G'day, humans.

Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.

This episode of uncomfortable conversations is the audio of a video live stream from the Zep's

live around the world tour, Substak's first ever live streamed global podcast marathon,

where I'm crossing two dozen time zones in a dozen days and circumnavigating the globe to sit down with some of the world's most interesting people in some new global capital nearly every single day, sometimes multiple times a day, streaming live in full high-deaf glory, not on smartphones,

mostly, to millions of subscribers across multiple publications, and you can join in at Uncomfortable Conversations.subtac.com. Should you wish to do so? Or you can listen to this

episode. It's delayed to conform to this podcast's normal twice

weekly schedule, which is fine, but you could have seen it or heard it already on Substack if you

want to get ahead of the next one. If you're new to uncomfortable conversations, this is a place

for wrestling with the world's most consequential and controversial and divisive issues in a non-deviceive, mostly non-uncomfortable way with the world's most fascinating minds.

We don't try to make guests uncomfortable, but the point is that the topics are subjects that normal people generally

feel uncomfortable disagreeing about, honestly, and we try to model how to do that in a courageous

and courteous and bullshit-free way. A reminder that if you get a paid subscription on Apple

podcasts, then you get the full episodes, but there's no way to feed you the live stream or the video or for you to join the conversation in the live chat on Substack or to get notified when we're live.

All that stuff comes with the Substack subscription, which is the same price as the Apple subscription with more

benefits. Some people are just committed to staying inside the Apple ecosystem, don't want to

download a new app, I get it. If you don't want the bells and whistles, that's totally

fine. I will just say, trust me, substack as a platform is becoming so ubiquitous and is growing

so fast and has so much more great

stuff on it that you will almost certainly get around to signing up sometime soon. So you're

probably only postponing the inevitable at this point and you might as well lodge your vote

for sane independent media in the meantime. Enjoy this conversation and thank you whether you're paid or unpaid for helping us to make

...