Brandon Herrera is the Republican nominee for Texas’ 23^rd Congressional district, and he’s running as someone who knows how to run a business and can reduce the national debt.

He’s best known for his gun manufacturing business, but he told me he also has ownership interests in businesses in social media, textiles, energy drinks, protein, and a streaming service. He has more than 4 million subscribers on YouTube, where he shares his knowledge of guns, and he has nearly 700,000 followers on X, where he shares his policy positions.

Herrera became the Republican nominee for TX-23 after former Congressman Tony Gonzales withdrew from the primary runoff in March following his admission that he had an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide. Gonzales subsequently resigned from Congress in April. Herrera also ran against Gonzales in the 2024 primary, when he lost by only 354 votes. He has been endorsed by President Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and he will face Democratic nominee Katy Padilla Stout, an attorney, mom, and former teacher, in the general election. TX-23 is a massive district, stretching from San Antonio to El Paso and reaching the border, and it is considered favorable to Republicans. (Disclosure: I’ve donated to Herrera’s campaign.)

In a recent interview with me, Brandon Herrera explained the biggest difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties.

“The Democratic Party of 2026 is the party of free pizza every day,” Herrera said. “And the Republican Party is the party of asking how you’ll pay for the pizza. They [Democrats] promise a lot. They think everybody should have free healthcare and free college and everything for free, and they don’t ask the question of, okay, fiscally speaking, how do you do that? And that’s something that makes Republicans unpopular amongst people who don’t really do any research. And they [Democrats] think that there is such a thing as a free lunch, but that’s just not the case.”

Herrera said that there are two ways Democrats can pay for “free” programs: much higher taxes, or government borrowing.

“There’s two ways that could be implemented,” he said. “One is astronomically higher taxes for everybody. Or they’ll just continue to run an incredibly high deficit. And that ends up with an even bigger problem because you just continue to have runaway inflation, because the government will just print the money to be able to pay the interest on the debt that we already have and continue to rack up debt slavery for our children and grandchildren. And in the form of inflation, that hurts everybody even worse because now the purchasing power of the dollar goes down. The government doesn’t even have to rob you of your money via taxes. They can just devalue the money you already have. So if you were doing the fiscally responsible thing and saving money and being smart and saving for your future, you’re still getting punished because the government is robbing you of the value of your dollar, and that’s what they don’t think about.”

The current national debt is $39.8 trillion, or $116,700 for every American, as of August 10, 2026, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

On socialists who are on the rise in the Democratic Party, Herrera said: “I don’t believe they have any sort of inclination to read about economics or understand economics… They just go with what’s popular in their crowd, and they have no interest in figuring out how to make it sustainable or how to make it work. And they go for the nice headlines… They institute policies in the short term, knowing that they’ll be out of office in the long term when you actually have to pay the piper.”

When I asked Herrera what his top legislative priorities are, he said two of them are border security and reducing the deficit.

“If I ran my business the way that the government runs its budget, I would be homeless three times over,” Herrera said.

He said that his experience running profitable businesses will help him reduce the federal deficit.

On his campaign website, Herrera says that he will oppose any spending bill that does not fund comprehensive border security. He also will strive to reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” program and stop abuse of the asylum system. He also has taken the “No New Taxes” pledge and promises to “fight to rein in wasteful government spending that fuels inflation.” (Prices are now 29.5% higher than they were in January 2020.)

Herrera also believes in moving toward single-subject spending bills, so that members of Congress can’t just “tack on all of their garbage” onto omnibus spending bills. “If we just had to do an open vote on every element of the budget individually, I think we could cut out a lot of fat,” Herrera said.

Herrera supports term limits for members of Congress. On his campaign website, he pledges to co-sponsor a constitutional amendment to limit members of the House of Representatives to three terms and Senators to two terms. He is the Texas state chair for U.S. Term Limits, a nonprofit advocating for term limits at all levels of government, especially Congress. He said it is a problem that incumbents have an “unstoppable money machine behind them” and an around 97% reelection rate. “You essentially have the job for life, and one of the reasons for that is, you build a fundraising empire that becomes very hard to beat, even if you do lie, even if you do betray your constituents, and it’s something that we see all the time,” he said.

“It’s something a friend of mine once said a long time ago: ‘Nobody goes to DC and gets better,’” Herrera said. “It’s a good thing to be able to hit the refresh button every once in a while to make sure we don’t have these monolithic dynasties that we’ve seen in American politics.”

When asked about how he feels about being one of the youngest members of Congress if elected (he’s currently 30 years old), Herrera said, “To quote Indiana Jones, it’s not the years, it’s the miles. I’ve had plenty of years of business experience in manufacturing and engineering and running teams and building businesses from the ground up. So I feel like I have more qualifications than a lot of the folks that are sitting in office right now, but I think my youth actually yields positive benefits with certain things like understanding data centers, understanding AI, understanding Bitcoin, cryptocurrency. These things that we have 85-year-olds currently in charge of legislating and they couldn’t tell you what the hell it is. I think that’s something that can’t be overlooked.”

If you want to learn more about Herrera’s campaign, you can check out his campaign website here.

Airrosti is a musculoskeletal care provider that says it resolves most cases in an average of three visits. It employs providers to do hands-on manual therapy that treats pain directly, and their physical therapists show patients how to do exercises at home.

Recently, I went to one of their locations in San Antonio for back pain. The provider diagnosed it as pain due to a muscle imbalance. He did manual therapy that led to immediate relief, and the exercises also helped. I was discharged after three sessions, and I’m now feeling much better.

Airrosti has locations across Texas, Ohio, Washington state, and Virginia. They could be located anywhere, but they were founded in and are still headquartered in San Antonio, Texas. And they have deep roots here. Airrosti has more than 20 locations in the San Antonio area alone, and its website notes that there have been more than 100,000 visits to Airrosti locations in the San Antonio area over the past 12 months.

I got to understand Airrosti’s roots in San Antonio better during a recent conversation with Dr. Chris Cato, Airrosti’s chief population health officer. He has worked for Airrosti since 2004, when it was founded.

“It’s a big city feel, it’s great affordability, but it also has a small town feel as well,” Dr. Cato said of San Antonio.

“San Antonio offers a lot from a recruitment standpoint,” Dr. Cato said. “San Antonio is very popular for us, for our providers wanting to come here. It combines affordability. There’s also a lot of talent here. There’s a deep healthcare presence here in San Antonio, and then we’ve got a very collaborative business culture… The climate…it’s a lot milder in the winter…we saw a lot of people wanting to come here getting out of the harsh winters up north.”

When I asked him whether Airrosti would ever consider moving its headquarters to Austin because of the hype there, he said no.

“I just don’t think we would ever consider moving our headquarters to Austin; I think San Antonio still gives us a lot of benefits over Austin,” Dr. Cato said. “Going back to the affordability piece where we don’t have to focus so much on overhead. It also allows us to be able to draw talent here, versus the overhead in the Austin market. And then two, San Antonio has a stronger healthcare community. We also got the military healthcare community as well, and then just a great business collaboration going on.”

Dr. Cato said on the advantages of Airrosti being based in San Antonio: “The affordability, the talent, the deep healthcare presence here, all of that combined has really allowed us to focus on our patient experience, focus on our patient outcomes, and having a strong anchor to where we can build out our national reach.”

Dr. Cato did say, however, that it would be helpful for Texas if it built high-speed rail between San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, and Houston.

“I would like to see…an effective train system, high-speed rail, because I do travel a lot to Austin, Houston, Dallas, and sometimes I fly, sometimes I drive, but it would be great to have another option. Spending some time over in Europe, and experiencing travel on those high-speed rails, seems quite nice.”

Airrosti has almost 700 employees total, and around 250 of them live and work in San Antonio, according to Dr. Cato.

Airrosti provides a strong model as a successful national business based in San Antonio, Texas. Its growth has been supported by San Antonio’s warm weather, affordability, strong healthcare industry, livability, and collaborative business culture — advantages that have helped it provide a good living to employees here, across Texas, and around the U.S.

Other founders should take note. San Antonio is a good place to start and scale a successful business, especially one that provides a concrete service people genuinely need. Airrosti’s success shows that San Antonio is more than a comfortable place to live. It is also a serious place to build.

(Originally published on Medium on May 20, 2026.)

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The River Walk in San Antonio.

There is a growing exodus of tech founders and investors leaving California, driven by a combination of rising costs, regulatory uncertainty, and a deteriorating quality of life. More recently, a statewide wealth tax ballot initiative has added to these concerns, raising questions about the long-term incentives and stability required to build and retain companies. David Sacks has recently relocated to Austin, Peter Thiel and Larry Page have moved to Miami, and many others are actively considering moves to Texas, Florida, New York, or elsewhere.

Most tech founders, investors, and employees in California looking at Texas are focused on Austin, which is now the biggest tech and startup hub in Texas. However, they should also consider moving to a city that is only an hour and a half away from Austin and doesn’t have many of Austin’s downsides: San Antonio.

Texas has obvious advantages over California: no wealth tax, no income tax, and high-quality state and local governance. But why San Antonio in particular?

I was born and raised in San Antonio, left when I was 18 to go to college at Harvard, and moved back after a long time away at the end of 2021. San Antonio has wonderful quality of life and is a great place to raise a family and/or be close to family. It has lower rents and housing prices than Austin, and the traffic is much better than in Austin. While traffic is regularly slowed to a halt in Austin during rush hour, congestion is rare in San Antonio.

San Antonio has a small but mighty startup scene. There is a yearly San Antonio Startup Week, and Geekdom, which was co-founded by Rackspace founder Graham Weston, serves as a central coworking and community hub for early-stage companies, offering space and mentorship. Scaleworks, run by former Rackspace president Lew Moorman, is based in San Antonio and invests in and operates B2B SaaS companies, and it has already had several successful exits. Beto Altamirano, founder and CEO of the government technology company Irys, ran for mayor last year and came in third place out of 27 candidates, reflecting the growing presence of ambitious, civic-minded founders in the city.

Large companies with deep roots in San Antonio include Rackspace, USAA, Valero, and H-E-B, while firms such as UBS, Deloitte, and JPMorgan Chase maintain significant local offices. The city is also a national center for cybersecurity and defense, with several military bases—earning it the nickname “Military City”—as well as a large NSA office. There is also a thriving healthcare sector, with a major medical school, big hospitals, and many successful independent healthcare practices. And there are several universities here, all with different strengths.

Two prominent holding company owners live in San Antonio: Michael Girdley, who regularly shares his insights online, and Sardar Biglari, who was inspired by Warren Buffett and started his holding company after attending Trinity University in San Antonio. They reflect a local culture that values durable businesses over short-term hype.

Real estate is also a major industry in San Antonio, and there is plenty of space to build.

One of San Antonio’s quiet advantages is the absence of constant FOMO. It is a calm, family-oriented, broadly middle-class city, not dominated by any single industry or status hierarchy. Quality of life is high: housing remains affordable, healthcare is high-quality, and cultural institutions—from a symphony orchestra and museums to a steady stream of performances at the Majestic Theatre—are well supported. The city has a diverse and excellent food scene (ranging from Indian to Tex-Mex to Thai), a wide range of fitness options, many churches and synagogues, and many active nonprofits serving everything from food insecurity to elder care. Shaped by generations of immigration—especially from Mexico, but also from around the world—San Antonio embraces diversity. The climate is mild and warm, crime is largely contained, and people are kind. For many people, San Antonio feels quiet, warm, safe, and livable.

Housing abundance is one of San Antonio’s most important advantages. Because rents and home prices remain relatively low and stable, early-career technology employees are far less burdened by day-to-day financial stress than they would be in coastal cities or even Austin. More broadly, San Antonio is a place where people with demanding, essential jobs can realistically afford to live well—whether by owning a home or renting a decent apartment. For those who care about the well-being of the people who make a city function—cooks, drivers, caregivers, and service workers—housing abundance matters. Cities like San Antonio make it far more possible for people with hard jobs to live stable, dignified lives, and that should weigh heavily in decisions about where to build and settle down.

Another underappreciated strength of San Antonio is its ease with aging. The city is genuinely welcoming to middle-aged and older people, in part because it is home to many of them. Unlike places whose culture is narrowly oriented around students or twenty-somethings, in San Antonio, you can settle down for the long term without worrying about aging out of the social fabric. It is also a city where professionals can bring their retired parents to live near them.

San Antonio also offers strong educational options for families. Both public and private schools in the city make it possible to pursue rigorous academic paths without the extreme costs or pressure that now characterize many other metropolitan areas.

San Antonio does not yet have the dense, highly visible scene of ambitious people who regularly find one another through platforms like X or overlapping social networks, as people in cities such as Austin, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and New York City do. But that absence is also part of the opportunity: as more founders, investors, and startup employees arrive, those networks can form early and organically.

Moving to San Antonio is an asymmetric bet. It offers proximity to Austin without Austin’s traffic, housing costs, or other downsides, while benefiting from existing institutional capital in healthcare, energy, the military, cybersecurity, and related industries. Just as importantly, it offers room to shape culture rather than simply inherit it. For founders, investors, and equity-holding startup employees willing to arrive early, San Antonio represents a city with real long-term upside.

If you’re seeking maximum hype and social density, Austin, San Francisco, or Miami may be a better fit. But for those who want a place where they can put their head down and build something durable, San Antonio offers a compelling alternative. It is a city with real long-term promise—one that deserves to grow as more founders, investors, and tech employees arrive. For people looking to build a good life for themselves, their parents, their current and/or future children, and the teams they help support, San Antonio is an unusually livable place to do so.

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This message is primarily meant for people in the Middle East, but if you’re reading this in the United States, Europe, Russia, Asia, or elsewhere, your prayers will make an enormous difference too.

Pray outside with your fellow citizens, or alone in your room, or with your family or friends, or at a place of worship. Fight back against the shouting, threats, and violence with peaceful but forceful prayer.

Instead of violence, choose love. Listen to and pray for your perceived enemies. Realize that in the end, they are your fellow brothers and sisters. Hatred only means swallowing poison yourself.

Mourn the dead Israelis and Palestinians. Pray for the hostages trapped in tunnels from dozens of countries, including Israel and the United States, and the Palestinians who can’t find clean drinking water and who have nowhere to go if they leave their homes.

Mourn the dead Iraqis, Afghans, and Americans from the United States’ occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Mourn the dead Syrians from the Syrian Civil War. Mourn the dead Yemenis from Yemen’s civil war. Mourn the people that ISIS beheaded.

Pray for the people of the Middle East to gain the civil rights and personal safety that they deserve, to be able to express themselves and have true freedom of choice.

Pray for the cycle of violence to end.

When the cycle of violence spirals out of control, it can be nearly impossible to stop.

So it is absolutely critical to nip the cycle of violence in the bud, right now. With a show of force in the streets, in our homes, in our places of worship. With peaceful prayer.

Pray for peace, freedom, faith, hope, and love. (See 1 Corinthians 13 and Matthew 5-7.)

Amen.

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Postscript:

Songs for peace:

Ofra Haza - Jerusalem of Gold
Hatikvah (The Hope) - Israel’s national anthem (I like the recording from the soundtrack to the 2005 movie Munich, as composed and conducted by John Williams)
Khaled - Aicha
Arash - One Day (feat. Helena)
Arash - Pure Love (feat. Helena)

Dylan Livingston is the president and founder of the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives. It’s a 501(c)4 organization that is devoted to lobbying the government to fund research on the mechanisms behind aging and therapies that will treat it to help people live longer, healthier lives. They’re doing very important work. I can think of few causes more important than helping people have more time to enjoy their lives. There already is a growing longevity industry, but it needs more funding. I wrote about the case for a longevity moonshot funded by the government in an article for the Lincoln Network last year. Below is an email interview that I conducted with Dylan. If you’re interested in his work, you can check out his organization’s website here.

Why did you start the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (A4LI), and what is the goal of your organization?

The Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (A4LI) is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit advocacy organization focused on increasing healthy life expectancy in the US by helping advance the development of drugs and therapies that target aging. I started A4LI because of a combination of two things. First, I had worked for the Biden campaign and various Democratic-backed organizations in the years leading up to 2020, and developed an impressive political rolodex because of it. I also had become tremendously interested in longevity science as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, which coincided with my time with the Biden campaign. So it kind of made sense for me personally to try to cross my interest (longevity) with where my prior experience was (politics). Second, and probably more importantly, I noticed there weren’t any other organizations with this goal to advocate for increasing healthy life expectancy in the US through supporting the development of drugs that target aging. I noticed a bit of a gap in this blossoming biotech ecosystem, and I understood the importance of political advocacy especially in the context of bringing a fringe idea to the mainstream. With no clear leadership in the political space, I felt obligated to create A4LI as an entity.

What are the major policies that you’re advocating for?

Congressional allocation priorities don’t maximize the longevity industry's ability to be effective.  Right now, the National Institute on Aging’s Division of Aging Biology, the agency set up to research and fund geroscience-focused projects, is only allocated about $400 million dollars a year, compared to the roughly $52 billion dollar NIH budget. If aging therapeutics promise to prevent/treat the chronic diseases associated with aging, diseases the government spends billions of dollars trying to cure, why is research into aging therapeutics so small? That is something A4LI is looking to change — we want to increase that number to at least a billion dollars by 2025.

As I’m sure much of this audience knows, aging is not considered a disease in the eyes of the FDA, and we won’t be pushing for that designation change at this time. What we’re really looking to do is create a path forward for longevity/aging biotechnology companies, a path that gives them advantages while developing these drugs and therapies that will eventually target aging. A4LI would like to help create an analog to the Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy Pathway for companies that classify as “longevity medicine” companies. Under the “LMAT” Pathway, eligible longevity companies (as selected by the FDA) would be given advantages like being given fast-track or breakthrough therapy designation.

In a broader context, we want to make Congress a participant in and promoter of increasing healthy lifespan in the U.S. We want to see the U.S. adopt a similar position to the U.K., where they are pushing for “everyone to have five extra years of healthy, independent life by 2035.” However, we would like the U.S. government to be a bit more audacious. One thing the COVID-19 pandemic showed us is that when the U.S. government wants to get something done, like developing and distributing multiple effective vaccines, it can easily. Political will is very powerful. We want to give the longevity movement a COVID-19 level of political willpower.

What would be the benefit for individuals, the economy, the government budget, and society if people could be healthier into old age?

Individuals will benefit by being able to live in better health for longer. Aging therapies promise to ward off the diseases associated with aging, such as cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, stroke, diabetes and the disabling conditions associated with aging, such as immune system dysfunction, arthritis, loss of muscle, etc. From that, individuals will be able to work longer, make more money and have more fulfilling careers. They’ll also be able to spend more time with their families and loved ones. Who doesn’t want that?

The economy will benefit in unprecedented ways from increasing healthy life expectancy. The various iterations of the longevity dividend argument state that we could see anywhere from ~$3 to $37 trillion dollars in added GDP by adding one extra year of life expectancy. These gains will come from reducing healthcare costs and a massive increase in population productivity, as our workforce will include older, more experienced workers with the clarity and energy of a younger worker.  The increase in GDP would help the US government balance its budget, which would allow the United States to continue to be a promoter of democracy and global stability (something that’s clearly needed at the moment and for the foreseeable future) while also being able to take care of its citizens back home. 

I think we would see more cross-generational relationships, both platonic and romantic. I think society would “relax” a bit more, in the sense that people wouldn’t be pressured to go to college out of high school, women wouldn’t feel pressured to have children at a certain time in their lives, etc. I think multiple careers in different areas will become common, and I think that’s a good thing for our economy — cross-disciplinary work generally results in great things. The introduction of effective gerotherapies will afford people more time to live in better health, and I think that would cause everyone to be a lot happier.

Tell me more about the future that you’re trying to create. Is it a future where people when they’re 80 can be nearly as healthy as when they were 30? Or where people can live past 100 and be healthy?

Officially, the organization is looking to increase life expectancy year over year, so the future A4LI is trying to create is one where politicians actively pass legislation that will achieve that goal. Personally though, of course I’d love to see a future where people can remain in a healthy, youthful state as they age. This may or may not be controversial, and I am not speaking for the organization here, but I want to see a future where aging and the poor health associated with it becomes optional. I want to see a world where your effort in taking care of your body directly correlates to how physically healthy you are. That really was one of the things that got me so invested in longevity — seeing my 94-year-old grandfather, (who takes excellent care for himself — daily mile-plus walks, eats perfect, and golfs regularly) terrified of COVID-19 strictly because of his age. The difference in the outcome of COVID between him and me is really just our age, not effort, and that’s one of the great injustices of life, an injustice I plan to dedicate my life to fixing.

Why do you think the US government hasn’t done more to try to increase our healthspans and lifespans?

Because for all of human history, we haven’t been able to manipulate the rates at which we age, until literally the last few years. I don’t blame them. But now that there is significant proof in the laboratory that the aging process can be manipulated, attention needs to be paid. There also hasn’t been any sort of public persuasion campaign — much of the money being spent is going toward the labs and drug development aspect (rightfully so), but if the longevity industry wants to see the government get more involved in increasing lifespan, the industry must become activists. The loudest and most well-funded activists are the ones that get the attention of Congress, plain and simple. If we want the government to take notice of longevity, we need to be among the loudest and most well funded, period; there is no way around that fact.

There have been recent private-sector efforts to conduct longevity research, like at Altos Labs and NewLimit. Is it possible that the private sector can do enough for longevity research without government involvement? Why do you think the government needs to get involved?

The US government’s budget dwarfs both companies' funding. The NIH alone has $52 billion dollars. And why is it bad if another player (the US government) throws its hat in the aging biomedical research ring? No one complains when new companies are getting funded each week. What’s the downside of allocating more funds toward aging research, and who cares where the funds are coming from? Also, these government funds are directed to more foundational research, which is a good thing because it allows VC’s to do their job properly (company build and commercialize) rather than seed a scientific concept that may or may not work. Also, something like 80% of the longevity companies in existence are based in the US, and we want the government involved so we can properly change policies and regulations to make it easier for the majority of the industry to operate more easily. NewLimit and Altos Labs are ultimately at the mercy of the FDA and US government, so I would assume they want to have a dialogue with Congress and regulators.  

Why do you think it’s important for therapies to treat aging directly, rather than individual diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s?

Because gerotherapies have much wider-reaching effects than a drug focused on curing one specific disease. It’s worth noting that around 60% of people over 65 are dealing with more than one of these chronic, age-related diseases at one time. Gerotherapies would target all of the diseases that come with aging, unlike an Alzheimer’s or cancer drug which will only target that one specific disease. Again, don’t quote me exactly on the numbers, but we spend all this money and time to treat and cure cancer, but the fact of the matter is that curing cancer would only increase average lifespan in the US by like 2 years. Same with all of those diseases of aging — curing them gives you only a few more years of life. By taking this geroscience approach, we can tackle all of the diseases of aging at once and instead of us only gaining 2 years because we cure cancer, we would gain another 2 or so years from that, as well as another 2 from defeating diabetes, another 2 years for heart disease, etc., etc. So by creating successful gerotherapies, we can add a much more healthy lifespan to peoples lives rather than one disease at a time. Plus, aging therapies target things that impact quality of life, like muscle loss, weakened bones, arthritis – all the things that cause 75-year-olds to be less athletic and energetic than they were at 25 years old. My point is, gerotherapies or therapies that target aging have such a wide-reaching effect that it’s hard to argue against putting more research money into aging therapeutics development.

Some longevity advocates argue that the FDA is standing in the way of innovation in longevity. What kind of FDA reform, if any, do you think would be helpful to speed up innovation in longevity research?

A lot of people want to see “aging as a disease,” but the issue is that there aren’t biomarkers that the FDA and the entire aging research community can agree on. That’s a major obstacle, and gives FDA officials pause. What we would like to see happen is the establishment of the LMAT or Longevity Medicine Advanced Therapeutics pathway. This would be analogous to the RMAT (Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapeutics pathway), but for drugs that target the aging or aspects of aging. Under LMAT, the most promising longevity therapeutics, as decided by the FDA, would be given special drug development priorities like breakthrough designation. Hopefully over time, we can get these companies who get accepted under the LMAT designation to work side-by-side with the FDA to establish and agree on biomarkers for aging in a public-private partnership type of agreement. We’re still working on the details of this policy proposal, so check back with us in a few weeks for more details.

Some people argue that science funding needs fundamental reform, since scientists spend a lot of their time writing grant proposals and avoid areas of research that are riskier because they’re less likely to get funding. Do you agree with that, and if so, what kind of reforms to science funding do you recommend?

That’s why we are pushing hard for ARPA-H to have program managers with a geroscience focus or project. ARPA-H was pretty much created to circumvent this issue, and allow for the higher-risk, highest-reward biomedical research endeavors, like developing drugs and therapies that target aging. The current administration supports ARPA-H too, which we’re happy about, but we want to make sure they understand where the focus needs to be – aging and rejuvenation therapeutic developments. 

What needs to be done to get politicians to prioritize longevity research? Do we need a mass movement?

What politicians need to do, first and foremost, is get this longevity caucus together. I truly believe that political and societal will is the biggest roadblock in the longevity formula. Leading scientists have more or less accepted that aging can be reversed, and big-time institutional investors and VC’s are funding these endeavors. Politicians need to get their act together in regard to the longevity biotech field, understand the unfathomable potential of this field to completely revolutionize humanity for the better, and support (via policy) everything from foundational drug discovery endeavors to commercializing said drugs. Politicians need to understand that the longevity dividend states that if we increase healthy lifespan, GDP also skyrockets and would relieve much of the issues we bicker about: funds for climate change, defense spending, welfare, etc. Having this caucus gives us an audience of decision-makers for the thesis above, and so that’s why setting up the caucus is the first thing Congress needs to get done to prioritize longevity research.

From there, they’ll need to completely buy into the geroscience approach. We don’t want this caucus to be a palliative care-focused caucus — one that discusses more accessible ramps for seniors, more meals on wheels, things like that. This caucus needs to be focused on pushing for research initiatives that will prevent elderly people from even needing things like wheelchairs and home service. We want all adults to be as self-sufficient as possible — it’s better for the patient and caregiver.

So to answer your question, no I don’t think we need a mass movement to get many of the things we want to get done, but don’t get me wrong, we’re pushing to create a mass movement regardless because the more voices calling for these reforms, the better. But I don’t anticipate that happening in the next year or two. We will need to create a mass movement once longevity therapies 1.0 are ready to hit the market, and will need to advocate that as many insurance providers cover said therapies, and that patients, sick or not, participate in these therapies so we, the United States, can achieve the tremendous economic reward associated with the longevity dividend.

How can people learn more about what you’re working on?

By visiting our website a4li.org and joining our mailing list. By becoming a member and quite honestly, contributing as much money as you feel comfortable contributing (as much as I personally hate to say that). The unfortunate fact in this 501(c)(4) political advocacy world is that your effectiveness is super closely tied to your fundraising levels.

Two of the most politically prominent 501(c)(4)s in the country, in my opinion, are the NRA and Sierra Club. There is a reason that gun laws have hardly changed in the last 30 years, and that’s because the NRA has been the fundraising behemoth that has the funds that allow them to hire advocates to advocate like hell for the policies they support. The reason that climate change has become the number one issue of the Democratic Party is because advocacy organizations like Sierra Club (and other groups) have hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for organizers, advocates and lobbyists. These two organizations attract polar opposite types of people, but they have two commonalities. They’re funded up the wazoo, and they’re funded by small dollar donations (less than $200) from people who believe in the cause. That’s what A4LI needs; we need all of the people in America who believe that the government should make a concerted effort to increase life expectancy to ALL put their money where their mouth is and financially support A4LI, even if it's not a ton. We need all of your help to make this world a better place, where people can live in more robust health for a much longer time.

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The Russian invasion of Ukraine will worsen an already bad inflation situation in the U.S.

Russia is one of the world’s biggest exporters of oil, and Russia’s oil is sitting unsold because of uncertainty around sanctions and shipping dangers because of the war, which is raising energy prices.

Gas prices are rising significantly. Gas prices are currently $4.33 per gallon on average, up from $3.48 per gallon a month ago and $2.84 per gallon a year ago, according to the AAA gas price tracker.

Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE aren’t talking to President Joe Biden after he’s tried to arrange calls with them to persuade them to export more oil. That’s because they’re at odds with the U.S. over a number of policy issues, including the war in Yemen. So Biden’s attempt to replace Russian oil with more Saudi or UAE oil is facing roadblocks. Therefore, the price of oil is likely to stay high or increase further over the next few months.

The Russian invasion also will raise food prices. For one thing, energy prices are a big component of food prices. That’s because higher energy prices raise the cost of fertilizer and transporting food. In addition, Russia is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, and Ukraine is the world’s fifth-largest. Together, they account for approximately a quarter of the world’s wheat exports. Ukraine is also the world’s fourth-largest corn exporter and the world’s largest sunflower seed producer.

Ukraine’s ports are shut because of the war, and Ukraine has banned the export of wheat, oats, and other food staples to ensure that they can meet the food needs of their own population. Wheat prices have spiked since the invasion started.

Inflation measured by the Consumer Price Index could reach close to 9 percent in the next couple of months, Alan Detmeister, an economist at UBS, told The New York Times.

Expect higher food and energy prices as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This will exacerbate the forces that were already causing prices to rise, such as supply chain problems and fiscal stimulus that raised demand above supply.

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Life in Russia is about to get very hard. Some of the biggest collateral damage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is to the well-being of ordinary Russians, who did not ask for this war.

As the West has announced unprecedented sanctions against Russia, the value of the ruble has crashed to less than a penny, making Russians’ holdings of rubles worth a lot less in international markets. And many Western companies are pulling out of Russia.

“The economy in Russia is in free fall. The economy is likely set for a deep economic recession, maybe more than 10% a year. Inflation is spiking. His [Putin’s] war chest of foreign reserves is now worthless. The ruble is worth less than a penny. His stock market hasn’t opened all week…and rating agencies are downgrading the country to junk status,” Daleep Singh, deputy national security adviser for international economics at the White House, told ABC News. “The Russian economy is set for a free fall. It may be the 11th largest economy now, but if this aggression continues and the currency continues to plummet, Putin is looking at an economy roughly half the size with the living standards for his people falling precipitously.”

Russians won’t be able to buy basic goods from other countries. Apple is no longer selling iPhones in Russia. Car companies including Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen are halting exports to Russia. Airbnb has paused all operations in Russia. Disney has stopped the release of its films in Russian theaters. Ikea is closing all of its Russian stores. Nike is shutting down its Russian stores. Dell has stopped selling its computers in Russia. And Mastercard and Visa have suspended operations in Russia.

Meanwhile, Russia has blocked Facebook in the country and criminalized what it considers to be false reporting on the Ukraine invasion. As a result, CNN is no longer broadcasting in Russia.

The result of all of this is to make Russians much poorer and more isolated. While many Ukrainians are now fleeing Ukraine, many Russians are now looking into leaving Russia as well.

The West has imposed these sanctions on Russia in order to try to stop their invasion of Ukraine and prevent further Russian aggression. But keep in mind that the Russian people did not ask for this, and they’re now facing collateral damage.

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I had the pleasure of interviewing Adam Singer recently. He’s a marketing executive who has worked for Google, LEX, Invitae, Think3, and more. He is active on Twitter and also has a Substack. I was eager to talk to him about his move from San Francisco to Austin, where he’s now a homeowner, as well as other things he’s discussed on his Twitter feed, such as remote work and how times have been hard for millennials. He has plenty of opinions and is one of the most interesting people that I follow on Twitter. A condensed transcript of my interview with him is below.

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Bonnie: How long did you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and why did you move from San Francisco to Austin? You had mentioned on Twitter that you had a lot of financial stress in San Francisco, even though you were making a good salary at Google.

Adam: I was in San Francisco for about a decade, and I don’t know that I had financial stress, I don’t think that’s a fair thing to say. I was in a rent-controlled apartment, so I was very lucky to have that. Obviously, not everyone can find such a unit; they’re certainly in demand. So my finances were fine. The reason that I decided, approaching 40, you don’t want to be renting an apartment forever, and I got married, and I had a dog, so a lot more space necessary than just the city apartment which works fine for a single guy. So we looked at homes in all parts of the suburbs around San Francisco, East Bay, Berkeley, we looked in Sunnyvale. And basically what it came down to was you could pay at that time, it was like $1.5 to $2 million to live next to a dilapidated strip mall maybe only a couple of blocks from the 101, and in Austin, and not just Austin, in Ohio, in Minneapolis where I was living previously, even in South Florida, for the same amount, you basically can buy as much house as you want.

So the Bay Area has very much been a NIMBY DMA, and what I mean by that is not in my backyard. They have restricted new residential builds while allowing tens of thousands of new offices a year, so it’s a tax on young people to basically pay incumbents who architected a system that drove up prices due to an artificial scarcity situation. I went to some of the city council meetings, and you would hear these people, they were vehemently against things like tearing down a laundromat for a new three-story or God forbid five-story building. And then they would come out and use environmental impact reports or claim it was a historic laundromat or historic site. If you don’t believe me, there are tons of videos and stories and reporting on the types of tactics that people there did. So they wanted to stay a bedroom community.

Tech pre-pandemic had already been an optionality world from where you work perspective, so a lot of people have been remote work employees for a long time before the pandemic. Even my firm at the time didn’t really care where I worked from. As long as I shipped, they could care less where I physically was located. So I wouldn’t say it was just economic reasons. I waited until I was almost 40 to buy a home, which is typical of a millennial, and so at that point, I didn’t want a starter home that I would have gotten in my 20s, I had sacrificed and worked to be able to afford a house that someone in the middle class with reasonable expectations, they’d be able to afford at that age, and it just wasn’t available in NorCal.

There were other issues of course, like paying the highest rents in the country to basically be assaulted outside my own home by strung-out people who obviously needed help, and the city does just a very poor job of being stewards of that situation, both from a public safety perspective and from a rehabilitation perspective. Additionally, I have found that I have severe allergies, so the ongoing wildfires and smoke made it basically unlivable for me for longer periods of time. And also, I had been in the city for 10 years. I’ve lived in cities my whole adult life, South Florida, Minneapolis, San Francisco, I travel to New York, London, all these places a lot.

So it was more appealing for me to have a little bit more room, and all my trips to Austin were amazing. Austin, to me, the tech community here feels a lot more like San Francisco did when I first moved there in 2008, basically at the height of the financial crisis. The thing is, during the financial crisis, the people who are there in a boom-and-bust town like San Francisco are the people who really want to be there. They’re not there to take advantage of whatever excess capital is happening or whatever opportunities may exist because companies are trying to rush funding rounds and IPO, those are the people who really want to build. Austin very much feels like that, so the vibe is a lot more fun, there are people who like the later-stage stuff, and for me, I like the earlier-stage stuff where no one’s paying attention to a sector and we can just create things.

Bonnie: Do you think that metro areas with a lot of jobs, like the Bay Area, have an obligation to build more housing?

Adam: Yes, 100%... California is very much structured as a little bit of a modern feudal/dynasty state, because through Prop 13 where they basically lock in your property tax at the price where you purchased, it incentivizes everyone to not build because they want all of the pricing of all the houses to increase since their property taxes won’t go up… There’s a great Twitter feed called Nextdoor Silicon Valley, I think it’s just @NextdoorSV, they document all of the insanity of the people in the Bay Area who say things such as, “Oh, if you can’t afford to live here, you shouldn’t be here.” Or things like—it’s very, very narcissistic and selfish. Things like, oh, we don’t want a new apartment complex in our neighborhood because it’s five stories and might ruin the character of the neighborhood, even though it’s right next to the 101, not really in anyone’s view or anything. Someone once, I’ll find a link for you if you really want it, someone once didn’t want, this is emblematic, they didn’t even want their neighbor putting up a second story on their house because it created a slight shadow in their backyard.

It’s such a me, me, me, all about me, attitude for a lot of the Californians. I think that it’s somewhat generational. I’m not making broad generalizations about entire age cohorts, because that’s obviously not correct, but there are certainly many within the Baby Boomer cohort, especially a lot of ex-hippies who moved to California, they were super-liberal, they got there, as soon as property values started going up, as soon as industry started coming in, they basically did everything they could to extract value from that at the expense of doing anything that might benefit newcomers or that might benefit the community at large. And I went to City Council meetings, I’m probably one of the only people in tech who actually did, and the people who would come out and complain, they were frankly deranged.

It is a responsibility of a market to manage growth. So in normal markets, the suburbs take pressure off of the downtown. So you see that manifest in New York, for example. A lot of people live in New Jersey, and it’s not dirt cheap, but there is plenty of housing in a lot of the suburbs of New York and the boroughs and in Jersey, and so that does work to take the pressure off the city a little bit, and New York also has way more supply. Same thing in Minneapolis. I lived in downtown Minneapolis. It’s not that expensive, but if you want to live a little bit further out, you could pay less. In the Bay Area, that doesn’t happen, because all of the neighborhoods are sort of the same mindset of, Oh, go live somewhere else, oh, it’s not my problem. So a lot of the people not in San Francisco are like, Well, San Francisco needs to get their shit together about the homeless issue, about housing and whatnot, and then those same areas allow no new builds themselves. And so, I feel like there’s a disconnect there where a lot of the people in suburbia don’t see the city as part of their market, and in fact the city is inexorably tied to their market. If you were to plot new homes built and new resident influx vs. new offices created in the Bay Area, it would be a chart where you could smack your hand to your face and say how could they allow this to happen.

That’s why even beyond tech, there’s many stories of firefighters who were doing two-hour commutes to get to their station to work because they couldn’t live in their community. This is what you ultimately create. You can have a neighborhood like Atherton with all millionaires and billionaires, and then you have no servers for your restaurant, you don’t have baristas, you don’t have schoolteachers, you don’t have firefighters. It’s not in the interest of a community to create a single demographic, slice of wealth, because a functional community needs everyone. Frankly, I think that’s boring too. Then your whole neighborhood is lawyers, MDs, tech engineers, and I think healthy, worldly, intellectual adults aren’t just concerned with money and status and being around people who do as well as them financially. I think they want to connect with all walks of life, with all types of people. In a monoculture, you don’t get that. That also helps create bubbles and probably why a lot of libertarians love living there, they don’t want to fraternize with the hoi polloi…

One other comment, this happened two days ago, Marin had a vote for a thirty-unit new apartment complex in their neighborhood in Sausalito I think it was, and there was a group of 30 people who came out, all of the signs that say, Don’t San Francisco Our County, or something like that. Whatever percent of those homes were for affordable housing. So we wonder why there’s a homeless crisis in the Bay Area, you have half the community saying we don’t want the homeless to be housed here. It’s a crazy situation. And then they just want to push those people somewhere else, they don’t want to deal with them. I don’t know how we fix that. But that hopefully doesn’t happen in Austin or doesn’t happen in Miami or anywhere where there’s an influx of people, and I don’t think it will. I think that the Bay Area NIMBYs are nuclear most insane NIMBYs on crack of anywhere in America. You get some in New York, in the Hamptons or whatever. They’re the same people who have pride flags on their lawn and “Love everyone” and they’re liberal from a perspective of where it’s convenient and easy to be liberal, and then they’re not liberal in the sense of the really hard things that you might have to do to help the community. And we all know that the things that are important to do are hard to do.

Bonnie: A lot of people are prejudiced against Texas because they view it as backwards and right-wing. What would you say to them?

Adam: We all can’t stay in our coastal elite habitats and expect the middle of the country, where they have policies that are harmful for women, for example, to continue. So if some of us don’t go there and vote differently and connect with people and do education and run for office and join the business community, it’s not going to change. So yeah, you can stay in California, and things aren’t going to change there. But if people from these places try somewhere new, culture ends up meeting at this hopefully beautiful midpoint in terms of what everyone thinks. And another point on that is obviously demographics are destiny, all demographics throughout time have trended to be more progressive. That will not change with the next cohort here. All of the younger people I talk with in Texas are less religious than their parents, more open-minded on legal weed or women’s rights, of course there are some holdouts, but I happen to think that people who think another state is acting poorly, if you really wanted to help, you could vote with your feet and move there and be a part of it or you could scream from the sidelines, “How dare they,” as if that’s going to help.

Bonnie: Would you recommend more people to move to Texas?

Adam: I think Austin is a wonderful choice if you are in New York or California and you want somewhere with more breathing room, where you can maybe have a bigger living space, but you still want to be close to a world-class city. Austin is a world-class city. We have Google, Facebook, Amazon all have headquarters here. AMD has a huge facility here. Tesla is opening a big facility here. We have awesome local small businesses as well. There’s a booming economy. I think it’s a great, great place. In fact, two of my friends from New York who visited me are like, “Oh my God, I’m so jealous, I didn’t realize that as young people you could have this much space.” And I’m like, “You could.” So I think a lot of coastal people get trapped in their bubbles.

Bonnie: So you’ve been working remotely for a while. What’s your advice to people who want to work remotely for a certain company, but the job they want isn’t advertised as a remote job? Because when you worked at Invitae and LEX, those jobs weren’t necessarily advertised as remote.

Adam: Invitae was actually full remote. They were based in San Francisco, but on the business team, it could be full remote. If you’re in the lab, you obviously have to go into the lab, so those aren’t remote roles. It’s a great question. I have a lot of thoughts on this one. So obviously we’re in a pandemic. So every role right now in theory is a remote role for an office job, because their whole team is already probably remote. So you can at least start a discussion from that point and ask them if they’re expecting everyone to come back into the office later or if there’s going to be some optionality or what that looks like. I worked at LEX, which was based in New York, and I think if the pandemic didn’t happen, they would have been office-only. But I would fly there once every couple of months and see the team. Because it's a startup, it’s nice to be with them face-to-face in person, and I also love the org, so I was happy to do that. Remote work doesn’t mean you never see your team physically, I think that that’s probably a myth. At the very least, there should be QBRs [quarterly business reviews] where the team gets together for planning and brainstorming and results analysis of the previous quarter. So it’s team-building, so that part of work will continue to be in person.

But with that said, I think the pandemic has changed everything, and a lot of people just don’t understand what that means or how that is going to affect hiring. I think enough people who have worked remote realize that they enjoy the autonomy, they don’t have to deal with people coming into their office and interrupting them, they don’t want to sit in a commute for 2 hours plus in the Bay Area. So the quality of life is just better for them. If a company stipulated that it had to be in person, they’re in the middle of a pandemic, by the way, I would probably email them and be like, “Hey, I’m interested in this role. You know what, my work preference is remote. Once the pandemic is over, I’m happy to visit my team on whatever cadence in person.” If they’re unwilling to do that, there’s now enough companies that are full remote and that aren’t measuring people based on butts in chairs, they’re measuring people based on the results they produce and the work that they ship.

And so I personally wouldn’t work for a company that is biased to a Lumbergh-esque Office Space-style management, where the most important thing to them is they can see you, because what does that have to do with you being productive and shipping work? There’s no formal or scientific or logical reason that that should be the modus operandi for office work. It’s not like this is something that’s evolved over thousands of years. There’s no right or wrong way for any of this. So I think employees need to assert themselves and dictate the working situation and environment they want and they should raise their hand and ask for it. And if a company is unwilling to provide it, go work for somewhere else. This is definitely a buyer’s market with choosing where you work. I’ve been hiring positions for the last four companies I’ve worked for, it’s never been easy to find great talent, that’s always a hard thing. Great talent is hard to find. Make sure you can market yourself.

Most people who are talented and know that they are, and I think that’s a lot of people, especially knowledge workers work very hard. There’s a bad rap of people misunderstanding internet economy jobs. A lot of the startup jobs, people are working 10-12 hours a day and giving it everything they have, and working on really complex problems. So get value for it. And part of that getting value for it isn’t just compensation, it’s also the autonomy to ship. We’re all adults. So it seems really petty and somewhat patriarchal in the negative sense to dictate to your team how they need to work, and it’s emblematic of probably the culture of that company. So I just wouldn’t work there and I recommend no one else do the same, and eventually we can all force the hand of corporate America.

Bonnie: Do you think that more companies should move their headquarters from expensive coastal cities to more affordable places like Texas? And why do you think that so many companies stay in expensive coastal cities?

Adam: I mean, companies are doing that. Tesla moved to Texas, Palantir moved to Colorado. A lot of big companies are leaving San Francisco and California because of the tax rates, basically the anti-corporation bias, the residents who oppose new builds or oppose a lot of the pro-business policy that would help everyone there because it does help the residents too, a lot of them don’t quite get it. But even more so than Texas and Austin, I actually think right now the really more exciting opportunity would be for young entrepreneurs to go to a suburb of Ohio, or there’s an amazing startup community in Detroit right now, or go to Ann Arbor or go to one of these smaller areas, there’s plenty of smart people in all of these places. If you’re an entrepreneur, you might find it easier to hire people, and by the way, they’ll be happy, and they’ll work for less money because their cost of living is less there, so your business is going to be more profitable, and ultimately you can pay those people even more and help them do better. So I think the more we can blow up the notion of location, I think the better we’ll be.

And I think that was going to happen anyway because of the internet, and I think the pandemic sort of skipped that ahead like five years, just like it did for ecommerce revenue and just like it did for online collaboration tools and all of these things. These are real trends that are happening, and it’s net positive for America. Why do we want a not trivial portion of the GDP of America in a 50-square-mile peninsula in California, in NorCal, that doesn’t even want new people there? Right? They don’t want new people there. So how is that healthy? It’s so good for everyone. And shouldn’t they be happy, right? They want everyone to leave, they want their bedroom community back. So there’s no losers here.

Bonnie: One of the themes on your Twitter is how millennials don’t have it easy. Can you talk about the unique challenges that millennials have faced? And are younger generations going to have it even worse than millennials, as prices for housing, healthcare, and education keep going up?

Adam: You said it yourself. Housing, healthcare, education are all up orders of magnitude, whereas flat-screen TVs and cell phones and video games are all down 50 to like 70, sometimes 90 percent for some things. The reason is we’ve run the real capitalist playbook, the free-market playbook, on the things we don’t need, and then the things that we need, like housing, healthcare, and education, a lot of regulatory and institutional interference ensures that they just continue to cost more and more due to administrative overhead and due to pricing power and artificial scarcities and all these things, they all compound. Is it harder for young people now? If you were to look at purely economic charts on the cost of the things that we both mentioned, don’t look at anything else, just look at that, yes, it’s harder for them. Also plot income, and it’s not like income is helping. So looking at charts, it is harder. You can’t argue, the numbers are the numbers.

The ways it is easier is the fact that I do think the internet has done a lot to level the playing field for everyone. And so there are tons and tons of people, so many examples that it's just crazy, of people who were born into impoverished situations or perhaps just unlucky situations, and they had whatever trauma they had or they had no connections to wealth or to opportunity, and because of the internet, they were able to learn, connect with others, start to build those connections and have built wealth for themselves with tools that they previously wouldn’t have had access to. That is one thing that we have that they don’t. We also, unlike past generations, I do think millennials are probably better educated. I think that exposure to technology, but probably more than that, I think that the one good thing that the older generation, the Boomers, did for millennials is they did focus on education, they did tell young people, “You need to have a lifelong pursuit of learning and growing.” So when I talk to a lot of young people, especially people younger than me, I’m always so impressed by how worldly they are, by how articulate they are, and with that, higher empathy for their fellow human, for animals, for causes like climate change, and all of these good things. That’s net positive.

The other thing is the notion of having gone through hard times. Millennials have gone through, what is it, three financial crises now. 9/11, the trauma of that is pretty intense. Every generation has things like that, but I think that was acutely so. I am net optimistic that hard times create strong people. I think that if times are just easy forever, you get a situation like in the movie WALL-E, where everyone is overly fat and fed and everything catered to. So the optimist in me wants to say, this is certainly not true for all millennials, but the millennials who can’t afford a home or had all these hardships—I don’t come from money, my parents were poor growing up, I’ve worked every day since I was 15, and a lot of millennials had their college paid for and everything, so that sounds awesome. But I think all of the hard times that they’ve gone through, past is prelude, they’re going to prepare the millennial generation to be better leaders.

And the one thing millennials don’t realize is, the older millennials are almost 40, look, we’re running the world now. We don’t realize it. The millennials are in charge. Boomers aren’t in charge anymore, they’re on their way out. Gen X, do people mention Gen X? I’m just kidding, we love Gen X, I have tons of Gen X friends. But millennials don’t realize that actually they have all the power. Doesn’t matter that they don’t have financial power. They have social capital, they have aesthetic capital, they’re the decision-makers of tomorrow.

So I think that we can fix this, it’s not existential, we all still have it better than everyone hundreds of years ago. Right now you can tap a few buttons on your phone and have a salad brought to you. The richest person 100 years ago, that didn’t even exist. You could have been the richest king and you can’t tap two things and have literally any food brought to your door. I mean, that’s crazy, right? We are so lucky to be born now. We talked about comparison. If you’re going to compare yourself to anyone else, don’t compare yourself to the dude in the private jet, it’s probably not even a real private jet. Compare yourself to royalty from hundreds of years ago where you have access to delights, pleasures, travel, food, infrastructure that their wildest dreams couldn’t consider. So taking all of that together, fellow millennials, we’re all going to make it.

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Housing costs are rising throughout the country. The average rent in the U.S. has risen 14 percent over the past year, according to Redfin data cited by the Washington Post, and the average rent in some cities has risen much more—such as 40% in Austin and 35% in New York City. And the median sales price of a house in the U.S. has risen 14 percent over the last year to $408,100 in the fourth quarter of 2021, according to government data.

As you can see in the chart below, housing prices were about flat for a few years until the Federal Reserve started its extraordinary stimulus measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Federal Reserve now holds $2.7 trillion in mortgage-backed securities, double the amount it had before the pandemic. The Fed also lowered the federal funds rate to near zero in the wake of the pandemic. The low federal funds rate and the Fed’s active purchases of mortgage-backed securities have kept mortgage rates lower, boosting demand for housing. As a result, there are bidding wars for houses in many parts of the country.

In addition to the Federal Reserve’s policies, there are a number of other reasons why it’s hard to buy a house now. For one thing, the pandemic has increased demand for housing; the shift to remote work has led more people to want a larger space to live in. In addition, millennials, a historically large generation, have now reached an age where it’s time for them to buy their first house.

But there just aren’t enough houses for everyone who wants one. Since the 2008 economic crash, the U.S. hasn’t been building enough housing, so the country is now short millions of homes. And many Baby Boomers are holding onto their homes rather than selling.

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The available housing inventory in the U.S. has continued to reach record lows, as you can see in this chart featured by MarketWatch:

Part of this is due to the rising cost of building homes. Land, construction worker wages, and lumber have all gotten more expensive. Construction costs are up 21% over the past year, according to Robert Dietz, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders, who was cited by Bloomberg.

Many existing homeowners also don’t want to part ways with their houses. The current shortage of available housing has made it difficult for existing homeowners to find new housing that meet their needs, so they’re holding onto their current homes, further exacerbating the housing shortage.

As more people are priced out of the housing market, there are more people renting, which has raised rents. High housing costs are also preventing people from moving to where they might have more economic opportunity.

The bottom line is that we need more housing. We should try to make it easier to build housing, by relaxing zoning laws so that more multi-family complexes can be built and zoning more land for residential construction. And we need to make it more attractive to build in the physical world, not just online. A lot of money and attention has been flowing into the virtual world, and more of that needs to be channeled into the real economy. Facebook may be betting on the metaverse, but you can’t live in the metaverse. We all need a place to live, and building homes is one of the most important economic activities in the real world.

We also need to fundamentally rethink the way the middle class builds wealth. Right now, a middle-class homeowner has most of their wealth tied up in their house and expects their home value to keep going up. But if housing prices just keep going up, that’s going to lock out new generations from buying homes. That has already happened in expensive housing markets like the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City. We should aim to have housing be affordable enough for most people to be able to buy, not for housing prices to keep going up to benefit only existing homeowners.

You may be wondering: Is this a good time to buy a house? Maybe. Mortgage rates are low, so you’ll be able to lock in a lower monthly payment now. The Federal Reserve is winding down its purchases of mortgage-backed securities and eventually planning to sell some of them, which will raise mortgage rates. Because of supply problems, the cost of building new homes will continue to rise. Due to climate change, land safe from floods and fires is becoming scarcer and more expensive. Finally, if inflation persists, owning a house is a good hedge against inflation, since your home value will go up at least with inflation.

On the other hand, if the Federal Reserve overreacts to inflation by raising interest rates too much, then that may result in a recession, leading housing prices to fall. But in the long run, housing prices are probably going to keep going up, so you might as well buy before they get even higher.

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President Joe Biden made an important point in remarks in Pittsburgh on Friday: We don’t invest enough in research and development (R&D) in America, and that is reducing our prosperity. He said:

“When the federal government invests in innovation, it powers up the private sector to do what it does best: creating incredible new technologies and new industries and, most importantly, new jobs — good-paying jobs…

“Decades ago, we used to invest 2 percent of our gross domestic product in research and development here in America. Let me emphasize that: research and development. Today, we invest less than 1 percent.

“The United States of America used to be ranked number one in the world in investing in the future. Now we rank number nine in research and development. China was number eight three decades ago; today, it’s number two. And other countries are catching up fast. 

“But we can and we must change that trajectory. We have an opportunity ahead of us right now. The House and Senate — the United States Congress and the United States Senate are working out a bill that’s going to provide an extra $90 billion for research and development, manufacturing all the elements of the supply chain needed to produce the end products.”

Biden is referring to the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, which the Senate passed on a bipartisan basis in June 2021. The bill would invest in the domestic production of semiconductors; invest in research on artificial intelligence (AI), robots, biotechnology, and wireless technology; overhaul the National Science Foundation and give it more funding; and invest in new technology hubs outside of Silicon Valley. The bill has stalled in the House, where some Republicans and progressives have criticized it. It’s a top priority for the Biden administration and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

This legislation has echoes from MIT economists Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson’s 2019 book Jump-Starting America. In the book, Gruber and Johnson outline the case for more public investment in R&D and for more investment in technology hubs outside of Silicon Valley. They show that new ideas often stem from government-funded research—including the GPS, the internet, airplane wing designs, digital camera sensors, and many pharmaceutical drugs. They argue that the private sector underinvests in research because there’s a high risk of failure and it can benefit competitors more than the companies conducting the research, since competitors can free-ride off of their discoveries. Basic research in particular is underfunded.

In her book The Entrepreneurial State, economist Mariana Mazzucato demonstrates how publicly funded research made the iPhone possible. She makes the case that we need government funding of research because private investment is more risk-averse than government funding.

It’s refreshing that Biden is making research and development such a high priority. There is a lot of worthwhile basic research that the private sector is unwilling to fund. But it’s also important for the government to try to make science less bureaucratic. By some estimates, scientists spend about half of their time on administrative work like writing grant proposals. As the percentage of grant applications that get approved by the government has fallen, researchers have become more risk-averse, choosing areas of research that are safe and fundable rather than what is high-risk and high-reward, including interdisciplinary research. Another problem is the short-term orientation of funding, when many scientific problems take a long time to solve. One potential solution is to fund specific people and labs rather than specific projects, which the new Arc Institute in Palo Alto is doing. The government needs to approach its role as a funder of science more like a venture capitalist, where it’s fine to take risk because a few big winners make up for all of the losers.

We need more science funding, but we also need to fix how science is funded. If we can fund more science and do it effectively, the resulting innovation will lead to higher living standards for us all.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen gave a good speech at the World Economic Forum’s online Davos Agenda meeting, which you can watch here and read here. In her speech, she discussed “modern supply-side economics” as the Biden administration’s economic growth strategy, in a departure from Keynesian economics and traditional supply-side economics.

While Keynesian economics focuses on bolstering demand and traditional supply-side economics emphasizes deregulation and tax cuts, “modern supply-side economics, in contrast, prioritizes labor supply, human capital, public infrastructure, R&D, and investments in a sustainable environment,” Yellen said.

This is a welcome change. Traditional supply-side economics, which was pioneered during the Reagan era, promised that if we just cut regulations and cut taxes, then economic growth would burst forth, and that hasn’t quite happened. Not having too much regulation or too high a tax burden are worthy goals in and of themselves, but they’re not an economic panacea. Tax cuts and deregulation alone aren’t going to make the economy more productive.

On the other hand, directly increasing the U.S.’ productive capacity will increase potential economic output. Some ways we can do this are investment in infrastructure, investment in education and training, investment in basic research that the private sector is unwilling to undertake on its own, and ensuring that we have a competitive economy that is not controlled by too few firms.

The inflation and shortages that we’re currently experiencing are a direct result of not paying enough attention to the supply side of the economy.

The Biden administration is aiming to bolster the supply side through its spending, though in some ways, it’s not ambitious enough, and they’re trying to pile more money on top of systems that are failing or likely to fail. For instance, the original Build Back Better legislation would have made community college free. But less than 40% of community college students earn a certificate or degree within six years of enrolling, and some employers are unlikely to hire community college graduates because they view it as a negative signal. Reform is better than throwing money at the problem. Community colleges need to provide higher-quality and more practical education.

The government spent almost $7 trillion in 2021—a mind-boggling amount. And there is still so much that our economy is missing. We have a dearth of basic research for new technology that can be commercialized; we’ve been free-riding off the invention of the internet and personal computer over the past 30 years. To address this, we need to make government-funded scientific research less bureaucratic, so that scientists aren’t spending half of their time writing grant applications. We also have a skills crisis; the reason we hire so many workers on H-1B visas is that employers don’t think Americans have the necessary skills to fill their jobs. And we have too few firms producing important products; if we had more chip-makers, then there wouldn’t be a chip shortage causing delays in car and computer production.

It’s good that the Biden administration is paying more attention to the supply side after long neglect by previous administrations. But they should think bigger and fundamentally reform systems that need not just more money, but also structural change.

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Basically, what is happening is that demand is outstripping supply for many goods, as the Federal Reserve and the federal government have had very loose monetary and fiscal policy to prop up the economy, but the supply chain crisis has made it harder for some goods to come to market.

Is high inflation going to continue? The OECD forecasts that inflation in the U.S. will stay elevated through the end of 2023. It forecasts a peak of 6.6% in the first quarter of 2022, and then a steady decline, but inflation will stay above 2% through the end of 2023. The IMF forecasts inflation to be 3.5% in 2022 and 2.7% in 2023. Economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal believe inflation will remain elevated through 2023.

Jason Furman, a former top economic adviser to President Obama, said at the ASSA Meeting earlier this month that he expects inflation to remain “very elevated” in 2022, since anything the Federal Reserve does to tame inflation will have a lag of about a year.

The Federal Reserve is now taking inflation more seriously. Lael Brainard, a Federal Reserve governor who has been nominated to be the Fed’s No. 2 official, recently said that reducing inflation is now the Fed’s “most important task.” There is a risk that the Fed’s future actions to curb inflation could trigger a recession, as James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute noted in his newsletter.

The bottom line is that if you want your purchasing power to stay the same, you really should ask for a raise at work if you can. And if you want a new job, this is a good time to look for a job, since the good job market may not last forever if the Fed tightens monetary policy too much in the next year or two.

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