SZEPS WORLD TOUR - KMELE FOSTER on Race, Spirituality & 'Wokeness'
Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps
Josh Szeps
4.5 • 905 Ratings
🗓️ 8 August 2025
⏱️ 84 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What is your race? What is your identity? How should your kids think about how they fit in at school, or don't, on the basis of their racial or economic group? What is it really about, this game of being human?
Kmele Foster is one of the most original and humane thinkers Josh has the privilege of knowing. Funny, fearless and wise, the two young dads sat down in Brooklyn during the Szeps Live Around-the-World Podcast Marathon to wrestle with Blackness, whiteness, racism, parenting, guilt-ridden woke white leftists in San Francisco (where Kmele lives) and the meaning of the cosmos.
After having a falling-out with Silicon Valley, Kmele was recently appointed the editor-at-large of Tangle, an independent news website that summarises arguments from the right, left, and center. Kmele's first column was this absolute barnstormer. He also serves on the board of directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and co-hosts the smash hit podcast The Fifth Column.
Don't miss this uplifting, provocative, moving, mind-expanding chat.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | G'day, humans. |
| 0:03.9 | Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. |
| 0:06.7 | This episode of uncomfortable conversations is the audio of a video live stream from the Zep's |
| 0:13.4 | live around the world tour, Substak's first ever live streamed global podcast marathon, |
| 0:40.6 | 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, |
| 0:46.5 | 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 |
| 0:51.7 | episode. It's delayed to conform to this podcast's normal twice |
| 0:57.2 | weekly schedule, which is fine, but you could have seen it or heard it already on Substack if you |
| 1:02.5 | want to get ahead of the next one. If you're new to uncomfortable conversations, this is a place |
| 1:08.1 | 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. |
| 1:21.6 | We don't try to make guests uncomfortable, but the point is that the topics are subjects that normal people generally |
| 1:29.2 | feel uncomfortable disagreeing about, honestly, and we try to model how to do that in a courageous |
| 1:34.7 | and courteous and bullshit-free way. A reminder that if you get a paid subscription on Apple |
| 1:42.4 | 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. |
| 1:55.8 | All that stuff comes with the Substack subscription, which is the same price as the Apple subscription with more |
| 2:01.2 | benefits. Some people are just committed to staying inside the Apple ecosystem, don't want to |
| 2:06.0 | download a new app, I get it. If you don't want the bells and whistles, that's totally |
| 2:09.8 | fine. I will just say, trust me, substack as a platform is becoming so ubiquitous and is growing |
| 2:17.1 | so fast and has so much more great |
| 2:19.1 | stuff on it that you will almost certainly get around to signing up sometime soon. So you're |
| 2:25.4 | probably only postponing the inevitable at this point and you might as well lodge your vote |
| 2:29.8 | for sane independent media in the meantime. Enjoy this conversation and thank you, whether you're paid or unpaid, for helping us |
... |
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