"Smile! Civilisation is Collapsing" with Sarah Wilson

What's the "queer community"? Who's "LGBTQIA+"? When did sexuality get hitched to a queer cultural movement aimed at deconstructing gender, colonialism and white male privilege? What happens when a boring old gay guy dissents? Ben Appel found out. Raised in a fundamentalist Christian community, he expected his Ivy League University experience to be one of liberation. Instead, he found the minds of queer college activists as closed as his pastor's. Ben joins Josh to describe his run-ins and to ask whether the rights of gay people are served by an LGBTQIA+ coalition now as preoccupied with Gaza and trans ideology as it is with gay people themselves. Ben's new memoir is Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic.

On Sunday, mixed martial arts fighters will beat the crap out of each other in a 90-foot-tall Ultimate Fighting Championship cage on the South Lawn of the White House. Senator John McCain once denounced the sport as "human cockfighting". President Trump loves it so much he's made it a centrepiece of the United States' 250th birthday celebrations. Trump isn't alone. Not long ago, MMA was considered too violent even to be offered alongside pornographic movies on pay-per-view cable. Now, it's a mainstream juggernaut. How did this happen? The story is an insane saga involving Las Vegas, Covid, Joe Rogan, MAGA and the spectacular ambition of one man: Dana White.  White, who built the UFC, is on the cover of TIME magazine this week. His profile was written by TIME's senior sports correspondent, Sean Gregory, who visited with White, Trump and legendary Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel for his piece. Sean Gregory joins Josh to explain the wild origins of MMA, the alliances that turbocharged it, Dana White's role in delivering young men to MAGA, and what the UFC tells us about masculinity, the manosphere, and where America finds itself today.

In a world of catastrophic fires, record floods, collapsing democracies and rising unrest, our lives have rarely felt more precarious. So how do we keep living meaningfully through it? And if (or when) it all comes apart, what kind of people do we want to be? Sarah Wilson is a New York Times bestselling author, whose new book, ‘I Eat the Stars’, chronicles how we might live meaningfully, sanely, and hopefully, survive the end of civilisation. Live at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne, Sarah sits down with Josh to discuss how we face difficult truths without succumbing to doom, whether rumours of humanity’s death are greatly exaggerated, and how oddly liberating it is to recognise you are useless to capitalism.

Get 30% OFF an Annual Uncomfortable Conversations Subscription at https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/subscribe/sanity What happened to the news media? What does it have to do with why Hillary Clinton couldn’t fill a room, while Trump filled stadiums? Did diversity kill objective journalism? And what does a journalist who lived in the Soviet Union think of free speech in the West today? Matt Taibbi became a rockstar reporter covering Trump’s first election campaign for Rolling Stone. He went on to cover huge stories like Twitter’s pre-Elon censorship regime and the misinformation around Trump’s ties to Russia. Matt joins Josh in New York City for this in-the-flesh livestream about American politics, algorithms and why, despite it all, he’s optimistic about what comes next.

Los Angeles was once the city where people went to reinvent themselves. Space, sunshine, stardom. How did it become the city where people go to disappear into homeless tent encampments? Meghan Daum is one of America’s sharpest cultural essayists, a former LA Times columnist and a longtime Angelino. While Josh is in L.A., he and Meghan livestreamed from the Hollywood Hills in this Memorial Day conversation about what, exactly, Los Angeles is (city? county? megalopolis?), the decline of showbiz, the 2025 wildfires, California Democrats, dog abuse, addiction, incarceration, and why Spencer Pratt, a reality TV star from The Hills, might be the most honest candidate running for mayor.

Is it possible to criticise Israel without being anti-Semitic? How do we even know if you cross that line? It’s a question that has divided dinner tables, ended friendships, and split the left in half since October 7th, and with recent events, is no longer a theoretical debate. The oldest hatred in human history is once again at the surface. Israeli President and Prime Minister Shimon Peres called David Harris “the foreign minister for the Jews”, having spent fifty years as one of the most prominent Jewish diplomats in the world. He served as CEO of the American Jewish Committee, has met with heads of state on every continent, and has just published Antisemitism: What Everyone Needs to Know with Oxford University Press. He grew up in a family that lived through Soviet communism, Nazi-occupied France, and the expulsion of Jews from Libya. He knows what happens when the shapeshifting virus of anti-Semitism comes out of hibernation. He joined Josh in the Uncomfortable Conversations studio to discuss why anti-Semitism always ends in lethality, why Israel has become the Jew among nations, what the left gets catastrophically wrong about October seventh, and why, after fifty years of working for peace, he still considers the existence of Israel nothing short of a miracle.

As the Hantavirus and Ebola pop up in the news, what did we get wrong during Covid? Dr Nick Coatsworth was the Australian government’s deputy chief medical officer during the pandemic’s first wave, when he regularly appeared on radio and TV to provide the public with information. He became the face of the vaccine rollout. Today, he’s more reflective. He shuns vaccine mandates, wants a national Covid inquiry, and opposes policies that would ban health “misinformation”. Earlier in his career, as an expert in infectious and respiratory diseases, Nick led humanitarian teams in the Congo and in Darfur for Medicins Sans Frontiers - an experience so horrifying it left him with PTSD. He’s now a resident medical expert at the Nine Network on Australian TV, as well as a practising doctor at Canberra Hospital, where he was previously its director of infectious diseases. Nick and Josh bring you up to speed on Hantavirus & Ebola, and wrestle with lockdowns, lab leaks, contact tracing, quarantine, misinformation, vaccine mandates, and what we need to learn from a pandemic we don’t reflect on enough.

The world is seemingly on fire. Iran, Ukraine, China, Trump, AI, climate, antisemitism, the Australian budget. It’s an avalanche of bad news, until Reverend Szeps arrives on the scene to put it all into perspective. Plus: Shakira vs the Spanish government, might be the most inspiring thing you’ll read this week.

Hey! Politicians! Stop talking like cardboard cutouts (if you're mainstream) or lunatics (if you're not). If politicians can't figure out how to have uncomfortable conversations, voters will elect populists who can. Last Thursday, Australia's flagship current affairs TV show grilled the opposition leader, Angus Taylor. It wasn't pretty. Obfuscations, snarkiness, waffling, pre-rehearsed speechifying, evasions. Why??? Few people are more experienced at navigating uncomfortable conversations than ole Szepsie. Here, in a selfless public service, Josh plays back the interview and interjects with his thoughtful advice. This is a fascinating post mortem of how politicians can do better, how political personas are constructed, how political interviews work, how to succeed at them, and what all this reveals about our unique political moment.

Trump is in China, and you need to know what he and Xi are up to. What new world order are they creating? Today, Josh sits down with a senior US former national security official to understand how three men - Trump, Xi and Putin - are remaking the world. Tom Wright was a special assistant to President Biden and the Senior Director for Strategic Planning on the US National Security Council, where he helped to shape US policy on Ukraine, Taiwan, semiconductors, and the China relationship as it lurched from confrontation, to managed competition, and back again. Now, from the outside, he's trying to make sense of what Trump, Xi and Putin are building together, and what it means for every country they don't run (yet). Josh probes Tom about the night he learned about the famous Chinese spy balloon in US airspace, about President Biden's mental decline, the Kamala Harris campaign, and how medium-sized powers might navigate a brave new world. Tom is a scholar of international relations by training, originally from Ireland. He's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute and a contributing writer to The Atlantic. He joined Josh at the Uncomfortable Conversations studio during a tour of Australia to discuss the Trump-Xi summit, Putin in Ukraine, nuclear submarines, and why you shouldn’t buy a Chinese EV. His new paper for the Lowy Institute is ‘Inflection Point: Biden, Trump and the Future World Order.’ Our thanks to the Lowy Institute for facilitating this conversation.