Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 3: I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 4: Tracy.
Speaker 2: One of the topics that we like to talk about,
Speaker 2: but we haven't talked about it for a while, public
Speaker 2: sector tech, public sector are hiring. We've done a number
Speaker 2: of episodes on this. It's been a while though, since
Speaker 2: we've revisited this question, but it raises so many fascinating things.
Speaker 3: I remember the ones that we did with Jennifer Palca,
Speaker 3: which were fantastic and we got a good sense of
Speaker 3: some of the issues facing public technology, including I think
Speaker 3: it was seven thousand requirements in a single RFP that
Speaker 3: was at the state level. But you hear stuff like
Speaker 3: that and it just kind of blows your mind how
Speaker 3: complex the whole process of developing new technology actually is
Speaker 3: in government.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: So, and we've also Patrick McKenzie is the other one
Speaker 2: we've talked about this with, like these legacy systems, they
Speaker 2: have all of this croft or whatever, and some of
Speaker 2: its tech, and some of it's related to hiring. Everyone
Speaker 2: I feel like comes in to the public sector and
Speaker 2: they're like, why can't this look more like the private sector.
Speaker 2: But I have an observation that I thought about after
Speaker 2: the last time we talked to Jennifer, which again they're
Speaker 2: excellent conversations.
Speaker 4: We'll move the ball forward. So they're all kinds of
Speaker 4: obvious problems with the public sector.
Speaker 2: We'll get into them. That being said, and I think
Speaker 2: you had the same experience. You hear these descriptions of like, say,
Speaker 2: what's broken with the hiring process, and it's like, you
Speaker 2: know what, that sounds kind of familiar.
Speaker 4: I've experienced that in the private sector too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of these pathologies seem to exist in
Speaker 2: large organizations.
Speaker 3: I was going to say, I think it's it's endemic
Speaker 3: to bureaucracy. Yeah, right, And I remember Jennifer specifically saying that,
Speaker 3: like one of the main choke points is just the
Speaker 3: operational process of getting stuff approved or getting a new
Speaker 3: candidate through a hiring process that has been dictated by
Speaker 3: Human resources and you have to fit into certain slots
Speaker 3: or certain categories. So it's a big deal.
Speaker 2: But that's the whole dealing with HR thing and their
Speaker 2: role as gatekeepers of the hiring process. And they're all,
Speaker 2: you say, jar I love our HR people here a Bloomberg.
Speaker 2: I'm just saying some of it sounded a little bit familiar,
Speaker 2: that's all I'm gonna I'm gonna leave it at that.
Speaker 2: Some of it sounded a little bit familiar. Fair So,
Speaker 2: of course we know that the new administration. Of course,
Speaker 2: lots of people from the tech world have come to it,
Speaker 2: I think probably most famously Elon Musk and the whole
Speaker 2: Doge endeavor, which you know, we'll get into perhaps where
Speaker 2: we stand on the verdict for that, but widely viewed
Speaker 2: is not particularly transformational et CIEC. Nonetheless, a lot of
Speaker 2: like buying a lot of people from the tech world
Speaker 2: thinking about what aspect of our most dynamic industry in
Speaker 2: America can be brought into the public sector to perhaps
Speaker 2: make it a more dynamic place, maybe more efficient, maybe
Speaker 2: more effective, and a maybe a more desirable place to
Speaker 2: work for talented people.
Speaker 3: Right, and the government, the Office of Personnel Management is
Speaker 3: launching a new cross government program right to recruit top
Speaker 3: technologists to modernize the federal government. And I would just
Speaker 3: add it kind of has some new urgency because the
Speaker 3: Trump administration has identified the AI race with China as
Speaker 3: like this existential threat to the US. So you can
Speaker 3: see stuff kind of coalescing totally.
Speaker 2: Well, we literally do have the perfect guest because we
Speaker 2: are going to be speaking with the Director of the
Speaker 2: Office of Personnel Management in DC. We're going to be
Speaker 2: speaking with Scott Cooper. He's a former venture capitalist who's
Speaker 2: at Indrees and Horowitz, so he knows all about the
Speaker 2: public world, the private world, et cetera. Literally the perfect guest. Scott,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for coming on the Outlots podcast.
Speaker 5: Well, thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.
Speaker 4: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: What is let's start from real basics, what is the
Speaker 2: job of the office the Director of the Office of
Speaker 2: Personnel Management.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a great question, and I didn't know the
Speaker 5: answer to this one before I started talking to the
Speaker 5: administration about the job either. So I think the simple
Speaker 5: way to think about it is, Look, we're the talent
Speaker 5: management organization for the federal government. So there's about two
Speaker 5: point one million federal employees roughly in the government today,
Speaker 5: and we are responsible for all policies related to people.
Speaker 5: So how do you hire, how do you fire? Performance
Speaker 5: management system so HRIT systems, And then we're also across
Speaker 5: functional organization that everything we do obviously touches all the
Speaker 5: different agencies. So we're trying to make sure that we've
Speaker 5: got consistency of policies across the government. And the simple
Speaker 5: goal in my mind is just how do we make
Speaker 5: sure we have the right people in the right jobs
Speaker 5: in the federal government. That's basically the forward articulation of
Speaker 5: what we do.
Speaker 3: Why did you decide to go from Andrewson Horowitz to
Speaker 3: what seems like, you know, something of a challenging job
Speaker 3: and possibly lower paid. You don't have to tell us
Speaker 3: your salary.
Speaker 2: But public somewhere, but I assume it lower than It's
Speaker 2: definitely lower than.
Speaker 5: A partner in a Jerisa Arty, right, right, my salary,
Speaker 5: My salary is public. Actually, in fact, you know, you
Speaker 5: know what you know when you've hit a hype point
Speaker 5: in your life when your oldest daughter, who is I
Speaker 5: won't give her age, but she is, let's say, under thirty,
Speaker 5: is making more money than I am at this day.
Speaker 5: So exactly, I'm very proud of her. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 5: great question. Look, the honest answer is it was a
Speaker 5: couple of things. One is just it was the right time.
Speaker 5: You know, I'd been an injuriesent, as you know from
Speaker 5: the Founding for sixteen years. Super proud of what we
Speaker 5: did there, and Ben and Mark were incredibly gracious in
Speaker 5: giving me this opportunity, and I really felt like this,
Speaker 5: there is an opportunity in this administration to do something differently.
Speaker 5: So you mentioned a bunch of technology people coming to
Speaker 5: the administration, there's also just a bunch of you know,
Speaker 5: business people more generally, and look, we're not going to
Speaker 5: make a mistake of applying every private sector you know,
Speaker 5: method and model to the federal government. But I think
Speaker 5: what the President has asked us to do is to
Speaker 5: think differently about things and giving us kind of the
Speaker 5: permission and the flexibility to do that. And so to me, look,
Speaker 5: I I've been around the venture capital business. You know,
Speaker 5: ultimately company succeed or fail. My lesson from the venture
Speaker 5: capital business is they succeed or fail almost entirely because
Speaker 5: of the people in the organization and the organizational structure
Speaker 5: and the culture and the incentives. It's pretty simple. And
Speaker 5: so my view is, look, why can't we learn some
Speaker 5: of those lessons and apply them as appropriate to the
Speaker 5: federal government and think about creating a culture where we've
Speaker 5: got great people who can do great stuff on behalf
Speaker 5: of the American people.
Speaker 2: So let's say, I want you to tell me about
Speaker 2: your new initiative to bring in tech talent, and also
Speaker 2: in the answer, maybe like situated within maybe what makes
Speaker 2: it different from other endeavors where you know it was
Speaker 2: the code for America Endeavor, which you know probably had
Speaker 2: some similar themes. Obviously there is the Joje experience, which
Speaker 2: I want to get into further. But talk to us
Speaker 2: about this new project. What is it and then why
Speaker 2: is it different from past efforts to infuse technology or
Speaker 2: infuse tech thinking into the government.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so let me take you through the program. So
Speaker 5: the program is called US Tech Force, So anybody who's
Speaker 5: interested can go to our x at us TESK Tech
Speaker 5: Force and find more information about it. Basically, here's the program.
Speaker 5: The goal is to bring a thousand engineers into the government,
Speaker 5: so software developers, AI experts, data scientists, product managers, so
Speaker 5: anybody who can help us basically with the job of
Speaker 5: modernizing government infrastructure. It's a two year program and we
Speaker 5: partnered with about twenty five of the largest private technology companies,
Speaker 5: private sector technology companies, i should say, And we're really
Speaker 5: trying to accomplish a couple things here. Number one is
Speaker 5: the government has a dearth of what I would call
Speaker 5: modern software expertise and modern AI technology expertise. And that's
Speaker 5: not a knock at all on the organizations, but a
Speaker 5: lot of what these big cio organizations of the government
Speaker 5: have to do as they're maintaining these massive legacy infrastructures,
Speaker 5: and so the ability to do bespoke development is quite
Speaker 5: difficult in those organizations. So this will be a vehicle
Speaker 5: to help them accelerate bespoke development across the entire government.
Speaker 5: The second problem we're trying to solve is we have
Speaker 5: a massive early career pipeline problem in the federal government.
Speaker 5: So seven percent of the federal workforce is early career
Speaker 5: let's call that less than five or seven years worth
Speaker 5: of work experience, and that compares to about twenty two
Speaker 5: to twenty three percent in the non federal sector. So
Speaker 5: by a factor of three to one, the federal government
Speaker 5: is completely failing at getting early career people into government.
Speaker 5: And if you look at the other end of the spectrum.
Speaker 5: By the way, so we've got about forty four percent
Speaker 5: of our population that's over the age of fifty, and
Speaker 5: that compares with about a third in the you know,
Speaker 5: non federal workforce. So we've got this looming problem, which
Speaker 5: is we're going to have a ton of people, you know,
Speaker 5: over the next five percent years who rightly so you know,
Speaker 5: are at retirement age and want to go do other things.
Speaker 5: And we've done very very little to actually replenish the pipeline.
Speaker 5: So this program is really intended to do that. And
Speaker 5: one of the ways we're doing that is by making
Speaker 5: it a two year program. So I don't think it's
Speaker 5: reasonable for us to go to a twenty two to
Speaker 5: twenty five, twenty seven year old person and say, decide today,
Speaker 5: do you want to commit forty years of your life
Speaker 5: to be a career public civil servant. What I'd rather
Speaker 5: do is expose them to the problems in government, let
Speaker 5: them actually have a great experience, and you know what,
Speaker 5: like we should convince them over time how great this is.
Speaker 5: But you know what, if the end of the two
Speaker 5: year period they want to go back to the private sector,
Speaker 5: that's great. And that's why we've lined up all these
Speaker 5: private sector partners who are going to actually help run
Speaker 5: a job fair for us and make sure that we
Speaker 5: have kind of greater a connectivity between the public and private sectors.
Speaker 3: Can you talk a little bit more about why historically
Speaker 3: government roles have not been that desirable for tech workers.
Speaker 3: Is I assume you diagnosed the problem before you came
Speaker 3: up with a solution. But in your view, what is
Speaker 3: the main choke point or market failure that is leading
Speaker 3: to difficulty for the government to recruit the kind of
Speaker 3: people that it wants to.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I think there's a couple of problems. So
Speaker 5: one is it's I think the fundamental issue, quite frankly,
Speaker 5: in my mind, is a messaging problem, which is I'll
Speaker 5: give you an anecdote. Right, So, when I first came
Speaker 5: into office, I've been in the office about six months now.
Speaker 5: How I met with one of my managers in the
Speaker 5: organization who said, hey, you guys are ruining things. And
Speaker 5: I said, what do you mean? And by you guys,
Speaker 5: she meant DOGE. And you know, I'm not part of DOGE,
Speaker 5: but obviously, look I come from you know, I know
Speaker 5: lots of those people. And I said, well, how are
Speaker 5: we ruining things? She said, well, our whole value prop
Speaker 5: to employees has been come to the federal government and
Speaker 5: have lifetime employment. And I said, oh my gosh, you're
Speaker 5: not going to like my answer, because number one, I'm
Speaker 5: going to tell you like, that's a myth and a
Speaker 5: lie that people have been telling you. There is no
Speaker 5: such thing as lifetime employment. And two, I said, look,
Speaker 5: that's the most that's the worst least compelling kind of
Speaker 5: narrative that I've ever heard that I'm going to go
Speaker 5: tell some twenty five year old like, that's the value proposition.
Speaker 5: I'm coming to work with the government. So number one
Speaker 5: is like, we have to change the narrative. The narrative
Speaker 5: in my mind is come work on the toughest, biggest,
Speaker 5: most complex problems. You know, do some public service, but
Speaker 5: then give yourself career options and you know what, if
Speaker 5: you want to go to the private sector after that,
Speaker 5: you know, God bless you, that's a perfect thing to do.
Speaker 5: So that's part of the problem. The other problem is
Speaker 5: the nature of what happens in government. And you know,
Speaker 5: you know Jen Polka, as you guys mentioned in your intro,
Speaker 5: who's like brilliant on this stuff, diagnosed it per which
Speaker 5: is so much of what government does is it's a
Speaker 5: compliance based culture. Right, It's not just literally you know
Speaker 5: that we follow laws, but if I do something wrong,
Speaker 5: you know, I'm worried about getting an inspector General report,
Speaker 5: or I'm worried about a GAO report, or I'm worried
Speaker 5: about some congress person hauling me in front of their
Speaker 5: committee to testify about stuff. And so the short answer
Speaker 5: as a result is like, we have a zero risk
Speaker 5: based culture inside of government. There's no concept of you know,
Speaker 5: you know, you guys mentioned I came to the venture
Speaker 5: capital world. You know, in that world, look, we take
Speaker 5: crazy risk because all we're doing is trying to maximize
Speaker 5: upside opportunity. Now, I'm not proposing we do that in government,
Speaker 5: and I've been using the term measured risk as a
Speaker 5: better way to try to describe it in government, but like,
Speaker 5: we have to kind of change the culture and enable
Speaker 5: people to think about the upside opportunity that comes from
Speaker 5: taking modest amounts of risk. And unfortunately, particularly on the
Speaker 5: technology side of things, that has not been the case.
Speaker 5: And so again, if you're a young, you know, early
Speaker 5: career person, I think you want to do cutting edge stuff,
Speaker 5: you want to learn things, you want to kind of
Speaker 5: go out a little bit on the risk curve. And
Speaker 5: right now, at least historically, government has not been in
Speaker 5: a minimal place for that.
Speaker 2: Well, you mentioned that the pitch to work in the
Speaker 2: federal government should not be this is lifetime employment. That
Speaker 2: that is like, that's not healthy for a lot of reasons,
Speaker 2: and I think a lot of people can intuitively agree
Speaker 2: with it. On the other hand, you know, you mentioned
Speaker 2: the sort of like in the VC world, you're always
Speaker 2: shooting for the right tail, but when you're talking about
Speaker 2: the layoffs or lifetime employee means like you're cutting off
Speaker 2: the left tail. Just from a money standpoint, the employee
Speaker 2: of the federal government never has the chance to experience
Speaker 2: a right tail outcome. The highest paid worker in the
Speaker 2: federal government, it's a very decent salary, but you know,
Speaker 2: in the compared to very even moderately successful people, you know,
Speaker 2: the most senior successful person in the federal government will
Speaker 2: make less very often than just sort of like someone
Speaker 2: who's hung around Google for a long time. So, like,
Speaker 2: how much of a problem actually just comes down to
Speaker 2: that simple monetary fact.
Speaker 5: So, look, there's no question that compensation is relevant, but
Speaker 5: I actually think we've been overstating the nature of that problem.
Speaker 5: So let me give you a couple of thoughts on it. So,
Speaker 5: first of all, part of the reason why we're focused
Speaker 5: on early career here is at least the pay gap
Speaker 5: between private and public is a little bit more manageable,
Speaker 5: and it just kind of it as themptotes like massively
Speaker 5: as you go farther through your career. So yes, it's
Speaker 5: totally unrealistic, you know, unless you're rich and you just
Speaker 5: decide you want to do something different. It's totally unrealistic
Speaker 5: for us to think we're going to compete against like
Speaker 5: a VP at Google for a senior level executive person
Speaker 5: in the government. So that's not even in my mind, like,
Speaker 5: that's not even worth worrying about, basically, because like the
Speaker 5: pay gap is just crazy and nobody's going to do that.
Speaker 5: But my experience, at least, and you know, you guys
Speaker 5: have been around a lot of organizations, is look, there
Speaker 5: are some people who are purely kind of profit maximizing,
Speaker 5: and that's great. It's not I'm not have no normal
Speaker 5: objections to that, obviously, but my sense is that's actually
Speaker 5: a relatively small minority the population of employees. I think
Speaker 5: most employees come to work every day because they're being challenged,
Speaker 5: they're learning, they have career development opportunities, they work for
Speaker 5: someone who cares about their career and they feel like,
Speaker 5: you know, they can be rewarded when they actually do
Speaker 5: good stuff. They feel like they're held accountable Like that,
Speaker 5: to me is a culture that we can create inside
Speaker 5: of the federal government. And you know, even if it
Speaker 5: means yes, in a short period of time, you are
Speaker 5: going to have like a you know, remuneration challenge relative
Speaker 5: to the private sector. But this is also why again
Speaker 5: just to go back to it, This is why I
Speaker 5: think this whole narrative of come, you know, work for
Speaker 5: the federal government for forty years, to me is just crazy.
Speaker 5: Like we should have an open idea that you can
Speaker 5: go back and forth being the public and private sector.
Speaker 5: And you know what, if you have points in your
Speaker 5: life where you think, like profit maximization is the most
Speaker 5: important thing, then yes, like you should go to the
Speaker 5: private sector because the government's never going to deal with that.
Speaker 5: But I think we just have to break this. Like,
Speaker 5: to me, this dichotomy that there's one way to go
Speaker 5: or the other makes no sense. So look, in the
Speaker 5: perfect world, I'd wave a magic wand and say we
Speaker 5: pay everybody like what they can get paid to Google.
Speaker 5: But that's not realistic, and quite frankly, you know, there's
Speaker 5: there's zero support in Congress for that. The final thing
Speaker 5: we can do, though, just to Joe, to give you
Speaker 5: one last perspective, is we can do things inside of
Speaker 5: OPM to mitigate some of the challenges on the compensation
Speaker 5: side of things. So let me give you a very
Speaker 5: specific example. So, as you probably know, there's a GS
Speaker 5: schedule which is like everybody gets paid, you know, GS
Speaker 5: one through fifteen. These are different levels today. All those
Speaker 5: GS schedules are driven off of tenure and they're driven
Speaker 5: off of degree requirements. So if I don't have a
Speaker 5: college degree and I haven't worked for ten years, no
Speaker 5: matter how good I am, I can't get to a
Speaker 5: GS fifteen level in government. In my mind, that's just silly,
Speaker 5: quite frankly, right, that's the opposite of a merit based culture.
Speaker 5: You all will remember, since we've talked does, right, You'll
Speaker 5: remember I won't mention his name, but you know there's
Speaker 5: a doge engineer with a very colorful name that turger
Speaker 5: listeners have heard of. You know, when all the kind
Speaker 5: of exciting dose stuff was happening, there was a quote
Speaker 5: from an administration official who said this guy's terrible. We
Speaker 5: never would have hired him because he didn't graduate from
Speaker 5: college and he didn't have whatever five years of work
Speaker 5: experience coming here. And in my mind, like, I literally
Speaker 5: wanted to pull my hair out when I heard that,
Speaker 5: because I'll say, that's the craziest thing in the world. Like,
Speaker 5: if this guy is capable of performing at a GS
Speaker 5: fifteen level, why should we care about what his tenure
Speaker 5: is or whether he has a college degree. And so
Speaker 5: one of the things we're doing inside of OPM is
Speaker 5: we're going to eliminate all requirements and all tenure requirements
Speaker 5: in the pay schedule and so as a result, if
Speaker 5: someone is doing awesome, like we can hire them at
Speaker 5: the appropriate level. So some of the pay gap problem
Speaker 5: is not just a numerical problem, it's a leveling problem.
Speaker 5: And I think we can solve that even in the
Speaker 5: absence of congressional legislation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I remember Jennifer again said something very similar about
Speaker 3: like the best coder in America or a young guy
Speaker 3: who had won this huge coding competition and then couldn't
Speaker 3: get hired by the government because you didn't take all
Speaker 3: of the official boxes.
Speaker 4: Kind of crazy specific role.
Speaker 3: Yeah, since you mentioned doing awesome. How do you actually
Speaker 3: go about evaluating the performance of a tech worker in
Speaker 3: government and how do you figure out which people you
Speaker 3: actually want to hire in terms of talent?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so the short entwer is we have to do
Speaker 5: it differently from how we do it today. But let
Speaker 5: me give you the very specific So on the front end,
Speaker 5: historically we have relied on self attestation of skills in
Speaker 5: order to hire people into the federal government. So I
Speaker 5: apply for a software engineering job and I get this
Speaker 5: application where I check boxes and I say, you know what,
Speaker 5: I'm an expert in Perl programmer, I'm an expert in
Speaker 5: you know, AI technology, And I literally checked the boxes.
Speaker 5: And that is the basis on which, like, my application
Speaker 5: gets through or doesn't get through to the next round
Speaker 5: of screening.
Speaker 3: I assume this is at some point, though, right, there's
Speaker 3: some sort of contency test.
Speaker 5: So in many roles there's not. And the reason is,
Speaker 5: let me give you APEC. There's a historical reason for this.
Speaker 5: So way back when we used to have literally a
Speaker 5: civil service exam, it was called PACE was the name.
Speaker 5: I forget what the acronym stands for, but it's PACE
Speaker 5: that existed until nineteen eighty and there was a lawsuit
Speaker 5: at the very tail end of the Carter administration, very
Speaker 5: beginning the Reagan administration, first Reagan administration, where there was
Speaker 5: desparate It was a disparate impact claim basically, so the
Speaker 5: kind of test results on this exam were disproportionately negative
Speaker 5: for minority applicants versus majority applicants. And so in nineteen
Speaker 5: eighty one, the government entered into a consent to free
Speaker 5: where basically they banned essentially the use of these examinations.
Speaker 5: And from nineteen eighty one until literally four months ago,
Speaker 5: we were living under that consent decree. Nobody ever revisited it,
Speaker 5: and as a result, every agency was terrified to use
Speaker 5: any kind of actual merit based assessment for hiring because
Speaker 5: they were afraid they would run a foul of this
Speaker 5: consent degree. Luckily for us, we revisited it along with
Speaker 5: the Department of Justice, and we got out of the
Speaker 5: consent decree. We actually found the original plaintiff actually was
Speaker 5: still alive, Levano was his name, and we actually, you know,
Speaker 5: finally said okay, forty three years later, we think it's
Speaker 5: time to get rid of this consent degree, and they
Speaker 5: agreed to that. So for the first time ever, now
Speaker 5: we have kind of avoided we've eliminated the risk that
Speaker 5: the agencies worried about, which is if I use a
Speaker 5: technical assessment to judge somebody in the employment process, I
Speaker 5: might get sued, you know, under some type of disprit
Speaker 5: impact theory. So we are now doing that. So number
Speaker 5: one to answer your there was a long way to
Speaker 5: answer your question. But so like, the way we're going
Speaker 5: to evaluate people is they actually have to demonstrate merit.
Speaker 5: So there's lots of private sector tests as you probably know,
Speaker 5: code signal, all these other things, and every single private
Speaker 5: sector company uses where they're like, hey, basically, let me
Speaker 5: give you a coding test if you're applying for a
Speaker 5: software development job, and then we can level you and
Speaker 5: figure out are you a you know, GS five or
Speaker 5: GS fifteen based on that, and then we can do
Speaker 5: secondary stuff like obviously an in person interview or other
Speaker 5: things to make sure that you know, you're actually a
Speaker 5: good fit for the organization. So that's kind of thing.
Speaker 5: The more when we have to do on the front end,
Speaker 5: does that make sense at least?
Speaker 3: And kind of you know, yeah, it totally does. It
Speaker 3: is kind of wild to think that, you know, last
Speaker 3: year or a few years ago or just four months ago.
Speaker 3: Joe and I could literally say that we're like, I'm
Speaker 3: hunting experts.
Speaker 4: I'm a ten X engineer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right, and apply I know, I'm a cokeball expert.
Speaker 3: Cobyl COBBYL.
Speaker 5: I can never write cobol expert, would be very much
Speaker 5: in demands. Coball, cobyl, Cobalt is Cobalt is the mineral.
Speaker 5: There's a cobalt mineral.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I never know if it's cobble.
Speaker 3: I want to say cobble because it's like cobbled together
Speaker 3: on across IT systems.
Speaker 5: Oh, that's actually really good. Okay, I didn't think about that.
Speaker 2: Okay, actually, but on the second part of Tracy's question, Okay,
Speaker 2: so once they're in, once they're in the office, and
Speaker 2: again because it's not a for profit entity, like, how
Speaker 2: do we current how does the government currently go about
Speaker 2: evaluating how someone did this year? And what would be
Speaker 2: the optimal way for the government to evaluate how productive
Speaker 2: someone there there is? And they're saying, and this is
Speaker 2: a problem in private sector too. I'm pretty sure that
Speaker 2: if you went into facebooks or Google, et cetera, they
Speaker 2: would also not have a clean answer of like which
Speaker 2: software engineer is more productive or core attributed more value
Speaker 2: than the other one.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, you're upsote. Right. Look, this is not a
Speaker 5: problem that's unique at the government. But what I think
Speaker 5: is unique to the government is historically, basically everybody gets
Speaker 5: an A in government. To give you a perspective, most
Speaker 5: agencies rank people one through five at the end of
Speaker 5: the year on their performances, one being the worst and
Speaker 5: five being the best. And if you look historically over
Speaker 5: long periods of time in government, about eighty plus percent
Speaker 5: of people get ranked A four or five. Okay, so
Speaker 5: meaning basically, you know, everybody is in you know, kind
Speaker 5: of like Globa gone and well well above average. And
Speaker 5: then about zero point two percent of federal workers get
Speaker 5: ranked A one or two, meaning that you're performing below expectations.
Speaker 5: So number one, like, we've had no system that actually
Speaker 5: recognizes like outstanding performance and quite frankly unfortunately, no system
Speaker 5: that actually holds accountability on the other end of the spectrum.
Speaker 5: We're changing that. We've already put out regulations for the
Speaker 5: most senior executives what are called the sees, which are
Speaker 5: the most senior executives, where we effectively. For the SEES
Speaker 5: have put out a regulation that requires a forced distribution,
Speaker 5: so a cap of thirty percent of fours and five rankings,
Speaker 5: which we think is appropriate to actually distinguish people, you know,
Speaker 5: in terms of their performance. So number one is we
Speaker 5: got to reform the system, period and we're working on
Speaker 5: that and you'll see more regulation from us. In that
Speaker 5: number two, you're actually right, which is look like sometimes
Speaker 5: the metrics are hard, right, so you know, you don't
Speaker 5: really want to measure like lines of code that somebody
Speaker 5: produces because obviously all code is not created equal. But
Speaker 5: you know, what I think does work in the private
Speaker 5: sector is, look, managers are responsible for their frontline workers.
Speaker 5: They meet with one on one, they have you know, weekly,
Speaker 5: they have a sense of what they're doing. They provide
Speaker 5: feedback along the way, like I think the performance management
Speaker 5: ongoing process works better in the private sector. In the
Speaker 5: public sector, what I found is instead of managers, we
Speaker 5: use the term supervisor, which I think actually unfortunately does
Speaker 5: a disservice to what the job is. Like, I don't
Speaker 5: think the job is necessarily supervision. The job is to manage,
Speaker 5: meaning are they working on the right stuff, are they
Speaker 5: doing the right things. Do they need training for this
Speaker 5: kind of stuff, And historically we haven't done a great
Speaker 5: job on that. So one of the things that we
Speaker 5: just did, for example, is we just rolled out a
Speaker 5: brand new training program that's mandatory for all supervisors specific
Speaker 5: to this issue on performance management, so to teach them
Speaker 5: like what does a one on one look like? You know,
Speaker 5: those of us who go up in the technology industry.
Speaker 5: The first book that we were all assigned to read
Speaker 5: was Andy Groves Only the Paranoids Survive, which I still
Speaker 5: think is a fantastic book. I don't know if y'all
Speaker 5: have read it. It's actually a really all I have read it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, keep going, Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean basically, he literally talks about like what is
Speaker 5: a one on one meeting with your you know, team member,
Speaker 5: Like what should it look like? And it's like, you know,
Speaker 5: it's very much like management one on one stuff. But
Speaker 5: I think the understands or is like, most people don't
Speaker 5: get that training, and so as a result, we have
Speaker 5: had a performance management culture where we have inflated grades
Speaker 5: and we have basically once or maybe maximum twice a
Speaker 5: year people actually get feedback. So it's totally unfair to
Speaker 5: the employee and it's also just unfair to top performers
Speaker 5: who are not actually getting differentiated reviews and differentiated compensation.
Speaker 3: I was just about to ask, just to be one
Speaker 3: hundred percent clear, compensation is going to be tied to performance.
Speaker 5: Correct, Okay, correct, yes, all right, yes, And again it's
Speaker 5: not that it hasn't been before. But the problem is
Speaker 5: if everybody's a four and a five and you have
Speaker 5: a finite bonus pool, then you're peanut buttering out the
Speaker 5: bonuses basically. So like, yeah, just you know, Tracey, just
Speaker 5: give me a sense. Like when we gave guidance on
Speaker 5: this sees these very senior executives, what we said is
Speaker 5: a thirty percent cap. We also said we think sixty
Speaker 5: percent of the bonus based compensation should go to those
Speaker 5: that thirty percent of the individuals. And you know that's
Speaker 5: a you know, we can argue whether it's sixty percent
Speaker 5: or eighty percent, but the point is, like, let's let's
Speaker 5: actually really pay per performance, and let's differentiate compensation as
Speaker 5: a posed to giving everybody a three hundred or five
Speaker 5: hundred dollars bonus, which in the scheme of things, has
Speaker 5: little retentive or incentive value for employees.
Speaker 3: So you mentioned project management just then, and I was
Speaker 3: looking at some of the press releases and documentation that
Speaker 3: you put out as part of this program, and there
Speaker 3: really is an emphasis on getting project managers, and I
Speaker 3: am very curious why that particular role seems to be
Speaker 3: in short supply, because I know someone who moved from
Speaker 3: a completely different industry into project management for a graphic
Speaker 3: design company. They had never done it before, and it
Speaker 3: didn't seem that hard.
Speaker 5: Okay, So I'm going to distinguish between project management and
Speaker 5: product management, which is I hope we wrote product management
Speaker 5: in the in our in our Stone.
Speaker 3: So did I miss read it?
Speaker 5: Well, I don't know that you didn't matter. We may
Speaker 5: have put it in there. But what we need is
Speaker 5: what I would call a product manager job, which is,
Speaker 5: you know, a product manager, in my mind, is basically
Speaker 5: somebody who sometimes they ca from an engineering background. They
Speaker 5: might actually have been developers themselves, but they're kind of
Speaker 5: people who sit between the engineering organization and the end
Speaker 5: user customer and they listen to the customer and say, great, okay,
Speaker 5: tell me your problems. What are you trying to solve?
Speaker 5: And their job is kind of to translate that into
Speaker 5: ultimately in tech speak, what we'd call a PRD a
Speaker 5: project requirements document for the engineers to develop against. So
Speaker 5: like that's the role we need. So in a well
Speaker 5: functioning engineering organization, you have developers, you have designers, uh,
Speaker 5: and then you have product managers. And the product managers
Speaker 5: probably aren't puting their hands on the keyboard actually you know,
Speaker 5: you know typing, you know, ones and zeros, but they
Speaker 5: are literally that go between between like the end user
Speaker 5: customer and then the requirements that ultimately drive the development process.
Speaker 4: It's interesting.
Speaker 2: I feel like that's something I've really come to appreciate
Speaker 2: in working for a large organization, how valuable translation skills are,
Speaker 2: because you have this one part of the room that
Speaker 2: knows one very specific thing, and then there's these generalists
Speaker 2: on the other end that have some vague thing, and
Speaker 2: that person who could sit in the middle and talk
Speaker 2: to both sides is clearly a very is a valuable person.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 2: So you mentioned, like the one thing that comes up
Speaker 2: a lot in a common theme on our podcast is
Speaker 2: like the importance of this sort of like tacit organizational knowledge.
Speaker 2: Things that are like cannot simply be written down. They
Speaker 2: do not exist necessarily in one person's head. They're just
Speaker 2: things that are sort of collectively known process knowledge and
Speaker 2: so forth. How do you think about that in light
Speaker 2: of the fact that these are two year roles and
Speaker 2: you know, again maybe in some cases someone will do
Speaker 2: two years and then continue their career in the federal government,
Speaker 2: but that but you know, especially given the pay gap
Speaker 2: that emerges specifically for technologists, like that's probably you're taking
Speaker 2: on the one area where the pay gap probably gets
Speaker 2: the widest over time. How do you think about fostering,
Speaker 2: fostering and maintaining that kind of knowledge, especially given what
Speaker 2: you laid out at the very beginning, which is this,
Speaker 2: I don't know if crisis is the right word, but
Speaker 2: these looming retirement of all these people that do have
Speaker 2: years of accumulated knowledge about how things really work.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so you're absolutely right, which is, look, we have
Speaker 5: to balance kind of the two year time period against
Speaker 5: the need for actually the organization being able to maintain
Speaker 5: these systems once people leave. So let me just give it.
Speaker 5: I'll give you a real world example, Joe, just so
Speaker 5: you have it because it might be helpful. So in
Speaker 5: my organization o PM, we own the retirement process and
Speaker 5: retirement for you know, several million and new attempts. Basically
Speaker 5: who have you know, kind of completed their professional careers
Speaker 5: and we are completely it's a very I won't go
Speaker 5: into the details I want for you, but there's literally
Speaker 5: it's a like a ridiculously manual paper based process where
Speaker 5: for years we have had people literally filling out paper
Speaker 5: applications as recently as the beginning of this year and
Speaker 5: sending paper by postal mail and all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 5: And we literally have a mine in Bowyers, Pennsylvania, which
Speaker 5: is very fun if you ever want to come see it,
Speaker 5: where we have hundreds of millions of file cabinets of
Speaker 5: people's retirement records.
Speaker 4: So we'd love to I would love to.
Speaker 2: I've always wanted to go like those those like huge
Speaker 2: like under mountain like big.
Speaker 4: Yes, that's literally very lo it is. I I'd love to.
Speaker 3: Check warehouse for government.
Speaker 2: I've always wanted to check out on these places. We'll
Speaker 2: arrange that, all.
Speaker 5: Right, we're gonna we're gonna work on that one together. Anyways.
Speaker 5: I bring that up to say, Okay, so look, we've luckily,
Speaker 5: uh we've had a small team of developers Joe Jebbia,
Speaker 5: who you guys may recognize the name. He's a co
Speaker 5: founder for Airbnb. He joined the administration even actually before
Speaker 5: I got there, but he's been he's been kind of
Speaker 5: housed in o PM, and he has like a team
Speaker 5: of like three developers and you know, a design person,
Speaker 5: and they've been completely redesigning this retirement application. So we
Speaker 5: now have what we call ORA, the Online Retirement Application,
Speaker 5: where instead of paper, people actually can go, you know,
Speaker 5: in the year twenty twenty five onto a you know
Speaker 5: computer and and you know, type in their Apple their information,
Speaker 5: upload their documents, it gets routed to the HR and
Speaker 5: it's you know, it's you know, vastly better than what
Speaker 5: we've had. So I bring this up to say, look,
Speaker 5: I think this is me is a good example, which
Speaker 5: is all those people are going to disappear at some
Speaker 5: point in time, and then the responsibility for that application
Speaker 5: is going to shift to the existing CIO organization within
Speaker 5: OPM to maintain it, to integrate it with other systems.
Speaker 5: And so a requirement of being able to do that
Speaker 5: development process for Joe and his team is, Look, they
Speaker 5: have to do documentation, they have to do training of
Speaker 5: the team. Look, I think it's not an insurmountable problem.
Speaker 5: I just think it means, as part of your process,
Speaker 5: you just have to anticipate that there is going to
Speaker 5: be a time where people are going to disappear. And
Speaker 5: quite frankly, it's a smart thing to do anyways, because
Speaker 5: we just know and look, this happens in private companies
Speaker 5: all the time. Look people's average tenure in private companies.
Speaker 5: I can tell you in Silicon Valley it's way less
Speaker 5: than four years, is what the average tenure of an
Speaker 5: engineer is. So these are not new things. They are
Speaker 5: new things to the government, which is this idea of
Speaker 5: kind of knowledge capture and knowledge management, you know, kind
Speaker 5: of in light of the fact that people might not
Speaker 5: be there for their entire career. But I think it
Speaker 5: just means, as we've designed this program that we have
Speaker 5: to have the appropriate level of documentation, of integration of
Speaker 5: source code notes and all those things that are you know,
Speaker 5: you would do in a normal circumstance to recognize that.
Speaker 5: Now look at Joe in the perfect world. I hope
Speaker 5: people love it and they're like, wow, this is this
Speaker 5: is exactly where I want to spend the rest of
Speaker 5: my life, and that's awesome. Want to do that like
Speaker 5: we want to keep them in government, but you know,
Speaker 5: I think we'll also have to deal with the practical
Speaker 5: realities that you know, the current generation of you know,
Speaker 5: people are not thinking about you know, three, five, ten
Speaker 5: year you know, employments basically think things are much more
Speaker 5: clearer than that.
Speaker 3: What are you doing to streamline the operational side of
Speaker 3: the process, because I imagine you mentioned culture before. If
Speaker 3: the pitches come work for government, it's important, but you're
Speaker 3: going to be lower paid and you're going to have
Speaker 3: to constantly deal with paperwork and put together you know
Speaker 3: RFPs that have seven thousand requirements and things like that.
Speaker 3: That that's a tough sell to someone who's used to
Speaker 3: the whole move fast and break things culture.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So anyways, let me just be totally clear, which
Speaker 5: is we are not going to move fast and break
Speaker 5: things because we can't quite do that. In government. We
Speaker 5: can move faster than we currently do, and we can
Speaker 5: afford to take some risk, but we generally don't want
Speaker 5: to break things because you know, people do need to
Speaker 5: get their Social Security checks and you know, the IRS
Speaker 5: needs to actually make sure you get your tax refunds.
Speaker 5: So but it's a great it's a great question so look,
Speaker 5: there's a couple of things that we're doing both inside
Speaker 5: and outside this program. So outside the program more generally,
Speaker 5: one are the big things that OPM is driving along
Speaker 5: with OMB, you know, kind of the offseome management budget
Speaker 5: is we're working with all the agencies to basically what
Speaker 5: I would call do headcount planning and reshape the priorities
Speaker 5: for the organization. So there's a huge amount of government
Speaker 5: is very good about adding things to the plate, and
Speaker 5: they're very bad about actually ever taking anything off. So
Speaker 5: every time something new comes down from Congress, we add
Speaker 5: you know, thousands of more people, We add stuff to
Speaker 5: the plate. And then we have this list now of
Speaker 5: twenty things, probably five of which we've been doing for
Speaker 5: twenty years, and quite frankly, nobody even remembers while we're
Speaker 5: doing them anymore. They've just now become like, you know,
Speaker 5: embedded into our culture. So part of the exercise in
Speaker 5: order to kind of make the throughput faster and to
Speaker 5: make sure that an engineer isn't like sitting on their
Speaker 5: hands dealing with you know, crazy bureaucracy, is we have
Speaker 5: to go back and look at prioritization and actually remove
Speaker 5: services that are no longer statutory, and they're no longer
Speaker 5: valuable to the American people. So that's the exercise we've started.
Speaker 5: That's the exercise that we're kind of is ongoing right now.
Speaker 5: But the purpose of that will be not only to
Speaker 5: make sure that we're hopefully spending our money in the
Speaker 5: right places, but will also be to remove layers that
Speaker 5: ultimately slow down the actual work product of government. The
Speaker 5: second thing we can do is, as I mentioned, we're
Speaker 5: really trying to kind of change the performance management culture
Speaker 5: in government and eliminate barriers to people being able to
Speaker 5: move through the organization and change the idea that you
Speaker 5: can't take any risk. I mean, obviously that's a big
Speaker 5: cultural challenge that we have in government. So everything from
Speaker 5: down to like what your performance plan look like. Your
Speaker 5: performance plan should have, you know, efficiency, it should have
Speaker 5: you know, some measured amount of risk taking in there.
Speaker 5: So things that again will speed the pace of deployment
Speaker 5: and makes sense. The third thing we're doing is and
Speaker 5: this is again you guys asked me, you know, how
Speaker 5: is this program different from other programs. As we hire
Speaker 5: these thousand engineers, ultimately they will live in various agencies. Right, So,
Speaker 5: doctor oz At CMS says, you know, it's like, look,
Speaker 5: I need seventy five engineers to do you know, kind
Speaker 5: of important projects there or obviously Department of War you know,
Speaker 5: have lots of stuff, so they're going to live in
Speaker 5: those agencies. But what we're not going to do, which
Speaker 5: is historically where I think these programs has failed, is
Speaker 5: if you drop these teams just into the blob that
Speaker 5: is the federal government, they're going to have a terrible
Speaker 5: experience and they're going to get lost, and they'll their
Speaker 5: two years will literally go by without them actually having
Speaker 5: accomplished anything. So our whole goal with this is keep
Speaker 5: these teams together. So when you know what I'm what
Speaker 5: I'm hoping from doctor Oz is there's going to be
Speaker 5: a team of seventy five engineers who are going to
Speaker 5: be a team, and they're going to work on the
Speaker 5: projects that he thinks are the most important projects. And
Speaker 5: of course they have to integrate with the existing CIO
Speaker 5: organization because so much of what we do has integration
Speaker 5: back ends and all that kind of stuff. But we've
Speaker 5: got to make sure that that happens because otherwise, you know,
Speaker 5: you hire a random you know, intern to and you
Speaker 5: PLoP them into ananization and they get swallowed by the beast. Basically,
Speaker 5: it's just it's understandable why that happens. So we've got
Speaker 5: to think about the organizational implications of bringing people in
Speaker 5: and make sure they're set up for success. And you know,
Speaker 5: my expectations are and certainly the conversations that I've had
Speaker 5: with all the agency heads are that they understand that,
Speaker 5: and they understand that for them to achieve what they
Speaker 5: want to do, they have to create the organizational structure
Speaker 5: that enables these guys to actually do what they're there for.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that this is another thing that we
Speaker 2: could probably say from firsthand experience, is you come to
Speaker 2: a big organization, You've spent a long time, maybe the
Speaker 2: first year of just getting to know the lay of
Speaker 2: the land, who are the people that you should talk to,
Speaker 2: et cetera. It's a real challenge. It's a real challenge
Speaker 2: being effective of actually accomplishing anything.
Speaker 4: The amount of time. I mean, I've been a bloomberg and.
Speaker 3: There's all experience.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're still I've been here ten years. That there
Speaker 2: is like who do I call it? It's just like
Speaker 2: the nature of large organizations. I want to talk about
Speaker 2: you know, people who you say, Okay, like you, we
Speaker 2: need to do something about the fact that all these
Speaker 2: people are going to retire, and there is this pipeline
Speaker 2: et cetera. Set it aside, optimal levels of how big
Speaker 2: the federal workforce should be, et cetera. One thing that
Speaker 2: I could see as a bit of a problem about
Speaker 2: maintaining careers if federal workers do not feel that they
Speaker 2: are respected in their jobs. And there is a rhetoric
Speaker 2: that is that you hear it's like the federal governments
Speaker 2: they you know again some people it's like, oh, they're leeches,
Speaker 2: they're part of the deep state. They're all look and
Speaker 2: they spend money on this, and that's ways. But even
Speaker 2: that spending looks like what I observe is spending in
Speaker 2: the private sector, et cetera. And then you know, there's
Speaker 2: at least from this administration, there's been these sort of
Speaker 2: seemingly from the outside and probably from the inside, capricious
Speaker 2: layoffs or arbitrary layoffs. And so if you respect this workforce,
Speaker 2: then how how could you possibly have just like cut
Speaker 2: so arbitrarily. I mean, these are this is what it
Speaker 2: seems like when you think about building a talent pipeline.
Speaker 2: Do you think think about this dimension and do agree
Speaker 2: with the sort of premise of the question that it's
Speaker 2: a challenge that no one is going to work at
Speaker 2: a place if their boss is to some extent sort
Speaker 2: of think they're you know, do not respect them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So the short answer is yes, like absolutely, this
Speaker 5: is a critical part of making sure that the federal
Speaker 5: government is an attractive place for the people who are
Speaker 5: there and also the people who you know, we're trying
Speaker 5: to recruit in. So I got a million thoughts. Let
Speaker 5: me try to see if I can keep them in
Speaker 5: the time we have remaining. So I'll give tell you
Speaker 5: one thing. So just to back up, as you know,
Speaker 5: I've worked at entries in Horowitz and Ben Horowitz, in
Speaker 5: my mind, is one of the best CEO's, best managers
Speaker 5: that I've ever learned from. And I had worked for
Speaker 5: him for literally ten years prior, so for twenty six
Speaker 5: years of my life I've had the benefit of learning
Speaker 5: from Ben. The most important thing I learned from him
Speaker 5: is exactly what you describe, which is when you have
Speaker 5: restructurings in companies, basically you have broken trust with your employees. Okay, so,
Speaker 5: particularly in the startup context, right, Like, you know, when
Speaker 5: we were in startups, we personally recruited every single person
Speaker 5: into that company, and we told them how we were
Speaker 5: going to conquer the world and how awesome we were
Speaker 5: going to be, and we believed that we weren't like
Speaker 5: lying to them. But it turns out we were wrong.
Speaker 5: Like the market change, we didn't have to no money
Speaker 5: and and you know, we had to live through this
Speaker 5: in our loud cloud opsware days we laid we had
Speaker 5: to lay a bunch of people off, and so you've
Speaker 5: immediately broken trust with those employees. So you are from
Speaker 5: that day forward basically in a situation where you have
Speaker 5: to rebuild that trust. Right, so you have to demonstrate
Speaker 5: to them that you know it wasn't capricious and arbitrary,
Speaker 5: and that you're not like lying to them in a jerk,
Speaker 5: but that you actually do care about them. And it
Speaker 5: turns out, through no fault of their own, their next
Speaker 5: door neighbor who sat in the cube next to them
Speaker 5: unfortunately lost their job because like we couldn't afford to
Speaker 5: pay them anymore. So I say that only to say, look,
Speaker 5: I recognize that very clearly. I understand that. And if
Speaker 5: you literally go back to like the testimony I gave
Speaker 5: when I went through my hearing, I said that very splicit.
Speaker 5: I think that's important. All that being said, I think,
Speaker 5: look the way to think about. Let me just give
Speaker 5: you the context of the headcount reductions that happened in
Speaker 5: the government, because I think there is in my mind
Speaker 5: at least some misinformation out there that I think is
Speaker 5: worth talking about. So it'll give you some numbers. You know,
Speaker 5: you've got a very sophisticated audience. As at the end
Speaker 5: of the year, roughly about three hundred and seventeen thousand
Speaker 5: people will have exited the federal government. Okay, we started
Speaker 5: the year at about two point four million ish roughly
Speaker 5: in terms of civilian These are civilian employees, by the way,
Speaker 5: so forget about the armed services, because my organization doesn't
Speaker 5: touch that. About two point four million civilian employees will
Speaker 5: be roughly two point one million civilian employees as of
Speaker 5: December thirty first of this year. At the same time,
Speaker 5: we hired about sixty six thousand employees. So on a
Speaker 5: net basis, call it two hundred and seventy you know,
Speaker 5: two hundred and sixty two hundred and seventy thousand roughly
Speaker 5: kind of net departures from the government. If you go
Speaker 5: back to that three hundred and seventeen thousand, number, ninety
Speaker 5: two and a half percent of those people took some
Speaker 5: form of voluntary retirement. So we had this thing called
Speaker 5: DRP Deferred Resignation Program that was the back that was
Speaker 5: literally half of it. One hundred and fifty four thousand
Speaker 5: people took that, which was an eight month seference that
Speaker 5: we gave to people to voluntarily leave government. And then
Speaker 5: the rest of it was where there are some other programs.
Speaker 5: The acronyms aren't relevant for your for your listeners, they're
Speaker 5: called Viera and VISA if people want to look them up,
Speaker 5: but those are other voluntary kind of you know, retirement programs.
Speaker 5: And then only seven and a half percent of people
Speaker 5: were removed through either rifts or what we call probationary employees,
Speaker 5: which is in the government, if you've been if you've
Speaker 5: been there for one or two years, it depending upon
Speaker 5: the job. You're kind of the closest thing to an
Speaker 5: app will employee that we have in the federal government.
Speaker 5: And so that we're about seven thousand of those probitionary
Speaker 5: employers who were removed in about seventeen thousand people who
Speaker 5: were ultimately riffed, you know, reductions and forced as a
Speaker 5: result of restructings. So I say that number one, not
Speaker 5: to I want to be totally clear with your listeners,
Speaker 5: not to make light of any of this. Obviously those
Speaker 5: are real people with real jobs and real families and stuff.
Speaker 5: But the numbers, again, you know, kind of I think
Speaker 5: bear out what we tried to do in the government,
Speaker 5: which is tell people that things were changing, tell people
Speaker 5: that you know, we do have a different view as
Speaker 5: to what, you know, we think the federal government should
Speaker 5: be doing, and give people an opportunity to voluntarily say, okay,
Speaker 5: this is not what I signed up for, which is
Speaker 5: a very noble thing to do, and say, you know,
Speaker 5: it's time for me to go do something different. So
Speaker 5: ninety two and a half percent of the people who
Speaker 5: left the government did so because they decided, you know,
Speaker 5: this wasn't an environment they wanted to be in. So
Speaker 5: that being said, now, look I totally agree with you,
Speaker 5: which is we have to demonstrate to the people that
Speaker 5: are there and to the people who are coming in
Speaker 5: that you know, we obviously care about them and that
Speaker 5: we think they do valuable work. And I think that's
Speaker 5: the case for the vast fast majority of people there
Speaker 5: do great work, like any organization. Yes, there are some
Speaker 5: people who are not doing great work, and we have
Speaker 5: a system that makes it very hard to hold them accountable.
Speaker 5: We're going to try to fix that. But look, that's
Speaker 5: true of any organization. So I don't think it doesn't
Speaker 5: make sense that kind of demean the broad federal government
Speaker 5: based upon the work of a few. But we have
Speaker 5: to do that, and we also have to be honest
Speaker 5: and transparent with our people, which I believe very strongly,
Speaker 5: and is Look, we can't be all things to all people,
Speaker 5: Like we're running two trillion dollars deficits. That's not sustainable.
Speaker 5: And so look, we've got to be smarter. We have
Speaker 5: to use technology to find ways to improve efficiency. We
Speaker 5: have to think about if we're doing twenty things, are
Speaker 5: all twenty of them still required? Do they still add value?
Speaker 5: Because ultimately we're stewards of the taxpayer dollars, Like this
Speaker 5: is not our money we're spending, and so I think
Speaker 5: it's incumbent upon everybody. And this is the message that
Speaker 5: I'm trying to get across to my team and to
Speaker 5: the rest of the government. Is efficiency doesn't mean just
Speaker 5: cutting cost. Efficiency means are you thinking about delivering a
Speaker 5: better service but doing so you know, at or below.
Speaker 5: So like what you do today, because you're thinking about
Speaker 5: organizational changes, you're thinking about technology. Like to me, that
Speaker 5: is just like quite frankly required of anybody in any
Speaker 5: organization to do. And so that to me is like
Speaker 5: what I'm trying to convey to people. And yes, that
Speaker 5: means that there may be some jobs that are impacted
Speaker 5: because of technology, but those things are going to happen,
Speaker 5: whether you know kind of you know, we want them
Speaker 5: to happen or not. The question is do we actually
Speaker 5: set up the workforce and do training and do all
Speaker 5: the kinds of things we need to do to make
Speaker 5: sure that people have opportunities in light of what is
Speaker 5: a very very rapidly changing, you know, technological market.
Speaker 3: So I get that part of the problem that you're
Speaker 3: trying to solve is an operational one. This idea of
Speaker 3: like a COBOYL programmer who's been there for decades and
Speaker 3: he retires and walks out the door, and no one
Speaker 3: knows how to do what he was doing, or no
Speaker 3: one understands the system that he's basically had control over
Speaker 3: for ages. But at the same time, you know, we're
Speaker 3: talking about a decent amount of turnover a lot of
Speaker 3: new employees. If this goes the right way, how are you,
Speaker 3: I guess, guiding for safety. Are there any sort of
Speaker 3: like institutional guardrails that you're putting in so that the
Speaker 3: government doesn't actually end up breaking things?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, look, there are you will hopefully appreciate
Speaker 5: this bill. Look, there are a ton of institutional guardrails.
Speaker 5: You know. In my mind, like the problem is we
Speaker 5: have too many institutional guardrails. And again, you know, rational
Speaker 5: people may disagree with me, but you know, I can
Speaker 5: just tell you, like the entire culture of everything we do.
Speaker 5: Any everybody I've talked to in government and luckily we've
Speaker 5: had lots of kind of impact on making change ear on,
Speaker 5: everybody is like, we can't do that because of X, right,
Speaker 5: And the answer is either because like it's statutory and
Speaker 5: the honest answers when you dig and dig and dig
Speaker 5: the realities it's not statutory, Like we've built up this
Speaker 5: like urban myth over time that something is statutory, or
Speaker 5: as I mentioned, because like I'm terrified that I'm gonna
Speaker 5: get a GAO report, an inspector General report, or a
Speaker 5: congressional inquiry. And like, we we have built such a
Speaker 5: compliance culture that we are just literally like unable to
Speaker 5: do anything that actually is kind of modern and you know,
Speaker 5: forward thinking in terms of government. And so this is
Speaker 5: what I'm this is what I'm trying to do. And
Speaker 5: as I told you guys from the beginning, like, yes,
Speaker 5: this is not the private sector. We're not going to
Speaker 5: take crazy risks. We're not going to like go like
Speaker 5: put everything on black, you know, in the casino. But
Speaker 5: we can have a rational conversation, which is okay, like
Speaker 5: what are the risks we're taking and what's the upside.
Speaker 5: So if you'll give me a minute, let me give
Speaker 5: you a very very tangible example for your listeners. So
Speaker 5: I mentioned to you that we handle retirement services and
Speaker 5: it's a very manual process, and so like it takes
Speaker 5: us a really long time to get people formally retired.
Speaker 5: So you quit from you know, you retire from the
Speaker 5: government on September thirtieth. In the current process, you know,
Speaker 5: it takes sixty ninety one hundred and twenty days sometimes
Speaker 5: for you to actually get a check because we have
Speaker 5: this ridiculous, manually paper process that takes forever to for
Speaker 5: us to calculate what are you actually entitled to and
Speaker 5: to make sure you're getting the right money and all
Speaker 5: that stuff. So that's a huge burden on retire reach. Right,
Speaker 5: You've been getting a paycheck every two weeks for the
Speaker 5: last forty years, and now I'm going to tell you,
Speaker 5: like sorry, like go manage your cash flow some other
Speaker 5: way while I'm doing this, Like, that's terrible in my mind,
Speaker 5: and it's a complete disservice and completely disrespectful to people
Speaker 5: who are retired with the government. So we have a
Speaker 5: process in the Retirement Services thing called interim pay right,
Speaker 5: which is as the name sounds, right, The idea is, okay,
Speaker 5: can we get you some money on an interim basis
Speaker 5: that may not be one hundred percent accurate, but at
Speaker 5: least helps bridge this gap between you when you retire
Speaker 5: and when you get your actual annuity check. Okay. So
Speaker 5: going into and then the couple this with we've got
Speaker 5: this massive You know, we have had a lot of
Speaker 5: exits in government. So the three hundred and seventeen thousand
Speaker 5: I mentioned, not all of those are retirees, but like
Speaker 5: on average people, we have about one hundred to one
Speaker 5: hundred and fifty thousand exits a year, so we're you know,
Speaker 5: more than double the number. So and as a result,
Speaker 5: there's more than double the number of retirees that are happening.
Speaker 5: So you've got this terrible papal process like massive volumes,
Speaker 5: and we're just going to make life miserable for all
Speaker 5: these people who can't get money. So I asked the team.
Speaker 5: I said, okay, how many people go through interim pay today?
Speaker 5: This is kind of pre are change, and it's about
Speaker 5: like percent of people. And I was like, well, what's
Speaker 5: the problem. Layer like, well, that's how we've always done it,
Speaker 5: so you know, again, part of the answer was statutory,
Speaker 5: which it's not statutory. And they're like, well, there's huge
Speaker 5: risk to the system because if we pay somebody more
Speaker 5: and then they die between the time we paid them
Speaker 5: their interim payment and we get their actual annuity, there
Speaker 5: may not be any assets left into the estate, and
Speaker 5: so we might compromise the fidelity of the trust fund. Okay,
Speaker 5: Now keep in mind, this is a one point two
Speaker 5: trillion dollar trust fund that is actually cashful, a positive.
Speaker 5: So among trust funds for retirement. It's actually fairy rare.
Speaker 5: But we earned two and a half percent on government
Speaker 5: treasuries a year, which is horrendously bad because we're only
Speaker 5: allowed to invest in government treasuries but not with Spain.
Speaker 5: That it's actually still pet cashul the positive and fully
Speaker 5: funded like almost in any any circumstance. So we finally
Speaker 5: went through the math, and I said, let's go through
Speaker 5: the math, and let's assume, you know, we get it
Speaker 5: wrong x amount of time and all this sudden stuff.
Speaker 5: And we did a bunch of math, and I said, look,
Speaker 5: if we're wrong one hundred percent of the time, it
Speaker 5: could cost us a couple million dollars over payments at
Speaker 5: one point two trillion dollars trust fund. But we can
Speaker 5: shrink from ninety to one hundred and twenty days the
Speaker 5: time somebody gets a payment to either zero to seven
Speaker 5: days if we put more people through this interim pay process.
Speaker 5: So in my mind, like this is just the most
Speaker 5: obvious thing to do, and we are doing it by
Speaker 5: the way we decided to do it. But like it's
Speaker 5: a great example, at least in my mind, of where
Speaker 5: we have so ingrained in the culture that risk, any
Speaker 5: kind of risk is bad without actually people being willing
Speaker 5: to have the conversation to say, Okay, like what is
Speaker 5: the cost of that risk relative to the upside opportunity
Speaker 5: that that taking that risk entails. And I'm perfectly happy,
Speaker 5: you know, I told them, I said, look, you don't
Speaker 5: need to protect me if it turns out some congress
Speaker 5: person wants to yell at me because like, I took
Speaker 5: a modicum of risk in order to like make you know,
Speaker 5: hundreds of thousands of retirees lives better and not have
Speaker 5: to like take loans out after they've given their career
Speaker 5: service to the federal government. Like, I'm totally fine defending that.
Speaker 5: I think that's a perfectly rational answer. So that, to
Speaker 5: me is the issue.
Speaker 2: I have one least question, and maybe I'll sort of
Speaker 2: ask you a little bit to put your VC hat on,
Speaker 2: maybe because maybe you will go back to VC when
Speaker 2: this level is over. But who knows someone who knows
Speaker 2: a lot a lot about technology. So we had an
Speaker 2: episode recently with Tyler Cowhen we talk about one of
Speaker 2: the weird things, Yeah, is that you know, the AI.
Speaker 2: We haven't even really talked about AI. So this's my
Speaker 2: AI question. AI the tech make you know, makes your
Speaker 2: jaws drop when you see it. On the other hand,
Speaker 2: the impact so far on the economy or the real
Speaker 2: world is sort of muted. It maybe is like you
Speaker 2: might have, given the capabilities, you might have expected more
Speaker 2: more revolutionary change. And his thesis that he put forth
Speaker 2: was like, we're really not going to see that sort
Speaker 2: of meaningful, impactful diffusion of the tech until we have
Speaker 2: organizations that to some extent are built ground up from
Speaker 2: AI that you know, yes, you can maybe get some
Speaker 2: productivity gains here and there by putting AI into some
Speaker 2: existing workflow, but that the real breakthroughs will come from
Speaker 2: whether it's companies or so forth, that are truly AI
Speaker 2: native from day one. I'm curious, you know, when you
Speaker 2: think about you know, again going back to the VC world, A,
Speaker 2: does this feel intuitive to you that the real deployers
Speaker 2: will be AI native And then does that have any
Speaker 2: implications for like, we're not going to have a revolution,
Speaker 2: I guess hopefully at the at the federal level, are
Speaker 2: not going to have a complete destruction and starting over.
Speaker 2: Does that have any implications then for thinking about how
Speaker 2: AI will be diffused within federal processes?
Speaker 5: Yeah? So obviously, Yeah, Tyler is a brilliant guy, so
Speaker 5: far from me to disagree with him. But let me
Speaker 5: give you just a couple thoughts on what he said.
Speaker 5: So look, I guess I generally agree with most of
Speaker 5: what he says, which is, and this is true by
Speaker 5: the way I think of adoption of most new technologies,
Speaker 5: which is, we go to the common use cases and
Speaker 5: we think about incrementality as the first thing to do it.
Speaker 5: So if you go way back when Mark Andresen told
Speaker 5: me this, so if it's if it's made up, I'll
Speaker 5: blame him. You know, when when we when we first
Speaker 5: when we first had movies, you know, actual like you know,
Speaker 5: moving pictures, they were just plays basically that people filmed, right,
Speaker 5: so like they weren't like producing them, they weren't new content.
Speaker 5: It was literally just we said, Wow, we have this
Speaker 5: cool thing called a camera. Let's film a play and
Speaker 5: then go in a thing. Now it's obviously that's not
Speaker 5: that relevant to this conversation, but my point is just
Speaker 5: like we tend to go to these very common incremental
Speaker 5: use cases for things. And so look, I believe that
Speaker 5: if you look at any major fortune five hundred company,
Speaker 5: I guarantee you that every single board conversation is what
Speaker 5: the heck are you doing about AI? And how do
Speaker 5: I get three to five to seven percent greater EPs
Speaker 5: growth relative to last year because you can fix my
Speaker 5: customer support problem or stuff like that. So I think
Speaker 5: that's what's happening right now. I do agree that, Yes,
Speaker 5: what often happens is then there will be a new
Speaker 5: generation of companies And we see this in the venture
Speaker 5: capital world too already. Which is the most obvious use
Speaker 5: cases that people did is there's a ton of companies
Speaker 5: who have customer support applications for AI, and there's a
Speaker 5: ton of companies who have you know, how do we
Speaker 5: help lawyers read documents better using AI? And that's great
Speaker 5: and those companies are fantastic, but the real breakthrough is
Speaker 5: going to be yes, like when someone says, Okay, we're
Speaker 5: not just gonna make salesforce dot com more efficient, but like,
Speaker 5: we're just going to rethink customer relationship management with an
Speaker 5: AI first mentality, and like, the AI should know who
Speaker 5: my customers are. It should anticipate what I want to do,
Speaker 5: and it should send me emails and texts and say, like,
Speaker 5: you haven't talked to this person in five weeks and
Speaker 5: I just saw that they you know, spoke at this
Speaker 5: conference and they talked about this, and you know you're
Speaker 5: not following up on it. So that's where we will
Speaker 5: get and I have no doubt we will get there,
Speaker 5: quite frankly. And look, I'm an optimist by nature. You
Speaker 5: have to be to be in the venture capital business.
Speaker 5: But yes, I would agree with him generally. I think
Speaker 5: that's right. What does it mean for the federal government?
Speaker 5: Very simple, which is that if the private sector is incremental,
Speaker 5: the federal government's going to be like, you know, a
Speaker 5: hundred x incremental relative to a hundred x less incremental.
Speaker 5: I guess I would describe it, but that's in my mind.
Speaker 5: That's okay. Like, so again I've told everybody in my team,
Speaker 5: I'm not asking you. I don't want you to go
Speaker 5: build like the twenty forty AI plan because we have
Speaker 5: no idea what the heck that's going to look like.
Speaker 5: That's a total waste of our time. What I want
Speaker 5: you to do is look at a process you do
Speaker 5: today and figure out can you use an AI tool
Speaker 5: to help you get three, five, ten percent greater performance
Speaker 5: out of your organization? Right, So we do a ton
Speaker 5: of I'll give you very simple say, we do a
Speaker 5: ton of regulation writing obviously, because you know that's what
Speaker 5: we're ultimately in the business of government is producing regulation,
Speaker 5: and we're about to put out a regulation. We got
Speaker 5: forty thousand public comments on this regulation. We literally assigned
Speaker 5: each one of those forty thousand comments to a person
Speaker 5: to read and to draft a response to. Now, to me,
Speaker 5: that's just insane, right, And I'm not saying that like
Speaker 5: the AI, we should just like the AI should do it.
Speaker 5: But like, clearly AI is very good at you know, summarization,
Speaker 5: at you know, helping people think about stuff like that's like,
Speaker 5: that's all. If we did that, like, we would unleash
Speaker 5: so much creativity and opportunity to government if we just said,
Speaker 5: take the very basic stuff we're doing today and use
Speaker 5: your you know, companion, chat, GPT or XAI, whatever your
Speaker 5: favorite tool is, and just you know, eke out a
Speaker 5: little bit of productivity. So anyway, that's how I think
Speaker 5: about it. So, yes, the government is not gonna we're
Speaker 5: not gonna transform government overnight. But what we're trying to do,
Speaker 5: and what the US Tech Force is trying to do,
Speaker 5: is can we get the right people in here who
Speaker 5: understand those things that we start to drive ourselves forward
Speaker 5: so we don't wake up five years from now and
Speaker 5: find that we're the last dinosaur basically, and you know
Speaker 5: the world has passed us by.
Speaker 3: So you sort of mentioned it just then, But can
Speaker 3: you talk at all about what kind of platforms you're
Speaker 3: using currently or what kind of models, because I you know,
Speaker 3: I'm sure some people would find it very ironic if
Speaker 3: the federal government was using deep seek or something like that.
Speaker 3: And I'm curious whether you lean towards like an open
Speaker 3: source thing or a closed source thing because of privacy concerns.
Speaker 5: Right now, the honest answer is we're at the very
Speaker 5: very early stages, which is most of what people are doing.
Speaker 3: It.
Speaker 5: Literally, this may make your head spin because it made mine.
Speaker 5: Until about a month ago, we did not even have
Speaker 5: chat GPT on our government desktops. So, like you know,
Speaker 5: I literally would sit there on my phone and ask
Speaker 5: chat GIPT questions myerson my personal phone, just to be
Speaker 5: totally clear on my personal phone, and then I would
Speaker 5: go back to my work laptop and do stuff. So
Speaker 5: as of about a month or two ago, we actually
Speaker 5: have chat GPT, we have Xai. Now we might even
Speaker 5: have We not even have a third one. I don't
Speaker 5: even know. And of course we're the government's a big
Speaker 5: Microsoft client. So we have my soft copilot for an
Speaker 5: individual user in government that's basically the state that is
Speaker 5: like the state of you know, kind of advanced automation basse.
Speaker 5: We literally have it on our laptops. Now for the
Speaker 5: development work that's happening. You're absolutely right, which is, Look,
Speaker 5: there are major security issues that we all have to
Speaker 5: think about. Look, I'm a big believer as you can
Speaker 5: imagine an open source and certainly our firm entries in Horowitz.
Speaker 5: You know, you've seen Mark make lots of public comments
Speaker 5: about this. So I think the government will use open
Speaker 5: source and can appropriately do so. Clearly we're not going
Speaker 5: to use like the deep seat commercial version, but you know,
Speaker 5: so much of that stuff is open source, and if
Speaker 5: you bring it in you know, to your environment, and
Speaker 5: you make sure that you get the right security standards.
Speaker 5: You know, there's tremendous value to develop on open source.
Speaker 5: But I would just just to give you a sense
Speaker 5: of where we are, I would say we're very very
Speaker 5: early in that journey in government.
Speaker 3: I have one last, very quick question, which is how
Speaker 3: much of a constraint is drug testing on new hires nowadays?
Speaker 5: You know, I wish I had a really smart answer
Speaker 5: to your question. I don't know the answer to that.
Speaker 5: I have not seen it. It hasn't I say, it
Speaker 5: hasn't shown up as some like big red flag where
Speaker 5: we're losing people in the recruiting pipeline because of that.
Speaker 5: But the very honest answers, I don't know, but I
Speaker 5: will find out.
Speaker 4: I think it's a good que we should.
Speaker 2: I'm actually very curious about drugs in the workforce in general.
Speaker 4: We should do more on that.
Speaker 2: Scott Cooper, thank you, no for real, for real, I
Speaker 2: you hear about it. My bark was talking about how
Speaker 2: hard it was to hire because he's like everyone is sort.
Speaker 5: Of if somebody I would just say, Joe, if somebody,
Speaker 5: if somebody clips that and puts it on Joe is
Speaker 5: very I'm very I'm very curious about drugs in the workforce.
Speaker 5: That's gonna be a great click.
Speaker 2: We'll get our producer, we'll clip it. Well, we'll get ahead,
Speaker 2: We'll get ahead of that one. Scott Cooper, thank you
Speaker 2: so much for coming on od Laves. That was really
Speaker 2: really appreciate your take.
Speaker 4: Your time.
Speaker 2: Very helpful, and I would love to stay in touch
Speaker 2: and hear more about how these projects evolved during your tenure.
Speaker 5: Right, thank you both for your time. I appreciate it.
Speaker 4: I thought that was great.
Speaker 2: I love I love these comm conversations. I mean because
Speaker 2: I think they're just I guess the sociology of them. Yeah,
Speaker 2: like that is what these conversations are really about. And
Speaker 2: especially you know, we talk about some of these pathologies
Speaker 2: that replicate from the public to a private sector, et cetera,
Speaker 2: that are both like, they're really interesting sociological questions.
Speaker 3: The Department of War needs to get a bunch of
Speaker 3: ping pong tables and tree snacks to recruit the most
Speaker 3: cutting edge tech workers, right.
Speaker 4: With a macha bar, that's right.
Speaker 2: I wonder, I wonder if they're experiment We should have
Speaker 2: asked that whether they have a macha on tap at
Speaker 2: the office and whether that could move the dial.
Speaker 3: But it's also interesting, again, there's that cultural sociological aspect,
Speaker 3: but it does apply to large bureaucracies and private organizations.
Speaker 3: And I think everyone at some point in their lives
Speaker 3: will experience this type of unnecessary paperwork, whether it's in
Speaker 3: their jobs or when they're applying for a driver's license
Speaker 3: or whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know what like this is like where I
Speaker 2: have like the sympathy for like sort of like modern life,
Speaker 2: large complicated things. How can the individual with our I mean,
Speaker 2: how could we do How could you navigate insurance? How
Speaker 2: can you navigate all this stuff? It like drives you
Speaker 2: crazy at any scale. I do think, you know, And
Speaker 2: this came up also in our conversations with Jennifer, and
Speaker 2: I believe it that there is a lot there is
Speaker 2: more to a career than pay, right, But I also
Speaker 2: think that's like a very real issue, especially when you're
Speaker 2: talking about the tech workforce specifically, where we know you
Speaker 2: could just make an absolute fortune, and in many cases
Speaker 2: you can make it a fortune as a very young person.
Speaker 2: You'll be in the right company at the right time,
Speaker 2: and many overnight multimillionaires in Silicon Valley. So it's not
Speaker 2: just the late stage, although that's where it becomes the
Speaker 2: most obvious. I really the pay is a very tricky situation.
Speaker 5: Well.
Speaker 3: I do think the emphasis on time constraints for the
Speaker 3: tech force that's really interesting, and that's kind of a
Speaker 3: shift again, a cultural shift from the way people have
Speaker 3: perceived government jobs for a long time. And I can imagine,
Speaker 3: you know, like if you were a young tech worker,
Speaker 3: maybe you're having trouble getting into the private sector. You know,
Speaker 3: just last year, you know, two years ago, remember there
Speaker 3: was the wave of like layoffs. Yeah, and now everyone
Speaker 3: is recruiting because of AI.
Speaker 2: But well, I mean no, I mean you're to your point,
Speaker 2: like there are even like there are many talented tech
Speaker 2: people if they're right there on the sweet spot, even
Speaker 2: though that's not what it used to be.
Speaker 3: So I can imagine, like you go to the government
Speaker 3: for two years and it's it's an educational process, and
Speaker 3: you can take some of that knowledge away from you
Speaker 3: when you then go into the private sector. Although that
Speaker 3: also opens up the question of rotating doors between the
Speaker 3: government and private companies, but maybe that's a topic for
Speaker 3: a different day.
Speaker 2: I just and I do think there is and it's
Speaker 2: not just this administration, but I think it's been very notable,
Speaker 2: at least with some parts of the administration or some
Speaker 2: parts of the rhetoric. There's this sort of like vilification
Speaker 2: of bureaucrats, which is again of sort of a long
Speaker 2: time thing, Like bureaucrats has sort of been a kind.
Speaker 4: Of a pejor, I mean a beer word.
Speaker 2: Anyway, I do think that's an issue. And I also think,
Speaker 2: you know, like maybe we should just bring back civil
Speaker 2: service exams everywhere and if you could know seriously and
Speaker 2: if you could pass this test, you can get a job.
Speaker 2: Like it's Lindy, you know, it's like famously, you know,
Speaker 2: go back thousands of years in China.
Speaker 3: It's like the Big I was about to say, do
Speaker 3: you know about the Chinese civil service exams? Those are
Speaker 3: so interesting and crazy? Shall we leave it there?
Speaker 4: Let's leave it there, all right?
Speaker 3: This has been another episode of the Oud Loots podcast.
Speaker 3: I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy.
Speaker 2: Alloway and I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at
Speaker 2: the Stalwart. Follow our guest Scott Cooper, He's at s Cooper.
Speaker 2: Follow our producers Kerman Rodriguez at Kerman Arman, dash O
Speaker 2: Bennett at dashbod at kil Brooks at Keil Brooks. From
Speaker 2: where Oddlots content go to Bloomberg dot com Flash Odd
Speaker 2: Lots were the daily newsletter and all of our episodes,
Speaker 2: and you can chat about all these topics twenty four
Speaker 2: to seven in our discord Discord GG slash oddlines and.
Speaker 3: If you enjoy od loots, if you want us to
Speaker 3: go to Pennsylvany to look at a bunch of file cabinets,
Speaker 3: then please leave us a positive review on your favorite
Speaker 3: podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber,
Speaker 3: you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free.
Speaker 3: All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel
Speaker 3: on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.