The David McWilliams Podcast

Broadcast from Serbia, this episode dives into the Balkans, the most misunderstood, most underestimated corner of Europe, and one with the biggest upside if it can ever stop tripping over its own history. We look at why Serbia sits so close to Russia, why Kosovo still blocks the country’s European future, and how war, sanctions, hyperinflation, and decades of bad leadership turned a natural crossroads into an economic cul-de-sac. A new generation is pushing back against corruption and state capture, and culture may be moving faster than politics, from packed derby stadiums in Belgrade to a runaway rom-com hit about a Croat-Serb wedding that’s quietly rewriting the story. If the Balkans can turn rivalry into cooperation, it could become one of Europe’s great comeback economies.

This episode begins at the ancient seven-arch bridge in Killaloe, the crossing point where Clare, Tipp and Limerick collide, and jumps to Višegrad in eastern Bosnia, where Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina uses one structure to tell a five-century story of tribes, trade, love, and conflict. Back in Ireland, the row over closing the old Killaloe bridge is about suburban sprawl swallowing once-separate towns and turning them into commuter satellites. Ireland has built a low-density model that forces people into cars, clogs villages with traffic, and makes the whole system fragile. Just 13% of Irish people live in apartments, compared to 46% across Europe, and the gap between where jobs and services are concentrated and where people actually live is now being paid for in time, congestion, and quality of life. So where do you look for a better model? Japan. We end in the Tokyo–Yokohama mega-region, 38 million people living densely, safely, and efficiently, and ask why Ireland keeps choosing a “rainbelt” version of American car sprawl, instead of building compact, mixed-use neighbourhoods that let people live near where they work, study and socialise.

For forty years, the software engineer was the hero of the modern economy. That era may now be ending, fast. In this episode, we argue that software engineers are becoming the horses of the 21st century. Just as the steam engine replaced animal labour, AI is now eating the lunch of human coders, automating what was once seen as elite, technical, and irreplaceable. Stock markets are already reacting, wiping value from software-heavy firms as investors realise that AI’s economic value will be measured the same way steam engines were: by how much labour they eliminate. We trace this moment through history, from the Industrial Revolution to the rise of the nerd after 1984, and ask what happens when an entire generation’s promised career suddenly looks like drudge work dressed up as genius. As 'vibe coding' replaces programming languages, and English replaces hieroglyphic code, technical skill is being commoditised at speed. AI is also stripping the human element out of markets, trading, and commerce itself, replacing noisy, emotional trading floors with silent machines trading in milliseconds. As technical skills lose their mystique, the economy may swing back toward the very things machines can’t replicate: empathy, creativity, comedy, poetry, and human judgment. 

Credit is the lifeblood of a modern economy. When it expands, ideas turn into companies, small builders become employers, and innovation compounds. When it contracts, the damage is slower, quieter, and far harder to see. In this episode, we trace what happens when banks stop lending and money stops doing its real work. Using Ireland as a case study, we show how domestic credit has collapsed since the crash, from banks lending 160% of deposits at the peak of the Celtic Tiger to barely 40% today, and why that matters far more than headline GDP figures. Drawing on history, from the silver mines of Potosí to Spain’s long decline, we explain why money is never neutral, why credit fuels growth in ways governments cannot replicate, and how multinational windfalls can mask a dangerously hollowed-out private economy. The result may look like prosperity, but it behaves more like stagnation.

If central banks “control money,” why do we still get credit booms, banking crises, and bubbles, and what can a new Fed chair actually do about it? Who actually controls money, the central bank, commercial banks, or the markets? We break money into two parts: currency and finance . Once you see that split, a more unsettling reality appears: central banks can set the price of money (interest rates), but they don’t directly control the quantity, because commercial banks create new money every time they approve a loan. From fractional reserve banking and the “pull” model of credit creation, to why Treasuries sit at the centre of the whole machine, we explain what central banks actually do Can Kevin Warsh tighten and cut at the same time? Markets moved on a single sentence. The politics want low rates. The plumbing wants discipline. Only one of those can win.

Not even “thermodynamically sound energy through time and space” makes Bitcoin money. In this episode, we take another hammer to the sacred cow of crypto and ask a simpler question: what does money actually have to do to count as money? We revisit our infamous chat with Michael Saylor at peak crypto-poetry, then go where all good monetary debates should go; back to the original forgers and the original punishments. Dante put counterfeiters near the bottom of hell for a reason: mess with money and you mess with civilisation. We break down why Bitcoin’s fixed supply is exactly what stops it functioning as a currency, why volatility turns it into a hoarding game, and why “stablecoins” are less innovation than rebranded old finance. Crypto generates no income, finances no productive activity, and gives you no legal claim on anything, it’s a tradable gamble powered by belief, momentum, and the greater fool theory. We start with Dante, detour through Archimedes, and end with Isaac Newton, and the madness of crowds.

We think the biggest cultural shift of the last 15 years is inflation, immigration, or housing. It isn’t. It’s singledom, a shockwave moving through Western societies since the smartphone slid into our pockets and quietly rewired how we meet, desire, commit, and build a life. On today’s episode, we unpack the numbers that should make policymakers sit upright: around half of men and 43% of women aged 25–35 now have no partner, and the trend has worsened sharply in just the past decade. If coupling rates had simply held steady since 2017, there would be tens of millions fewer single people across the West. When the basic social unit shifts, everything built on top of it shifts too, housing demand, tax systems, politics, even how communities function. To explore the lived reality behind the data, we’re joined by comedian Aideen McQueen, whose hit show Waiting for Texto captures the emotional truth behind the statistics: the fatigue, the marketplace logic of dating, the compromise dilemma, and the strange modern paradox where people deeply want partnership, yet struggle to find a path to it.

In a world where “might is right” is having an ugly little renaissance, Rutger Bregman returns as the perfect antidote: a stubborn, data-backed case that humans are cooperative, that culture is malleable, and that your career doesn’t have to be a slow-motion betrayal of your ideals. We talk about his new book Moral Ambition, and the “Bermuda Triangle of talent” of consulting, finance, and corporate law. Along with the quietly shocking stat that one in four people doubts their job is socially meaningful. We revisit the 1970s Irish banking strike, when the banks shut for months… and the economy kept moving on trust, IOUs, and community glue. If trust is money, and stories shape human behaviour, what happens when we start telling a better story, and actually act on it?

Ireland has spent the last two decades riding a unique position: European by treaty, American by economics, a “bridgehead” for US multinationals into the EU, and a country whose prosperity has quietly depended on America’s outsized pull on global capital. But if the US and Europe drift into a real rupture, Ireland becomes the uncomfortable jockey straddling two horses heading in opposite directions. In this episode, we map the cold numbers behind Ireland’s exposure, exports, FDI, and the corporate tax windfall, and then pivot to a genuinely optimistic idea: using the last of the US windfall not just to cushion the future, but to build it. Think infrastructure now, and a Schumpeter-style startup fund that turns the country into an innovation machine before the sugar daddy’s money slows down.