Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Why don't Palestinians have a state?

To answer "because Israel" is to treat Palestinians as props in a Western morality play, rather than as a people in a fight for survival. The true tale of Palestinian resistance is an incredible story of power, Zionism, Maoism, Algerian anti-colonialism, Islamic liberation and Arab nationalism.

Haviv Rettig Gur is an Israeli journalist and political analyst who's critical of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and its war crimes in Gaza. But he's also deeply informed about the nature of Palestinian resistance. As the senior analyst at The Times of Israel and a Middle East analyst at The Free Press, he's covered the region for the better part of two decades. His podcast is Ask Haviv Anything.

This mind-blowing conversation could transform how you understand the Gaza War. If you respect Palestinians as agents in their fate, rather than as victims in a Westernised fable, you'll be gripped by Haviv's insights into what's gone wrong in the Middle East.

It’s 10 years since Britain voted to leave the EU, and their revolving door of Prime Ministers just keeps spinning.

Josh goes live to share his thoughts on the potential new Prime Minister, the New Left and Right, and where Britain goes from here…

Can we blame polarisation on right-wing internet crazies? Or is the whole online system shot?

The most valuable thing we produce online is anger. Not our data, our habits, or our clicks, but our anger.

Ed Coper is a progressive activist who wants us to understand how tech platforms farm anger on an industrial scale. He calls it angertainment: the machinery that turns outrage into clicks, clicks into money, and money into power.

Ed and Josh disagree on the politics of the problem, with Josh feeling Ed gives left-wing groupthink too much of a pass. Ed built digital political campaigning on the left in Australia, turning left-wing activist group GetUp into a political force. He’s advised everyone from Greta Thunberg to Malala Yousafzai.

This conversation is a fascinating rumble about how legacy institutions have failed people, which voices are amplified by the algorithm, and whether we can save the conversation without censorship.

Ed’s new book is “Angertainment: How Social Media Outrage Ruined Everything”. He appears at The Wheeler Centre in Melbourne on Wednesday 24 June.

The Reverend Josh breaks down Trump's surrender to (sorry, “memorandum of understanding with”) Iran; what Elon's trillion-dollar payday revealed about the far left, the far right, AI and prosperity; how we might interpret the rise of populist, anti-immigrant parties in the UK and Australia; and why you should spurn pessimism and tales of civilisational collapse, and have a weekend of grace. What a week!

What's the "queer community"? Who's "LGBTQIA+"? When did sexuality get hitched to a queer cultural movement aimed at deconstructing gender, colonialism and white male privilege? What happens when a boring old gay guy dissents?

Ben Appel found out.

Raised in a fundamentalist Christian community, he expected his Ivy League University experience to be one of liberation. Instead, he found the minds of queer college activists as closed as his pastor's.

Ben joins Josh to describe his run-ins and to ask whether the rights of gay people are served by an LGBTQIA+ coalition now as preoccupied with Gaza and trans ideology as it is with gay people themselves.

Ben's new memoir is Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic.

On Sunday, mixed martial arts fighters will beat the crap out of each other in a 90-foot-tall Ultimate Fighting Championship cage on the South Lawn of the White House. Senator John McCain once denounced the sport as "human cockfighting". President Trump loves it so much he's made it a centrepiece of the United States' 250th birthday celebrations.

Trump isn't alone. Not long ago, MMA was considered too violent even to be offered alongside pornographic movies on pay-per-view cable. Now, it's a mainstream juggernaut. How did this happen? The story is an insane saga involving Las Vegas, Covid, Joe Rogan, MAGA and the spectacular ambition of one man: Dana White. 

White, who built the UFC, is on the cover of TIME magazine this week. His profile was written by TIME's senior sports correspondent, Sean Gregory, who visited with White, Trump and legendary Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel for his piece.

Sean Gregory joins Josh to explain the wild origins of MMA, the alliances that turbocharged it, Dana White's role in delivering young men to MAGA, and what the UFC tells us about masculinity, the manosphere, and where America finds itself today.

In a world of catastrophic fires, record floods, collapsing democracies and rising unrest, our lives have rarely felt more precarious. So how do we keep living meaningfully through it? And if (or when) it all comes apart, what kind of people do we want to be?

Sarah Wilson is a New York Times bestselling author, whose new book, ‘I Eat the Stars’, chronicles how we might live meaningfully, sanely, and hopefully, survive the end of civilisation.

Live at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne, Sarah sits down with Josh to discuss how we face difficult truths without succumbing to doom, whether rumours of humanity’s death are greatly exaggerated, and how oddly liberating it is to recognise you are useless to capitalism.

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What happened to the news media? What does it have to do with why Hillary Clinton couldn’t fill a room, while Trump filled stadiums? Did diversity kill objective journalism? And what does a journalist who lived in the Soviet Union think of free speech in the West today?

Matt Taibbi became a rockstar reporter covering Trump’s first election campaign for Rolling Stone. He went on to cover huge stories like Twitter’s pre-Elon censorship regime and the misinformation around Trump’s ties to Russia. Matt joins Josh in New York City for this in-the-flesh livestream about American politics, algorithms and why, despite it all, he’s optimistic about what comes next.

Los Angeles was once the city where people went to reinvent themselves. Space, sunshine, stardom. How did it become the city where people go to disappear into homeless tent encampments?

Meghan Daum is one of America’s sharpest cultural essayists, a former LA Times columnist and a longtime Angelino.

While Josh is in L.A., he and Meghan livestreamed from the Hollywood Hills in this Memorial Day conversation about what, exactly, Los Angeles is (city? county? megalopolis?), the decline of showbiz, the 2025 wildfires, California Democrats, dog abuse, addiction, incarceration, and why Spencer Pratt, a reality TV star from The Hills, might be the most honest candidate running for mayor.

Is it possible to criticise Israel without being anti-Semitic? How do we even know if you cross that line?

It’s a question that has divided dinner tables, ended friendships, and split the left in half since October 7th, and with recent events, is no longer a theoretical debate. The oldest hatred in human history is once again at the surface.

Israeli President and Prime Minister Shimon Peres called David Harris “the foreign minister for the Jews”, having spent fifty years as one of the most prominent Jewish diplomats in the world. He served as CEO of the American Jewish Committee, has met with heads of state on every continent, and has just published Antisemitism: What Everyone Needs to Know with Oxford University Press. He grew up in a family that lived through Soviet communism, Nazi-occupied France, and the expulsion of Jews from Libya. He knows what happens when the shapeshifting virus of anti-Semitism comes out of hibernation.

He joined Josh in the Uncomfortable Conversations studio to discuss why anti-Semitism always ends in lethality, why Israel has become the Jew among nations, what the left gets catastrophically wrong about October seventh, and why, after fifty years of working for peace, he still considers the existence of Israel nothing short of a miracle.