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.

I’ve been wanting to have Kathryn Mitchell on The Friday Reporter for a while. She’s one of those people in Washington who has earned the right to have a real opinion about one of the most consequential policy debates of our time — and she’s generous enough to explain it in terms the rest of us can understand.

Kathryn spent nearly a decade in government, moving from Capitol Hill to the Pentagon to the Department of Commerce, where she served as chief of staff for the CHIPS R&D office at NIST. She helped stand up the $50 billion CHIPS for America program — essentially from scratch. Earlier this year she moved to DLA Piper, where she now helps tech companies navigate the government landscape she used to sit inside.

This conversation covers a lot of ground. We talked about the origin story of the Chips and Science Act — passed bipartisan under Biden, now being implemented differently under Trump — and what Kathryn is watching to gauge whether the U.S. is actually getting this right. (She says we won’t know for a decade or two. But she knows exactly what signals to track right now.)

We also got into something I find genuinely fascinating: the role of relationship-building in Washington. Before you can change a policy, before you can land a government contract, before your innovation can make it out of the garage and into a lab — you build the relationships. That’s what Kathryn does every day for her clients, and she explains why it’s the foundation of everything else.

A few things I’m still thinking about from this conversation:

Her point that AI and semiconductors are “inexplicably tied” — but that AI won’t solve the physical-world challenges of building fabs, navigating permitting, or standing up domestic production. That nuance matters a lot right now.

Her career advice: “Wear your honors lightly.” Don’t aim to be the smartest person in the room. Aim to be the one who keeps learning. I’m going to borrow that one.

And her lightning round answer on Washington: “It is both a marathon and a sprint every day.” That about sums it up.

This episode drops today — wherever you listen to podcasts. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did recording it.

— Lisa

The Axios Takeover of The Friday Reporter wraps with one of the sharpest eyes on Democratic politics in the business. Holly Otterbein covers the 2028 presidential race for Axios — and she’s here to tell us why the race is already underway, even if most people aren’t watching yet.

In this conversation, Holly breaks down the fault lines fracturing the Democratic Party right now: it’s not just progressive versus moderate anymore. It’s generational, regional, ideological, and increasingly shaped by the Israel-Gaza divide. She explains why Kamala Harris is more of a 2028 factor than Washington insiders want to admit, why Gavin Newsom may be the only Democrat who truly understands the attention economy, and why the Maine Senate primary is a perfect case study in everything the party is wrestling with at once.

Holly also goes deep on a story she wants to keep digging into: AI in campaigns. Democrats, she says, are behind — and the race to shape what chatbots say about candidates may be the new search engine optimization. Plus, the quiet pivot among 2028 hopefuls on AI data centers: yesterday’s economic win is becoming today’s political liability.

And on the craft of political journalism itself — how do you stay independent when you’re embedded in the vortex of a campaign? Holly shares the advice that’s stuck with her since she started covering presidential races.

Subscribe to Axios 2028 — Holly’s Sunday newsletter — by searching “Axios 2028,” and follow her on X at @HollyOtterbein.

Madison Mills covers AI for Axios — but she came to the beat from Wall Street, and that changes everything about what she’s looking for. She spent years covering markets, interviewing Jamie Dimon and Ray Dalio, and building one of the most-read financial newsletters in the country. She knows how investors think, how they hedge, and how wide the gap is between what they say publicly and what they actually believe.

That’s the lens she’s bringing to the AI story. And the picture it reveals is one most of the tech coverage is missing entirely.

We talked about the hidden financial exposure in the AI buildout — the small-town bank loans to truckers and construction companies that don’t look like AI bets on paper, but absolutely are. We got into what Wall Street sources are telling her off the record right now about fraud risk, and why she describes those conversations as “a very scary picture.” And we dug into the trillion-dollar question she keeps putting to the AI labs themselves: when are you actually going to be profitable?

We also ended up in a really honest conversation about the jobs debate — why she’s skeptical when public companies attribute layoffs to AI, what’s actually happening with entry-level hiring, and why some of the most enthusiastic AI adopters she’s encountering are the most senior people in the room.

Madison is one of the smartest reporters working this beat. I think you’ll want to listen twice.

Find Madison at Axios — she co-authors the AI Plus newsletter Monday through Thursday — and on Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

For years, the Pentagon promised drone dominance would change everything.

Then Iran shot down an American fighter jet.

Colin Demarest has been covering the future of defense at Axios long enough to know the gap between Pentagon strategy and battlefield reality. As the author of the Future of Defense newsletter, he’s been inside the Iran conflict coverage since the first strike — tracking new weapons systems in their first real-world test, watching war costs climb past $16 billion and rising.

We get into whether drone dominance is actually delivering, what the U.S. dismissal of Ukraine’s anti-drone technology offer tells us about how Washington processes advice from allies who’ve been in the fight, and whether the defense industrial base can sustain a long war.

The future of defense isn’t theoretical anymore.

Part Three of the April Axios takeover of The Friday Reporter.

The Pentagon just tried to blacklist an AI company from all government work. Not because its technology failed — because the company refused to let its AI run autonomous weapons or surveil Americans at scale.

That’s not a contract dispute, it’s a new kind of power struggle. And it’s reshaping the entire AI industry.

Maria Curi is the AI+Government reporter at Axios and the author of the newsletter that drives tech policy conversations across Washington. She breaks down how the Defense Department is using procurement as policy — and why the stakes extend far beyond one company’s government contract.

We get into who actually controls AI governance in this administration, what the Pentagon-Anthropic standoff means for every AI lab now doing business with the federal government, and the question Maria says nobody is asking yet — but should be.

It’s Week Two of the April Axios takeover of The Friday Reporter.

Local news is disappearing. And the communities left behind aren’t just losing a newspaper — they’re losing accountability, connection and a shared sense of place.

Holly Moore is helping change that.

As Executive Editor of Axios Local, she’s leading one of the most ambitious efforts in journalism to fill the news deserts spreading across this country — and to remind audiences that what happens at city hall, in their school district and on their block still matters deeply.

We talked about what’s been lost, why it’s so hard to get back and why Holly believes local journalism isn’t just worth saving — it’s worth rebuilding from scratch.

This is a conversation I didn’t want to end.

Axios Owns April. Again. — Episode 1 of 5