Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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.