Pod Insights The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway Ending the Two-Party Political System — with Katherine Gehl About this episode Katherine Gehl, the founder of The Institute for Political Innovation and co-author of “The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy,” joins Scott to discuss why it’s time to disrupt the politics industry with Final Five Voting.
Scott opens with his thoughts on why Twitter’s subscription model is all wrong.
Algebra of Happiness: Get memories out of your parents while you can.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:18 Scott Galloway? Episode 209. 209 is the area code of North Central California. In 2009, President Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, and Captain Sully safely landed a commercial plane on the Hudson River. I think of Barack Obama every Valentine's Day as I am Obama myself. Go, go, go!
1:44 Scott Galloway? Welcome to the 209th episode of the Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Catherine Gale, the founder of the Institute for Political Innovation and co-author of "The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy." We discuss with Catherine how we can fix our broken two-party system with political innovation and what to look out for in our midterm elections next week. Okay, what's happening? All right, so we've got a megalomaniac running a social media platform. I should say we have another megalomaniac running a social media platform. Let's start there. What should we talk about? What's the 411? What's on the docket? What wave is forming? Let me think. What should we talk about? Shortly after Elon took control of Twitter, a wave of right-wing politicians celebrated
2:28 Scott Galloway? their right to free speech, and also racial slurs and anti-Semitic memes spiked on the platform. Just to be fair, it looks as if most of this came from a small number of sources that were sort of testing, or, I don't know, battle-testing free speech, if you will. Also, Russia's former president praised him by tweeting "Good luck at Elon Musk in overcoming political bias and ideological dictatorship" on Twitter. Oh, thank God. By the way, Elon believes that we should seriously consider China, or Hong Kong should consider, or enter into discussions for Taiwan to become an administrative China. And wouldn't you know, what a coincidence. Probably half of Elon's net worth is tied up in the blood-sugar level of Xi Jinping, and that is factories and their biggest growth
3:12 Scott Galloway? market in China, and what do you know, he's carrying Xi's water. And now, and now parroting talking points for Putin, and now controls Twitter. What could go wrong? Or maybe the question is, what could go, what could go right? Can you believe, seriously, seriously, can you believe this shit? We have this individual now deciding battlefield technologies? Anyways, good for you, Elon. Really glad everyone has their free speech back, and we're freed of Twitter's former dictatorship. I mean, my gosh, I just felt so censored on Twitter. There was that time when, when I wasn't censored, and then there was that time I said something really obnoxious and totally inappropriate, and I wasn't censored. I mean, what is it these people want to do on Twitter, exactly?
3:56 Scott Galloway? When has Elon been censored? You have to be so vile or spread so much misinformation before they even threaten to, to delete your account. It just, what on earth? And this notion of free speech, it's not free speech, it's not the public square, it's the goddamn private square. It's the private square. Do I have an obligation to have AOC and Ted Cruz comment, come on my podcast, and spew whatever they have to say? No, because it's a private company. It's just crazy how we have totally confused what free speech and the First Amendment is. And by the way, let's talk about Twitter from a business perspective, in moderation, if you will. What is the least moderated platform? And that's 4chan. And then somewhere in the middle, you'd argue that it's Pinterest, Twitter, Snap, Meta.
4:38 Scott Galloway? And then what by far is the most moderated platform, where if you post a video and use the terms COVID, that video gets taken down and your account suspended? You guessed it, TikTok. And now let's look at success. And what do you know? There is a near perfect correlation between moderation and economic growth and economic value. By the way, TikTok, the most moderated platform in the world, is now worth more than, get this, Meta. ByteDance, the parent company, repurchased shares from employees or offered to repurchase shares at a valuation of 300 billion, and now Facebook's at about 250 or 260. So ByteDance is now worth more than Meta. And what do all of these things have in common? Simple, the more moderated, the more moderated, the more valuable, the greater the growth.
5:23 Scott Galloway? So Twitter's limited success is a function of its moderation, not despite it. So anyways, good luck with that. He's already walking him back. And by the way, he's already parroting the dog's talking points around business strategy. I think subscription could work. They've kind of fucked up, or they kind of don't have a sense for it. They want to do, they want to anchor it around the blue check. That doesn't make any sense, because there are some people with a blue check that should be free. Journalists, nonprofits, whatever, political figures, creators, content creators. But there are a lot of people who have massive followings who get paid to tweet. Why wouldn't Twitter take on the same complexion as Apple and say, we're going to take 30% of that cabbage? When Prof G promotes his podcast here for free, or promotes his podcast on Twitter for free, there's some economic value there.
6:08 Scott Galloway? And they should be able to assess what that economic value is and step in and say, hey, Prof G team, we're going to charge you 10, 20, 30% of what we perceive that economic value to be. Every corporation in the world, every entity in the world now has a Twitter account that they use similar to a firm called PR Newswire. They use to spend 70, 80, 120, 1100 dollars to put out a press release to various Periodicals and media outlets all over the world and pay a fee. Why on earth would Twitter not charge that? What happens? A, it's a better business model, it's more enduring, it survives a recession. And B, it creates better incentives. Your incentive is around adding value to the end consumer, not around weaponizing or enraging them such that they just keep coming back to the goddamn platform by spreading incendiary content. It's the ad model that has fucked everything up.
6:53 Scott Galloway? Everything reverse engineers to Sheryl Sandberg's success at Meta. When she created an ad model, it was hugely scalable with an incredible ad stack. And as a result, and I don't believe this was intentional on her part, she just ignored it when she saw signs that shit was getting awful. It creates an ecosystem where we just want you engage no matter what, which equals enrage ment, which equals more Nissan ads. And by the way, this is nothing that CNN and Fox don't do themselves. It's just that these platforms do it at scale. So where does Twitter need to head? It needs to head to subscription. Still have their head up their ass, slightly starting to pull it out, starting to pull it out. We can see the neck again. We can see the neck again. But, but they're not thinking correctly here. They're not, they're not price discriminating.
7:36 Scott Galloway? That same seat on my flight from LAX to Denver is worth more to different people at different times. They need price discrimination and segmentation here. Caitlyn Jenner's blue check is worth millions of dollars to her. The blue check for Stephen King is worth a lot less and the blue check for Planned Parenthood is worth a different amount of money. I mean, this is just, come on, guys, think, think. You're supposed to, you electrify the automobile industry. You think you can put a man on Mars, but you can't figure out price discrimination or surplus value? There is immense surplus value that needs to be captured and charged for on Twitter. Okay, so back in February 2021, I wrote the following in our No Mercy No Malice Newsletter. Open quote, "Twitter's management, enabled by legacy board members, has demonstrated
8:21 Scott Galloway? an alarming disregard for the Commonwealth, weak strategic thinking, and inability to create a fraction of the shareholder value that is possible for the platform. Twitter's financial weakness gives it a chance for redemption. It's time." Close quote. So, does that redemption appear to be taking place? Are we, is Twitter being redeemed? Is, is Musk redeeming himself, if you will, around some of the shitty behavior leading up to this acquisition? Let's talk about what's happened so far, four days post-acquisition.
8:52 Scott Galloway? Firing Parag and other senior managers for cause. By the way, quick story, quick story on firing people for cause. You can't, you can't fire people for cause. I had an employee at my last firm who was addicted to opiates, stole $120,000 from the firm. And my counsel's advice to me, it's going to be really difficult to fire her for cause unless the senior management team at Twitter gets convicted of a crime by a jury of their peers. Then Elon has a shot at firing them for cause. But this is nothing but an attempt to intimidate them, try and reduce their payouts, which they are obligated, which they are owed. And guess what? For the second time in as many months, the day before this thing goes to trial, and he might actually have to go under deposition,
9:34 Scott Galloway? he's going to see the light and pay them everything they are owed. Just humor him, charge him a million dollars in legal fees, and then tell him that he's going to lose. Said every lawyer that has worked for Musk in the last six months. And I'm like, how does this help the culture? I'm not going to uphold your agreements if I don't like them. So what do we have here? We have the retweeting of baseless conspiracy theories, an attack on employees' contracts, an attempt to intimidate them and take the money that they are owed. And also, my favorite, appointing advisors that are literally the worst advisors in the world. Guys in their 50s who have used the platform to weaponize their user base to attack incessantly people who attempt to have a conversation
10:18 Scott Galloway? around the value of the septic tank that is their portfolio companies. I can't, look at who he has decided to appoint to be his advisors. It's literally the counsel on little dick energy and pumping my investments and attacking other people who want to have an honest conversation. What have we decided? Okay, this platform is toxic. I don't know, let's pour more fucking cyanide into the river that is Twitter. Jesus Christ, day four.
10:46 Scott Galloway? We'll be right back for our conversation with Catherine Gale.
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13:10 Scott Galloway? Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Catherine Gale, the founder at the Institute for Political Innovation and co-author of "The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy." Catherine, where does this podcast find you?
13:25 Speaker 02 I am in Chicago.
13:27 Scott Galloway? Chicago, nice. Let's bust right into it. Let's start with the problem. You say the two-party system is broken. Why is it broken?
13:35 Speaker 02 Aha, it's actually, I think, more accurate to say that the system isn't broken. It's doing what it's designed to do. And the problem is, it's not designed to solve problems on behalf of voters. It's designed to further the growth and power and revenues of the political industrial complex, and that it's doing really, really great.
14:02 Scott Galloway? So say more. How's that happen?
14:04 Speaker 02 Our constitution fits in our pockets, right? That's why we can all have the pocket constitution. And that, I think, can tell us quite quickly that there isn't much in that constitution about how we actually run the day-to-day of what I would call the politics industry, or the day-to-day of how we govern, how legislation happens. And those rules, norms, and practices of how we set up the game of politics, if you want to call it that, are the elements, are the rules that create the incentives that everybody in that industry responds to.
14:48 Speaker 02 So we have had to invent, since we formed our country, the way we're going to elect people to Congress and to state legislatures and statewide offices. We've had to invent how people are going to work together when they are deciding on legislation. And in any human endeavor... The rules of a game, be it a serious game like politics or other games like board games or basketball, the rules of the game affect the way the game is played and affect the outcomes of that game. And the net result of the rules of the game in politics is that the two companies that exist in politics,
15:32 Speaker 02 the Democrats and Republicans, keep growing larger and more powerful, and everybody associated with that, while the customers keep getting less and less satisfied. So we'll see that Congress has, let's say, a 10% to 20% approval rating. In any other industry that was as large and as thriving as politics, with 80% of customers dissatisfied, and there's only two companies, some entrepreneur would come in to create a new company to give customers what they want. There'd be competition. And yet, we never see that in politics because it turns out that the two parties work very well together in one particular way. And that is to rig the rules of the game
16:15 Speaker 02 to protect themselves jointly from any new competition. And when there's not any new competition, the customers are not going to get what they want, and that's why voters don't get what they want in this country.
16:29 Scott Galloway? But everybody, I mean, the notion of a third party isn't a new one. And for the majority of democracies, it is a two-party system. Why hasn't a third party been able to get traction? And what can you point to? What other nations can you point to where multiple parties has been an effective solution?
16:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, let me first say that I do not suggest that any particular number of parties is going to solve our problems, a third party, a fourth party, a fifth party. In fact, our problem is not that we have only two. Our problem is that the current two are guaranteed to remain the only two, regardless of what they do or don't get done on behalf of the voters. So we don't need more parties, per se. We need the threat of more parties if the current ones don't start solving problems that make voters happy and deliver results
17:32 Speaker 02 in real people's lives. So it's the pressure of competition that we need.
17:40 Scott Galloway? Do you think more than a third party, we'd benefit more from ranked choice voting or open primaries?
17:45 Speaker 02 So, my preferred solution is something called final five voting, which is the combination of a top five primary and instant runoff voting general election. And that creates, those two elements of election change combined in final five voting, create the conditions for competition. And that means, yeah, you could have a third party emerge, but you'll also have lots of competition within the Republican Party or within the Democratic Party. And the most important thing that they do, and this is the root cause that we've mostly
18:26 Speaker 02 not seen, is that final five voting will ensure that nobody wins an election until November voters turn out.
18:35 Scott Galloway? Can you explain final five?
18:37 Speaker 02 Final five voting is, as I just said, the combination of two changes to our election system, one in the primary and one in the general. In the primary, we get rid of party primaries, where there's a Democrat primary and a Republican primary. And instead, we have just one primary ballot and everybody running is on the same ballot, regardless of party. Everybody votes using that ballot, regardless of party. Pick your favorite, polls close, count the votes, and the top five finishers will advance to the general election. Then, between the primary and the general, we benefit from a debate of diverse candidacies, ideas, visions, personalities.
19:20 Speaker 02 And then we get to the general election, and now that we have the benefits of competition, we need to decide who wins. And of course, you wouldn't want one of those five to win with 21% of the vote, which could happen if the vote split relatively equally five ways. So, we implement instant runoffs to narrow the field of five to the final two, at which point, the candidate with the majority wins. It's just like a series of runoff elections, but instead of voters needing to keep coming back for each additional round of runoff...
20:01 Speaker 02 The voters cast all their votes at once using a ranked ballot. And that combination is final five voting.
20:09 Scott Galloway? So Catherine, what's the biggest misconception about final five voting?
20:13 Speaker 02 Final five voting is consistently confused with ranked choice voting. Final five voting is not ranked choice voting. Here's why, because they're trying to solve for different problems. So people who are pushing ranked choice voting want to make voting more fair, want to make elections more fair and more representative and more democratic, all of which are are good goals. But what problem we're solving for, which we discussed earlier, is how to make those people that are elected able to do the work of solving our problems by working across the aisle and negotiating.
20:58 Speaker 02 And only final five voting does that. Because final five voting, which is the combination of the top five primary and instant runoff general, makes sure no winners are chosen until November. Whereas if you have ranked choice voting on its own, and you put it, for example, in party primaries in the general election, you'll still have 85% of the House members chosen in a party primary, and they will still only answer to that segment of voters that votes in those low turnout primaries. So you don't reenfranchise November voters. It is through the reenfranchisement of all November voters and having real competition
21:40 Speaker 02 to hold those elected accountable and having that competition occur in November that we're going to get the better results. And I'll say a second thing, if I may. It's really not helpful to call the process by which we choose the majority winner ranked choice voting. We need to talk about it as what it really is, which is it's a series of instant runoffs.
22:06 Scott Galloway? I mean, my fear, and maybe it's this sort of illuminates my politics, but that that type of, and that that's appears entirely rational to me, and whether it's gerrymandering or the primary system, we just end up with extremists on both sides. Nobody gets along, and we have what I would refer to as minority rule. My fear is that unless it's federal legislation, if you go state by state, the states that will do this and see the wisdom in it will be primarily progressive states. I mean, for example, the New York Supreme Court has basically said New York is guilty of gerrymandering, but no red states seem to be headed that way. Do you worry that this ultimately ends up being a gift, and maybe it should be a gift to conservatives, because it feels to me like the states that
22:50 Scott Galloway? will embrace this final five tend to be on the more progressive side. Having said that, as I listen to myself talk, Alaska has embraced this, right?
22:59 Speaker 02 Right. So, let's make it clear that the goal of final five voting is to re-enfranchise every single November voter and ensure that winners are never chosen until November. And that is not so that final five voting will change who wins the elections. It's so that whoever wins will be able to do different things when they're in Washington governing, that they will be able to reach across the aisle, innovate, negotiate, make a deal, and vote yes on the difficult deal that they've crafted to solve these complex problems. Now
23:43 Speaker 02 coming to your question about whether progressive states are going to implement this. The facts show us that progressive states are not more likely to implement this. First, we, it's, it's been passed in Alaska, which is, you know, known to be a quote, red state. But the second thing is, Scott, that the next state on, on track for final five voting is Nevada. Nevada voters will vote on November 8th, yes or no to final five voting in Nevada.
24:18 Speaker 02 And the Democratic governor, the two current Democratic senators issued a joint statement earlier this year saying that this was bad for, you know, Nevada. And final five voting has also done something that I don't think anything else has done in Nevada. It's united Democrats and Republicans because the Republican establishment in Nevada is also opposed, which is to say that those people who are currently in the business of politics, they want it to stay the same. They don't care about November voters.
24:57 Scott Galloway? To that point, 95% of incumbents are reelected. Congress, our elected representatives have never been older. We have sort of the oldest leadership in the world, at least of a democracy, and every year it gets older. What are your thoughts on term limits and age limits?
25:12 Speaker 02 I come from business, and so I have this rule that the only things I want to suggest that people invest their time in and hopes in are efforts like final five voting that are both powerful, as in they'll change how the results Congress gives us, and that they're achievable. And achievable is what I call a ruthless metric, because I define it as we have to be able to get that powerful in a matter of years, not decades. So the thing about term limits for Congress is that they're not achievable. They require a constitutional amendment. So that's not going to happen before I'm dead.
25:56 Speaker 02 So we could spend a lot of time talking about whether they're powerful or not, and I would actually end up making a case that they're not as powerful as people think. But since they're not achievable, we don't even need to talk about it.
26:08 Scott Galloway? What's the point?
26:09 Speaker 02 Yeah. So we really, I find it interesting that in business and even our own home lives, we don't talk about things that we could only dream of that aren't possible. We live in reality. But for some reason in politics, particularly in reform, we like to think about how we wish things were, as if that makes them worth investing in. We need to find things that we wish were so that we have the power to make so.
26:43 Scott Galloway? Yeah, I think that's, I think that's really insightful. So the midterms are next week. What are you looking for? Or what are you looking out for, I should say?
26:50 Speaker 02 I'm not looking forward to this in the midterms, but I am deeply concerned that the symptoms of this broken system are going to show themselves in, again, very distressing ways. So I'm likely to find the results of the midterms, not just in who wins, but really more what, how the public handles it and how media handles it and what it does to our unity. I'm likely to find it very, very distressing. And what I hope will be the bright spot in it is that Nevada final five voting will be announced as a win.
27:33 Scott Galloway? We'll be right back.
27:36 Scott Galloway? Support for the show comes from Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so does your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits, and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls, and playing catch up when audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. The regentech trust platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over 1,400 automated tests across 400-plus integrations, Vanta collects evidence and monitors your controls year-round, cutting your audit prep by 82%. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent everywhere you work, whether your team is in Vanta every day or living in tools including Claude or Cursor. Want proof?
28:21 Scott Galloway? Over 16,000 fast-growing companies like Ramp, Ryder, and Harvey save time and resources while scaling fast with Vanta. Learn more at vanta.com/profg and get $1,000 off. That's spelled V-A-N-T-A dot com slash prof G for $1,000 off.
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29:14 Scott Galloway? So I would imagine a lot of our listeners will say that final five voting makes a lot of sense. If you don't live in Nevada, how can you, how can you still support? How can you be effective and not just right and, and help final five voting get more traction?
29:28 Speaker 02 The first thing is that people have to know that it exists and it's an option. So if I go back to 2009, I don't know about you, Scott, but I consider myself pretty politically engaged and I honestly did not know what gerrymandering was. I had no idea. And then gerrymandering after 2010 sort of went on this hockey stick of awareness. And now most people, I mean, I don't know the statistics, but know what gerrymandering is and most people have a view that it isn't, you know, a good idea. It turns out, by the way, it's not in the intersection of powerful and achievable. It's not the thing we should be trying to fix right now.
30:09 Speaker 02 But, and final five voting really bypasses the gerrymandering problem by making sure you choose winners in November anyway. But my point is that final five voting needs to and should soon go through that same hockey stick of awareness. And if your listeners could help make that happen by, for example, sharing your wonderful podcast and also perhaps looking at my TED Talk, which they can get by Googling my name, my last name, Gail, G E H L, and TED Talk, and then sharing that with their friends. And, and I would also say if they get a little conversant with it by listening to this talk,
30:50 Speaker 02 watching TED and looking at our website, which is at finalfivevoting.org, they can talk politics at Thanksgiving and Christmas this year because this is something that people across the political spectrum. Really come together on.
31:07 Scott Galloway? Catherine Gale is a business leader turned political innovation activist. She is the former CEO of Gale Foods, a high-tech food manufacturing company in Wisconsin. In 2020, she co-authored the book, The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy, with Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter. She joins us from Chicago. Catherine, I mean this sincerely, I hope that, I hope your efforts get traction. I think this is an important moment where we need, I don't know, get away from minority rule and become less polarized. And it strikes me that the incentives that you have outlined are a big, a big problem. Anyways, thanks for your time and your good work, Catherine.
31:46 Speaker 02 Scott, thank you. It's been a pleasure to be talking to you today. Appreciate it.
32:01 Scott Galloway? As a group of happiness, get memories out of your parents while you can. My father is struggling. He's 92 and has early onset dementia, or just dementia that I think is pretty common among 92-year-olds. And when I ask him, I'm now panicked because I'm trying to find out more about his childhood. And for example, I'm going to see the Glasgow Rangers soccer team in Glasgow play against a smaller team in Perth. I just think it'll be so much fun to take my boys to a football match in a small community outside of Edinburgh with a 7,000-seat stadium. I think that's going to be just so much fun and I'm so excited. So I call my dad. He has a really difficult time on the phone. And I asked him about the Glasgow Rangers and when he, when he went to those games. And he didn't remember, he didn't know what I was talking about.
32:46 Scott Galloway? And it just struck me, okay, as he loses his memories, he's just lost the Glasgow Rangers. And that's really sad. That's a moment of connected tissue between him and me, and between him and me, and his grandsons. And now it's gone, and it's unlikely it'll ever come back. So my advice is the following. It goes much faster than you think it's going to go. And so sit your parents down and ask them a lot of detail and maybe even video it or record it about their youth and them growing up because once it's gone, it's like you really miss it. I really now am angry that I didn't find out more about my dad's childhood and the sporting teams. My dad served on a ship. My dad served in the Royal Navy and I know he was a frogman.
33:31 Scott Galloway? I know, I know he jumped into the water and I know he repaired planes, but I don't know which planes he repaired. I would love to go find a replica model of the planes my dad repaired and give it to my kids. There's just so much cool shit that I could be doing right now with my dad's history that it's too late for. I know some of it, but not enough. So time marches on relentlessly. So my advice is find those memories, find that connective tissue before your parents lose them.
34:00 Scott Galloway? Our producers are Caroline Shager and Drew Burrows. Sammy Resnick is our associate producer. If you like what you heard, please follow, download and subscribe. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod and the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you next week.
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Previous Office Hours: Should I Short Meta? The World Cup in Qatar, and How to Acquire New Customers Next No Mercy / No Malice: Elephants in the Room Page updated September 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
