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.     ...

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.   ...

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...

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.    To get more...

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...

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...

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...

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...

"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...

Andy is the producer The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling and previously of the New York Times' groundbreaking podcast The Daily.   During the riots and racial reckoning after the killing of George Floyd, newsrooms were roiled by existential questions: Should journalists be activists? Do white male journalists hide behind "objectivity" to impose their bias? Do they get coddled by media companies who hide their misdeeds, or do they suffer extra scrutiny as targets for the social-justice mob?   ...

Can great TV & movies help us overcome political polarisation? Is being creative the same as being open-minded? Why are artists sometimes blinkered?   Emile Sherman is the Academy Award-winning producer of Heartstopper, Slow Horses, The King’s Speech, Top of the Lake, The Power of the Dog, Anthony Hopkins' latest film, One Life, and much more.   His new podcast, The Sandbox, interviews the key creatives behind his biggest shows and films about their creative process. His other podcast...

What should you make of comparisons between the present day and the 1930s? Is the greatest risk that we're sliding towards Nazi-style fascism? Or that we're being drawn into a civil war where half the country are villains?   Dennis Glover has a PhD in History from King’s College Cambridge and works as a professional speechwriter and author. He has written policy and speeches for many of Australia's most influential left-wing politicians including Julia Gillard and Kim Beazley.   He's the...

Two of the internet’s most intellectual contrarians sit down in a park with Josh. Magic ensues.   Jesse is among the world's most astute analysts of internet nonsense. He became a lightning rod when his 2018 Atlantic cover story was the first deeply reported mainstream article to question child transgender medicine.   His punishment was swift and severe, driving him into the netherworld of Podcastistan where his hit show with Katie Herzog, Blocked and Reported, analyses the pieties and...

Why do some people have strong moral opinions but don't act on them, while other people effect real change? It's a question Josh wanted to ask Australia's most influential athlete-turned-politican. David Pocock was a rugby champion who played for Australia's national team, one of the world's most iconic rugby sides. He then became the first senator not aligned with any major political party to represent the Australian Capital Territory. He was one of the most prominent faces in a tsunami of...

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for the presidency, has chosen her running mate… and it isn’t one of the swing-state governors her pollsters were recommending.   Josh is surprised, impressed, and uncharacteristically chipper about what this means for Harris, for the election and for the future of the American left. Cheer up and dive in to everything you need to understand about the possible fiftieth vice president of the United States, Tim Walz.   To get more...

DON'T MISS COLEMAN HUGHES AND JOSH LIVE IN MELBOURNE! GET TICKETS NOW AT https://bit.ly/Coleman-Szeps-Melb   Vaccine mandates. Wokeness in Hollywood. The female pay gap. Race protests. Diversity programs. Covid lockdowns. #metoo. The so-called intellectual dark web tackled it all. A loose grouping of dissenting intellectuals and commentators, they sought to buck taboos and open minds.   What happened? Who went down the rabbit hole to crazy town, and who maintained thier heads? And where...

Have you ever wondered what’s up with Earth? Seriously. What the actual heck. Of all those trillions of space rocks, this one is all leafy and watery and lifey. What is it, this spaceship we’re on, this pale blue dot? Might it be a kind of living thing itself? ‌ This old hippy idea has been wrestled into a more fascinating, harder-headed thesis by the scientist and journalist Ferris Jabr. He's written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, National Geographic, Wired and The Los Angeles...

Project 2025, technically the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, is a set of sweeping policy changes to be enacted on Day One of the next conservative administration. If Trump wins, that’s January 20th, 2025. Skye Perryman is one of the project’s leading opponents.   She’s the president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a non-profit that promotes democracy through court cases, lobbying and education. Washingtonian magazine named her one of this year’s Most Influential People Shaping Policy...

How do you escape the shaming of the mob when you're a public figure with original ideas?   Tim Minchin is one of the most successful creatives Australia has ever produced. He wrote the music and lyrics for Matilda the Musical, which won more Olivier Awards than any other show in history at the time. Now in its 13th year, the show continues to sell out on the West End. The Broadway production was nominated for a stash of Tonys. The 2022 movie version is a riot.   Minchin went on to write...

First things first: The Uncomfortable Conversations LIVE touring empire is expanding, with live shows in Sydney and Melbourne in August with the inimitable Coleman Hughes. Tickets are selling fast. Get yours now. Don’t miss out:   Sydney https://bit.ly/Coleman-Szeps-Syd Melbourne https://bit.ly/Coleman-Szeps-Melb   Meanwhile, the new YouTube page is going gangbusters. The episode you're listening to was shot as an outdoor TV interview on an early spring day in a Manhattan park. Check it...

When Sydney's biggest broadsheet newspaper published an opinion piece by Josh on the occasion of the Mardi Gras Gay Pride Parade, it triggered a backlash from some in the LGBT+ community. One of Josh's attackers was a prominent activist, Alastair Lawrie, the Director of Policy and Advocacy at the Justice and Equity Centre.   Instead of arguing with Alastair on Twitter, Josh invited him on the show to hash out their differences and discuss what challenges the LGBTQ+ community still faces. ...

Well, what happens now? Does Donald Trump win? Does he lose? To whom? What are we all in for?   On the eve of Trump’s coronation as the Republican presidential candidate at the party’s National Convention this week, he was narrowly shot in an apparent assassination attempt at a rally.   Is this the most dramatic election of our lives? David Frum is one of the most influential anti-Trumpers to come out of a Republican White House. As President George W Bush’s speechwriter, he's credited...

"Transsexual" sounds like an old-fashioned term. But it describes a real medical condition in which your brain has the opposite sex from your body. Are transsexuals threatened by newer gender-queer, non-binary theories of sex?   Dr Dana Beyer says so. She's one of the most influential and effective trans activists in history. A medical doctor and self-described transsexual, she's been striding the hallways of power since the 1970s meeting with the likes of Barack Obama, Michelle...

Boomers. Millennials. Gen X. Gen Z. Are you actually in control of your feelings about gender fluidity, social media, streaming television, laptops, jumbo jets and the pill, or have you absorbed the norms of your generation?   Dr Jean Twenge is a psychology professor who's been studying large, national surveys of young people for decades, teasing out how the generations differ. Her books include an analysis of millennials ("Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident,...