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PODCAST

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

The world has never been more connected. Yet never more divided. We yell at each other from inside our echo chambers. But change doesn’t happen inside an echo chamber. It’s time to get out, to stretch our legs, to step on some land mines. It"s time to have an uncomfortable conversation with Josh Szeps. A DM Podcast

society & culture comedy interviews

All Episodes

83:11

SZEPS LIVE TOUR: "Inequality, Abundance, & Using A.I....

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/07/29

Tyler Cowen is one of the world's Top 100 Global Thinkers according to Foreign Policy magazine. The Wall Street Journal calls his blog, Marginal Revolution, the world's best economics blog. His day job is as an economics professor at George Mason University, where he also runs the classical liberal Mercatus Center. But his influence is immense... on policymakers, tech titans and thought leaders who hang on his ideas as a visionary sage. Tyler hosts what Josh regards as one of the world's best

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40:03

SZEPS LIVE TOUR: "Atheism, Wokeness & Islam" with...

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/07/27

Born in Pakistan, Sarah Haider founded the Ex-Muslims of North America to help Muslims escape Islamist coercion. She was an outspoken atheist. Then... she lost her faith in atheism.First, she noticed progressive peers preaching critical race and gender ideologies, while punishing blasphemers of their social-justice dogmas in ways that felt uncomfortably... religious. Second, she tripped out on Ayahuasca. Third, she walked away from her podcast, A Special Place in Hell. What happened? Sarah sat down

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71:53

THE SZEPS LIVE WORLD TOUR IS UNDERWAY

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/07/26

G'day from New York City. We've been sitting on this Easter egg for some time, warming it up under our feathery little tooshes. It's now time to let the warm yolk of intellectual invigoration ooze over your grateful noggins. It's time for theSZEPS LIVE WORLD TOUR. Yes, global mega-giant publishing behemoth Substack has tapped this li'l ole show for Substack's first-ever Live-Streamed Around-the-World Podcast Marathon. That's a LOT of hyphens. Six cities. Twelve days. Twenty-four time zones. No

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67:57

"How Not to Feel Like a Failure (When Fame & Fortune...

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/07/21

How do you avoid the hamster wheel of hoping that your next success will deliver happiness? How do you escape mental ruts, anxious spirals and critical self-talk? Osher is a superstar in Australia. He was the face of Australian Idol, The Masked Singer, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. He also happens to have, as he politely calls it, "a different brain" -- a brain prone to depression, social anxiety, obsessive compulsion, psychosis and addiction. His podcast, Better Than Yesterday, discusses

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57:16

PREMIUM: "How to Raise an Awesome Kid (and be an...

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/07/17

It's one of the most persistent, perplexing and provocative questions to plague our culture: What explains the explosion in ADHD, anxiety and autism in kids? Is it too much Instagram? Not enough Ritalin? Or are one-of-a-kind kids being failed by a one-size-fits-all model of schooling and parenting? Dr Billy Garvey is one of Australia's leading developmental paediatricians. He's a senior specialist at one of Australia's largest university paediatric hospitals, where he works with kids struggling with

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97:43

"The Case for Nuclear Power" with Aidan Morrison

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/07/14

Have rich democracies been hoodwinked into chasing a mirage of green energy? Are renewables leading us into a dead-end of brown-outs, white-elephant wind farms, and costly, dodgy electricity? Are the "smart homes" and "smart grids" actually overly-complicated patchwork solutions to a problem that has a safe, affordable, reliable, carbon-free solution - nuclear? And what the hell is "baseload" power, anyway? Aidan Morrison is the Director of Energy Research at the classical-liberal Centre for

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32:50

PREMIUM: "In-Groups & Out-Groups" with social...

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/07/10

Are you defined by your identities? Where do you rank in the hierarchy of your social group, either online or in real life? How are the boundaries of your communities policed? By whom? In an era of social-media mobs, splintering communities and anti-immigrant ideas, the way we sort ourselves into in-groups and out-groups is a fascinating field of social psycology. Professor Jetten is an expert in the psychology of inclusion and exclusion, radicalisation, social dynamics, and the ways in which

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123:35

“Josh vs the Anti-Gay-Parenting Activist” Katy Faust

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/07/07

Katy Faust is a family-values activist who campaigns against all families that don't contain a biological mother and father. A rockstar among American conservatives, she's the founder of the children's rights organization, Them Before Us. On shows like Jordan Peterson's - and in her lobbying of lawmakers - she argues for prioritising every baby's right to its biological parents over the right of adults to start a family. At a time when Republican support for same-sex marriage is dropping fast thanks

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50:39

"Artificial Intelligence in a Human World" with Prof....

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/07/03

Is it legit for tech companies to vacuum up everything humans create, to spin off A.I. content, and not to compensate humans? Will this world of creative artificial creatures promote or corrode human creativity? In America, two tech giants just won landmark court cases over their use of copyrighted works to train A.I. models. The court found that Meta and Anthropic didn't violate copyright when they trained their large language models on books without the authors' permission. This raises big

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65:56

"Should We Ban Extreme Wealth?” with Prof. Carl Rhodes

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/06/30

Is there something broken about a world where some people are absurdly, insanely rich? Or is inequality the price we pay for innovation? What do Bezos, Gates, Musk & Zuck tell us about what's malfunctioning in our societies? Would be better with no billionaires, or is the anti-rich movement an impoverished politics of envy? Professor Carl Rhodes was the dean of the business school at the University of Technology, Sydney. His new book is "Stinking Rich: The Four Myths of the Good Billionaire"

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50:43

PREMIUM: “The Palestinian Delusion: the 'Right of...

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/06/26

What if the problem for the Palestinian people was not Israel, but the encouragement by the international community of a fantasy that, one day, Palestinians will return to Israel proper? That’s the thesis of 'The War of Return’ by former Labor parliamentarian and foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Shimon Peres, Einat Wilf. She opposes settlement-building but is otherwise a left-wing hawk. Wilf argues that the main reason why the conflict endures - and why Palestinians remain

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64:16

"A.I., Artificial Souls, and the Crazy Conundrum of...

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/06/23

Let's take a break from the news cycle for a moment, shall we? There's a lot of cool shit to ponder that's more important and more fascinating. Like, how does the gooey blob of atoms between your ears generate all of your experiences? And are we on track to producing machines that feel as alive as you? Eric Schwitzgebel is a legendary professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley and an important voice in Silicon Valley's conversations about ethical artificial sentience. He and Josh muse on the various

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75:08

"Being Courageous in a Conformist World" with Sarah...

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/06/19

Are we too spoilt to be creative? Are we succumbing to decadent decline? How do you dissent when the incentives are to conform? How do the French retain the art of disagreement while the Anglosphere gets stuck in predictable squabbles? How can we grow a pair of collective cojones and defiantly create a better future? Today's episode would normally be paywalled. We're offering it as a free example of the kind of unstructured, unpredictable, unedited, freewheeling, thought-provoking clashes Josh does

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56:11

JUST JOSH: "Staying Sane on Israel"

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/06/16

Anti-Zionism, antisemitism, Palestinians, Hamas, Israeli Arabs, diaspora Jews, Gaza, and now an all-out war with Iran. It's head-spinning, trying to make sense of Israel right now. Today, Josh comes to you battered and bruised by the slings and arrows of a national pile-on. He wrote the lead opinion piece in the big thumping weekend edition of Sydney's and Melbourne's biggest broadsheet newspapers, in which he argued for diaspora Jews to stop reflexively making excuses for Israel. The backlash has

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44:32

PREMIUM: “Old Media, New Media & the Truth” with...

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/06/12

Chris Uhlmann is one of the most experienced and well-known journalists Down Under. He worked for decades as either the host or the chief political reporter on many of the country's most respected news shows: The 7.30 Report, ABC News, Nine News, and ABC Radio's flagship current affairs show "A.M." He's made the leap to Substack, and joined Josh to discuss his regrets as a leading journalist, objectivity, fairness, thought bubbles, the flaws of media (old and new), climate change, immigration, and

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47:08

BONUS: The Playwright Who Just Won the Tony Awards

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/06/11

Over the weekend, the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play went to Eureka Day, a brave, hilarious satire of wokeness, vaccine denial, identity politics and social justice. Fresh from Broadway, the Sydney production is on now at the Seymour Centre. Its playwright, Jonathan Spector, joined Josh from California before his Tony triumph. Eureka Day is playing in Sydney until the 21st June 2025 at the Seymour Centre. You can find out more here.

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60:10

“An Incredible Clean-Energy Future: Smart Homes,...

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/06/09

If you want to feel optimistic about the mind-boggling potential of the renewable energy revolution, listen to Saul Griffith, one of the world's leading experts in electrification, decarbonisation and renewable energy technologies. He's founded a dozen Silicon Valley technology companies, R&D labs, and non-partisan organizations, and he was instrumental in developing the Biden Administration's climate action plan. Saul's U.S. research labs were recently eviscerated by Elon Musk's DOGE cuts. He

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35:19

PREMIUM: "Trump, the Left, and the Future of...

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/06/05

Can we take heart from the resurgence of anti-Trump liberalism in Canada, Australia, the U.K. and Europe? Could the Democrats capture that energy? If the culture has moved on from "wokeness", then what's the next paradigm for the Left? How should we think about immigration, multiculturalism, infrastructure, abundance, Obama’s legacy, and big-vs-small government in the next chapter of American political life? And can it really be true that Mississippians are richer than Italians? Yascha Mounk

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95:02

"Influencers, In-Fights & New Media" with Hannah...

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/06/02

At 26, Hannah Ferguson is one of the most influential young women in Australia. Her media company, Cheek Media, boasts an army of politically-engaged, progressive female fans. Ferguson co-hosts the smash hit podcast Big Small Talk, which breaks down politics and pop culture. An unapologetic progressive, she recently interviewed the prime minister and earned the honour of speaking at one of Australia's most prestigious forums, the National Press Club address. Ferguson intends to run for the senate

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36:10

PREVIEW: Andrew Sullivan

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps ·

2025/05/29

Andrew Sullivan is one of the most influential political writers of his generation. He became the face of the gay marriage fight, after writing the first major American article arguing for it in 1989. His 1995 book, Virtually Normal, became a bible of the marriage equality movement. Andrew had moved to America to get his PhD in politics from Harvard in the '80s, after studying at Oxford. As a gay, British, Catholic conservative in America, he dominated debates - on television as well as in writing -

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