From Ideas to Innovation Podcast

America has a housing supply problem. Most people agree on the diagnosis. Almost nobody agrees on the cure. Recent discussions in Washington over housing affordability and institutional investors are the perfect example. Alex Cartwright thinks the cure is hiding in plain sight — in the lobbies of distressed hotels that nobody wants anymore. Welcome to Episode 7 of From Ideas to Innovation. Alex is...

Populism is hard to define. Is commonly labeled by whatever the speaker doesn’t like. But João Pedro "JP" Bastos argued we can do better than that, and helped build an index that measures it. Welcome to Episode 6 of From Ideas to Innovation. JP recently defended his PhD in economics at my alma mater, Texas Tech University, and his research focuses on populism, institutions, and economic developmen...

Many states run their welfare programs and workforce programs like two separate businesses that never talk to each other. Families in poverty have to navigate multiple agencies, multiple buildings, and mountains of paperwork just to get help — let alone get back on their feet. Utah decided to do something different. Welcome to Episode 5 of From Ideas to Innovation. I'm joined by Nic Dunn , Vice Pr...

Most people think the fight for liberty happens in think tanks, classrooms, and political campaigns. Alexander McCobin thinks they’re missing the most powerful lever of all: business. Historically, business leaders have been on the front lines of advancing liberty — creating value, funding academic and policy research, and lifting up their communities. The question today is whether enough still se...

Two expert policy communicators walk into a podcast… One was a rock drummer whose car accident sent him down the road to Milton Friedman. The other, a high school leftist who discovered Reason Magazine and never looked back. Both ended up spending their careers fighting for economic freedom — and neither has stopped since. In a world where institutions bend their principles with every new administ...

Brilliant researchers are often the worst communicators. Not because of what they have to say, but because they lead with logic in a world that feels first and reasons second. Every day we face an important choice: be right, or make a difference . Most people working in policy and academia focus too much on one, to their detriment. If you have a great idea that’s struggling to catch momentum, this...

Most of us hate how we consume media. We doom scroll, feel anxious, and know something is wrong — but keep going back anyway. John Jameson Gould grew The Atlantic ‘s audience by 10x by relying on a the modern media business model — then grew increasingly uncomfortable with what he’d built, realizing the business model ran on dopamine and conflict. Welcome to the first episode of From Ideas to Inno...