Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Do you drink too much? If there was a magic pill that made you not want a second drink, would you take it? You’d at least expect to have heard of it.

 

That’s what the journalist Katie Herzog thought as she sat through AA meetings, feeling like a failure for boozing. Then, she found naltrexone. Josh hasn’t had a drink in four years after having a different epiphany. Here, the two of them wrestle with myths, blind spots and revelations about drinking, addiction, introspection, and being a grown-up.

 

Katie hosts one of the most successful podcasts on the web with Jesse Singal, Blocked & Reported, where they dissect internet craziness.

 

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Imagine being an innocent YouTuber, tricked into receiving millions of dollars from Russia just because you're a Putin hack. That's what the U.S. Department of Justice alleges has been happening, and worse. How are the enemies of liberal democracy shaping the information you see online?

 

Ross Anderson is an expert on right-wing YouTubers, the Life Editor at the world edition of The Spectator, and a regular contributor at The New York Sun. He explains the whole extraordinary shebang.  

 

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Keith Urban is one of the world’s most popular musicians. He started out in Australia, moved to Nashville, worked his arse off, won a stack of Grammys and sold over 20 million albums.

 

He’s about to start a residency in Las Vegas and he'll tour Australia in 2025. His new album is “HIGH”.

 

Don’t miss the YouTube page to see Keith and Josh bantering in the flesh. And get more amazing conversations by popping your email address into our Substack supercomputer.

 

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Can governments regulate “misinformation”? Or is that just a pretext for controlling what you can say? Were “the Twitter Files” a bombshell revelation of censorship, or a paranoid beat-up? How should Big Tech have grappled with issues like Russia, Covid, and the FBI?

 

Andrew Lowenthal worked with Matt Taibbi for months on the Twitter Files. He helped to create the Westminster Declaration to oppose any restrictions on online speech.

 

He used to work with leftie NGOs fighting for the digital rights of dissenters across the Asia-Pacific, until he saw his activist colleagues drift away from free speech towards the opposite – what he calls "anti-disinformation".

 

He now runs a digital civil liberties initiative called liber-net which argues that, under the cloak of countering misinformation, the powers-that-be suppress information, ideas, and opinions expressed by everyday people. Andrew is an Australian based in Europe and he was kind enough to stop by the Uncomfy Studios on a recent trip to Sydney.

 

Watch the in-the-flesh video on the YouTube page (subscribe while you’re there) and if you’re not a paid Substack subscriber, enjoy this preview of a much longer, gripping convo.

 

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Missy Higgins is one of Australia's most successful musicians. She exploded onto the scene in 2004. Her debut single launched at No. 1, her first album debuted at No. 1, and, barely out of her teens, she won the ARIA, Australia's Grammy, for Best Pop Release. 

 

Tabloid speculation swirled about her sexuality. Josh wants to know how she now thinks about gayness, love, fame and failure. Her new album, released exactly on the 20th anniversary of her first, is The Second Act. 

 

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In the lead-up to every U.S. election of the past 12 years, Chas Licciardello has hosted a national primetime television comedy show called Planet America, covering the ins and outs of American politics. 

 

He is a member of Australia's most famous comedy group, The Chaser, and starred in their satirical TV shows for nearly a quarter of a century: The Chaser Decides, CNNNN, The Chaser's War on Everything, Yes We Canberra! and The Hamster Wheel.

 

Chas and Josh sat down after the landmark presidential debate to share their thoughts. 

 

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Outside Australia, Alexander Downer is best known as the diplomat who kicked off the Mueller Investigation by alerting the FBI that one of Trump’s advisors, George Papadopoulos, said the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton over drinks in London. Downer was Australia’s ambassador to the UK at the time.

 

Inside Australia, Downer is a household name. He is the most consequential Foreign Minister in decades (what Americans call the Secretary of State), serving for over a decade during 9/11 and the Iraq War. As a senior government minister in the Five Eyes alliance, he was influential in formulating Western countries' response to ISIS and jihadism. Most recently, he was Australia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom (a position which, between Commonwealth countries, is called the High Commissioner).

 

Downer recently wrote about the UK race riots and the strains of multiculturalism. As someone deeply familiar with immigration, multiculturalism, Islamism and foreign policy, Josh wanted to pick his brain.

 

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Our societies are more diverse than ever, yet we spend more of our time with people just like us. Are we losing a sense of common life? Maybe the far left and the far right aren't the cause of our division, but a consequence of it?

 

Jon Yates is an entertaining, whip smart writer and activist who studies how to build a more united society. He says the problem is not that we're different from each other, but that we're distant from the other. We are not fractured because of Trump or Fox News or MSNBC - those are consequences, not the cause, of our fracturing. Our divisions create the space for demagogues, he argues, not the other way around.

 

Is he right? If so, what can we do? Jon has a few ideas. Many of them you won't like, especially the "Hitler-y" ones (we hope). But you definitely want to hear them.

 

Jon's book is called "Fractured". To hear more from clever bunnies like him, get our newsletter at https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/subscribe

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Are we too focused on race? Have recent anti-racist movements like The Voice to Parliament and Black Lives Matter abandoned the colour-blind spirit of the civil rights pioneers?

 

Josh took to the stage for a special one-night-only Uncomfortable Conversations live event with Coleman Hughes, one of America’s most prominent authors and thinkers on the topic of race.

 

This is a 25 minute preview of the exclusive live show. If you want to hear the full 1 hour + event, as well as lots more similarly provocative conversations, head to https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/subscribe

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"The debate over free speech, hate speech, online harms, algorithms and social media is tangling us up in knots. Let’s get back to first principles, because our ability to survive the 21st century depends on it."

 

So wrote Josh in Australia's top newspapers on the weekend, linked below. He had gotten into a stoush on the national TV panel show Q+A with Australia's eSafety Commissioner, whom Elon Musk calls a “censorship commissar”, over free speech on social media.

 

Thanks to you, the listener whose attention makes this show possible, we needn't restrict ourselves to thinking inside the limitations of the television sound bite, or the newspaper column inch. Here, in a freewheeling, unfettered way, let’s wrestle with free speech, algorithms, incitement... and whether it's sexist to tweet that #NotAllMen are dicks.

 

Josh's article

 

Josh's episode of Q+A

 

The Australian's profile

 

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