Episodes

  • Josh Vs The News: Feel Better with Reverend Szeps

    Josh Vs The News: Feel Better with Reverend Szeps
    Mar 18 2026
    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.
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    49 mins
  • The Mind-Boggling Magic of Math with Adam Spencer

    The Mind-Boggling Magic of Math with Adam Spencer
    Mar 16 2026
    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!
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    1 hr and 43 mins
  • Josh vs the News: How to Think About Iran Without Losing Your Mind

    Josh vs the News: How to Think About Iran Without Losing Your Mind
    Mar 11 2026
    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.
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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • Turning Point Australia's Leader vs Josh

    Turning Point Australia's Leader vs Josh
    Mar 9 2026
    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.
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    1 hr and 39 mins
  • ‘The Iran Conversation No One Is Having’ with David Frum

    ‘The Iran Conversation No One Is Having’ with David Frum
    Mar 5 2026
    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.
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    50 mins
  • A.I., Iran, & Automated War with Prof. Toby Walsh

    A.I., Iran, & Automated War with Prof. Toby Walsh
    Mar 2 2026
    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.
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    1 hr and 31 mins
  • How Big Tech Destroys Learning

    How Big Tech Destroys Learning
    Feb 26 2026
    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.
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    51 mins
  • What's China Up To?

    What's China Up To?
    Feb 23 2026
    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.
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    1 hr and 38 mins