Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

What should we make of the public shaming machine we have built?
Following the death of the Cambridge academic Jason Arday, Josh checks in with the godfather of public shaming, Jon Ronson. His 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed was the first blockbuster analysis of what we now call “cancel culture”, and even inspired an episode of Black Mirror.
Ronson was Louis Theroux before Louis Theroux. His BBC podcast, Things Fell Apart, is about the culture wars. He’s a contributor to This American Life, the New York Times Magazine, GQ and The Guardian UK. His TED Talk, Strange answers to the Psychopath Test, has nearly 60 million views.
Jon joins Josh to to revisit his ideas about cancel culture; how the “shaming machine” has been weaponised; the new identitarian “woke right”... and to discuss the best sightseeing spots in Sydney.
His new book is The Castle, and he’ll be touring the UK & Australia later this year.

Peter Beinart is arguably the world’s most influential Jewish anti-Zionist. 

He’s a journalist and a professor of journalism and political science. But in American and Jewish cultural life, he’s far more than that -- a lightning rod, a traitor, a truth-speaker, a coward, a hero. Applauded, derided, beloved, loathed.  

Peter is an orthodox New York Jew who keeps kosher, attends synagogue, and sends his kids to Jewish schools. He was originally a pro-Iraq-War liberal hawk, who wrote muscular books like “The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror”. His worldview changed, especially regarding Israel, after numerous visits to the West Bank. He no longer argues for a two-state solution but for a single state between the river and the sea in which Jews and Palestinians live as equals. Is that pie-in-the-sky, or the only way out for Jews and Palestinians alike? Peter’s latest book is “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza”.

Peter has written for Time, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books and is a contributing opinion columnist at The New York Times. On the eve of his trip to Australia to appear at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas (where Josh will appear in conversation with Glenn Loury - stay tuned for that), Peter joins Josh to wrestle with Zionism, anti-Zionism, Palestinianism, Gaza, ethnic supremacy, and the future of the Jewish people.

What unites Trump and Obama, Pepsi and Coca-Cola, the far right and the far left? They’re all brilliant at defining their brands. They have a clear narrative. They can tell a compelling story about the world and their place in it.

So much of life, of business, of social media, of political parties and social movements is shaped, these days, not by facts but by “alternative facts”, by feelings, by storylines. You, yourself, may even have a personal brand: the disrupter, the carer, the loyalist, the contrarian, the lover.

Matt Jones was a political strategist and speechwriter for the British Conservative party in the early 2000s. He went on to deploy his brand expertise in the private sector, where he co-created a small gin company which was sold for a fortune less than a decade later on the strength of its brand reputation.

Matt joins Josh to explore how storytelling is shaping your life more than you realise, from the supermarket to the ballot box, and how we might bring sanity back to public life. Matt’s new podcast is StoryWork.

What does it mean to be a dissident? If you join a protest march, are you dissenting… or conforming? How should you push back against leaders who wield fear and intimidation; against digital technology that dehumanises you and flattens us all?

Gal Beckerman is a staff writer at The Atlantic who worked for six years at the New York Times Book Review. His first book was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker and The Washington Post, and his latest is How to Be a Dissident, a guide to living with integrity in an age of conformity and authoritarian drift.

Gal joins Josh to discuss ICE agents, Jimmy Kimmel, Putin’s dissidents, Jews defending Gaza, communist Czechoslovakia, the quiet, task-by-task incursion of algorithmic media into your life… and what the most courageous dissidents reveal about how to find your moral compass in a dizzying age.

Is Israel making Jews safer, or less safe? Does pro-Palestinian activism feed antisemitism, or is that a Zionist lie? And why are Greek men so hunky?

Two of Josh’s favourite gals, ChayaLeah and Yael from the “Ask a Jew” podcast, join Josh from California and Greece for a funny but forthright catch-up about freedom, terrorism, Palestine and felafel. Enjoy.