Today we welcome Josh Szeps who is a television, radio and podcast host who shakes up the status quo with his fierce intellect and infectious sense of humor. Josh’s interviews with prominent figures and celebrities like Jane Goodall, Ron Howard, Russel Brand, and Neil Patrick Harris have attracted billions of online views and sold out event tickets. Currently, he can be heard on ABC Radio Sydney and on his award-winning podcast Uncomfortable Conversations.
In this episode, I talk to Josh Szeps about what it means to think freely. In this social media age, it’s become increasingly challenging to become an independent thinker. Our tribal nature and online echo chambers tend to reinforce ideologies we already believe in. Even the way we talk sounds scripted! Josh and I discuss how to genuinely search for truth so we can broaden our worldviews. We also touch on the topics of intersectionality, wokeism, ethics, and racism.
Website: linktr.ee/joshszeps
Twitter: @joshzepps
Topics
- Are we living in a simulation?
- The clique of provocateurs
- Compromise through conversation
- The excess of wokeism
- Moral foundations and disgust
- Racism in the gay community
- Reverse racism
- Respecting individual identity over group identity
- Should we be proud of intrinsic attributes?
- Scripted ideologies
- How to overcome binary thinking
- Pushing limits through radical curiosity
This was a wonderful conversation. Thanks so much for sharing it with us. I rushed to subscribe to Josh’s podcast as he seems to have an insightful take on everything.
I have been saddened to see that the best of intentions get funneled by tribalism into moral certainties. It gets politicized. I suppose there are times to think critically and times to move forward with determination, but we’ve got to get the balance right. Keep the thinking alive!
I was troubled by one matter: how the human has changed since life on the savannah. I’ve been re-reading Julian Jayne’s Origin of Consciousness, and I’m convinced it’s important to see the mind as “evolving” throughout human history. Netflix shows us Vikings and Crusaders who don’t seem that different from us. They sleep in a dirt hut and don’t have a phone, but they get caught up in the same petty dramas. This approach feels to me like a belief in something like an eternal soul– that there is one kind of mind, one way it feels to be human. I think the mind and the experience of being human are surely changing in important ways.
Thanks again for your good work!