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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How 9/11 shaped the man behind Trump's tariffs
On September 11, 2001, Howard Lutnick's firm Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 employees, including his brother and best friend, when the World Trade Center...
Why Guantanamo Bay is so hard to close
It’s been 25 years since the September 11 attacks, and Guantanamo Bay is still open. But its use as a legal grey zone predates the War on Terror by a...
The cat that broke Einstein’s brain
So, there’s a cat in a box and it’s trapped. Most people have at least heard of the term Schrodinger’s cat. But many of us don’t actually know what it...
Nepal's glacier time bomb
In August, a glacier collapse in Nepal triggered a catastrophic flood, and the danger still isn't over. Fragile new lakes have formed from the debris,...
The mystery of the Monkey Man
There was a very curious crime wave recently in India... a number of victims presented to the hospital with scratches and bites - like they'd been att...
Will Trump's weird obsession break the US Navy?
Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln have spent more than 250 consecutive days at sea without a single port call, a new US Navy record. Leaked photos sh...
The scam queen of the Philippines
Earlier this year, we took a deep dive into the seedy underbelly of the scam centres of Cambodia and Myanmar. And there was one story that our produce...
Is the Secret Service too broken to protect Trump?
The Secret Service was created to hunt counterfeit money, and only started guarding presidents after three assassinations forced Congress's hand in 19...
Jonathan Swan on the real Trump White House
New York Times reporter Jonathan Swan has spent more than a decade covering Donald Trump, and he says nothing compares to this term. His new book, Reg...
Why MAGA is turning on Russia
Last month Ukrainian drones struck an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea, the first direct link between the wars in Ukraine and Iran, and proof of a secr...
What happens when AI commits a crime
Last month, a new AI model from OpenAI made headlines when it hacked into another AI company's servers during testing. Nobody asked the AI to hack any...
Who's really bankrolling Nigel Farage?
Nigel Farage has some…strange revenue streams. The leader of Reform UK has been paid about £700,000 to front ads for a gold bullion company. His fixer...
How to become an Albanian superstar
In 1995, 80-year-old British comedian Norman Wisdom stepped off the plane in Albania for the first time, to a crowd of cheering fans. Over four days h...
Dua Lipa and Ivanka Trump go head to head in Albania
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump found what they call an untouched private island while swimming off a friend's superyacht near Albania. But it wasn't q...
Polymarket’s dumbest betting market
On Polymarket, you can bet on almost anything. Today Matt is speaking to Supervising Producer Kara Jensen-Mackinnon about one of the strangest markets...
How to get away with selling classified information
There's a Polymarket account called Magamyman that's terrible at picking elections, but it's made $800,000 betting on exactly when the US would strike...
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...