Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

A.I. is unleashing a “judgment day” on everything from algebra and geometry to probability and logic. What happens to human knowledge when it's dropped in our laps instead of being understood?
It was just days ago that OpenAI dumped 722 new mathematics papers online, claiming extraordinary mathematical breakthroughs. Professional mathematicians are stupefied. Many of them are worried that A.I. risks prematurely shutting down lines of inquiry. Will humans receive ready-made insights with no new techniques, questions or, ultimately, understanding?
One leading mathematician even needed to use A.I. to read the A.I.’s proof of the problem she spent years working on.
Adam Spencer is a mathematics communicator and broadcaster whose Substack, NerdNews, discusses math, A.I. and general geekiness. He joins Josh to describe the shockwaves in the field and to wrestle with the pros and cons of super-intelligent machines solving humankind's deepest questions for us.
Read Adam Spencer’s Substack https://adambspencer.substack.com/

A female university student visits a male frat house at night. She is drugged and raped, for seven hours, by seven male students. She reports it but the university authorities sweep it under the rug. No charges are laid.
That's the story that has lit up the media and sparked thousands of online arguments since the young woman filed a 101-page civil complaint. She names seven of the young men and seven organisations, including Cornell University itself. Seven rapists, seven hours, seven organisations.
Yesterday, Cornell students occupied a dining hall on campus in solidarity... for seven hours. The district attorney reopened the case. The state governor appointed a special prosecutor. A special committee was set up. A review was launched. The university's president says this is a turning point in Cornell’s history. Students are calling for his resignation.  
The story depicted above, though, of being drugged and gang raped, is not the accuser's own account of what happened. It's folklore being repeated by politicians, activists, celebrities and commentators. The woman's own story is more subtle, more intriguing, and more challenging.
Kat Rosenfield is a culture writer and podcaster on Substack and for the Free Press. She's an unflinching analyst of female sexuality, male violence, justice, and consent. Kat takes Josh to the heart of the profound but uncomfortable questions that usually make conversations about male violence and female safety so fraught.

When does healthy scepticism become unhinged suspicion? How do you know if you’re being gullible or sensible? What are the cognitive traps that social media pulls us into? And why should you care?
As soon as news broke of a violent attack in the cockpit of a FlyDubai 737 en route to Tel Aviv, the internet pushed back. Something was fishy. There were anomalies in the official story. Viral videos from both the left and the right hinted at an Israeli plot.
Josh is on vacation, but he interrupted his important work reviewing Texas rodeos to bring you this emergency livestream. He reflects on the difference between clear thinking and muddled thinking about uncertain events.
Using Carl Sagan, The Simpsons and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, he presents the FlyDubai incident as a lesson in how to protect the most valuable asset you own — your rationality.

Every human mind is a propaganda machine. It manufactures certainty, reinforces old narratives, and keeps us loyal to beliefs that no longer serve us. In an era of infinite information and AI-generated content, these internal distortions make it tricky to distinguish between insights and self-bullshit.
Owen Fitzpatrick is a social psychologist who's travelled to more than 100 countries and studied propaganda first-hand in places like North Korea, Rwanda, and Afghanistan. He now sees it operating insidiously at home, as well.
Owen joins Josh to discuss his new book "Inner Propaganda: Leading Hearts and Minds Through Turbulent Times". They wrestle with dictatorships, a free media, misinformation, echo chambers, polarisation, fragmentation... and how understanding our own stories can help us bridge divides, rather than deepen them.

What do we actually owe each other in a society trying to hold pluralism, free speech, and real religious and ethnic tension together at the same time?
Josh sits down with comedian, writer, and Crikey columnist Sami Shah, born Muslim in Pakistan, where his satirical writing on religious extremism drew death threats and a fatwa before he found his way to Australia. They cover an extraordinary amount of ground: the strange mirror-image psychology of ex-Muslims who drift right and anti-Zionist Jews who drift left, the conditional condolences that followed the Bondi terrorist attack, whether the Anti-Semitism Royal Commission was ever built to answer the question it was created for, and the big philosophical difference between America's individual-rights conception of free speech and Australia's more communitarian one.