The David McWilliams Podcast

The David McWilliams Podcast

The aim of this weekly podcast is to make economics easy, uncomplicated and accessible. With the world at a political, technological and financial tipping point, economics has never been so important to all of us and yet, it’s made inaccessible and complicated by so many. I’ve always thought what is complicated is rarely important and what is important is rarely complicated. That will be our motto. Every week we are going to tease out some big economic or political issue facing us, not just here in Ireland but in Europe and further afield. Globalisation has brought us all together. We all face similar challenges whether you live in Dublin, London, Minnesota or Milan. If you would like to enjoy all of our content ad-free and have early access to episodes, subscribe to DMCW+ on Apple Podcast. If you would like to support the show, please consider becoming a patron at www.patreon.com/DavidMcWilliams. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episodes

2025: China’s Year

December 22, 2025 • 42 mins
For 2,000 years, China has played a different game. While Europe fragmented, fought, and conquered outward, China focused inward, on standardisation, stability, and turning a vast empire into a single nation. In this episode, we explore why China emerged from 2025 stronger than any other power, why it has no interest in ruling the world, and why that restraint may be its greatest strength. From the invention of a shared written lan...

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Was Genghis Khan the World’s First Globalist?

December 17, 2025 • 37 mins
We usually remember Genghis Khan as history’s ultimate destroyer but what if he was also its first great economic integrator? In this episode, we rethink the Mongol Empire not as pure terror, but as the largest continuous free‑trade zone the world has ever seen, stretching from Korea to Ukraine. By reopening the Silk Road after a thousand years, the Mongols allowed ideas, technologies, and capital to flow from China to Europe; pape...

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Can Wind Power Make Us Rich Again?

December 15, 2025 • 42 mins
Ireland controls seven times more sea than land, and with the Atlantic blowing 25% stronger winds than the North Sea, we sit on one of the greatest untapped energy jackpots on Earth. This episode dives into the staggering 600 gigawatt potential of offshore wind off Ireland’s coast, enough to power every home and factory in the EU, several times over. So why haven’t we built a new offshore wind farm in 20 years? From floating turbin...

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Europe Under Threat: Can the Centre Hold?

December 10, 2025 • 46 mins
Europe is under pressure militarily, economically, and politically. NATO spending is up 45% since 2014. Germany’s exports to China have dropped 11% in a single year. France is bracing for a possible far-right presidency. Here in Ireland, neutrality suddenly feels less like a principle and more like a liability. In this episode, we ask: is Europe still a power bloc, or just a museum with great croissants? From Russian disinformation...

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The Great Affordability Lie?

December 8, 2025 • 35 mins
Around the world, people feel poorer, even when the numbers say we’ve never been richer. In Ireland, GDP is soaring, household wealth has more than doubled since 2014, and yet most families are pinned to their collar. Why? Because the official poverty line is €33,600, but it now takes at least €52,000 a year just to stay afloat. That’s a 40% gap between what’s measured and what’s felt. Rent has passed €2,000 a month, groceries are ...

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Petty Lines in the Sand

December 3, 2025 • 36 mins
We’re diving into the economics of borders, the lines we pretend are ancient but were mostly scratched into the earth by soldiers, surveyors and empire-builders with rulers. From Ukraine’s shifting frontlines to Dublin’s Herzog Park, to Northern Ireland’s uneasy edges, we trace how geography becomes politics. Then we go back to the original culprit: William Petty, Cromwell’s cartographer, the man who mapped Ireland in 13 months and...

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China Explained with Dan Wang

December 1, 2025 • 50 mins
We talk to writer and analyst Dan Wang, whose book Breakneck argues that China is an engineering state, run by people who build, while America, Ireland and the wider Anglosphere have become lawyer states, run by people who litigate. China lays highways and high-speed rail at warp speed; common-law countries file objections and environmental reports. Europe, meanwhile, risks turning into a mausoleum eco...

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Is Central Asia the Next Front Line of Global Power? with Peter Frankopan

November 26, 2025 • 38 mins

Leaving the US after weeks on the road, we zoom out from New York and Washington and asks a question we almost never ask in Europe: what if the real future of geopolitics isn’t in Brussels, Beijing or DC, but in Central Asia? To get there, we bring in historian Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads, to map the region we lazily call “the Stans”; Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan, plus Afghanist...

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Why Can’t the West Build Anymore?

November 24, 2025 • 39 mins
Reporting from New York, with a Bitcoin slump at his heels and the Hollywood-launch buzz of Money: A Story of Humanity still in the air, we dive into one of the most important economic questions of 2025: why can America, Ireland, and Britain no longer build the infrastructure that made them great? From the riveted, soot-stained genius of the New York subway to China’s ability to throw up a hospital in ten days, we explore...

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Is $4,000 Gold the First Crack in the Fiat Era?

November 20, 2025 • 31 mins
Broadcasting from under the Hollywood sign in the middle of a rare Californian downpour, we follow the water straight into the gold. Starting with LA as a city built on pure imagination, we jump back to the original gold rushes that reshaped the map: California in 1849, the Australian fields, the Klondike, and the deep shafts of South Africa. We meet Johann Sutter and the prospector who accidentally ruined his carefully built New H...

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Hollywood, Soft Power & Ireland’s Anti-American Left?

November 17, 2025 • 47 mins
Reporting from West Hollywood, in a rock ’n’ roll hotel with no parties and no drugs as house rules. We take a walk down Sunset Boulevard and into the strange engine of L.A.: a city built almost entirely on imagination, storytelling and constant reinvention. From Mulholland’s aqueduct to the studios that wrote America’s myths, we asks: what does a place like this tell us about capitalism, churn and the Uber-ised, gigged-out modern ...

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Vibecession, AI Mania & The New Casino Economy with Kyla Scanlon

November 12, 2025 • 37 mins
Live at Kilkenomics, we welcome Roscommon's own economics star Kyla Scanlon author of In This Economy for a fast, funny, and razor-sharp tour of where money and mood collide. We get into her “vibecession” idea on why feelings beat spreadsheets, the AI splash that’s propping up markets, and why America is drifting from a work economy to a casino economy. Why are unprofitable companies dominating the stock ma...

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The Tech Crash, The Demographic Time Bomb, and Ireland’s Future 40

November 10, 2025 • 39 mins

A tech bubble always feels rational until it doesn’t, as Wall Street fuses with Silicon Valley and the entire American economy becomes a single hyper-leveraged bet on AI, we trace the early tremors: falling job numbers, concentration of risk, a market propped up by story over profit. The real shock comes at home, Ireland’s new Future 40 report quietly maps out a country sleepwalking into decades of slower growth, soaring age-relate...

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The Pope’s Children at 20: How Ireland Grew Up

November 5, 2025 • 38 mins
Twenty years ago, The Pope’s Children changed how Ireland saw itself; a country high on credit, confidence, and Celtic Tiger ambition. Two decades later, we’re back where it all began: the suburbs, the shopping centres, the bouncy castles and breakfast rolls that built a new middle class. We revisit the characters who defined an era, Decklanders, RoboPaddy, Breakfast Roll Man, and the forces that reshaped Irish life: class, credit,...

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Australia, Argentina & Ireland: A Tale of Three Economies

November 3, 2025 • 41 mins
Australia is the country Argentina should’ve been, and the country Ireland could become. Seventy years ago, Argentina and Australia stood side by side as the world’s great hopes, rich in land, resources, and ambition. Today, one is a model of steady prosperity, the other a warning wrapped in inflation and political theatre. We dig into how two nations with the same starting line took radically different paths: Australia’s pragmatis...

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The Life Raft for Billionaires: Why Tech Titans Are Buying New Zealand

October 30, 2025 • 33 mins
As Ireland square up to the All Blacks at the weekend, we are all New Zealand this week, podcasting from the edge of the world, Richie McCaw's old stomping Christchurch, New Zealand. We explore why the world’s richest men are turning NZ's quiet and beautiful South Island into their apocalypse insurance policy. Peter Thiel has bought hundreds of acres near Lake Wānaka, joining a wave of tech billionaires building bunkers at the...

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The AI Bubble: Boom, Bust & Baked in Nimbin

October 28, 2025 • 42 mins
Somewhere between a biker bar in Nimbin and a data centre in Virginia, we try to make sense of the biggest capital boom in history. The AI revolution has garnered $400 billion of spending this year alone, nearly half of all US growth. What if it’s all built on industrial lettuces, tech that expires faster than it earns? From NVIDIA’s chip race to Meta’s debt-fuelled data farms, the same story keeps repeating: speculation first, pro...

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The Lost Sailors: From Aboriginals to Schumpeter

October 22, 2025 • 38 mins
Deep in an Australian rainforest, surrounded by birds older than any cathedral, We unpack one of the greatest mysteries in human history, how the first people to sail across open seas, 60,000 years ago, became a civilisation that forgot how to sail. The Aboriginal Australians, the oldest continuous culture on Earth, arrived when Europe was still under ice. They built languages older than Latin, mapped deserts the size of continents...

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The Land of Opportunity Down Under: Australia

October 20, 2025 • 41 mins
Cycling through Brisbane in the heat, we've found a country that hasn’t had a recession in nearly half a century; a statistical miracle in modern capitalism. Australia’s economy has grown steadily since the 1980s, powered by the luck of geography and the grit of immigration. Iron ore alone earns more than €100 billion a year, and one in three residents were born abroad, making it the most immigrant-driven economy in the rich world...

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Saudi the Kingmaker: Gaza, Trump & a New Middle East with Andrew Maxwell

October 15, 2025 • 54 mins
Live from Christchurch, literally tomorrow, we bring on Andrew Maxwell, fresh off stage in Riyadh, to ground-truth the social shift you won’t see in think-tank PDFs: 8k-seat comedy arenas, mixed audiences, and a culture moving at startup speed. With approximately 17% of the world’s proven crude reserves, a sovereign fund near $900bn, and a population that’s 65% under 35, Riyadh can bankroll outcomes, including a Gaza deal. Female l...

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