The Chaser Report - Behind The Scenes Of 'If You're Listening' | Matt Bevan

Episode Date: March 3, 2026

Dom has been working for the last few years on a PhD in how to make the perfect podcast — despite all the answers he needs being in The Chaser Report. As a special treat for you, dear listener, here is a sneak preview of the very first episode of the culmination of Dom's research, where he interviews Matt Bevan of If You're Listening fame. Presenting... CAST MASTERS!Find Cast Masters on:Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/matt-bevan-mines-archival-gold-for-if-youre-listening/id1881820992?i=1000752808320Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/episode/77oRMRdYuyitUlE9hHfLDk?si=7e6061ebde8f4b27Acast - https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/6995b6f0435569254bcd0431---Listen AD FREE: https://thechaserreport.supercast.com/ Follow us on Instagram: @chaserwarSpam Dom's socials: @dom_knightSend Charles voicemails: @charlesfirthEmail us: [e-mail] CEO’s Super-yacht upgrade Fund: https://chaser.com.au/support/ Send complaints to: [e-mail] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is the Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report. This is Dom without Charles. Today, Charles was furiously writing, I presume, and then performing the first trial version of the new Wankonomics show he's doing with James Schleff from the shovel. It's called Wankanomics Show underscore V4.1 underscore final underscore used this. a name possibly inspired by Charles's own filing system for successive versions of the Chaser

newspaper. Anyway, he is out of action today and I thought rather shamelessly that I would promote some of my own work. I've just launched a podcast today called Castmasters and it's all about podcasting and it reflects a research project I've been doing for the past couple of years into podcasting in Australia and in particular the podcasts made by major media companies. I'm trying to research the ways in which they've used their position in the market and some of the strengths that they have and abilities that they have to promote things to try and promote their work and what that does to the podcasting industry and stuff like that. What this means, though, is I get to sit down with lots of excellent podcasters to talk to them

about what they do. And I'm hoping you'll be interested in that because, well, you are listening to Podcast now, so you probably like them. The first guest on the first episode of Castmasters is Matt Bevan from the ABC Podcasts. If you're listening, we sat down and had a long chat about how the show evolved, its origins during his time presenting breakfast on Radio National, on ABC Radio National, and how he's been adding video and live shows and lots of exciting things to make a show that tries to explain the news that's going on right now, utterly compelling. I think the other reason,

which he's too modest to mention is that he's a very, very bright and funny guy, as you will hear in this episode. So after the ad break, a clip from the first episode of Castmasters. The whole thing's about 40 minutes long. So if you want to listen to my whole chat with Matt Bevan, please head over to the Castmasters feed and check it out. And we'll catch you with another chase report, probably tomorrow. This is Castmasters, where you'll hear the stories behind Australia's top podcasts from the people who make them. I'm Dom Knight. And as part of some research I'm doing at the University of Sydney, I'm exploring how legacy media companies

that is publishers of newspapers and websites and broadcasters of radio and TV are using their experience, personnel, resources and existing broadcasting and publishing platforms to succeed in this new media. Each episode you'll get insights into how podcasts get launched, how major media companies approach podcasting and what it takes to put together an excellent series

that finds an audience. I'll explain more after the interview. Today, Matt Bevan, the former radio guy who turned daily news updates about Donald Trump into one of Australia's most popular and most idiosyncratic podcasts. Matt's series, if you're listening, covers fascinating stories from across the globe, such as, to choose one of my favourites, the CIA's bizarre attempts to kill Fidel Castro with exploding seashells. The Americans sent poisonous pills and cigars to anti-communists or to the mafia,

or to Castro's lovers, they developed a poisoned wetsuit and an explosive seashell, apparently Castro-like diving. It's funny, insightful, and as we'll hear, based on extensive digging in the news archives of Australia's national broadcaster, the ABC. Matt's show is now the most popular non-daily ABC podcast with 200,000 monthly listeners as of July 2025. It's an ideal case study in how a podcast series. can evolve from a short segment on ABC Radio National's breakfast program

into a multi-platform juggernaut across radio, television, streaming and more, all recorded in Matt's basement in Newcastle. Matt, thank you so much for joining me. Hello, Dom. Very nice to be here. Sorry about my chewing. That is okay. This is a reflection of how intense your production schedule is and I've managed to catch you during a brief moment between deep dives into the complexities of world affairs.

Yes, you caught me during a dive into the complexities of a chicken kebab with potato on the side. Have you managed to analyse it as a symbol of the current conflict in the Middle East? I'll stop eating for a little bit so I can answer your questions. Go ahead. What is your current role and how did you come to have it? My current role is writer and presenter of the ABC News program if you're listening. It began as sort of a part-time role that I had while simultaneously working on the ABC's Radio National Breakfast Program. And the popularity of the show initially as a podcast and now as a weekly podcast and video program has led to this becoming my full-time job as of two and a bit years ago.

I've always admired how you managed to create this thing on the side of one of the busiest jobs at the ABC, working on RN breakfast for very long hours, very early in the morning. Somehow you managed to carve out the time. As with a lot of podcasts, they start out with people doing it as unpaid overtime, basically, and hoping that at some point they can get paid for it. When it comes to this show, the arrangement with... was that I was paid for basically four or four and a half hours a day to be on Radio National Breakfast and then the remainder of my full-time, you know, whatever it was. About three hours

each day I was rostered to make the show. So it wasn't as though it was entirely being done as unpaid overtime, but a pretty large chunk of the show had to be written outside of those hours and that was, yeah, it certainly was a lot of work and it was a lot of hard work for quite a long period of time. But eventually the show gained enough significance inside of the ABC that I would be taken off work on Radio National Breakfast for a couple of months to make each season of the show. So then it was much less of a strain. Matt, did the podcast evolve naturally from your role as a newsreader on our own breakfast, where you were bringing a lot of Donald Trump stories into that program, because I know initially it was all about Donald Trump and

Russia, Russia, Russia. Yes, it was. And it was basically a longer version and a better produced version of a segment that I was doing each morning on the radio, which was a sort of five to seven minute segment on news that had happened overnight. and yeah, increasingly throughout 2016, 17 into 2018, that was being absolutely dominated by news about Donald Trump, particularly because there was obviously a high interest in Donald Trump, but also so many of the news stories regarding the Trump administration were happening

while Australians were asleep. And so they were keen to find out about it in the morning. And so I was doing a lot of coverage of Donald Trump each morning. and the podcast was basically a longer version of that with more complex stories but a similar format to what I was already doing on the radio. Yeah, it's one of the quirks of our time difference with the US that when we all wake up, Donald Trump's latest actions are at top of the headlines on any given day.

Matt, did you find that the management you were working with at Radio National were they supportive of podcasting or was it seen as this odd eccentric side project for Matt who is obsessed with the US. politics. Look, a bit of both. Obviously, the ABC, by 2017, 18, when I was starting this project, the ABC was very much involved in podcasting and saw the value in it and supportive of the idea of launching podcasts and developing them. There was a bit of skepticism about whether it would work or not, and it certainly worked, I think, in terms of the popularity of the show, far beyond the expectations that I had or that any of our managers had in that we were sort of went very

rapidly to being the number one ranked podcast on the Apple podcast charts just within a couple of days of our launch. We were not expecting that at all. Wow. But yeah, look, it was generally seen as a side project. And it took quite a long time before it was sort of seen as the primary thing that I was doing. How has the podcast evolved since it started? And what was the role of media company that you worked for, the ABC, in that? The podcast started as a seasonal thing. So we did a 17 episode first season,

which was just a crazy thing to do in terms of the amount of resources we had available to do that at the time. But we did the 17 episode first season. And then from that point, we changed it to making seasons that were generally between six and nine episodes long. So the next, yeah, I think the next six seasons were all within sort of that band between sort of six and nine episodes long. And then in 2023, we changed it to being a weekly program, which we made every week. on a constant always on is the term that we use basis. And now, you know, previously we would take an approach where we would be making all six episodes at once.

If you can sort of imagine that, we would plot out all six episodes and write them as though they were, sort of like the way that a movie is made, I suppose. We'd write this bit and that bit and we'd do the interviews in the order. in which the interviewees were available rather than in the order in which they would appear in the podcast. And so it was a lot more complicated and we sort of had to store a whole lot more things in our head at a time. This now, the concept of making it every week, which is what we do with most of our episodes. Occasionally we do do sort of serialised things. But making it every week means that I only have to focus on one topic every week, which makes it a little bit easier

and frees up a bit more brain space to be thinking about creative and interesting ways of making it work visually as well as just a story on a podcast. And that change has also enabled you to do different forms of storytelling and uncover different time periods, hasn't it? So I know that the podcast initially you tell kind of one story for a season in detail, So the history of Donald Trump's relationship with Russia, for instance. Some of that was happening at the time you were making it, but some of it was a little bit older. Or lack thereof, yes, indeed.

Of course, there's nothing to see there. I'm sure that was what you've established in that season. But nowadays, you can focus on stories in detail, such as the recent Who broke Britain series, looking back at austerity and conservative rule going up to the election that happened there last year. But then sometimes you'll cover whatever's happening in the world that week. and then at other times you'll do a deep dive on something from a long time ago. So it seems there's a lot of flexibility now in terms of what you're able to do within your very broad remit of just world affairs.

Yes, because our show is very much based on using archival tape and archival video and grabs and audio and visual and video of the things that we are talking about, we are limited somewhat by that, in that we're. can only really cover things that we have those things available for, so which sort of creates a bit of a cut-off point before the invention of the invention of audio recording and video recording. And certainly there are things that have happened more recently are more simple to cover, but at the same time, you know, things that have happened further back are often less understood by the audience.

And so we can sort of be a bit more simplistic and broader in what we cover when it goes further back. But yeah, the show has always been about mining archives and finding interesting things in archives to illustrate stories about what is happening today. And that's been the case all the way back to the first episodes of the first season of, if you're listening, you know, we think of that season as being about Donald Trump. But we started with two episodes that were about who Vladimir Putin is, where he came from the concept of oligarchy in Russia. And most of those episodes were about things that had happened not particularly recently, leading into more recent events and providing context for those events.

So, yeah, it's about trying to find subjects that are interesting and scenes and character. characters that are interesting, but more importantly and more restrictively is stuff that we have tape on is the key thing. We always need to have ways of visualising and enriching the audio experience of the things that we're talking about. That's a key thing about the show. The other evolution I want to look at, Matt, is from audio on demand, from strictly being a podcast to the current multimedia spectacular that encompasses radio, YouTube, I View, appearing on the ABC News Channel and elsewhere. How did that evolution happen?

You suddenly, as I think Howard Stern, liked to call himself the king of all media. Well, the thing, it's actually sort of a strange roundabout way that we ended up doing this. because so much of the stuff we were using in the podcast version, in the audio-only podcast version, what we were doing in a lot of cases was removing video from files. So going into the archive, finding an archive of video, stripping the audio off it, and using the audio, and throwing the video in the bin. When I think it was 2022, I sort of had the idea of seeing if I could use some of that video content to create something interesting as a live performance at the Newcastle Writers Festival. And so we put together sort of a multimedia presentation for that festival where we used music and audio and video together to illustrate the story we were telling. And that worked really, really well. But more importantly, it wasn't that difficult for me to find video to cover the story that we were covering because there was already so much video attached. And we already had so much video in the archive, it wasn't all that difficult. And so when the ABC started talking about potentially, you know, there's this big push over the last few years to try and turn podcasts into video.

products as well. When the ABC started talking about that, I went, look, we've already been kind of been doing this. And it's not as hard as we thought. So give us a go at piloting, turning our show into a video product as well as a podcast. And they agreed to do that. And there was a lot of skepticism, I think, around the ABC initially as to whether or not we would be able to sustainably do this every week, but we produced a couple of pilot episodes. They looked pretty rough, but they sort of were a proof of concept that then got a lot more parts of the ABC on board and saw this as a potential piece of content that could be put in lots of different places. Because research is, in so many cases, the most expensive part of journalism is just letting someone sit there and read a book

for a while and figure something out. That's the most expensive and inefficient part. So finding a way to take the investment that they make in me sitting down and reading a book or just combing through an archive to try and find something, to try and find a way to make that work on as many platforms as possible was seen as a really potentially good use of resources and time. And that's really where it came from. And we've had a significant amount of success in doing that.

and built quite a large audience. How does the process of putting together each episode work? So it's a two-week process, which kind of sounds strange, but yes, it's a two-week process to make a weekly show. And the way that that works is, say, we've got an episode coming out two weeks from now. We decide to do an episode, the episode will come out two weeks from now. I will spend the first of those weeks doing the research and the writing of the episode, then we'll film and record my, the script, and then hand that over to our production team

who spend the second week turning it into the video and podcast product. meanwhile I am researching the following episode. So I'm always researching and writing an episode that will come out a week after I finish writing it is the way that the system works. Really the reason the show works is because of that system. The system was the thing that we spent a lot of time working on and perfecting. And that's the secret of the show is in fact that system. And the fact that we're able to hand a over work from person to person so that, you know, one person doesn't need to be involved in the entire process from start to finish, which means that you can be working on two episodes simultaneously, which allows us to spend the two weeks making the show. It would be incredibly difficult to try and make the show in five days of work. So it's this system that allows us to make the show as effectively as we can. Yeah, so interesting that you're able to divide and conquer and you found collaborators who can take over that key second week of actually

assembling everything. And Matt, you film the program in your own basement. How did that come to be? Yep, I do. It was a pandemic thing. We started making the show at my house and the audience didn't notice. I also moved out of Sydney to Newcastle when that happened during the lockdowns, and we started making the show in my house, and that seemed fine. We then went back to making it in the ABC Newcastle studio, but it's a small office with not a huge amount of capacity for me to just arrive whenever I need to record something and kick someone out of a studio and tape something. And then when it came to requiring a TV set as well, that was going to be difficult for the ABC Newcastle office to accommodate.

And so I was like, well, look, I'm already making big chunks of the show in my house. Why don't we just film it here? But the advantage really was that I have a strange-shaped room that allows me to sort of put the camera in one corner of the room and sit in the other corner of the room. And it makes it appear that the room is much larger than it really is. and creates a sense of space in a room that actually isn't nearly as big as it looks on TV. So the fact that we're able to set that up and make it look as good as it does, it didn't seem like there was any need to figure out how to do it a different way. Matt, who has editorial control over the podcast, and how does this work in practice?

And if you want to hear more of my chat with Matt Bevan, you'll have to jump over to the castmaster's feed. There's another 20 minutes or so of him going very deep. into how he makes the show. So if you love, if you're listening, it's a great chat. And you can subscribe if you'd be so kind, if you want to hear some more of this sort of thing down the track. In case you're wondering why the questions felt a bit scripted, it's for a research project. So I have to ask everyone the same questions so I can compare their answers. That's why at times it got a little bit of formulaic. But hey, nothing like a wooden interview is there for a bit of fun.

Anyway, we'll bring you a regular episode of The Chaser Report very, very soon. Thanks for listening to this. We're part of the Iconiclass Network. And we'll catch you next time.