Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

How 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’.

Is 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.

When 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.

Australia'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.

Why 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.