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Uncomfortable Conversations

Uncomfortable Conversations

The world has never been more connected. Yet never more divided. We yell at each other from inside our echo chambers. But change doesn’t happen inside an echo chamber. It’s time to get out, to stretch our legs, to step on some land mines. It's time to have an uncomfortable conversation with Josh Szeps.

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1 hr, 7 min•
Monday

"How Not to Feel Like a Failure (When Fame & Fortune Aren't Enough)" with TV Host Osher Günsberg

How do you avoid the hamster wheel of hoping that your next success will deliver happiness? How do you escape mental ruts, anxious spirals and critical self-talk? Osher is a superstar in Australia. He was the face of Australian Idol, The Masked Singer, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. He also happens to have, as he politely calls it, "a different brain" -- a brain prone to depression, social anxiety, obsessive compulsion, psychosis and addiction. His podcast, Better Than Yesterday, discusses sanity, recovery, parenting, and what it means to grow older without growing rigid. This episode is a recording of a Szeps Live stream which you can watch on YouTube or Substack if you wanna see Osh 'n' Josh's purdy faces. And just a heads-up to stay across Uncomfortable Conversations in the next few months because, as we discuss in this episode, Josh is about to deliver some killer livestreamed celebrity content during an imminent Szeps Live around-the-world tour. If you've been putting off figuring out how to download the Substack app, do it now in one click and follow this show to keep abreast of what'll be a delightful tsunami of mind-expanding chats. Osher’s new illustrated book about mental wellness is called "So What, Now What?” Watch this conversation on YouTube. And you’re missing out on our best ad-free content if you haven’t popped over to the Uncomfy Convos Substack page. http://twitter.com/joshzepps http://instagram.com/joshszeps/ http://tiktok.com/@uncomfyconversations

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57 min•
17 Jul

PREMIUM: "How to Raise an Awesome Kid (and be an Awesome Grown-Up)" with Dr Billy Garvey

It's one of the most persistent, perplexing and provocative questions to plague our culture: What explains the explosion in ADHD, anxiety and autism in kids? Is it too much Instagram? Not enough Ritalin? Or are one-of-a-kind kids being failed by a one-size-fits-all model of schooling and parenting? Dr Billy Garvey is one of Australia's leading developmental paediatricians. He's a senior specialist at one of Australia's largest university paediatric hospitals, where he works with kids struggling with behavioural issues just like he did. His clinic has a waiting list that's years-long. Billy and Josh debate masculinity, permissive parenting, rigid schools, the over-diagnosis of mental "diseases" in kids, and whether kids are coddled these days. Josh wants to understand why the Greatest Generation was able to win WWII without the high rates of clinical anxiety and depression that supposedly afflict today's snowflakes. Billy says that's exactly the wrong way to look at it. Billy also hosts the #1 parenting podcast in Australia, Pop Culture Parenting, and is the founder of Guiding Growing Minds, a social enterprise that helps children to live meaningful lives. His book is Ten Things I Wish You Knew About Your Child’s Mental Health. Josh walked out of this conversation feeling like he'd received a bracing, mind-expanding free therapy session. Unleash your inner twelve-year-old and take a seat. Watch this conversation on YouTube. And you’re missing out on our best ad-free content if you haven’t popped over to the Uncomfy Convos Substack page. http://twitter.com/joshzepps http://instagram.com/joshszeps/ http://tiktok.com/@uncomfyconversations

PREMIUM: "How to Raise an Awesome Kid (and be an Awesome Grown-Up)" with Dr Billy Garvey
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1 hr, 37 min•
14 Jul

"The Case for Nuclear Power" with Aidan Morrison

Have rich democracies been hoodwinked into chasing a mirage of green energy? Are renewables leading us into a dead-end of brown-outs, white-elephant wind farms, and costly, dodgy electricity? Are the "smart homes" and "smart grids" actually overly-complicated patchwork solutions to a problem that has a safe, affordable, reliable, carbon-free solution - nuclear? And what the hell is "baseload" power, anyway? Aidan Morrison is the Director of Energy Research at the classical-liberal Centre for Independent Studies. He's a data scientist with postgrad qualifications in physics who leads the centre's energy systems research. He argues that most assessments of renewable energy are incomplete or misleading. If you missed Josh's chat with the renewable-energy engineer and entrepreneur Saul Griffith on June 10th, you might want to give it a listen first here. Here, Aidan and Josh debate how to think about generating and supplying cheap power to a high-tech society... and whether the answer to our growing energy needs is staring us right in the face. Watch this conversation on YouTube. And you’re missing out on our best ad-free content if you haven’t popped over to the Uncomfy Convos Substack page. http://twitter.com/joshzepps http://instagram.com/joshszeps/ http://tiktok.com/@uncomfyconversations

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32 min•
10 Jul

PREMIUM: "In-Groups & Out-Groups" with social psychologist Jolanda Jetten

Are you defined by your identities? Where do you rank in the hierarchy of your social group, either online or in real life? How are the boundaries of your communities policed? By whom? In an era of social-media mobs, splintering communities and anti-immigrant ideas, the way we sort ourselves into in-groups and out-groups is a fascinating field of social psycology. Professor Jetten is an expert in the psychology of inclusion and exclusion, radicalisation, social dynamics, and the ways in which “who you are” is shaped by “who you are with.” Professor Jetten is from the Netherlands, but currently works at the University of Queensland in Australia. Watch this conversation on YouTube. And you’re missing out on our best ad-free content if you haven’t popped over to the Uncomfy Convos Substack page. http://twitter.com/joshzepps http://instagram.com/joshszeps/ http://tiktok.com/@uncomfyconversations

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2 hr, 3 min•
7 Jul

“Josh vs the Anti-Gay-Parenting Activist” Katy Faust

Katy Faust is a family-values activist who campaigns against all families that don't contain a biological mother and father. A rockstar among American conservatives, she's the founder of the children's rights organization, Them Before Us. On shows like Jordan Peterson's - and in her lobbying of lawmakers - she argues for prioritising every baby's right to its biological parents over the right of adults to start a family. At a time when Republican support for same-sex marriage is dropping fast thanks to discomfort with parts of the LGBTQIA+ agenda (especially relating to kids and transgenderism), Katy's ideas are gaining traction. Her policies would revolutionise - and in some case, criminalise - IVF, surrogacy, adoption, sperm donation, egg donation, and even divorce. The group most targeted by biological-parenting laws would, of course, be gay parents - who, by definition, subvert the nuclear biological family. While Katy was touring Australia, she was kind enough to stop by the Uncomfortable Conversations studios to make her case against gay parenting to one of Australia's most prominent gay dads, the host of this show. Watch this conversation on YouTube. And you’re missing out on our best ad-free content if you haven’t popped over to the Uncomfy Convos Substack page. http://twitter.com/joshzepps http://instagram.com/joshszeps/ http://tiktok.com/@uncomfyconversations

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50 min•
3 Jul

"Artificial Intelligence in a Human World" with Prof. Toby Walsh

Is it legit for tech companies to vacuum up everything humans create, to spin off A.I. content, and not to compensate humans? Will this world of creative artificial creatures promote or corrode human creativity? In America, two tech giants just won landmark court cases over their use of copyrighted works to train A.I. models. The court found that Meta and Anthropic didn't violate copyright when they trained their large language models on books without the authors' permission. This raises big questions. Who gets to create? What is A.I. actually doing, under the hood? How is it impacting human work? Is the famous "Turing Test" even relevant any more? And by what measure would we even know if machines are "intelligent"? Might we already have achieved Artificial General Intelligence and will only know it with hindsight? Professor Toby Walsh is one of the most respected - and most measured - A.I. academics in the world. He studied theoretical physics and mathematics at Cambridge, and got his PhD in artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. He's currently a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, where he runs the A.I. Institute, and the former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence. At this tipping point in the evolution of A.I., Toby and Josh wrestle with the development of artificial intelligence, its future... and where that leaves the rest of us. Toby's new book is "The Shortest History of A.I." Watch this conversation on YouTube. And you’re missing out on our best ad-free content if you haven’t popped over to the Uncomfy Convos Substack page. http://twitter.com/joshzepps http://instagram.com/joshszeps/ http://tiktok.com/@uncomfyconversations

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