Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

What’s up with boys? Or, more importantly, what’s up with the men who use “what’s up with boys?” to crush women?

It’s not just a rag-tag fringe of young male influencers who are reviving sexism. There’s a professional movement of influential Christian nationalists whose long-term agenda is to return women to their rightful place, as homebound subjects of their husbands.

Helen Lewis’ reporting on gender, politics, and internet culture has made her one of the sharpest voices on the culture wars. She became a viral sensation when she bested Jordan Peterson in a 2018 debate about gender roles for British GQ. She’s now a staff writer at The Atlantic, where her recent cover feature was “The New Gender War”.

Helen and Josh unpack the evolving backlash to feminism and liberalism, the furore around surrogacy and transgender rights, Andrew Tate… and what the World Cup had to do with all of it.

The way culture-war ideologues have hijacked The Odyssey reveals how social media ruins everything. As go the arguments about the film, so go our conversations about fairness, gender, race and immigration. And so go our elections.

Josh recounts the online sh**storm, and draws a long bow from Homer to Christopher Nolan to how civilisations like ours collapse.

Read Josh’s column in the Australian Financial Review here:

https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/culture-war-ideologues-have-hijacked-christopher-nolan-s-odyssey-20260720-p60gpr

and David French’s NYT column here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/opinion/odyssey-christopher-nolan-greek-gods.html
Oh, and go back and watch “Just Josh: The Woke Catastrophe of Snow White” here:

https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/p/just-josh-the-woke-catastrophe-of?utm_source=publication-search

Dr Jillian Spencer is a senior child and adolescent psychiatrist who was fired three years ago after publicly criticising how puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones were being prescribed to kids.

Now, her employer, one of the biggest health care providers in the country, has issued a bombshell statement. Children's Health Queensland has announced that it is withdrawing its misconduct allegations against her, and effectively admits that her concerns were legitimate all along. It’s a potential turning point in the transgender debate.

Dr Spencer flew from Brisbane to Sydney to join Josh in the Uncomfortable Conversations studio and tell an extraordinary story of groupthink, institutional pressure and medical integrity.

Are men innately more violent? Are women innately more people-focused? What explains gay people, campness, transgenderism? How much of the sex differences are cultural, and how much is hardwired by our evolutionary psychology?
The science of the sexes has come a long way. Steve Stewart Williams is a psychology professor who wrote the groundbreaking book The Ape That Understood the Universe and whose new book is A Billion Years of Sex Differences: How Evolution Shaped the Minds of Men and Women.
Steve joins Josh to explore the science of the sexes, from aggression to promiscuity to parenting, and what recent research reveals about how, and why, men and women behave the way we do.

Journalist and ne’er-do-well Michael C. Moynihan joins Josh for a Substack livestream about the state of American politics, far-left candidates, far-right ICE agents, and the importance of being respectful, in this time of mourning, towards the late Senator Lindsey Graham’s butthole.