00:48:42 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
Tell me the 20 things you're working on. Like, which ones are really important? Which ones should we not be doing? We never take stuff off the plate in government. We just keep adding. [00:48:51] S0: This like inertia. It is. It's insane. [00:48:54] S1: It's crazy. [00:48:55] S0: The, the, the story of you oversee retirement benefits And for all, we were on the phone the other day and you told me the story I just could not believe. I was like, do you understand? Like we were talking about the fact that, hey, you know what, America is full of like dynamic, really smart, high agency young people that don't even know this is a path and this is an opportunity. Maybe we should just shine a light on this and maybe beneficial regardless of what you think. If you have a choice between a better functioning government or not, course, you're gonna choose that. It has to do with the people that are in it, like in any other organization. But then you're like, do you know about the mind full of 4,000,000 pages of documents and like... [00:49:33] S1: 400,000,000. I mean, 100,000,000. [00:49:36] S0: And I'm like, Scott, what the hell are you talking about? [00:49:38] S1: I know. [00:49:39] S0: Can you tell the story?
00:49:40 · Scott Kupor
[00:49:40] S1: This is a great this is a great story. So... And and credit to Elon, right, because Elon made this story a real one. So we, OPM, manage retirement. So roughly 100,000 to 200,000 people retire every year from government. And when you retire, there's a whole process, right? You have to fill out a bunch of paperwork. It has to go to your HR department who has to confirm it. One of the like literally crazy problems by the way in government is we do not have the canonical history of your government service until you literally decide to retire. So most people to this day are in government for thirty plus years. They go to different agencies over time. Each of those agencies has different HR systems, has different payroll systems. And so I cannot look at, you know, David's record and say, hey, you spent five years here and you spent this. Literally part of the retirement process is we have to create that record. Now we're changing that, by the way, one of the other big projects I'm gonna come back to the mind is we are consolidating the entire HR IT system in government from 120 different systems into a single system, and we're gonna go from spending $2,000,000,000 a year to $40,000,000 a year. We're literally gonna save 95% by actually getting to a single system, and we will now have, like, the record of David Senra that you can look at every day and see all the stuff. So, anyways, you wanna retire. What you did prior to last year was you literally filled out paperwork, you put a fucking stamp on it, you mailed it by mail to your HR department, okay? They did their stuff, they put a stamp on it, they mailed it to a payroll department, which is different by the way in the federal government from the HR department, payroll is a totally separate thing, And then they've... The final piece is they mail it literally to an underground mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania. Now nobody probably here has ever heard of Boyers, Pennsylvania. It actually happens to be in Butler County, which is where, you know, the president's assassination attempt in July, I guess, of '24 was. It's what you would expect, like, you know, rural Middle America looks like. The federal government happens to be actually one of the largest employers out there. So people go to work every day in an underground mine that used to be an actual working limestone mine.
00:51:33 · Scott Kupor
It was since turned into basically a storage facility, but you can't get in there without going through massive security. You can go down in the mine and there are literally people driving golf carts around in with limestone walls. And so it shows up here and then literally we have individuals, 800 people in my retirement service organization who take that paper, they read the paper, they make a bunch of manual calculations, and then they give you a retirement check. That process historically takes anywhere from three months at the low end to twelve plus months to do. Partly because we go back and forth, and if you forgot to sign your paper, I literally will snail mail it back to you, ask you to sign it, and that will introduce another one month delay in the process because like literally, like it's sitting there waiting for you. Elon identified this and rightly so, he's like this is insane. He teamed up with a guy named Joe Gebbia. Gebbia is a co founder of Airbnb who's now running this national design studio. And they started this project at OPM before I got there and then I picked it up, which is how do we automate this process? Today, fully automate the process. So now you never actually send a piece of paper. In fact, we declared last day of paper in the on June 30. So we will never receive another piece of incoming paper into the mine. Everything's online, which it should be in the year 2026, which is this is not rocket science, right? Like you should be able to fill up an online application for your retirement. And as a result, we can reduce the processing time today just with the first iteration of this by more than 50%. My goal is like, we're gonna be able to reduce this like by 90%. Our commitment is if you give us an application that's electronic, that's healthy, within fifteen days, like you should literally have like a full retirement check. Like it should not be any harder than that. So we're doing that. Now we have 400 existing million existing pieces of paper from all the people who retired prior to last year, basically, who call us up sometimes and they say, hey, my spouse died or my child needs to be added to my insurance, whatever the hell stuff.
00:53:18 · Scott Kupor
So literally, if you call our call center today, we send what we call a runner, this is actually a job classification of the mine, goes into the mine, pulls a file out of a electronic file cabinet. Sorry, not electronic file, but an actual virtual physical file cabinet, some of which date to like the 1950s. It's a great... I'll show you some pictures after that. And they bring it to the person who adjudicates it, then when they're done, they literally return the thing back to its thing. Like, we are now... We've just purchased two massive, like digitization machines. I don't know what you call them, like literally like scanners that like take up an entire room. It's like a mainframe computer. And, you know, from this day forward now, every single one of those 400,000,000 pieces of paper is going to be digitized, which will allow us number one to at some point in time actually literally shut down the storage component of the mine, but also just dramatically change the nature of what we're doing in terms of servicing people. Like our service is not good for people in part because like we haven't given the people there, they don't have the stuff at their fingertips to resolve problems. They literally have to wait for somebody to deliver a piece of... A file for them from a file cabinet, like it's insane. There are problems like this all over the government. They're so obvious we should fix them, but like this comes back to what we talked about about risk. I didn't like discover this, Elon to his credit didn't discover this. You can go back literally to the 1970s and 1980s, you will see articles written about how fucking ridiculous this mine is. Nobody has ever tried to solve this because God forbid, some congressional person is gonna say, oh, you screwed it up, or you didn't do this, do that. And I was like, look, this is ridiculous. We have to fix this, but the incentive structure is so aligned against fixing these things. It's way better to have a shitty service for people and not like risk rocking the boat than it is to actually try to convert these things into like a modern day experience. Like this is the fundamental like incentive problem that we have to solve.
00:55:04 · David Senra
[00:55:04] S0: Which ties to your main mission, which is like if you don't change this incentive structure, you're not going to be able to recruit high quality talented people. And if we keep, let's play this out ten years from now, okay, might not matter to you that what 44% of the workforce, whatever the number is, is 50 or over. Well, it's gonna matter when they're all gone and we have nobody to replace them.
00:55:23 · Scott Kupor
[00:55:23] S1: Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah, so look, everything ties together, right? I'm gonna, I got to go tell people a good story to get them here. When they get here, actually have to have an environment they're excited to do. And if they're excited to do it, then we will actually get modernization because they won't be trapped in the system of not actually trying new things. And look, we have to accept the fact that we're going to screw some stuff up, again, and know, Marc always, always, you know, gets excited about some of these, you know, there's a whole meme in Silicon Valley, right? That Silicon Valley like loves failure, right? And like nothing can be farther than food, nobody fucking likes failure, but what Silicon Valley does recognize is look, if we're gonna innovate, we're not gonna get it right all the time. And again, okay, if we're talking about life and death for people, we should be pretty careful we get it right all the time. But if I can like make the retirement experience 10 times better and there's some risk that's reasonable that I fuck it up quite frankly, it doesn't work, like we got to incent people to take that risk. Like it's crazy that we're not doing that, but it like historically, nobody has been willing to do that because, you know, whenever the person who was in my seat wanted some other political job coming out of this and therefore if they got a bad, you know, congressional hearing that would stop it. Like, I told the president this when he interviewed me in December, after he like asked me why he thought I was qualified for the job. And I was like, look, I'll tell you the other reason why I think I'm qualified is there's not some other job I'm trying to get out of this. Like I've been incredibly blessed, incredibly lucky in my private life. I didn't come to this job because like I'm competing for some other either private sector job or public sector jobs. So it's like, look, I don't really care. Like I'm going to do what I think is the right thing. And then if I get in trouble, like, know, I'm either gonna fight if I screwed up or if it turns out like I did something stupid, that's fine, like fire me, I'm okay with that.