There’s a conversation I come back to every so often in this work — the kind where you walk away thinking differently about something you assumed you understood. This week’s episode was one of those.

I sat down with Chad Peace, the voter advocate and attorney behind the More Choice initiative and the Independent Voter Project. If you’ve heard of California’s top-two primary — the system where the two highest vote-getters in a primary advance to the general, regardless of party — Chad was one of the architects. He’s spent years in courtrooms and state legislatures arguing for something that sounds deceptively simple: that the right to vote should belong to you, the individual, not to the party you join.

The conversation that stuck with me was about incentives. Right now, our election system rewards division. You don’t have to win by being good — you can win by making your opponent look terrible. That’s not a bug in the system. It’s the design. And it’s why we keep electing people who are better at tearing things down than building consensus.

More Choice — Chad’s proposed next step beyond the top-two — would advance four or more candidates to November and give voters the ability to rank their preferences. The idea is simple: if second- and third-place votes matter, you can’t win just by going negative. You have to actually persuade people who don’t already agree with you. That changes the calculus completely.

I also appreciated how clear-eyed Chad is about the opposition. Both parties — left and right — want to get rid of the top-two. They call it a “jungle primary” (a term he correctly identifies as deliberately pejorative). Their solution? Go back to closed primaries, where party members pick the candidates and everyone else chooses from whatever’s left in November.

His response: that’s not reform. That’s consolidating power.

Chad grew up between a Republican family on his mom’s side and a Kentucky Democrat on his father’s. They never fought at the dinner table. They respected each other. He believes most voters are actually like that — closer to the middle than our political system reflects. The system just isn’t built to show it.

This one is worth your time, whether you follow election reform closely or you just found yourself standing in a voting booth last November thinking: really? These are my only options?

Full episode is on YouTube now.

— Lisa

When I sat down with Kasia Hatcher for the latest episode of The Friday Reporter, she described every adult as having an invisible operating system — not just what we think, but how we make sense of the world. Most leadership development, she said, works on the apps. The skills, the tools, the behaviors. What she does is go deeper: to the patterns that have been running your leadership without your awareness.

I’ve worked with Kasia personally. She is the real thing. And bringing her onto The Friday Reporter felt long overdue, because what she does for founders and executives is genuinely hard to describe until you experience it — and I wanted to try.

We talked about a lot in this episode. Why most systems fail solo entrepreneurs (hint: they built it for someone else’s business). How to actually integrate AI without generating what Kasia very accurately calls “slop.” And the thing I’ve gotten the most value from in our work together: how to have the hard conversations you’ve been avoiding.

Her framework for that is deceptively simple. Make the decision before you go in. Strip to one fact. Then stop talking. She said something I think about every time I’m about to have a difficult conversation: your job is not to manage the other person’s emotions. Your job is to stay grounded enough to have the conversation at all.

There’s a story near the end about a client who had been avoiding a phone call for two weeks — a conflict of interest situation with real money on the line. Kasia helped her prepare, and she made the call that night. Three minutes. No blowup. No fallout. And the outcome was better than if she’d taken the new client in the first place. That’s not magic. That’s just what happens when you stop rehearsing and start doing the actual work.

This one is for every founder who is running — really running — and can’t quite figure out why the battery never feels full.

In this episode of The Friday Reporter, Lisa Camooso Miller sits down with Matthew Cutts of Dentons for a fast-moving conversation on what’s actually happening inside Washington right now—and what corporate leaders, policymakers, and the media may be missing.

While the headlines suggest gridlock and dysfunction, Cutts offers a more nuanced—and surprisingly hopeful—view: much of the real work is happening out of sight, where relationships, preparation, and bipartisan problem-solving still shape outcomes.

The conversation explores how CEOs are recalibrating their approach to government, why the next political shift is already influencing boardroom strategy, and how emerging policy battles—from AI to crypto—are moving faster than the institutions built to regulate them.

Key Takeaways

* The real action in Washington is off-cameraCommittee work, relationship-building, and early positioning are driving outcomes long before issues reach the headlines.

* Government is now a core business riskCEOs are paying closer attention to Washington than ever before, as policy decisions increasingly impact bottom lines in real time.

* 2026 is already shaping strategy todayCompanies are preparing now for a potential shift in House control—and the policy and oversight changes that could follow.

* New policy battles are outpacing the systemAI and crypto are forcing bipartisan alignment in unexpected ways, even as Congress struggles to keep up with the speed of innovation.

Why This Conversation Matters

This episode pulls back the curtain on how influence really works in Washington today. It’s not just about ideology—it’s about timing, preparation, and understanding where decisions are made before they become public.

For anyone working at the intersection of business, policy, or communications, this conversation is a reminder: if you’re only following the headlines, you’re already behind.