Podcast
Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps
Hosted by Josh Szeps · EN
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
51episodes
Episodes
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Josh vs the News: How The Odyssey Broke the Internet
Yesterday00:32:43Tap to summarizeThe 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-p60gprand David French’s NYT column here:https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/opinion/odyssey-christopher-nolan-greek-gods.htmlOh, 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"?
5d ago00:47:56Tap to summarizeDr 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
1w ago01:49:14Tap to summarizeAre 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)
2w ago00:13:02Tap to summarizeJournalist 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?
2w ago01:15:49Tap to summarizeScreen 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"
3w ago00:25:10Tap to summarizeHow 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?
3w ago01:37:08Tap to summarizeIs 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
4w ago00:17:36Tap to summarizeWhen 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
Jun 2901:38:32Tap to summarizeAustralia'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
Jun 2601:44:40Tap to summarizeWhy 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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