Alex O’Connor, also known as CosmicSkeptic, is an English podcaster and YouTuber. He hosts the Within Reason podcast, on which he has interviewed figures including Richard Dawkins, David Deutsch, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and Slavoj Žižek.
O’Connor began posting videos to YouTube as a teenager and studied philosophy and theology at St John’s College, Oxford, graduating in 2021. His YouTube channel has grown to two million subscribers, and he is known for his long-form explorations of ethics, religion, and secularism. He identifies as an agnostic atheist and often describes himself as an emotivist.
He has appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored, BBC Sunday Morning Live, and Channel 4 News, and is an outspoken republican on the question of the British monarchy. O’Connor’s Closer To Truth interviews with Robert Lawrence Kuhn were conducted alongside Kuhn’s own appearance on Within Reason.