Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Epizode

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  Are Jews Okay? (with baklava) 06.08.2026 17min

  Is Israel making Jews safer, or less safe? Does pro-Palestinian activism feed antisemitism, or is that a Zionist lie? And why are Greek men so hunky? Two of Josh’s favourite gals, ChayaLeah and Yael from the “Ask a Jew” podcast, join Josh from California and Greece for a funny but forthright catch-up about freedom, terrorism, Palestine and felafel. Enjoy.
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  Josh vs the News: Why Everyone is Wrong About A.I. 05.08.2026 48min

  Fable this. Deepseek that. As fascinating as each new A.I. model breakthrough (or breakout) is, are we missing the forest for the trees? The Reverend Josh believes so. In this scintillating Substack Livestream, he leads us to the Promised Land the way all great Messiahs do: with a four-point bureaucratic plan. Along the way, he’ll answer your questions about Israel, sun protection, and how much he can bench.
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  Why is Trump Building a Secret Ballroom Bunker? 03.08.2026 1h 32min

  Exploding pagers! Enigma codes! Sexy Israeli spies! J Edgar Hoover's boyfriend's remote-controlled window opener! And, yes, Trump's top-secret ballroom bunker. It's all told with impeccable style by Matt Bevan, the host of If You're Listening, which is one of Josh’s favourite shows about international intrigue. The show's companion book, If You're Listening: Declassified, explores how history is a patchwork of conflicting accounts, misremembered details and outright myths. Matt regales Josh with the most amazing anecdotes of espionage... and to explain what Hezbollah's exploding pagers have in common with the bunker which Dick Cheney hid in on 9/11. Help us improve the show! Share your thoughts and have your say, take the Uncomfortable Conversations Audience Survey: https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/p/have-your-say-to-shape-the-show
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  Buckle Up for “the Manosphere 2.0” - Helen Lewis 30.07.2026 18min

  What’s up with boys? Or, more importantly, what’s up with the men who use “what’s up with boys?” to crush women? It’s not just a rag-tag fringe of young male influencers who are reviving sexism. There’s a professional movement of influential Christian nationalists whose long-term agenda is to return women to their rightful place, as homebound subjects of their husbands. Helen Lewis’ reporting on gender, politics, and internet culture has made her one of the sharpest voices on the culture wars. She became a viral sensation when she bested Jordan Peterson in a 2018 debate about gender roles for British GQ. She’s now a staff writer at The Atlantic, where her recent cover feature was “The New Gender War”. Helen and Josh unpack the evolving backlash to feminism and liberalism, the furore around surrogacy and transgender rights, Andrew Tate… and what the World Cup had to do with all of it.
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  Josh vs the News: How The Odyssey Broke the Internet 27.07.2026 32min

  The way culture-war ideologues have hijacked The Odyssey reveals how social media ruins everything. As go the arguments about the film, so go our conversations about fairness, gender, race and immigration. And so go our elections. Josh recounts the online sh**storm, and draws a long bow from Homer to Christopher Nolan to how civilisations like ours collapse. Read Josh’s column in the Australian Financial Review here: https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/culture-war-ideologues-have-hijacked-christopher-nolan-s-odyssey-20260720-p60gpr and David French’s NYT column here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/opinion/odyssey-christopher-nolan-greek-gods.html Oh, and go back and watch “Just Josh: The Woke Catastrophe of Snow White” here: https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/p/just-josh-the-woke-catastrophe-of?utm_source=publication-search
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  Is this Child Psychiatrist "Anti-Trans"? 23.07.2026 47min

  Dr Jillian Spencer is a senior child and adolescent psychiatrist who was fired three years ago after publicly criticising how puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones were being prescribed to kids. Now, her employer, one of the biggest health care providers in the country, has issued a bombshell statement. Children's Health Queensland has announced that it is withdrawing its misconduct allegations against her, and effectively admits that her concerns were legitimate all along. It’s a potential turning point in the transgender debate. Dr Spencer flew from Brisbane to Sydney to join Josh in the Uncomfortable Conversations studio and tell an extraordinary story of groupthink, institutional pressure and medical integrity.
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  How Evolution Shaped Men vs Women 20.07.2026 1h 49min

  Are men innately more violent? Are women innately more people-focused? What explains gay people, campness, transgenderism? How much of the sex differences are cultural, and how much is hardwired by our evolutionary psychology? The science of the sexes has come a long way. Steve Stewart Williams is a psychology professor who wrote the groundbreaking book The Ape That Understood the Universe and whose new book is A Billion Years of Sex Differences: How Evolution Shaped the Minds of Men and Women. Steve joins Josh to explore the science of the sexes, from aggression to promiscuity to parenting, and what recent research reveals about how, and why, men and women behave the way we do.
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  Do Not Speak Ill of Lindsey Graham's Butthole (and other advice for America) 16.07.2026 13min

  Journalist and ne’er-do-well Michael C. Moynihan joins Josh for a Substack livestream about the state of American politics, far-left candidates, far-right ICE agents, and the importance of being respectful, in this time of mourning, towards the late Senator Lindsey Graham’s butthole.
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  Have Kids Become Little Shits? 13.07.2026 1h 15min

  Screen time. Free range parenting. Attention deficit disorder. Social media bans. And that little bastard on the plane kicking the back of your seat the whole flight. Are we losing control because of parenting advice that's overthought, overcomplicated bullshit? Today's guest says so. Ryan Martin is an educator who specialises in helping families navigate the wild terrain of raising challenging kids. He's been a school principal in the outback and a teacher in the big city. He joins Josh to provide real humour, wit and wisdom for parents, educators and the rest of us about how to raise better kids. Ryan's new book is "Little F*ckers: A book for parents of cranky, crazy, lazy, fabulous, amazing little humans".
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  Race, ICE & the "Woke Right" 09.07.2026 25min

  How do you stay enthusiastic about defending your opponents’ right to say things you hate? That’s the pickle of the free-speech defender in these crazy times. Whether it’s Trump dragging his enemies through courts, ICE agents kidnapping activists or the Florida government banning ‘wokeness’, David Volodzko - once a victim of left-wing cancel culture who now fights right-wing cancel culture, too - has his hands full. David is a journalist who spent much of his adult life in Asia. After reporting from countless hot spots and war zones, he became an editorial board member and columnist at The Seattle Times. He was fired less than two months later, after a social-media mob called him a Nazi. David is now a News Editor & Senior Writer at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a free speech activist group, and his Substack is The Radicalist, where he writes about political extremism, philosophy, and history. He joined Josh to discuss the conversations around wokeness, "hate speech", Black crime... and the brouhaha over colourblind casting in ‘The Odyssey’.
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  Is Morality Made Up? 06.07.2026 1h 37min

  Is everything you believe about right and wrong just an accident of where you were born? Or is morality a universal truth waiting to be discovered? And if you dedicate your life to answering these questions, how would you feel if one of the greatest moral problems of our time unfolded around you? David Enoch is a world-leading ethicist and philosopher of law. He also happens to be an Israeli who's vocally critical of the Israeli government. David is a professor at Oxford University and holds a chair in the Philosophy of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has spent time in a military jail in Israel for refusing to serve in the West Bank and been arrested for protesting Benjamin Netanyahu. David joins Josh to discuss how we know what's right and wrong, how politics should react to our moral conclusions, and how to judge Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, the war in Gaza, and the international law that’s meant to govern both.
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  Why We Don’t Believe Boys: Female Grooming & the Male Teen 02.07.2026 17min

  When Harry was thirteen, his stepmother initiated a sexual relationship with him that lasted for three years and made him a father at fifteen. The horror and confusion of feeling complicit, of being treated as the guilty party, of seeing bystanders gaslit and abusers exonerated, motivated Harry to launch a political campaign, #YourReferenceAintRelevant. Last month, he succeeded in changing the law to abolish "good character" references in criminal trials. Harry was generous enough to visit the Uncomfortable Conversations studio to talk Josh through the head-spinning dynamics of being seduced as a boy; how the sentencing of sexual and domestic violence abusers is broken; and how gender expectations affect how we think about teenage victims. His bestselling new memoir is "Transform Your Pain into Purpose". If you need a hand with any similar issues you might be going through, the 24/7 phone number for the sexual assault, domestic and family violence counselling service in Australia is 1-800-RESPECT. In the US, it's 1-800-656-HOPE, and in the UK 0808-500-2222.
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  Josh vs the News: The TODAY Show, Cancel Culture, and Karl's Free Speech 29.06.2026 1h 38min

  Australia's most famous TV host has just been cancelled… but has he really? The "Matt Lauer of Down Under", Karl Stefanovic, hosted the TODAY Show for more than two decades. Suddenly, he was fired on Friday after a chummy interview on his new independent podcast with the British anti-Muslim activist Tommy Robinson. The podcast only launched four months ago. Is this cancel culture? An attack on free speech? Or was Karl inviting his exit by modelling himself on Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson? Josh has been inundated with requests for a hot take, as someone who was cancelled from his own show during Peak Woke. In this improvised live editorial, he shares his analysis of the furious debate that the controversy has ignited about free speech, editorial independence, partisanship, media fragmentatiom... and the future of healthy conversations.
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  Why don't Palestinians have a state? Haviv Rettig Gur on the True Tale of Palestinian Resistance 26.06.2026 1h 44min

  Why don't Palestinians have a state? To answer "because Israel" is to treat Palestinians as props in a Western morality play, rather than as a people in a fight for survival. The true tale of Palestinian resistance is an incredible story of power, Zionism, Maoism, Algerian anti-colonialism, Islamic liberation and Arab nationalism. Haviv Rettig Gur is an Israeli journalist and political analyst who's critical of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and its war crimes in Gaza. But he's also deeply informed about the nature of Palestinian resistance. As the senior analyst at The Times of Israel and a Middle East analyst at The Free Press, he's covered the region for the better part of two decades. His podcast is Ask Haviv Anything. This mind-blowing conversation could transform how you understand the Gaza War. If you respect Palestinians as agents in their fate, rather than as victims in a Westernised fable, you'll be gripped by Haviv's insights into what's gone wrong in the Middle East.
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  Just Josh: a New UK PM, the New Left, New Right, & Brexit 10 Years On 24.06.2026 34min

  It’s 10 years since Britain voted to leave the EU, and their revolving door of Prime Ministers just keeps spinning. Josh goes live to share his thoughts on the potential new Prime Minister, the New Left and Right, and where Britain goes from here…
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  Angertainment: How Online Outrage Ruined Everything 22.06.2026 16min

  Can we blame polarisation on right-wing internet crazies? Or is the whole online system shot? The most valuable thing we produce online is anger. Not our data, our habits, or our clicks, but our anger. Ed Coper is a progressive activist who wants us to understand how tech platforms farm anger on an industrial scale. He calls it angertainment: the machinery that turns outrage into clicks, clicks into money, and money into power. Ed and Josh disagree on the politics of the problem, with Josh feeling Ed gives left-wing groupthink too much of a pass. Ed built digital political campaigning on the left in Australia, turning left-wing activist group GetUp into a political force. He’s advised everyone from Greta Thunberg to Malala Yousafzai. This conversation is a fascinating rumble about how legacy institutions have failed people, which voices are amplified by the algorithm, and whether we can save the conversation without censorship. Ed’s new book is “Angertainment: How Social Media Outrage Ruined Everything”. He appears at The Wheeler Centre in Melbourne on Wednesday 24 June.
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  Just Josh: Iran's Billions & Elon's Trillion 19.06.2026 59min

  The Reverend Josh breaks down Trump's surrender to (sorry, “memorandum of understanding with”) Iran; what Elon's trillion-dollar payday revealed about the far left, the far right, AI and prosperity; how we might interpret the rise of populist, anti-immigrant parties in the UK and Australia; and why you should spurn pessimism and tales of civilisational collapse, and have a weekend of grace. What a week!
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  The Gays Who Reject "LGBTQ+" 15.06.2026 1h 33min

  What's the "queer community"? Who's "LGBTQIA+"? When did sexuality get hitched to a queer cultural movement aimed at deconstructing gender, colonialism and white male privilege? What happens when a boring old gay guy dissents? Ben Appel found out. Raised in a fundamentalist Christian community, he expected his Ivy League University experience to be one of liberation. Instead, he found the minds of queer college activists as closed as his pastor's. Ben joins Josh to describe his run-ins and to ask whether the rights of gay people are served by an LGBTQIA+ coalition now as preoccupied with Gaza and trans ideology as it is with gay people themselves. Ben's new memoir is Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic.
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  WTF? Gladiator Battles on the White House Lawn: How MMA & the Manosphere Took Over America (& the White House) 11.06.2026 13min

  On Sunday, mixed martial arts fighters will beat the crap out of each other in a 90-foot-tall Ultimate Fighting Championship cage on the South Lawn of the White House. Senator John McCain once denounced the sport as "human cockfighting". President Trump loves it so much he's made it a centrepiece of the United States' 250th birthday celebrations. Trump isn't alone. Not long ago, MMA was considered too violent even to be offered alongside pornographic movies on pay-per-view cable. Now, it's a mainstream juggernaut. How did this happen? The story is an insane saga involving Las Vegas, Covid, Joe Rogan, MAGA and the spectacular ambition of one man: Dana White.  White, who built the UFC, is on the cover of TIME magazine this week. His profile was written by TIME's senior sports correspondent, Sean Gregory, who visited with White, Trump and legendary Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel for his piece. Sean Gregory joins Josh to explain the wild origins of MMA, the alliances that turbocharged it, Dana White's role in delivering young men to MAGA, and what the UFC tells us about masculinity, the manosphere, and where America finds itself today.
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  "Smile! Civilisation is Collapsing" with Sarah Wilson 08.06.2026 1h 12min

  In a world of catastrophic fires, record floods, collapsing democracies and rising unrest, our lives have rarely felt more precarious. So how do we keep living meaningfully through it? And if (or when) it all comes apart, what kind of people do we want to be? Sarah Wilson is a New York Times bestselling author, whose new book, ‘I Eat the Stars’, chronicles how we might live meaningfully, sanely, and hopefully, survive the end of civilisation. Live at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne, Sarah sits down with Josh to discuss how we face difficult truths without succumbing to doom, whether rumours of humanity’s death are greatly exaggerated, and how oddly liberating it is to recognise you are useless to capitalism.