The David McWilliams Podcast

By David McWilliams & John Davis

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 importa

... more

4.6

216216 ratings

Download on the App Store

Download on the App Store

Get it on Google Play

FAQs about The David McWilliams Podcast:

How many episodes does The David McWilliams Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 615 episodes available.

The David McWilliams Podcast episodes:

November 20, 2025 Is $4,000 Gold the First Crack in the Fiat Era?
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 Helvetia, the pioneers who turned empty coasts into booming economies, and the engineers and chemists who turned raw gold into the backbone of the 19th-century gold standard, global trade, and the first great age of financialisation. More recently, we ask why is gold nudging $4,000 an ounce? Why are central banks loading up on bullion again? Is this a bet against the dollar, a sign of geopolitical jitters, or the start of a new monetary era as fiat money and the old globalisation order creak? From mudslides in Malibu to vaults in Fort Knox, this episode is all about gold, what it did to the world before, and what its new surge might be telling us now.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
32min
November 18, 2025 Hollywood, Soft Power & Ireland’s Anti-American Left?
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 economy? From there, we fly back into something touchier: Ireland’s relationship with the United States. We lay out just how dependent Ireland is on U.S. investment, jobs and tax, and then ask why so much of the Irish left, especially what he calls the “presidential left”, is reflexively anti-American. We unpack third-worldism, neutrality as moral performance, climate politics as a Trojan horse, and the growing gap between Áras rhetoric and how ordinary Irish people actually live, work and travel in a world where America is still our best friend
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
48min
November 13, 2025 Vibecession, AI Mania & The New Casino Economy with Kyla Scanlon
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 market? What happens when a whole generation treats the economy like a casino? And how did social media become both the marketplace and the message? From America’s leveraged bet on tech to Ireland’s own Gen Z drift, we follow the vibes, the volatility, and the very weird definition of adulthood emerging in 2025.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
38min
November 11, 2025 The Tech Crash, The Demographic Time Bomb, and Ireland’s Future 40
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-related costs, and a housing crunch that will outlive an entire generation. The proposed solution currently is to import more workers into a market that can’t house the people already here. We break down the numbers, the politics, and the intergenerational showdown now shaping Ireland’s future, a collision of tech mania, demographic reality, and a state betting tomorrow on the backs of the young.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
40min
November 06, 2025 The Pope’s Children at 20: How Ireland Grew Up
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, and cultural reinvention. From boom to bust to boom again, we ask what really changed, and what just got a rebrand.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
39min
November 04, 2025 Australia, Argentina & Ireland: A Tale of Three Economies
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 pragmatism versus Argentina’s populism. From Perón to protectionism, from housing booms to resource riches, it’s a lesson in how economic choices shape destiny, and why Ireland should listen carefully before history starts to rhyme again.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
42min
October 30, 2025 The Life Raft for Billionaires: Why Tech Titans Are Buying New Zealand
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 bottom of the planet. They call it resilience; it looks a lot like retreat. From Victorian settlers fleeing moral decay to modern tech evangelists escaping the society they built, New Zealand has always drawn utopians convinced the world is ending somewhere else. We trace the country’s shift from colonial outpost to libertarian life raft, unpacking The Sovereign Individual, the book that shaped Silicon Valley’s doomsday economics. A journey through empire, ideology, and the strange new faith that the future belongs only to those who can afford to escape.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
34min
October 28, 2025 The AI Bubble: Boom, Bust & Baked in Nimbin
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, profits later. Live from Australia, we trace how bubbles drive innovation, and destruction, from railroads to radio to AI. They ask who really benefits when Silicon Valley welcomes the bubble, Wall Street fears it, and democracies are left to clean up the crash.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
43min
October 23, 2025 The Lost Sailors: From Aboriginals to Schumpeter
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, and thrived for 99.7% of Australia’s human history before a single European set foot here. Then, in just decades, 90% of them were gone, wiped out not by conquest, but by microbes. From this collision of worlds, we explore what makes societies innovate, why isolation freezes progress while connection multiplies it. Drawing on Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich’s idea of the collective brain, they trace how collaboration fuels invention, from the first tools to AI. The episode arcs from the Aboriginal sailors who crossed 100 miles of open water before anyone else, to the Nobel Prize winners studying the alchemy of innovation, and ends with Ireland’s own late awakening from creative isolation.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
39min
October 21, 2025 The Land of Opportunity Down Under: Australia
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. Its central bank floats the currency to stay competitive, its politicians spend sparingly but smartly, and its cities remain among the most liveable on Earth. Yet beneath the sunshine and swagger lies a tension: record house prices, soaring costs, and a nation riding two horses at once, one facing Washington, the other Beijing.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
42min

FAQs about The David McWilliams Podcast:

How many episodes does The David McWilliams Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 615 episodes available.

More shows like The David McWilliams Podcast

The Second Captains Podcast by Second Captains

The Second Captains Podcast

175 Listeners

Irish Times Inside Business by The Irish Times

Irish Times Inside Business

12 Listeners

The Last Word with Matt Cooper by Today FM

The Last Word with Matt Cooper

63 Listeners

Callan's Kicks by RTÉ Radio 1

Callan's Kicks

70 Listeners

Inside Politics with Hugh Linehan by The Irish Times

Inside Politics with Hugh Linehan

150 Listeners

The Pat Kenny Show by Newstalk

The Pat Kenny Show

51 Listeners

Brendan O'Connor by RTÉ Radio 1

Brendan O'Connor

80 Listeners

The Other Hand by Jim Power & Chris Johns

The Other Hand

45 Listeners

The Mario Rosenstock Podcast by Mario Rosenstock

The Mario Rosenstock Podcast

27 Listeners

In The News by The Irish Times

In The News

50 Listeners

The Indo Daily by Irish Independent

The Indo Daily

122 Listeners

Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning by Gold Hat Productions

Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning

77 Listeners

Path to Power by Matt Cooper

Path to Power

38 Listeners

Ask About Wealth by Ask About Wealth

Ask About Wealth

6 Listeners

Indo Sport by Irish Independent

Indo Sport

52 Listeners