A conversation about free speech, Perth humility, and the dangerous pursuit of 'Enough' with Josh Szeps.

Last night I joined

Josh Szeps

on his show Uncomfortable Conversations for what began as a chat about New York’s newly minted mayor and quickly became a 90-minute meditation on free speech, burnout, and the noble art of saying “No” before your arse falls off.

(Side note: if you haven’t yet, feel free to sign up for my “NO-vember” challenge right here.)

Josh introduced me as “one of the most successful cartoonists in the world,” which made me instinctively check my bank account. (To see if the bribe I paid his producer went through). We talked about Ginger Meggs ending after 102 years, and how that pushed me further into what Josh called “the independent mediaverse.” He meant Substack. I meant survival.
It’s a place in which he’s been thriving since leaving his longtime role in Australian national radio.

From Perth to the Fire Hose

Josh asked what it was like moving from Perth to New York, and I told him it’s like drinking from a fire hose after wading in a paddling pool. (That’s not an insult. I bloody love a paddling pool.) Perth’s the perfect place to be a baby, and have a baby, and not terribly much in between ..unless you work in the mining industry. But if you work in the arts, you invariably pull stumps for a larger market with more opportunities. Or you stay and become the mayor. In Manhattan, the volume knob is stuck on eleven. You either adapt or melt into the pavement.

One of the many great advantages of Perth being the most isolated city in the world is the ability to hone your craft and knuckle down, to focus without the ceaseless distractions of a “Big City.” I was very lucky to have had that. I arrived with runs on the board and chops honed. Josh talked about how rare and appealing that is for agents in the US, especially when they’re wading through locals still figuring out how to say their name into a camera lens.

On Cartooning, Custodianship, and Censorship

We talked about my inheriting Ginger Meggs at the age of 23, and the tightrope between preservation and progress. Updating a century-old comic strip felt like trying to modernise one’s great-grandfather without killing him. I introduced Indigenous and Asian characters- not to cynically tick boxes, but to reflect modern reality. Some readers wanted the 1920s Australia they grew up with to be preserved in stone. An escape back to another time. It was a delicate balance.

Josh got it. He’d faced the same tension working for the ABC: you speak for an institution until you realise it’s speaking through you. Then one day, you’d rather just speak as yourself — even if it means you’re now “just another guy with a podcast.”

The New Danger for Satirists

We drifted to darker territory: what it means to be a satirist now, when a joke can make you famous, unemployed, or doxxed before breakfast. Once upon a time, cartoonists got letters. Now, they get death threats. “It feels new,” I said, “because it is new.”