 So, Jen, I guess I want to just to start by having you kind of set kind of the moment, you know, like what's happening to government right now? Well, I have a certain view into it right now. I'm spending a lot of my days on calls with people in health and human services departments, departments of innovation, departments of labor, particularly at the states, though also at cities and counties, a few federal agencies that we're working with as well. And it's pretty overwhelming. I appreciate, Rob, your reminder that we should be hopeful and inspirational as we talk today. And I think there is some of that that we can speak to. And I think there's also some, you know, real cause for concern about what's going on. So you have states and municipalities and a federal government who have been underinvested in for decades now, not just in terms of the money that we put into the operations of our government, but also an underinvestment in looking in there and modernizing and rebooting and questioning the status quo about how things operate. And it's very unfortunate that we didn't do that when we had the time to do it thoughtfully. Because what's happening right now is that you have states and municipalities who are very thin on capacity, especially things about things like data for better decision making and service delivery on a good day. And now we have a very, very not good day, many very not good days. And what we see really is that across those two categories that sort of mostly where I'm working with government right now, data for better decisions and service delivery, you have not only orders of magnitude greater demand than you've had suddenly, you know, almost overnight. So the scale of it is huge. I mean, we had one project with State of New Jersey. This was a small business loan program that it existed, and it had gotten about 3000 applications in the past several years. And the minute they opened it up to this, you know, pandemic benefit had 30,000 applications in a day. They're simply not built to take that. So orders of magnitude greater demand, and then just orders of magnitude greater speed that's required of them. They, if you think about the way that government has stood up services in the past or been able to, you know, report data months, sometimes years later, you know, I've watched, for instance, you know, a project in California that was supposed to modernize child welfare system. And it was, by the time I looked at it, which was when they were bidding it out, they had already taken 10 years to just develop the requirements and writing as an RFP. So call that midway, then you're talking 20 years to modernize the service. And now they have to modernize some things, you know, overnight. So I love that line, Ross Dakin in New Jersey apparently said, we need to move at the speed of need. They're all saying that. What's the speed of need? And it's just it's transformative. And of course, you've been working on that at Coach America for a decade. Hey, some of these things don't have to take 10, 15 years. You can actually build things Silicon Valley style, not necessarily overnight. Although in fact, they did build something overnight in New Jersey. We gave this guy the requirements for this small business loan eligibility wizard. And I think he basically just stayed up. It was one of our volunteers, that's how we work as a volunteer model kind of stayed up all night and got it ready the next morning. So which is sort of one of the really interesting things to me about that. One of the pillars of the work that Jen did at Coach America was, you know, is called, you know, show what's possible. And I think, you know, one of the big things that's happening now, I think in this relationship between technology and government, but also I think more broadly between society and government is we've had all of this cruft that gets in the way of us doing what's now possible. We're still doing things the way that they were possible 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. And that sort of ossified into a system for doing things. When in fact, we can now move much more quickly. And so there's both a very disruptive part of that, but also a very hopeful part of it, because government has been one of the sectors that has been immune from the kind of disruption that has been so prevalent in the private sector. You know, you don't get chompateria destruction in government. There's not been much of a constituency for it. I mean, 20 years to modernize a government system like child welfare. I don't see the people, I don't see, I haven't in the past 10 years largely seen philanthropy get upset about that. I haven't seen much of civil society get upset about that or at least focus on it. And we're paying the price for that today when suddenly, you know, child welfare is a system that of course highly impacted by COVID response. And we're working a little bit with an organization called Foster America to help their folks that are embedded in states deal with kids in care. But the one that you're going to see in the news much more that we are working pretty deeply in is unemployment insurance where these systems were built in the 70s and 80s. They are mainframe systems running cobalt for the most part. And I've spent a little time in the past couple of weeks looking at the history of that. Again, these have been on a modernization path, but that path is now two decades old. And you can't modernize if it takes two decades to do it because what you have done is made a modernization plan 10 years ago that by the time it ships is no longer modern. But people care. I mean, that's the thing right now that's different is that I know that the people on this call have cared. And I think that's one of the things I love about INED is that you're willing to sort of dig into some of the dysfunctions of government that other people tend to ignore. But there's not been a focus on modernizing these systems. And suddenly people do care about this lack of investment. They care about the fact that, you know, so many more of their constituents are now forced to apply for unemployment, for instance. And the way that it is happening in some cases is that seeded of hopes of change. Like, great, if we can do it fast now, why did we have to do it so slowly in the past? But some of it is also still stuck in those original dysfunctions. So, for example, in a lot of states right now, if you're eligible for pandemic unemployment insurance, which is, you know, for largely gig workers and a set of folks that previously weren't eligible, if you heard me talk before, you know, I talk a lot about just the process and the experience of applying for any benefit in this country is very frustrating and frankly insulting. Now, think about your toll, you see in the news, okay, I'm eligible for pandemic unemployment insurance. Let me go do this. In many states, what you're told to do is apply for regular unemployment insurance through the normal channels, which is, you know, essentially sending an application into a 1980s, you know, mainframe, which is also overloaded right now, which is also overloaded right now. And wait until you get your rejection from that system. And then only then with that rejection letter, are you allowed to apply for pandemic unemployment insurance? That makes no sense for the users or for the needs of the moment or the administrators, you know, there's, but there's that's that's a holding on to, you know, a previous way where they're not taking advantage of the moment and saying, there's a better way to do this. And we're seeing both reactions. Yeah, can we back up just a little bit? And can you give a bit of context on what US digital response is, you know, yeah, just how it works? Basically, it, yeah, you just started this a month ago, of course, a little more than a month ago now. Just a day, I think it was March 15th. Got a call from a friend who was the first US chief data scientist and asking, you know, DJ Patel, DJ Patel, many of you probably know saying, what will my role be in in helping out since there's a lot of help that was going to need and be needed. I called some other friends and basically, it's the idea that there's low started with the basic idea that there's just low tech and data capacity in government. And it's quite was quite obvious by March 14th that more was going to be needed. And so the simple faces from the start was there are people who are going to want to help and their people are going to need that help. So you built a matching marketplace? We put up a web form for people to apply and say, I wonder, I want, I can do something, enormous number of these people said that they could work immediately and full time. And everyone who's been asked to work full time has worked something like double time. It's been a little bit crazy. All for free. And, and then we put up a form asking, you know, telling governments that they could get help if they needed. And it was pretty surprising how many of them very quickly without asking many questions said, yes, I need help. And it was everything from Napa, the city of Napa said, we don't have a decent VPN, and we got them somebody who could, you know, just enable remote work to, you know, much more sophisticated data problems like ingesting 100 points of data about hospital bed availability, ventilator availability in Pennsylvania, where they just they had, you know, multiple people just doing manual data coalition every single day. And we were able to free them up from that. And that sort of ballooned into a larger project. But it's hard to describe what we're doing, because we have I think 160 projects that have already completed through this network of volunteers. And some of some of them are these one time projects, you know, just like get somebody set up you know, on remote work or debug their VPN or, but some of them are, hey, here's a really an extensible project we can do for one jurisdiction. And then we can basically turn it into a pack, basically a packageable code unit that can be built on. So you built a number of projects that are now in use in in a dozen or more jurisdictions, many that are in use in multiple jurisdictions, but very often what we're doing is the code won't exactly translate very quickly, but the approach does. And so, you know, I think probably the one of the most sophisticated things that are most impactful things is just the availability of very good data modeling for understanding the spread of the disease, the impact of various interventions in, you know, where places like California have access to DJ, who is amazing, are ahead of and have higher need probably as a large state in California, have resources that say Louisiana doesn't quite have actually met the guy who does their data modeling in not in person by zoom, everybody's by zoom now, and met the guy who does data modeling for the state of Louisiana is actually great, but he doesn't have all of the tools and all of the sophisticated models didn't have access to the Johns Hopkins model. What we can do is sort of take what we know from what DJ is doing in California, spend an hour on the phone with the guy, get them a couple of extra people so that they can do more, get them access to some of the tools that the others had, and then you start to, you know, lift up that long tail of the states, even without just, you know, it's not necessarily just shipping code. You know, a lot of what you're building on what you learned in 10 years at Code for America and setting up the United States Digital Service, but there's one other thing I wanted just to have you talk about a little bit, which going back to the willingness of a volunteer to go in and help set up a VPN or debug a security problem versus, hey, we're doing the cool new technology, you actually have something you make all your volunteers agree to, you know, you call it the oath and you're talking just a little bit about that because it goes really to the values. I think one of the things that's been really unique about your work is you really value the and understand the power of Silicon Valley, but you also understand and value the power of basically what civil service is all about and the oath kind of bring those two together. Yeah, when we were starting, we didn't actually know quite what we were, what exactly we were going to do, but we, other than match people, and we have done much more than that, but we did stop at a time when it was hard to stop at all because there was just very fast pace this first couple of weeks and remain so. We did stop and say, how do we want to be? And so I have had the benefit of 10 years of sort of this culture clash between Silicon Valley and as Piazza the Belt way and knowing where that can be really beautiful and have great impact and where it can kind of go awry. And we decided that the best way to do this very quickly is to have anybody who volunteers from the tech industry, many of them actually have already worked in government, but many of them are straight out of a stripe or Dropbox or Facebook. And this is their first chance to sort of help in this government transformation space. Yeah, we wrote a little oath that's basically, you know, it's essentially, it says a lot of things, but I think what it says is, it's not about me. It's about what the need is. And if you get assigned and you expect to use your fanciest data science skills, but the first thing you need to do is like debug a spreadsheet or get someone's VPN set up, you will do that. There's not any time at this moment for your ego. And I think we've done a good job of saying that. And, you know, it does speak a little bit to, you know, Pia set up about the power of Silicon Valley and that approach. It's, that is very much present for us. And that is what we're trying to bring. But, you know, leading up to this moment, there's also just been a lot of awareness of the downside of Silicon Valley is, you know, what can be perceived as arrogance. And we're trying to work with both of those dynamics. Yeah. The other thing I wanted to talk about a little bit was this, you've taken this notion from the disaster response community, which is build back better. And, you know, given that this is INET, which is really about what do we need to build for the future as an economic system. I thought we should talk a little bit about what build back better means in your world. And then maybe just pivot a little bit to start talking more broadly about what the build back better opportunity is in the COVID crisis. Well, that's, yeah, I mean, I think I can talk about it as it relates to how government functions. And I think that that will, that builds into how government is perceived and trust and faith in government, which is such an important part of sort of, you know, the compact and, and what's gone wrong. But I agree it is there is a much more fundamental way in which we need to build back better in terms of an economy, which is why I'm glad to be here with INET today and all of you. You know, at a very functional level in government, it's just the opportunity where we can to say if we could do it fast and in a crisis and we can do it well in a crisis, why can't we do it that way in, in a time that isn't quote unquote declared as a crisis, right? We're in a crisis now because so many people are affected. Before COVID, we were in a crisis, but we weren't admitting it. And we weren't taking the opportunity to say, you know, we are not serving people with an effective safety net. We have a crisis in our criminal justice system and government service delivery is compound, you know, poor government service delivery is compounding that let's take advantage of that sense of urgency to question a level of things. One is, you know, like I said, on a very basic level, these systems need to be invested in so they work well. We shouldn't be trying to run pandemic unemployment insurance and regular unemployment insurance on 1970s mainframes that don't scale. And the code needs to be really rewritten. But that is only possible if you also, you know, reboot the code that runs them, which is the the program rules and regulations that are so vastly complex. And I've been digging into these old reports about UI modernization, and they're talking about how literally nobody even knows what the code does anymore, because it's a spider web of sub programs that have been written over the years to respond to regulatory changes that have come in. And, you know, if somebody wrote that 35 years ago, there is nobody alive today who knows how that works. But you can't just rewrite the code if you don't actually rewrite the complicated rules and regulations that run it. I mean, it's and it's things that really have an impact on people like how we verify some someone's, you know, income. There are much simpler ways to do this that reduce the burden on the administrators, but also massively reduce the administrative burden on the user, which is a concept I'd like to talk about building back better really is about reducing administrative burden in a lot of ways. But it's not just the, you know, rebooting our program rules and regulations. It's also there's a level of rebooting how and a meta level how government works procurement compliance and all that has to be rethought now. And now we have an excuse to do it. We just have to take that excuse and act on it. Yeah, I would broaden it even further. You know, there's a way that in my book, I talked a little bit about this, but, you know, the idea that in some sense government is an is like an operating system. You know, there's some strong analogies between a, you know, technology operating system. And one of the things that you see is that periodically you need to throw out everything you had before and start over. You know, when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, you know, Mac OS 9 was sort of the perfection of, you know, decade or more of Macintosh development. And, and he said, no, we're going to start over with something new. And they started this Mac OS 10. Now Mac OS 10 has gotten crusty, you know, and they've kind of moved over. And, you know, you look at the same thing with, you know, with, with phones, you know, people who are hanging on to the old way that things worked miss the new opportunity. You know, so Microsoft was so wedded to Windows and the desktop metaphor, they couldn't, you know, they just missed the mobile revolution. And so I think in a similar way, you know, one of the big risks we face today is we're going to try to build back, even if we try to build back better, it'll be just a slightly less crufty version of what we had before, rather than taking that opportunity to go, no, no, actually we're going to, we're going to do a much deeper refactoring and much deeper restart. And I think that, you know, when I think about it a lot, I think about it, for example, most obvious area in which government is like an operating system for the economy is in our tax policy. You know, we have all these baked in incentives, you know, taxable expenditures, so to speak, you know, where you give people a deduction for this, a deduction for that. And when we talk about, you know, changing taxes, we talk about, well, maybe we'll change the rate structure a little bit. You know, we don't actually think, oh, wait, we could go back and completely rethink how we generate revenue. Where does it come from? Where does it go? What would be a more equitable system? And, you know, I think the same thing is true across many, many areas, you know, clearly healthcare, you know, some countries have basically built a very different version of healthcare than we have in the US. Will we have the courage to go back and dig deeper? Or will we just go back to some version of the status quo, which is slowly crumbling away beneath our feet? And a good example of that is, you know, I live in a world where everyone is fighting over the, you know, finest, minutest details of regulations around SNAP and how you, you know, who gets what and how you, you know, it's all designed to avoid fraud and waste. SNAP being supplemental nutrition assistance program, which is the food stamps. And, you know, in, in that world, you know, the people who have talked about universal basic income have been, you know, loonies. It's like, no, we're, we're fighting for this tiny little change that makes it like, you know, 0.1% easier for someone to get SNAP. There's no weight world in which we're just giving people money. And suddenly the Overton window has moved. I think it's, you know, to quote Tim, the title of Tim's book, it's a bit up to us whether we continue to shift that Overton window or if it just slides back. Just to clarify the history. It's the part of the title of my book, which you came up with. Yeah, I know, I did. It's up to us with your contribution. But you meant it. Anyway, it, that's the whole point of the book, right, is that these things are not predetermined. They're, they are determined by people and that, therefore, we can change them. Yeah, exactly. And of course, Inet's been talking about, I think about Joe Stiglitz's rewrite the rules, you know, rewriting the rules, you know, just we have an opportunity now and I think we should be taking it. The other piece that I guess I wanted to bring us around a little bit to economics before we open for, for, you know, Q&A with the audience. And that is, here's this all volunteer organization. Yeah. Doing amazing work at amazing impact. You know, there's no money changing hands. And yet it's working. And it reminds me back of this. Wait, can I just say something about that? The funny thing is, our problem is that we have like some of the highest paid, you know, technical workers in the country who are actually upset at us because we're not putting them to work for free. We have almost 5,000 people who want to serve through USDR and we've only placed about a little over 200 of them. So yeah, it's quite ironic. Yeah, but it really, maybe what I was going to say, it reminds me of this great quote from many years ago from a book by Paul Hawkin called Building a Business. And he said, saying that you can't do it because you don't have enough money is like saying that you can't build a building because you don't have enough inches. You know, money is a measure of something else. You know, and if that thing is present, you know, maybe you can do it without the money. You know, and so here's the work being done. Yeah. I mean, obviously people have to have enough to live on, but these people, you know, there's all these people in our economy who are effectively post-economic. And in this case, you've got 5,000 saying, Hey, I just want to work on something that's important. And if you could imagine that spreading, you know, I kind of think of this adhocracy, you know, of people just kind of going, Yeah, I'm going to work on the stuff that really matters. And, you know, could we start to build a different kind of economy? You know, I've been seeing there's a bunch of ways this happened on the internet too. You think about Wikipedia, you think about open source software, you know, where our traditional model of, you know, the social sector and philanthropy and, you know, volunteerism is so limited. And in fact, you know, if we broaden our sense of, you know, the value horizon, you know, I mean, Mariana Mazacada talks about this in the value of everything, you know, like household, you know, labor isn't counted. You know, all this philanthropic labor isn't counted. It's a huge amount of human economic activity outside the boundaries of what we think of as, quote, the economy. And I think it's a wonderful opportunity for us to broaden that and to break and to make more porous those boundaries between that, you know, you know, that economy of people who are doing art, the economy of people who are doing service, the economy of people who are doing things for the love of it, and to go, actually, that's actually a pretty important economic sector. How do we actually bring it into our economic thinking? Absolutely. I should also just say that one of the elements of the about, I don't know, some percentage of the USDR projects have been about we are using volunteer labor, but we are also building platforms to enable volunteer labor. In fact, one of the first projects that came in was from before I, before we had started USDR, when we were just asking people if they would be willing to help, and we didn't have a form for governments to apply, got a LinkedIn message from the mayor of Concord, who just had happened to her code for America. Concord, California. That's right. Out here saying we know that we are going to need to have people checking on homebound seniors, getting groceries for them. Can Code for America help build a platform for, you know, connecting volunteers with homebound seniors? And I said, well, USDR can do that. But I in fact tapped a former code for America fellow and just said, can you please go talk to mayor of Concord? And, you know, four days later, there's this operating platform for Concord. But that's now been extended into ways to get people with skills relevant to healthcare, even if they're not officially healthcare workers to help out in the healthcare systems that are overwhelmed right now, particularly in Louisiana, where we're doing a lot of work, and it's been very hard hit. And I, you know, it just, it reminds me that that's a kind of self-reliance and, you know, bottom up kind of answer that you see inherent in this work. It comes up, even if you don't intentionally target it, that really is a story, I think, that's very appealing to a wide range of political beliefs and ideologies. And when you put up the code for that program on GitHub, and then other municipalities is quite a few others who have adopted it now, how much do they do that self-service? And how much do you have the volunteers help them stand it up? The volunteers largely stand it up for them, but it's in part because it's very easy for them to do that. There are other more complicated projects, especially ones that involve, you know, personal identifying information, where we have to make the government do it so that we are not owning any PII. Yeah, but there is sort of an interesting point here that there is sort of an infrastructure in software development for sharing, you know, free of money. There's infrastructure in the web for sharing, you know, content. You guys will put this up online. Anybody can, you know, consume it. You know, so we're actually building this actually vast non-monetary economy in a bunch of sectors. And I always love this line from Ernest Hemingway, you know, of course, he used it for a bad thing. This is in The Sun Also Rises, where one character asked, how did you go bankrupt, Mike? And he says, two ways. First, gradually, then suddenly. And of course, we're seeing that in what's gone wrong in the modern world, you know, that we were actually going bankrupt gradually. And now we're suddenly, we're coming to the suddenly parts of it, not just the pandemic, but also things like climate change. But also, the new comes in gradually, then suddenly, you know, this new world that's been building quietly, new forms of cooperation, new ways of thinking about how we can work together, which of course, is what an economy is. It's a way that people have built a bunch of mechanisms for working together. And I feel like we are building new mechanisms for working together and new affordances that allow us to do that. And it's coming on. I kind of, my hopeful moment is that there's a gradually, then suddenly moment when we go, oh, oh, we can do more of that. Well, one last thought, you know, Tim, you've always talked about valuing different kinds of work. We're suddenly in a moment where if we don't do that, we all die, right? So, or a lot more of us die than is needed. So if you think about what's needed to reopen, and that's a really, really, really hard question that nobody knows how to answer, but we need to bring better data and better models and better decision making to the table so that we can. Well, you know, one of the things is that we need to isolate people who may have been exposed. And we need to do that much more effectively. Well, first of all, we need to know that they may be exposed and that we're doing a lot in both particularly in manual contact tracing that has to go along with digital contact tracing and understand who needs to be isolated. But as Todd Park pointed out, is my former boss and who's currently working with State of California on their approach, you know, we're not China. We're not going to just, you know, pull people off the street against their will. But if we say if you have been exposed, we need you to self isolate. What if you first of all think, well, I'm not sick. So I'm, you know, I don't want to. And further more, I am the breadwinner for my family. I cannot just skip work for two weeks without devastation to my family, especially if others members of my family have recently lost their jobs. We have to do the right thing, which is wage continuation, give them a place where they can isolate. We need to finally do the right thing in order for all of us. In some ways, the virus is like a metaphor for, you know, forcing us to do what we should have done always.