Mm.

Mm.

uh.

Mm.

Mm.

He pulled down into the middle of the parties and they

and the cool we get by the bed. They went quiet. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

Episode 289. Oh, You have to approach it not that the bureaucracy is there intentionally

evily 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 Nitza, a professional fixer of broken systems, a hacker, not of computers and technology,

although she does do that too, but of the social phenomena 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.

I'm Marina Nitza. I'm a partner in a crisis incident response from called Laird, 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 it was in his 60s

so when she told me this story, I could not believe I had met someone who actually fixed something that had affected my life.

Early on at my time at VA, I had... that had

very very little budget and a very big dream which was I wanted veterans to be able to

...