Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

One of the greatest characters Josh regularly interviews is Gary Kennedy, the iconoclastic food scientist who oversees international food safety protocols and can answer every weird, wonderful, arcane food question that has ever popped into your noggin. 

How long can you leave a Christmas ham in the fridge after it sat on the table for three hours? Can you use just one chopping board for the whole feast? Will reheating Chinese fried rice kill you? Does a "best before" date mean anything? Is it more dangerous for Australians to eat stale prawns in the sun on or for Americans to eat marshmallow-slathered sweet potato mash?

The full conversation is almost two hours long and sbolitely fascinating. Enjoy this free preview or, to hear the whole shebang, subscribe at Uncomfortableconversations.substack.com

"Woke” is such a tired word. Yet there remains a cultural elite which uses the language of social justice to gain power and status, without helping the disadvantaged. What’s going on?

Musa al-Gharbi is an assistant professor of sociology who studies how knowledge workers have improved their cultural power by deploying the language of social justice to justify their own influence -- and to portray the losers in the knowledge economy as deserving their lot because they think or say the “wrong” things about race, gender, and sexuality.

Far from being a right-wing anti-woke crusader, Musa is a Black Muslim academic who explores how we think about about social phenomena. His new book is “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite”.

Here, Musa and Josh wrestle with what the “Great Awokening” was really all about, how ideas are the currency of the knowledge economy, and how we can actually help the marginalised and disadvantaged. This episode is part of Permission to Think, a collaboration with the University of Technology, thanks to Professor Alan Davison.

After the slaying of one of America’s highest-flying health-insurance CEOs, the tenor of many reactions from the Online Left was: “Murder is never justified, BUT…”

The chattering classes are now busy condemning such hot takes for seeking to “understand” a killer’s motives; for excusing the inexcusable.

But neither reaction will convince the growing minority of Americans who believe that something is fundamentally broken, and that violence could be morally justified to fix it. Here, Josh dares to ask… could it ever, in fact, be okay to respond to corporate malfeasance with public violence? Can we use this moment to think a bit harder about our moral code?

Tim Dean is the Senior Philosopher at The Ethics Centre, a non-profit that fosters moral conversations about everyday life. He has a PhD in philosophy with an expertise in the evolution of morality, he runs philosophy and ethics workshops for businesses, and he's a public philosopher and science writer whose first book is How We Became Human, about how our evolved moral minds are out of step with the modern world.

How did the best satirists notice the comedic potential of “wokeness” in its earliest moments? And where does the evolution of the Left leave political satire now?

Andrew Doyle writes for the fictional parody characters Jonathan Pie and Titania McGrath. He invented Titania as a caricature of social-justice activists (her Twitter bio describes her as an ecosexual radical intersectionalist poet with variable pronouns) but many people believed she was real, falling for her absurdly worthy tweets.

Andrew has written a couple of terrific books, "Free Speech and Why It Matters" and "The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World".

As Syria transforms, as Trump returns, as Putin prepares for victory, as China lies in wait, and as we all look towards a new year, Josh sits down with one of the smartest analysts of liberal democracy.

Stan Grant was CNN's Senior International Correspondent based in Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong and Beijing, before returning to Australia as International Affairs Analyst for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

He is arguably Australia's most experienced global journalist and the most famous Indigenous Australian. He resigned from the national public broadcaster last year in a national firestorm about racism.

He and Josh discuss the future of the global order, whether Enlightenment values are up to the task, and the role of public broadcasters like the ABC.

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