Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

You may not realise it, but humankind is on the cusp of an extraordinary space race. Are we about to become a multi-planetary civilisation? Do we really need a super-fuel-tanker floating in space? Just how many A.I. data centres does Elon want floating high above your head?
Anthony Colangelo is a proud space nerd who knows anything and everything about the latest state of play between SpaceX, Blue Origin, NASA and the Mars mission. He hosts two podcasts, Main Engine Cut Off and Off-Nominal, and he joins Josh for brain-tickling banter about why the space shuttle sucked, why satellite communication constellations like Starlink will become indispensable, and everything you need to know about the unfolding revolution in humanity’s adventures off the face of this planet.

In this recording of a live event at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Josh hosts a one-on-one conversation with the legendary American intellectual, Glenn Loury.

Loury is one of America's most influential thinkers about self-censorship, cancel culture, race relations and polarisation. As a Reagan conservative in the 1980s, he was a controversial dissenter from mainstream Black thought... but a hero to the likes of Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Loury argues that self-censorship isn’t just a personal failure of nerve, but a social epidemic. Every society enforces norms. But have we become so intolerant of dissent that we’ve stopped being able to think freely in public?

This episode is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to listen in to a sold-out event. Our thanks to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas for bringing Glenn to Sydney for this special Uncomfortable Conversations collaboration.

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.