Some economists make you feel dumber. Justin Wolfers makes you feel smarter—and he does it while cracking jokes about wombats, OnlyFans, and Cliff’s handsome eyes. The University of Michigan economist (you may know him from his Platypus Economics Substack, or from being the rare economist who’s actually funny on TV) sat down with Cliff Schecter and David Shuster for an hour that somehow makes the economy, AI, inflation, and the future of work genuinely fun to think about.
This is the conversation that finally untangles why the stock market is soaring while your paycheck buys less, what an AI economy actually does to people like you, and whether your kids are going to be okay.
And then he starts doing math you can’t unhear. Wolfers walks through exactly how Elon Musk bought the 2024 election—for 0.026% of his fortune, the equivalent of you finding $50 in the couch cushions, with enough left over to buy 3,819 more. Elections, that is, not couches.
He explains why AI is the first revolution that comes for brains instead of brawn (”I now know what it meant to be a Detroit autoworker in the 1970s”), why you should stop being pro-business and start being pro-competition, and why, as an economist, he thinks January 6th was one of the most dangerous things a president has ever done. You cannot summarize this one. You have to watch it.
Cliff’s Note:
Here's where we're headed: we're building out a whole paid-member tier—the deeper conversations, the bonus segments, the inside stuff that doesn't fit in the public feed—and it's launching soon. The smart move is to get on the inside now, before any of it drops. Right now membership is 40% off, which brings a full year down to $36—three bucks a month, less than one of David's Zingerman's sandwiches—and you lock in everything we're about to roll out.
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Conversations like this one with Justin Wolfers are exactly what your membership pays for: smart people, no corporate handlers, telling you the truth about who's buying your democracy and what it means for your family. Come inside, become a member, and let's build this thing together.
—Cliff
