Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Let's take a break from the news cycle for a moment, shall we? There's a lot of cool shit to ponder that's more important and more fascinating. Like, how does the gooey blob of atoms between your ears generate all of your experiences? And are we on track to producing machines that feel as alive as you?

Eric Schwitzgebel is a legendary professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley and an important voice in Silicon Valley's conversations about ethical artificial sentience. He and Josh muse on the various explanations of what your experiences actually are at their most profound level; why you probably don't have a soul; whether sufficiently intelligent machines will ever feel internally emotional alive... and how we'll even be able to tell. 

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Are we too spoilt to be creative? Are we succumbing to decadent decline? How do you dissent when the incentives are to conform? How do the French retain the art of disagreement while the Anglosphere gets stuck in predictable squabbles? How can we grow a pair of collective cojones and defiantly create a better future?

Today's episode would normally be paywalled. We're offering it as a free example of the kind of unstructured, unpredictable, unedited, freewheeling, thought-provoking clashes Josh does live on Substack, versus the more buttoned-up, pre-recorded tone of the podcast. 

Sarah Wilson is a former media high-flyer - the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, host of MasterChef Australia, big-time wellness columnist - who turned her back on her fabulously materialistic life, sold all her possessions, and became a nomadic creator. She doesn't have a home but spends most of her time now in Paris, where she preaches her secular wisdom of sanity to fans around the world. 

Josh and Sarah have a relationship of respectful disagreement and curious admiration. They streamed live this week with no particular agenda (except to save the world). Treat yourself to more conversations like this by registering here and downloading the Substack app.

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Anti-Zionism, antisemitism, Palestinians, Hamas, Israeli Arabs, diaspora Jews, Gaza, and now an all-out war with Iran. It's head-spinning, trying to make sense of Israel right now. 

Today, Josh comes to you battered and bruised by the slings and arrows of a national pile-on. He wrote the lead opinion piece in the big thumping weekend edition of Sydney's and Melbourne's biggest broadsheet newspapers, in which he argued for diaspora Jews to stop reflexively making excuses for Israel. 

The backlash has been as savage as you'd expect on a topic where nuance goes to die. 
From the fallout, Josh takes a crack at wrestling with tribalism, group-think, moral honesty, and the unfolding Israel-Iran war.

Watch this conversation on YouTube. And you’re missing out on our best ad-free content if you haven’t popped over to the Uncomfy Convos Substack page.

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Chris Uhlmann is one of the most experienced and well-known journalists Down Under. He worked for decades as either the host or the chief political reporter on many of the country's most respected news shows: The 7.30 Report, ABC News, Nine News, and ABC Radio's flagship current affairs show "A.M."

He's made the leap to Substack, and joined Josh to discuss his regrets as a leading journalist, objectivity, fairness, thought bubbles, the flaws of media (old and new), climate change, immigration, and what it was like to interview Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

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Over the weekend, the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play went to Eureka Day, a brave, hilarious satire of wokeness, vaccine denial, identity politics and social justice. Fresh from Broadway, the Sydney production is on now at the Seymour Centre. Its playwright, Jonathan Spector, joined Josh from California before his Tony triumph.

Eureka Day is playing in Sydney until the 21st June 2025 at the Seymour Centre. You can find out more here.

If you want to feel optimistic about the mind-boggling potential of the renewable energy revolution, listen to Saul Griffith, one of the world's leading experts in electrification, decarbonisation and renewable energy technologies. He's founded a dozen Silicon Valley technology companies, R&D labs, and non-partisan organizations, and he was instrumental in developing the Biden Administration's climate action plan.

Saul's U.S. research labs were recently eviscerated by Elon Musk's DOGE cuts. He begins this conversation in a gloomy mood about the state of American scientific research, but peps up about the potential for overhauling how we generate, deliver and manage clean electricity. It's a wild rebuke to the climate hysterics on both sides.

While the rest of the country argues about nuclear energy, solar panels and fossil fuels, enjoy this electrifying chat about how we could be on the brink of electrifying everything.

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While the showdown continues over Trump's military deployment against Los Angeles protestors, can we take heart from the resurgence of anti-Trump liberalism in Canada, Australia, the U.K. and Europe? Could the Democrats capture that energy? If the culture has moved on from "wokeness", then what's the next paradigm for the Left? How should we think about immigration, multiculturalism, infrastructure, abundance, Obama’s legacy, and big-vs-small government in the next chapter of American political life? And can it really be true that Mississippians are richer than Italians?

Yascha Mounk is one of Josh's favourite thinkers on how to hold liberal democracies together in a destabilising time.

Yascha will rejoin Josh on a Szeps Live Substack Livestream next Tuesday June 17th at 9pm ET to answer your questions about this conversation (11am Sydney-time on Wed 18th). Be sure you're subscribed to notifications here to stay abreast of all the additional content - it's free to watch (but comments are only for paid subscribers).

This interview was recorded before the Los Angeles protests. Enjoy this sanity-inducing chat about the state of liberalism in 2025 and beyond.

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At 26, Hannah Ferguson is one of the most influential young women in Australia. Her media company, Cheek Media, boasts an army of politically-engaged, progressive female fans. Ferguson co-hosts the smash hit podcast Big Small Talk, which breaks down politics and pop culture.

An unapologetic progressive, she recently interviewed the prime minister and earned the honour of speaking at one of Australia's most prestigious forums, the National Press Club address. Ferguson intends to run for the senate and to someday be prime minister.

She and Josh wrestle with new media and old, feminism, schisms in the online mediaverse, Rupert Murdoch, and holding guests - and themselves - to account.

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Andrew Sullivan is one of the most influential political writers of his generation.

He became the face of the gay marriage fight, after writing the first major American article arguing for it in 1989. His 1995 book, Virtually Normal, became a bible of the marriage equality movement.

Andrew had moved to America to get his PhD in politics from Harvard in the '80s, after studying at Oxford.

As a gay, British, Catholic conservative in America, he dominated debates - on television as well as in writing - on everything from AIDS to Iraq to Obama.

Andrew pioneered online journalism as one of the first superstar "bloggers". He wrote for the likes of London's Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, the Atlantic, Time magazine, the New York Times Magazine and New York magazine. He now publishes The Weekly Dish on Substack.

Josh and Andrew discuss his gay marriage fight, the opposition from gays, the transgender culture wars, HIV/AIDS, the "LGBTQ+ community", Andrew's college life in Reagan's America, and how he won over a conservative country to a radical agenda (and how liberals might do it again).

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Terms like "genocide" and "apartheid" are thrown around a lot by anti-Israel activists. But when a leading Israeli Holocaust historian declares his own country to be a genocidal apartheid state, we ought to listen.

Born and raised in Israel, Dr Goldberg is a professor in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was the head of the university's Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry until last year.

Goldberg is a world-renowned expert on the cultural history of Jews during the Holocaust, in particular in the Warsaw Ghetto. He's been a visiting scholar at many of the top institutes for the study of genocide all over Europe and America, including at Cornell University and at The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

These bona fides give Goldberg the authority to level devastating accusations against his homeland. He recently went viral after co-authoring an opinion piece in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, entitled "There's No Auschwitz in Gaza. But It's Still Genocide".

Professor Goldberg made time for Josh from his office in Jerusalem.

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