Chatter

This is going to be a fun one, I can tell! I've been doing a lot of serious podcasts so I wanted to do some fun ones as well. I watched Woke: The Movie a few weeks back and had my mind blown a little. It's VERY off the wall, talks about Aliens, secret fleets of spaceships, bases in Antarctica, and human colonies on Mars - but there is a lot of fun in entertaining some of these ideas and some truth...

Dr Lee Jones is a Professor of Political Economy & International Relations at the Queen Mary University of London. Dr Jones and I had a great conversation about China, covid policy, and making the best of Brexit. I've become increasingly concerned that a lot of people in society are unable to move on from the loss of Brexit to find ways to make the best of it - it is not the situation I wanted to...

Professor John Turner and Dr William Quinn of Queen's University Belfast were my guests on today's show. They are the authors of the recent book, Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles, which has been critically acclaimed by the Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, and the Irish Times, and was named an Economics Book of the Year for 2020 by the Financial Times. With so...

Have you ever wondered how a government budget works? How borrowing works? Whether the magic money tree really exists? Positive Money are a group hoping to educate people on how a sovereign government has the ability to create and spend money. Simon Youel is Head of Policy & Advocacy at Positive Money, a non-profit research and campaign group working towards a money and banking system which suppor...

Julian Winkler is the co-author of the paper "Reddit’s self-organised bull runs: Social contagion and asset prices". The paper makes a "theoretical case for how ‘hype’ among retail investors can drive large asset fluctuations". The paper was written before the GameStop Saga kicked off, but the interesting part about this for me was to get an understanding of how he believes idea spread online. I'v...

I had Kirby Sommers back on my show to talk all about the Prince Andrew lawsuit vs Virginia Giuffre. She has sued him for sexual allegations dating back to the early 2000s when she was being held as a prisoner/slave for Jeffrey Epstein.  Kirby Sommers is the author of over a dozen books. She is an investigative journalist and an advocate for human rights. She writes the weekly Epstein Project news...

Steve Topple is a journalist at the Canary who specialises in issues surrounding disability, health, housing, class, economics and government. ‘Mr Topple’ is also now making waves as an innovative music journalist, breaking the mould in terms of his approach to the industry. He regularly writes for one of the world’s leading music sites, Reggaeville, and is also in partnership with the blossoming...

Joël Valenzuela has been living without a banked account (or "unbanked") since 2016. He's began with Bitcoin, but when that became too expensive he began transacting with Dash instead and now he actually works for the firm! Dash is part of the digital cash race, alongside Dogecoin, Bitcoin Lightning Network, BCH, BSV, and more. Dash is an interesting option with it's decentralised community making...

Why Nations Fail is one of the best books I have read all year. Authors Acemoglu and Robinson insist that "development differences across countries are exclusively due to differences in political and economic institutions, and reject other theories that attribute some of the differences to culture, weather, geography or lack of knowledge about the best policies and practices. For example, "Soviet...

Why Nations Fail may be the best book I have read this year, so I was absolutely delighted when both of the authors agreed to speak to me on my podcast! This is the first of these interviews, with Professor James A. Robinson. The main idea that I took from the book was that across history we can see that freedom - both political and economic - and inclusive institutions are precursors for growth,...

The civil war raging within the bitcoin community is one that I first came across in my interview with Brad Mills. Kurt Wuckert Jr is a strong advocate for Bitcoin cash and has written extensively in support of BSV, in opposition to many Bitcoin Maximalists like Anthony Pompliano. So I wanted to get Kurt on the show to talk me through the difference between BTC and BSV and to explain the civil war...

It's no secret that I have been exploring some of the ideas of crypto currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum on this show. North Korea is also a fascinating story to me, I've been thinking about it a lot since the string of interviews conducted by North Korean defector Yeon-mi Park. So when this book about Virgil Griffith, Ethereum, North Korea, and blockchain came across my radar I had to get the a...

Covid has caused massive upheaval and disruption around the world, but something I had not given a lot of thought to was the idea that disease shapes our political leanings. The concept of parasite stress is one that has been studied by my guest Dr Randy Thornhill for decades - it's the idea that the more infectious disease that is prevalent in a country, the more right wing and collectivist a pop...

A lot of the discussion about an inquiry into the covid response has been, in my view, poorly framed. There are massive lessons to be learned from this pandemic, but I believe that a huge segment of this is being ignored - what the cost of lockdowns will be and has already been. For this reason I spoke to wellbeing economist Paul Fritjers, co-author of the book The Great Covid Panic, who believes...

Throughout the entire GameStop saga, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the idea of a hive mind. I’ve dedicated an entire chapter in my forthcoming book to this idea and I wanted to get Tim’s perspective. I first came across his work on hive minds when I saw his Ted Talk, “Changing the hive mind -- How social media manipulation affects everything”. In it he explores how even a single like can...

Magic Man London was my guest on today's show. David showed me some incredible tricks on camera - I cannot work out how he made this happen. He keeps finding my card!!! We spoke about counting cards in black jack, how he took handcuffs from a policewoman, and throwing cards through the window of a London pub. HELP ME CROWDFUND MY GAMESTOP BOOK. Go to https://wen-moon.com to join the crowdfunding c...

Today I am speaking to the Lawyer of the Apes about GameStop and the lawsuit against Citadel and Robinhood. We wanted to walk through the court case, the response from Citadel, and what we can expect to happen over the next few months! HELP ME CROWDFUND MY GAMESTOP BOOK. Go to https://wen-moon.com or join the crowdfunding campaign and pre-order my next book here now - https://www.indiegogo.com/pro...

One of the biggest stories of the year is the release of the Pandora Papers, whilst we may still be at the beginning of the releases, there is already a lot of stories catching the headlines so I thought it was a great chance to talk about the offshore world and tax evasion more broadly. Joining me today to talk about the Pandora Papers and more is Robert Palmer from Tax Justice UK. The Pandora Pa...

On this episode of Chatter I am speaking to Chris Martenson. I have been paying more and more attention to Chris's channel Peak Prosperity as one of the best places to find calm analysis of the current state of the world. In this episode I wanted to speak to Chris about whether our institutions are failing, how we can reimagine our current system, whether capitalism is doomed, and why our response...

Timothy B. Lee is a reporter who has written about technology, economics, and public policy for more than a decade. He joined the Washington Post in 2013 to lead a team covering tech policy. The next year he left the Post along with Ezra Klein and several other Post staffers to launch Vox.com. From 2014 to 2017, he led Vox's coverage of technology and business. He also wrote extensively about econ...

Sanjeev Sabhlok is back for round 2 on Chatter! Sanjeev is the author of "The Great Hysteria and the Broken State" and a complaint to the International Criminal Court" - the latter is free so people can get an idea of the criminality of the current policies by reading it free of cost. I asked Sanjeev back on the show to talk about what is happening in Australia. The government has taken the enforc...

Josh Kosman has been covering the financial industry for twenty-five years. He is a reporter for the New York Post, a former editor at Mergermarket.com and a former senior writer for The Deal and Buyouts Newsletter. He appears frequently in the media as a private equity and mergers expert. Few people realise that the top private equity firms such as Blackstone Group, Carlyle Group and Kohlberg Kra...

John Coffey worked at BNB Paribas for 30 years, retiring as head of trading at the age of 52. He led a team of Traders & Sales Professionals who managed the bank's liquidity & capital resources, trading FX, Bonds & Derivatives and selling related products & hedging solutions to Fortune 500 corporations and Financial Institutions. Since retirement, he has chosen to work as a volunteer consultant at...

Paul Mason is a journalist, writer and film-maker. His latest book How To Stop Fascism: History, Ideology, Resistance describes the rise of the modern far-right, its colonisation of conservatism and right-wing populism, and the danger it poses amid the wider process of democratic decay. It argues that, faced with the danger of a second fascist era, the centre and left should unite around the defen...

Ben Mezrich is the author of Bringing Down The House, The Accidental Billionaires, and the brand new book The Antisocial Network. Anyone who follows this podcast will know that I have been writing my own book on the GameStop Saga, so before I spoke to Ben and read his book I was a little nervous that he may have beaten me to the punch. Thankfully his book is written like a thriller designed for ad...