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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03 Black Swans | Burning Hill
In 1959 a flight to London took days and cost half a year’s average salary. But things were changing rapidly. The invention of the Concorde meant tha...
The city that ten beers built
Matt and Kara delve deeper into the story of town planner Alex Ramsay, and the bizarre deal he struck to purchase the land that would become Elizabeth...
02 Black Swans | The Australian Dream
In the 1950s three quarters of Australians were homeowners, most lived on a quarter-acre block, with a mortgage that could be covered with one income...
01 Black Swans | The Population Bomb
Until recently people were scared our planet would be outstripped by the weight of a colossal population. Experts feared that by 2026, there would be...
Matt got lost on his way to the costume department
Kara and Matt take you behind the scenes of putting the series together, and how hard it is to find an iron when you need one.
The Black Swans s...
Trump’s playbook for Nicolás Maduro and Venezuela
In a post on Truth Social, US President Trump announced that he had captured the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro and his wife, and that the pair...
NEOM: The world's dumbest megaproject
The massive infrastructure project NEOM sits in the Saudi Arabian desert, and the jewel in its crown is The Line, a futuristic city which looks insane...
What's the deal with 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 good are Australia’s gun laws really?
Australians are very proud of our gun laws, and we have good reason to be. The laws are world famous and frequently referenced in the wake of almost e...
24 hours after the Bondi shooting
On Sunday the 14th of December, two men; a father and son, used a range of firearms to attack a large Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach playground....
Why is Venezuela falling apart?
During a 15 minute phone call, US President Donald Trump offered the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro safe passage for him and his family to the co...
This robot will shoot you and steal your wife
We have always been obsessed with stories about killer robots. But where do stories about malevolent machines with a mind of their own originate? Matt...
Where’s my robot butler?
Tech bros are racing to develop the first mass-produced humanoid. But despite billions of dollars in investment, these robots require a great deal of...
Is internet piracy making a comeback, me hearties?
You wouldn't steal a podcast!
After meeting the founder of Sweden's Pirate Party, Rick Falkvinge, we decided to take a closer look at the world...
Is China’s plan to invade Taiwan inevitable?
Currently, as many as 5000 Chinese spies are operating in Taiwan. Many of Taiwan’s allies are concerned that these spies, along with the increasing fr...
The time Andrew Denton tried to hire a bounty hunter
In the early 90s, Australia’s most wanted fugitive was Christopher Skase. He was hiding on the Spanish island of Mallorca, to avoid the corporate crim...
The truth about China’s social credit scores
For the last decade or so, there’s been a lot of talk about how the Chinese government uses technology to issue social credit scores to its citizens....
maTt and kaRa address yoUr conspiracy THeory
Get ready as Matt and Kara address a whole lot more listener questions. All things from Elon Musk’s impending trillionaire status to the mystery of th...
So you’ve robbed the Louvre… now what?
On the 19th of October at 9:30am, two thieves parked a truck at the Louvre. They carved a hole in the window, climbed into the gallery, smashed two di...
Was the CIA involved in Whitlam's dismissal?
On 11 November 1975, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was sacked by Governor-General Sir John Kerr. For the past 50 years, people have speculated about th...
Can we afford to power AI?
In the last decade, the number of data centres worldwide has doubled. As the tech bros spend big to render AI an irreplaceable part of our everyday li...
This town ain't big enough for two dog puppets
This episode is about a lawsuit between two puppet dogs. What more do you need?
This past week we’ve been waist-deep in the dot com boom of the...
Is the AI bubble too big to burst?
There are no salary caps when it comes to securing the future brains of AI researchers. Mark Zuckerberg recently paid a 24 year old $250 million to co...
The people have spoken and they love mud
Today Matt and Kara are answering your questions, mostly about Trump and mud. They talk about whether Trump could serve a third term, if the rest of t...
Sizing up the Gaza rebuild
On October 8, US President Donald Trump announced that Israel and Hamas had reached an agreement and signed the first phase of the deal. The ceasefire...
The balloon that started the US Air Force
So, Matt has found a shiny new rabbit hole to get lost in and this time it's balloons. More specifically spy balloons. This is a story about a man wit...
What happens if Trump takes over the Federal Reserve?
US President Donald Trump has set his sights on the Federal Reserve, his unprecedented threat to fire the Fed Chair Jerome Powell and replace him with...
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...