Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Josh reflects on Elon Musk, Kanye, Israel, and the rise of online Jew-hate. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What will Elon Musk do with Twitter? Who wants to live inside Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse? Should Facebook censor hate speech? Jordan Guiao lived and worked in Silicon Valley and he knows big tech inside and out. We was formerly a digital strategist and the head of social media for the ABC and SBS respectively, and is currently a Research Fellow at The Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology. His new book is Disconnect - Why We Get Pushed to Extremes Online and How to Stop It. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Josh reflects on Kanye's antisemitic meltdown, Taylor Swift's supposed fat shaming video and activism in Iran. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David got his PhD in political thought from the London School of Economics and now teaches at King’s College London. He was a political science lecturer at the National University of Singapore and an associate editor of the University of Malaya’s South East Asian Studies journal. He explains the echoes he sees in the West of Mao's Cultural Revolution. A politics of rage. Intellectual conformism. Cancel culture. This episode is a collaboration with the University of Technology Sydney as part of its "Permission to Think" series.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Emile is the Academy Award-winning producer of Lion, The King’s Speech, Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Power of the Dog. His cousin is a high-flying corporate consultant and former anti-apartheid activist. They have a podcast, Principle of Charity, which seeks to find common ground between opponents on controversial issues. But how far can talk take us, really? Don’t miss this electrifying debate. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Should women aspire to the same things as men? Or have they been betrayed? Louise says we lie to young women about who they are and what they should want. She's a journalist, anthropologist, activist and the writer of the new book "The Case Against the Sexual Revolution". Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On the previous episode of Uncomfortable Conversations, the trans activist Dianna Anderson alleged bad journalism by Jesse Singal, who wrote the bombshell 2018 Atlantic magazine piece, "When Children Say They're Trans". Josh left the issue dangling, agreeing that it deserved a fact-check. Don't listen to this episode until you've heard Dianna's. Here, Jesse responds. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dianna E. Anderson is a gender non-binary writer and activist whose latest book is “In Transit: Being Non-Binary in a World of Dichotomies”. They and Josh disagree on a lot: the reality of biological sex, journalists who criticise trans issues, and whether burqas are sexist. Here, they hash it all out. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Misha is a former trade union boss who now reports from Ukraine for the Australian Financial Review. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tyson is a researcher, writer, and traditional wood carver. He works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges and is the founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University. His podcast, "The Other Others", discusses how Indigenous knowledge can solve the world’s problems -- which is also the topic of his book, Sand Talk. He and Josh debate the far right, the woke left, structural racism, acknowledgments-of-country, and conspiracy thinking in Aboriginal communities.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.