The GovNavigators Show

Robbie Holmes on AI, Identity, and What Government Gets Wrong About Technology

• Adam • Season 4 • Episode 158

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This week on The GovNavigators Show, Robert and Adam are joined by Robbie Holmes, founder and CEO of Holmes Consulting Group and member of the GovNavigators Network, for a wide-ranging and deeply personal conversation on technology, government modernization, and what it really takes to build systems that serve people. Robbie traces a remarkable career arc, from the New York City welfare system and Sony Music to Zagat Survey, Google, USDS, and local government, and draws from each stop to make the case for pragmatic, constituent-centered technology. He reflects on his evolution from AI skeptic to cautious optimist, explains why so many well-intentioned government systems have created more friction than they've solved, and makes a compelling argument for why identity infrastructure and unified case management should be the government's next big bets. 

Show Notes:

Events on the GovNavigators' Radar:


SPEAKER_01

Welcome everyone to the Gov Navigator Show, a government-focused program that won't make you seasick. We're the Gov Navigators. I'm Robert Chad. And I'm Adam Hughes. We hope to enlighten and enliven your week with news and insightful entertaining guests, all on the topic of government management.

SPEAKER_02

Enjoy today's episode of Gov Navigators, brought to you by the creative geniuses behind the award-winning podcast Fedhead.

SPEAKER_01

Adam, how was Actiac? You know, ActIak Act Iak is like going to a family reunion and you're actually excited to see the people. That's what I feel like it's like. So you met a lot of new people, apparently. No, saw a lot of old friends. It's always great to catch up. It's like the friendly confines. Uh actually, and the keynote, the first day keynote, was the CIO at Johnson Space Center. And CIO's keynote's gonna be dry, you know that. And he did this amazing job of just showcasing some of the imagery that NASA uses in their missions and that the astronauts take. And then talking, using that as like the entry to talk about the amount of data and information in those images and how they have to catalog them and then in NASA in the back end in the CIO operation that he runs and how they're using AI to help expedite that. Each space shuttle mission to the International Space Station, they last anywhere between four and six months. They take, on average, one million pictures per trip. So, and then he did that with these amazing images and then talked about like all the infrastructure and work that his team has to do to meet maintain this vast storehouse of information that the government has. It was fantastic.

SPEAKER_02

Wow.

SPEAKER_01

Yep. So great event.

SPEAKER_02

We graduated my youngest. I can't let that go without notice. What a milestone. Amazing. They're now all three graduated and off the payroll. Payroll are any of them living in your basement. Do you believe that? Do you believe that?

SPEAKER_01

I don't. I knew I have no good.

SPEAKER_02

Congratulations, Plutosha.

SPEAKER_01

But um congrats to you and Eva, right? That's a long haul and that's a lot of work. And what a moment. I love it.

SPEAKER_02

But while you and I were flooding around, CMS was bit busy shutting off the spigot. Yeah, this is big. This is big news. And I think it foreshadows things to come, but CMS says it won't approve any more hospices or home health aid agencies next nationwide for at least six months. When California got the spigot cut off entirely because of its lack of fraud prevention controls.

SPEAKER_01

Yep. And which is a big deal. They're going to need to scramble to fix that pretty fast. But they should have had these things in place to begin with, right? And we're not necessarily going to go around dinging everybody who doesn't have fraud protections in because it takes time and expertise and money and all that. But at a certain point, you got to be like, when are we going to actually fix this so that it's we're it's working in a way in which we're not just throwing money down the toilet?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. It's we've been banging the drum about fraud for a long time. And to see people taking steps to prevent it, it's great. Yep. Not all of them are gonna hit, but I think HHS is gonna lean in. And if you've been receiving grant dollars or any other dollars from HHS, you better make sure your house is in order. Yeah, the bar is about to be raised. I think you're right. It's interesting though, one of Governor's favorite milestones occurred last week.

SPEAKER_01

Well, I was also gonna say you in addition to Pluto graduating of equal weight.

SPEAKER_02

GAO released its annual Senator Tom Coburn sponsored Memorial report on the extent of overlap and duplication in government programs. And ironically, one of those areas is schemes. So GAO told the FBI it should consider talking to other agencies like the FTC, CFP, Social Security, Treasury, Postal Inspectors about all their various disconnected scam efforts.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And you know, I obviously this is tongue-in-cheek, but what a concept. How many PhDs over at GAO did it take to suggest that one agency that works in a specific area talk to another agency that works in that same very specific area?

SPEAKER_02

Well, remember, they have to communicate things at a sixth grade level. Which is which can be helpful. And what they these kinds of recommendations, they estimate had produced about $775 billion in cost savings and revenue gains since 2011.

SPEAKER_01

So make fun. Go ahead and no, no, no. And you know, I'm I'm not making fun of the GAO folks. They're doing God's work in the Devil City. But like the these recommendations that they have, many of them in the overlap and duplication report have not been enacted either. So there's even more stuff that can be done if only agencies would pick up the GAO report.

SPEAKER_02

Not going to help that they they highlighted 97 new matters for consideration. Oh wow. Okay, so the list is growing. Yeah, but they've also got different bullions, one on op overall open GAO recommendations and another explicitly congressional related. So hopefully billions and billions more will be saved.

SPEAKER_01

Well, and not related directly to scams, but similar to what we talked about a couple weeks ago with the House Oversight Committee markup of legislation, one of the proposals in there is to create a centralized fraud prevention office at Treasury that can help to coordinate a lot of these efforts, not necessarily specifically on scams, but there is no central clearinghouse like that right now, uh, other than the PRAC, which is, although it's been reauthorized, it was temporary. So having the government have a more concerted effort for a centralized place, I think will help a lot. And hopefully we'll encourage that type of information sharing and collaboration between agencies.

SPEAKER_02

Just one more thing. Uh not the that wasn't enough. But now we've got reconciliation going on. So it's sort of like the current, the budget process is always happening, but looks like Congress is going to try to fund DHS through reconciliation. For three years. Fund DHS, CBP and ICE, pretty much.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Well, and you know, bless those staffers on the House and Senate budget committees. Because about the oversight committees and no, not more so than any other staffer. But this is like this is two in a year. That's I mean, even one reconciliation is enough for a year. So the people are working hard and staying up late for sure.

SPEAKER_02

Are you gonna stay up for the Votorama?

SPEAKER_01

No, I don't think so. I'm just gonna have I'm gonna have my AI note taker listen to it and then he can summarize it for me the next day. Will it wake you up if somebody important? I mean, that would be good. We need some we need some integration to that. Put my alarm on if I need to wake up. I got him. I got him. You won't believe what just happened. All right. Boy, we have a doozy for you today. Excited to get to it. Robert, what a treat we have today. You and I talk about this a lot. A lot of times we don't hit records soon enough. All the good stuff. So we gotta slow people down and be like, no, that's good. You gotta we gotta wait till we hit record. And that just happened now.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, this is one of those episodes where you wonder whether the hosts are completely extraneous.

SPEAKER_01

That's true. So Robbie Holmes, founder and CEO of Holmes Consulting Group, a good friend of Gov Navigators. Robbie, thanks for being on the show.

SPEAKER_00

Hey folks, it's good to see you. It's good to talk to everybody out there. Yeah, I've been waiting to have this conversation. I'm lucky enough to be married to the amazing Amy Edwards Holmes, and I've gotten to know these gents over the last three or four years. And I just am I'm always enamored with the stories that you are telling. And I feel like as a storyteller, uh I always look forward to the next episode of the podcast.

SPEAKER_01

Okay, so Robbie, let's start. Tell us, and all of our listeners, tell us your background other than being married to Amy, which is a huge plus, obviously.

SPEAKER_00

I mean, literally, it just validates me more than almost anything else I can say.

SPEAKER_01

It's that end of bio.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's like dot fit, right? I am 100% lucky to be here. Uh, I am a person who has a weird forest gump-like background in the technology space. I started out back in the day in the city and state of New York in welfare. So I worked for the Department of Social Services for the state of New York as a help desk person, eventually became a network engineer, shifted to the city of New York because the welfare system is federally funded, state delivered, and then distributed to the localities. So New York City is a really unique place because it's a very parasymbiotic relationship. The city is over 50% of the welfare. So they have to work together, right? And it creates a lot of friction. So I moved to the city of New York because so much of the work I was doing for the state was supporting the city. And they were rolling out a new system called the paperless office system. So I went over there initially to be a network engineer and eventually became almost like a field CTO or a technology liaison between the city and state of New York and helped roll out a graphical wrapper around welfare. When I think it was Giuliani's administration was trying to do what they were calling job centers. So we rolled out to the 26 job centers, this newer version that reduced duplication, right? It it allowed for documentation. Even then, I was like trying to think about efficiency, it seemed like back early in my career. And as I rolled out of all of that work, I eventually ended up running and leading the network operations center for the city in New York because of my network background and they needed somebody to come in and lead that org. I had a great boss who was like, This is Robbie Holmes. And I was there for four days. And on Friday morning, he walked, he got up at the beginning of the day and was like, Robbie's now running the network operations center, and he left. So I just took over running 250,000 nodes across the city of New York.

SPEAKER_01

Fucking told. Yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_00

It was fun. It was great. I got a chance to do a lot of open source advocacy and transitioning some of the organization to save some money. I think the number we always got to was like $8 million in licenses in the first year, which was super cool. And then I found my way to the Drupal community, which has been a huge factor in all of my career. But from there, I ended up landing at Sony Music as the manager of interactive media for the platform for all the Sony artist websites, so Britney.com and Slayer.net. And then that led to Zagat Survey, which led to this weird side window for me at Google. I got acquired at Zagat Survey by Google. So we took all of our data and migrated it into the Google ecosystem because they were standing up Google plus local at the time. So they needed all that information for their restaurants. So all the attribute data, all the review data. And after three years or three and a half years at Google, I realized I can pay for my own coffee and lunch. And I decided to go back to the things I cared about, the open source community. And I went to Johnson Johnson. I built out a platform team there for the consumer-facing website, Tylenol.com. The other ones are really funny, like ky.com. Really a the variety of consumer-facing products that team does. We were building this platform for. And then after that.

SPEAKER_01

I don't believe you know Tylenol had its own website.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, every one of those websites does because they have coupons. They also have like whenever there's a recall, you have to stand up a website to take feedback. So it's like a combination of a consumer platform and then all these adjacent needs for the compute for that platform. And then that led me to all these other things. I ended up going to IDT Telecommunications, a stadial telecom company and leading innovation with a friend of mine who was the head of that. I became his director of engineering. And that just slowly led to me being like, I want to get back to the things I care about. That was fun. And I proved that I could work in the finance space and get stuff done. But I ended up going and working for a company called Phase Two Technology. They needed a new director of engineering with an outside perspective. So I came in as the third of three directors they were hiring. And then I read a blog post about healthcare.gov. And in that blog post, the writer said, How do you know when healthcare.gov is down? And they were like, We turn on CNN and we, if we're getting yelled at, we know we're down. And that person was like, We know how to monitor things. And it was very pragmatic. It was like, we can monitor these things, and then we can know when they're down, and then we can tell the secretary that we know it's down. So when the president calls, the secretary is not being told by the president that the site is down. The secretary can say, We're working on it, right? And build a little political capital. And it turned out that was written by Mikey Dickerson, who was the first administrator for the USDS. But Mikey was also one of the early site reliability engineers at Google. So the things he was saying were on the walls at Google. He had created the web application hierarchy of needs. So this resonated with me a lot. And I was like, wow, I can use my skills to help America. Maybe I should do that. So then I applied, and six months later, I walked in the door at the VA. So I got a chance to go and become a USDS member on the ground at the VA. And I worked on vets.gov. We wanted to prove we could do something in a modern way. And after about two years, there was a giant brand consolidation into VA.gov. So all the human-centered design and all the modernizations we were doing in vets.gov were proved out, and we were able to apply those to VA.gov. So we modernized, we brought an identity provider for the first time. So there's a login, personalization, all that kind of stuff for the for veterans on VA.gov. And I got a chance to work on a bunch of stuff. I have a Drupal tattoo on the back of my leg. So anytime someone said Drupal near a USDS person, it was like a bat signal got sent up and they were like, we should get that guy. So I got to work on farmers.gov's procurement and I got to work on ADA.gov's migration and behind the scenes like a beta of IRS.gov. So if there was a.gov that had a Drupal backend, I was probably called. And then when I left USDS, I joined Pluribus Digital as a VP of product development and worked there for a while and then moved, bought a house in Manassas with the previously mentioned amazing Amy Holmes. And that led to me applying to be the director of digital services and software engineering for the county. It was a lot about moving remote and into the cloud. And I tried to convince them to have their next five-year plan be about how do we deliver customer and constituent services. So trying to, I did a lot of educating of digital services and modern delivery inside the organization. And then ended up leaving them. And that was my founding of Homes Consulting Group Incorporated, because it was easier for me to come in as a consultant than it was to be an employee. And then that led me to all these other wacky places.

SPEAKER_02

Fantastic journey, a mix of really interesting and weird, like the tattoo thing. I'll have to put that in the show notes. Talk about the current environment we're in. You've been at the leading edge of technology and innovation for your entire career. I'd love just your general observations on what's happening in technology today, how you see things being transformed, and what you wish you had back when you were just starting at the VA or New York.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's funny. I feel like I've been like an AI skeptic, is the way I would put it most of my career. And I've been seeing more and more of the benefits and the possibilities ahead of us. I think a lot of the discovery sprint work I've done at the cities and the state level. So I've done a few in the state of California. I did one with the CDC trying to reduce the friction on how data gets submitted by the stilts, the states, the localities, territories. It was just this interesting mix of people who are desperately trying to solve real problems, but have a lot of maintenance and data burden. I've been trying to think about a lot nowadays, how can we apply AI to the rudimentary day-to-day minutiae of jobs that isn't the job the person was hired for? There's so much data manipulation. Every time I had a really great boss back when I worked at Zagat Survey, and she was one of the smartest, most pragmatic people I've ever met in technology. And she said very pointedly, anytime you see a spreadsheet of any complexity, that's an application waiting to be created. And it really resonated with me then because I had seen it a few times, but you spend any time in city, state, any government agency, you're going to come across a spreadsheet that has a bunch of business logic in it. And I've seen that over and over again. And a lot of that is just manipulating data that can be moved into a format that is of use to someone in the future, right? I'm sure you've all heard the idea of a swivel report where somebody takes data from one system and puts it into another system and the chair swiveling is what actually makes it happen. So much of that today could probably be modernized. And I wouldn't even say I'm like an AI evangelist. I am a pragmatic person who thinks about what how can we solve a real problem. So, Robert, I think that idea of if there was an early take that we could have proved out maybe 10 or 15 years ago to do this, we could have gotten a track in government to allow these amazing civil servants a chance to do the job they were hired for instead of the work they end up having to do and remove a lot of the burden on those people, right? It's a combination of mental burden, physical burden, overwork. And the other one is re-evaluation of regulations and policies and whether or not they're solving the need that they were trying to do. I'm currently working with the city of New York in the campaign finance board. And they have a leader right now who's very pragmatic. Again, it's a word that seems to be resonating with me a lot right now, but he's so realistic about the idea that the rules of this campaign finance board are defined by the campaign finance board. So they can possibly change those relatively simply. But the nice part of that is he even said at one point, if there's legislation that needs to change, we can lobby for that. I think there's not enough of that being done inside of agencies in the federal government to look at the regulations and the policies that are coming down and saying this has the best of intentions, but it's causing these problems. And I think so, those are the two things that I think if I was revisiting the beginning of my career in government, it would be like be more realistic about what is the day-to-day life of a civil servant and how can we make that better? Everything else is just to facilitate that process. How do we give people the ability to do their job better and take away the burden and the concern and the anxiety, right? Which we live in such a risk-averse environment, especially in the federal government. Like, how many SESs get insurance the moment they become an SES because they're worried they're going to get sued, right? It's just part of the culture.

SPEAKER_01

So going all the way back to it's expected at this point.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. So how do we do that in a way that allows people to do their job and be unburdened from all these things they're responsible for?

SPEAKER_01

So what turned you around? You said you were an AI skeptic, but now it sounds like you're not. Was there a particular moment where you're like, holy crap, this thing is really cool?

SPEAKER_00

It helps being married to Amy. She's very clear-eyed and clear-minded about the approaches of technology and data and AI. But I think the bigger one is taking a step back and seeing places where I watch people struggle to complete the work that is getting done and realizing that there's a possibility. I think I was at the state of California and it was watching people who were doing a lot of manipulation of data having to do with payments of medical providers. So they were validating that the medical providers had the money from that they were doing the things that they were being asked to do to get paid. And so much of that was this manual coalition of data and collection of all this huge amount of data and then revisiting it and going through it. And I just I felt this friction that was really rough. And then the other one was at the CDC watching that there's this idea. Uh, and it goes, it's crazy because I can talk about a project that Amy was responsible and worked on a lot, right? Was the USA Spending.gov sort of broker of data, that idea of how do we take data in from so many places and normalize it? And I just thought about that project a lot because it was it always impressed me early on, the work that you folks were a part of in establishing that, and then the work that Amy was doing at Treasury, that idea that we should be able to take data from any place, desperate data sources in different formats, and we should be able to coalesce it into something of use. And watching the CDC try to accomplish that and not do it via AI or any other machine learning, but they were forcing it. They were saying it has to be in this format. It had, but I am watching so many government agencies deal with the fact that data is coming in from many sources and it always can't be standardized because it's not enforced at the systems that are submitting this data. Why would we not do it the other way around? Why wouldn't we say we're a dumping ground for valid data? We'll figure it out. Our job in the government shouldn't be to say, provider, fix this in this way. We now have the technology to say, we'll take your data and we'll figure it out. We'll create a data lake or we'll create a data warehouse, whatever it is, but we should do that work as part of what we provide, right? It's that same idea going all the way back to the welfare system as everybody, everything that has to do with not welfare and applying it is something we should be doing to make that easier. But I don't know that the agencies wide have that idea, right? I think the mission statement for veterans is easy. Everybody wants veterans to get everything that they have coming to them, right? I think having that exact same model in other government constituent groups is not as obvious, right? What does that look like for the parks? I think there's an interesting play here where we should we had those centers of excellence back in previous administrations. And I think there was a beginning of this happening. And I think it would be great to revisit how do we just think of the constituents and the end users of all these systems and how do we make it as smooth and easy as possible? I think that is something for me. If I could define a 2050 goal for the government, it would be like if you're a citizen, you go to a portal that says you have access to a thing because I know this about you. I know your tax portfolio. I know you served in government, I know you have 20 years of service. Let me take care of your loans. Those kind of things that are just so friction-filled. Watching so many of you folks and my, you know, I don't have 20 years of service, but so many people go through to try to get their loans taken care of. That has been such a friction point. And it's so complicated. There's so many individual nuances to why or when. And I think we should be thinking more about like how do we just solve this problem before the people we're trying to solve it for?

SPEAKER_02

The I think we have time for one more question. The you've worked at all these levels of government. I love what you said, first of all, that uh improving the employee experience is part of employ improving the customer experience. But the complexities of government are genuinely getting in the way. What have you seen in the interaction at the federal, state, local level that you think needs fixing?

SPEAKER_00

I have two hobby horses. One is we have too much too many identity providers across the board, right? In general, it's one of those things that if I could go back and we could think about in the 60s, the first digital systems that were starting to come on board, if we were able to mandate a nationwide identity provider like a login.gov, but it was incepted early and it could have been part of all of this, we would have solved a lot of security footprints that we have, a lot of complexity in all of our systems. There's no, even if you think about fraud, right? Identity providers, right? Like how do you have a UUID or some unique identifier for all of these? It would be great if they were tied together and they were, it was built from the ground up with that in. It's really hard to retrofit that. I worked in a lot of places that were doing content and they were trying to later localize it and internationalize it. If you didn't build that system with internationalization and glow and localization built in from the very beginning, it is near impossible to bolt onto. And I feel like we have some problems in the government that are and across the board, from federal all the way down to locality, that are complicated because of identity. And identity is one of those things that I think is really difficult. So there's there should be like a big project of like how do we handle identity in America? I think that would be like a really big thing the federal government could work on in the future.

SPEAKER_01

But I think the other one's making me you're making me think too about it's individual identities, but it's corporate and organizational identity too, right? And the Dunne's number and the moving to the unique identifier instead of that's been that's taken decades and decades. And it's still that the changes and the lack of action on a more comprehensive system has reverberated through everything that government does, every single thing.

SPEAKER_00

And I think the it makes me think of my time at Google. At Google, one of the things they want to do is they want to know everything about everything in the world, right? They want to have information on everything. You, every single space inside of a space. So if you think about a building that has like the Department of Veterans Affairs, if you think about Vermont Avenue, the whole home location, that would have a feature ID, right? There would be a unique identifier for that building. And then inside that building would be a feature ID for the Department of Veterans Affairs, and it would have a feature ID for everything inside the VA that's in that building. So probably something VBA related, something VHA related, because they're all housed in that building. But there's also a store in that building, a cafeteria, right? And then there's a store for the VA stuff. Those would have feature IDs, right? But that's something that Google had done early on, is they realized that every single thing could have you could have a feature ID that was the identifier for the location. And then there could be multiple feature IDs housed inside that building. And I think that thinking that people talk about bringing the idea of modern technology into government, that is just a mindset, right? Google realized that there's a way to categorize these things. And it's not that Google is any different than anywhere else. It's just that they've done it for the world, right? Like, so when people get to government problems, people will often say, this is unique. I think the scale of government problems is relatively unique, the impact you can have working in the government. But I do think the patterns of other systems could be applied, right? So I watch this all the time. There's so much interconnect connection between data that's moving in and out of systems and agencies in all these places. If you think about during the COVID outbreak, at the beginning, the city of LA is bigger than some states in the US. And they had to figure out how do we handle that data. Then the state had to deal with how do we collect individual city data, how do we collect county data, how do we but because there's no unified system that is behind all of this, they're all figuring it out on their own. So when I was working with the CDC, there were like 260 or something like that, separate, distinct EHR systems from different companies in the ecosystem of the CDC. That's 260 different patterns of data, recognitions, modernization plays. I think that we should be thinking more about how do we make a system. The government is nothing more than I've said this before, it, but not here. So the lingua franca of government is forms, right? The way you get access to stuff and things is you fill out a form. If you want to update information, you fill out a form. If you want to get access to benefits, you fill out a form, whether it's paper or digital, right? So if we start with the lingua franca of government is forms, the second piece of this is the government is made up of case management systems. They are just stacked on top of one another, right? If you submit a form, it has to go through a case management system, it has to get approved, it becomes a data set. Eventually, if you want to do something in the future, it gets pulled into a case management system and moves around again, right? You turn corners. What would be amazing is if governments could work together to build a case management system that could be leveraged in every everywhere that's using it, even inside of one government agency, right? Like the VA, every time I turned a corner at the VA, there was another data set that was in a different case management system that was trying to solve a unique problem for veterans because of the best of intentions. But it meant that there were unique silos of data all over the place. So going all the way back to that idea, Robert, of what makes these things complicated or what I would like to have seen is there was no standardization. There was a lot of best intentions, like congressional members trying to get a law passed that said veterans get access to X, right? The post-911 GI bill is a different GI bill than the other GI bills that exist. But when they implemented that, they created a separate mailing address for the post-9-11 GI bill. Why? Why, to get that benefit, do you have a separate mailing address from every other mailing address at the VA? So it's a common problem we saw at the VA, which was when I change my address with the VA as a veteran, I expect it to change. But if you don't change it in the right space, you are still getting your prescriptions mailed to the wrong system.

SPEAKER_01

Or in every system, right? If it's a properly designed system like you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00

And it's hard because all these systems exist in their own silos and they weren't interconnected when they were designed. And I think the bigger one is how do we take a step back and say, what problems have we created by our best intentions? And like removing the ego from moving forward. And I think that is it's really difficult, right? People have spent their entire career building a system or solution, and that's sometimes hard. I was coined by Deputy Secretary Sloan, right, when I was at the VA. And it was because we had created an identity on Vets.gov. And I went to his office with a couple of people and we created his account. And he asked me a lot of questions about that identity. And one of the questions he asked me was, Why did we have to make a new one? And I was like, Because the previous ones were not as secure. And he was like, We made veteran drive six hours to get identity proofed in person. And I was like, Yes. And he's that really was why did we do that? And I was like, it was the best solution you had at the time, but I still don't think it was very secure. And he was like, Do you think this is more secure? And I was like, Yes, from the ground up. We had built it around a new modern solution. But the other one was he said, Is this going to work for both VHA and VBA? So he even knew there was this distinction inside the VA. And I was like, I believe you are a veteran, Deputy Secretary. If you log in after we create your account and you may have been rated on benefits or you may have a medical situation, you may be able to see that it'll work across both. And he logged in and then rubbed his temples and took his glasses off and he said, I think we're going to change how we interact with veterans. And I was like, Yes. And he got up and all I heard was clink clink. And it was him picking up challenge coins to coin me and a couple of other people in the room. And the most amazing thing about that is one of my friends was just like, you know, that challenge coin is means something. And I was like, Can we just get out of his office before you make me cry? Yes, this is a big deal. He recognized the change, right? And he was such an advocate for veterans. And he was such a he was like a walking heartbeat of the VA while he was there. And I feel like getting him to understand the importance of the work we were doing was the biggest thing we could have done. Because now he's going to go out and advocate, right? He's part of so many veterans' groups. I just wish that we could take a step back. And I think right now, because of the where we are in the world, it's hard on people to do that. And as a person who has an understanding and of what it means to have a reputation and to put your reputation on the line, that can be difficult. So I wish we could get people to understand that it's more important to help the end user than it is to keep the current system.

SPEAKER_02

All right. Challenge made. Robbie, this has been fantastic. Yes, and you are a tour de force. We're so grateful to know you and to spend time with you and have you on the podcast. Yep.

SPEAKER_00

It's always good to chat with you.

SPEAKER_01

Amazing insights. Always love talking to Robbie.

SPEAKER_02

So short week.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Other than Botorama, what do you what do you see on the horizon? Well, Gov Navigator Hillary Serpus is down in Tampa, Florida this week at Soft Week Special Operations Forces Week, which is a huge event if you've never been. So she is navigating her way through what I'm sure are football-sized warehouses of exhibits.

SPEAKER_02

Standing out is always critical. Did we give her the naval hat that we have? The captain's hat.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. If we didn't, that's a huge huge missed opportunity.

SPEAKER_02

I mean, it's it brand brands with the event and govnaves. That's true in one.

SPEAKER_01

We get it. Chloe, make sure you go back to the govnav archives and pull up that picture of me and Robert when we debuted those things. Those were that was a special night. So we got that.

SPEAKER_02

GovCO's got its federal IT efficiency summit over at Curasoft on the May 20th.

SPEAKER_01

May 20th. And then on the 21st, PSC is having their Fed Health Conference, which has a pretty good lineup of speakers already. So that's a good event. If that's your space, check it out.

SPEAKER_02

And then we slide into Memorial Day.

SPEAKER_01

And then Memorial Day and a day off, finally.

unknown

Yes.

SPEAKER_01

Have a great week, everybody. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Gov Navigator Show, brought to you by GovNavigators. We sure hope you enjoyed it and learned something in the process and didn't get seasoned. Right, of course. If you want to know more about us and what we're up to, please follow us on social media or visit govnavigators.com. Ahoy.