Learning Economics Through Decode Econ

It’s no secret I love teaching economics. What I love even more is watching it click for someone else. That exact second a concept moves from “I don’t get it” to “wait, that explains everything,” that’s what keeps me in education.

It’s also why I went all in on social media. Not as a marketing channel, but as a classroom that never closes, one that reaches undergraduates, graduate students, and business leaders trying to make sense of the economics they’re actually living through, not just the version they got in a textbook.

This week, those two things collide. Decode Econ became less of a podcast and more of an apprenticeship: my research assistants, Claire Maddox and Jonathan Marx, sat across from me, and we talked through what they’d actually learned. The economics, about business, about figuring out how the two connect once you’re out of a classroom. At one point Claire put it simply:

I am learning economics through my work with Decode Econ.

That’s the whole episode in one sentence. That’s experiential learning, and it’s the whole reason I love this community.

Here’s what I’ll admit: I never built Decode Econ to be a teaching tool. I built it to reach people who’d never set foot in one of my classes, to translate economics for a public audience. The classroom was always separate. But watching Claire and Jonathan learn economics by actually doing the work — writing it, researching it, defending their take on it — I realized I’d built a better classroom than the one with a syllabus. Nobody assigned this. They learned it because the work was real and public.

I am a huge believer in the power of building in public.

If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like when teaching and content actually merge into one thing, this episode is it.

More on today’s episode below.

Youtube

Spotify

Our listener, an educational mentor, and previous guest Cecilia Cuellar pushed our team in a comment on last week’s podcast:

I watched the episode on YouTube and definitely enjoyed it. I really like podcasts that feel more like real conversations than scripted interviews. Also, I hope you keep Claire in the conversation. It is always valuable to have diversity of voices and perspectives at the table. Good job!

One thing I would maybe challenge Claire and Jack to do is to push Dr. Al-Bahrani’s perspective a little more on air. I say this with a lot of respect because I admire him too, but I think good conversations become even stronger when people ask questions from different angles.

Every person brings biases to the table. Some are natural, and others are constructed through our experiences. That is actually one of the positive things AI has helped me with: it pushes me to look at different opinions, different ways of writing, different posts, and different ways of thinking, sometimes faster than I could do it by myself.

So my small suggestion would be: do not be afraid to ask more “why” questions on air. Sometimes we are afraid to ask because we think the answer is obvious, but life is not always obvious. I keep learning a lot by asking myself why, even with absurd things like, “Why do I love and hate running at the same time?” That was actually my pace question during today’s run.

Anyway, I would love to see you challenge Dr. Al-Bahrani with different views and perspectives. I think that could be a great addition to the conversation.

Thank you for her advice. It is helping encourage my students to make their voice heard. In this week’s episode, you hear more from Claire, and Jack doesn’t hold back in sharing his views.

That is what I love about teaching and sharing publicly: we get more input from the audience.

Here is what we cover this week!

• 00:30 – Welcome Back to Decode Econ (Claire’s 2nd Episode)

• 02:54 – How Levi’s Turned a Logo Ban Into a Viral Moment

• 07:40 – FIFA’s Hydration Breaks: Player Safety or Ad Revenue?

• 10:05 – For-Profit vs. Nonprofit: Why FIFA Still Maximizes Profit

• 14:50 – Kevin Warsh’s First Fed Press Conference

19:25 – Claire on Learning Economics Before Forming Opinions

Show Correction

We mistakenly refer to Alan Greenspan as Alan Greenberg in this show. Here is more on both Alans.

• Alan Courtney "Ace" Greenberg (September 3, 1927 – July 25, 2014) was an American businessman who was an executive at The Bear Stearns Companies, Inc., serving as its CEO from 1978 to 1993 and Chairman of the Board from 1985 to 2001.
  

• Alan Greenspan (born March 6, 1926- June 22nd 2026) was an American economist who served as the 13th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. He worked as a private adviser and provided consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC.

Update: A version of this post went out before the news of Alan Greenspan’s passing. I learned a lot of my central banking philosophy from Greenspan. His line about “irrational exuberance” is etched in my memories. It is a phrase I use often in different contexts.

Irrational Exuberance

Irrational exuberance is an economic term describing a state of widespread, unsustainable investor optimism that drives asset prices significantly above their actual fundamental value. It serves as the primary psychological catalyst behind speculative market bubbles, which inevitably culminate in severe market corrections or economic downturns when the bubble bursts

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan famously introduced the phrase on December 5, 1996. He used it during a speech to warn that the stock market might be dangerously overvalued during the early stages of the dot-com boom

Yale economist Robert J. Shiller further popularized the term by using it as the title of his landmark book, Irrational Exuberance, published in March 2000. Shiller's book hit shelves the exact same month the dot-com bubble began to crash