Pulp Finction

In this episode, Paolo Sironi welcomes Chris Skinner for an unconventional episode: not the presentation of a business manual, but a financial thriller. In Diary of a Ponzi Scheme — the first novel in Skinner’s Pulp Finction series — a broke operator launches a fund invested in stablecoins, crypto, and digital currencies, then pulls his wealthy circle into a scam that only works as long as new money keeps arriving. Skinner explains why he moved into fiction: to smuggle how finance works into a story, so readers learn tokenization, CBDCs, and crypto without being lectured. The conversation ranges across the wider series like fintech fundraising, a last branch in town, climate activism, and an AI attack that stops payments to return, again and again, to the same question: how do you scale trust?