Same frustration that caused me, my coauthor, and so many others to look around and say what were doing isnt working. And people come at this from any position. 10 years ago,his first out of the National Debt crisis. Michael porter came to it out of my invitation but also because he has been doing work on Harvard Business school on our economic competitiveness and whether we are a country that can grow jobs and grow income levels. And other people come to it from specific policy angles, which is that every policy organization has begun to come to the communication realization that they may have a fabulous policy idea but he has absolutely zero chance to be successful in congress because the system is dysfunctional. And now people across the board are coming to it because theyre frustrated with the division, with the diff dysfunction, and the lack of progress in washington, d. C. And certainly really veryr two troubling tragic elements that we see, the governments response to the coronavirus, and the struggles of systemic inequality and racism have also caused people to say hmm, why cant we, in the United States of america, make a difference in these problems . Why are they persisting . And so thats where we are. Susan so politics industry, people should know its not just a book. Its a campaign, a cause for you. Whats your mission . Katherine thank you for asking that. Youre right. Heres what i care about in the d. C. ,s washington, specifically congress, making progress, delivering legislation that actually solved the problem, a problem in a sustainable way, that they take action on this legislation, actually implemented, and that over time, people across the spectrum have broadbased science. Its all about results. Were not here on a campaign to change who gets elected, or to change the number of parties we have, or to change rules to make them more fair or more democratic, although of course we care about fair and democratic ideals. We care about the likelihood solves problems in the pond in the Public Interest. So we dont allow ourselves to be distracted by other reforms or movements that may be important for other reasons, but that dont get at the core problem of whats going wrong in washington, d. C. Susan why do you describe our political system as an industry . Katherine so, as you just noted, our book is called the politics industry, and we look at politics, not government, but politics, the competition between politicians, and all of the surrounding actors, as an industry, not because its the only way you can look at it, but because its super helpful to look at it this way, which is to say we, as americans, are very used to being consumers. Were used to being customers. Business people are used to thinking about how to grow their companies and get more revenue and more growth for their companies, etc. So, when we look at politics as an industry, it helps us, either as customers or as Business Leaders, to begin to understand why its so dysfunctional. Ill just give a hint at it. What we look at the interest, the Public Interest, the citizen, is not the most important customer. And politics is not broken. Its actually working exactly how its designed to work. But in the politics industry, when we look underneath the hood, the politics industry has not been designed to put the Public Interest and selling problems for citizens. Its been designed to put the interests in the political Industrial Complex, which is what we call these politicians and the lobbyists and the Campaign Consultants in the media, everybody involved in the business of politics, we call it the political Industrial Complex. The history has been designed to put them first. And what we see is, thats working. Its working super well. We dont even need the average viewer of this to look at statistics. They can just look at it for a moment. Yea, you know, totally makes sense. We can see all the time washington, d. C. Is thriving. Theres more commercials. It seems everybody has more powerful and more money and more, more, more. Voter, the customer, the are super dissatisfied. How is that right . And so, by again, looking at it as an industry, we explain whats gone wrong. But the purpose for that explanation is solely to figure out where in that dysfunctional design could we intervene to change the dynamics so that the Public Interest becomes the most important customer . And thats what we ask ourselves. We analyze, we diagnose, and we essentially prescribed because we can now identify the most powerful changes we could make. Susan so, about Michael Porter, your partner in this project, and what he brings to the table. Katherine yeah, so Michael Porter is really considered the founder of modern corporate strategy. He is a professor at Harvard Business school. Transformed the way that virtually every business of a reasonable size, of a certain size, manages their strategy. He also has transformed the way countries look at their strategy for their own economic growth. But in this particular case, he develops the five forces analysis, the five forces framework, sorry. In the five forces framework is the Gold Standard for understanding competition in every industry. And i used it to understand competition in my industry. I use it in my Strategic Planning when i was running a Food Manufacturing company in wisconsin. 2014,s was back in 2013, i had a company, employees, using this strategy, and using the five forces. And while i was using his forces for Food Manufacturing, and we this was cheese wisconsin. Thats one of the things we make. At the same time, because i was involved in politics, i ran the parallel analysis of the five forces on the politics industry. Now, the five forces have never been used for that type of work before. But the ahas kept coming to me all through the process. Thei actually completed heart of what is in the politics industry as the analysis all the way back in 2013 and 2014, but then i was still running my company so i had to wait a while. Company, id the decided that Business People were missing in action when it came to changing the political system. They just thought it was totally irrational and all these crazy people over there. And i wanted more people to be engaged and investing time and resource into improving the overall trajectory of our political system for our economy and the like as citizens. So, i decided to take this analysis, the five forces of politics and write it up. Me, i wasately, for able to convince Michael Porter to join me as a coauthor. I would say initially, he wasnt super excited, but over time, he has certainly become very issionate about this work and think it was well, i know it was a revelation to him that we could use the five forces to analyze the politics industry. So, its been exciting, certainly for both of us. And by joining forces with michael, i was able to get this work an initial look that wouldve been very hard to generate in another way. Because the legitimacy that michael and Harvard Business school brought to this analysis really was critical to getting a general openness to the idea. And certainly, weve had a great response since we originally wrote about this in september 2070. Susan you are described in the book as someone who experienced the five stages of political grief. Whats that mean . Katherine yes, one of your first questions you asked me was where is this work coming from and how do i think the United States is doing . So, i will go back to that in a sense. So, what happened to me, and other people go through similar stages, is that i was really evolved in involved in politics, and particularly back in the 2008 campaign. And then i found myself really disappointed with the results that came out of washington, d. C. H, i worked so hard for candidates, you know, for a candidate i really believed in. And thats not delivering what i wanted. So that was my first stage of grief. So i said i know. Ill work on policies. So i joined the ceo physical Leadership Council of the campaign to fix the debt, and overtime i discovered oh, Everybody Knows what the right policy is and behind closed doors, they agree, but theres no political will to do it. I know. Ill work on culture. So i got involved early on with a fabulous organization working to change the culture and encourage bipartisanship. And in that effort. I found that a lot of people joined the organization, they said they wanted to do this. But when push came to shove, the ors basically voted the same way they did before they joined up. So i said, ok, not culture. Now ill work on candidates again, but this time ill work on independent candidates, not each side of the duopoly, which i think of the political system as. And then i thought, guess what . They cant get elected, these independents. And at that time, i wrote a book, former republican congressman mickey edwards, and in it, he pointed out that its the system. I never looked back. I could never unseat that. It was immediately evident that candidates, culture, policy, they basically all, perhaps all will intended, with even say, go into this well intended, lets even say, go into this system, and it spits out dysfunction. This system delivers reliably, like a machine, gridlock and division. Because its built to do that. And whats so shocking to me, and away, is how ive never seen that in a way, is how ive never seen that before. But its all about the system. As i often say now, the rules of the game, any game, the rules of the game, affects the way the game is played and affects the outcome of that game. So in order to change the way the game is played and the outcomes, we have to change the rules. In the entire book is really a lead up to the action section where we say what rules need to be changed in order to change results wer and the get out of congress. Susan he referred to congress as a duopoly. What does that mean . Katherine a good parallel to our industry, people have heard of monopolies, where one market has the entire market cornered. And a duopoly is where there are only two competitors, at the very least two major competitors. And thats what we have in politics. We have republicans and we have democrats. Those are the only two. And whats interesting about a duopoly is that theres a rational way of competing in the duopoly that happens in industry, forprofit industries, and we see in the politics industry. And that is the two sides like to compete. They are incentivized to compete by dividing. They actually want to move the respective customers as far apart as they can. They dont want to compete here in the middle. They want to make them so far apart that this site hates the site and this site hates this side, and that way, even if job,er of them do a good their customers dont want to go to the other side because theyre so differentiated. And the other thing players in a duopoly often do and we see this in politics. The two sides, the parties and the allies, work very well together in one particular way. And that is to rig the rules of the game of politics to protect themselves jointly from new competition. As much as we think we would like the other want to go away, they actually like this balance of fight. And thats how they keep appealing to their core cup customers and they keep getting the Campaign Contributions and all of the money in the industry to act in this fight. So, this division that we see, the money that we see, the gridlock that we see is a result of having two who are in scented to work far apart from each other and in scented to keep everybody else out. And theyre in scented not to compromise ever because it works better for them to leave a than tounsolved compromise and to give a little, on either side. Theyd rather leave the problem unsolved and keep it as an issue for the next election. So again, its super important for us to understand its the way our policies are behaving is entirely rational in this duopoly stick competition and duopolistic competition. In a forprofit industry, what you see, generally in theory, is that when you have competition in a monopoly or a duopoly, but its bad for the customer, there will be antitrust regulations that kicks in to say oh, you cant be that large. You cant have the market cornered because now thats really anticompetitive. And the interesting thing is that, of course, the antitrust rules are made by politicians and, ever so conveniently, antitrust does not apply to the politics industry. Stuck in thisy system thats guaranteed to keep doing what its doing unless we change the rules. Susan as congress has been getting more partisan, the electric is going the other electorate is going the other direction. The independents are now the largest sector of the voting public, 43 self identified. The parties are around 30 . So why is it the public is becoming more independent, less aligned with parties, and congress is going the other direction . Susan you know what . Theres nobody satisfied. Even if we look at the 30 thats still dennis five with one side or another, often you find that if you delve deep into it, they also might like to see some better choices. But why we see the public becoming independent is, again, because nobody is doing a good job. Whats interesting is, in any other industry this large, with that customer dissatisfaction, so 40 being larger than either of the two sides, you would see a new competitor that was responding to what customers wanted. But we dont see any competition in politics because, as i said a moment ago, thats where the parties Work Together really well and that one way, which is to break those rules of the game, to protect them subs jointly from new competition. I like to tell people that really, politics isnt broken. Its sick, as in a rigged game. And it is. Theyve effectively done now is create this situation where they dont really care how dissatisfied people are as long as they in,er stay home, not give or vote for their side just because thats sort of the lesser of two evils. Is how eithery side wins, which is they get the voter to choose them to stay home, choose them as the lesser of two evils, or to vote for them because at least that party says theyre for what that particular voter believes. But what neither side ever has to do, and we have to let this sink in, what neither side ever has to do is deliver results. Because no matter how disappointed a particular voter is, he or she likely still fers what their site says for ratherheyre than what the other side says theyre fo so we getr. For. So we get gridlock. We get competition. We get the same old. Were always looking for that new change candidate, and yet the change candidates, while they make a certain part of the population happy, dont end up being able to deliver fundamentally transformative results, which is not like, susan, saying like even with our prescription,w ere going to have some utopia. Democracy is hard. Their issues are challenging. Theres tons of tradeoffs. If our problems were easy, even this crazy system wouldve solved them. So, weve got challenge, absolutely, as with any country around the world. About we can have a system working under different rules and different incentives that wi ll change the likelihood that washington, d. C. Get stuff done. Susan was there a point in somewhat recent history where Congress Worked effectively, or more effectively . Katherine yeah, so if we look over history and we dont go into all the ups and downs of congresses working together in detail in this book, although we talk about one particular era, the progressive era, where there was a lot of citizen led change to the system, and thats what we need again now. But when you look over time, theres a sort of an ebb and flo w of how Congress Works well, and that always depends on multiple factors, like whats going on in the culture, whether we have a war, whether we have a common enemy in the war, whether we have an economic expansion, on it also always depends what the rules of the game are at that moment because, you know, our constitution i usually have a pocket constitution here. Its tiny. His short. It its short. If its in the pocket. So most of the rules arent written in the constitution. They are made up by the players in the game. And the parties actually have changed the rules, substantively, overtime. Right now, we are at a period of time where an in numerous amount of power is concentrated in the hands of the leadership. So, the Mitch Mcconnells and Nancy Pelosis of this particular congress. And that is part of the problem that leads to these bad results that were getting. And i talk about the elections machinery and the legislative machinery slightly thatdo a her job of answering your question, has it worked overtime . Whats changed that got us to today is that the elections machinery, the rules of how we elect people to congress, have not changed. But over time, the competitors have figured out how to optimize them. We can go into some of the rules in detail later, but if you think about it, remember we and thend to hear, theyre going to have to compete for the center. They realized we dont have to do that at all. Well gestate far apart and depressed the middle. Theyve operated operated around this scenery and rigged it and affected it to account their growth for power. In the second thing is that there legislative machinery, the es of how we make the laws and its not the schoolhouse rock version, which some of the viewers might remember that from saturday mornings growing up. Version. Not that its a very corrupted set of practices, norms, and rules about how to Work Together, which no one, no rational person would ever do. Ill say it this way. Ksyone listening, wor somewhere, and the company wanted to solve its biggest problems. The one thing they would not do is bring everybody together to work on these tough issues and then say oh, just a moment. Before we get started, lets count off by twos and divide into warring teams and then well get straight to work. But effectively, thats how it is every day in washington, d. C. The combination of distort