get stuck into in september well well done well done for getting through ulysses i mean it is it's an amazing it is an amazing book but it is i mean it is so avant-garde even to this day that it's um it's it's a it's a it is a cracker but it's a big investment of energy and time and brain power well the one i was going to say in made much more much more accessible than than ulysses but i think possibly actually put a gun to my head i'd say it's the if i could only read one more book again it would be this one and it's moby dick by herman melville right but i think it is such a wonderful story but it's such a there are parts there are passages in Moby Dick that it's again it's it's a very modern it's a very modern novel because it it takes these diversions into science and culture and society and the descriptions within it are just magic I mean and obviously the core story is is Homeric you know almost literally you know but um but for instance the chapter on um um on the physiology of whales and the oils they produce and the fats they produce i mean it's absolutely stunningly interesting as well but it's a beautifully written book and maybe it's the greatest novel of american literature in all time maybe huckleberry finn moby dickie take your pick but it's that would be my choice it's a very good claim to be the great american novel I totally agree I mean what you said at that time it it kind of um it entrenched something or it firmed up something that I've been thinking for a while which was I think a lot of these big classics which are sort of force-fed down you know young people are actually I'm not saying you shouldn't read it when you're young but you know I've actually better read when you've got a few miles on the clock a hundred percent and and you asked me that in that answer if I'd read Ulysses and I had like almost 40 years ago but when you said it I thought I didn't understand it and I've got to go back to it and and so there's that and I think there's another thing which is really interesting to me is that um you know since we've the new world's been on Substack I've spent a lot more time on Substack and I noticed with great pleasure the proliferation of reading groups all sorts all sorts all sorts you know George Saunders who the book of probably been as a wonderful one lots and lots of subscribers to it and it's they all want great books they want big great books you know um and it's really interesting so how to kind of go about it and i think one of the ways to kind of approach this sort of task without it becoming a burden if you like yeah sort of to treat it as you would daily exercise but but not a monastic retreat you know you don't have to go off for 10 hours a day right you know pick a book like maybe or something yeah read 20 pages a day before you know it yeah a few months pass and you've and it's part of your daily routine and you've you've had time to absorb it and then you've finished it alongside all your other tasks and I think you know the mind gym is as important as the physical gym so the one I'm that I was already going to do actually and the reason I was going to do it is because I and again I'm not sure why but it's been cropping up a lot in conversations I've had and in articles I've read and things uh as as being very relevant to our times and I again I read it when I was too young to know anything about anything and that's the Brothers Karamazov right yeah and it's like I it's really long and it's really hard and I want to take another crack at it but I want to do it in that way I described to you right I'm not going to take a week off to read it right that's yeah yeah well listen okay what about and i'm putting you on the spot now what would be a novella that you would uh so so let's start as something more containable what would be a classic novella you would point people towards um that's a really good question well i mean if people haven't read the great gatsby they should yeah i mean you are much better place than me to recommend the best hemingway to read right well the sure the shortest one would be the old man in the sea i guess which would be a good way but what better you know um uh yeah i mean i think if you haven't read the great gatsby and if you have tender is the night and yeah if you've read that the last tycoon you know a fitzgerald is a great experience and and again to your point about you know americana it kind of it's a window into the american soul it's very yeah i'll throw i'll throw in uh having well have so this is a secure this 21st century way into a a novel so having heard my great adored nick cave singing train dreams which is a song that has just been running around my head for for the last month absolutely magnificent song which is of course the end song at the end of the film train dreams now on netflix great now on netflix so if you've got netflix watch that absolutely wonderful film and then our editor steve anglesey when i made this comment said yeah but the book is better so i have recently read train dreams short book by dennis johnson and it is absolutely magnificent it's a it is an absolute classic so yeah i maybe we should do a sort of monthly book thing i don't know i don't know how that would work it's not like there's a shortage of that but maybe we could do something i think there is i mean if you just sort of roam around substack yeah and indeed you know a lot of people sneer at book top okay and they're stupid to do so because anything that's getting gen z to read yeah even if it's romantic not even if it's romantic to see and i don't care you know if it's getting them and and and the publishers in america say that the the the read across from book talk to sales is huge i can imagine i embrace that without any reservation but just on you know sub stack it is really interesting to me how many you know you you go down your feet and it's like starting in an hour we're going to be looking at part four of aristotle's ethics right fantastic there'll be a thousand people live right now okay that's not the whole world but boy you know it's a good thing you know it's a good number take that right folks next week is aristotle's ethics on the tune next week if you haven't read aristotle's ethics then i'm afraid you know you'll be in detention well listen serious point let us know dear listeners if you if you think there'd be any value in matt and i um doing some sort of some sort of reading a book thing you know maybe something even a little bit looser where we talk about our favorite books i'd be well up for that but only if you guys are so write in and let us know whether that's a good idea or not uh two mats at tnepublishing.com one amazing book that you can get for free when you subscribe to the new world is paul mason's reds right his uh his uh is an absolutely remarkable um history of communism um and uh if you if you've got communism and a little box in your head as something that happened in 1917 in russia and never really oh my god read paul's book it's it's it's brilliant and it's brilliantly written as as regular readers of the new world know paul is a terrific reader anyway you can get your free signed copy of reds by paul mason when you sign up go to thenewworld.co.uk forward slash two mats that's the number two m-a-t-t-s thank you as ever to the third matt matt with us for producing the show thanks matt and uh until next thursday at latest have a fantastic week folks have a great week

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