Stay ConnectedThe 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.
A DM Podcast
Copyright: © 2024 Josh Szeps 224787
Zohran Mamdani has just been elected mayor of New York, parachuting onto a political terrain more polarised and energised than it's been since the 1960s. How do you maintain an independent satirical voice in such vitriolic times?
Joining Josh from NYC on a Substack Livestream the day after the mayoral election is Jason Chatfield, one of the world’s most successful cartoonists. Jason was implausibly young when he was tapped to run Australia’s longest-running and most iconic comic strip, Ginger Meggs. After moving to the States, he won acclaim for iconic cartoons in The New Yorker, Esquire, Variety and Mad Magazine, and he served as the president of the National Cartoonists Society. Now, he's independent, on Substack.
In an age of algorithms, outrage and censorship, how far can creative people go? Politically, financially, and personal fulfillmentilly, it's a conundrum for anyone pursuing an independent creative life. Jason joined Josh from his home in Manhattan to talk Mamdani, Trump, satire, authenticity, perfectionism... and the future of free expression.
The conversation around climate change is so predictable. It's either depressing doom, science denialism, or ambitious summits that don't achieve much. Can't anyone think outside the box?
Quico Toro does. He's the Director of Climate Repair at the Anthropocene Institute, a former journalist who's written for the New York Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic, and a Venezuelan-born thinker shaped by his homeland's slide into authoritarianism.
He is deeply worried about climate chaos but believes the comfortable consensus about carbon must be shattered. There has always been a fringe of geo-engineers and techno-tinkerers with wild schemes to hack the sky or scrub the atmosphere. While most of those ideas deserve the scepticism they get, Toro's plan could, he hopes, literally save the world.
Pile-ons, performative outrage, apology rituals, and public humiliation have become a blood sport over the past decade. What happened? Was it a moral panic? A byproduct of new communications technologies? Or a storm in a teacup - a well-intentioned overreach, exaggerated by anti-woke right-wingers?
Clare Stephens is a feminist journalist who has spent years at the coalface of cancel culture. She spent years at Australia’s biggest independent women’s media outlet, Mamamia, copping heat from all sides and watching digital mobs turn ordinary mistakes into existential crises.
Now she’s written a novel about it, The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done, and created a podcast, The Pile-On. Clare and Josh unpack how cancel culture evolved, why it hit women differently from men, how shame works, and whether we’re beginning to find a healthier way of disagreeing online.
What happens when the fight for women's equality collides with transgender rights? Is the anti-trans nastiness of the Elon MAGA-verse now winning? Or is it mere chaff in a new legal regime that privileges gender identity over feminism and gay rights? Where are we, exactly, in the gender wars?
The question of who counts as a woman, once banal, is now a cultural lightning rod, shaping debates over prisons, sport, health care, and child rearing.
Professor Robert Wintemute is one of the world’s leading human rights lawyers. A lifelong gay rights advocate and an early contributor to international transgender rights frameworks, he has since revised his view, arguing for a balance between trans inclusion and sex-based protections for women.
He joins Josh to explore how we got here, what has changed, and what co-existence might look like.
You know you should meditate. But you don't have the time. Or you're no good at it. So you occasionally subscribe to a meditation app, you listen to podcast episodes about mindfulness, you nod along sagely about the importance of living in the Now, and you get back to your busy life. It doesn't stick.
That's been Josh's story for decades. So when he heard that the founder of one of the world's leading centres for Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction has written a book criticising how meditation is marketed and packaged and practised, Josh's ears pricked up.
Have meditation apps, Buddhist mantras, and “good vibes” influencers turned mindfulness into a self-help circus?
Mo Edjlali is a former tech entrepreneur and the founder of Mindful Leader. His new book, Open MBSR: Reimagining the Future of Mindfulness, takes aim at elitism, pseudo-spirituality, and quick fixes.
Mo joins Josh to troubleshoot what isn't working about modern meditation... and to help you grasp the secular, scientific basis for mastering your attention.
The Saudi stand-up controversy, the Jimmy Kimmel brouhaha, the clickification of live shows into viral video clips, the clash of podcasters like Marc Maron vs Joe Rogan over Trumpism... What is comedy for in this algorithmic era of culture wars?
Wil Anderson is perhaps Australia's most successful stand-up comic. As well as his countless sold-out live shows, he hosts Gruen, a weekly panel show that has run for seventeen years.
Wil and Josh riff on the state of comedy today and go deep into its craft, purpose and perils. How do you stay curious in a world allergic to doubt? What is humour when outrage travels faster than nuance? And is it wiser to just tune out of the chaos all together?
What if the fight for America’s soul wasn’t just political, but theological?
A powerful movement inside Christian America believes it is on a divine mission to rescue the nation’s institutions; from education and media to business and government. Their chief cheerleader was Charlie Kirk, whose organisation, Turning Point USA, is now better positioned to reshape American life than when he was alive.
In the same month as Kirk's assassination, by sheer coincidence, a book was released revealing the incredible backstory of Kirk's plan: The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy.
Its author, former journalist and academic Dr Matthew Boedy, joins Josh to explain how a vision of two evangelists in the '70s became the blueprint for a cultural takeover, and how its most modern champion, Charlie Kirk, built a machine capable of turning online outrage into real-world political power.
Insane house prices are destroying the middle-class dream of home ownership. Or... are they?
Is there actually a housing crisis? Or are most people, in fact, comfortably paying historically-unremarkable mortgage repayments for a desirable product? Economist Cameron Murray argues for this unpopular (you might even say “uncomfortable”) heterodox view. While many of his peers, like our recent guest Peter Tulip, argue that house prices are too high because of a lack of supply, Cameron reckons they’re actually… checks notes… just fine.
Josh pushes on this theory, from interest rates to immigration to the politics of property, in a conversation that asks what really drives up the property price tag, what we’re really paying for... and why we just can’t stop talking about it.
He’s been called the most successful environmentalist in Australian history, and one of the most influential in the world.
Former Senator Bob Brown co-founded the world’s first Green Party, in Tasmania in 1972. He led the Australian Greens in Parliament for decades and spearheaded a pivotal moment in global environmentalism, when he helped save the pristine Franklin River from being dammed.
Senator Brown joined Josh in Sydney to talk about his life of protest and purpose, from heckling President George W. Bush to being openly gay when it was still illegal. They discuss the phoney choice of voting for major parties, the pickle the modern left finds itself in, and why love and wildness are the keys to saving the planet.
His new book is Defiance: Stories from Nature and Its Defenders.
It’s the second anniversary of the October 7th attacks, and the Middle East is abuzz with a new plan that would see an independent Palestinian body administer the Gaza Strip.
Could the Gaza War end up delivering real peace? What would it take, in Israel, Palestine and beyond, for the horrors of the past two years to give way to something better than the previous status quo?
Yaakov Katz is the former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post after devoting many years as the paper’s military correspondent. He was briefly senior adviser to Naftali Bennett (a former - and, many believe, likely future - Israeli prime minister) and Yaakov’s new book is While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East.
Yaakov and Josh reflect on the intelligence and military breakdowns that led to October 7th, the clash between Israeli policies and world opinion, the disillusionment of many Jews with the Gaza War, the trauma on both sides, and whether the future for Arabs and Jews might, in fact, be more hopeful than you’ve been led to believe.
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