In this episode of New World in the Making, I sit down with Zee, known online as The Reluctant Accountant. Zee has spent the last fifteen years working in the parts of finance most of us never see: internal audit, risk, and compliance. The places where you actually find out how the system works, because your job is to check whether anyone is breaking the rules.

Now she reads the news so the rest of us don’t have to. And she does it in a language built to include people, not exclude them.

We talk about:

• How a working-class kid from South London ended up decoding global finance, and why she thinks her languages degree shaped her more than accounting ever did

• What shadow banking actually is, and why we’re not as protected from another 2008 as we think

• Private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and the rebrands that quietly hide what’s really going on

• Why money only has value because we collectively believe it does, and what happens when that belief shifts

• The AI bubble: is the valuation real, or are we pricing a future that may not arrive?

• The petrodollar, BRICS, de-dollarization, and what’s happening to American financial power

• CBDCs and the dystopian edge of programmable money

• How geopolitics is reintroducing friction into a global economy that ran on Amazon-Prime logic for decades

• The deliberate flooding of misinformation, and why people are starting to see through it

• Why community, the unsexy, slow, in-person kind, may be the most radical thing left

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About Zee — The Reluctant Accountant

Find Zee’s commentary on financial news, geopolitics and the systems behind both — accessible, sharp, and refusing to be obtuse on purpose.

→ Follow Zee on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thereluctantaccountant/

⚠️ Disclaimer All content shared in this episode is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing discussed should be considered financial, investment, or legal advice. The views expressed by the guest are their own and do not necessarily reflect my personal views or positions. Listeners are encouraged to do their own research and form their own conclusions.

Thank you for listening, and for being part of the New World in the Making.