As we near the 2026 Midterm elections, Maggie Mick hosts Katie Harbath of Anchor Change. Katie is a longtime political strategist and technology-policy expert who spent 10 years at Facebook, ultimately serving as Public Policy Director for Global Elections. She helped build Facebook's elections operation essentially from the ground up and was deeply involved in how the company approached elections, political actors, civic engagement and election integrity around the world. She left in March 2021. Today, she's a frequent speaker and writer on the intersection of technology and politics. Her memoir Disrupting Politics will be released on October 6.
[00:00:11] Welcome back to another episode of The Political Life. This is Maggie Mick with Multi-State, and today I am so pleased to introduce you to kind of a renaissance woman with whom I had the opportunity to meet many years ago at the Public Affairs Council Institute. But today she is going to talk about not only her own career, but some of the most fascinating debates going on around the country, and she will be a wealth of knowledge and insight for us. But welcome, Katie, Katie Harbath,
[00:00:41] with Anchor Change. Maggie, thanks for having me. Of course. Well, we always start with the first question. Where did you start your political life? So for me, it was in Madison, Wisconsin at the University of Wisconsin. I was, I originally wanted, I was a journalism major, graduated as a journalism major, but had to have so many social science credits that I added political science at the end
[00:01:06] as a major, but then also met a lot of people at the student newspaper. And when I didn't get editor-in-chief my senior year, a friend of mine was like, why don't you think about political communications? He goes, I think you'll have a lot more fun. And I went and my first campaign that I volunteered for was the Norm Coleman Senate race in Minnesota in 2002. And for those who were around then, this was the one
[00:01:31] where Paul Wellstone, who was the incumbent senator for a very long period of time, died like two or three weeks before the election day in a plane crash. And so the race got completely upended. And I got to go, I was part of the advance crew because Coleman was doing events all across the state. And I joked that I got my, caught the political bug on a campaign bus in like the middle of the night. Minnesota is like a hotbed for such interesting political history.
[00:02:01] Well, and so is Wisconsin, right? Like, I mean, we are both like, sorry, the rivalry stays strong between Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Michigan. But yeah, I mean, I think that both states have very interesting political histories, very interesting role in our political system overall, the electoral college, the mix between like Republican and Democrats that they tend to elect into office
[00:02:29] is very interesting. So did you go on to join Coleman once elected? No, my friends did, but I still had more school to go to because I was a year behind. So I interned for the Wisconsin State Republican Party. And then after graduating in May of 2003, everyone said, if you wanted to job in DC, you needed to be in DC. And I tried to interview at the state capitol and all of that.
[00:02:57] But my friend Morgan and I decided, let's just do it. And so July of 2003, we drove out here. You know, we had never driven in a big city before. We, this is before, you know, you don't even have, you have flip phones. You don't have, you're on MapQuest, right? You're printing out the map. The MapQuest is printed out, correct? MapQuest is printed out. And for those who are familiar with DC, the grid and spoke, the grid model on top of the wheel and spoke model is really confusing.
[00:03:26] And even really hard when you have GPS, let alone, let alone MapQuest. So we were, so we moved out here and I, the state party had recommended me to the national party and about a couple, I worked at the Macy's perfume counter and Pentagon City Mall for a little bit, and then started my career as an assistant, a communications assistant at the Republican National Committee. Nice. And then what was the next stop after there?
[00:03:53] So did that through President Bush's reelect at the beginning of 05. Then I had a very brief stint at the committee and house administration on the Hill because I wanted to get assistant press secretary experience because I wasn't sure if this digital thing was going to take off in the early and I wanted to have a backup. And I knew how hard it was to get anybody to let you speak on the record, you know, your first time on behalf of somebody. So it was a great opportunity
[00:04:18] for me to do that. And then I ended up going to work in Ohio because the then chairman of the committee, Bob Ney, he had to drop out of being chairman. People remember the Jack Abramoff scandal, but he asked me to come out on his campaign and I saw it as a great opportunity because it was a higher profile house campaign because of all that had happened. I was coming after anything, like everything that he was accused of happened. And so got a lot of experience being not just the
[00:04:46] communications director for that camp, but you know, when you're on a house campaign, you're doing fundraising, you're doing political stuff, you're doing it all. And then went to go work at DCI group very briefly, which is a public affairs firm here in DC, then went up to New York for a year to be on Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign. So this was 2007 and I was doing, we were still calling it e-campaign back then. I think I was assistant e-camp or associate e-campaign director, maybe
[00:05:13] deputy. And then after Giuliani back at DCI group for a bit. And then for the 2010 cycle, it was the national Republican Senatorial Committee. So you became an elections expert at some juncture. So how did you build from a campaign background to a subject matter expert? Yeah. Leader in your career. So after the NRC, where I learned about elections from, like you said,
[00:05:42] the candidate perspective, right? Like how are you running ads? How are you trying to win polling? All of that kind of stuff. And then Facebook came calling because they had just launched Facebook pages a year or two earlier. They knew that president Obama would be running for reelection in 2012. And there'd be all these Republicans vying for the nomination. And so they wanted a Republican on
[00:06:05] staff that knew all of the digital people in the Republican world. I had been spending a lot of my time not only working for these campaigns and committees, but doing a lot of conferences, right? Trainings, panel discussions, all of that. And so joined Facebook originally to help Republicans learn how to use Facebook. But then we were also thinking at the company, okay, how do we help people know where or when and how to vote? How do we help people know who's on their ballot? What are those types of
[00:06:35] things that we can do? And so started building that out and learning more about it almost from the election official side on that, of what those rules were, et cetera. And then it was really after 2016 as the work shifted into a lot of this election integrity work, political ad transparency, mis and disinfo, foreign interference, stuff like that, that I really kept digging into it a lot more
[00:07:01] because we'd be working with election officials would be one of many different stakeholders that we were working with to try to make sure, okay, what is acceptable versus not acceptable to be happening on the platform. So tell me some of the biggest questions. And this is when we met is you came to the Public Affairs Council to talk about just your elections portfolio. You had now become this policy expert. It was the
[00:07:29] year 2022 and had kind of been through this evolution of the big policy questions around elections. So talk about the big questions that you wrestled with while you were at Facebook and maybe how it eventually led to this next part of your career outside of Facebook. Yeah, I left Facebook in March of 21. So it's been about five and a half, almost six years that
[00:07:54] I've been out on my own doing anchor change. And, you know, we were grappling, I think, you know, I go through this. So I have, my book comes out on October 6th called Disrupting Politics, a front row seat to the collision of technology and democracy. And it goes through a lot of this, basically from the 2000 election to the tech CEOs at the inauguration in 2025. And in the early days, we had rose-colored glasses on. It was like, this is great. Like,
[00:08:23] this is a way for candidates to directly reach out to voters, to talk to voters directly. You don't have to worry about how a reporter's going to put it in context, what thing they're going to edit out, what they're going to choose to use, et cetera. We can just put our own content up online and we can measure it, right? So before you would put an ad out and you had to do, you know, if you were trying to advertise to New Hampshire, you'd have
[00:08:49] to buy the very expensive Boston media market in order to hit New Hampshire. Now you could target people in a much more narrow way. And if you used to run an ad, you'd have to run a very expensive poll to know, did the message resonate with voters or not? Now with online, we were like, holy smokes, we're getting clicks in near real time. We can really see how quickly what people are clicking
[00:09:15] on. And initially that feels like a good thing, right? Like more clicks are better, more engagements better. Like it's all about winning and more and more and more and getting more than your opponent. And I think that in hindsight, what we didn't realize was like how that was slowly moving people further to the extremes because that would get more reaction out of people. And we weren't thinking about the long-term consequences and the incentives that we
[00:09:43] were building out for candidates and other political figures online. And so that was something that we ended up starting to have to grapple with at Facebook was like, okay, not only how do you, like, what should you do about this, but also what is, who are we as unelected people inside this company to pick what people can or cannot say or engage with when it comes to politics? So you had these like
[00:10:09] really philosophical questions around that. You had questions around, so foreign interference, very easy to say, yeah, we don't want Russia or China interfering with our elections. But if a Canadian organization wants to try to influence members of Congress about trade deals, is that okay? Is that
[00:10:31] not okay? Is it, you know, if it's coming, if the BBC is advertising into America, is that okay? And so when it came to political advertising and foreign interference, we had to decide, okay, where do you draw the line? A lot of me, my time in Facebook is where do you draw the line? Who's a news organization? Who's not? Who's, what foreign, foreign communication is okay? What is not okay? For political ad
[00:11:00] transparency in our typical, you know, I will use the before online days, the FEC, we'll just use Federal Election Commission for now. It was based upon who you were. So you are a political candidate, you're a party, you're a super PAC, whatever. If you are this thing, your ads thus have to have this sort of disclaimer. Well, the problem we ran into was that it's not like the Russians were being like, hi, we're from Russia, we're trying to interfere in your election. They were disguising themselves as
[00:11:28] Americans. So we had to flip it around and start with what does the advertisement say? And based upon that, is it a political ad? Well, the challenge there is any issue can become a political issue very quickly. And so we had to early on, so we were like, okay, we're starting with the ad, but then that meant companies that were talking about recycling or some of these issues, we were calling
[00:11:54] them political. We had nonprofits that even though they weren't saying a candidate's name, we're talking about the issues and they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're not political. Like don't, don't ruin our IRS designation. And it's like, okay, but you know, if you want us to stop these bad ads from happening, then we got to have the good people go through these processes of having disclaimers and doing all of this. And that was, and that continues to be so tricky to this day, because I call them impossible trade-offs, because
[00:12:24] we kind of had to, we had to pick, okay, are we more willing to take the heat from us missing potential foreign interference? Or are we willing to put more friction there for those that are wanting to run these ads? And we potentially catch some ads that while some people might not think of them as political could be political, but I'll pause there. There's a whole bunch more, but like, that's sort of the examples of what we were trying to weigh and figure out in a world online without borders that also don't
[00:12:53] have a lot of regulations around it. Enormous questions. And you're sitting as a human, as, you know, a campaign practitioner trying to wrestle with gigantic questions that impact so many people. So when we met at the end of your talk around elections and how technology was, you know, infusing into elections and how that evolution was happening, you know, at the time I was really
[00:13:21] wrestling with potentially leaving an organization that I had been at for a long time, and you had just made this huge career change. And I remember at the end of the conversation, I remember thinking, oh my God, she made huge decisions. She had immense pressure on her. And at some point, she decided to exit stage left. And that's actually what I wanted to know about. After all of the election
[00:13:47] talk of like 2016 or 2015 to 2022, I just knew that there was enormous story behind it. And so, you know, what you actually shared, and I do think it was the first time you had actually shared it probably outside the confines of your family and friends, was the decision-making tree that you took on to actually leave a job that you loved, created, grew, a program that was quite large
[00:14:13] at Facebook at the time. Can you share kind of that process? And I just remember you talking about some like whiteboard and the forms. Like this is six years ago. There's a lot of color coding, a lot of post-it notes, a lot of all that. So I think that it's informative for folks. Yeah. The process you took. Yeah. And it wasn't, it's not like, it wasn't an overnight process by any stretch of the
[00:14:39] imagination. In fact, it was probably, it was a bit of a two-year process. And if I'm honest, I feel like I'm still in it a little bit six years later. But so part of it was my choice, part of it was not. So in late 2019, I got pulled off the U.S. elections work. I'd got moved to a different boss where we did not, we saw things very differently in how things should be structured.
[00:15:07] And I get pulled off the elections work. I'm like, I can't, I, if she's got such a different vision and that's where the company wants to go, I'm not going to keep fighting this. Like I can't, I can't, I can't do that. I was mentally completely burnt out, physically very, very, very burnt out. I was on, I was on year eight, nine of having been at the company. Four of those years,
[00:15:32] a ton of pressure that was happening. And so in January, 2020, so we are hearing grumblings of COVID, but we are not yet in, oh my gosh, we're going to be locked down for a year plus in mode yet. And so January, 2020, I was talking to a mentor and we were at the Ritz Carlton here in DC at the bar. And I stayed after, after chatting with him, cause I was like, okay, what,
[00:16:00] like, I want to keep on doing election stuff. I want to keep doing stuff around the world. And I knew that, so I didn't work just in the U S I was working globally. Right. And I was like, okay, there's a major year of elections in every five years, a ton of countries go to the polls. So 2014 was a big year. 2019 was a big year. So I was like, okay, that means 2024 should be a pretty big year. And I was like, well, that's going to be a U S presidential. And then I was like,
[00:16:26] oh my gosh, there's going to be India, Indonesia, Mexico, which is every six years is going to happen to be that year. I'm like, I think this might be an unprecedented year of the number of people that will go to the polls. That will be really hard for these companies. And now remember this is January, 2020. We don't have COVID yet. We don't have AI as we know it yet either. So we, so I go home, um, do, do the math. And I'm like, holy smokes, this is going to be a historic year.
[00:16:56] And I go to Facebook and I'm like, what if I focus a bit more on the longterm? Like, what do we need to do to get ourselves ready for that? How do we want to think about regulation? How do we want to think about all this? And then COVID hits and the world turns upside down. And all of a sudden I go from being on the road, 260 plus days a year, um, and having my dream job
[00:17:19] to not having a defined role and being stuck here in this apartment with my, the cat I had at the time. Um, and so I was like, well, I'm not going to leave if they're not firing me because I don't know what the job market looks like right now. I'm going to try to help where I can internally, but why don't I use this year to figure out what it is that I want to do? Because November, 2020 would be,
[00:17:46] I will have been at the company for 10 years. I was turning 40 and it was after a major election. So if I was going to make a move that felt like a lot of things combining, right? To do that. So I start thinking about, um, okay, no, I want to, again, stay in elections globally. I start working with a coach. Her name's Lori Brewer Collins. And she pulls together this group
[00:18:16] to sort of adult stage development. Like we don't stop after we're kids, right? Like we keep learning and growing as adults. And there's this great book called Life Forward that talks about like sort of four phases you might go into. So you go into a new job, you've got this learning phase, you have this mastery phase, and then usually most people will just short circuit to the next thing, the next job. And it's like learning mastery, learning mastery. And she talked about these two other
[00:18:43] phases. One was cocooning. And then the last one was sort of preparing to go into that. And I'm like, well, let's go into a cocooning phase and think about this. And started asking my questions of like, what types of, what types of environments make me happy? What types of work make me happy? The types of people that I work with. Um, I started doing a lot of, because nobody's going anywhere. I could do a lot of virtual coffee. So I made a goal of trying to do 10
[00:19:10] virtual coffees a month. And I started thinking about, okay, what pillars of things matter to me? So this is where the whiteboard comes in. So it didn't happen overnight. But what this ended up turning into was, uh, the pillar on top was tech and politics or tech and democracy. Then there were four pillars around it. One was mentorship. I loved being a manager. Um, but I also love talking to
[00:19:35] college classes, love talking to people who are trying to think through their next thing or think, cause my career, every job I had didn't exist before I had it other than that one in the committee and house administration. And so you learn things from that and, and building those things. So mentorship was one voice was the second one. I knew I wanted to start my sub stack, which I'm on my five-year anniversary of having right written that sub stack around technology and politics called anchor
[00:20:04] change. Um, I knew I wanted to write my book. I knew I wanted to think about doing a podcast, talking to reporters more, but at the time when I was leaving, the only voices talking publicly were very, very anti-tech. And I thought that there was room for a more nuanced voice to help better explain those tough choices that I was mentioning, but then also, um, from a center right perspective
[00:20:28] of what that could look like too. So voice was my second pillar. Then the third pillar was build because I didn't want to just be somebody that talked about what should be done. I wanted to actually help build it. And so I ended up helping to build something called the integrity Institute that we had a lot of trust and safety people be a part of, um, a lot of the clients and stuff that I had, I'm helping them build their sort of next thing. And then my fourth pillar was family and friends
[00:20:56] because they had been very understanding over the 10 years that I was on Facebook of many a vacation where I'm on my phone, taking calls from random places, doing all of that. And my parents had just retired. My nephews at the time were, um, they had about 10 years before they went off to college. And so I wanted to make sure I could spend as much time as possible, um, with all of them. And so pulled all of that together. And then I was like, okay, where could that live? I could build my own
[00:21:25] thing. Could it go into a think tank? Could it go into another company? What could that look like? And in doing a lot of interviews with folks. So by this time we are in the thick of the 2020 campaign, we are all locked down. A lot of it's virtual. It is really neck and neck, right? Between Trump and Biden and what that looks like. And I'm doing some interviews and there was just sort of a really,
[00:21:52] it was my intuition that was like, don't go into another company right away. Like there, I was just so burnt out that I really wanted to have had the energy for that. And I was talking to a consultant who really flipped it around in my head. Cause I used to think I never wanted to be a consultant. I wasn't sure I would like the rollercoaster of not having a steady paycheck and those types of things. And he flipped it around for me. Cause he was like, Katie, he goes, and at the time there weren't all these layoffs happening in tech. He goes, Katie, if you
[00:22:22] set up your consultancy, right. And your portfolio business, right. You have a variety of income. So if one drops you, you've got others you can lean on. And while you try to find additional work. And I was like, oh, I hadn't thought about it that way before. And I was already thinking of having all those different ones. And so I already had that in the back of my mind. And I was starting to think about what it would take to build, like start on my own, start talking to folks about what
[00:22:49] they might hire me for, et cetera. And then January 6th happens. And I'm here in Roslyn, which is right across the river from the, from DC. And I'm watching all this happen. And I'm like, the two entities I've spent my career working for the Republican party and Facebook are very different than when I first started working for each of them. And I was like, this is going to have huge reverberations across this world that I helped create, right? Like we ended up taking down and suspending
[00:23:19] the president of the United States from all these social media platforms. That was not my dream and goal way back in 2004 when we were first starting this, right? And so I was like, And you came to teach people how to use Facebook. I came to teach them how to use Facebook, not have them get kicked off of Facebook. And I, and so I was like, I know I've been a part of getting us to this point, but I've also learned a lot from getting us to this point. And so I was like, if I can't do this work
[00:23:49] inside Facebook, the company, and they started really pulling back on politics and a lot of their work at that point in time, I was like, I really just need to leave. And so I took that leap in March of 21. Yep. And so March of 21, you had an anchor client, correct? I had one, yes. The Bipartisan Policy Center hired me on a six-month retainer to help them to think
[00:24:13] through their tech and politics and their tech and democracy portfolio. So that was, and I had done a budget to know what my, you know, how much I bare minimum need to make a month. I'd been very smart with my Facebook investments and all of that kind of stuff too. So I, you know, I was lucky enough to have a bit of a nest egg that if I needed to, I could dip into around these things. But yeah,
[00:24:40] once I told people that I was becoming a free agent, then I started learning a lot about doing sales and reaching out to my network. And the work's really changed and evolved over the last five and a half years, depending upon what people need. But there were so many, you know, you had, you know, as Elon was taking over Twitter, you had newer companies like Blue Sky, TikTok was coming on the scene. You had a lot of companies that were now trying to figure out their own rules around all of
[00:25:10] this. And coming to those of us who had to do it in the first place, when we had no playbook, being like, please tell us what the playbook is. Like, what do we need to do? So I ended up being able to, rather than being inside one company and knowing that company really well, I then got to see how a bunch of different companies sort of handled this work. Fun to be an OG in the last five years. Yes. Yes, it has. It's been, and it's a little bit, you know, I remember talking to people here in
[00:25:36] July at a conference and it was all about political influencers. And the question was, well, how do we define, how do we define influencer versus journalist? How do we define political versus not? And you could just see people being like, almost wanting to cry, being like, I'm like, no, no, we got, I'm like, it's not easy, but like, here's how you can think about the trade-offs. Here's how you can think about, like, we had to do all this work. Like, you don't have to do it exactly the way
[00:26:01] that we did it, but let me save you a bunch of time and time in terms of having to research it. So you've got anchor change of the four columns and you've touched on some of this, but what came to fruition? Yeah. What, what are you doing in all those facets of your life now? Yeah. So mentorship, I, I continue to do a lot of guest lecturing at a lot of different universities.
[00:26:28] My favorite thing is I have a simulation that I take students through to be content moderators. So I take them through, rip from the headlines, ones we actually had to go through and make them decide what they would do with that piece of content. And then I walk them through the repercussions of that decision. So they might be like, oh yes, we're going to take down this post by the president of this country. I'm like, okay, what are you going to do then when your person in
[00:26:56] country gets arrested for this? And are you willing to put your colleague in jail for your values? And that's where you get the students being like, oh wait, like, so it takes it out of the theoretical and puts it into the, into the practical. So I love doing a lot of that. Still do a lot of, of mentorship and talks to folks in not only trust and safety, but like public policy land, et cetera, who are trying to think about their own things. Have also helped a lot of people get
[00:27:23] their own newsletters off the ground on Substack and stuff like that. So I've really, really enjoyed that. The voice one is probably the one I've done the most in. So mention the, you know, the newsletter. I haven't done the podcast yet this year, but I've got a lot of seasons of the podcast up and then a lot of time on the book at the moment. And then build is, I would say at the moment, like there was, like I mentioned that Integrity Institute that I helped to
[00:27:52] build, but I'm doing a lot right now of helping organizations think about how they're going to incorporate AI into their orgs. So this goes from tech companies to public affairs companies, to think tanks, to nonprofits. And so it's a bit of sort of one-on-one, like what is a good, what is a prompt? How do you think about a project? Like what files you put in a project? What are the things you could do with AI? Helping them to think through what they can build
[00:28:19] to help make their lives easier as part of this. And also while we're doing that, I'm not just building that forum. I'm kind of, I'm teaching them how to fish so they can learn how to use these tools on their own. And so that's been really fun to sort of see and watch because I have this phrase about people panicking responsibly because I felt like when AI first came on the scene, people were both being told if you use it, it's cheating, but if you don't use it,
[00:28:48] you're going to lose your job. And people were like, wait, well, which one am I? And so you could see a sigh of relief when I would talk to people. I'm like, all right, let's talk about the ethics. Like, let's talk about where your lines are. Like there's a difference between saying, write me a blog post about this topic versus you giving it 20 pages of your own notes and your own thoughts. And here's the connections you're making and asking it to help you organize it. And when you say it to folks that way, they're like, oh yeah, I'm okay with that second one.
[00:29:18] It's that first one that I, you know, I don't like, but it's hard to have that nuanced of a conversation in the public sphere. And people don't like to, nobody likes to look or feel dumb. And so a lot of people feel like, because if you read a lot of these newsletters or see what's coming out of Silicon Valley, you're like, oh my God, these people are so far ahead of me. Like, I don't know what to do. Maybe it's a lost cause. And it's like, no, no, no,
[00:29:42] it's not like we can still do that. So that's what I'm doing a lot on the build side. And then on the friends and family side, we were talking about just this past weekend, my friends and I went to the Badger Notre Dame game at Lambeau Field. My nephew just started college at UW-Stevens Point. He's studied paper science, which is, my dad was in paper science. My brother-in-law, it's a big family thing of toilet paper, paper napkins, all that, that kind of stuff.
[00:30:10] Um, so, but every summer we go fishing up in Canada for a week, um, and just being able to, and spend a lot of time with them. And the biggest thing is that spending time with them with the phone down, right? That's, that's- I was going to ask you if you still take the calls. I, you know, I don't get as many anymore. I actually turned off all notifications on my phone, every red dot, except for text messages, like a few messaging apps. Um, because I would,
[00:30:37] I would be spending so much time being like, oh my God, I got to clear out the red dots. And I was like, I don't miss it. Like, and I tell people on Slack, I'm like, if it's really urgent, send me a WhatsApp message or a text message. And it's pretty rare when that happens. And so that allows for you to not, or at least for me to not get distracted by what's coming in and being able to handle it on my own time versus other people's time. Yeah. I just got back from vacation and the past two years when we've been over
[00:31:05] abroad, I've turned airplane mode on during the day. So you start in the morning, clear out the inbox, you go to airplane mode, and then evening, one hour, just clear it, kick it back to America. Um, if you stop the notifications, you stop the brain. Um, so before we get to, um, disrupting politics, I have to ask, you know, it was in your
[00:31:32] pillars that you wanted to write a book, but what was the decision point to actually go for it? Because it's such a huge undertaking. And it was a journey to even get to that point of making that decision. So 2018 in the summer of 2018 was the first time the thought popped into my head of like, I was already a big journal or, you know, keeping a journal. Um, I'd done that since high school, but like, there was something
[00:32:00] that was like, this is a very special time. Like, just like take note of it. Right. And then when I left Facebook, I, I talked to an employment lawyer to better understand sort of the rules around all of this. And I started talking to some agents that friends introduced me to and talking to friends that had written their own books. So this is like summer of 21 that I'm doing that. And at the time
[00:32:25] the agents were like, it was very clear that they were going to want a Facebook bashing book, which is not the type of book I was going to want to write. Um, they also felt people were burnt out on Facebook coming out of January 6th and everything like that, that just the sentiment towards the company was so low that no one was going to want to buy that. The other thing I heard from everybody that I talked to that was an author, whether it was through traditional publishing or there's hybrid
[00:32:51] or self-publishing was that you need to have your own platform, like your own social media following, newsletter, email list, something. And you should expect to have to do most of the marketing yourself in, in all of this. And so I was like, okay, let's put this away for a couple of years. I'll work on the newsletter, focus on the business, focus on building all of that. And I did set little stuff along the way, like at Bipartisan Policy Center, we wrote,
[00:33:19] we wrote a brief history of tech and politics that helped do a lot of the research for the book, et cetera. And then I was like, okay, if I want this out before the midterms of 26, because I was like, I need it out kind of right before the midterms to go into the presidential. I started doing math backwards and I was like, so in 2023, I'd had a bunch. So a hybrid publisher is different in that a traditional publishing, the publisher gives the author an advance,
[00:33:48] but then the author doesn't make very much off the book until they pay out that advance. And even then you're still not making that much. It's like one, $2 a book. With hybrid, I put money up front for that. And I mean, I still only make $1 to $2 a book that way, but I had full editorial control over the book, which was really important to me.
[00:34:13] And I got to like do the content, the context and everything in the way that I wanted. And they were giving me developmental editors, a writing coach, cover design, like that part of the publishing process. And so I signed with Indigo River in February, 2024. So at this point, so I'm expecting my first meeting with my writing coach, I'm expecting them to hand me a framework. Like here's how you write a book. Congratulations. And I've been
[00:34:40] reading all the writing books, right? Like The Artist's Way, Stephen King on Writing, all of these things. And some people were like, well, just write a thousand words a day. Everybody had their own method. And it was very overwhelming. And it was very overwhelming too for me in that I had all these stories in my head, but I was like, this is my life. I don't, which one, you know, some of them are the ones people care about, but like, which ones are important, which ones aren't.
[00:35:07] And it took me most of the year of 2024 to figure out my own process of writing a book and how that was different than a newsletter. And I realized I needed to set aside a dedicated chunk of time to write it. I had visited a friend in Paris in the fall of 24, and I realized the European time zone was perfect because I do better in the morning for writing. And thus I could write while America
[00:35:35] was asleep and I wasn't getting those pings. And I wasn't feeling, I don't know if you feel phantom pings, but I still feel phantom pings where it's like, you have the notifications off, but you're like, I know people are awake. I know they're sending me stuff. Like, is there something in there? So there was just a calm about it being in Europe. And so I had met this woman on Substack, Kate Hill, who's an American. She's in her seventies, had found this 300 year old farmhouse just outside of Bordeaux,
[00:36:02] France. And she invites, she's herself as a chef. She has chefs, writers, photographers, all sorts of creative people come and be able to stay for two weeks at her place. And so she, I booked it for February of 2025. And that's when I sat down and I wrote 30,000 words in six days. So that's when, yeah, but it was, you know, I've been telling the story for so long.
[00:36:27] It was like, let's just sit down and put it on paper. And then, then, and so I felt like getting that first draft done, I was like, this was such a long process, right? Then you get into the editing process and that was a whole other, so that took a whole year as well. And then it's been most of this year design and cover edit. So even though a hybrid process is faster than traditional, it still was a
[00:36:52] very long thing to do it. But there was, there was just something in me that was like this, you have, do you ever have that feeling of like, this thing needs to get out of me? Like, I have to do it. This thing needs to get out of me. And it was like, I say this jokingly because Sarah Longwell's book today that just came out is called like, How to Eat an Elephant, like one bite at a time or something like that. And so I felt it like that. It was like, all right, I'm just doing this one,
[00:37:18] one step at a time and setting aside, knowing that I have to set aside the time to actually do the edits or stuff like that as I was going through it. And to go into the mode. I mean, it makes perfect sense to take two weeks and just like, let it all out. Did you go and sleep for like 20 hours after that two weeks? The nice thing was there is like, I would write from like nine to nine to noon, nine to one,
[00:37:43] do an hour for lunch, take a walk outside. Then I'd write from like two to five. And then by then, America's waking up and I get to open up a nice bottle of Bordeaux wine. But there was only like three euros because you're right there. And then, you know, and still, I would get to bed at 10 o'clock. And so you would get a pretty good night's sleep from it. So I actually came back feeling more rested than exhausted. That's good. So I've always appreciated that you, it's how you publicly
[00:38:12] speak. It's how you write your sub stack, the blog. It's like how to think about something. Is that how the book actually translates too? Um, yes, a little bit. It was, it's a bit more of, so I think of the book as part of an overall project rather than just its own standalone thing. Cause any book about tech that is forward looking is out of date before it's even published because of the way the publishing cycle goes.
[00:38:38] So the book is a bit more of how I thought about it, like kind of past tense, right? How I thought about it, how I was part of it, how I tried to navigate all of it. And then there's a little bit of, okay, how am I trying to navigate this now as we go into the AI era with the goal of driving people. If you want to stay like, if you want to be hearing how I'm thinking about things or like ask questions or engage, that's what the sub stacks for because that I can keep much more
[00:39:05] up to date. So we got the book for the history of it, the sub stack for sort of what's happening now. I also want to do a podcast where I want to interview people from these different eras, the Howard Dean campaign folks, the first aren't like Republican digital folks that had the first online donation and all that. Cause these stories are there, they're not, they haven't been captured. They all have them. And I realized I couldn't fit them all in my book. So I was like, okay,
[00:39:33] the book's going to be my story, but I'll do this podcast to help amplify these other voices so that we have all this, particularly the really early history. Cause we think everything stays on the internet. It doesn't from those very early days. Like it was very hard to find some of these, some of these past things. And then I also hope that leads to, you know, paid speaking gigs, gigs, consulting other things, because it's not just tech companies now having to figure out
[00:40:00] how you make these decisions with imperfect information in a super fast changing environment. Every company is going through that. Now every individual is going through it with their own career. Every manager is trying to figure it out. Okay. How do I think about this? Not only for my company, but for myself, but for my team, how do you lead through when the most honest thing you can say to somebody is, I don't know what's going to happen in the next three months. Yes. Existential overload. Yes.
[00:40:30] So you're practiced in how to question, to, to raise the question and wrestle with it. Yeah. And to, and to keep, you know, how do you prioritize, right? Like how do you think about, okay, is this a decision that has to be made in the next hour because of this thing? Is it next 10, you know, what does that look like? What are the questions to ask yourself? Right? Like
[00:40:55] there is this traffic light framework that we developed at Facebook that I learned from our product teams where you have a list of criteria on the horizontal access or on the vertical access and options on the horizontal. And you have to be really ruthless about like, you have to put the extremes, like the options where you're like, we would never do that. And it's like, that might be the case, but you got to put them on there because you got to know your spectrum of what it is that could
[00:41:21] be done. And then why are you like, what are the trade-offs? Because somebody will come to me and be like, okay, Katie, what do we, what do we do around political, political ads, for instance? Like, do we ban it? Do we do this? Do we do that? And usually my first question will be, well, what's your risk tolerance of your leadership team? Like where I go, the question is really more, where are they willing to withstand pain? Because if they're hoping that there's an answer where there will be no pain, I can't,
[00:41:49] that doesn't exist anymore. And so it reframe, I'm trying to help reframe the question and try to get folks like, there's so much stuff that I wish we would have done ahead of time in thinking through, because when you're trying to think through these things in crisis, you make what is the best short-term decision to stop the pain in that moment. And you don't necessarily think about the second, third, and fourth
[00:42:12] order effects of that. Yeah. So 10 years at Facebook, what did that decade, how does that decade inform for you how people should be thinking about the Facebooks, the metas, the big tech, as we are entering the AI era? So one of the biggest things for me, and I talk about this in the book,
[00:42:35] is that we as the citizen, we as the voter, have a role in this too. We all have our own personal agency, right? Like you might not be able to influence what any of these big companies do, but you can influence what your information ecosystem is and environment is. And I try to, at least once a year, if not twice, kind of over the course of a week, consciously think about,
[00:43:02] okay, what am I watching on TV? What am I watching on Instagram, TikTok? Like how much time am I spending on these things? And is my information consumption match what if somebody asked me what my information consumption is and what my aspiration is, would it match that? Also in terms of which tools you use, how much time you're spending on social media, what you're posting,
[00:43:27] which AI tools you use, you have agency over that. And I think that that's still very important for people to being informed consumers of what's, because so that way technology is not just happening to you. You are able to, you can't control everything, but you can have a little bit more control, I think, over that and understanding. And then you can spread that out to your community,
[00:43:52] right? Like if you're a parent to your schools, to your kids, like to your friends, to those things. And all of that, I think can have some impact. But then I think also that's at the individual level. I think at the corporate and manager level, you just can't stick your head in the sand. You just can't be like, okay, I'm going to wait and see, like, I'm going to wait and see, or I'm just going to hope that this, you know, I don't get, you know, political backlash for X,
[00:44:21] Y, and Z. I have to remind people a lot of times deciding to do nothing is in and of itself a decision and could have consequences and impact around all of that. And so it's like, and I really love how Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen have been talking about this from the Axios, because they've also been very transparent about how they're trying to think about this. And it's like, they're like, the six-month plan doesn't exist anymore. Like it's how, but the six-month plan might not exist,
[00:44:50] but I still think people's North Star hasn't changed a lot. It's just more getting used to pivoting a lot more along the way in how we get there. And that's something that if you're in a company that's been around for a really long period of time, that can be really hard for those folks to know how to operate in that kind of environment. Yeah. I remember a few years ago, someone said to me that it's no longer, I think you should still,
[00:45:18] to your point about the North Star, have like a five-year plan of what the actual goal is, but it's how you go about it. The tactics, the tools, et cetera. But I remember a few years ago, someone said, you know, we all used to work on these like election cycles and 24 and 22. And, and now it's, and then at the time they said, well, the best case scenario is 18 months, but now it's two months. I don't know. Just,
[00:45:43] I mean, I, it's interesting. Like even this book and use of AI has been a fascinating journey for me because when I signed in February 24, use of AI in the publishing industry was not being talked about very much other than like there was copyright, right? The copyright considerations. I wrote that entire first draft myself, but I, AI helped me do a lot of editing. I had it interview me
[00:46:10] because I realized there was a lot of dots I was connecting in my head that I wasn't connecting on the page. I was used to being a journalist where you didn't necessarily take the space to describe the room or your feelings or what was happening. And so I would have it interview me to help me like pull some of that stuff out. It was really helpful. It was not helpful in doing overall editing with long pieces of text. I had to make it shorter because it would repeat itself
[00:46:39] a lot. And that was in 25. They've gotten a little bit better since then, but then for copy editing, it was very helpful of finding repetitive phrases in words. Cause it, you know, we all have these writing ticks that you don't necessarily realize that you have. And so it was super helpful for me for doing that. But now as you know, when you're uploading it to various booksellers, some of them want to know if it's AI or not. And it's like, some of them have an AI assisted,
[00:47:06] some don't. And it's like, okay, there's nuance. I wanted to use my friends. My friends have a startup where they will create a model off of your face. So you can generate AI images of yourself, but it's only built off of images of you that you gave consent for. So you're not pulling in like Chachi, BT and Claude, cause they're trying to find an ethical way to do it. I try to talk about that to my publisher and they're like, no, we have a no AI policy for our cover. And I'm like,
[00:47:33] okay, but like, this is actually, you know, ethical way of, and then even with audio books, like getting it translated into other languages, Amazon will not accept audio, AI generated audio books unless you use their AI in which to do it right now. And that's even in beta. So I'm, you know, I've always loved being on the cutting edge of this stuff, but like, I was like,
[00:47:57] I wrote a piece about how I'm learning so much about what to ask about AI in generating contracts now and what you can use and what you can't use and what that should look like. Because when I signed my book contract, I had no idea to even ask these questions. These AI, yes. And the process questions. And so my book was, so going back to what we were talking about, my book is kind of like, it's been a North Star for a long time of wanting to do this. How I got there was a really
[00:48:27] long and interesting journey. And so like, I know I want to, for my business, keep building up my speaking, keep building up the thought leadership, keep building up the consulting and all of that. The specifics of what that looks like changes every two, like you said, every two months. And I'm experimenting. I'm getting much, I'm continuing to get much better at experimenting and being like,
[00:48:53] that worked, that didn't. And getting, you know, even thicker skin on that because it's, you know, it's not easy to put yourself out there. And then you're like, wait, what do people, and that's why like with the book, I'm both excited and terrified because this has been mine for so long. And now I'm like, I feel like I'm kind of just opening my heart out to the world and like, just kind of be as gentle as possible, please. You've been leaving bits along the trail.
[00:49:21] Yeah. This is just the, this is the full, this is the full. Exactly. Well, one last question before we do our two capstones. You've mentioned a couple of mentors in the moments of your career, but, you know, leadership lessons that you've learned either at the RNC or on the campaign, you've worked for great leaders, you know, what, what informed your success with you along the road and what could you pass on to others?
[00:49:51] So I'm thinking, so I'll never forget Jim Dyke was my, he was the communications director at the RNC during 04. And I remember thinking I wanted to go into government and he was like, no, you're a campaign person. And like, he was the first one where I was like, it was like, actually think about what you enjoy versus just what you think is the next thing you're supposed to do type of thing was super helpful. I learned very early on, not just with, with Jim, but
[00:50:18] throughout my career with all my, my bosses, don't just come to somebody with a problem, but come with a solution. And so I, you know, whether it was at the RNC, at Facebook, all these jobs, you know, when I said I, all these jobs didn't exist before I had them is because I saw a need, I had a desire to do that. And then I put in the work to be like, here's what I think we should, I didn't just go ask for it. And they were like, sure. I had to put together a plan, right? Like
[00:50:46] you had to show that you, you had a plan and what you could, what you could do and what that could look like. And that took a lot of work to, you know, those were six month type things, year long things to get somebody on board with that. It wasn't just one meeting in terms of doing that, but it was a lot of perseverance and learning how to build coalitions and making the case for what it is, for what it is that you, that you want to do that. I think those are, those are two big
[00:51:13] ones that have stuck with me. And I think the other thing is my dad, my dad is, was my first like mentor, I think on a lot of this. And he ran a paper mill in Green Bay for, for many, many years. And I'll never, he's, he's the one that really taught me about transparent communication with not only your, the people above you, but also your team team in that, like, make sure, you know, tell like, he's like, all anybody wants is the opportunity to have their voice be heard.
[00:51:41] So like for those, for those managing me being like, I just want to have the opportunity to share with you my, my point of view and make sure I have that opportunity. And then for those that are on my team, I will make sure they have their opportunity to do so. But then I will also promise to come back to you and explain to you why we're taking the position, like making the decision that we are and why. And if I can't tell you why we're doing something, which is usually HR related, right?
[00:52:07] I'll at least be honest about that. And that, that really builds up a lot of trust with teams so that when you do have to go to them and say, I can't tell you all the details around this, they know that you're, you're being truthful about it. Yeah. And the why is it said, the why is so important because it provides more growth because it provides the context. So you're not just assigning a task, the why and, and also in trust environments too. Yep, exactly.
[00:52:34] Um, okay. Our last two capstone questions always are the same. Where were you last on a personal or professional trip? So I guess Michigan, maybe for this one, Wisconsin. Yeah. Or Wisconsin. Um, what, what was the best meal that you had on the road? Um, and then where are you going next, either professionally or personally? So if someone wants to reach out on LinkedIn, they can give you a restaurant tip. Um,
[00:52:58] Oh, that is very good. I will say, so I was in green Bay. Um, I was so happy because I got to show people off, um, uncle Mike's. I did the Kringle. We did butter burgers at Krull's. We did cheese curds. We did spot a cow. We did Wisconsin old fashions. I, we needed a lot of Pepto-Bismol by the end of the trip, but they definitely got that full, that full, um, experience. And I don't
[00:53:24] get that all that often either. So that was, that was really fun there. Um, and then, um, I'm actually headed to Rochester soon in a couple of, um, to, um, university. So I will definitely take some Rochester, um, tips as well. Okay. Well, October 6th is when it releases. Okay. Congratulations. I mean, years in the making, 16 years probably in the making, if not before. I mean, it's a whole
[00:53:50] career, right? It's 25 years of a career. Cause that's why people are like, how long it took? I'm like, well, I had to do this stuff first and you had to write about it. Um, and so it's kind of wild that it's been all condensed down to 276 pages. Well, disrupting politics. We will link it in the show notes. Congratulations again. And thank you for the time today. Yeah. Thank you.