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.

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’.

Is everything you believe about right and wrong just an accident of where you were born? Or is morality a universal truth waiting to be discovered?

And if you dedicate your life to answering these questions, how would you feel if one of the greatest moral problems of our time unfolded around you?

David Enoch is a world-leading ethicist and philosopher of law. He also happens to be an Israeli who's vocally critical of the Israeli government. David is a professor at Oxford University and holds a chair in the Philosophy of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has spent time in a military jail in Israel for refusing to serve in the West Bank and been arrested for protesting Benjamin Netanyahu.

David joins Josh to discuss how we know what's right and wrong, how politics should react to our moral conclusions, and how to judge Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, the war in Gaza, and the international law that’s meant to govern both.

When Harry was thirteen, his stepmother initiated a sexual relationship with him that lasted for three years and made him a father at fifteen. The horror and confusion of feeling complicit, of being treated as the guilty party, of seeing bystanders gaslit and abusers exonerated, motivated Harry to launch a political campaign, #YourReferenceAintRelevant. Last month, he succeeded in changing the law to abolish "good character" references in criminal trials.

Harry was generous enough to visit the Uncomfortable Conversations studio to talk Josh through the head-spinning dynamics of being seduced as a boy; how the sentencing of sexual and domestic violence abusers is broken; and how gender expectations affect how we think about teenage victims. His bestselling new memoir is "Transform Your Pain into Purpose".

If you need a hand with any similar issues you might be going through, the 24/7 phone number for the sexual assault, domestic and family violence counselling service in Australia is 1-800-RESPECT. In the US, it's 1-800-656-HOPE, and in the UK 0808-500-2222.

Australia's most famous TV host has just been cancelled… but has he really?

The "Matt Lauer of Down Under", Karl Stefanovic, hosted the TODAY Show for more than two decades. Suddenly, he was fired on Friday after a chummy interview on his new independent podcast with the British anti-Muslim activist Tommy Robinson. The podcast only launched four months ago.

Is this cancel culture? An attack on free speech? Or was Karl inviting his exit by modelling himself on Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson?

Josh has been inundated with requests for a hot take, as someone who was cancelled from his own show during Peak Woke. In this improvised live editorial, he shares his analysis of the furious debate that the controversy has ignited about free speech, editorial independence, partisanship, media fragmentatiom... and the future of healthy conversations.