David McWilliams is shaking off the jet lag on his trip from Ireland to Los Angeles as he opens a Zoom call and logs on with Fortune. The widely read (and listened to) economist, with hundreds of thousands of followers on X and an economics podcast with claims to be Europe’s most popular, McWilliams is also, frankly, a very nice and affable man. He regales Fortune with tales of his old adventures in New York City in the late 1980s, when he spent a summer working at the Red Lion Inn on Bleecker Street, a job he got from “an uncle of a friend of mine.”
A Dubliner, McWilliams landed in the U.S. just 24 hours before talking to Fortune, as he was starting on a nationwide tour for the release of his History of Money, a widely acclaimed, international bestseller released in Europe in 2024. (In a blurb, Bono called it a “swashbuckling epic of grand sweeps and tight close-ups.”) McWilliams told Fortune he already sensed something different about America: “you kind of feel the boominess of the place, right?” He related his astonishment at getting in an Uber and being bombarded with a driver’s speculative initiatives. “Within two minutes, he was talking about the stock market, Bitcoin, AI, Nvidia, the whole thing. And I’m, like, driving down Sunset Boulevard with this guy, right?”
