Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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.

As the Hantavirus and Ebola pop up in the news, what did we get wrong during Covid?

Dr Nick Coatsworth was the Australian government’s deputy chief medical officer during the pandemic’s first wave, when he regularly appeared on radio and TV to provide the public with information. He became the face of the vaccine rollout. Today, he’s more reflective. He shuns vaccine mandates, wants a national Covid inquiry, and opposes policies that would ban health “misinformation”.

Earlier in his career, as an expert in infectious and respiratory diseases, Nick led humanitarian teams in the Congo and in Darfur for Medicins Sans Frontiers - an experience so horrifying it left him with PTSD. He’s now a resident medical expert at the Nine Network on Australian TV, as well as a practising doctor at Canberra Hospital, where he was previously its director of infectious diseases.

Nick and Josh bring you up to speed on Hantavirus & Ebola, and wrestle with lockdowns, lab leaks, contact tracing, quarantine, misinformation, vaccine mandates, and what we need to learn from a pandemic we don’t reflect on enough.

The world is seemingly on fire. Iran, Ukraine, China, Trump, AI, climate, antisemitism, the Australian budget. It’s an avalanche of bad news, until Reverend Szeps arrives on the scene to put it all into perspective.

Plus: Shakira vs the Spanish government, might be the most inspiring thing you’ll read this week.

Hey! Politicians! Stop talking like cardboard cutouts (if you're mainstream) or lunatics (if you're not).

If politicians can't figure out how to have uncomfortable conversations, voters will elect populists who can.

Last Thursday, Australia's flagship current affairs TV show grilled the opposition leader, Angus Taylor. It wasn't pretty. Obfuscations, snarkiness, waffling, pre-rehearsed speechifying, evasions. Why???

Few people are more experienced at navigating uncomfortable conversations than ole Szepsie. Here, in a selfless public service, Josh plays back the interview and interjects with his thoughtful advice.

This is a fascinating post mortem of how politicians can do better, how political personas are constructed, how political interviews work, how to succeed at them, and what all this reveals about our unique political moment.

Trump is in China, and you need to know what he and Xi are up to. What new world order are they creating?

Today, Josh sits down with a senior US former national security official to understand how three men - Trump, Xi and Putin - are remaking the world.

Tom Wright was a special assistant to President Biden and the Senior Director for Strategic Planning on the US National Security Council, where he helped to shape US policy on Ukraine, Taiwan, semiconductors, and the China relationship as it lurched from confrontation, to managed competition, and back again. Now, from the outside, he's trying to make sense of what Trump, Xi and Putin are building together, and what it means for every country they don't run (yet).

Josh probes Tom about the night he learned about the famous Chinese spy balloon in US airspace, about President Biden's mental decline, the Kamala Harris campaign, and how medium-sized powers might navigate a brave new world.

Tom is a scholar of international relations by training, originally from Ireland. He's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute and a contributing writer to The Atlantic. He joined Josh at the Uncomfortable Conversations studio during a tour of Australia to discuss the Trump-Xi summit, Putin in Ukraine, nuclear submarines, and why you shouldn’t buy a Chinese EV.

His new paper for the Lowy Institute is ‘Inflection Point: Biden, Trump and the Future World Order.’ Our thanks to the Lowy Institute for facilitating this conversation.