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 threatening to undo that important work. So what will that mean for the global economy? 

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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, and that video of Putin and Xi talking about organ transplants.

Jack’s story inspired the new series of ABC’s Science Friction podcast, Artificial Evolution, which is all about cloning and genetic technology. All episodes are available now on the ABC Listen app.

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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 doomed plot and the man behind it, a former Green Beret from Florida named Jordan Goudreau.

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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 last time? And should Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro be watching his back?

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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. That delay fuelled decades of fascination and conspiracy.

Today, Matt Bevan and Supervising Producer Kara Jensen-McKinnon discuss the Zapruder Film and how the way we experience big news events has changed. 

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 called for revenge on what they call “left-wing extremists”. There is no evidence of an organised left wing militia trying to take down the Trump Administration, but is a crackdown on anti-Trump groups now inevitable? 

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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-iconic audio to the public. Kim Malmgren is a crime reporter for Swedish Newspaper Expressen and hosts the Swedish-language true crime podcast Krimrummet. What starts as a conversation about a meme leads to a bigger story about Sweden’s growing problem with gang violence, tracing the Kurdish Fox’s rise, his war with the fearsome Strawberry, and the teenage "child soldiers" caught in the crossfire.

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