Episodios

  • Australia, Argentina & Ireland: A Tale of Three Economies

    Australia, Argentina & Ireland: A Tale of Three Economies
    Nov 4 2025
    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.

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

    The Life Raft for Billionaires: Why Tech Titans Are Buying New Zealand
    Oct 30 2025
    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.

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    33 m
  • The AI Bubble: Boom, Bust & Baked in Nimbin

    The AI Bubble: Boom, Bust & Baked in Nimbin
    Oct 28 2025
    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.

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    43 m
  • The Lost Sailors: From Aboriginals to Schumpeter

    The Lost Sailors: From Aboriginals to Schumpeter
    Oct 23 2025
    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.

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

    Saudi the Kingmaker: Gaza, Trump & a New Middle East with Andrew Maxwell
    Oct 16 2025
    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 labour-force participation has doubled since 2016, internet use is near-universal, and Vision 2030 is pointing trillions in capex at tourism, sport, and tech. We dig into how a Saudi–Egypt–Pakistan triangle (money, manpower, nukes) changes the bargaining set, why normalisation with Israel would be a geopolitical earthquake, and what a “phase two” looks like. We also hit the shelved India–Gulf–Med trade corridor, Qatar’s broker role with Hamas, and why Europe’s mostly a spectator in a multipolar game.

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    55 m
  • The Behavioural Budget: How Tax Shapes Us

    The Behavioural Budget: How Tax Shapes Us
    Oct 14 2025
    We promise this isn’t another boring budget breakdown! This week, we’re asking a bigger question: what if taxation isn’t really about raising money, but about changing behaviour? With Ireland awash in corporate tax revenue, the old logic of “tax to fund spending” doesn’t quite hold. So, should we start using taxes to shape how people act, from derelict sites to carbon emissions, and borrow the money we need instead? We explore how Ireland’s unique position in global finance could make it a testing ground for a new kind of economic thinking, one where the budget becomes less about arithmetic, and more about incentives, behaviour, and human nature.

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    37 m
  • The Art of Creation with The Edge - Part Two

    The Art of Creation with The Edge - Part Two
    Oct 9 2025
    We’re back with The Edge for part two of our conversation. This time, on the creative mind itself, we talk about what connects the artist and the entrepreneur: the instinct to imagine something that doesn’t exist and make it real. From James Joyce’s Volta Cinema to U2’s Berlin reinvention, we explore how creativity and risk are two sides of the same coin, and why failure, not success, is what really drives innovation. The Edge opens up about reinventing old songs, finding confidence in chaos, and what it means to stay curious for decades. We also dig into AI and the future of music, asking whether algorithms can ever truly create something new, or if the human imagination will always win out.

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    43 m
  • The Art of Creation with The Edge

    The Art of Creation with The Edge
    Oct 7 2025
    Live from the basement, we sit down with The Edge, the musician who wanted to be a scientist, to talk about the spark that connects rock bands and startups. From U2’s early ambition to his work with Endeavour, The Edge shares how curiosity, mentorship, and a willingness to fail can turn creativity into success. We explore why Ireland can’t rely on multinationals forever, how to build a real culture of innovation, and why begrudgery has held us back for too long.

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    44 m