Forget oil. The real fight is over the world's most precious and least understood commodity; water. We're joined by Paul O'Callaghan of BlueTech Research to explain why two billion people still can't get safe drinking water, why Saudi Arabia is quietly draining Colorado, and why Ireland's biggest strategic advantage might just be the rain we love to complain about.

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Made in Kinsale, sold in America, the Ozempic boom is making Ireland rich and dangerously exposed. We unpack how three companies now pay nearly half our corporate tax, and what happens when Trump finally notices.

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Monetary historian Brendan Greeley explains why the dollar's power has nothing to do with the Fed, why crypto is just a bank in disguise, and why politicising the dollar might be the fastest way to end its reign as the world's reserve currency.

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Birth rates are collapsing, not just in rich countries, but everywhere from Mexico to Tunisia. The FT's John Burn-Murdoch joins us to unpack the surprising culprit, why young people aren't just having fewer kids, they're not even coupling up, and what it means for the future of work, wealth, 

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Britain is running out of money, in a currency it prints itself. We unpack the gilt market panic, Starmer's impossible bind, and why the UK is starting to look more like 1970s Italy than the country that invented modern finance.

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China is winning, and Trump doesn't know it yet. As the two leaders sit down in Beijing today, we explain why the Chinese think America is an empire in decline, and why they might be right.

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What happens when a country produces more graduates than it has elite jobs to give them? According to Peter Turchin, the Russian-American thinker behind End Times, that's exactly the moment civilisations start to crack. This week, we get into his theory of "elite overproduction" and ask whether Ireland is staring straight into it. We unpack the stats: most educated population in the EU, master's degrees doubling in 15 years, and nearly one in three graduates working in jobs that don't need a degree. We talk about why the barista with a first-class honours and the barman with an economics master's are not just funny anecdotes, they're leading indicators of political instability. We look at how the public sector is quietly absorbing the overflow that the private sector can't, why AI is about to pour petrol on the fire, and why historically it's not the abject poor who revolt, it's the relatively rich and bitterly disappointed.

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The UAE has just walked out of OPEC after nearly 60 years, and the timing is no accident. This week, we head to Abu Dhabi and Dubai to ask what's really going on. Why now? Why leave the cartel in the middle of a war? What does it mean for the price of petrol in your car, for Trump's midterms, and for the geopolitics of the Gulf? We get into the strange tacit alliance between the UAE and Israel, why Iran's real leverage isn't the Straits of Hormuz but the Emirates themselves, and how Saudi Arabia's old swing-producer power is being quietly dismantled. We also draw a much bigger lesson for small countries everywhere, including Ireland: the multilateral world that small states have hidden inside since the 1940s is breaking down, and the UAE's gamble is a glimpse of the hard choices that lie ahead. Oil, war, money, and the end of an era, all in one episode.

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This week, Sinead O'Sullivan is back, and she's got an answer that official Ireland really doesn't want to hear. We dig into the "failure premium", the staggering cost of a state that knows how to hand out subsidies but has forgotten how to coordinate, build, or own anything. We follow the money: why HAP quietly inflates the rent into the landlord's pocket, why housing a refugee costs €99 a night here and €13 in the Netherlands, and why we're paying premium prices for second-rate outcomes across housing, health, and infrastructure. We look at how a country adapts to dysfunction, sheds in back gardens, hollowed-out city centres, kids emigrating, until we stop noticing it's not normal. What happens when the multinational money slows down and we're left holding the infrastructure deficit we never fixed?

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