Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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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.

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.