Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Across the West, young people are finding it harder to build their careers, afford homes, and start families. But have we assumed they’re all the same, and been so busy treating the symptoms of their unhappiness that we've accidentally made them more miserable? A major new study has divided young Australians into six "tribes": from far-left student activists to family-oriented nationalists, from pragmatic strivers to the affluent and already comfortable. They have almost nothing in common politically, but they all want the same things: financial security, home ownership, meaningful work, a family. The difference between them isn't money or politics, but whether they believe the barriers in their way are within their control. Parnell Palme McGuinness is a columnist at the Sydney Morning Herald and a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. She’s previously worked for the Australian Liberals, our conservative centre-right party, and the German Greens. She joins Josh to explain the six tribes she identifies in her report, ‘Generation Trapped: Housing, handouts, and the collapse of young Australians’ life satisfaction’, and why understanding them is key to resolving the tensions simmering across the West, from intergenerational equity and immigration to the rise of populism.

Everything is awesome humans. Well at least it is when Uncomfortable Conversations Community Manager (and resident Tocqueville expert) Evan Pivonka joins us. Josh and Evan went live to answer your questions and explore some underreported stories: Ozempic zombies, insider trading allegations, humans about to return to the moon, and the lost art of talking to strangers.

What is going on with Trump’s foreign policy? Attacking Iran, decapitating Venezuela, threatening Cuba. Is America flexing its greatness, or flailing? Is there a method to the madness? What is really going on inside the room where it happens? Stephen Biegun was the United States Deputy Secretary of State in the first Trump Administration. He was also the special representative for North Korea, charged with overseeing America’s North Korea policy and running the first ever in-person negotiations between the two country’s leaders. While Trump was tweeting about “Rocket Man”, Biegun was trying to make history. What was it like to work with Trump on complex foreign policy negotiations? What happened on last-minute sorties across the DMZ with the leader of the free world? And what has Stephen’s experience in seeing Trump’s worldview, first hand, taught him about strategy, Putin, Ukraine, and Iran? Biegun worked in the George W. Bush administration as a member of the National Security Council under Condoleezza Rice and was a senior executive at the Ford Motor Compnay. He joined Josh on a visit to Sydney to deliver a major lecture at the Lowy Institute, which kindly facilitated this conversation about American power, diplomacy, war, and the Trump you don’t see behind the scenes.

Cities that rock and cities that suck do a few things differently. They need to hit a bullseye on high-vs-low density, walkability, law and order, red tape, congestion pricing and a host of other things. Which cities nail it? And how can yours do better? Eamon Waterford is a world expert on what the best cities get right. He's the chief executive of a think tank, the Committee for Sydney, that represents the interests of all the big players in Sydney’s economy: not just property developers but local councils, banks, architects, consultants, law firms, universities. He assesses how cities all over the world can evolve into the best version of themselves. Eamon joined Josh to riff on Mamdani, New York, Tokyo, Singapore, Paris, Los Angeles; on the tension between low-density suburbs and walkability; between infrastructure and green spaces; between untrammelled development and too much risk aversion. If you want to live in the city of your dreams, listen up. Go to https://surfshark.com/joshs or use code JOSHS at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN!

Step away from the doomscrolling. Take a breath. Let the waves crash. In this week's edition of Josh vs the News, Josh offers something different: a tonic for tumultuous times. Instead of dissecting the latest outrage or geopolitical crisis, he invites you to zoom out and remember what actually matters. How do you find peace when artificial intelligence threatens widespread, fast, and traumatizing change across every sector of society? When the news cycle never stops? When even our political tribes have become echo chambers of certainty? Consider this your permission to touch grass, smell the roses, and remember that the waves of the South Pacific will keep crashing long after today's outrage has faded.

How can a bunch of equations on a piece of paper reflect the deepest facts about reality? How is it that every single object, from a skyscraper to a black hole to your liver, obeys mathematical gobbledegook? And how do physicists deduce that gobbledegook just by solving written puzzles? Today's episode will blow your mind with curiosities about the fabric of reality, the size of the biggest numbers, and how a simple probability problem, posed by a popular television game show, the Monty Hall Show, captivated America for years. Adam Spencer is a former radio host, keynote speaker and the University of Sydney's ambassador for mathematics and science. His TED Talk was "Why I fell in love with monster prime numbers" and he has a new Substack, NerdNews by @adambspencer. References from Adam: John Searle’s article “Consciousness” (published in Annual Review of Neuroscience) “Biological naturalism” Anil K. Seth, “Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2026, Cambridge University Press). Go to https://surfshark.com/joshs or use code JOSHS at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN!

Everyone’s had something to say about Iran. But they're missing the most important piece. In this week's powerful editorial, Josh invites you to shift focus away from the tsunami of hot takes, of Trump takedowns, of condemnations and victory proclamations and self-certainty on both sides. Take a reprieve from the chatter and consider the question most commentators have skipped.

The national director of Turning Point Australia (the Aussie chapter of Turning Point USA) isn't your typical Christian nationalist. He's a 28-year-old Lebanese-Australian influencer, educator and activist. How should we understand the goals of the new, nationalist right? From Trump to Farage to the National Rally in France, from the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany to the meteoric rise of Pauline Hanson's One Nation party in Australia, it's time to understand who we're dealing with. Joel Jammal gained popularity protesting Australia's Covid lockdowns. Nigel Farage convinced Charlie Kirk to hand Joel the keys to the Turning Point franchise. He now has more than 600,000 followers and a billion views, with a newspaper and a podcast serving Christian nationalism to hundreds of thousands of people disillusioned with mainstream politics. This is not your grandpappy's conservative party. Joel joins Josh to debate immigration, Brexit, Trump and the future of democracy.

David Frum had a front-row seat the last time America went to war against a Middle Eastern adversary. He was in the George W. Bush administration in the lead-up to the Iraq War. In fact, as one of Bush's speechwriters, he wrote the line that came to define American foreign policy for the first decade of the 21st century. Four months after the World Trade Center towers were turned to rubble, President Bush channelled Frum in his State of the Union speech, saying that rogue states which harbored, financed and aided terrorists -- like North Korea, Iraq and Iran -- "constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world." This idea, of America being at war with an alliance of dangerous terrorist states, provided the rationale for going to war with one of them, Iraq. In fact, David Frum went on to write a book in 2004 with a fellow neoconservative, Richard Perle, a chief architect of the Iraq War, entitled "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror". It became a bible of neoconservative foreign policy, in which Frum and Perle argued, among other things, for taking immediate, decisive action against Iran. Fast-forward 22 years and David Frum is one of the most prominent and persuasive conservative voices against Donald Trump. He has written two anti-Trump books, "Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic", and "Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy". He's a staff writer at The Atlantic and the host of the podcast The David Frum Show. And since the invasion of Iraq, his view of American power has grown more nuanced. David joins Josh to explain the precarious position in which war with Iran puts not just the Middle East... but American democracy itself.

Among the first responses by Iranian state media to the US-Israeli war on Iran was a propaganda video. It flaunted row upon row of gleaming Iranian drones, safely lined up in an underground weapons cache, ready to strike Israel, Arab states and US bases. Drones. Precision-Guided Munitions. A.I. war games. Autonomous Weapon Systems. At the Pentagon, at Anthropic, for Trump and in Iran, they're redefining warfare in real time. When the Pentagon's A.I. partner, Anthropic, insisted its systems mustn't be used to spy on Americans or to build killer robots, President Trump baulked. On Friday, Trump directed every federal U.S. agency to stop working with Anthropic, and the Pentagon declared Anthropic to be a "supply-chain risk" - a designation normally reserved for companies in enemy nations, which would bar even private defence contractors from using Anthropic's A.I. Its competitor, OpenAI, stepped in and took the Pentagon contract instead. As conflict spreads across the Middle East, how is artificial intelligence being used? How will these fights change in the near future? Can we control it? Toby Walsh thinks so.  He's the Chief Scientist at the UNSW A.I. Institute and a leading voice in the global regulation of A.I. weapons. He studied theoretical physics and mathematics at Cambridge University, has a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence, and was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. Toby stopped by the Uncomfortable Conversations studios on his way to the airport to fly to Geneva to participate in a United Nations conference about A.I. in warfare.

How do you learn things? Does it come easily or is it hard? Are you drawn to e-readers, or books? Typing, or handwriting? Duolingo, or moving to a Tuscan villa for six months to drink wine and debate epicureanism? We’re all alert to the problem of smartphones, screentime, kids and social media. But what if the problem is bigger? What if our brains and bodies are fundamentally hardwired to learn in ways that technology cannot reproduce? Today’s uncomfortable question is whether educational technology - Chromebooks and tablets and whizz-bang learning apps - are ruining education for students and grown-ups alike. That’s what the data says, according to the neuroscientist and educator Jared Cooney Horvath. He does education-related brain and behavioural research as the director of the Science of Learning Group and of NeuroEducation. He’s lectured and researched at Harvard University and been published in the New Yorker, the Economist, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Scientific American and New Scientist. Jared’s new book is “The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning -- And How To Help Them Thrive Again”. He joins Josh to wrestle with the problems of multitasking, rote learning, memorising, the transferability of skills, the fragility of Gen Z, and how you can learn better.

Military purges. DeepSeek AI. Social credit scores. Taiwan.  Why has the Chinese leader purged five of the seven members of the military's top decision-making body (one of the remaining two members being himself)?  Next month, the Chinese Communist Party will enact its fifteenth Five-Year Plan. It's a biggie, because 2027 is the centenary of the People's Liberation Army - a date when China has declared it will be ready for major military combat.  Bill Bishop is the most-read China analyst in the world. A former media guy who wrote the New York Times Dealbook's China Insider column, he became an entrepreneur and was the media's go-to China analyst during Covid. He launched one of the first Substacks ever, a fascinating blog about China called Sinocism, which now has hundreds of thousands of subscribers.  Bill and Josh step back to ask: Will China own the 21st century? Will it eat our lunch, or slowly deflate? Happy lunar new year, humans.

Imagine a world where vast solar arrays produced cheap, abundant energy for everybody... while also powering hyper-scaled superintelligent A.I. data centres, as well as factories that suck carbon from the atmosphere to make cheap natural gas from nothing but sunlight and air. It's within our grasp. Solar is the cheapest form of energy. The only impediments are regulations that were written in the 1970s and our own ideological hang-ups and squabbles about energy. In fact, Europe could already be energy-independent from Russia if they'd decided to invest a fraction of their gigantic gas expenditures on solar arrays when Ukraine was invaded. Casey Handmer is an Aussie in California who got his PhD in Theoretical AstroPhysics at Caltech. He's worked at Elon Musk's Hyperloop One and at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. Now he's the founder of Terraform Industries, which plans to bring cheap, carbon-neutral hydrocarbons to everyone on Earth, while displacing drilling as the cheapest energy source. He joins Josh for an inspiring, freewheeling conversation about solar, nuclear, coal, Russia, China, defense, artificial intelligence... and why a truly extraordinary future of abundance is just around the corner, if we choose to take it.

How much will A.I. change your life in the next few years? In what ways? How will you navigate the upheavals? How will the society around you do so? "Normies" are finally waking up, it seems, to the scale of what's happening. The dam broke this week in part thanks to an essay which went viral by the A.I. founder and investor Matt Shumer, titled ‘Something Big is Happening.’ It's a clarion call for everyone to pay attention after two A.I. giants released their latest models this month. The new tech leaves no doubt that things are going to get very weird, for all of us, fast. The neuroscientist Professor Joel Pearson works at the coalface of how humans can be psychologically and practically resilient for the social, economic and political impact of A.I. He runs the Future Minds Lab at UNSW and is Deputy Director of Human Readiness at the UNSW A.I. Institute. Joel joins Josh live on Substack to explain the recent developments, paint a picture of what the near-term looks like, and guide us on how us humans can adapt to, and survive, the coming A.I tsunami. Read Matt Shumer’s essay here: https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2021256989876109403

Violence erupted this week as police in downtown Sydney clashed with thousands of activists protesting a visit to Australia by the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog. He was invited to Australia in the wake of the anti-Semitic Bondi terrorist attack. In his weekly livestream, ‘Josh vs the News’, Josh sits down to sift through the media reporting and how we might best think about protest, free speech and Palestine.

Has our culture had a grown-up conversation yet about race and gender? Or did the media flip from the casual bigotry of the 20th century to the censorious hysteria of the 2010s in a way that empowered the rise of the New Right? And what was it like to work as a comedy writer on a hit progressive comedy show as the culture underwent The Great Awokening? Jeff Maurer was a writer on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver for its first six seasons. He left in 2020 after feeling its editorial angle had become too ideologically captured. Now, Jeff has a wildly popular political-satire Substack, “I Might Be Wrong”. Josh intended to chat with Jeff to help make sense of Minneapolis, Epstein, ICE, the 2020 election ballots, Don Lemon’s arrest and, of course, the Melania documentary. There’s been a lot, lately. But this conversation evolved into a far more fascinating and funny discussion about what the controversies over blackface and transgenderism can teach us about how the media lost its way; about whether we’ve lost the ability to cover the news - and to satirise it - without preaching to the choir. Follow Jeff’s comedy writing below at www.imightbewrong.org

Minneapolis. ICE. The arrest of journalists. The indictment of political opponents. The pursuit of election officials. The killing of protestors. Is the U.S. government openly pursuing authoritarian rule? What is the risk of a low-grade, neighbour-against-neighbour spate of Balkan-style violence? How do we stitch American democracy back together? How does the Trump Administration end? Take this opportunity to step back from the fire-hose of news and join Josh, as he puts America's current crisis in context, homes in on the real threat, and identifies a path to national sanity.

With the arrest of the high-profile journalist Don Lemon, the protests in Minnesota have become the new frontline of press freedom. Is the Trump Administration openly hunting down journalists now? Or, in the aftermath of Snowden, Manning & Assange, is Trump just more shameless in cracking down on voices he disapproves of? What happens to a democracy when reporters and commentators are targeted in politically-motivated, trumped-up prosecutions? Seth Stern is a civil liberties lawyer and the chief of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation. He joins Josh to discuss the case against Don Lemon, the weaponisation of espionage laws, the difference between ethical journalism and genuine national-security threats, how the Trump Administration - using Minneapolis as a pretext - is criminalising the freedom of the press, and how we might fix it.

Does Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank call into question its legitimacy as a state? Or is the occupation a necessary evil to defuse the threat of an intractably hostile Palestinian population? While everyone's been focused on Gaza, the larger, more populous chunk of Palestine - the West Bank - has seen a dramatic escalation of violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians. Why? Without answering that question, no solution in Gaza will amount to a hill of beans. In this double-feature episode, Josh speaks with two people who have each lived and worked in the occupied West Bank and emerged with very different opinions.  Andrey X is an anti-Zionist Russian-Israeli journalist and activist who documents Israeli violence in the West Bank for his nearly 400,000 Instagram followers. Charlotte Korchack is an American-Israeli educator of Jewish & Israeli history. Both have lived in the occupied territories and reported on Israeli settlers and Palestinian residents alike. Josh speaks with Andrey and then Charlotte about the reality on the ground and the history & future of all the territory between the river and the sea.

How much are you a product of your genes, and how much are you a product of your experiences? Or are you a free agent, acting in spite of your biology and environment? Kathryn Paige Harden is a world-renowned psychology professor who specialises in how genes affect our behaviour. She was nearly cancelled during the era of Peak Woke for her book 'The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality'. Her research, while egalitarian in intent, was demonised as paving the way for eugenics. Now, Professor Harden reveals even more fascinating links between genes and addiction, appetite, sex and violence in her amazing new book ‘Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness.’ She joins Josh to discuss nature, nurture, free will, dysfunction, genetic predispositions, and what taking acid taught her about being human.