If You're Listening
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If You're Listening
The world is on fire. There's a coup. Inflation is through the roof, and AI is taking our jobs. What does it all mean? Each week, Matt Bevan explains the biggest story in world news while hiding in his basement from assassins and authoritarian regimes. Recent episodes include an exploration of the...
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What it takes to put a question to Trump
We've been looking into the remarkable amount of money Donald Trump is making in his second term, so today Matt is sitting down with a man who asked t...
Trump's rise from bunker boy to billionaire
In 2020, Secret Service agents rushed Donald Trump to the White House bunker as protests raged outside. Trump was down on his luck…the media nicknamed...
Is Trump pushing more countries toward nuclear weapons?
President Trump promised he'd negotiate a better nuclear deal with Iran than the one struck under Barack Obama, which he's described as "the worst dea...
What’s Under Trump’s Ballroom?
Presidents have always left their mark on the White House. Harry Truman rebuilt it from the inside out. John F. Kennedy restored its elegance. Jimmy C...
Criminals, if you're listening
In last Thursday's episode, we talked about one of the most sophisticated intelligence operations in recent history, when Israel planted bombs in thou...
Why is Netanyahu sabotaging Trump?
Israel's campaign against Hezbollah began with one of the boldest intelligence operations in recent memory. The pager attacks devastated the group's l...
Matt finally gets to talk about Sealand
Last Thursday's episode touched on the relatively short-lived, Israel-backed microstate of Free Lebanon. For Matt, that's all the excuse he needs to t...
Why Israel-Hezbollah threatens Trump’s Iran peace plan
Donald Trump wants a historic deal with Iran. The problem is that some of the biggest obstacles aren't in Tehran or Washington. They're on the border...
Trump’s grand designs for the White House
The construction of Trump's new White House ballroom would make for maybe the best episode of Grand Designs ever made. The budget has blown out, a his...
Trump’s unbreakable bond with the UFC
Before it was a billion-dollar sporting empire, the UFC was fighting for survival. Regulators wanted it banned, broadcasters kept their distance. The...
The Taiwanese masters of genital weightlifting
While researching our series on Taiwan, we stumbled across one of the strangest stories ever filed for ABC's Foreign Correspondent. In 2005, while cov...
Will Xi Jinping cross the Taiwan Strait?
For decades, Beijing has pursued a simple strategy towards Taiwan: the carrot and the stick. The stick comes in the form of military drills, missile l...
How Peking Duck and Moutai changed the world
Modern China has used ceremonial banquets to resolve diplomatic disputes for decades - but there's often a message hidden within. ABC reporter Bang Xi...
Taiwan’s violent, messy, beautiful democracy
A fistfight erupts in Taiwan's parliament. Punches fly as two rivals find themselves at the centre of the chaos. On one side is Chen Shui-bian, a memb...
Was Taiwan's Olympic champion sabotaged?
To this day, international recognition of Taiwan is a fraught issue - with only a handful of countries affirming their claim of statehood.
Toda...
Taiwan’s 100 year fight for freedom
For decades, Taiwan has existed in political limbo: claimed by China, governed separately, and shaped by a history far more complicated than most peop...
The secret techbro city of the future
A team of tech billionaires and venture capitalists have proposed a city that promises to revive the American Dream. But secret landgrabs, legal dispu...
Trump and Xi Jinping’s deadly game of chess
The world watched Donald Trump and Xi Jinping sit across from each other in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing last week. Two leaders with radica...
What is Palantir doing in Australia?
Palantir has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts with Australian federal and state governments. The ABC's national AI reporter Cam Wils...
Will anything stop Palantir?
The shadowy U.S. tech company Palantir has had a meteoric rise from complete obscurity to transforming the nature of surveillance forever. Pivotal to...
The FBI dug a tunnel under the Russian embassy
The CIA and the FBI famously weren't talking to each other in the lead-up to 9/11. This is the story of why.
Supervising producer Kara Jensen-M...
How did Palantir get so powerful?
In the aftermath of 9/11, the problem wasn't just intelligence failure; it was information stuck in silos. The FBI and CIA had pieces of the puzzle, b...
Matt's producers present the weirdest tales from the basement
From engineers with god complexes to elite athletes prone to being struck by lightning, Matt’s producers Pat and Adair bring the strangest stories tha...
The unexpected loser of the Iran war
For decades now, the tiny gas-rich nation of Qatar has been surviving off the back of its international diplomacy. But now old alliances are falling...
How not to cover a radioactive incident
In 2003, fire trucks, ambulances and hazmat crews descend on Merewether High School in Newcastle after reports of a radioactive incident. No one is sp...
Will the US and Iran make a deal (again)?
In the midst of bluffs, empty threats and broken promises, Trump has struggled to find any leverage over the Iranian regime he has declared war on, so...
When will Australia run out of fuel?
Until now, Australia has been relying on oil that passed through the Strait of Hormuz before the war began. But the last tankers to leave the Persian...
How the Iran war exposed Australia's energy mistakes
When the Strait of Hormuz closed, global gas prices doubled seemingly overnight. As one of the world’s biggest gas exporters, the spike should have me...
Trump’s on-again, off-again negotiations with Iran
Matt spent a week camping entirely out of internet reception, so Kara does her best to get him up to speed on all the latest of the US-Iran war negoti...
The brutal scam compounds of Myanmar
Over the past few years, industrial scam compounds have surged throughout Myanmar, buoyed by the resources of powerful criminal networks, and hidden b...
Growing up fighting apartheid
Sisonke Msimang from the new ABC podcast Boycott! joins Matt to share her father’s journey as a revolutionary in the fight against apartheid.
F...
What happened last time we ran out of oil
Turn on the tv and you’ll see no shortage of concerned journalists standing at fuel bowsers, shaking their heads at the rising prices. For plenty of y...
When Iraq accidentally bombed a U.S. warship
In 1987 the USS Stark became the first U.S. ship sunk by missile fire since World War II. The missiles were fired by Iraq, America’s ally at the time,...
We were warned about the Strait of Hormuz
While governments scramble to find a way around the Strait of Hormuz, a pipeline sits half-finished in the desert that would have solved the problem....
Why Iran is building their own internet
As we’ve been looking into Iran over this month, we’ve had a lot of trouble finding out what is really happening on the ground. That’s due to the conc...
Iran is running out of water
Water is the lifeblood of all civilisations. In Iran, the water is drying up. That disappearance is becoming impossible to ignore, and after decades o...
Life inside the Iranian Revolution
Author Saeed Fassaie shares his story of witnessing the Iranian revolutionary first-hand, from being a political fugitive, to a soldier, to building a...
Who is Trump really fighting in Iran?
There’s a persistent fantasy in Washington that regimes are like light bulbs: smash the fixture, screw in a new one, problem solved. The reality in Ir...
Kylie Moore-Gilbert says Trump might be stuck in Iran
Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert spent over 800 days in an Iranian prison interrogated by the Revolutionary Guard, and got into plenty of argum...
Trump thinks he can switch off the Iran War
Donald Trump once warned against endless wars. Now, he’s launched a strike killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and many Iranian leadership figures, so what...