If You're Listening

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 display cases, and made off with 88 million euros worth of crown jewels. It was all over in eight minutes. 

It turns out robbing the Louvre isn’t as hard as you might think. Many of the security cameras are outdated, and 249 rooms in the gallery have no cameras at all… ...

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 the motives behind Kerr’s unprecedented decision — could there have been interference from outside Australia? Today, we’re getting to the bottom of the CIA conspiracy theory that’s dogged Whitlam’s dismissal for decades. Matt talks to The Eleventh producer and award-wi...

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 lives, the energy and water required is truly eye-watering. 

Nvidia, Google, Microsoft and Meta have already seen their cumulative emissions rise by 72% in the last five years, and given the direction AI is headed, it’s likely that our AI footprint today is the smallest...

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 90s, in particular the meteoric rise and fall of one company called pets.com. It was during this time that supervising producer Kara Jensen-Mackinnon came across a very strange court case between two fictional dogs - the case of the Pets.com sock puppet vs. Triumph the Insu...

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 come work at Meta. OpenAI gave thousands of employees bonus cheques for millions of dollars. AI developer salaries are rising 32% annually, but just how high can these pay packets go? 

The AI bubble is now four times the size of the dot com bubble at it’s peak, and when...

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 the world could just ignore the US, and ask for your help solving a mystery about the soil in the rural NSW town of Nimmitabel. Plus, Matt has a very exciting announcement.

Got a question you want us to answer next time? Email ifyourelistening@abc.net.au

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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 covered the return of all living Israeli hostages as well as the liberation of 2000 Palestinians who had been detained in prisons. 

What isn’t mentioned in the ceasefire agreement is what happens to Gaza when the fighting is over. Is it possible to rebuild a city tha...

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 with a fabulous moustache who called himself Professor, who was accused of being the devil in the American Civil War and ended up becoming a spy in a big balloon, triggering the creation of the US Air Force. 

Matt joins Marc Fennell on his podcast, No One Saw it Coming t...

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 someone more willing to lower interest rates sent financial markets into a tailspin. 

It’s taken decades to build robust, independent central banks that people trust to fight inflation and keep the economy on track. But now a generation of populist leaders are threat...

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 the course of history. Today, Marc Fennell joins Matt Bevan to chat about this unlikely alliance. Set during WWII, it’s a story about boats bursting into flame, mobsters with marvellous names, and the curious team-ups that come about in a country at war. 

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This episode originally aired in September 2023.

For a century, society has bullied and shamed people into trying to lose weight, without much result. Is the century-long search for a weight loss drug finally over? A seemingly accidental discovery by Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, people are hailing semaglutide (known as Ozempic or Wegovy) as a miracle weight loss drug — but it comes at a cost.

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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 in jail for a truly bizarre crime. He orchestrated an elaborate, multi-country conspiracy to smuggle the tissue of a rare bighorn sheep into the U.S. and clone it.

Today, Matt chats to Peter about this outlandish plot. They also get into Barbra Streisand’s cloned dogs...

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 problem China faced after decades of dodgy population data and the One Child Policy. No longer the world's largest country, China's population is shrinking, its property sector is faltering, and its economy is feeling the strain.

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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.

It’s the bizarre story of a group of American mercenaries who tried to invade Venezuela and collect the $15 million reward offered by the U.S. Justice Department for capturing President Nicolás Maduro.

Matt chats with If You’re Listening producer Adair Sheppard about the do...

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 administration is hoping to gain out of this. But when you look at it in a historical context, it makes a lot more sense. This follows a playbook the United States used 35 years ago to topple a Central American dictator they had decided they didn’t like. So what happened las...

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 updates, speculation, conspiracy theories, and graphic footage — all before breakfast.

But it hasn’t always been like this. When Abraham Zapruder filmed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the public didn’t see those 26 seconds of film for many years....

In the days since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the internet has been awash with conflicting information about the assassin’s ideological motivations. Until recently, most people understood that political violence in America tends not to be organised, but one idea has galvanised many of those on the right: “they are trying to get us”. 

Just minutes after the shooting, US President Donald Trump and his allies c...

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 unexpected… Swedish TikTok. He was intrigued (and baffled) by a viral sound from a gangster known as the Kurdish Fox that blew up in late 2023.

To help him understand this meme, Matt got in touch with the journalist who broke the story and released this now-apparently...

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 had Israel spelled wrong and they were committed largely by people with no clear ideological motivation. For many, the slapdash nature of these attacks raised a serious question about who was really behind them. 

Recently ASIO revealed that at least some of these attac...