Power and Plutocracy: Have we Reached Peak Billionaire?

Has Israel just become the undisputed power in the Middle East? After a lightning-fast 12-day conflict, oil prices fell instead of spiking, Iran backed off with symbolic missile strikes (after giving the U.S. a heads-up), and Russia is suddenly too nostalgic about its expats in Tel Aviv to pick a side. We unpack how this war, short, sharp, and stunning, shifted the entire balance of power in the region. Why didn’t the Strait of Hormuz crisis materialise? Why are markets pricing in peace while Gaza burns? And what does this all mean for Iran’s regime, which now looks more cornered than combative? We also take a surprising detour through France, exploring how language is shaped by power, and why the poor speak more languages than the rich. Is this the start of a new Middle East? Or just the next chapter in a permanent struggle?  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

 Live from a packed GAA hall at the Dalkey Book Festival, this episode tackles one of the wildest questions in economics: how did humans, flimsy, anxious apes, end up running the world, and why did we invent money to do it? We dig into the evolution of money as a collective hallucination hardwired into our psychology. Along the way, we unpack how 90% of dollars exist only digitally, how the pandemic rewired our sense of value, and why the dollar’s global dominance might be nearing its final act. From Mesopotamian beer tabs to the Fed’s modern firepower, we trace the story of money as a force that built empires and could just as easily unmake them. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this powerful episode recorded at the Dalkey Book Festival, we sit down with Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, whose memoir The Memoirs of an Arab Jew weaves together the personal and political. Born in Baghdad and expelled to Israel, Shlaim dismantles the dominant Zionist narrative and shares a forgotten story: that of the Arab Jews, rooted in the Middle East for millennia, fluent in Arabic, and often alienated in the state built in their name. Shlaim explores British colonial meddling, the legacy of the Holocaust, and what he calls Israel’s transformation from a refuge into a settler-colonial project. He also offers explosive insights into Mossad’s alleged role in the exodus of Iraqi Jews. This is a conversation about historical amnesia, and why the trauma of the past can’t justify injustice in the present. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tensions in the Middle East are escalating, following Israel’s surprise attack on targets across Iran on Friday, and ensuing strikes between the two powers continued over the weekend. The Muslim world has often been accused of a failure to modernise and adapt. Christopher de Bellaigue disagrees and charts the forgotten story of the Islamic Enlightenment – the social movements, reforms and revolutions that transformed the Middle East from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Modern ideals and practices were embraced across the region, including the adoption of modern medicine, the emergence of women from purdah and the development of democracy. We look behind the sensationalist headlines in order to foster a genuine understanding of Islam and its relationship to the West.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Forget Brussels, the first European Union was built by medieval merchants, not politicians. This week, we dive into the Hanseatic League: a loose alliance of 200 city-states that dominated trade across the Baltic and North Seas for 500 years. They pioneered free trade, built Europe’s first banking networks, and forged a multilateral model that still shapes today’s EU. Their story is also a warning. The League eventually lost out to land-based nation-states, a tension that’s alive again in today’s battles between globalists and nationalists, city-states and populist powers. Along the way, we also explore the unlikely African roots of Russia’s greatest poet, medieval slave routes linking Dublin to Iran (!), and why the architecture of Lutheran cities tells the story of global trade. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.