00:46:26 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
Tell me the 20 things you're working on. 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. [00:46:35] S1: This inertia- It is.... Is insane. [00:46:38] S2: It's crazy. [00:46:38] S1: The story of you oversee retirement benefits We overall, were on the phone the other day, and you told me a story I just could not believe. We were talking about the fact that, Hey, know what? America's full of dynamic, really smart, high agency young people that don't even know this is a path and this is an opportunity, and maybe we should just shine a light on this and maybe be beneficial regardless of what you think. If you have a choice between a better functioning government or not, you're going to choose that. It has to do with the people that are in that organization. But then you're like, Do you know about the mind full of 4,000,000 pages of documents? [00:47:17] S2: 400,000,000. I'm like, [00:47:20] S1: Scott, what the hell are you talking about? I know. Can you tell the story?
00:47:23 · Scott Kupor
[00:47:23] S2: It's a great it's 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 that 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 going go from spending $2,000,000,000 a year to $40,000,000 a year. We're literally going save 95% by actually getting to a single system, and we will now have the record of David Senra that you can look at every day and see all the stuff. So anyways, you want to 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 the final piece is they mail it literally to an underground mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania. Now, 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 largest employers out there. So people go to work every day in an underground mine that used to be an actual working limestone mine.
00:49:14 · 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 poles. 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. So Ivan 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 the National Design Studio. And they started this project at OPM before I got there, then I picked it up, which is, How do we automate this process? Today, we've fully automated 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? You should be able to fill out 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, 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 that stuff. So literally, if you call our call center today, we send what we call a runner.
00:51:03 · Scott Kupor
This is actually a job classification of the mine who goes into the mine, pulls a file out of a electronic file cabinet. Sorry. Not electronic file. I'm gonna actual virtual physical file cabinet, some of which date to, like, the nineteen fifties. It's a great... I'll show you some pictures after that. And they bring it to the person who adjudicates it, and 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. Mhmm. And, 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, and and Elon, to his credit, didn't discover this. You can go back literally to the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties. 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 and 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.
00:52:48 · David Senra
[00:52:48] S1: 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. 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.
00:53:07 · Scott Kupor
[00:53:07] S2: Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah, so look, everything ties together. Right? If I'm gonna... I gotta go tell people a good story to get them here. When they get here, I 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. Like... And look, We have to accept the fact that we're gonna screw some stuff up. Like, again... And and, you know, Marc always always, you know, gets excited about some of these. Like, 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 true. 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, like, 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, and it doesn't work, like, we gotta incent people to take that risk. Like, it's crazy that we're not doing that, but, like, historically, nobody has been willing to do that because, you know, whatever, 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 I'm competing for some other either private sector job or public sector job. So it's like, look. I don't really care. Like, I'm gonna do what I think is the right thing, and then if I get in trouble, I'm either going to fight if I screwed up, or if it turns out I did something stupid, that's fine. Fire me. I'm okay with that.