Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

What are Trump and Putin cooking up for Ukraine? Can the Europeans sideline it? What options does Ukraine still have on the table? And does any of this really matter to non-Europeans any more?

This week, the ceasefire talks that President Trump boasted he'd wrap up in 24 hours fell apart, again. Russia says it wants an end to the war, if Ukraine effectively surrenders. Trump now admits Putin might be "dragging his feet".

Misha Zelinsky lived in Ukraine for the first year of the war, reporting from the conflict. A Fulbright Scholar and national security expert, he has the honour of being personally sanctioned by the Putin regime.

Misha and Josh assess where the conflict currently stands, what Ukraine's options are now, and whether it still matters to the rest of us.

Angus Taylor is the Shadow Treasurer of Australia and a key figure of the Opposition, the centre-right Liberal Party.

A former cabinet minister, businessman and Rhodes scholar, he's often discussed as a future prime minister. Opinion polls put his party's return to power in the May election as a 50/50 bet.

Josh sat down with the Shadow Treasurer to discuss innovation, productivity, nuclear power, and how annoying it is to do your taxes.

How should moderate, secular Jews feel about Israel? How brutalising must Israel’s Gaza policy be before more Jews denounce it? Is Israel a well-intentioned country hijacked by right-wing leaders from its true purpose of peace? Or is it intrinsically committed to destroying Palestinians? Was a Jewish ethno-state a mistake from the start? Or is Israel an island of democracy in a sea of Islamist dysfunction?

No group debates these questions more vehemently than Jews themselves. After the October 7th Hamas attack, one book in particular shot up the bestseller list in the West. "The Palestine Laboratory" detailed how the technologies which Israel developed to control Palestinian populations have been exported for ugly purposes to regimes all the world. The book won Australia's most prestigious journalism award, a Walkley.

Its author, Antony Lowenstein, is an anti-Zionist Jew. He lived in East Jerusalem from 2016 to 2020 and has been published in The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times.

Josh felt it's time to invite Antony back for another argument, as Jews are wont to have, about the state of the Jewish state.

John McWhorter is arguably the world’s most famous linguist. A professor at Columbia University and a columnist for the New York Times, he alternately enrages the right and the left as an anti-Trump, anti-woke, Black academic.

John and Josh sat down in Sydney to discuss gay slang, the Trumpist right, Black provocateurs and “serving c***t”.

When Trump floated the idea of the U.S. acquiring Greenland, some called it a random brain fart. But there is a real conversation among security experts about control of the Arctic in the 21st century. As climate change opens up new avenues for shipping, spying, mining, submarining and warfare, the far North Atlantic matters more and more.

Sherri Goodman was the Pentagon's chief environmental officer in the Clinton Administration. Her specific expertise is in the polar regions, Russian nuclear subs, climate chaos, and Arctic security. She's a Senior Fellow with the Polar Institute and the Environmental Change and Security Program with the Woodrow Wilson International Center, and her latest book is "Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership and the Fight for Global Security".

Josh picks her brain about the threats and opportunities of climate change… and why Greenland does, in fact, matter.