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 the co-founder of HotelShift, a real estate company converting distressed hotels into affordable multifamily housing. He’s also a former economics professor who spent years teaching price theory — and then decided to live it.

This conversation is one of the most practical, grounded explorations of housing economics this podcast has produced. If you care about affordability, entrepreneurship, or what it actually looks like to transform academic insight into a real-world business, this episode is for you.

About This Episode’s Guest

Alex Cartwright didn’t leave academia because he was unhappy. He left because he saw a free market solution to the housing problem that was too compelling to ignore.

As an assistant professor of economics, Alex was winning teaching awards, taking students abroad, serving as department chair, and living what he describes as “the life of the mind.” He also happened to be working on real estate projects on the side for personal financial security and intellectual curiosity.

Then someone at a conference pointed him toward a distressed hotel in Michigan and said it might be convertible to multifamily housing. But despite thinking that idea sounded like a terrible pain to execute, Alex went to look at it anyway.

When he sat down to run the numbers he discovered a $35,000-per-room hotel didn’t sound so bad in a market where multifamily buildings sold for $300,000 per unit. He sat down and put prices on all the problems. The math worked — and a business was born.

Today, HotelShift acquires distressed hotels, converts them into affordable apartments, and builds the kind of housing that the market desperately needs but rarely produces. Alex brings to that work something most real estate developers don’t have: a deep academic grounding in free market economic thought — and the firsthand experience to know when theory matches reality.

What You’ll Take Away

* Why America is chronically undersupplied on housing

* What academics could learn from talking to the industries they study — and what entrepreneurs could learn from going back to first principles

* What theories explain why building codes only ever get stricter and more expensive and the systematic bias toward luxury housing

* How Hotel Shift’s cap rate arbitrage works — and why the gap between hotel and multifamily valuations creates a durable, scalable opportunity

* What factors actually kill real-estate deals

* How one policy change would unlock more affordable housing overnight

Cross-Sector Connection

Alex didn’t just study housing economics — he built a business around it. And in doing so, he became a living example of what happens when academic insight meets entrepreneurial execution.

Researchers and academics spend careers studying housing affordability, zoning reform, and price theory. Alex’s story is a direct challenge to stay connected to the industries they study. He shares how firsthand experience of markets shapes worldviews in ways that academic models simply can’t replicate, and the best policy research accounts for that gap.

Policymakers are often the biggest obstacle to the very solutions entrepreneurs like Alex try to build. Parking minimums, impact fees, energy retrofit mandates, and quiet resistance to affordable rezoning all show up in this conversation as real-world deal killers. Alex highlights a Texas law that allows commercial properties to be rezoned for housing by right is a replicable model that any state or city could adopt tomorrow to address this crisis.

Business leaders and entrepreneurs might recognize themselves in Alex’s description of entrepreneurship as getting punched in the face multiple times a day and coming back anyway. They also will appreciate his framework for identifying durable market inefficiencies, building a niche around solving them, and creating a business that the market won’t easily arbitrage away.

The conversation doesn’t end here. I hope it sparks your curiosity and gives you a place to start some cross-disciplinary dialogue.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fromideastoinnovation.substack.com

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 development in Latin America. Our conversation is an exploration into why these topics matter far beyond the region and should be discussed beyond academic circles.

About This Episode’s Guest

JP Bastos didn't set out to become a skeptic of state-led development. He started in local government in Brazil, an atmosphere he describes as similar to Parks and Recreation, working to simplify the legislation required to open a business. What he found motivated his entire research agenda.

When he asked bureaucrats why certain permitting requirements existed, the answer was rarely a law. It was usually: "that's how we've always done it." This search pulled him toward public choice economics and a career-defining question: is underdevelopment less about labor and capital than it is fundamentally an institutional problem?

JP pursued that question through a PhD at Texas Tech, where he became a Research Assistant at the Free Market Institute. There, alongside Nicolás Cachanosky and Alexandre Padilla, he helped build the first index to measure Latin American populism using actual policy outcomes, not just rhetoric.

This fall, he joins the University of Austin as an Assistant Professor of Economics in the Center for Economics, Politics, and History

What You’ll Take Away

* How to define and identify populism, beyond the common packaging of “what I don’t like”

* Why populist governments in Latin America made their countries roughly 20% poorer than expected

* How a single populist leader can wipe out a generation of progress on liberal democracy almost overnight, including the staggering example of Venezuela’s Supreme Court

* The difference between good and bad inequality, and the deeper institutional problems behind it

* Why crime and public safety, not economics, may be the most misunderstood driver of Latin American politics

* A surprising take on Argentina’s reforms under Milei, and what a smarter long-term strategy might have looked like

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fromideastoinnovation.substack.com

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 President of Policy and Communications at the Sutherland Institute, one of Utah's most influential think tanks, and one of the country's sharpest thinkers on poverty, upward mobility, and what it actually looks like when policy works.

Nic Dunn didn’t start out in policy. He started in broadcast journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, but he left the program feeling like he didn’t yet know enough to go into the field. That intellectual humility sent him to the University of Utah for a master’s degree in public policy. From there he entered a career that has taken him from speechwriter for Governor Gary Herbert to policy advisor at the Salt Lake County Council to Chambers of Commerce in Utah to his current role at the Sutherland Institute.

Along the way, Nic has developed a rare combination of policy depth and communications instinct — and a firm conviction that the two are inseparable. Good policy that can’t be communicated effectively goes nowhere. And communication without substance is just noise.

Today at Sutherland, he hosts the Defending Ideas podcast and leads the Institute’s work on poverty, upward mobility, housing, and welfare reform. He is one of the most thoughtful voices in the country on what a pro-work, pro-human approach to the social safety net actually looks like in practice.

What You’ll Take Away

Why Utah has ranked number one in social mobility two editions in a row— and what other states can actually replicate

How Utah’s One Door to Work model integrates welfare and workforce programs in a way that federal law prevents most states from doing

What a chronically homeless man taught Nic about what the social safety net should actually be for

Why the benefit cliff is one of the most underrated barriers to upward mobility, and how Utah is fixing that

What it looks like when think tanks do their job well, and communication’s role

Why Utah’s political culture is a model worth studying

Why housing affordability is both a symptom of Utah’s success and its most pressing challenge

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fromideastoinnovation.substack.com

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 see themselves that way.

Alexander McCobin is the founder of Liberty Ventures and Principled Business, and he has spent his career sitting at the intersection of policy, academia, and capitalism — building the case that business leaders are the most important and most underutilized defenders of a free society.

What You’ll Take Away

- What principled business actually looks like

- Why business is the liberty movement’s most underused and most powerful tool

- The four types of capitalists — and why some of the biggest threats to capitalism come from within

- Lessons Alexander has learned about messaging, movement-building, and how good ideas get mutated

- Why networking is the wrong frame — and what building real relationships actually requires

The biggest mistake the liberty movement makes, and what fixing it could change

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fromideastoinnovation.substack.com

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 administration, consistency is a superpower. Vance Ginn and Richard Morrison have it in abundance.

I’m excited to share with you our recent conversation, where we connect the dots between the ideas they’ve spent decades defending and the real-world outcomes those ideas produce.

About This Episode’s Guests

Vance Ginn, Ph.D. took the long road to economics. A homeschooled kid from Houston, he was an aspiring rock star until a bad car accident changed his trajectory. Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom changed his worldview. Since then he has taught economics at Sam Houston State University, served as Chief Economist at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and worked as Chief Economist in the first Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget. Today he runs Ginn Economic Consulting and hosts the Let People Prosper show.

Richard Morrison has been at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in various roles since 1999 — rare consistency in a city where people cycle in and out with every administration. As a precocious high school leftist, he stumbled onto Reason Magazine and was captivated. His work at CEI spans economic regulation, climate and energy policy, and FDA reform — unglamorous work, but deeply consequential work that quietly shapes everyday American life. He hosts the Free the Economy podcast where he examines news, policy, and economics of the day.

Together, they bring decades of hard-won experience from the places where economic ideas meet political reality.

What You’ll Take Away

Why real policy innovation is happening at the state level, and why DC is the last place to look for it.

How to maintain principles across administrations while still making an impact.

Why the abundance agenda is a unifying platform, and what gets in the way.

The case against AI doomerism, and a 1957 romantic comedy that predicted everything we’re worried about today.

Why podcasting is one of the most powerful tool for communicating economic ideas to the people who need them most.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fromideastoinnovation.substack.com

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 episode is for you.

About This Episode’s Guest

Josh Bandoch has spent his career in the places where ideas meet resistance — academia, government, policy advocacy, speechwriting, and fundraising. As a persuasion expert and policy advocate working across ideological lines in Illinois, he has tested these methods where the stakes are real, and to audiences who rarely agree with him.

His new book, How to Get What You Want: Mastering the Art and Science of Persuasion, draws on over a decade of research and real-world practice to tackle a problem hiding in plain sight: brilliant people with important ideas who can’t get anyone to listen.

In this conversation, Josh breaks down the science behind why logic alone fails and shares a practical, actionable framework for persuading anyone across the political spectrum.

What You’ll Take Away

* Why leading with data and logic is actually illogical, and what neuroscience says you should do instead

* How to frame the same idea differently for a conservative, a progressive, and a libertarian audience without being inauthentic

* Why the winning mindset destroys long-term relationships

* The single most powerful question you can ask anyone to unlock what’s really stopping them

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fromideastoinnovation.substack.com

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 Innovation. In this conversation, Gould takes us inside the institutions that created this model, and explains why he decided to dismantle it.

About This Episode’s Guest

John Jameson Gould has shaped how America thinks for decades. As former digital editor of The Atlantic, editor of The New Republic, and editor at large of The Washington Monthly, he helped grow some of the most influential media brands in the country.

Today, as CEO of Marlborough House and editorial director of The Signal, he’s doing something different: building a media company designed not to capture your attention, but to help you think.

With a Ph.D. from Yale in the history of political thought, experience at McKinsey & Company, and now running his own media startup, John is exactly the kind of cross-sector thinker this podcast exists to bring to the table.

What You’ll Take Away

* Why the attention economy is really exchanging narratives.

* Understanding “conflict entrepreneurialism” and how it quietly shapes the media you consume every day.

* Why truly “neutral” media doesn’t exist, and what a more honest alternative actually looks like.

* How The Signal is built around the primacy of the question rather than hot takes and partisan point-scoring.

* Why there’s a demand for media that helps people think together, and what that means for the future of American democracy.

Cross-Disciplinary Connection

Information is the lifeblood of good decision-making, but the current media ecosystem is poisoning it.

I’ve written before about the horseshoe theory of politics, which is the idea that the far left and far right are actually quite closely aligned. In this episode, Gould calls the engine driving that convergence: “conflict entrepreneurialism.” The premise that half the country is your enemy is false — but you can hear it everywhere in the "them" and "they" language that dominates modern media.

What I found most compelling was how The Signal is actively rejecting that model — not by claiming neutrality, but by enabling people to think for themselves rather than telling them what to think. As Gould puts it, that’s a radically democratic idea.

And it’s one that matters enormously for the three sectors this podcast exists to connect:

* Business leaders making high-stakes decisions need information that builds understanding, not conflict.

* Policymakers crafting legislation are only as good as the inputs they receive — and a broken media ecosystem produces broken inputs.

* Academics trying to communicate complex ideas to the public are fighting a model that punishes depth and rewards outrage.

This conversation only works if the people in it can come to the table and actually hear each other. That’s why reimagining media isn’t just a journalism problem — it’s the foundation on which every cross-sector conversation must be built

The Conversation Continues…

A few questions from this episode worth sitting with, and asking friends and colleagues:

* Do you think the media’s business model is fixable, or does it need to be rebuilt from scratch?

* Have you ever caught yourself consuming media you knew wasn’t good for you? What kept you going back?

* Is there a media outlet you trust to help you think rather than just react? What makes it different?

Feel free to drop your thoughts in the comments. Your perspective belongs in this discussion, pull up a chair at the table.

Next Time…

I hope you’ll tune in for our conversation in two weeks. I’m sitting down with Joshua Bandoch to discuss his new book How to Get What You Want: Mastering the Art and Science of Persuasion. We will discuss persuasion across academia, policy, and business.

In the meantime, please subscribe and share the episode with a colleague who will find the topic interesting.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fromideastoinnovation.substack.com