If You're Listening

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, that same billionaire is Donald Trump's Commerce Secretary, and the man driving his global tariff war. Lutnick's business thrives on chaos rather than growth, and having survived and profited from the worst days of his life, he seems entirely unafraid...

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 court ruling from that saga established that America's constitution doesn't apply on the base, because while the US has complete control there under a 1903 treaty, Cuba technically retains sovereignty. That's the sam...

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, and how it could lead to a technological revolution... That could solve the world’s biggest problems: feeding more people, curing disease, optim...

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 aftermath… the same lake can collapse again and again for years. These floods are becoming more common as the climate warms. But there's also a rare bit of good news: a decade ago, Nepal's own...

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 been looking into this Monkey Man for her new series, "Nature's Most Wanted". Check it out here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/what-the-duck/natures-most-wanted/106620406Follow If You're Listening on the ABC List...

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 electromagnetic catapults that took over a decade and billions more than planned to get working, contributing to a shipbuilding backlog linked to a spike in sailor suicides. Now Donald Trump, who's l...

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 series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

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 caps by the thousands. It's already led to scandal, security lapses, and a botched response to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, the threats are multiplying and becoming even more complex; domestic militia plots and foreign intelligence operatives are b...

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, and designed to move faster than Congress, the courts or the media can keep up with. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playli...

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 spent months touring Kyiv and doing friendly interviews with the Ukrainian president. Now Zelenskyy is using his new MAGA allies to argue Ukraine can help Trump too, which is good timing because the US has n...

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 happened, and who's responsible when an AI agent breaks the law.Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouT...

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 actually operating. Now Farage's newest backers are crypto players, and he's using his platform to talk up both gold and cryptocurrency, the two assets favoured by people convinced the financial system is about to collapse. So who...

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 Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

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 flamingoes, and Albania's government has fast-tracked approval. Many Albanians aren’t happy and thousands have taken to the streets to protest in what's become known as the Flamingo Revolution, including pop star Dua Lipa. Fo...

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=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

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 Nicolas Maduro days before doing it himself. Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi have exploded into a $20 billion industry, and they're built on a simple promise: that crowds are smarter than any individual, and secrets are worth cashing in on...

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 Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

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 fortune transformed by meme coins, a hype-driven venture called World Liberty Financial, and a cast of podcast bros and pickup artists selling access to the most powerful man in the world...

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 Ernest Moniz, one of its lead negotiators, to talk about negotiating with Iran, Trump's approach to diplomacy, and how worried we should be about the risk of nuclear conflict.Follow If You're Listening on th...

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 renovation; it's the reaction.After years of fuelling conspiracy theories about Washington elites and corruption, Trump has created an audience primed to question everything. So when he announces his biggest White House project yet, ma...

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 encryption machines, bought by governments around the world, to the "secure" phones that tricked organised criminals into incriminating themselves.Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https...

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 weak central government, it provides schools, healthcare and social services alongside its military wing. That leaves Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump facing the same problem. Netanyahu needs enough security for evacuated Israelis to return to the north before t...

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. Today, Matt is telling producer Adair the story of the radio pirate turned actual pirate who declared himself Prince of a rusting gun platform in the North Sea.Follow If You're Listening on th...

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 Hezbollah and years of cross-border fighting, this frontier has remained one of the Middle East's most dangerous flashpoints. More recently, Hezbollah attacks forced tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes, challenging a...

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 Washington Post, Dan Diamond, who has watched, and heard, all of it go down.Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.y...

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.Decades later, the relationship may have come full circle. After January 6, Trump's approval rating was collapsing, and some of his first major public appearances were cage-side at UFC events, reconnecting him with the young male audience t...

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 reflect on Eric's almost three decades reporting from the world's most contested places.Eric's report on Yin Diao Gong: https://www.instagram.com/reels/Cgg1xWGlxb4/Al Jazeera report on the South China Sea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

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 closer ties with the mainland.The problem is that neither approach has delivered the outcome the Chinese Communist Party wanted. Since the 1990s, the number of people in Taiwan who identify as Chinese has collapsed, while a distinct Taiwanese identity has surged...

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

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 transformation from authoritarian rule to one of Asia's most vibrant democracies. At the heart of the story is an unresolved question: what is Taiwan? While politicians have spent decades debating the answer, most Taiwanese people hav...

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 the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

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 rebuilt the Republic of China government there. Taiwan was marketed internationally as “Free China” but on the ground, it was a different story. Taiwanese people were subject to nearly 40 years of martial law: censorship, political persecution, arrests...

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

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 chokepoints to force rivals into line. In contrast, Xi’s strategy is slower, colder, and arguably more dangerous. He’s spent years stockpiling resources, staging large-scale military exercises and playing the long game around...

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

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 justifications and bold mission statements for his company, citing a laser-focus on maintaining U.S. hegemony across the world. In doing so, he believes Palantir prevents the rise of undemocratic, far-right movements. But is there any line that Pa...

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 Listen AppFollow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

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 deceptively simple: give analysts the ability to see connections across messy datasets without compromising privacy.The arrival of large language models has supercharged what Palantir was already doing: ingesting, structuring, and interrogating enormous amounts of...

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?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

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://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

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 events that led to his first ever live radio cross.Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDT...

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

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 all, Matt has enlisted the help of ABC Senior Business Correspondent Carrington Clarke. Carrington also hosts two of the ABC's newest podcasts, ABC Busi...

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 with Japan.In an extremely volatile market, Australia continues to ship gas offshore at low, fixed rates, while Japan on-sells it at a profit. As domestic prices rise and supply tightens, the consequences of th...

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 You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

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 for years. But now, as Chinese citizens fall prey to scam kidnappers, China has forced a response. Will it be enough to stop the spread of these compounds?Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.Ch...

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

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 on the ABC Listen app.Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

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

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