Syrian Warnings,Irish Limitations, Japanese Solutions

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 Afghanistan, Iran and their neighbours. Together we unpack why this vast strip of land, once the beating heart of the Silk Roads, is suddenly back at the centre of the global game: home to huge reserves of oil, gas, uranium, rare earths and critical minerals, a young and growing population, and wedged between Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Iran. We hear how Central Asian states are learning to play everyone off against everyone and why the new Great Game isn’t a neat East vs West story at all. If the world is getting more dangerous, more digital and more fragmented, what does it mean that Ireland is the EU’s weak link on defence, with tiny cyber budgets, under-protected seabed cables and a very cosy version of neutrality? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 a new way of understanding global power: engineers vs. lawyers. Guided by Dan Wang’s Breakneck, we trace how China’s engineer-run state builds at breakneck speed while lawyer-dominated America litigates itself into paralysis, and how Ireland, with a Dáil stuffed with talkers rather than doers, finds itself in the same boat. We dig into the numbers, the politics, the personalities, and the quiet collapse of Western state capacity. If the people running your country don’t know how to build, how can the country itself ever hope to? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.

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.

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.