Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Join Matt Welch and Kmele Foster, co-hosts of The Fifth Column podcast, for a fiery live panel at the Comedy Cellar. They discuss the evolving role of satire in politics and how humor can challenge authority. The duo tackles the media's collapse and the rise of podcasting as a news source. They debate the ethical dilemmas of platforming controversial voices while sharing hilarious anecdotes, including one about Epstein's Island. It’s a night of laughter, insightful critiques, and the absurdities of today's media landscape.

Tyler Cowen, a renowned economics professor at George Mason University and influential blogger at Marginal Revolution, dives into pressing topics like urban inequality, critiquing traditional solutions like rent control. He discusses the nuanced relationship between immigration policies and economic sustainability amid societal concerns. Cowen also explores the tensions around free speech in academia and the intersection of AI with intellectual discourse, weaving in personal insights about happiness and the future of knowledge.

Sarah Haider, co-founder of Ex-Muslims of North America and outspoken advocate for those leaving Islam, opens up about her transformative journey from atheism to exploring spirituality. She addresses the unsettling religious undertones within progressive ideologies, revealing her disillusionment with the existing atheist movement. The conversation also dives into the emotional complexities of belief, the struggle for meaningful dialogue in cultural debates, and the moral imperatives that shape ethical frameworks in today's society.

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 the SZEPS 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 filter. For the next two weeks, Josh will go head to head, live, with some of the world’s most fascinating minds before a global audience in back-to-back foreign locales. From London to Los Angeles, New York to Malibu, Josh and his long-suffering producer, Jono, are hopscotching the planet to visit a parade of iconoclasts and intellectual troublemakers, broadcasting raw, unfiltered conversations sometimes multiple times a day. To enjoy every morsel, subscribe for free to get notified whenever we go live. You'll be able to watch every episode as it streams in real time. To catch up afterwards, about half the shows will be exclusive for paid subscribers. For the price of a cup of coffee a month, you'll get the whole enchilada. All will be available on your podcast app too. The tour's centrepiece will be a high-voltage live event at New York’s iconic Comedy Cellar – the stomping ground of Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle and Robin Williams – on Tuesday July 29th at 6pm ET (11pm in London, 3pm in LA, 8am Wed in Sydney). Put it in your calendar. It'll be a no-holds-barred panel discussion with some of the biggest names in New York journalism. Your normal podcast release schedule may be a little wonky while we fly blind around the planet, streaming live with no safety net, chasing the most fascinating minds… while jet lag fries ours. But you're a big kid. You can handle it. Today's episode is the first cab off the rank - a livestream from a Brooklyn rooftop with panoramic views of Manhattan and the one-&-only  Jesse Singal, co-host of the smash hit podcast Blocked and Reported, and one of America's most courageous reporters on youth gender medicine. Buckle up, humans, for the most audacious live-streaming event in Substack's history.

Osher Günsberg, a well-known Australian TV host and mental wellness advocate, engages in a candid discussion about navigating fame and personal struggles. He shares insights on managing anxiety, depression, and the misconceptions surrounding success. The conversation touches on the importance of resilience, confronting personal pain, and finding meaning in life beyond surface achievements. With humor and heartfelt anecdotes, Osher emphasizes the need for self-reflection and the pursuit of genuine fulfillment in a fast-paced world.

Dr. Billy Garvey, a leading developmental paediatrician and founder of Guiding Growing Minds, dives into pressing issues surrounding childhood mental health. He and host Josh Szeps tackle the surge in ADHD and anxiety, questioning the impact of modern parenting and education. They explore masculinity, the challenges of diagnosing developmental disorders, and the complexities of neurodiversity in schools. The need for a balance between unconditional love and allowing freedom in parenting is also discussed, making for a thought-provoking conversation on raising resilient kids.

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 Independent Studies. He's a data scientist with postgrad qualifications in physics who leads the centre's energy systems research. He argues that most assessments of renewable energy are incomplete or misleading. If you missed Josh's chat with the renewable-energy engineer and entrepreneur Saul Griffith on June 10th, you might want to give it a listen first here. Here, Aidan and Josh debate how to think about generating and supplying cheap power to a high-tech society... and whether the answer to our growing energy needs is staring us right in the face. 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. http://twitter.com/joshzepps http://instagram.com/joshszeps/ http://tiktok.com/@uncomfyconversations

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 “who you are” is shaped by “who you are with.” Professor Jetten is from the Netherlands, but currently works at the University of Queensland in Australia. 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. http://twitter.com/joshzepps http://instagram.com/joshszeps/ http://tiktok.com/@uncomfyconversations

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. 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. http://twitter.com/joshzepps http://instagram.com/joshszeps/ http://tiktok.com/@uncomfyconversations

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." 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. http://twitter.com/joshzepps http://instagram.com/joshszeps/ http://tiktok.com/@uncomfyconversations