If You're Listening
Each week, Matt Bevan explains the biggest story in world news while hiding in his basement from assassins and authoritarian regimes. Recent episodes explore the relationship between India and China, the Saudi Arabian city of NEOM, the conflict in the Middle East, and Ukraine's incursions into Russia. Matt Bevan draws connections between stories from the past and the events of the present to help listeners understand world news and international affairs. The podcast also features series about big moments in world news, including the US presidential election, the UK's Conservative Party leadership, and Donald Trump's relationship with Russia.
Episodes
The dirty trick that couldn’t save Trump’s midterms
After Democrats declared a landslide win in the midterms, a narrative quickly formed online: Republicans’ aggressive redistricting strategy had spectacularly backfired…but the reality is more complicated. Years ago, Donald Trump pushed Texas Republicans to redraw their electoral map specifically to blunt the kind of wave that just hit them, and it worked exactly as designed, just
Matt answers your US midterms questions live(ish)
The US midterm results are still coming in, but already, the Democrats have won the US House of Representatives and the Senate in a landslide. Surprisingly, in an interview on Fox News, Donald Trump said he will accept the results, saying the Democrats have “some good people” who “fought hard”, and that the Republicans lost because voters “didn’t like the candidates”. We did our
What’s actually at stake for Trump at the midterms?
It's US midterms eve, and since Matt hasn’t actually travelled to the US this election cycle, he's called up Four Corners reporter Mark Willacy. Mark has spent the last few weeks travelling across America, talking to voters and experts, including former FBI director James Comey and former CIA director John Brennan.Mark and Matt talk about why some Republicans are bracing for a ba
Israel’s October 7 inquiry hinges on this election
In 2018, Israeli intelligence obtained a Hamas planning document outlining almost exactly how the October 7 attack would unfold. A more detailed version followed in 2022, and Egypt and the UAE both delivered direct warnings in the weeks before the attack. None of it stopped what Israelis call the worst single day in the country’s history. More than 1100 days later, Israel still h
The Bananas in Pyjamas’ doomed trip to Moscow
In 1998, the Bananas in Pyjamas visited Moscow as part of a promotional tour. Things did not go to plan. Today, Eric Campbell, the ABC’s Russia correspondent at the time, joins Matt to try to piece together what really happened. Eric also talks about meeting Boris Yeltsin in a broom cupboard, the changing face of Russian media, and why Russian politicians took aim at Peppa Pig.Fo
Lenin's WWII goo adventure
Surprise! We're popping in on a Sunday to answer your questions, many of which were about goo and the Canadian state of Alberta this month.Kara also tells Matt an incredible story from Russia during World War II — the Weekend at Bernie's-style odyssey that kept Vladimir Lenin's corpse safe. We're going to do this regularly, so if you have questions for Matt and Kara send them thr
Is Trump going to bomb the bond market?
Donald Trump recently said that if his treasury secretary can’t get bond yields down, the next move might be the military. It sounds absurd, but the US bond market is the quiet foundation underneath almost every price in the global economy, from your mortgage to a company’s loan. When investors lose faith in a government’s ability to manage its money, as happened under the UK’s L
My name is Inigo Jones. Prepare for rain.
Before we knew about El Niño, La Niña and the other patterns scientists now use to make long-range weather forecasts, there were men like Inigo Jones, whose prediction methods owed more to astronomy than to meteorology. Farmers, construction companies and brides-to-be all turned to these unorthodox weathermen, who charted the cycles of the planets and the spots on the surface of
The apocalyptic El Niño we didn't see coming
Toxic smoke haze is blanketing Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, after weeks of fires in Indonesia. In central Chile, flash flooding has trapped people on their roofs, and already Australia’s spring is unusually hot. Scientists have confirmed it’s an El Niño year, and it’s expected to be one of the worst on record, tipping the odds for these extreme weather events. But we
A day out at the Hezbollah theme park
Over recent decades, Hezbollah has become deeply embedded in southern Lebanon. It runs everything from hospitals and schools to infrastructure projects, and even has its own theme park.Naturally, when an email landed in our inbox from listener Alex who’s actually been to that theme park, we wanted to know every detail. So Matt gave him a call.Follow If You're Listening on the ABC
Putin's billion-dollar quest for immortality
A hot mic caught Putin telling Xi that organ transplants could bring immortality. It's not just talk, and it's not new either: Russian leaders have spent nearly a century chasing eternal life, with some genuinely bizarre results.Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_N
The US-Canada border fight over a pig
With tensions between Donald Trump and Mark Carney heating up, it's the perfect excuse to revisit another time things got tense on the US-Canadian border… back before Canada was Canada.In June 1859, on a small island wedged between what's now Washington State and Vancouver Island, an American farmer raised his rifle at a pig that kept eating his potatoes, and pulled the trigger.
Can AI predict the future?
The US-Israel war with Iran. The UK leadership kerfuffle. Who’d finish the top of the ladder in the AFL. At the start of 2026 none of these things would have felt all that predictable. But as Matt experiments with AI stuck in the recent past, he finds computers have gotten good at predicting certain kinds of futures — and he investigates what that means for us, and for Donald Tru
Thatcher's Falklands PSYOP radio station
The 1982 Falklands War wasn't just fought on land and at sea, but also over the airwaves. Radio was part of the strategy on both sides of the conflict, with Britain launching its own covert radio station as a form of 'grey' psychological warfare. Global Roaming producer Pat Sunderland tells Matt the story of Operation Moonshine.Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Che
Are the UK and Argentina about to go to war…again?
In 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, and Britain took them back by force. But it was messier behind the scenes than it looked… leaked tapes, real and fake, revealed Ronald Reagan secretly urging Margaret Thatcher not to humiliate Argentina, even as the US publicly stood by its closest ally. More than 40 years later, the islands are back in the headlines, and Argentina
Why there are abandoned tunnels under Dallas
We love a tunnel on this show. A few months ago Kara told Matt all about the FBI's secret tunnel under the Russian embassy in Washington. Today Matt takes Kara back underground, digging into the rise and fall of the pedway: an infrastructure idea that spread through North America in the 1960s and 70s, from Montreal to Dallas to Calgary, with mixed results.Follow If You're Listeni
Is Trump cracking Canada?
Donald Trump's trade war with Canada has renamed lakes, threatened to make Canada the 51st state, and slapped tariffs on everything from steel to snowmobiles. The surprising part is what it's doing to the country itself. Quebec, home to Canada's oldest and fiercest separatist movement, has been hit hardest by the tariffs, and yet, support for leaving Canada has dropped to its low
How we feel about the AI apocalypse
In this highly anticipated mailbag episode, Matt and Kara finally answer the most-asked question in the If You're Listening inbox. Plus, they talk dirty bombs, whether or not Matt is qualified to be doing this, and give their takes on AI insiders’ warnings about humanity’s destruction.P.S. Please stop emailing us about mugsFollow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check ou
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 collapsed. Days later, he became a national pariah for cutting off their salaries, a gamble to keep the company alive long enough to eventually give their families a quarter of its future profits. It worked. Twenty five years on, th
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 decade. In the early 1990s, thousands of Haitians fleeing a coup were held at Guantanamo, including hundreds of HIV-positive refugees held there indefinitely until Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins called it out at the Oscars. A US cou
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 is.Science reporter Jacinta Bowler might have the answers... They spent months with their head in quantum physics land for Dead and Alive, a series of Science Friction on ABC Radio National.Today we’re unpacking what this all means
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, and authorities are warning that another flood could burst through at any moment, putting rescuers still working in the area at risk. It's called a Glacier Lake Outburst Flood, and unlike most disasters, it doesn't really have an a
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 attacked by something. When questioned by police, they all described the perpetrator as a "Monkey Man". A short, half-monkey, half-man, dressed in a monkey-sized police uniform, and he was causing havoc.ABC Journalist Ann Jones has bee
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 show broken toilets and meals of mystery mush, the result of being trapped on the wrong side of Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. But the real story is much bigger. The Navy's next-generation carriers were built around untested
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 producer, Pat Sunderland, uncovered that we couldn't really fit in. It's the story of a beloved mayor whose fall from grace changed the political landscape of the Philippines.Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our s
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 1901. More than a century later, agents still split their careers between protecting the President and investigating fake twenties. The agency is understaffed by over 20 percent, and burnt-out staff are hitting mandated overtime pay c
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, Regime Change, co-written with Maggie Haberman, argues Trump's second presidency is being run unlike any other in living memory: driven by gut instinct over briefings, staffed by loyalists chosen for devotion rather than experience, an
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 secret arms pipeline between Moscow and Tehran. The strike came amid an extraordinary shift inside MAGA world. Pro-Trump influencer Laura Loomer, who once called Zelenskyy an authoritarian and said Ukraine needed to be "denazified", has
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 anything. It just decided that was the fastest way to get the answers it needed.Now the ABC's national AI reporter Cam Wilson has uncovered the first case of an autonomous AI hack here in Australia. Cam joins Matt to explain what happe
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, Posh George, once advertised money laundering on the dark web and served time in a US prison. His biggest Brexit donor Arron Banks claimed his fortune came from South African diamond mines that, when reporters checked, weren't act
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 he was swarmed in the streets, men came up to kiss him, and he met the president. Today, producer Adair Sheppard tells Matt the story how Wisdom became one of the most famous people in Albania without knowing it.Follow If You're List
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 quite as private as they thought… turns out it’s actually a regular day-trip spot for locals. Despite that, the pair now want to build a luxury resort there along a protected coastal lagoon that's a key nesting site for migrating fla
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 the site has ever run: one that turned WNBA games into a target for flying sex toys.Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFM
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 Iran, cashing in within minutes of the bombs actually falling… and it’s not alone. Donald Trump's own teleprompter operator is under investigation for betting on his boss's speeches, and a US soldier allegedly bet on capturing Nico
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 the president about it directly. ABC's Americas editor John Lyons takes Matt behind the scenes of the exchange that made headlines, revealing what it takes to ask the most powerful man in the world a question.Follow If You're Listeni
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 him “Bunker Boy” and he had a measly $92 million in the bank. Fast forward to his second term, and financial disclosures show he made more than $2.2 billion in a single year. The man who once dismissed crypto as a scam found his fo
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 deal ever negotiated." But after another Trump-brokered ceasefire appears to have broken down, that looks increasingly unlikely.So what did it take to get the 2015 deal over the line? Matt sits down with former US Energy Secretary Erne
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 Carter installed solar panels… then Ronald Reagan removed them. By that standard, Donald Trump's plan to build a grand ballroom isn't all that unusual. In fact, it's something he's talked about for years. The real story isn't the ren
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 thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah.But it wasn't the first time something like this has happened. Today, Matt and Kara trace the long history of people accidentally spying on themselves: from the CIA's best-selling
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 leadership, and Benjamin Netanyahu declared Hezbollah had been crushed. But eliminating a leader is one thing, defeating an ideology is another.In southern Lebanon, Hezbollah is woven into daily life. After decades of conflict and a
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 tell the story of his favourite ever micronation: the Principality of Sealand. Especially because, when he mentioned Sealand in an episode last year, so many of you wrote in to say you shared his enthusiasm.So here we finally are. To
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 between Israel and Lebanon. In this two-part special, we trace the conflict that keeps dragging the region back into crisis. From Israel's invasion of Lebanon and the creation of a security zone in the south, to the rise of Hezbolla
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 historic wing of the house has been demolished, and it's putting a strain on President Trump and Melania's relationship.Sadly, Kevin McCloud wasn't available for this episode. Instead, Matt is talking to White House reporter for the Wa
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 company was down for the count. Then Donald Trump stepped in. When few venues would host the sport, he opened the doors of the Trump Taj Mahal, giving the sport a much-needed lifeline and UFC President Dana White never forgot it.De
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 covering the aftermath of Taiwan's disputed presidential election, reporter Eric Campbell investigated a bizarre practice that its followers claim dates back centuries. In this episode, Matt and Eric revisit that remarkable report and
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 launches, and increasingly aggressive displays of force designed to remind Taiwan of China's power. The carrot is soft diplomacy: business opportunities, cultural exchanges, economic integration, and promises of prosperity under clos
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 Xiao gives Matt the meaning behind the meal. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq
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 member of Taiwan’s progressive DPP who became Taiwan's first president from outside the long-ruling KMT. On the other is Han Kuo-yu, a KMT populist. But this isn't just another political brawl. Their careers mirror Taiwan's transformati
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. Today, Matt's producer Adair tells him the strange saga of Taiwan's Olympic ambitions, including the tale of a Taiwanese man once called the greatest athlete in the world, and the potential plot to take him down.Follow If You're Listening on t
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 people realise.After the Second World War, Taiwan was handed back from Japan to China just as the mainland descended into civil war. Mao Zedong’s Communists eventually defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, who fled to Taiwan and rebu
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 disputes, and good old reliable NIMBYism stands in their way.Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq
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 radically different foreign policy styles but the same conviction: that the future belongs to the bold.Trump’s approach to foreign policy has looked like a blitz attack, complete with tariffs, airstrikes and threatening to close strategic
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 Wilson joins Matt to share the details.Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq
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 that rise is its unorthodox CEO, the philosophising tech-entrepreneur Alex Karp. As Palantir integrates itself into systems in every facet of life, from Australian supermarkets to the controversial U.S. ICE raids, Alex Karp provides
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-Mackinnon tells Matt about a decades-long secret FBI operation underneath the streets of Washington which ended in one of the most extraordinary betrayals in American intelligence history.Listen to Matt on No One Saw it Coming on the ABC Li
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, but no shared picture. Enter Palantir: a company built on the premise that data, if stitched together properly, could surface threats before they metastasise.Co-founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, Palantir's early pitch was decepti
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 that haven’t made it into a story of If You’re Listening.You can listen to Matt Bevan's episode of Conversations hereFollow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis
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 apart and diplomatic norms are being crushed - is the law of the jungle the only law left?Listen to Matt on Conversations on the ABC Listen appFollow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https:/
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 speaking to the media — except a 14-year-old student who’s just been given a mobile phone. Matt Bevan is live on the scene.Recorded live at Newcastle Writers Festival, Matt revisits a mystery from his past: the bizarre series of event
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 why is he so confident he can make a better deal than Obama did back in 2015?Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq
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 Gulf before the conflict are set to arrive in Australia this week. It’s not just the domestic situation that is making hair stand on end. The entire global energy market also seems to be losing its mind. To try and make sense of it
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 meant a big payday for Australia. Unfortunately, it hasn’t played out like that because Australia has a habit of locking in energy deals that look increasingly out of step with reality. Case in point: our long-term gas agreements wit
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 negotiations. Trump’s been doing most of his negotiation on Truth Social, and so every day is a new… more deranged revelation. Plus your questions about Iran, the price of petrol, and why there aren’t more oil pipelines answered!Follow If
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 by the chaos of civil war. Occasional raids have uncovered that these compounds are staffed with hundreds of thousands of trafficked workers, kept there by force. China has financially and militarily supported its neighbour Myanmar f
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. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq
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 young people, the idea that we might have to seriously limit our fuel consumption is unprecedented… But for anyone who lived through the 1970s, it’s all too familiar. So why did Donald Trump start this war?Follow If You're Listening
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, who claim they did it by mistake.Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq
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. So why was it never completed?Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq
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 concerted and deliberate internet shutdowns carried out by the Iranian regime. And this isn’t the first time the internet has been shut down for Iranian users. It’s happened many times before. Today, Matt speaks with Deakin University P
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 of mismanagement, the country’s water system is approaching a breaking point. Rivers that once crossed the Iranian plateau are drying to threads; aquifers are collapsing; lakes have retreated into salt flats. The roots of the crisis
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 new life in Australia.Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq
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 Iran is closer to a tangled electrical grid that’s been growing since 1979. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps isn’t just a military unit; it’s a sprawling ecosystem. It runs companies, shapes politics, and embeds itself deep in th
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 arguments while she was there. Kylie returns to the pod to share with Matt what she learnt about the group, what she makes of the latest in the Iran war, and where Australia should go from here.Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Liste
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’s changed? Has Trump decided the Iranian regime’s threats are all talk? Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq
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 this attack impact the global oil trade and does Donald Trump actually have a master plan?Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U
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 been one of the most enduring, with the least available evidence. Now, the deposition of billionaire businessman Les Wexner has provided a potential answer - Epstein simply scammed rich clients who didn’t know any better. Could the tru
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 consequences for the Royal family, whether Epstein could possibly be “Q”, and whether they’ve changed their view on the claim Epstein was a Mossad agent.Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www
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 London, Keir Starmer faces mounting pressure from within his own ranks, accused of knowing more than he’s let on. Meanwhile, Lord Mandelson’s long-rumored association with Epstein is now headline material, raising questions about how dee
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 joined by Fiona Pepper, co-host of the Science Friction podcast, to discuss a weird story the team stumbled across when researching flights leading up to the 1986 Challenger disaster.You can listen to The Challenger Legacy, the latest season of
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 through online message boards like 4chan. What began as internet trolling and fragmented rumour became fuel for something much bigger. The Epstein case fed directly into the rise of QAnon, a conspiracy movement built on the belief tha
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