Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

The image of a singular political leader is misleading. Why? Because they can barely function without a team behind them. Chief among that team, being their Chief of Staff: part strategist, part consigliere, part javelin-catcher. But the real job is even stranger. They are the gatekeepers to presidents and prime ministers. The triage nurses for national crises. The confidantes who remind a leader to eat breakfast, steady them during massacres and terror attacks, and sometimes challenge them on the very policies they champion. Phoebe Saintilan-Stocks has interviewed the people behind Mandela, Blair, Gillard, Howard, Ardern, Trudeau and more, revealing a world of invisible power, professional intimacy, and the oddity of a system in which unelected aides can quietly influence the fate of nations. From the death of Princess Diana to 9/11, from Port Arthur to Christchurch, their stories show how leadership actually works when the stakes are existential. Phoebe joins Josh to unpack the hidden architecture of power, the personalities behind it, and what their experiences reveal about trust, loyalty, crisis, and the human frailty of the people we expect to carry entire countries on their shoulders. Go to https://surfshark.com/joshs or use code JOSHS at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN!

If you're ethically conflicted about industrial animal farming, this episode is a shot of hope. Shaming people into going vegan doesn't work. What does? Aidan Alexander is the co-founder of a non-profit that distributes money to a basket of effective charities creating cruelty-free options for millions of farmed animals each year. If you care about whether pigs and hens endure agonising lives simply to shave a few cents off each pound of their flesh, here's your practical solution. FarmKind, Aidan's organisation, is independently funded through philanthropy. It takes no cut of any donations -- they pass it all directly to six of the best charities working to fix factory farming. Until the end of 2025, all donations using the code "josh" will be matched 100% by FarmKind so your dollar goes twice as far. (If this reads like an ad, it's not. We're not paid for this; we just believe in fixing factory farming so Josh can have his steak and eat it too.) Go to FarmKind.giving and use the code "josh" before the new year, to double your contribution. Or follow the link below: https://www.farmkind.giving/giving-season-2025?promo=josh Aidan joins Josh to discuss why animal-rights activism hasn't worked, the problems of preaching veganism, the sentience of different species, the strangely elevated status of cats and dogs, the negative externalities of industrial agriculture, and practical ways we all can solve this fixable problem. Go to https://surfshark.com/joshs or use code JOSHS at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN!

Bluffing, double-crossing, predicting, testing your enemy. The mind games of international relations are wildly complex. And at the end of the day, the outcome of the next major conflict will be decided not by military questions but by psychological ones. Why did France lose to the Nazis, despite having more tanks, troops, and guns? How did Ukraine stand firm against Russia? Why was Winston Churchill right and Neville Chamberlain wrong? How do you know if you can trust an ally? Will the logic of nuclear mutually-assured destruction hold? How will technology shape the future of war? What will happen if China goes for Taiwan? In an era of asymmetric warfare, of killer drones and bunker-busting bombs, it’s more important than ever to tease out the psychological games of conflict. Dr Nicholas Wright is a leading neuroscientist who advises the Pentagon and the UK Cabinet Office on psychological strategy. His new book is Warhead: How the Brain Shapes War and War Shapes the Brain. He joins Josh to explain how all wars come down to psychology, to prediction, to second-guessing, to mental games... and how we in the West might master them. Go to https://surfshark.com/joshs or use code JOSHS at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN!

Josh takes a look at the week’s news, and tries to make sense of it. A

Is faith in our economic system cracking up? From Mayor Mamdani's win to Elon's trillion-dollar payday, from Instagram infuluencers embracing communism to Bernie and AOC, from Trump's tariffs to Chinese communism. Critiques abound of the neoliberal order that has dominated the past half century. But those assumptions - not just about policies, like free trade and low taxes, but about the very structure of we live our lives, how we produce stuff, and get stuff; assumptions like the existence of money and markets and wages - are not inescapable facts of reality. They evolved, over the course of the last thousand years. They made us very rich. And they could've been otherwise. Professor Sven Beckert is a professor of history at Harvard University and one of the world's leading historians of capitalism. He's not a free-market cheerleader, not a libertarian economist defending unfettered capitalism. He's a historian who studies how, in the real world, violence, coercion and empire were foundational to capitalism's rise... but how capitalism remains the indispensable system that made you richer than most people who ever lived. Beckert got his PhD in history from Columbia University and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2014. His new book is Capitalism: A Global History, and he joined Josh to shed light on what capitalism is, how it came about, and how might we re-anchor capitalism in moral and ecological limits... without extinguishing the creativity that has made it the most productive engine of all time. Go to https://surfshark.com/joshs or use code JOSHS at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN!