Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

What's the "queer community"? Who's "LGBTQIA+"? When did sexuality get hitched to a queer cultural movement aimed at deconstructing gender, colonialism and white male privilege? What happens when a boring old gay guy dissents?

Ben Appel found out.

Raised in a fundamentalist Christian community, he expected his Ivy League University experience to be one of liberation. Instead, he found the minds of queer college activists as closed as his pastor's.

Ben joins Josh to describe his run-ins and to ask whether the rights of gay people are served by an LGBTQIA+ coalition now as preoccupied with Gaza and trans ideology as it is with gay people themselves.

Ben's new memoir is Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic.

On Sunday, mixed martial arts fighters will beat the crap out of each other in a 90-foot-tall Ultimate Fighting Championship cage on the South Lawn of the White House. Senator John McCain once denounced the sport as "human cockfighting". President Trump loves it so much he's made it a centrepiece of the United States' 250th birthday celebrations.
Trump isn't alone. Not long ago, MMA was considered too violent even to be offered alongside pornographic movies on pay-per-view cable. Now, it's a mainstream juggernaut. How did this happen? The story is an insane saga involving Las Vegas, Covid, Joe Rogan, MAGA and the spectacular ambition of one man: Dana White. 
White, who built the UFC, is on the cover of TIME magazine this week. His profile was written by TIME's senior sports correspondent, Sean Gregory, who visited with White, Trump and legendary Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel for his piece.
Sean Gregory joins Josh to explain the wild origins of MMA, the alliances that turbocharged it, Dana White's role in delivering young men to MAGA, and what the UFC tells us about masculinity, the manosphere, and where America finds itself today.

In a world of catastrophic fires, record floods, collapsing democracies and rising unrest, our lives have rarely felt more precarious. So how do we keep living meaningfully through it? And if (or when) it all comes apart, what kind of people do we want to be?
Sarah Wilson is a New York Times bestselling author, whose new book, ‘I Eat the Stars’, chronicles how we might live meaningfully, sanely, and hopefully, survive the end of civilisation.
Live at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne, Sarah sits down with Josh to discuss how we face difficult truths without succumbing to doom, whether rumours of humanity’s death are greatly exaggerated, and how oddly liberating it is to recognise you are useless to capitalism.

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What happened to the news media? What does it have to do with why Hillary Clinton couldn’t fill a room, while Trump filled stadiums? Did diversity kill objective journalism? And what does a journalist who lived in the Soviet Union think of free speech in the West today?

Matt Taibbi became a rockstar reporter covering Trump’s first election campaign for Rolling Stone. He went on to cover huge stories like Twitter’s pre-Elon censorship regime and the misinformation around Trump’s ties to Russia. Matt joins Josh in New York City for this in-the-flesh livestream about American politics, algorithms and why, despite it all, he’s optimistic about what comes next.

Los Angeles was once the city where people went to reinvent themselves. Space, sunshine, stardom. How did it become the city where people go to disappear into homeless tent encampments?

Meghan Daum is one of America’s sharpest cultural essayists, a former LA Times columnist and a longtime Angelino.

While Josh is in L.A., he and Meghan livestreamed from the Hollywood Hills in this Memorial Day conversation about what, exactly, Los Angeles is (city? county? megalopolis?), the decline of showbiz, the 2025 wildfires, California Democrats, dog abuse, addiction, incarceration, and why Spencer Pratt, a reality TV star from The Hills, might be the most honest candidate running for mayor.