Are Men Toxic?

Is there any room left for the political centre, or has it been swallowed by two competing extremes with nothing but contempt for the middle? Josh chats with comedy writer and author of I Might Be Wrong, Jeff Maurer, for a wide-ranging conversation about the collapse of moderate politics in America. They dig into the strange case of Abdul El-Sayed campaigning with Hasan Piker in the Michigan primary and why that alliance, once worn as a badge of honour, is now something El-Sayed can't stop running from. They also cover Milo Yiannopoulos's deportation, the Democratic Socialists of America's growing foothold in progressive media.

It's a quarter-century since 9/11. What do we need to understand about its legacy, so as to handle the next quarter-century better? Josh was a college student visiting the World Trade Towers the summer before the September 11th attacks. In this marathon editorial, he reflects on the day itself, the complacency of the 1990s, the "clash of civilisations", popular misconceptions about al Qaeda's motivations, the extraordinary backstory of the Saudi royals and Osama bin Laden, and the moral conundrums of terrorism and war. Lastly, Josh offers the insight you need to take away from September 11th to avoid being blindsided by the civilisational challenges of today.

Has a secret in your ancestry ever changed who you are? Imagine being a non-Jewish comedian who suddenly finds out he's Jewish. What do you do? You put on a comedy show on the site of the worst antisemitic terrorist attack in the country's history. Of course. David Rose found out his great-grandfather was a famous 19th-century caricature of the stereotypical "Hebrew comic", who performed with the Marx Brothers. Suddenly, David found that audiences expected him to account for Gaza. After the Bondi Beach terrorist attack, the newly Jewish (but still uncircumcised) David Rose staged a show at the Bondi Beach Pavilion entitled "Nepo Great Grandbaby", wrestling with the Jewish sense of humour before Nazism, after Nazism, before Gaza and after Gaza. Fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, he swung by the Uncomfortable Conversations studios to discuss the craft of comedy, terrorism, trigger warnings, Vaudeville jokes and anti-Jewish sentiment. David's show returns to Sydney and Melbourne next week. Get tickets at https://www.davidrosecomedy.com/

A sex scandal involving star players for the Sydney Swans has rocked Australia. Coinciding with a spate of violence against women, the country is revisiting its all-too-familiar conversation about how “Men must do better”. What does that look like, exactly? How do we explain and reduce male misbehaviour against women? Ben Vasiliou is the CEO of Australia's leading preventative mental health charity for teenage boys, The Man Cave. He joins Josh to discuss loneliness, identity, women’s rights activism, male relationships and the influence of the manosphere. Ben’s new book is “Better Man: Reclaiming masculinity for good”.

You may not realise it, but humankind is on the cusp of an extraordinary space race. Are we about to become a multi-planetary civilisation? Do we really need a super-fuel-tanker floating in space? Just how many A.I. data centres does Elon want floating high above your head? Anthony Colangelo is a proud space nerd who knows anything and everything about the latest state of play between SpaceX, Blue Origin, NASA and the Mars mission. He hosts two podcasts, Main Engine Cut Off and Off-Nominal, and he joins Josh for brain-tickling banter about why the space shuttle sucked, why satellite communication constellations like Starlink will become indispensable, and everything you need to know about the unfolding revolution in humanity’s adventures off the face of this planet.

In this recording of a live event at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Josh hosts a one-on-one conversation with the legendary American intellectual, Glenn Loury. Loury is one of America's most influential thinkers about self-censorship, cancel culture, race relations and polarisation. As a Reagan conservative in the 1980s, he was a controversial dissenter from mainstream Black thought... but a hero to the likes of Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Loury argues that self-censorship isn’t just a personal failure of nerve, but a social epidemic. Every society enforces norms. But have we become so intolerant of dissent that we’ve stopped being able to think freely in public? This episode is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to listen in to a sold-out event. Our thanks to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas for bringing Glenn to Sydney for this special Uncomfortable Conversations collaboration.

Josh has been reflecting on what the tragedy of Cambridge University's youngest-ever Black professor reveals about the high-stakes identity game we've all been enlisted into. In this solo episode, he issues a call to arms to defy the whole sanctimonious circus and assert your own glorious human messiness. Be real, humans.

What should we make of the public shaming machine we have built? Following the death of the Cambridge academic Jason Arday, Josh checks in with the godfather of public shaming, Jon Ronson. His 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed was the first blockbuster analysis of what we now call “cancel culture”, and even inspired an episode of Black Mirror. Ronson was Louis Theroux before Louis Theroux. His BBC podcast, Things Fell Apart, is about the culture wars. He’s a contributor to This American Life, the New York Times Magazine, GQ and The Guardian UK. His TED Talk, Strange answers to the Psychopath Test, has nearly 60 million views. Jon joins Josh to to revisit his ideas about cancel culture; how the “shaming machine” has been weaponised; the new identitarian “woke right”... and to discuss the best sightseeing spots in Sydney. His new book is The Castle, and he’ll be touring the UK & Australia later this year.

Peter Beinart is arguably the world’s most influential Jewish anti-Zionist.  He’s a journalist and a professor of journalism and political science. But in American and Jewish cultural life, he’s far more than that -- a lightning rod, a traitor, a truth-speaker, a coward, a hero. Applauded, derided, beloved, loathed.   Peter is an orthodox New York Jew who keeps kosher, attends synagogue, and sends his kids to Jewish schools. He was originally a pro-Iraq-War liberal hawk, who wrote muscular books like “The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror”. His worldview changed, especially regarding Israel, after numerous visits to the West Bank. He no longer argues for a two-state solution but for a single state between the river and the sea in which Jews and Palestinians live as equals. Is that pie-in-the-sky, or the only way out for Jews and Palestinians alike? Peter’s latest book is “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza”. Peter has written for Time, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books and is a contributing opinion columnist at The New York Times. On the eve of his trip to Australia to appear at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas (where Josh will appear in conversation with Glenn Loury - stay tuned for that), Peter joins Josh to wrestle with Zionism, anti-Zionism, Palestinianism, Gaza, ethnic supremacy, and the future of the Jewish people.

What unites Trump and Obama, Pepsi and Coca-Cola, the far right and the far left? They’re all brilliant at defining their brands. They have a clear narrative. They can tell a compelling story about the world and their place in it. So much of life, of business, of social media, of political parties and social movements is shaped, these days, not by facts but by “alternative facts”, by feelings, by storylines. You, yourself, may even have a personal brand: the disrupter, the carer, the loyalist, the contrarian, the lover. Matt Jones was a political strategist and speechwriter for the British Conservative party in the early 2000s. He went on to deploy his brand expertise in the private sector, where he co-created a small gin company which was sold for a fortune less than a decade later on the strength of its brand reputation. Matt joins Josh to explore how storytelling is shaping your life more than you realise, from the supermarket to the ballot box, and how we might bring sanity back to public life. Matt’s new podcast is StoryWork.