Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

David Frum had a front-row seat the last time America went to war against a Middle Eastern adversary. He was in the George W. Bush administration in the lead-up to the Iraq War. In fact, as one of Bush's speechwriters, he wrote the line that came to define American foreign policy for the first decade of the 21st century. Four months after the World Trade Center towers were turned to rubble, President Bush channelled Frum in his State of the Union speech, saying that rogue states which harbored, financed and aided terrorists -- like North Korea, Iraq and Iran -- "constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world."

This idea, of America being at war with an alliance of dangerous terrorist states, provided the rationale for going to war with one of them, Iraq. In fact, David Frum went on to write a book in 2004 with a fellow neoconservative, Richard Perle, a chief architect of the Iraq War, entitled "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror". It became a bible of neoconservative foreign policy, in which Frum and Perle argued, among other things, for taking immediate, decisive action against Iran.

Fast-forward 22 years and David Frum is one of the most prominent and persuasive conservative voices against Donald Trump. He has written two anti-Trump books, "Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic", and "Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy". He's a staff writer at The Atlantic and the host of the podcast The David Frum Show. And since the invasion of Iraq, his view of American power has grown more nuanced.

David joins Josh to explain the precarious position in which war with Iran puts not just the Middle East... but American democracy itself.

Among the first responses by Iranian state media to the US-Israeli war on Iran was a propaganda video. It flaunted row upon row of gleaming Iranian drones, safely lined up in an underground weapons cache, ready to strike Israel, Arab states and US bases.

Drones. Precision-Guided Munitions. A.I. war games. Autonomous Weapon Systems. At the Pentagon, at Anthropic, for Trump and in Iran, they're redefining warfare in real time.

When the Pentagon's A.I. partner, Anthropic, insisted its systems mustn't be used to spy on Americans or to build killer robots, President Trump baulked. On Friday, Trump directed every federal U.S. agency to stop working with Anthropic, and the Pentagon declared Anthropic to be a "supply-chain risk" - a designation normally reserved for companies in enemy nations, which would bar even private defence contractors from using Anthropic's A.I. Its competitor, OpenAI, stepped in and took the Pentagon contract instead.

As conflict spreads across the Middle East, how is artificial intelligence being used? How will these fights change in the near future? Can we control it? Toby Walsh thinks so. 

He's the Chief Scientist at the UNSW A.I. Institute and a leading voice in the global regulation of A.I. weapons. He studied theoretical physics and mathematics at Cambridge University, has a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence, and was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.

Toby stopped by the Uncomfortable Conversations studios on his way to the airport to fly to Geneva to participate in a United Nations conference about A.I. in warfare. 

How do you learn things? Does it come easily or is it hard? Are you drawn to e-readers, or books? Typing, or handwriting? Duolingo, or moving to a Tuscan villa for six months to drink wine and debate epicureanism?

We’re all alert to the problem of smartphones, screentime, kids and social media. But what if the problem is bigger? What if our brains and bodies are fundamentally hardwired to learn in ways that technology cannot reproduce?

Today’s uncomfortable question is whether educational technology - Chromebooks and tablets and whizz-bang learning apps - are ruining education for students and grown-ups alike. That’s what the data says, according to the neuroscientist and educator Jared Cooney Horvath. He does education-related brain and behavioural research as the director of the Science of Learning Group and of NeuroEducation. He’s lectured and researched at Harvard University and been published in the New Yorker, the Economist, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Scientific American and New Scientist.

Jared’s new book is “The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning -- And How To Help Them Thrive Again”. He joins Josh to wrestle with the problems of multitasking, rote learning, memorising, the transferability of skills, the fragility of Gen Z, and how you can learn better.

Military purges. DeepSeek AI. Social credit scores. Taiwan. 

Why has the Chinese leader purged five of the seven members of the military's top decision-making body (one of the remaining two members being himself)? 

Next month, the Chinese Communist Party will enact its fifteenth Five-Year Plan. It's a biggie, because 2027 is the centenary of the People's Liberation Army - a date when China has declared it will be ready for major military combat. 

Bill Bishop is the most-read China analyst in the world. A former media guy who wrote the New York Times Dealbook's China Insider column, he became an entrepreneur and was the media's go-to China analyst during Covid. He launched one of the first Substacks ever, a fascinating blog about China called Sinocism, which now has hundreds of thousands of subscribers. 

Bill and Josh step back to ask: Will China own the 21st century? Will it eat our lunch, or slowly deflate? Happy lunar new year, humans.

Imagine a world where vast solar arrays produced cheap, abundant energy for everybody... while also powering hyper-scaled superintelligent A.I. data centres, as well as factories that suck carbon from the atmosphere to make cheap natural gas from nothing but sunlight and air.

It's within our grasp. Solar is the cheapest form of energy. The only impediments are regulations that were written in the 1970s and our own ideological hang-ups and squabbles about energy. In fact, Europe could already be energy-independent from Russia if they'd decided to invest a fraction of their gigantic gas expenditures on solar arrays when Ukraine was invaded.

Casey Handmer is an Aussie in California who got his PhD in Theoretical AstroPhysics at Caltech. He's worked at Elon Musk's Hyperloop One and at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. Now he's the founder of Terraform Industries, which plans to bring cheap, carbon-neutral hydrocarbons to everyone on Earth, while displacing drilling as the cheapest energy source.

He joins Josh for an inspiring, freewheeling conversation about solar, nuclear, coal, Russia, China, defense, artificial intelligence... and why a truly extraordinary future of abundance is just around the corner, if we choose to take it.

How much will A.I. change your life in the next few years? In what ways? How will you navigate the upheavals? How will the society around you do so?

"Normies" are finally waking up, it seems, to the scale of what's happening. The dam broke this week in part thanks to an essay which went viral by the A.I. founder and investor Matt Shumer, titled ‘Something Big is Happening.’ It's a clarion call for everyone to pay attention after two A.I. giants released their latest models this month. The new tech leaves no doubt that things are going to get very weird, for all of us, fast.

The neuroscientist Professor Joel Pearson works at the coalface of how humans can be psychologically and practically resilient for the social, economic and political impact of A.I. He runs the Future Minds Lab at UNSW and is Deputy Director of Human Readiness at the UNSW A.I. Institute. Joel joins Josh live on Substack to explain the recent developments, paint a picture of what the near-term looks like, and guide us on how us humans can adapt to, and survive, the coming A.I tsunami.

Read Matt Shumer’s essay here:

https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2021256989876109403

Violence erupted this week as police in downtown Sydney clashed with thousands of activists protesting a visit to Australia by the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog. He was invited to Australia in the wake of the anti-Semitic Bondi terrorist attack.

In his weekly livestream, ‘Josh vs the News’, Josh sits down to sift through the media reporting and how we might best think about protest, free speech and Palestine.

Has our culture had a grown-up conversation yet about race and gender? Or did the media flip from the casual bigotry of the 20th century to the censorious hysteria of the 2010s in a way that empowered the rise of the New Right? And what was it like to work as a comedy writer on a hit progressive comedy show as the culture underwent The Great Awokening?

Jeff Maurer was a writer on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver for its first six seasons. He left in 2020 after feeling its editorial angle had become too ideologically captured. Now, Jeff has a wildly popular political-satire Substack, “I Might Be Wrong”.

Josh intended to chat with Jeff to help make sense of Minneapolis, Epstein, ICE, the 2020 election ballots, Don Lemon’s arrest and, of course, the Melania documentary. There’s been a lot, lately. But this conversation evolved into a far more fascinating and funny discussion about what the controversies over blackface and transgenderism can teach us about how the media lost its way; about whether we’ve lost the ability to cover the news - and to satirise it - without preaching to the choir.

Follow Jeff’s comedy writing below at www.imightbewrong.org

Minneapolis. ICE. The arrest of journalists. The indictment of political opponents. The pursuit of election officials. The killing of protestors.

Is the U.S. government openly pursuing authoritarian rule? What is the risk of a low-grade, neighbour-against-neighbour spate of Balkan-style violence? How do we stitch American democracy back together? How does the Trump Administration end?

Take this opportunity to step back from the fire-hose of news and join Josh, as he puts America's current crisis in context, homes in on the real threat, and identifies a path to national sanity.

With the arrest of the high-profile journalist Don Lemon, the protests in Minnesota have become the new frontline of press freedom.

Is the Trump Administration openly hunting down journalists now? Or, in the aftermath of Snowden, Manning & Assange, is Trump just more shameless in cracking down on voices he disapproves of? What happens to a democracy when reporters and commentators are targeted in politically-motivated, trumped-up prosecutions?

Seth Stern is a civil liberties lawyer and the chief of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation. He joins Josh to discuss the case against Don Lemon, the weaponisation of espionage laws, the difference between ethical journalism and genuine national-security threats, how the Trump Administration - using Minneapolis as a pretext - is criminalising the freedom of the press, and how we might fix it.