“Decoding the Gurus” with Chris Kavanagh and Matt Browne

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Josh Szeps

Comedy Interviews, Self-improvement, Society & Culture, Education, Comedy

4.6 • 863 Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2025

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

When are independent shows like Uncomfortable Conversations serving a useful purpose... and when are they just preaching to the choir?

"Decoding the Gurus" is a podcast that dissects how new-media personalities gain guru status. Frequently, such podcasters claim to be bravely challenging the status quo... while comfortably pandering to their team. Is Josh such a hack?

Josh is in Tokyo visiting one of the Decoding hosts, Chris, who lives there. The three of them caught up to record this crossover episode -- reflecting on Josh's run-ins with the likes of Candace Owens and Joe Rogan, debating the role of the new media vs the legacy media, and establishing, once and for, why Lex Fridman is a robot.

You can find the Decoding the Gurus podcast here.

You’re missing out on tons of exceptional content if you haven’t hit up the Uncomfy Convos Substack page at https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/subscribe

http://youtube.com/@JoshSzeps_

http://twitter.com/joshzepps

http://instagram.com/joshszeps/

http://tiktok.com/@uncomfyconversations

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Gide, humans.
0:03.3	Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
0:06.4	I'm in Japan.
0:07.7	This is a live, it's not live, broadcast from a hotel in Osaka.
0:12.9	I'm on vacation with the family.
0:14.8	I'm not going to bang on about how great Japan is.
0:17.0	Everyone knows Japan is great.
0:18.7	I was going to say, oh, what a lovely place,
0:21.2	lovely people, lovely scenery, lovely food.
0:24.2	You know that.
0:25.2	You know, you don't have to have been to Japan to know Japan's great.
0:27.7	Nobody goes to Japan and comes back going, what a dump.
0:29.9	What a shithole that place is.
0:31.4	They need to get their act in order.
0:34.2	They need to figure out how to do things with more discipline.
0:39.6	It's chaos. It's not chaos.
0:48.5	It's lovely. Admittedly, the lack of chaos can be somewhat disorientingly like uniform and conformist and difficult to glean from the foreigners' perspective. But that's on me. That's on me for being a dumb,
0:54.9	dumb white boy child blundering into a very orderly place whose norms I don't know. I will say
1:01.8	the one thing I've noticed is that Japanese culture, the Japanese people, great people, lovely people,
1:08.2	they really revere simplicity in all things except for toilets. Very simple,
1:16.4	you know, they love, you know, simple, delicate, petite little things, not toilets, huge.
1:22.3	They have things blown out everywhere and up you wherever, and it's complicated. It's complicated.
	...

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