Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Laws and constitutions protect your right to speak freely against the state. But nobody's writing a constitution to protect you from your neighbours, your colleagues, or your own Twitter feed.
Glenn Loury, one of America's most fearless public intellectuals, an economist who's spent decades saying the unsayable about race, class and culture, joins Josh to make the case that self-censorship isn't just personal cowardice. It's a social sickness, and it's wrecking democracy, policy and our ability to find the truth.
Have we gotten so allergic to disagreement that we've forgotten how to think out loud?
At the Festival Of Dangerous Ideas, Glenn encourages us to embrace risk, speak honestly, and live "within the truth" even when it's costly.

Josh has been reflecting on what the tragedy of Cambridge University's youngest-ever Black professor reveals about the high-stakes identity game we've all been enlisted into. In this solo episode, he issues a call to arms to defy the whole sanctimonious circus and assert your own glorious human messiness. Be real, humans.

What should we make of the public shaming machine we have built?
Following the death of the Cambridge academic Jason Arday, Josh checks in with the godfather of public shaming, Jon Ronson. His 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed was the first blockbuster analysis of what we now call “cancel culture”, and even inspired an episode of Black Mirror.
Ronson was Louis Theroux before Louis Theroux. His BBC podcast, Things Fell Apart, is about the culture wars. He’s a contributor to This American Life, the New York Times Magazine, GQ and The Guardian UK. His TED Talk, Strange answers to the Psychopath Test, has nearly 60 million views.
Jon joins Josh to to revisit his ideas about cancel culture; how the “shaming machine” has been weaponised; the new identitarian “woke right”... and to discuss the best sightseeing spots in Sydney.
His new book is The Castle, and he’ll be touring the UK & Australia later this year.

Peter Beinart is arguably the world’s most influential Jewish anti-Zionist. 

He’s a journalist and a professor of journalism and political science. But in American and Jewish cultural life, he’s far more than that -- a lightning rod, a traitor, a truth-speaker, a coward, a hero. Applauded, derided, beloved, loathed.  

Peter is an orthodox New York Jew who keeps kosher, attends synagogue, and sends his kids to Jewish schools. He was originally a pro-Iraq-War liberal hawk, who wrote muscular books like “The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror”. His worldview changed, especially regarding Israel, after numerous visits to the West Bank. He no longer argues for a two-state solution but for a single state between the river and the sea in which Jews and Palestinians live as equals. Is that pie-in-the-sky, or the only way out for Jews and Palestinians alike? Peter’s latest book is “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza”.

Peter has written for Time, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books and is a contributing opinion columnist at The New York Times. On the eve of his trip to Australia to appear at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas (where Josh will appear in conversation with Glenn Loury - stay tuned for that), Peter joins Josh to wrestle with Zionism, anti-Zionism, Palestinianism, Gaza, ethnic supremacy, and the future of the Jewish people.

What unites Trump and Obama, Pepsi and Coca-Cola, the far right and the far left? They’re all brilliant at defining their brands. They have a clear narrative. They can tell a compelling story about the world and their place in it.

So much of life, of business, of social media, of political parties and social movements is shaped, these days, not by facts but by “alternative facts”, by feelings, by storylines. You, yourself, may even have a personal brand: the disrupter, the carer, the loyalist, the contrarian, the lover.

Matt Jones was a political strategist and speechwriter for the British Conservative party in the early 2000s. He went on to deploy his brand expertise in the private sector, where he co-created a small gin company which was sold for a fortune less than a decade later on the strength of its brand reputation.

Matt joins Josh to explore how storytelling is shaping your life more than you realise, from the supermarket to the ballot box, and how we might bring sanity back to public life. Matt’s new podcast is StoryWork.