Have indigenous Welcomes-to-Country gone too far?

On Friday, far-right hecklers disrupted the Welcome to Country (i.e. the land acknowledgment, in North American parlance) of a profound Australian national event, the Anzac Day Dawn Service.

The protest has sparked a national firestorm about race, racism and remembrance.

Josh shares his thoughts about the coverage of the controversy, and then debates its deeper implications with the Indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta.

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What’s social media doing to us, and how would you fix it?

Mark Zuckerberg has been a busy boy on the witness stand in Washington DC lately. In one of the most consequential antitrust cases in tech history, Meta is being sued by the U.S. government for allegedly maintaining a monopoly. It could reshape the future of social media, privacy regulation, and Big Tech.

But in an ideal world, how would you reform social media? How might we prevent it from deranging us?

Frances Haugen worked at Google and Facebook as a product manager and data engineer. She helped build algorithms that tweaked the ranking of search results. Then she made global news as a whistleblower, collaborating with the Wall Street Journal on bombshell stories about Facebook's misdeeds. She appeared on 60 Minutes and testified before Congress.

Frances and Josh discuss the problems with social media and what practical steps she recommends to reform the industry... and save civilisation.

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What do you make of a U.S. government that snatches people off the street and disappears them into Central American prisons, forever, with no trial, and no way to appeal?

Matt Welch is a libertarian journalist. He's no wild-eyed, Trump-loathing leftie. Fresh off the back of his appearance on Bill Maher, Matt joined Josh on Josh's streaming TV show, Szeps Live, to riff about Elon, DOGE, government effectiveness, abundance liberalism, high-speed rail, Orbán, Erdoğan, el Salvador, the Supreme Court, and, ultimately, whether America is sliding towards an illiberal, MAGA-tinged, Hungary-style democratic authoritarianism.

Follow Matt over at The Fifth Column, and catch Szeps Live every Tuesday at 9pm ET on Substack.

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What's the purpose of school? Why do we run schools the way we do? How might we reinvent education in an era of artificial intelligence and ADHD?

Professor Pasi Sahlberg is one of the world's leading education experts. He ran Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture, moved to Washington DC to advise the World Bank on education, and was a visiting professor at Harvard University. His award-winning book is "Finnish Lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland?"

Pasi is now a professor at the University of Melbourne. He sat down with Josh to discuss radical ideas in teaching, learning, play, discipline, devices, and how to view school from the perspective of a child.

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The Democratic Party is paralysed. It can't merely offer resistance to Trump. It also needs to offer an alternative to him. But how? Should they oppose his every move, as the likes of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Cory Booker believe? Or should they shut up and wait for the president to doom himself, as Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and former Clinton consultant James Carville prefer? How have Democrats fallen... and what can they do now?

David Pakman is the guy Josh goes to for a vibe-check of the American left. He hosts one of the most-watched progressive YouTube shows in the world, The David Pakman Show, with over three million subscribers. His book is "The Echo Machine: How Right-Wing Extremism Created a Post-Truth America".

This week, David appeared on Szeps Live, which airs on Substack every Tuesday night at 9pm ET. They discuss their criticisms of the president, the curious spinelessness of congressional Republicans, how the Democrats can recover, and to what extent the left's woes are caused by purity tests and social-justice dogmas.

You can follow David's YouTube show here and watch Josh's Substack show, for free, every week, by signing up here.

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When are independent shows like Uncomfortable Conversations serving a useful purpose... and when are they just preaching to the choir?

"Decoding the Gurus" is a podcast that dissects how new-media personalities gain guru status. Frequently, such podcasters claim to be bravely challenging the status quo... while comfortably pandering to their team. Is Josh such a hack?

Josh is in Tokyo visiting one of the Decoding hosts, Chris, who lives there. The three of them caught up to record this crossover episode -- reflecting on Josh's run-ins with the likes of Candace Owens and Joe Rogan, debating the role of the new media vs the legacy media, and establishing, once and for, why Lex Fridman is a robot.

You can find the Decoding the Gurus podcast here.

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Anthony Bourdain was Josh's hero. Laurie Woolever was, as Bourdain called her, his "lieutenant".

A writer and culinary graduate, Laurie had worked for another gigantic cooking celebrity, Mario Batali, before he was brought down for alleged sexual harrassment.

She spent almost ten years as Bourdain's right-hand-gal. The two of them wrote two books together, one of which they were halfway through when Bourdain died by suicide in 2018. Laurie posthumously published "Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography".

Josh asks Laurie about her life with Bourdain, his struggles, her addiction, his death, and whether his romanticism and hedonism brought him down. Laurie's new memoir is called "Care and Feeding".

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Do males and females differ in what we want out of life? In what jobs we want to do? In how much we want to look after babies, or run a tech start-up, or sweep the living room, or be a CEO? Or are biological preferences just an excuse to justify inequality?

Cordelia Fine is a feminist academic who studies scientific explanations of sex differences and workplace inequality. Her books on gender have won prizes at the Royal Society, been recommended by the Sunday Times, and cited as among the Top Ten books on women of the past thirty years.

Professor Fine has a psychology degree from Oxford, a Master of Philosophy from Cambridge, and a PhD in Psychology from University College London. She's now a professor of the History & Philosophy of Science at Melbourne University. Her latest book is "Patriarchy, Inc."

Josh and Cordelia debate biology, culture, sexism, masculinity, transgenderism, the patriarchy, and what gender equality should look like in the 21st century.

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If you want to see what's wrong with not being offensive, watch Snow White.

The new Disney re-make is so committed to not offending anyone that it’s a social-justice jumble. Snow White isn’t white as snow; her love interest isn’t a prince; the dwarves aren’t “dwarves”; but there IS a dwarf in a non-dwarf role; Snow White doesn’t need a man; the man doesn’t “stalk” her; she’s a bad-ass independent gal; the word “dwarf” isn’t mentioned. It’s a mess.

As Australian politicians introduce sweeping hate-speech laws, Josh argues that Snow White gives us a glimpse of the dystopian cultural wasteland that awaits us if we try never to offend.

Hey, it may be a long bow. But Szeps is committed to drawing it. Enjoy.

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Even if you're not Australian, you want to listen to this conversation with one of the nation's most iconic statesmen.

Bob Carr is a former foreign minister of Australia (i.e. the secretary of state) and, before that, the longest-continuously-serving Premier of NSW, Australia's most populous state. He's an intellectual powerhouse, an icolonoclast, a champion debater, a student of American history, of geopolitics and of diplomacy.

For the first portion of this conversation, he and Josh discuss Australian issues - nuclear submarines, his tenure as state leader. But the second half is a delightful rumination on power, Trump, the liberal world order, China, success, legacy, and grief.

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