What is your race? What is your identity? How should your kids think about how they fit in at school, or don't, on the basis of their racial or economic group? What is it really about, this game of being human?

Kmele Foster is one of the most original and humane thinkers Josh has the privilege of knowing. Funny, fearless and wise, the two young dads sat down in Brooklyn during the Szeps Live Around-the-World Podcast Marathon to wrestle with Blackness, whiteness, racism, parenting, guilt-ridden woke white leftists in San Francisco (where Kmele lives) and the meaning of the cosmos.

After having a falling-out with Silicon Valley, Kmele was recently appointed the editor-at-large of Tangle, an independent news website that summarises arguments from the right, left, and center. Kmele's first column was this absolute barnstormer. He also serves on the board of directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and co-hosts the smash hit podcast The Fifth Column.

Don't miss this uplifting, provocative, moving, mind-expanding chat.

How much responsibility do podcasters have not to "platform" crazy voices? Is there a countervailing duty to explore unusual ideas, spurned by elites? Why did Sam Harris fearlessly take on Islam, Black Lives Matter and Gaza, but not transgender ideology? Are psychedelics a portal to another realm, will A.I. become conscious, and is Sam a hypocrite for eating meat?

Sam Harris is one of the world's most influential podcasters and commentators. He burst onto the scene as a prominent atheist but has since become an elder statesman of reason and logic, advocating mindfulness and rationality through his meditation app, Waking Up, and his podcast, Making Sense. 

Sam has always been a generous supporter of Josh's work and was kind enough to invite us to his private studio during the Szeps Live Around-the-World Podcast Marathon for a two-and-a-half-hour livestream. Enjoy this sparkling meeting of minds.

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 to discomfort with parts of the LGBTQIA+ agenda (especially relating to kids and transgenderism), Katy's ideas are gaining traction. Her policies would revolutionise - and in some case, criminalise - IVF, surrogacy, adoption, sperm donation, egg donation, and even divorce.

The group most targeted by biological-parenting laws would, of course, be gay parents - who, by definition, subvert the nuclear biological family.

While Katy was touring Australia, she was kind enough to stop by the Uncomfortable Conversations studios to make her case against gay parenting to one of Australia's most prominent gay dads, the host of this show.

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Can governments regulate “misinformation”? Or is that just a pretext for controlling what you can say? Were “the Twitter Files” a bombshell revelation of censorship, or a paranoid beat-up? How should Big Tech have grappled with issues like Russia, Covid, and the FBI?

Andrew Lowenthal worked with Matt Taibbi for months on the Twitter Files. He helped to create the Westminster Declaration to oppose any restrictions on online speech.

He used to work with leftie NGOs fighting for the digital rights of dissenters across the Asia-Pacific, until he saw his activist colleagues drift away from free speech towards the opposite – what he calls "anti-disinformation".

He now runs a digital civil liberties initiative called liber-net which argues that, under the cloak of countering misinformation, the powers-that-be suppress information, ideas, and opinions expressed by everyday people. Andrew is an Australian based in Europe and he was kind enough to stop by the Uncomfy Studios on a recent trip to Sydney.

Watch the in-the-flesh video on the YouTube page (subscribe while you’re there) and if you’re not a paid Substack subscriber, enjoy this preview of a much longer, gripping convo.

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Missy Higgins is one of Australia's most successful musicians. She exploded onto the scene in 2004. Her debut single launched at No. 1, her first album debuted at No. 1, and, barely out of her teens, she won the ARIA, Australia's Grammy, for Best Pop Release. 

Tabloid speculation swirled about her sexuality. Josh wants to know how she now thinks about gayness, love, fame and failure. Her new album, released exactly on the 20th anniversary of her first, is The Second Act. 

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In the lead-up to every U.S. election of the past 12 years, Chas Licciardello has hosted a national primetime television comedy show called Planet America, covering the ins and outs of American politics. 

He is a member of Australia's most famous comedy group, The Chaser, and starred in their satirical TV shows for nearly a quarter of a century: The Chaser Decides, CNNNN, The Chaser's War on Everything, Yes We Canberra! and The Hamster Wheel.

Chas and Josh sat down after the landmark presidential debate to share their thoughts. 

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Outside Australia, Alexander Downer is best known as the diplomat who kicked off the Mueller Investigation by alerting the FBI that one of Trump’s advisors, George Papadopoulos, said the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton over drinks in London. Downer was Australia’s ambassador to the UK at the time.

Inside Australia, Downer is a household name. He is the most consequential Foreign Minister in decades (what Americans call the Secretary of State), serving for over a decade during 9/11 and the Iraq War. As a senior government minister in the Five Eyes alliance, he was influential in formulating Western countries' response to ISIS and jihadism. Most recently, he was Australia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom (a position which, between Commonwealth countries, is called the High Commissioner).

Downer recently wrote about the UK race riots and the strains of multiculturalism. As someone deeply familiar with immigration, multiculturalism, Islamism and foreign policy, Josh wanted to pick his brain.

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Our societies are more diverse than ever, yet we spend more of our time with people just like us. Are we losing a sense of common life? Maybe the far left and the far right aren't the cause of our division, but a consequence of it?

Jon Yates is an entertaining, whip smart writer and activist who studies how to build a more united society. He says the problem is not that we're different from each other, but that we're distant from the other. We are not fractured because of Trump or Fox News or MSNBC - those are consequences, not the cause, of our fracturing. Our divisions create the space for demagogues, he argues, not the other way around.

Is he right? If so, what can we do? Jon has a few ideas. Many of them you won't like, especially the "Hitler-y" ones (we hope). But you definitely want to hear them.

Jon's book is called "Fractured". To hear more from clever bunnies like him, get our newsletter at https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/subscribe

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Are we too focused on race? Have recent anti-racist movements like The Voice to Parliament and Black Lives Matter abandoned the colour-blind spirit of the civil rights pioneers?

Josh took to the stage for a special one-night-only Uncomfortable Conversations live event with Coleman Hughes, one of America’s most prominent authors and thinkers on the topic of race.

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"The debate over free speech, hate speech, online harms, algorithms and social media is tangling us up in knots. Let’s get back to first principles, because our ability to survive the 21st century depends on it."

So wrote Josh in Australia's top newspapers on the weekend, linked below. He had gotten into a stoush on the national TV panel show Q+A with Australia's eSafety Commissioner, whom Elon Musk calls a “censorship commissar”, over free speech on social media.

Thanks to you, the listener whose attention makes this show possible, we needn't restrict ourselves to thinking inside the limitations of the television sound bite, or the newspaper column inch. Here, in a freewheeling, unfettered way, let’s wrestle with free speech, algorithms, incitement... and whether it's sexist to tweet that #NotAllMen are dicks.

Josh's article

Josh's episode of Q+A

The Australian's profile

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Andy is the producer The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling and previously of the New York Times' groundbreaking podcast The Daily.

During the riots and racial reckoning after the killing of George Floyd, newsrooms were roiled by existential questions: Should journalists be activists? Do white male journalists hide behind "objectivity" to impose their bias? Do they get coddled by media companies who hide their misdeeds, or do they suffer extra scrutiny as targets for the social-justice mob?

Andy was in the eye of the storm. He'd been snapped up by the world's most powerful newspaper to grow its audio division, co-creating The Daily and other celebrated podcasts like Caliphate and Rabbit Hole.

Then, in a life-altering cancel-culture frenzy, he lost it all.

Andy is in Sydney for the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, where he and Josh spoke together on a panel, "Speaking Bluntly: Identity politics in journalism". He stopped by the Uncomfortable Conversations studios to share his incredible tale, warts and all.

Andy's new podcast is Reflector.

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Can great TV & movies help us overcome political polarisation? Is being creative the same as being open-minded? Why are artists sometimes blinkered?

Emile Sherman is the Academy Award-winning producer of Heartstopper, Slow Horses, The King’s Speech, Top of the Lake, The Power of the Dog, Anthony Hopkins' latest film, One Life, and much more.

His new podcast, The Sandbox, interviews the key creatives behind his biggest shows and films about their creative process. His other podcast is Principle of Charity

If you’re on the free Uncomfortable Conversations podcast then this is a delightful twenty-odd-minute preview of the full conversation. Or enjoy the ninety-minute-plus intellectual adventure in all its Oscar-worthy glory by scoring your own primo podcast feed at https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/subscribe

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What should you make of comparisons between the present day and the 1930s? Is the greatest risk that we're sliding towards Nazi-style fascism? Or that we're being drawn into a civil war where half the country are villains?

Dennis Glover has a PhD in History from King’s College Cambridge and works as a professional speechwriter and author. He has written policy and speeches for many of Australia's most influential left-wing politicians including Julia Gillard and Kim Beazley.

He's the author of The Art of Great Speeches, Orwell’s Australia, An Economy is Not a Society, and The Last Man in Europe, a novel about George Orwell.

His new book is "Repeat: A Warning from History". 

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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 questions. Who gets to create? What is A.I. actually doing, under the hood? How is it impacting human work? Is the famous "Turing Test" even relevant any more? And by what measure would we even know if machines are "intelligent"? Might we already have achieved Artificial General Intelligence and will only know it with hindsight?

Professor Toby Walsh is one of the most respected - and most measured - A.I. academics in the world. He studied theoretical physics and mathematics at Cambridge, and got his PhD in artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. He's currently a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, where he runs the A.I. Institute, and the former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence.

At this tipping point in the evolution of A.I., Toby and Josh wrestle with the development of artificial intelligence, its future... and where that leaves the rest of us. Toby's new book is "The Shortest History of A.I."

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Two of the internet’s most intellectual contrarians sit down in a park with Josh. Magic ensues.

Jesse is among the world's most astute analysts of internet nonsense. He became a lightning rod when his 2018 Atlantic cover story was the first deeply reported mainstream article to question child transgender medicine.

His punishment was swift and severe, driving him into the netherworld of Podcastistan where his hit show with Katie Herzog, Blocked and Reported, analyses the pieties and group think of internet tribes. His own Substack is here.

Today's other guest is the most articulate, clear-headed contemporary thinker on race and social justice, tribalism and civil rights. He's been on The View, Real Time with Bill Maher and Joe Rogan. He's triggered a backlash from social justice warriors at the Ted conference with a Ted speech that transgressed racial taboos by calling for colourblind equality. His podcast is Conversations with Coleman and his Substack is here.

This episode is the audio of a YouTube video shot in New York City in early spring. Check it out here. It’s cool. (Oh, and subscribe to the YouTube channel, silly.)

Get tickets to see me and Coleman live in Melbourne here or at the festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney here.

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Why do some people have strong moral opinions but don't act on them, while other people effect real change?

It's a question Josh wanted to ask Australia's most influential athlete-turned-politican. David Pocock was a rugby champion who played for Australia's national team, one of the world's most iconic rugby sides.

He then became the first senator not aligned with any major political party to represent the Australian Capital Territory. He was one of the most prominent faces in a tsunami of independents who annihilated the ruling conservative government. The billionaire backer of that political revolution, Simon Holmes à Court, had a fascinating conversation on this show which you should listen to here

You don't neeeeed to hear Holmes à Court before listening to this episode, but it's a bloody great chat so you might as well.

Josh's conversation with The MeatEater, Steven Rinella, which Senator Pocock refers to at the start, can be heard here

Senator Pocock grew up in a white family in Zimbabwe in the 1990s before moving to Australia in his teens. He and Josh discuss his anti-racism, his activism, why Aussies gamble so much, what the purpose of sport is, and whether it's time to do away with the two-party system.

If you're new to this show and you're a fan of Dave Pocock's, here are a few other episodes you might want to check out:
Sam Harris
Megan Phelps Roper
Douglas Murray Live
Tim Minchin

Needless to say, subscribe to the show in your podcast app and on YouTube if you dig it.

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Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for the presidency, has chosen her running mate… and it isn’t one of the swing-state governors her pollsters were recommending.

Josh is surprised, impressed, and uncharacteristically chipper about what this means for Harris, for the election and for the future of the American left. Cheer up and dive in to everything you need to understand about the possible fiftieth vice president of the United States, Tim Walz.

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Vaccine mandates. Wokeness in Hollywood. The female pay gap. Race protests. Diversity programs. Covid lockdowns. #metoo. The so-called intellectual dark web tackled it all. A loose grouping of dissenting intellectuals and commentators, they sought to buck taboos and open minds.

What happened? Who went down the rabbit hole to crazy town, and who maintained thier heads? And where is the space for sane dissent today?

Dr Jamie Roberts is a political philosopher and university lecturer who has ruffled feathers by openly admiring some of what the IDW was trying to do -- and even teaching college classes on it. His new book is "The Way of the Intellectual Dark Web: What Joe Rogan and his associates can teach us about political dialogue". He and Josh perform a real-time post mortem on a still-metastasising movement.

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Have you ever wondered what’s up with Earth? Seriously. What the actual heck. Of all those trillions of space rocks, this one is all leafy and watery and lifey. What is it, this spaceship we’re on, this pale blue dot? Might it be a kind of living thing itself?

‌

This old hippy idea has been wrestled into a more fascinating, harder-headed thesis by the scientist and journalist Ferris Jabr. He's written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, National Geographic, Wired and The Los Angeles Review of Books; and he’s a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Scientific American. His new book is “Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life”.

‌

If your idea of a good time is listening to a couple of nerds geeking out on evolution, the cosmos, consciousness, and what happened to woolly mammoths, this is the episode for you, baby.

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Project 2025, technically the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, is a set of sweeping policy changes to be enacted on Day One of the next conservative administration. If Trump wins, that’s January 20th, 2025. Skye Perryman is one of the project’s leading opponents.

She’s the president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a non-profit that promotes democracy through court cases, lobbying and education. Washingtonian magazine named her one of this year’s Most Influential People Shaping Policy and her legal work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Skye and Josh debate what really matters in the stoush over Project 2025 and what Trump Round Two might look like.

This episode is a taste of a longer conversation. To hear the full chat and get more Uncomfortable Conversations content, head to: https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/subscribe

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How do you escape the shaming of the mob when you're a public figure with original ideas?

Tim Minchin is one of the most successful creatives Australia has ever produced. He wrote the music and lyrics for Matilda the Musical, which won more Olivier Awards than any other show in history at the time. Now in its 13th year, the show continues to sell out on the West End. The Broadway production was nominated for a stash of Tonys. The 2022 movie version is a riot.

Minchin went on to write the Broadway stage musical Groundhog Day, which scored seven Tony Award nominations and won the Olivier for Best New Musical.

Tim has starred in massive arena shows like Andrew Lloyd Webber's rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, and sells out stadiums with his own blend of music, comedy, and musical comedy. He co-wrote and starred in the hit television comedy show Upright and he's a staple on the biggest TV talk shows.

But he's been most influential as a thinker, rationalist and activist -- as a New Atheist, a Defender of the Enlightenment and a Renaissance Man. He often finds himself at odds with the progressive wing of the artistic scene... cautious about being cancelled, but compelled to call out the bullshit he sees.

Due to copyright, we aren’t able to include the full versions of the songs mentioned in this podcast, but I urge you to listen if you’re unfamiliar with Tim’s work:

White Wine In The Sun
https://youtu.be/fCNvZqpa-7Q?si=dTedPJk58G54Ikza

When I Grow Up
https://youtu.be/6Y82wktAEmQ?si=gVaVtvQIO1f8jCEB

Woody Allen Jesus

https://youtu.be/_SFdUJLebzU?si=1-rBM5ht7xt85V1S   

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First things first: The Uncomfortable Conversations LIVE touring empire is expanding, with live shows in Sydney and Melbourne in August with the inimitable Coleman Hughes. Tickets are selling fast. Get yours now. Don’t miss out:

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Meanwhile, the new YouTube page is going gangbusters. The episode you're listening to was shot as an outdoor TV interview on an early spring day in a Manhattan park. Check it out and subscribe to YouTube for more cool videos to come: https://bit.ly/UC_Videos

Thomas Chatterton Williams is a New Yorker who lives in Paris. He's the son of a Black father from the segregated South and a white mother from the West. He himself is the father of two white-looking children. Straddling the USA and Europe has given him a fascinating insight into identity, diversity and life as a Black man in America and in France. His memoir, Self–Portrait in Black and White, is a must-read.

As Thomas and Josh chat on a chilly but sunny New York day, they wrestle with the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks, Islamism, blood-and-soil right-wingers, George Floyd’s murder, racial profiling, and much more.

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When Sydney's biggest broadsheet newspaper published an opinion piece by Josh on the occasion of the Mardi Gras Gay Pride Parade, it triggered a backlash from some in the LGBT+ community. One of Josh's attackers was a prominent activist, Alastair Lawrie, the Director of Policy and Advocacy at the Justice and Equity Centre.

Instead of arguing with Alastair on Twitter, Josh invited him on the show to hash out their differences and discuss what challenges the LGBTQ+ community still faces.

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Well, what happens now? Does Donald Trump win? Does he lose? To whom? What are we all in for?

On the eve of Trump’s coronation as the Republican presidential candidate at the party’s National Convention this week, he was narrowly shot in an apparent assassination attempt at a rally.

Is this the most dramatic election of our lives? David Frum is one of the most influential anti-Trumpers to come out of a Republican White House. As President George W Bush’s speechwriter, he's credited with the famous phrase the "axis of evil". He wrote the first insider account of the Bush presidency. Frum is now a senior editor at The Atlantic.

David and Josh sat down shortly before the Trump shooting for the occasion of the Republican National Convention. They discuss Trump’s plans, Biden’s options, the fate of both parties… and of America.

In the first half-hour of this episode, Josh reflects on how to process this moment, and how the assassination attempt and response have already begun to shape what the future will hold for this campaign as well as American democracy at large.

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Josh Szeps

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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".

Carl and Josh debate fairness, democratic socialism, Bernie Sanders, Steve Jobs, diversity, whiteness, wokeness and wealth.

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"Transsexual" sounds like an old-fashioned term. But it describes a real medical condition in which your brain has the opposite sex from your body. Are transsexuals threatened by newer gender-queer, non-binary theories of sex?

Dr Dana Beyer says so. She's one of the most influential and effective trans activists in history. A medical doctor and self-described transsexual, she's been striding the hallways of power since the 1970s meeting with the likes of Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden to achieve landmark wins for LGBT rights. Today, she believes modern gender theory is harming transsexuals like herself.

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Boomers. Millennials. Gen X. Gen Z. Are you actually in control of your feelings about gender fluidity, social media, streaming television, laptops, jumbo jets and the pill, or have you absorbed the norms of your generation?

Dr Jean Twenge is a psychology professor who's been studying large, national surveys of young people for decades, teasing out how the generations differ. Her books include an analysis of millennials ("Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled―And More Miserable Than Ever Before"), Gen Z ("iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy―and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood―and What That Means for the Rest of Us") and most recently, a study of every single one of us in "Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's Future".

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Europe is holding its breath ahead of France’s parliamentary elections, in which a “far right” party could win power for the first time since WWII.

The hero of 21st-century right-wing European triumphalism is Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Many European far-right candidtaes are his devoted fan boys, as are farther-flung admirers like Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson.

This week, Hungary assumed the rotating leadership of the European Union presidency. Orbán’s first move was to swoop into Kyiv to tell the Ukrainian President to stop fighting and get along better with those nice Russkies.

How has this anti-Western, anti-democratic strongman upended a European democracy? What’s happened to Hungary? And could it happen here?

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President Biden’s catastrophic debate performance has left many people worried about his electoral chances against Donald Trump. At this late stage, is there any way out?

Here, you get a double feature. In the first half-hour, Josh shares his reaction to the debate and his advice on Democratic messaging. Then the iconic political scientist Yascha Mounk -- an expert in how democracies thrive or fail – joins us to explain the pathway to Democratic victory. But is Joe Biden part of the plan?

Finally, for premium subscribers, Yascha proposes a strategy for either the Republicans or the Democrats to win back popular support and re-stitch the fabric of American democracy.

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Why does the death of some people punch us in the gut, and others slide by? Does your way of grieving indicate what you value in life?

Judith Whelan died last night. She was 62. She was Josh’s mentor, his champion, his arch-defender, playmate, and confidante, despite being his boss’s boss’s boss. She is, in many ways, the person who made Josh’s current career possible.

Another mentor and friend, Howard Fineman, died two weeks ago. And Josh’s father is in the death spiral of Alzheimer’s.

Here, Josh answers a question his six-year-old daughter asked him this morning: Why is he crying for Judith Whelan… but not his own dad?

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What's up with kids these days? ADHD. Autism. Bullying. Toxic boys. Self-harming girls. Social media addiction. Coddled teens. Anxious parents. A lot of folks are wringing their hands about the young-un's mental health. Josh thought he'd pick the brain of one of the world's leading experts who actually works at the coalface with troubled kids. Dr Billy Garvey is a senior specialist in child mental health at one of the largest tertiary paediatric hospitals in the world.

Billy challenges many of Josh's assumptions about parenting and childhood. He's a fascinating, insightful, riveting guy whose own podcast about raising kids is called Pop Culture Parenting. His show is blowing up in Australia as parents crave simple, evidence-based strategies to raise tiny mewling lizard-people into flourishing human beings.

Billy's new book is Ten Things I Wish You Knew About Your Child’s Mental Health. Enjoy.

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Josh was at Jerry Seinfeld's Sydney show last night, which was disrupted by Palestinian protesters in the audience. Josh shares his initial reaction and reflects on Gaza activism and anti-Zionism.

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On September 11th, 2001, the Australian prime minister, John Howard, was scheduled to meet with President George W Bush at the White House. While he was hunkered down in Washington during the terrorist attacks, Australia was being run by his deputy, the Acting Prime Minister, John Anderson. John was the equivalent of Australia’s Vice President during some of the most significant events in recent history.

Anderson is a Christian conservative who opposed same-sex marriage and the 2023 indigenous referendum. He and Josh have a fascinating time, wrestling with the biggest issues of culture and politics -- from religious faith, to gay rights, to Gaza. He brings you his first-hand experience inside the halls of power. John now interviews public intellectuals on his podcast, Conversations with John Anderson.

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Is it useful or debilitating to frame Indigenous people merely as victims of history?

Anthony Dillon is an Indigenous Australian, an academic and commentator who rejects today’s popular ideologies about White Australia, invasion and racism. He and Josh wrestle with how to make progress on First Nations issues in an innovative way.

This episode is part of Permission to Think, a collaboration with the University of Technology Sydney, thanks to Professor Alan Davison. It’s a taste of a longer episode which you can hear by popping over to https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/subscribe

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Peter Helliar is one of Australia's biggest stand-up comedians. He was on TV every night for eight years as a panellist on The Project. He had his own network sitcom, How to Stay Married. He's a rockstar of the Melbourne Comedy Festival. He was nominated for Australia's biggest TV award, a Gold Logie. Last year, he was a contestant on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! When we sat down with him recently, he was playing the narrator in a live production of The Rocky Horror Show.

This interview was recorded shortly after another comedian, Arj Barker, asked a breastfeeding mother to leave his Melbourne Comedy Festival show when the baby was making too much noise, sparking a cultural debate about discrimination against mums versus the craft of comedy. Peter is hugely insightful as a performer. Enjoy.

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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 stateless - is the ongoing refusal by every Palestinian leader to accept that Israel is here to stay and there's no coming back.

To discuss her views and how the conflict has unfolded since October 7th, Einat joined Josh in our Sydney studios. This conversation took place at almost exactly the moment Israel began striking Iran, before the Iran news broke.

Watch this conversation on YouTube. And you’re missing out on our best ad-free content if you haven’t popped over to the Uncomfy Convos Substack page.

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Andrew Tate. Jordan Peterson. Joe Rogan. From where are young males getting their models of masculinity? What does it even mean to Be A Man in the 21st century?

Osher Günsberg is the biggest TV host Down Under. For the past 21 years, he has been a mainstay of the country’s biggest shows as the host of Australian Idol, The Bachelor, The Bachelorette and The Masked Singer, which were recently cancelled. He’s the narrator of Bondi Rescue, and his podcast, Better Than Yesterday, is one of the country’s biggest shows. In it, he discusses his mental health journey with high-profile guests.

Osher, like Josh, is the father of a boy. Here, he and Josh wrestle with male violence, women's safety, masculinity, mental health, and being a dad.

This conversation is a great listen in its own right, but the whole thing is even better. To hear the final section, get your own personalised premium ad-free feed by jumping over to https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/subscribe

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As the U.K. prepares for a sudden national election in four weeks, Helen Lewis and Josh wrestle with the issues that dominate all around the English-speaking world. Anger about rising prices – check. Anxiety about immigration – check. Dislocation due to globalisation – check. A culture war about wokeness – check.

Helen is arguably Britain's most insightful and entertaining journalist. Her interview with Jordan Peterson for GQ has nearly 70 million views on YouTube. She's done several terrific radio series and podcasts: The Spark, Great Wives, and The New Gurus; and she co-hosts The Private Eye Podcast. Her book, Difficult Women, was an instant classic. She’s a frequent panellist on the smash hit BBC TV panel show Have I Got News for You. And her columns in The Atlantic, where she is a staff writer, are a must-read.

If you believe the polls (and who could possibly doubt them these days?), the Labour Party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, is about to sweep away fourteen years of conservative rule. There’s no one better to explain why than the unmissable Helen Lewis.

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Josh had a rough week. He shares his advice about how to live a resilient, productive life -- to himself as much as to you. 

This is a preview of a longer monologue for paid subscribers. We hope you enjoy it. Thanks for listening.

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Does being "left-wing" mean giving everyone equal opportunities? Or does it mean elevating historically excluded groups like gays, trans folks and people of colour? Professor Clive Hamilton is a professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University. He was active in the civil rights movements of the 1970s and he founded the country's most important left-wing think tank, the Australia Institute, thirty years ago.

In additon to his many books about the threat from China and from climate change, he penned an article: "Wake up, lefties, and reject wokeness".

This episode is part of Permission to Think, a collaboration with the University of Technology, Sydney, where Josh is a visiting fellow. Thanks to the university’s dean of Arts and Social Sciences, Professor Alan Davison, for making it possible.

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We opened up the webcams for a live Zoom talkback episode. We discuss fascinating news stories, Josh shares a private essay he wrote to his friends who are having a dispute over Joe Rogan, and you’ll learn how he keeps his cool during testy conversations.

Keep an eye out for more live talkback sessions in the future, and make sure you’re signed up to http://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com to be part of the team.

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Wendy Harmer is the most groundbreaking female comedian in Australia. She shattered the glass ceiling in the 1980s as a stand-up comic and TV host, before ruling the radio airwaves for decades. Her book is “Lies My Mirror Told Me: A frank, funny, fearless memoir”. Josh picks her brain about when she bombed hosting television’s night of nights.

This is a taste of a longer episode for premium subscribers. If you'd like to hear the whole thing, pop over to the Substack page at https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/subscribe

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In Silicon Valley, it's hard to overstate the significance of Jaron Lanier. He coined the term "virtual reality" and founded the first virtual reality company in the '80s. You may recognise him as the dreadlocked polymath in the The Social Dilemma, Netflix's documentary about the harms of social media.

Today, he is a leader of a dissident group of tech geniuses who believe the hype of A.I. is overblown, in both its capabilities and its risks. While many of his colleagues speak of artificial intelligence as a mythological turning point for civilisation, he argues -- in books and in a series of groundbreaking essays in The New Yorker magazine -- that A.I. is just a tool. It's a mindless auto-complete bot.

Lanier's humanism is laudable and infectious. But Josh can't quite grok his dismissiveness of artificial intelligence. In this chat, Jaron is as frustrated by this impasse as Josh is. Enjoy the resulting to-and-fro.

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Why is the Australian government in a court battle with Elon Musk? Should taxpayers be paying for disabled Australians to hire hookers? Should campus protestors be as upset about the plight of the Uighurs as of Palestinians? And why has a lady been driving around with a deadly snake stowed in her car for months?

Josh breaks down the most intriguing stories of the week with two scintillating commentators: Claire Lehmann, the founder and editor of Quillette and a columnist for The Australian newspaper, and Peter van Onselen, the political editor of the Daily Mail Australia and a politics professor at the University of Western Australia.

This is a taste of a longer episode for premium subscribers. If you'd like to hear the whole thing, pop over to the Substack page at https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/subscribe

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Could independent politicians kill off the two-party system and make politics more accountable?

At the last Australian election, a decade of conservative government rule was brought to an end thanks largely to a wave of so-called "teal independents" supported by Simon Holmes à Court’s organisation. 

The son of Australia’s first billionaire and the heir to generations of influential politicians and businessmen, Simon Holmes à Court has become one of the most significant figures in Australian politics. His political revolution has challenged the status quo of the two major political parties and allowed communities to wrestle back power from institutions that don't represent them. This is a fascinating, wide ranging chat with a brilliant mind.

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Australia is in the grip of a national reckoning about male violence against women. Last month, 11 women died at the hands of men, almost half of whom were killed in the Bondi stabbing. Countless news reports describe an epidemic of men killing women. Rallies all over the country emphasise the central message: Men Need To Do Better. But what do the facts say? How can we best fix the problem? And is Josh merely being a defensive, toxic male when he says it’s “not all men”? Josh seeks to bring reason to an emotional conversation.

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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 explanations of what your experiences actually are at their most profound level; why you probably don't have a soul; whether sufficiently intelligent machines will ever feel internally emotional alive... and how we'll even be able to tell. 

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A legend of Australian comedy, Meshel Laurie has endured her share of woke social media pile-ons. The top-rating radio host, comedian and TV performer is invariably described as “divisive”. Why? Because she’s a woman? Because she’s uncensored? 

Meshel’s podcasts are Australian True Crime and Can We Be Real. Here, she and Josh reflect on social media, alcohol, drugs, comedy, stardom, Buddhism, the pandemic, and how to discuss male violence without alienating men.

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We opened up the phones to field questions from the listeners for our first-ever live talkback episode. We discussed fascinating news stories as well as the hard-hitting topics the mainstream media refuses to touch, like why it's okay to eat dog.

Keep an eye out for more live ask-me-anything sessions in the future, and make sure you’re signed up to uncomfortableconversations.substack.com to get involved.

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He’s the man who introduced Joe Rogan to hunting.

Steven Rinella hosts the long-running TV show and podcast MeatEater. He’s an outdoorsman, conservationist, writer and TV star who's written ten books about wildlife, hunting, fishing, and wild game cooking. But best of all, he’s a generous and wise thinker about ecology and animal suffering.

Josh has never shot an animal in his life. Enjoy.

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