Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers

Every dollar you spend having your money actively managed by someone in a sports car is paying for that sports car. In this Professor Is In episode, Justin Wolfers takes questions after his keynote at Stanford's Initiative for Financial Decision Making and lands on the core ideas he thinks every personal finance course must teach.
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Most of us wash our hands even though we've never seen a germ. But when it comes to personal finance, hardly anyone "washes their hands" — and the mistakes are expensive. Justin Wolfers, back from a Stanford keynote to finance educators, argues that ignoring sound financial advice may cost people somewhere between 2% and 10% of their lifetime consumption — putting it in the same neighborhood as the welfare cost of climate change, and dwarfing the 0.1–1% economists usually assign to business cycles.
So why won't people listen? Because the public doesn't trust economists: surveys show they rank barely above politicians in favorability. Justin makes the case that the fix isn't more experts screaming about interest rates — it's using plainer speech, telling better stories, showing real empathy, and laying out one clear action at a time. Here's what's in it for you: the employer match you're leaving on the table, the credit card interest compounding daily while your cash sits in savings, the actively managed fund quietly skimming your returns. Small mistakes, moved across a lifetime, add up to real money — yours.
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the Podcast 👉 https://platypuseconomics.com/podcast
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AI safety fears are in the news, so Justin Wolfers sits down with producer Augusta to work through the economics — and the ethics — of building guardrails into AI. Using airbags as the analogy, he shows why a "safe" AI, like a car with airbags, works a little less well than one built with no precautions — and why that tradeoff is worth taking when the downside isn't a fender bender but the electricity grid, a biological weapon, or human extinction.
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The people building the most powerful AI see faster science, better medicines, and explosive economic growth. Others see catastrophe. Justin Wolfers steps into that argument with the one tool that can actually weigh the two: economics.
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the Podcast 👉 https://platypuseconomics.com/podcast
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What's the relationship between journalism and borrowing costs?
When a local paper shuts down, something surprising happens: the town starts paying higher interest on its debt. Justin Wolfers sits down with producer Augusta to answer viewer questions about why press freedom isn't just a civics-class ideal — it's an economic force that touches your mortgage rate, your government's bond yields, and the whole institutional plumbing that keeps prosperity running.
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on YouTube 👉 https://youtube.com/platypuseconomics
on Substack 👉 https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com
the Podcast 👉 https://platypuseconomics.com/podcast
Follow on Social Media @PlatypusEconomics and @JustinWolfers