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. That leaves Xi Jinping facing an uncomfortable reality. Taiwan won't come willingly, but a military invasion would be enormously costly. So what happens when both the carrot and the stick fail?

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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. 

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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 have embraced the status quo, neither part of China nor formally independent, but something in between.

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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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