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.

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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, and violent crackdowns on dissent. Eventually the people started to push back. 

Today, Beijing considers Taiwan a breakaway province. But in Taiwan, a growing number of people see themselves as something entirely separate: not Chinese, but Taiwanese.

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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.

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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 Taiwan. Two very different strategies, but the same ambition. Two grandmasters are playing for control of the chessboard.

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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.

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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 Palantir won’t cross to assert U.S. superiority? And could they be in danger of undermining the democracy they claim to defend? 

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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-McKenna 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.

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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 information. The result is a shift from finding needles in haystacks to, arguably, predicting where the needles will land. It's powerful, unsettling, and very on-brand for a company named after an all-seeing stone from Lord of the Rings.

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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 here

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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?

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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.

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