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4.5

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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 relationship between India and China, a closer look at the Saudi Arabian city of NEOM, the conflict in the Middle East, the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran, and Ukraine's incursions into Vladimir Putin's 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; previous series have focused on the United States presidential election, the United Kingdom's 14 years of Conservative Party leadership, Donald Trump's relationship with Russia, Donald Trump's presidency and promise to Make America Great Again, the Mueller Report, Vladimir Putin's scheme to destroy western democracies, how the relationship between Australia and China came to the verge of collapse, and Australia's turbulent history with climate change. There's a new episode of If You're Listening every Thursday.

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Lenin's WWII goo adventure

2026/10/24

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 through as emails or voice notes, to [email protected]. And to ask Matt questions live as the US midterm election results roll in on November 4 at 3PM AEDT, subscribe to our brand new YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@IfYoureListeningABC Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.

Is Trump going to bomb the bond market?

2026/10/21

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 Liz Truss in 2022, bond yields spike, and borrowing gets more expensive for everyone, instantly. Trump’s tariffs, his war in Iran and his promised $5,000 dividend cheques have investors nervous all over again, and bond yields are climbing. Unlike Liz Truss, Trump has nobody above him to sack him over it. So who actually pays when the bond market loses faith in Donald Trump? Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

My name is Inigo Jones. Prepare for rain.

2026/10/19

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 sun. Today, producer Jess O’Callaghan tells Matt about the wild west of weather forecasting, before we really knew how to do 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

The apocalyptic El Niño we didn't see coming

2026/10/14

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 haven’t always had this warning — in 1982 there was a whole heap of apocalyptic weather, and no unifying theory to bring it all together. That “super El Niño” would totally change how we think about forecasting the weather. Now climate change threatens to send us back to the 1980s. 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 day out at the Hezbollah theme park

2026/10/12

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

Putin's billion-dollar quest for immortality

2026/10/07

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_Nq

The US-Canada border fight over a pig

2026/10/05

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. Within weeks, that one dead pig had brought the United States and the British Empire to the brink of war. It became known as the Pig War. No One Saw It Coming host Marc Fennell tells Matt how it all played out, and why it took the German Kaiser to settle 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

Can AI predict the future?

2026/09/30

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

Thatcher's Falklands PSYOP radio station

2026/09/28

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

Are the UK and Argentina about to go to war…again?

2026/09/23

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's president Javier Milei, one of Donald Trump's closest ideological allies, is talking about claiming them. But this time things have changed, this time the US might not automatically side with Britain. A Pentagon memo has reportedly floated reconsidering support for UK sovereignty over the islands, after Britain refused to help with the war in Iran. So which ally does Trump actually pick? 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 there are abandoned tunnels under Dallas

2026/09/21

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

Is Trump cracking Canada?

2026/09/16

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 lowest level in decades. Meanwhile in oil-rich Alberta, largely spared by Trump's tariffs and booming from high oil prices, a once-fringe separatist movement is gaining ground, with a referendum on leaving Canada looming in October. As far as Trump is concerned, he doesn't care where the cracks appear…as long as Canada eventually caves in. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

How we feel about the AI apocalypse

2026/09/14

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

How 9/11 shaped the man behind Trump's tariffs

2026/09/11

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 of the economic wreckage his tariffs are causing. So what happens when a man built to bet everything on volatility gets his hands on the entire US economy? This episode was originally broadcast May 2025. 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 Guantanamo Bay is so hard to close

2026/09/09

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 same loophole the Bush Administration used when it opened a detention centre there in 2002, and 25 years on, the US still hasn't figured out how to close 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

Podcast reviews

Read If You're Listening podcast reviews

4.5 out of 5

201 reviews

★★★☆☆

Eclipse🩵🩶🤍🖤 2026/10/21

To neb8407

That, that rap, that is absolutinly-tootinly is epic.

★★★★★

dancing gal 🌼🌷✨💐 2026/04/28

Amazing!

This series is amazing! Easy to understand AND talks about the real deal! As an Aussie living in the US, this is such a nice way to connect with cultu...

★★★★★

Zorgor 2026/04/16

Excellent show!

I love this show! As an American, I am in equal parts baffled and delighted that you take such an interest in American news and events. This gives me ...

★★★★★

Trotsky hated Stalin 2026/03/01

Love it!

As an American who finds that most media outlets and news channels are biased towards conservative propaganda this podcast truly is amazing. Matt can ...

★☆☆☆☆

Neb8047 2026/02/23

Headache

Podcast deleted Phone yeeted Holy water needed

★★★★★

AllyL96 2025/08/04

A different perspective

As a Brit living in the US, it is refreshing to hear things from a different point of view and to listen to good and entertaining journalism. I’m gl...

★★★★★

Oaktown_Rocco! 2025/06/05

Stories that need to be heard

Really enjoy this podcast. Aussies genuinely working on making America great again

★☆☆☆☆

paddymats 2025/03/21

If YOU’RE listening.

Pathetic You’re a long way away to be so knowledgeable about Trump and US politics. Nothing original just mouthing the party line. I don’t think you’...

★☆☆☆☆

Original_Owl 2024/11/12

FAR Left Rhetoric

I consider myself left of center and even for me this podcast is so far left, rationality is questioned. I’m also not American but even I’m taken abac...

★★★★★

sciencepyar 2024/10/19

Great host, great content

Very enjoyable, informative podcast

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