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The Economist
S1 Ep. 2 Mar 4, 2026

The Economist

Feeling lost in an economy that seems designed to confuse, Jacob turns to the Internet for answers—and finds them in Jacob Reed, the AP Econ teacher turned YouTuber. Their private tutoring quickly veers off course when a stranger reaches out about a financial advice book allegedly written by Jacob Reed. There’s just one problem: neither Jacob wrote it. As the mystery deepens, the episode becomes a hunt for the third Jacob Reed—an investigation into scams, self-help economics, and what it means to build authority in a system that often rewards confidence over truth.

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I’ll be honest with you: I don’t understand the economy. I’ve never really tried to. For most of my adult life, not understanding it felt like a moral stance — I don’t like what this system rewards, I don’t like the people who preach it, so I’m opting out. I graduated from college into the 2008 recession. I started a family during COVID. I’ve spent my entire life hearing politicians on all sides talk about how great the economy is doing while nearly everyone I know is struggling to make ends meet.

There’s a wealth inequality chart I saw once where Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are on one end, and everybody else — me, the guy who sleeps outside the Taco Bell near my house, Jennifer Lopez — we’re all basically the same data point by comparison. It made me wonder: is the economy just a giant scam?

But there’s a Jacob Reed who does understand it. He makes YouTube videos about economics. Almost 200 of them.

Jacob Reed #39 is an AP Economics teacher who runs ReviewEcon.com. He’s got plug earrings and a trucker hat with graffiti artwork of an equation on it — the epitome of “cool teach.” High schoolers on Reddit swear by his tutorials. One commenter said they were naming their children after him. I watched through his videos and immediately started arguing with them.

So, I reached out through his website. He replied immediately — and reminded me that I’d actually emailed him early in the pandemic when I first started working on this podcast, and that he’d listened to the first episode and found it “really entertaining and captivating.”

Okay. I take it back. I like this guy.

When I finally got Econ Jacob on the phone, the first thing I told him was that from where I’m sitting, economics feels like a smokescreen — a language invented by finance people to justify selfish behavior.

He didn’t flinch.

What I thought was “the economy” — stock prices, GDP, the news ticker — isn’t really the economy at all. As he put it, quoting Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal: “the stock market is not the economy.” In its essence, economics is about how people function together to get more of what they want. That’s it.

The foundational concept is scarcity: humans want things, and we can’t have everything, so we make choices. I pushed back — there’s plenty to go around, it’s just being hoarded. And he met me there too: the obscene wealth inequality in the US? Many economists consider that a market failure. Markets tend to be efficient, but they also fail. The crazy unequal distribution of wealth is one of those failures. So scarcity isn’t a defense of greed — it’s just a description of the human condition, one that applies to Elon Musk as much as anyone else.

That reframe kind of blew my mind.

I also asked him the question I most wanted answered: if I understood the economy better, would I be less angry about it?

“Ehh… honestly, I don’t believe you’d be any less mad, no. You’d understand it more. You might have more tools.”

“So then why should anyone understand it?”

“It will make you a better voter and make you a more engaged citizen. And I think it will help you understand when politicians are bullshitting us.”

To test some of what I was learning, I brought it up the next time I was sitting around a fire pit with my wife Heather, our producer Danny, and my friend Ky (no relation to Kai). A few beers in, I tried to explain supply and demand incorrectly.

Danny immediately corrected me. Ky gave a perfectly coherent two-sentence definition of micro vs. macroeconomics that made me feel like I’d been asleep for 40 years. And Heather, after listening to me get increasingly worked up about rent control and private equity and Arrowhead buying up California’s reservoirs, finally said:

“You get huffy and puffy and it clouds your ability to see things objectively.”

Then, after a pause: “I think your beef with economics might actually be a beef with capitalism.”

Ky nodded. So did I, eventually.

A few months into my economics education, I got a strange email. It was addressed to several Jacob Reeds — my current address, two old work emails, and two I didn’t recognize. A woman named Emily Brestfod was writing to tell me that my book about finances was being overlooked on Amazon, and that she could help.

“I’m not here to sell you anything.”

I highly doubted that.

The book Emily was reaching out Next-Level Investing for Young Adults: Building Wealth with Cryptocurrencies and Beyond, was by Jacob Reed. But, obviously… not by me. It was part of a trilogy, actually — three books, each released a month apart in the summer of 2023, all laser-focused on crypto.

I looked up the author. No website. No social media. No author page. Nothing outside of Amazon and Audible. I listened to all three books — nine hours of audiobook — looking for any clue about who Jacob Reed was.

What I found instead were patterns. Flat, repetitive, oddly structured prose. Transitional phrases stacked on top of each other. Lists of exactly how many things were about to be explained. The phrase “financial freedom” appearing so many times it started to feel like a tic.

“Financial literacy is the first step on the path to financial freedom… Road to financial freedom… Journey to financial freedom… and flourish into flowers of financial freedom.”

I ran all three books through an AI-detection tool. It flagged them as 85–90% AI-generated at minimum, noting their “encyclopedic breadth but shallow depth” and describing them as “content-farm financial literacy ebooks.”

I showed them to Econ Jacob.

“Oh, it’s by Jacob Reed, it says. Interesting. I’m assuming that’s not you.”

“I’m assuming it’s not you.”

“It’s not me. I’m a little sad that this person has my name on their books.”

I told him I’d find out who it was.

The only real lead in all three books was buried in the end credits of the third: the audiobook production copyright belonged to someone named Scott Gavlick. I tracked down thirteen phone numbers associated with that name. Every single one was disconnected.

The narrator, Shane Matsumoto, was more reachable. He’d recorded the book through Amazon ACX — a marketplace that connects publishers directly with narrators — and had never met or spoken to anyone involved. He also mentioned something telling: the first draft he narrated was full of typos and grammatical errors. He emailed Scott asking for a corrected version, got no reply, and recorded it verbatim to make the deadline. The audio was immediately approved, as if nobody had even listened to it.

“I wouldn’t even be surprised, dude, if Jacob Reed wasn’t a real person.”

Meanwhile, Emily Brestfod was still in my inbox. I decided to engage. She explained she runs a community of 2,000 readers who could get me reviews “naturally and ethically” — and invited me to join their private Discord server: Supper Book Readers. (As in, people who read books about dinner. The hero mascot was an AI illustration of books in superhero masks, and “Supper” was misspelled everywhere.)

I lurked in that Discord for several months. New authors would join; half a dozen members would ask them friendly questions; then they’d either leave skeptically or pour their hearts out before being referred back to Emily for payment. Members regularly changed their names and profile pictures, becoming entirely different people every few weeks.

It was a fake betting parlor, like in The Sting. A convincing facade — as long as you didn’t look directly at it.

When I asked too many skeptical questions, the friendliness evaporated fast.

“We are not a scam and will definitely not tolerate that accusation.”

“You won’t be able to stay here at all.”

Emily messaged me privately to tell me to stop asking “frustrated questions” in the group. I told her my concerns directly. She replied:

“I hope you were getting me too much problem and I think I will not be able to move forward with impotent like you no more. As regards to this no more conversation either with me or in the group or else you will be blocked, delete and removed away!!!”

A few days later she was back in my inbox like nothing happened.

To understand what I had found, I called Victoria Strauss. She is a novelist who co-founded Writer Beware — a blog and resource that has spent decades tracking, documenting, and exposing scams that target writers. If something shady is happening in publishing, Victoria has probably already written about it.

She told me this particular scheme — the “tip reviewer” scam — had only appeared in the months before I encountered it. Brand new. The explosion of self-publishing, accelerated by Kindle and Audible, had created millions of isolated authors who handle their own editing, marketing, and promotion entirely alone. Combine that with AI that can manage a high volume of convincing, personalized responses at scale, and you get a perfect new scam ecosystem.

“There are no readers. Sometimes there are these private Discord communities — they’re populated by fake people. You never actually get any reviews.”

If you’ve gotten an email like Emily Brestfod’s, Writer Beware is your first stop — Victoria documents these schemes in real time as they emerge.

When I explained all of this back to Econ Jacob — the AI books, Amazon’s unregulated marketplace, the fake review communities, the information asymmetry exploiting desperate authors — I tried to describe it using the vocabulary he’d taught me.

Amazon’s marketplace exploits isolated self-published authors through capital-labor substitution — replacing human curators with an algorithm to maximize profits. This creates a negative externality: the only way to get visibility is to game the review algorithm. Because buyers can’t verify claims and sellers can lie freely, it becomes a market failure that scammers exploit at scale. He replied:

“I am so proud.”

“I understand what I just said. I wouldn’t have, three months ago.”

And then I told him one more thing. I’d looked into how large language models generate names. They tend to pick names that feel universal, aren’t attached to anyone famous — and are especially likely to reuse names that appear frequently alongside a specific subject matter. One of the main things LLMs train on are YouTube transcripts.

Econ Jacob says his name out loud at the start of every single video he’s ever made.

“Jacob Reed here from ReviewEcon.com.”

“…I say it every single time.”

The AI probably learned his name from him. He might have inadvertently named his own plagiarist.

“I feel like I deserve royalties from this book.”

So we wrote one.

I took everything I learned from months of conversations with Econ Jacob, incorporated his actual lessons and framework, and we published a real book — a genuine collaboration between two Jacob Reeds — to take back our name.

And just to make sure anyone searching for the AI crypto trilogy would find us instead, we released it under three alternate titles that mirror the originals:

Next-Level Investing for Young Adults: The Truth To Building Wealth Without Cryptocurrencies and Beyond

Generation Wealth: The Real Way Young Adults Can Build a Fortune, Retire Early, and Navigate Cryptocurrencies

The Future of Wealth: What Young Adults Should Really Know to Build Wealth, Understand the Economy, and Conquer Cryptocurrencies

{{EMBED: Amazon/Audible link for the Jacob Reed & Jacob Reed book}}

Once the books were live, we needed reviews.

Hi Jacob. Congratulations on the book going live on Amazon. Yes, I’m ready to proceed.

Best regards, Emily Brestfod.

For a long time, I thought not understanding the economy was a moral stance. But talking to Econ Jacob made me realize: we don’t get to opt out. Whether you understand it or not, economics decides how much your rent goes up, what jobs exist, whether you can afford to stay. Ignoring it doesn’t protect you — it just means you experience all the ups and downs without the language, context, or leverage to do anything about it.

The people who understand the economy already have an enormous advantage. Politicians use aggregate data to tell us everything is fine while people are drowning in debt. Corporations talk about efficiencies while pushing their costs onto everyone else. And they get away with it because most of us don’t speak the language.

Economic literacy doesn’t make you less angry. But it gives you specifics to be angry about.

That’s the part that finally clicked for me: economics is the language power uses, whether we like it or not. And the more regular people speak it fluently, the harder it is for the people in charge to control the conversation.

Jacob Reed and Me releases new episodes every Wednesday. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Support the show and get early episodes at Patreon.