If You're Listening
Detalls del Canal
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...
Episodis Recents
279 episodis
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...
Making sense of Trump’s attack on Iran
Matt and Kara answer your questions about the the unfolding situation in the Middle East.
Who are the contenders for new leadership, how will th...
Where did Epstein’s money come from?
Where did Jeffrey Epstein get his vast fortune from? Of all the questions surrounding this labyrinthine saga, the source of Epstein’s millions has bee...
The Epstein Q&A our lawyers approved
Matt and Kara try to answer your questions about the Epstein files without being sued... with only limited redactions.
They get into the consequ...
Epstein’s ghost is haunting the UK
A dark Epstein storm cloud is settling in over Europe — and it’s drifting straight across Westminster. As the newly released Epstein files reach Londo...
The time an astronaut said they weren't coming back
Space travel is a serious physical and mental challenge by all accounts. But what happens when an astronaut goes rogue mid-flight?
Matt is joine...
How Epstein and QAnon blew up the justice system
When news first broke of a billionaire sex offender with a private island… the story didn’t erupt through traditional media — instead it circulated th...
There Will Be Mud (again)
That's right, we're talking soil again. Is there a field of Ukranian chernozem soil sitting in rural New South Wales? Producer Pat joins Matt to final...
Stephen Miller: Edgelord in Chief
For a long time, no matter which party was in power - the US government has operated within pretty defined guardrails… that is, until Donald Trump ret...
Pod Save America on the endless escalation of Trump
Jon Lovett has been following the daily minutia of U.S. politics for a decade on his podcast Pod Save America. Ahead of their Australian tour, Jon joi...
Steven Pinker thinks we’re worried about the wrong things
Matt is joined by psychologist and science writer Steven Pinker to discuss doomsday predictions, climate anxiety, and how best to split the balance be...
Steven Pinker thinks we're too worried about the future
Matt is joined by psychologist and science writer Steven Pinker to discuss doomsday predictions, climate anxiety, and how best to split the balance be...