How to Spook the Politics Industry
The Political Orphanage
Andrew Heaton
4.9 • 1000 Ratings
🗓️ 3 March 2021
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Politicians fear their base, so they play to their base--and disregard moderates, independents, and members of the rival party.
Elected leaders can store up campaign war chests, but they can't net excess votes or store them for the next election.
What are the bad structural elements we've built into our system, and how do we rearrange them?
Katherine Gehl is the author of "The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy"
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers. |
| 0:13.6 | I'm Andrew Heaton, your audio butler for today. |
| 0:20.0 | If you were to survey people about the root cause of American dysfunction, |
| 0:25.0 | the main problem in politics, |
| 0:28.0 | you'd find a lot of answers. |
| 0:30.0 | Some people would say the main problem is ideological. |
| 0:32.0 | People believe the wrong things if If we all got on the same page, if we got rid of our bad ideas, we'd be able to fix the problem. |
| 0:40.0 | Some people would say it's a problem of idiocy, a lack of knowledge. |
| 0:43.7 | The problem is we have too many stupid people. |
| 0:46.0 | But if only we could elect smart people, that would solve the problem. |
| 0:50.4 | Or maybe we have too many bad people. |
| 0:52.8 | If only we could elect more integrative individuals, people with morals and backbones, |
| 0:57.1 | that would root out the badies. |
| 0:58.2 | We need more good people. |
| 1:00.2 | The author I'm going to speak to today thinks that the root problem isn't the people we keep electing. |
| 1:07.3 | That's the variable. The problem is the equation. The problem is the system itself. And if the architecture of the system is faulty, |
| 1:18.8 | it will lead to shaky, inefficient, and perhaps dangerous governance. |
| 1:25.2 | Here's an example. |
| 1:26.7 | In business, if you have two Pepsi employees, |
| 1:30.9 | an employee A increases sales and lowers overhead and generally has demonstrably positive results. Whereas employee B hates Coca-Cola and is adamant about how much they hate Coca-Cola and particularly Coke Zero on |
| 1:46.8 | Twitter and they're just ranting about how awful Coke is in meetings. |
| 1:51.8 | You'd reward the guy with the sales, right? Wouldn't it be crazy to do anything other |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Andrew Heaton, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Andrew Heaton and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.