Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

Episode 261.

You have to approach it not that the bureaucracy is there intentionally, evenly harming you,

that it's not designed at all, so you might want to think about how you might be able

to make it work for you from that perspective.

That is the voice of Marina Nitsa, a professional fixer of broken systems, a hacker, not of

computers and technology, although she does do that too.

But of the social phenomenon, that tend to emerge when people get together and try and

accomplish, well, anything that involves shared goals or solving common problems or establishing

an institution, or a service, or a business, or a government.

Yeah, I'm Marina Nitsa, I'm a partner in a crisis incident response firm called Lair

Olive, and I'm a fellow at New America's New Practice Lab where I fix America's foster

care system.

I recently wrote a book called Hack Your Bureaucracy, and I used to be the chief

technology officer of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Yes, she is fixing America's foster care system currently, but before that, she fixed

all sorts of other things, especially the VA, the United States Department of Veterans

Affairs.

I'm familiar with this institution because my father had to navigate its Byzantine,

awful, terrible bureaucracy when he was trying to get his health care following the Vietnam

war, and he didn't start doing that until he was in his 60s.

So when she told me this story, I could not believe I had met someone who actually fixed

...