Alex O'Connor

Blackbird Leys to St John's

O'Connor was born on 27 March 1999 and grew up in Blackbird Leys, the housing estate on the southern edge of Oxford. The YouTube channel that made his name, CosmicSkeptic, dates from 2013 and began as somewhere to post skateboarding clips; by the time he was seventeen it had turned into videos about religion, ethics and atheism, which is the form it has kept ever since.

He stayed in the city for his degree, reading Philosophy and Theology at St John's College, Oxford, and graduating in 2021. He has been unsentimental about how he spent those three years. Speaking to the student paper Cherwell in May 2025, he admitted skipping lectures and doing little of the reading, finishing with a 2:1 he thought could have been a first had he applied himself. By then the channel was already a full-time job competing with the syllabus, and it won.

The channel, the podcast and the rooms he has argued in

The main channel now carries roughly 2.02 million subscribers and about 424 million total views, and trades under his own name rather than the old handle. The longer-form work sits in Within Reason, the interview podcast he started in 2019 as The Cosmic Skeptic Podcast and renamed as the guest list grew. Those guests have included Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Neil deGrasse Tyson, David Deutsch, the physicist Carlo Rovelli, Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek. The show reached its 166th episode on 27 September 2026, a conversation with Michael Pollan about whether plants can be said to be conscious, following Jan Westerhoff on Buddhist emptiness on 31 August.

Not every encounter has gone smoothly, and the awkward ones have travelled furthest. An October 2023 interview with the columnist Peter Hitchens ended with Hitchens walking out mid-recording. In January 2025 O'Connor took the chair in Jubilee Media's Surrounded format, arguing the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus against twenty-five Christians in sequence, which pushed him well beyond the atheist-channel audience.

Television has taken the same material in smaller doses. He has appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored, BBC Sunday Morning Live and Channel 4 News, usually on religion, free speech or his republicanism.

What he actually thinks, and what he has stopped doing

O'Connor describes himself as an agnostic atheist and, on ethics, an emotivist — the view that moral statements express attitudes rather than report facts. That combination is why his videos tend to end in qualification rather than a flourish. He is a republican who has argued publicly for abolishing the monarchy, and he was for years one of the better-known vegan voices online, though he no longer keeps to the diet.

Oxford made him more conciliatory rather than less. He has said the arguments for God's existence are more compelling taken together than any one of them is alone, and that he is drawn to the historical Jesus and the textual tangle of the New Testament while holding that "I don't believe that Jesus claimed to be God".

He has also cooled on the format that built him. Formal debate, he told Cherwell, is "theatre" that rewards recall and wit over whether anyone is right, and he prefers the podcast, where a point can be conceded without it counting as a loss. Anyone going in expecting a demolition is often disappointed; the complaint from both his own side and the apologists he talks to is that he concedes too readily.

2026: the Royal Institution, then the road

The exception to the debate fatigue came in May 2026, when he shared a stage at the Royal Institution in London with William Lane Craig, the apologist whose kalam cosmological argument has been the fixed point of these encounters for forty years. Craig ran the kalam, fine-tuning, moral values and the resurrection; O'Connor pressed on infinity, time, causation and the beginning of the universe before moving the ground to animal suffering, which is where his own objection to theism has always been strongest. It was filmed before a full house as a co-production between Premier's Unbelievable?, the Panpsycast and Theora.

The bigger change in 2026 has been the shift off camera entirely. General sale for a British tour opened on 12 December 2025 through Live Nation, and the run played in February and March 2026 across Liverpool, London, Oxford, Bristol, Cambridge, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Manchester. The Edinburgh date was at the Queen's Hall on 28 February; Manchester followed on 2 March in the Hall at Aviva Studios, the 1,600-capacity room Factory International opened in 2023. Promoters pitched it in plain terms: an evening of discussion and audience questions on God, religion, consciousness and more.

On 7 August 2026 he announced the follow-up, writing that he would be on stage "with a good friend (who you may know…)" to discuss philosophy, and that if it went anything like the British run it would be a lot of fun. The friend has still not been named publicly.

The North American run

Six dates were announced for November 2026: Washington DC on the 11th at the Lisner Auditorium, Boston on the 12th at the Wilbur, Toronto on the 14th, San Francisco on the 19th at the Palace of Fine Arts, Los Angeles on the 21st at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre and New York on the 27th at Town Hall, promoted by Outback Presents. The venues are mid-sized seated rooms of roughly 1,200 to 1,700 capacity rather than arenas, which fits a show that depends on being able to hear a question from the floor.

The billing at every stop is the same as it was in Britain, down to the wording, and the listings lean on the podcast rather than the YouTube back catalogue — Town Hall's copy introduces him as a content creator and podcast host with over two million subscribers and a philosophy and theology degree from St John's College, Oxford. The topics advertised are God, consciousness and ethics, plus whatever the room asks.