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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 and to someday be prime minister.
She and Josh wrestle with new media and old, feminism, schisms in the online mediaverse, Rupert Murdoch, and holding guests - and themselves - to account.
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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 - on everything from AIDS to Iraq to Obama.
Andrew pioneered online journalism as one of the first superstar "bloggers". He wrote for the likes of London's Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, the Atlantic, Time magazine, the New York Times Magazine and New York magazine. He now publishes The Weekly Dish on Substack.
Josh and Andrew discuss his gay marriage fight, the opposition from gays, the transgender culture wars, HIV/AIDS, the "LGBTQ+ community", Andrew's college life in Reagan's America, and how he won over a conservative country to a radical agenda (and how liberals might do it again).
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Terms like "genocide" and "apartheid" are thrown around a lot by anti-Israel activists. But when a leading Israeli Holocaust historian declares his own country to be a genocidal apartheid state, we ought to listen.
Born and raised in Israel, Dr Goldberg is a professor in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was the head of the university's Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry until last year.
Goldberg is a world-renowned expert on the cultural history of Jews during the Holocaust, in particular in the Warsaw Ghetto. He's been a visiting scholar at many of the top institutes for the study of genocide all over Europe and America, including at Cornell University and at The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
These bona fides give Goldberg the authority to level devastating accusations against his homeland. He recently went viral after co-authoring an opinion piece in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, entitled "There's No Auschwitz in Gaza. But It's Still Genocide".
Professor Goldberg made time for Josh from his office in Jerusalem.
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How do you reconcile Trump's passion for American Greatness with his disengagement from international systems which America set up? What are the consequences so far of Trump's tariff flip-flops? Can Ukraine be resolved by the Great Powers alone? Do volatile bond markets predict the end of the U.S. dollar? Where does this all leave America in relation to the rest of the world? And what's the deal with Qatar's gift of a blingy Air Force One?
David Smith is an expert in American and international politics with the U.S. Studies Centre in Sydney. He's an Aussie who got his PhD in political science from the University of Michigan.
Here, he helps us understand the real theory underpinning Trump's foreign policy, and how it's likely to shake out.
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We've got a special treat for you today. Josh sat down with the hosts of the "Changed My Mind" podcast, who interrogated him about whether it's really possible, in our divided times, to change someone's mind.
Josh shares his thoughts about the art of persuasion; reveals topics on which his position has changed; and wrestles with conundrums like factory farming, freedom of speech and abortion.
How persuadable are people, really? Josh is more hopeful than many.
"Changed My Mind" is hosted by Aidan Alexander and Thom Norman.
You can check out the tool we discussed that Thom and Aidan's non-profit created to offset your diet's impact on animals at compassioncalculator.org, and if you use the code uncomfortable conversations you'll get your donation matched 100%.
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Gurwinder rose to fame writing elaborately insightful Twitter threads about how to be human in the twenty-first century. He now publishes The Prism, on Substack, a guide to navigating the digital age.
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Are people too disagreeable these days? Or, in fact, are we losing the knack for disagreement? Are we self-silencing? Or getting more rude?
Jenara Nerenberg is the founder and host of The Neurodiversity Project. She's a Harvard graduate who lectures widely on neuroscience and diversity, and who runs workshops at institutions like the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Her new book, "Trust Your Mind: Embracing Nuance in a World of Self-Silencing", investigates the psychology of “self-silencing” and the toxic impact of groupthink.
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Are we alone? If alien life exists, why can't we find it? What's "the great filter"? Why is the universe set up the way it is? What are the chances there 's some purpose to it all? And is BBC News correct in reporting that "Scientists find 'strongest evidence yet' of life on distant planet"? What have we actually found? What might it mean?
Whenever the news turns to alien life, Josh turns to his favourite astrophysicist, Dr. Sara Webb, at the Swinburne Institute of Technology in Melbourne. Light up a reefer, lie on your back, gaze at the stars, and pop this one in your ear holes, humans.
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The internet is a dumpster fire. Are you a firefighter? Or an arsonist?
This episode is a cracker. Sacha Judd is an expert on internet subcultures. A former lawyer, she has become something like “the Mark Cuban of New Zealand” - a smart, left-wing investor in high-growth startups; advisor to businesses; and fierce commentator on Big Tech.
Sacha wants to bring back the “good internet”: a place fueled by genuine community, creativity, and connection.
She and Josh wrestle with online conspiracy theories, artificial intelligence, social-media content moderation, whether platforms like Substack have a “Nazi problem”, and whether Mark Zuckerberg just wants to say the R-word.
They get into a few fascinating arguments about free speech, transphobia, A.I., and whether Twitter’s content moderation was ever ‘woke’. Don’t miss this terrific chat.
Follow Sacha here and, if you enjoy this conversation, do bother to throw the price of a Venti Mocha Frappuccino into a monthly subscription. If you, our audience, don’t devote sixty seconds to subscribing, then this show dies. You’ll score more episodes, longer chats, no ads, and video livestreams that you don’t even know exist. Go for it right now. Right here.
For more on the Australian election, check out Josh’s Livestream with Peter van Onselen here.
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Do nuclear weapons protect Western civilisation? Or are they an insane error that humanity should undo? Is nuclear power worth the cost and risk?
Dave Sweeney co-founded the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.
Dave and Josh debate the risks and rewards of nuclear weapons and nuclear power in an unstable world, and discuss whether environmentalism is antithetical to progress.
To hear every bit of this fascinating, two-hour-plus conversation with no ads, subscribe here. And follow Dave's work at the Australian Conservation Foundation here.
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Have indigenous Welcomes-to-Country gone too far?
On Friday, far-right hecklers disrupted the Welcome to Country (i.e. the land acknowledgment, in North American parlance) of a profound Australian national event, the Anzac Day Dawn Service.
The protest has sparked a national firestorm about race, racism and remembrance.
Josh shares his thoughts about the coverage of the controversy, and then debates its deeper implications with the Indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta.
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What’s social media doing to us, and how would you fix it?
Mark Zuckerberg has been a busy boy on the witness stand in Washington DC lately. In one of the most consequential antitrust cases in tech history, Meta is being sued by the U.S. government for allegedly maintaining a monopoly. It could reshape the future of social media, privacy regulation, and Big Tech.
But in an ideal world, how would you reform social media? How might we prevent it from deranging us?
Frances Haugen worked at Google and Facebook as a product manager and data engineer. She helped build algorithms that tweaked the ranking of search results. Then she made global news as a whistleblower, collaborating with the Wall Street Journal on bombshell stories about Facebook's misdeeds. She appeared on 60 Minutes and testified before Congress.
Frances and Josh discuss the problems with social media and what practical steps she recommends to reform the industry... and save civilisation.
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What do you make of a U.S. government that snatches people off the street and disappears them into Central American prisons, forever, with no trial, and no way to appeal?
Matt Welch is a libertarian journalist. He's no wild-eyed, Trump-loathing leftie. Fresh off the back of his appearance on Bill Maher, Matt joined Josh on Josh's streaming TV show, Szeps Live, to riff about Elon, DOGE, government effectiveness, abundance liberalism, high-speed rail, Orbán, Erdoğan, el Salvador, the Supreme Court, and, ultimately, whether America is sliding towards an illiberal, MAGA-tinged, Hungary-style democratic authoritarianism.
Follow Matt over at The Fifth Column, and catch Szeps Live every Tuesday at 9pm ET on Substack.
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What's the purpose of school? Why do we run schools the way we do? How might we reinvent education in an era of artificial intelligence and ADHD?
Professor Pasi Sahlberg is one of the world's leading education experts. He ran Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture, moved to Washington DC to advise the World Bank on education, and was a visiting professor at Harvard University. His award-winning book is "Finnish Lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland?"
Pasi is now a professor at the University of Melbourne. He sat down with Josh to discuss radical ideas in teaching, learning, play, discipline, devices, and how to view school from the perspective of a child.
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The Democratic Party is paralysed. It can't merely offer resistance to Trump. It also needs to offer an alternative to him. But how? Should they oppose his every move, as the likes of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Cory Booker believe? Or should they shut up and wait for the president to doom himself, as Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and former Clinton consultant James Carville prefer? How have Democrats fallen... and what can they do now?
David Pakman is the guy Josh goes to for a vibe-check of the American left. He hosts one of the most-watched progressive YouTube shows in the world, The David Pakman Show, with over three million subscribers. His book is "The Echo Machine: How Right-Wing Extremism Created a Post-Truth America".
This week, David appeared on Szeps Live, which airs on Substack every Tuesday night at 9pm ET. They discuss their criticisms of the president, the curious spinelessness of congressional Republicans, how the Democrats can recover, and to what extent the left's woes are caused by purity tests and social-justice dogmas.
You can follow David's YouTube show here and watch Josh's Substack show, for free, every week, by signing up here.
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When are independent shows like Uncomfortable Conversations serving a useful purpose... and when are they just preaching to the choir?
"Decoding the Gurus" is a podcast that dissects how new-media personalities gain guru status. Frequently, such podcasters claim to be bravely challenging the status quo... while comfortably pandering to their team. Is Josh such a hack?
Josh is in Tokyo visiting one of the Decoding hosts, Chris, who lives there. The three of them caught up to record this crossover episode -- reflecting on Josh's run-ins with the likes of Candace Owens and Joe Rogan, debating the role of the new media vs the legacy media, and establishing, once and for, why Lex Fridman is a robot.
You can find the Decoding the Gurus podcast here.
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Anthony Bourdain was Josh's hero. Laurie Woolever was, as Bourdain called her, his "lieutenant".
A writer and culinary graduate, Laurie had worked for another gigantic cooking celebrity, Mario Batali, before he was brought down for alleged sexual harrassment.
She spent almost ten years as Bourdain's right-hand-gal. The two of them wrote two books together, one of which they were halfway through when Bourdain died by suicide in 2018. Laurie posthumously published "Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography".
Josh asks Laurie about her life with Bourdain, his struggles, her addiction, his death, and whether his romanticism and hedonism brought him down. Laurie's new memoir is called "Care and Feeding".
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Do males and females differ in what we want out of life? In what jobs we want to do? In how much we want to look after babies, or run a tech start-up, or sweep the living room, or be a CEO? Or are biological preferences just an excuse to justify inequality?
Cordelia Fine is a feminist academic who studies scientific explanations of sex differences and workplace inequality. Her books on gender have won prizes at the Royal Society, been recommended by the Sunday Times, and cited as among the Top Ten books on women of the past thirty years.
Professor Fine has a psychology degree from Oxford, a Master of Philosophy from Cambridge, and a PhD in Psychology from University College London. She's now a professor of the History & Philosophy of Science at Melbourne University. Her latest book is "Patriarchy, Inc."
Josh and Cordelia debate biology, culture, sexism, masculinity, transgenderism, the patriarchy, and what gender equality should look like in the 21st century.
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If you want to see what's wrong with not being offensive, watch Snow White.
The new Disney re-make is so committed to not offending anyone that it’s a social-justice jumble. Snow White isn’t white as snow; her love interest isn’t a prince; the dwarves aren’t “dwarves”; but there IS a dwarf in a non-dwarf role; Snow White doesn’t need a man; the man doesn’t “stalk” her; she’s a bad-ass independent gal; the word “dwarf” isn’t mentioned. It’s a mess.
As Australian politicians introduce sweeping hate-speech laws, Josh argues that Snow White gives us a glimpse of the dystopian cultural wasteland that awaits us if we try never to offend.
Hey, it may be a long bow. But Szeps is committed to drawing it. Enjoy.
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Even if you're not Australian, you want to listen to this conversation with one of the nation's most iconic statesmen.
Bob Carr is a former foreign minister of Australia (i.e. the secretary of state) and, before that, the longest-continuously-serving Premier of NSW, Australia's most populous state. He's an intellectual powerhouse, an icolonoclast, a champion debater, a student of American history, of geopolitics and of diplomacy.
For the first portion of this conversation, he and Josh discuss Australian issues - nuclear submarines, his tenure as state leader. But the second half is a delightful rumination on power, Trump, the liberal world order, China, success, legacy, and grief.
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