Is Israel making Jews safer, or less safe? Does pro-Palestinian activism feed antisemitism, or is that a Zionist lie? And why are Greek men so hunky?

Two of Josh’s favourite gals, ChayaLeah and Yael from the “Ask a Jew” podcast, join Josh from California and Greece for a funny but forthright catch-up about freedom, terrorism, Palestine and felafel. Enjoy.

Fable this. Deepseek that. As fascinating as each new A.I. model breakthrough (or breakout) is, are we missing the forest for the trees? The Reverend Josh believes so. In this scintillating Substack Livestream, he leads us to the Promised Land the way all great Messiahs do: with a four-point bureaucratic plan. Along the way, he’ll answer your questions about Israel, sun protection, and how much he can bench.

Exploding pagers! Enigma codes! Sexy Israeli spies! J Edgar Hoover's boyfriend's remote-controlled window opener! And, yes, Trump's top-secret ballroom bunker.

It's all told with impeccable style by Matt Bevan, the host of If You're Listening, which is one of Josh’s favourite shows about international intrigue.

The show's companion book, If You're Listening: Declassified, explores how history is a patchwork of conflicting accounts, misremembered details and outright myths. Matt regales Josh with the most amazing anecdotes of espionage... and to explain what Hezbollah's exploding pagers have in common with the bunker which Dick Cheney hid in on 9/11.

Help us improve the show! Share your thoughts and have your say, take the Uncomfortable Conversations Audience Survey: https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/p/have-your-say-to-shape-the-show

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.

Screen time. Free range parenting. Attention deficit disorder. Social media bans. And that little bastard on the plane kicking the back of your seat the whole flight. Are we losing control because of parenting advice that's overthought, overcomplicated bullshit?

Today's guest says so. Ryan Martin is an educator who specialises in helping families navigate the wild terrain of raising challenging kids. He's been a school principal in the outback and a teacher in the big city. He joins Josh to provide real humour, wit and wisdom for parents, educators and the rest of us about how to raise better kids.

Ryan's new book is "Little F*ckers: A book for parents of cranky, crazy, lazy, fabulous, amazing little humans".

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’.