Americans who are functionally illiterate earn about the same as the average Briton.

And you are more than 2 times more likely to die from extreme heat in Europe than from gun homicides in America. No wonder young people are fleeing Britain in droves. Today, we’re speaking to one of them.

Welcome to Episode 12 of From Ideas to Innovation. Reem Ibrahim is a writer and commentator at Reason Magazine — a classically liberal voice covering economic freedom, regulation, and the lessons Europe’s stagnation holds for America. She moved from London to Washington DC eight months ago, not because she stopped loving Britain, but because Britain stopped working for people like her.

Our conversation touches on economic history, her personal story, and includes a serious warning. If you care about what America’s future could look like, keep listening.

About This Episode’s Guest

Reem Ibrahim didn’t always hold libertarian views. As a teenager in London, she felt sad watching homeless people on the street and concluded, as most 16-year-olds do, that the government should do something about it.

But she hadn’t yet connected that instinct to her own family’s story which is a case study in what happens when governments do too much. Her father’s side came from Egypt, where her great-uncle, a man who had built a construction business from nothing, had his assets seized by Nasser’s socialist government despite personal connections to the regime. The family eventually emigrated to the UK. And then, in a similar flight from stagnation, Reem moved to the US.

She first stumbled across classical liberalism in high school. It was the first time she noticed that you could believe in limited government intervention and social liberalism, and that the two ideas did not clash. That discovery sent her on an intellectual journey that introduced her to Hayek and Mises, Hannah Arendt and the concept of natural rights, and Murray Rothbard’s Anatomy of the State — which she says she threw across the room in rage — through a brief stint as an anarcho-capitalist, and eventually to the classical liberalism she practices today.

She explored these ideas publicly through social media. At 18, when she couldn’t sleep, she went live on TikTok to read excerpts from Anatomy of the State to strangers. She built a UK libertarian following. While she loved her job at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, she realized that if she wanted to become a better communicator of economic freedom, she needed to learn from the best. So she made the move to the US.

Now a research fellow at Reason, she turns public policy into sharp journalism and video. She mainly writes on regulation, trade, and economic freedom.

What You’ll Take Away

* How much richer and freer Americans are than our friends across the pond — and what that tells us about the cost of big government

* The real Brexit: why young, ambitious Brits are leaving the UK and where they’re going

* Why Europe doesn’t have a Tesla, and what labor market regulations have to do with it

* What “free” healthcare actually looks like in practice, including the story of Reem’s father who nearly went blind waiting for NHS surgery

* Why 12,000 people a year are arrested in the UK for online speech crimes, and what that means for freedom of expression

* The Falkland Islands dispute, France’s nicotine pouch ban, and what both tell us about governments that can’t stop themselves

* The countries Reem predicts are most likely to turn the clock back on bad policy — and the least likely

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

Whether in politics or policy research, most debates today focus on ideas while missing a vision for implementation. But when it comes to improving lives, the right idea simply is not enough.

Aly Rau Brodsky has spent her career working in that gap, making sure people don’t get lost in the politics.

Welcome to Episode 11 of From Ideas to Innovation. Aly is the Executive Vice President at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), where she leads initiatives that turn ideas into implementation across child welfare, workforce, and safety net reform. She has examined the safety net from nearly every angle — from her work at a state think tank and in the governor’s cabinet to her experience as a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) and foster mom.

This conversation is about what happens when ideas and implementation are aligned and what stands in the way when they don’t.

About This Episode’s Guest

Growing up in poverty in Louisiana, Aly Rau Brodsky developed what she calls a deep “justice sensitivity” — an early and abiding awareness of what it means to be born into hard circumstances without community, resources, or voice. She developed that sense of justice as a CASA and medical advocate for sexual assault survivors before finding her way into policy and, later, politics. But she ultimately realized that the ideas behind the decisions matter just as much as the people making them, which brought her back to the world of policy.

Her policy career began at the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, where she worked her way through many roles at the organization, founding their leadership program and the Kevin Kane Center for Opportunity Policy. Then the governor of Louisiana asked her to join his administration.

She became one of the youngest women ever appointed to a cabinet-level position in Louisiana, spending the next several years as Assistant Secretary of Family Support and leading some of the boldest human services reforms the state had ever attempted. In that role, she oversaw child welfare, disability services, food and cash assistance, child support enforcement, and employment and training programs, while bringing her firsthand experience as a CASA and former foster parent to the policies and systems affecting families.

Today, at FREOPP, she is doing what she has always done: connecting the right ideas to the right implementation and refusing to accept that the gap between them is inevitable. There, she helps ensure that opportunity is real and reachable for those too often left behind.

What You’ll Take Away

* Why the right idea can still fall completely flat — and the implementation details that actually determine whether a policy works

* The summer EBT story: how a group of non-experts figured out in 45 days what the subject matter experts said was impossible

* What five broken chairs in a government visitation room taught Aly about the gap between policy and lived experience

* Why America’s social services system is designed to make poverty survivable rather than escapable, and what it would take to change that

* The case for One Door to Work, and the specific federal barriers preventing most states from doing what Utah already does

* Why technology is the most overrated solution in social services right now

* What every policymaker should be taught about social services, but rarely is

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 sports economics is about Moneyball. Keri Lawson Rubenstein thinks it’s about everything.

Welcome to Episode 10 of From Ideas to Innovation. Keri is an assistant professor of sport analytics at Syracuse University in one of the country’s leading sport analytics programs, and one of the most interesting applied economists working today. Her research covers women’s labor markets in professional sports, unintended consequences of safety mandates, and the economics of the WNBA — and she brings to all of it the same tool kit: rigorous economic thinking applied to questions people actually care about.

Fair warning: if you care about sports at all, you may lose track of time.

About This Episode’s Guest

Keri Lawson Rubenstein was pursuing the path toward becoming a traditional economist until she took Brad Humphreys’ sports economics class at West Virginia University and couldn’t go back.

The conventional path for a sports economist is to either wait until after tenure to write sports papers or pivot entirely to a sport management department. Keri found a third option: Syracuse University David B. Falk College of Sport, where a group of economists and computer scientists had built a sport analytics program from scratch because the field didn’t exist as a traditional academic discipline yet.

It was the right place at the right time. And it gave her the freedom to pursue the research agenda she’d been building in her head for years, particularly on women’s sports where she believed important questions were going unanswered because not enough researchers were asking them.

Today, Keri is one of the leading researchers in her field, with a growing body of work on WNBA labor markets, safety mandates and their unintended consequences, the economics of the women’s sports boom, and the tension between analytics and the eye test. She is also, by her own admission, a devoted cycling fan and a very opinionated Bengals supporter.

What You’ll Take Away

* Why the NFL’s Guardian Cap mandate backfired and how this applies more broadly to regulations

* The perfect storm that created the women’s sports boom and what it will take to make it stick

* The economics of Caitlin Clark: why she was simultaneously underpaid and making more money than almost anyone in the league

* Why the WNBA’s dual labor market with international leagues is structurally changing and the implications for player salaries, career longevity, and league growth

* Why comparing the WNBA and the NBA as apples to apples is bad economics and why Keri’s is passionate about stopping it

* The most underrated stat in sports right now and why a double-double is basically meaningless

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

The story of the Gilded Age goes something like this: robber barons got obscenely rich, workers were exploited, and inequality soared. You can find that story in history books, TV shows, and political speeches.

But what if that narrative is completely wrong?

Welcome to Episode 9 of From Ideas to Innovation. I’m sitting down with a good friend and collaborator, prolific economist, and professor at George Mason University to discuss his upcoming book, The Great Enrichment. Vincent Geloso takes on one of the most contested periods in American economic history, arguing that what actually happened was almost the opposite of what we’ve been told.

This is one of the most intellectually fun conversations on this podcast. Buckle up and get ready to shift the way you’ve heard the historical narrative.

About This Episode’s Guest

Vincent Geloso didn’t dream of being an economist. He planned to study art history — until his father pointed out the distinction between a hobby and a job.

So he started by dabbling in politics, landing a summer internship in the Canadian Prime Minister’s office in Ottawa as one of the very few French-speaking Conservatives from Quebec. He tried journalism next. Neither stuck.

Then, in the final year of his undergraduate degree at the University of Montreal, he took a class he’d been avoiding: Leonard Dudley’s Economic History of the Western World. A quarter of the way through the semester, he knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life.

Since then, Vincent has built one of the most prolific careers in economics, with over 120 peer-reviewed papers on topics spanning economic history, inequality, public choice, and social mobility. He has written on everything from the economics of lobotomies to why lighthouses aren’t public goods. As a professor at George Mason University, he is one of the most distinctive voices in his field — a true economic historian who can speak both the language of an economist and that of a historian.

His upcoming book, The Great Enrichment, is the culmination of years of research into what actually happened to living standards in America from 1865 to 1945 — and why the standard account gets it so badly wrong.

What You’ll Take Away

* How to do economic history well and how to avoid the most common mistake people make when they look to the past to make present-day arguments

* Why both the popular and academic accounts of the Gilded Age are wrong — and what the data actually shows about who benefited from that era’s growth

* The difference between income inequality and living standards inequality, and why that distinction completely changes the story

* How the experiences of Black Americans in that period demonstrates the power of markets to mitigate even the most severe legal and social discrimination

* Who Peg Leg Williams was and how he made labor markets more competitive

* Why the U.S. has a smaller welfare state than France, and what that tells us about the relationship between growth and poverty reduction

* Who would make it on Vincent’s Mount Rushmore of economists

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 have studied the American Dream. Few of those researchers have also lived it.

Gonzalo Schwarz came to the United States for graduate school and never left. He drove for Uber to keep his dream of starting a think tank alive. Today he runs one of the most distinctive research institutions in the country, which he calls his own American Dream.

Welcome to Episode 8 of From Ideas to Innovation.

There is a striking gap in how Americans think about the American Dream. Gallup has found that less than half of Americans believe everyone in the country has the opportunity to achieve it. But flip the question and ask people about their own lives: 67% say they've either achieved the American Dream or are actively on their way, and 71% say they have similar or more opportunity than their parents.

Even more surprising, this uniquely American ideal may be the common ground we've been searching for in today's polarized political climate. 64% of Americans believe the Dream can still unite people across different backgrounds and politics.

As we celebrate the nation's 250th anniversary, it's fitting to explore this distinctly American ideal. If it's still alive and well, as the data suggests, can we elevate that truth to reinvigorate national pride, unity, and drive our nation's future forward?

About This Episode’s Guest

Gonzalo Schwarz is the founder and president of the Archbridge Institute and, full disclosure, my boss. But he didn’t set out to start a think tank. He started by examining how to solve poverty.

When Gonzalo came to the United States for a master’s degree in economics at George Mason University, he found more than simply a better education. He was struck by the spirit of this country where entrepreneurship was celebrated, ambition was admired, and the promise of a better life wasn’t just a slogan.

He fell in love with that idea. Then he noticed that most Americans were taking it for granted, or giving up on it entirely.

In 2016, he founded the Archbridge Institute to research the economics, psychology, and culture of human flourishing and social mobility. The early years were hard: there were payroll crises, half-salaries, and a stretch where he drove for Uber to make ends meet.

Still, he kept going. And as he’d be the first to tell you, that’s the whole point.

This year, Archbridge celebrates its tenth anniversary. Gonzalo joins the podcast to reflect on what makes America unique, share insights from our recent American Dream Snapshot survey, and weigh in on what he still sees as unfinished business for the American Dream as an idea.

What You’ll Take Away

* Why social mobility — not income inequality — should be the central frame for economic policy debates

* What a Disney reveals about the American Dream as a cultural ethos and how it shaped Archbridge’s founding mission

* The surprising finding from Archbridge’s American Dream Snapshot

* Why more Americans define the dream as freedom of choice — and very few define it as becoming wealthy

* What native-born Americans take for granted about the American Dream that immigrants almost never do

* Why Argentina has the most momentum of any Latin American country toward its own version of the American Dream

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

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