Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University who turns provocative ideas into bestselling books and graphic novels. He coined 'rational irrationality' to explain why democracies pick bad policies, argues education is mostly signaling, champions open borders and housing deregulation, and keeps a perfect public betting record on his predictions. He writes the Substack 'Bet On It' and has built a career out of cheerfully defending unpopular positions with data.
Jeremy Stoppelman is the co-founder and CEO of Yelp, the local reviews platform he built after getting the flu in 2004 and being unable to find a doctor online. A PayPal Mafia veteran who rose to VP of Engineering before dropping out of Harvard Business School, Stoppelman turned a $1M seed check from Max Levchin into a public company with 308 million reviews and $1.4 billion in annual revenue. He has spent two decades fighting Google's search monopoly, championing remote work and YIMBY housing policy, and writing Yelp reviews under the username 'Big Papa.'
Matthew Yglesias is one of America's most influential political writers - a Harvard-trained philosopher turned media entrepreneur who co-founded Vox and then bet on himself by launching Slow Boring, a Substack newsletter that earns him over $1.4 million a year. Known for his contrarian, rigorously argued takes on housing, immigration, economics, and American governance, he occupies a strange and productive niche: too wonky for Twitter, too heterodox for legacy media, and too prolific for anyone to ignore.