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...
Episodi recenti
209 episodi
The time the US Navy teamed up with the Mafia
Yes you read that right. It's a wild story from the latest series of No One Saw it Coming, a show about people, objects, and accidents that changed th...
Weighing up Ozempic
This episode originally aired in September 2023.
For a century, society has bullied and shamed people into trying to lose weight, without much r...
The Montana Mountain King and a conspiracy to clone
Last year, environment reporter Peter de Kruijff stumbled on the case of 81-year-old rancher Arthur “Jack” Schubarth, who was sentenced to six months...
How dodgy data sent China's economy off course
This episode originally aired in August 2023.
How do you plan for a country when you don’t even know how many people live there? That’s the prob...
Florida Man Invades Venezuela
While working on last Thursday’s episode, Matt had the very sad but familiar experience of cutting one of his favourite parts out of the script.
...
Why Trump is blowing up boats off Venezuela
The U.S. military has now attacked three boats off the coast of Venezuela in as many weeks. On the surface, it’s hard to see exactly what the administ...
This can't be good for our brains
It’s been almost two weeks since we woke up to the news of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. If you were online that morning, you probably saw rolling upd...
Charlie Kirk’s murder sparks calls for revenge
In the days since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the internet has been awash with conflicting information about the assassin’s ideological motivat...
The Kurdish Fox and the Strawberry
While researching our last episode on the bizarre wave of Iran-banked anti-semitic attacks in Australia and around the world, Matt ended up somewhere...
Iran’s global network of goons
There has been a spike in antisemitic attacks around the world, but there was something off about the ones happening here in Australia. The graffiti h...
Matt has been stuck in the mud for seven years
There’s a story Matt’s been trying to tell on If You’re Listening almost since day one. It’s about the agriculture, soil and water of Ukraine, and he...
Is Putin a master manipulator or a very smart guy?
Donald Trump once said he could end the war between Russia and Ukraine in one day. Well, it’s now been over 200 days and he’s finally admitted that it...
Who is the cigar-toting, moustachioed-American named Gunslinger?
In 1999, a young American called Robert Bogucki dumped his bicycle and walked out into the Great Sandy Desert in remote northern Australia. In 2022, E...
The Art of the Peace Deal
It’s no secret that Donald Trump has his sights set on a Nobel Peace Prize. He already claims to have brokered peace in a number of conflicts around t...
Does the Chinese Embassy look tacky?
When Palestinian statehood is recognised at the UN General Assembly in September, a small office tucked away in a residential street in Canberra will...
The blueprint for Palestine
Australia, the UK, France and Canada intend to recognise Palestine as a state at the UN General Assembly in September. But what does that actually mea...
Kara drags Matt back down the rabbit hole
After an entire week looking into the Oslo Accords, we still had a residual urge to find out more about Mona Juul and Terje Rod Larsen, the Norwegian...
How Middle East peace plans were hatched in the Norwegian woods
Even the most seasoned negotiators can’t agree on how to bring peace to the Middle East. Everyone agrees that - on a personal level - it’s a problem t...
The nurse on death row in Yemen
Getting accused of murder is never a good thing. But, hypothetically if you are going to get accused of murder, it’s generally for the best that it’s...
Are the MAGA podcasters right about Epstein?
The internet is flooded with hour-long podcasts about what really happened to Jeffrey Epstein. Until recently, two of the most high profile Epstein co...
Australia's most dangerous home-grown conspiracy theory
So Jeffery Epstein probably wasn’t a Mossad spy. But online conspiracies like this pop up closer to home too. Could Israeli intelligence have been inv...
Was Jeffrey Epstein a Mossad agent?
The Jeffrey Epstein rabbit hole has opened into a cavernous rabbit abyss and it seems no one is safe. Conspiracy theorists and right-wing podcasters a...
How to avoid abduction by a Mossad honeypot
Forty years ago, a man named Mordecai Vanunu came very close to exposing Israel’s secret nuclear enrichment facility in a bible group in the heart of...
Israel’s not-so-secret nuclear weapons
It’s widely accepted that Israel has nuclear weapons.
How many? Well, it’s impossible to know because to this day the Israeli government has ne...
How Ayatollah Khomeini changed Iran
With Iran still in the news, we thought we would revisit the man who created the regime that so many in the Israeli and American political establishme...
How a cancer diagnosis ended the US-Iran relationship
Before Iran was the Islamic theocracy it is today, it was a monarchy for two and a half thousand years. The last Shah or king of Iran was overthrown i...
Has the US busted Iran’s nuclear bomb plans?
The chaotic 12 days of the Israel-Iran war ended with the United States dropping bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities, then quickly brokering a ceasefir...
Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert on the bombing of Iran’s Evin prison
Israel recently bombed Iran’s notorious Evin prison, a place that Dr Kylie Moore Gilbert came to know all too well. The political scientist and author...
Why Israel's drones have changed the future of war
For the last century, since the rise of mechanised and then nuclear warfare, defence budgets are designed to stop big existential attacks. Ships, plan...
Can the US Air Force bust Matt’s studio bunker?
The United States has dropped some very large bombs on Iran, inserting itself into what we are currently calling the Israel-Iran War, despite Donald T...
Have ICE protests cracked Trump?
There is violence on the streets of America as anti-ICE protesters push back hard against the Trump Administration’s immigration policies.
In t...
Will any Prime Minister “Love Actually” Donald Trump?
It’s been a manic week in global politics. Trump and Musk have officially broken up, Americans have taken to the streets to protest ICE deportations…...
Trump and Elon's honeymoon is over
In news that will surprise no one, the big beautiful bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk has finally come to an end.
Over the last week...
Skunk oil and the butcher girl
While investigating the history of fluoride, Matt Bevan stumbled upon a regional newspaper insert from the 1940s called Modern Weekly News Magazine. A...
RFK Jr v Fluoride
Putting fluoride in drinking water has often been called one of the most successful public health measures in human history. But since the very beginn...
How a world leader kept a secret from 1.4 billion people
A little trivia question for you... is Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi married?
He’s gotta be, right? World leaders do tend to be married, a...
Why Pakistan fights India
India and Pakistan have agreed to a temporary ceasefire, but tensions between the two nuclear-armed nations are still running high. There are factions...
Why India fights Pakistan
After a brief moment where two nuclear powers looked to be on the verge of war, India and Pakistan have agreed to a temporary ceasefire. But Indian Pr...
Howard Lutnick and The Gates of Hell
When two planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers on September 11 2001 Howard Lutnick lost 658 of his colleagues. It was a tragedy of unthink...
The man betting big on Trump's tariffs
The man behind Trump’s trade war is Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and his backstory is extraordinary. He’s been a hero, he’s been a villain, he’s...