What’s Wrong With The Business Of Politics And How To Fix It with Katherine Gehl

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Fascinatingly, the key problems are actually in the rules of how we vote. And if we change those, it will automatically make votes more important than money, make voters and citizens more important than special interests, and it can be done through referendums or legislation in the states.

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Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's Pharmacy with an F. FARMACI, a place for conversations that matter. And if you care about what's happening in the world today, care about politics, care about why we can't get things done in Washington, then this conversation is going to matter to you because it's with an extraordinary woman who wrote a book with her partner, Michael Porter, called the Politics Industry, which we're going to talk all about. Catherine, I know her for a long time, both professionally and personally. She's a business leader, writer, speaker, political innovation activist. She was president and CEO of Gale Foods, which is a $250 million high-tech food company in Wisconsin. She held many positions in policy and government and industry. She went to Notre Dame and Catholic University and has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management in Northwestern. And she is on a mission to change how politics are done because she says it's an industry that is not serving citizens but but private interests. And that is what we need to change clearly. Now, welcome, Catherine.

Mark, I am so happy to be here, so happy to see you and talk to your viewers.

Yeah, thank you. So, I was trained as a functional medicine doctor, and my goal is to look at the root causes of problems and disease. And it's what led me to write Food Fix, which was really about the root causes of why my patients were eating food that was making them sick. and why we have this food system that needs change. And I realized that what you're doing, what you and Michael are doing is trying to change the conversation around the politics of what instead of the politics of to the politics of how, how we govern and how our leaders are elected and where the dysfunction comes from. Because we don't deal with it at the root, we can't begin to solve the big problems we have, whether it's the food industry or climate change or social injustice we're seeing as we're recording this podcast, You know, George Floyd was recently murdered by the police and there are race riots and riots going all over the country. There's incredible instability. We've 40 million people out of work, greatest since the Great Depression. We have a complete pandemic that's locking down our society. We have social unrest, economic and health disparities that existed in this country are being revealed for everybody to see. bear nakedness, and everybody's wondering, how did we get here? How do we end up here? And I think, you know, you're thinking about this provides a real map. So what led you to write this book, the PoXis Industry, how political innovation can break partisan gridlock and save our democracy, which it seems like we really need to do right now?

Yeah, we really need to do it right now, and really we needed to do it years ago, of course, so we wouldn't ideally have ended up in this place. Here, so it's almost hard to have a conversation in the midst of so much trauma as a country, you know, to have a conversation that's about process and where we should go from here. And yet I actually want to say, I am profoundly grateful to be able to have this conversation in the midst.

Of.

These tremendously troubling and difficult times because This is what keeps me going, which is to say, I think, I know that we as citizens, as Americans, have power of which we may not be fully aware to change some really.

Key.

Issues in our political system which could put us in a better place to address all of the troubling situations that you just described. So as I share the emotional distress of this time with everybody, you know, around the country, I also am pleased to say, let's get together and change things so we don't get here again. So now to your question though, why did I write this book? Well, it actually is similar to you, which is to say I had issues about which I was passionate, things that I cared about as a business leader, as a mother, as a citizen, and I was involved in the political system in traditional ways. Like I worked to help candidates get elected. I worked on policy. I worked on culture and calls for bipartisanship. And eventually, and I can't believe it took me so long, I ended up realizing that none of those things were making any difference. It wasn't mattering so much, you know, who we elected, they couldn't fix it. Definitely people can make it worse, but no politician is coming to save us and can really fix the things that need to be fixed. And the policies we advocate for so many people, Agree with them across both sides of the aisle, and yet they don't vote for them. We don't get them done. We don't take action. We don't deliver results. And eventually, I read an extraordinary book written by a man named Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman, and the book was called the Parties Versus the People. And in that book, he basically turned the light bulb on for me, which is to say, we're always talking about Washington isn't broken. Washington is broken, sorry, we always say Washington is broken. And what Mickey said is, oh no, it's not broken. It's working exactly how it's designed to work.

Yeah.

And I cannot unsee that. So once I saw it designed that way, and I've always been a systems thinker, which is why it's so surprising that it took a long time to see it, but I think I share that with a lot of Americans. We think politics works differently than everything else we do. But it's a system and it responds to incentives and people in the politics industry do rational things. So once I saw that, I said, I gotta delve into this. And then we came up, we were able to find the biggest problem points in the system. And after I knew that not only was it the system, but I knew that there were things that we could that would make a difference? I said, I've got to let my company go. I need to sell that company, and I'm all in on changing the system so that we can get results for people. Not results for politicians, results for the country, for Americans.

So it seems like right now our democracy is threatened more than ever. And we're seeing the destabilization, polarization, divisiveness, Anarchy, you know, far right, far left groups. I mean, it's just unlike anything I've ever understood. And I think that there are a lot of things you describe in your book about how we got here. And I remember being in a lecture at Cleveland Clinic one year where Peter Orszag, who was the director of the OMB, Obama, yeah, the Office of Management and Budget, he showed this incredible graph of Political voting from the 60s until now in Congress, in the Senate. And in the 60s, it was a complete like blending, like a Venn diagram. And then it kind of slowly moved apart. So there was really this complete separation. And what you're saying, sort of in your book and the work you've done with Michael, is to sort of highlight that this is not by accident, that this is by design. And how do we get here? How do these structures that lead us to have the inability to put public interest in public health over private profit happen?

Yeah, let me talk about that. And let me first hold up my book and say that this graphic on the book is from that exact slide that Peter Orszag showed you, a voting pattern.

Oh, that's so funny.

This is when they're overlapping.

That's exactly right.

Yeah.

So we both love that visual and know that's the problem.

60S, a lot of stuff that happened, civil rights happened, you know, Medicare happens, you know, all sorts of social benefit programs happen under Johnson, the Great Society programs. So there's a lot of stuff that actually happened even, you know, under Nixon, the EPA was formed, regulations, a lot of stuff that, you know, was for the benefit of our citizens and the benefit of our environment that got passed and now we're seeing the sort of rolling back of all of that.

Yeah, we definitely used to be able to get things done. So let me tell you what is a core problem in our system. So we all in our lives do the things that we're rewarded for doing. Here's how the rewards work in politics. I want you to imagine two circles. Okay, so one is elected officials acting in the public interest, and the other is the likelihood that these politicians will get elected and reelected. And there should be a connection between those things, which is to say that acting in the public interest should be the thing that makes you get elected and makes you get reelected. But In our existing system, these things are separate. There's actually no connection between getting things done that need doing for Americans and getting elected. And I want to talk about why that's so. I mean, essentially, what the system is right now is if you do what needs doing, if you do your job the way we need you to do your job, you're likely to lose your job. That's a completely crazy design. Any organization we worked for that was like that would fail too, right?

Right.

Yeah.

Can you give an example of how that would look? So you've got people elected to serve in the public interest and who don't, but they still get elected. How does that work?

Yeah, so for example, let's give the fact about that. Congress has about 10% approval rating, but has over 90% reelection rating.

Yeah.

Right?

So there's no, so it's a marketplace where the consumer, the customer who's dissatisfied has no power to buy a different product. So let me step back for a moment. So I want to talk, so there's no connection, right? And that means we don't get results. The most powerful reason, everything's complex, but I'm gonna simplify it here. The most powerful reason why we don't get results is because we have party primaries. So let's just think about Congress only for today's conversation. So when you, right now when we go and elect people, we go vote in a party primary. If you're a Democrat, you vote for the Democrat in the primary. If you're a Republican, you vote for the Republican. And the party primary has very low turnout. Usually under 20% of eligible voters turnout in the midterms. And the party primary, people may be familiar with this, it tends to push the elected officials further to the right and the left. Because the people who turn out for the primary, very few, are more ideological than voters as a whole. So, you know, there's always that, oh, they're just saying that to make it through the primary and then they're gonna quote tack to the center. That doesn't really happen anymore, but nonetheless, there's some knowledge that people get pushed to the side in these party primaries. You have to be super far to the right or super far to the left. Now, that's a problem what people say to get elected, but much more the bigger problem is that the influence of the party primary extends to actually governing, to what people do when they're making the laws. So imagine yourself for a moment as the politician, and you're in Washington, D.C. and you have an opportunity to vote yes on a Bipartisan compromise bill, a landmark piece of legislation like what you referred to, the things we used to do like civil rights and Medicare and welfare reform and interstate highways, you know, things that we accomplished previously. Well now when you have a chance to solve one of today's problems, health care, immigration, fiscal debt deficit reduction, the questions that You as a politician ask yourself, maybe one, you might ask, is this a good idea? Or you're going to ask, is this the right policy for the country? Maybe, is this what the majority of my constituents want? But in fact, you don't ask yourself any of those questions. You ask yourself, am I going to make it back through my next party primary if I vote for this? And if the answer to that single question is no, and on all the big issues it virtually always is for both sides, then the rational incentive to get re-elected dictates that you vote no. And the answers to all the important questions are rendered fundamentally irrelevant by the party primary system. So I talk about the party primary as creating what I call an eye of the needle. So a tiny little eye of the needle through which no problem solving politician can pass. Because problem solving solutions are complex and in this diverse society we would need to come together and get some of this and some of that and what if you, I'm going to be stereotypical here, if a Democrat can never vote yes For something that has $1 of benefit decrease and a Republican can never vote yes for something that has $1 of tax increase.

Yeah.

They can never come together to solve anything. They can't make any trade-offs. And if they do, and their party leadership doesn't want them to do that, then in the party primary they're threatened with A primary isn't just a noun anymore. It's a verb, as in we're gonna primary you. And that means that we're gonna run someone further to your right, if you're a Republican, and kick you out in the primary, or we'll run someone further to the left and kick you out in the Democratic primary. So that's a control mechanism. And so we solve nothing.

Wow. It's fascinating because we have You know, I think good people want to do good things, but they get paralyzed by not being able to do it. And they're not actually elected by that many people. And there's so many forces against it, whether it's, you know, special interests, donors, the gerrymandering of districts, which sort of redistricts in ways that force things, the voter suppression. I mean, it's just sort of endemic to the system. And it seems like both parties are involved in it. I mean, wasn't it the Democrats who sort of allowed for the gerrymandering and the Republicans utilized it or something like that? It just seems like a mess. And I think, for me, as a sort of a fairly uneducated political student, it seems to me that it's, you've got these large forces at play that are very hard to overcome. And the kinds of changes that you say happened or happened, they're institutionalized within the political system. So, like you said, we actually have the system that was designed to work the way it's working. It wasn't an accident. It's not that it's broken. It's actually working. because it was bit by bit.

For some people.

It was bit by bit changed to actually allow for this kind of sort of disenfranchisement of the citizen and the empowerment of corporations and special interests and donors who actually are trying to do this. And Lawrence Lessing, who is also at Harvard where Michael Porter teaches at the Harvard Business School, you probably know him. I know Larry. He wrote a book called America Compromise, talked about how this sort of idea, there's Lester's in America, you know, he did a great TED talk on it, how there's like, very few number of people, about 132 people that control the majority of the donations that go driving the political process. Whether it's Soros on the left or the Koch brothers on the right, you've got literally billions of dollars flowing in. And then you also wrote in one of the articles you've written with Michael Porter was that when you look all in, in an election process in a cycle, it's $100 billion flowing in. from special interests and donors that are driving the political system. And so you've got, you know, the average person on one hand, and you've got $100 billion on the other hand. How do you actually navigate that? Because it just seems like a lose-lose situation.

Yeah, I'll comment on two things here. First of all, when you talk about, you know, the system is built for Democrats and Republicans, it's built to benefit those in the industry. I want to reinforce that, which is to say, we think Democrats and Republicans are always fighting, right? But I want to tell your viewers that the political industrial complex, which is what we call this big system, the two sides of that work really well together in one particular way. And that is to rig the rules of the game behind the scenes to protect themselves jointly from new competition.

Yeah.

So they want to have just two of them and they don't want to have any other new competition and that they do very well.

So I often say- It's a monopoly, like a duopoly.

It's a duopoly, we call it a duopoly.

Yeah.

So another way of saying that is politics isn't broken, it's fixed.

Ah, it's fixed, yes.

Yeah. And I smile, I mean we laugh about that, but But only for a moment. And here's what we need to understand about that duoply, and I'll come back to Larry Lessig a little later. When you only have two, so remember I just talked about party primaries and I said that's why we don't get any results. Now I want to simplify and say, and the reason there's no accountability for not getting any results is for one other structural reason. So like if you didn't get results in your job, you'd get fired.

Yeah, if people didn't get better, then, you know, they wouldn't come back.

Right, they wouldn't come back to you, exactly. And so, but in politics, as we said before, we don't seem to be firing anybody in Congress, even though we're dissatisfied. Well, why are we not firing anybody? Well, because in politics, there's only two choices. So no matter how dissatisfied you are, with what your side is managing to accomplish, you still likely prefer what your side says there for than what the one other choice says there for. And so neither side actually has to produce results to stay in power. They just have to be slightly less disliked than the other side. They have to be the lesser of two evils. and that's why they can continue to ignore the customer who's the voter and serve the customers who are the donors, the special interests, and these other parts of the political industrial complex, which brings me back to Larry Lessig. Money in politics is a problem, no question. However, the answer is not to artificially reduce the amount of money in politics. It is to increase the power of the vote. Because the vote is how we as Americans, that's like the currency that we use in this industry.

It's like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. She had the power to go home to Kansas all the time. All she did was click her heels three times and Americans don't vote. I mean, I worked at Cleveland Clinic and there's a young African-American woman who was a medical assistant who worked with me very closely and became very friendly and close and I said, you know, so are you gonna vote? This was in the 2018 elections. So are you gonna vote? She's like, no. I said, why aren't you gonna vote? She said, well, you know, it doesn't matter. My vote doesn't count. It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant. Nothing changes. It's the same old thing. And, you know, she really felt disenfranchised. And I think, you know, we see this incredibly in America. It's, you know, most of the democracies, there's, you know, 70% or more voting turnout here. It's, it's dismal as a lesson. 50% and then, you know, it's in the elections that really matter, like you said, the primaries, there's 20%, which means that 80% of the people's voice is not heard, which doesn't really seem like a representative democracy anymore. So how do we put that? How do we get sort of apathy, the political apathy and disenfranchising that people feel? I mean, I don't know why, but I was so excited to vote in my first presidential election. The guy voted, didn't win, but I still was really honored to be able to actually vote and wanted to actually make a difference. And I think, you know, it does sometimes feel like it doesn't matter, but you still have to go because this is democracy and people are just so disconnected from that. And yet they complain about how the world is so how do we get people to change their consciousness? Because it's true. We could do a nonviolent takeover of the government if we so chose. find different candidates, we could elect them, we could fund candidates. I mean, there's 300 million Americans and maybe you get $10, that's $3 billion that we have toward elections for the president. So we could do it, but it's really not happening.

Yeah, here's the thing. I actually agree with your colleague at the Cleveland Clinic, who said, my vote doesn't matter. Most votes don't matter. The only votes that matter right now are in the primary, and it's only in the primary where you know, you know whether that's a Democratic, if it's a Democratic district, it's only votes in the Democratic primary that make a difference. But here's, again, instead of trying to get people to turn out to do something that doesn't make a big difference, let's change the system so if they turned out, it would make a big difference and then they'll start turning out. So instead of funding like get out the vote campaigns when it won't change anything other than who wins and neither side will give us results, Let's make it matter. And here's how we do that. So coming back to when I said, you know, there's only two, we have to make it so there's more than two. Think about everything that the free enterprise system has delivered. Why is our technology so great? Because everybody's competing to improve the product so that we will buy it. We need to make our politicians compete to deliver results for us, and if they don't, we need to have another option. We need to be able to say, oh, no, no, no. If you don't deliver results for me and you only deliver results for special interests and donors, I'm going to pick someone else. So we got to get some other people to pick. And the only way we can get new competition in the system is by lowering the barriers to entry. So, I'll give a factoid, because there is corruption in the system. Right now, the politics industry makes their own rules, and parties made a rule together that if you want to contribute money to a Democrat or a Republican, to the Democratic or Republican party, you can contribute $855,000 every year, Mark. to the Democrats if you want. And if you want, you can also contribute another $855,000 to the Republicans.

Which many companies do.

What'd you say?

They play both sides against the middle, right?

Yes, some do, right. But that's what individuals could contribute that. But if you wanted to give to a really brilliant person that you knew who was running as an independent for Congress, You could give that independent who wasn't a Democrat or a Republican $5,600 only once every two years. That's 313 times different. So that's a rule that keeps out a new competitor that might make voters happier and would put pressure on the other people to actually do some stuff.

So you can't give like, you can't give 855,000 to a Democratic candidate or Republican candidate. You can give it to the party.

Well, it's a combination of what you give to the party, to the candidates, and all these party committees. But the party uses that to support their candidates. So, yes, you can still only give $5,600 to the actual candidate, but that independent candidate has no party to support them then. So they can't benefit from the other you know, $850,000 essentially.

Right?

So there's no one else who can help them run all those additional ads and get out the vote people and give them the technology, give them the data. But nonetheless, it's really fascinating. That's a corrupt rule. But the real problem is that we have a system where whenever there's a new competitor, they're said to be a spoiler. Have you ever heard of that? Spoiler argument. Does that ring a bell at all? Okay, let me tell you what this is and then we'll need to get to how we can fix these two things.

Yeah.

So remember we have party primary and now I'm gonna tell you the one other problem. So it's called the spoiler problem. So what happens is, and let's use the presidential election as an example, although I focus on fixing Congress, let the presidential election is a good example. You have a Democrat running and you have a Republican running. And if someone else wants to run, let's say as an independent, They want to run to the middle. They want to say, I'm going to be a new kind of solutions-oriented candidate, and I'm not going to be way over here or way over here. Well, the parties get very upset about that because they say, oh, whoever's running, you're going to spoil the election for our candidate. So you might remember-- oh, right. Yeah, like Pro, you might remember Howard Schultz, super well-respected former CEO of Starbucks, founder of Starbucks. And he considered running as a Democrat about a little more than a year ago. And if for president, and the Democratic Party was livid because they believed that if he ran, he would take just enough votes away from the eventual Democratic nominee to spoil the election for the Democrats.

He wanted to run as an independent, you mean?

Yeah, he wanted to run as an independent, so they thought he'd spoil the election for the Democrat and give the election to Trump. And on this other side, if some Republican super successful CEO wanted to run, the Republicans would also be livid because they would believe that that person would steal enough votes away from Trump to spoil the election for Trump and give it to the Democrat. So we have to get rid of this spoiler problem because the spoiler problem, because they're right about that. If a third party comes in, They're often going to spoil the election for one or the other. And that's why we never get started. That's why no new competition happens. That is the single greatest problem. And we can fix that.

How?

So we need to fix the party primary because we don't get any results because there's an eye of the needle.

So can anybody vote in a primary? Can anybody vote in a primary?

Well, no, it depends on the state. So in about half the states, you could only vote in the primary if you're registered as a Democrat or a Republican. So that's really bad, which is to say if you're not a party member, you can't even vote in the election that matters. And isn't that checking a box on your thing?

Like if you just check a box, Sam Democrat, you can vote on your vote.

About half the states, all the states have different rules. So some states you have to register, it's really complicated. Some states it's much easier, like where I live in Wisconsin, we can vote even if we're not registered and you can just show up and everybody takes a ballot. But some states make it really hard. But even if we change those rules where everybody can vote easily, it wouldn't change it if we still had party primaries and we still had no new competition.

Yeah.

So if we get rid of party primaries and replace them with something I can talk about, and we get rid of this inability for new competitors to get started, that won't solve everything. Democracy, it's messy, it's hard, et cetera. But we will now have a system Where politicians compete to solve the problems of the voters. Because the voters will have the most power.

But given those changes, people in power to make those changes, they don't seem likely to ever happen unless there's some other way to do it. Like a ballot initiative.

The thing we need to change is the way we run our elections. And the Constitution, here, I have a little exhibit. This is the pocket Constitution, okay?

Something everybody should read in America, actually.

Yeah, right. But look at how short it is.

Yeah.

So everybody thinks that, you know, everything is in the Constitution, and it turns out that the Constitution only has a couple sentences about how our elections should run. And then the Constitution gives all the power over elections to the states. And the states make these rules individually. And what that means is that every state can change the rules that we've identified as the biggest problem. And what's totally amazing is in half the states, the people can vote to change the rules. They don't even have to get their state legislature to do it. Because half of the states have referendums. so they can get a question on the ballot. Like, so you go in and you vote for the president, your congressperson, and then you vote yes or no on whatever is this ballot question. So what I'm gonna propose is that we change the rules to be something called final five voting. So people would go in and they would vote. I vote yes on final five voting. And if over 50% of the people vote yes, those rules would be changed. So we don't have to get Congress to change the rules.

So citizens can put a petition to get something on a ballot and a referendum. But it required a level of education and understanding of all this. It's just hard to imagine people getting, right? I mean, if everybody in America read your book, I think we'd get there. And I think they probably should. But I think how do we, I mean, this is something I feel like I spent a fair bit of time thinking about, and it's something that you know, just is all new to me. And I think it's sort of probably new to a lot of people listening.

You know, I don't, so this, so thank you for spending all this time with me. This is not the kind of time that every citizen is gonna have. So you only have to spend this amount of time with enough people who decide to start the campaigns. And then people start the campaigns, you know, which is a small group of volunteers. That's how change happens. Small group of volunteers starts a campaign. And in these states where you need the petition, They stand outside, you know, the grocery stores and the polling places, and they collect signatures. And when they get enough signatures, it gets on the ballot. And it happens, let me say, this is already happening around the country. So Maine, the state of Maine, had a referendum where they passed one half of what Michael and I proposed is the most important thing to do. They passed ranked choice voting. Alaska, the state of Alaska, is having a referendum in November on the proposal that we suggest, and they collected signatures and it'll be on their ballot if all goes well.

It's a 50-state grassroots effort to create these initiatives. You're getting people on the ground, and when people come out of the polling stations and get them to do it, it'd be powerful.

Oh, yes, and it's happening. So I just founded an organization called the Institute for Political Innovation. And the focus of my organization is to take these ideas and help people turn them into action, although I focus a bit on the other side, which is to say there are half the states where you can't put it on the ballot. So I'm helping people start campaigns to get their legislature to change the rules.

That's great.

But then I work collaboratively with other organizations who are helping citizens start the campaigns in the legislative states. And these movements are all out there. There are experts. There's Katie Fahey. There's Kara McCormack. I'm just throwing out some names of some extraordinary women who have already created and led these victories at the ballot box.

Well, the other thing that's so interesting is, you know, how do you get the right people to run? Because, you know, it seems like we have an increasingly Dumbed down Congress and White House, which is terrifying to me. You want the smartest people in the country, like you and Michael Porter running the country, not a bunch of dimwits who really can't solve our problems and who are so co-opted by the wrong. I mean, I know good people in Congress, and they are just so discouraged. And all the good people quit if they're quitting in droves. And I just, I'm like, no, stay. And they're like, no, this is We can't stay. It's a challenge.

Yeah, because who wants to live in a system where there's no connection between doing what needs doing and the likelihood of getting elected? Who wants to feel that pressure every day? And there are still even so amazing people in Congress, actually. We have leadership on these issues from Chrissy Houlahan, a Democratic legislator from Pennsylvania, and Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin. Wisconsin, they have come out. They actually wrote the foreword in our book and they said, it shouldn't be this way. You know, we served in the armed forces, we were on the same team, and now all of a sudden we're serving in Congress out of the same love of country, and we're considered to be opponents. It shouldn't be that way. So they too want to see things work differently, because actually it's not a great job.

No.

It's not a great job to not be able to get things done that you know need doing.

Yeah, so frustrating.

So long story short, I'd like to summarize a bit what we've talked about so far. We don't get results. There's no accountability for getting results. The structures that make it that we can complain all we want about donors and special interests, but fascinatingly the key problems are actually in the rules of how we vote, and if we change those, It will automatically make votes more important than money, make voters and citizens more important than special interests, and it can be done through referendums or legislation in the states. So there is no reason for us to feel despondent about our future. There's a reason to feel concerned. There's every reason in the world things are not going well now, but we have so much more power than we knew, and we can change these things won't we put our focus on the right things? And I'm happy to tell you quickly what the package is that we should implement.

Yeah, I mean, I want to hear that in a minute. But it's really fascinating is you're really talking about re-engineering the machinery of elections. And you're saying something that is kind of new to me, which is for most of the time I think about this, I focus on the problem of money in politics. Campaign finance reform and Citizens United and things that really co-opted government and made it a servant of business and personal large money donors. What you're saying is something quite different and actually very empowering is that if we change the rules of engagement about how elections happen, it will change the equation to put voters in charge and not special interest money.

Right?

That's a very, that's a big paradigm shift.

Yeah, and it won't just, the other thing that I love about this new system is it puts voters in charge, but it also puts elected officials in charge. Meaning once they're elected, it gives them freedom to be able to work together to craft solutions because they are not artificially to adhere to a strict ideology that gets them back through their party primary. So they can work together. I mean, what an amazing concept. They can come up with new ideas instead of the same old tired ideas. So they will have, I mean, this is so amazing. They'll have actually better jobs. It'll be better for people. It'll be better for them who will lose? Well, party leadership loses. They don't have the same control. But I'm okay with that, are you?

I'm okay. I don't have a good job right now, so.

Yeah, okay. So, and self-interested special interests lose, although I would argue that anybody who was in there trying to get, I don't know, some benefit for their company, some individual line item benefit, will be far more benefited by a stable, thriving country than by any individual thing they could carve out of this corrupt and dysfunctional system.

Well, that requires a level of long-term thinking.

Okay, so let's not put our pin our hopes on that. Let's put our hopes on the campaigns saying that they want to have these campaigns in their states, and they can come to my website, I want people to buy the book, but more than that, I want things to change. So if they come to the website, gailporter.com, maybe you can put that up. We can connect people with organizations where they could get these campaigns started, which would be a campaign for Final Five voting. What?

G-E-H-L, gailporter.com, and I encourage people to go there to look at the book, to buy the book, to understand these issues, and to become an activist in your own community. Because what you're saying, Catherine, is very powerful, is that we have more power than we think. We're just not using it.

Yeah, and to the degree that people are applying their power, they're looking to the wrong solution. They're not focused on the most powerful solution. Like they're focused on money and politics. And let me say, if we were able to right now in this crazy system, Artificially limit the amount of politics by a factor of 10?

Money, you mean?

Money, yeah. Limit the amount of money in politics by a factor of 10. The only thing we would do if we don't change the incentives, the connection between results and getting reelected, is we would just make it 10 times cheaper for self-interested money to get the same result. We have to change the incentive.

Yeah.

For the politicians to deliver results. And that means that you should be not able to get re-elected if you haven't solved problems. Yeah, it's interesting, you know, functional medicine is very similar.

You know, you can treat the symptoms all day long, but unless you deal with the root cause, the problems aren't getting better. And I think, you know, you know that, I know that, I think it's sort of self-evident, but it's something that, you know, what is the root cause? You know, a lot of, For a lot of people, I think it's money in politics. What you're saying is it's something really quite different. I mean, it certainly plays a role and it drives the system and it keeps it going. But it's not the thing that needs to get fixed to fix the bigger problem of a dysfunctional government.

Or it's not the thing that needs to get fixed first. And also, after we fix the first thing, maybe you'd have people who would be willing to put rational limits on money in politics. So, this is interesting. So, you know how, You in functional medicine, you have like these circles and everything is related. And then you figure out, what do you fix first?

First, right.

What do you fix first?

Right.

And so that's my message is that Final Five Voting, which is the name for the change we need to make, is what we need to do first.

So explain Final Five Voting.

Okay. So Final Five Voting is the name for how we should vote to fix these problems. So first of all, with Final 5 voting, we get rid of party primaries. You'll still have a primary, but it will be a nonpartisan primary. So it's just one ballot, every candidate running, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Greens, you know, new party, runs on the same ballot, and the top five finishers advance to the general election.

Then we have Republican Democrat? Republican?

Oh, you can have two Republicans, two.

Democrats, and an independent? Or you can have five Democrats or.

Five Republicans, depending on... You could, and if it was a super Democratic area, you would have a very dynamic competition between different versions of Democrats. Not everybody's the same. There's no way to reflect the diversity of ideas and solutions and thoughts of the public. So now you've got five, you've got a great debate. in the general election, and then in the general election we make one change, which is we implement something called ranked choice voting. So you see these five candidates? You put yourself at a cocktail party right before that election. Well, at least if you could be at a cocktail party. Right now you'd have to be at a Zoom. Okay, so think of yourself and you're like, oh, those five, I love that one. I want I want Amy, you know, and then you're sort of like, if I can't get Amy, you know, to win, then I'd be fine with this person all the way down to your fifth choice. You're sort of like, over my dead body do I want that person to win.

Yeah.

So in the ballot, in the actual voting booth, the way that looks is you just mark them in order of preference, first choice, second choice, third, fourth, and fifth. You can mark as many or as few as you want. If you only want to say, this is my first choice, no problem. But otherwise, you mark all of them. And then, when the polls close, all the first place votes are counted. And if one of those five candidates has over 50%, so they won a majority, then that's great. They win. But if out of those five, they've Split the votes in a way that whoever's in first place doesn't have a true majority, you know, like only has 20% because everybody got 20%. Then whoever came in last is kicked out. Okay? And now if you had voted for that candidate who came in last, your second choice vote is counted instead. And we rerun the race between those four candidates.

On paper, actual race.

Not right, not actual race. Sorry, we recount the totals.

Yeah, yeah.

Vote totals. It's like a series of runoffs, but instead of having to physically come back and vote again, you just cast all your votes at once.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's amazing.

And then, and then you end up electing the one of the five that gets over 50%, so it's the person who has the broadest amount of support to the greatest number of voters.

One or two, or yeah.

Right.

And you've eliminated that spoiler problem. So if someone comes in and they're running and they only get 10% and they get kicked out because they're last, they didn't spoil the race for someone else. So you can now have new competitors come in with new ideas. and that will hold accountable whoever does get elected. So it takes the power of competition to influence what people will do once they're elected. The reforms that I talk about, so final five voting, which is nonpartisan top five primaries and ranked choice voting in the general election. That reform is not focused on changing who gets elected. It's focused on changing what they do.

Yeah.

Okay, so it might change who gets elected, but I'm agnostic about that.

Yeah.

I want people to, when they're there, be working for their entire district, be working for the public interest, be accountable to the public interest, and be free to use their talent to solve problems without being guaranteed they're gonna get kicked out in their primary.

Yeah, powerful.

Oh, it's so fabulous.

So the second piece of this, aside from re-engineering the election machinery, is re-engineering the legislative machinery, which is once they get in, how do you get them to do stuff in a way that's coherent, and that gets debated and it gets voted on and passed. Someone said to me who's a very deep insider in Washington, he said, Washington's designed, the founding fathers designed Congress to not pass a lot of legislation. And the reason he said was because otherwise we'd have this whipsaw in policies in the United States that would be chaotic and all over the place and changing all the time. that it has to be hard to pass legislation. So for all the bills that get passed, get submitted, very few actually get passed. Is that true? And what kind of reforms need to happen for the legislative machinery to allow for the kinds of policies that are going to move things forward, whether it's, you know, the things we've talked about, or whether it's the food system, which is my passion, how do we fix the policies that are so broken on the food system, or driving all the consequences of product disease, at climate change and social injustice and more. So how do we deal with that?

Yeah, so I think the person who was talking to you about that it's designed to be slow, I mean, that's what we always say, but we've come to a point where the question is not slow or fast. The question is anything of value or nothing? It's gridlock or, you know, nothing these days. And I want to answer that question with a little bit of an example. So let's go back to the pocket constitution. Okay, so remember I said only a couple sentences about how elections are supposed to be run? And then there's only a couple paragraphs about how the House and Senate are supposed to be run. Okay, I got an exhibit here for you.

It's a pretty thin book.

This?

Here we go.

What's that?

It is the size of the House Rules book.

Wow. Okay, it's- these are all made up then.

It has 1500 pages of legislative machinery. And if I add another three reams of paper, I can get the Senate rules book on top of that. So we went from what the founders suggested to making up over all these years this.

Three thousand pages.

How would you run your life if this was a set of rules?

I mean, the Bible isn't even that long.

It's crazy. I mean, no one would say, I know we have some big problems to solve. Let's come together in a room and then before we get started, we'll count off by twos, we'll divide into warring teams, then we'll follow these multiple, you know, mega sets of rules and then I'm sure we'll solve something. I mean, it just, it'll never happen, right? So that's totally goofy. So we totally got to change that and I want to give your I want to give you and your viewers a bit of an example of how this works. So there's a rule that some people might have heard of, it's called the Hastert Rule.

Isn't that guy that got kind of dinged for misconduct?

Yeah, he did. He did, yes. And that is a tragedy, and the Hastert Rule is a tragedy also. Now, he didn't make up the Hastert Rule, just he started using it perhaps more than it had been used before. And so now it's all of a sudden called that. And believe it or not, despite this huge number of rules, the Hastert rule isn't even written down. But let me tell you, but it's super powerful. So we're always worried about the filibuster. You know how people always saying, oh, we need to get rid of the filibuster in the Senate. But very few people talk about the Hastert rule. But here's what that is. It's a well accepted practice of the speakers of the House, both Democrats and Republicans. So right now people may know that Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the House because the Democrats are in charge. And right before that, when the Republicans had the majority in the House, Paul Ryan was in charge. And both Nancy Pelosi and Paul Ryan can use this Hastert rule. And what that means is that the speaker is not going to allow a vote on anything unless a majority of the majority, which is to say a majority of the Speaker's party wants to vote yes for that bill. So even if the whole entire House would vote to pass it, the Speaker won't let it be voted on.

Wow.

One person.

One person. Wow. So unless speakers ignore this, practice, which they do from time to time, but rarely. Even legislation that is supported by a majority of the country.

And both parties.

In both parties often has no chance of passing because they'll never be a vote. It's not because it doesn't have support, it's because they'll never be a vote in our democracy. This one person is going to say no. So let me give you a real life consequence to that. Remember in 2013 we had a government shutdown. It was 16 days. We've had another one since then that was shorter. But what isn't well known is that that 16-day shutdown could have been averted entirely, like never had to happen, or it could have been ended at any point in time. If then House Speaker John Boehner had allowed a vote on a piece of legislation to end the shutdown that the Senate had already passed and that had majority support in the House from day one, meaning that pretty much all of the Democrats plus a minority of Republicans wanted to vote yes on it right from the start. But because not a majority of Republicans wanted to vote yes on it, then under the Hastert rule, Speaker Boehner said they weren't going to vote on it. And so the shutdown ended only when Speaker Boehner broke with his party and broke the Hastert rule and allowed that vote to happen. So effectively this made-up practice just made up, not in the Constitution, cements majority party control in a legislature that is supposed to represent all U.S. citizens. And in this particular case, that rule cost our country $24 billion in a 16-day shutdown that 90% of Americans did not want from the start.

Yeah, incredible. So one example of some of the stuff that needs to get addressed. But that's going to require the lawmakers to actually address it, which they're disinclined to do because it protects them in the current model. So unless we sort of clean house, so to speak.

Although it's really interesting, actually, a lot of these rules mostly protect party leadership and they make the day-to-day job of.

The.

435 other people, quite, I mean, I can't totally speak for them, but they'll tell you behind the scenes. As you said, they're saying it's not worth it, it's not working well here. So here's what happens. We need to change the election rules first. We need to get final five voting. And then when people are elected under final five voting, they will have the freedom to come together to say we need to change these rules. You couldn't change these rules right now because the elected officials don't have the power essentially and the, you know, they're just not incented to change these rules now. Whereas if we do the election stuff first, then later we can also add on this legislative piece.

Incredible. So, God bless you for taking this on because it's complicated. It seems a little obscure to most people, but it actually is probably among the most important things we need to focus on now. We want to get our democracy back on track. We want to get our economy back on track. If we want to deal with some of our biggest problems that we're facing as a nation globally, which are a lot. And I think, you know, I'm focusing on the food system, but I think this is almost a prerequisite for how do we begin to to think differently about how we make stuff happen that matters, that people care about. And I think this is really incredible work that you and Michael Borter have done. And I think he's always been a hero of mine because he's really talked a lot about value in healthcare, which no one was talking about beforehand, which means we should pay doctors and healthcare systems for results, not just going through the system. So that's what we're doing in Washington. We're not paying for results, we're paying for just I don't know what we're.

Paying for, but in healthcare now we.

Have an opportunity to start to shift to value-based care. And that was really from his leadership. So he's a big hero of mine. You're a hero of mine. I think this is great work. I think everybody should get a copy of this book. I wanted you to hold up the book for everybody to see. It's an incredible book. It's called the Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy. You should go to gailporter.com. That's G-E-H-L. www.porter.com, learn more about the book. You can buy it there. You can join and actually maybe you can start an initiative in your community, in your state to actually get these ballot measures on and let's change it. Why not? We have more power than we think. We're all like Dorothy with the ruby red slippers. We never know we had the power. But I think it's clear from your incredible book that we do. And I just encourage people to not be discouraged, not be frustrated or apathetic, but to take charge because Right now, things are going a pot. And my wife and I took a walk this morning. We were talking about where are we gonna go if the country falls apart? We're gonna move to New Zealand. It's like, I don't wanna leave. I don't wanna leave my country. I don't wanna leave my home. I wanna be here. But I think there's moments like this in history where the dysfunction is so great and the breakdown is so great that it's forcing us to take a look at things, which is not a bad thing. It's how we got civil rights. It's how we got a lot of other things happening. when things really broke down and people started speaking up. So, while we're in this horrible mess right now and a lot of people are suffering, I think it's a moment of also reckoning and thinking about how we do things differently. And so, I really thank you for being on the Doctors Pharmacy Podcast, Kathy. This has been an amazing discussion. I've learned so much.

Amazing. And let me thank you, Mark, for the leadership that you are in this country for the cause of food as medicine. and I want to say you have personally made a difference for me and for my health. I wouldn't have the energy to be doing this work if it weren't for having made changes that you advised me to make. Thank you. Thank you, Catherine.

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