Matt Cutts on the US Digital Service and Working at Google for 17 Years

Matt Cutts: Welcome to the podcast!

Host: Thanks for having me!

Matt Cutts: No problem. So for those who don't know you, you are the administrator of the U.S. Digital Service, and previously you were at Google where you were the head of the web spam team and also the seventy-first employee.

Host: Yeah, in the year 2000.

Matt Cutts: What was Google like in 2000?

Host: Oh man, so we had three people start that day, and that was a new record at the time. Now, you know, you've got like hundreds of people starting each week. But the crazy thing is it was a startup back then, you know? So late nights, working crazy hours. I remember one of the first projects I worked on was SafeSearch.

Host: Okay.

Matt Cutts: And so at one point, at like 2:00 a.m., I got something working and I was really happy! So I was gonna head home, and I was like speeding because I was like super excited I got this thing working. Got a speeding ticket! And so I literally remember working every weekend until at some point people were like, "Oh, three or four years in, we don't work on weekends anymore." And I was like, "Oh, now the culture's changed a little bit." But it's super weird to be like the people who were just folks, you know? Amit or Lucas or whoever, then eventually became entire departments, you know, sales departments and people who dealt with logs and privacy. But back then it was just like a small group of people. It's crazy.

Host: How do you...because I know the story with PV creating Gmail is just like a one guy goof. Yeah, let's see if we can do this. Right? How did projects get delegated and chosen? How did it all work?

Matt Cutts: Well, it was funny because I started out, I did SafeSearch, and then there was this ski offsite, okay? Like everybody fit on one bus, a 150-person bus back then. So that was a great introduction to the company. I was skiing and on a lift with a manager, and she was like, "Hey Matt, you like doing front-end programming?" And I was like, "Sure, I like front-end programming." And then like, boom! Guess what? You're in the ads group now. I don't want to be in the ads group! But there were only like five people, and they needed help. I was like trying to help out. We did like geolocation, and it took like a year to claw my way back towards, you know, ranking. So it was very informal. It was very much like, "Here's a problem. We gotta go swarm and tackle it." Even writing SafeSearch was because there was a partner that wanted it, you know? And so we were like, "Okay, can we build this in time?" I'll make it...it was so on and like a self-hosted version, really.

Host: Yeah.

Matt Cutts: To what degree did you feel like the success of Google was certain at the time?

Host: Completely uncertain. I mean, if you go back, I think Google had raised like twenty-five million dollars from, you know, like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia or whatever. As I recall, the dot-com crash happened like March of 2000. Winter apocalypse! Everybody was like, "This is gonna be terrible." And so it wasn't at all clear that we were gonna be able to make it. I remember when Alta Vista... I was worried they were gonna crush us because, like, you know, number ranking signals. And if they had twigged and caught on fast enough, they even copied our appearance! They had a little front end that you could set it where you could be like... I think they called it like goofy. We've had like rainbow colored, so it looked a little like Google-y. But they didn't get the quality right, so we were okay from that point of view. But it was non-stop for several years! I mean, trying to make sure that in those early days, Microsoft didn't realize how much money was coming from search engines, right? But also AdWords and later AdSense.

Host: Can you walk through that product development? Because I'm so curious.

Matt Cutts: Yeah, yeah. What did you start? You're like, "Oh, this might not be a thing." And then like a certain type of ad takes off? Or yeah, that's something that failed.

Host: So it was wild because back then people were like, "Do you have sales? People sell stuff," which was the default, you know? So you go to the most profitable folks and do you sell by CPM (cost per thousand) or do you sell by cost per click? There was this thing called Overture where people could bid on things. And so there was a whole bunch of shifts in strategy where people were like, "Let's figure out how to do this." So at one point I was in the ads group and they said, "We're gonna do this prototype of self-service advertising." So we're going to make some little ad on the right-hand side, and oh man, I forgot to turn off caching when I ran that in Spearmint, and I nearly melted Google at that point.

Host: Is that cool?

Matt Cutts: They were just dynamically serving them constantly to everyone. Well, no, no. This was super, super prototype. So it was like the ads were like pool tables and PlayStation, and I forget what the third one was. Or any search for...no, but in order to show enough, you had to have it in the experiment for like 30% of people. Not that many people were searching for PlayStations or whatever. And so I turned off caching for 30% of Google, which radically like racks were melting down and the sort of stuff. So I remember we looked at the click-through rate, and it was really low because we just picked some copy, you know? We hadn't done any A/B testing. We were like, "Would you like to buy a PlayStation now?" kind of thing. And as I recall, Marissa was like, "This is not good for the user experience." And Larry Page was like, "Well, maybe, but I could imagine click-through going up, so let's explore this a little bit more."

Host: That surprises me because I've heard stories about banner ads, for example, in the beginning having crazy click-through rates. So why was that not working?

Matt Cutts: Ah, you know, the only thing I can think of is the copy probably sucked. It was off on the right-hand side. People probably didn't know what exactly is this thing over here. And it was kind of fun because they were like multicolored ads back then. You like thrown in pictures, and trying to make...no pictures. But I remember like a one pixel darker color boundary. Like there were really pretty ads, but I think people just didn't even know to click on them. And it turns out having people willing to put in the A/B testing makes a huge difference. And the first self-service ad we got for AdWords, I think for a lobster company, like you could buy lobsters in Maine and have them, you know, packed in dry ice and shipped to you. And that was the point when we were like, "Oh, there's this whole long tail of people who want to reach people who are looking for the things that they're looking, you know, selling pretty social media."

Host: Holy. Did you do like a user set? Did you like call the person in Maine up? I mean, like what made you choose to do this?

Matt Cutts: I hope that they got in touch with them and be like a pizza shop in San Jose. Right? Not a lot. Yeah, right. I really hope they got in touch and were like, "Did you know you were the very first one?" Yeah. And I remember I went to a search conference a few years back and somebody was like, "Hey, I was one of the first AdWords advertisers." And I was like, "Oh, cool! What did you do?" And he was like, "It wasn't family safe." And I was like, "Oh, yeah." And he was like talking about how he tweaked all the keywords and did all the testing. But people were willing to put in that work because you could find these little cavities where nobody else was searching. And like if you found the right word, you could actually get great click-through rates and a great response.

Host: I think you see it today with YouTube, right? Like people realize like, "Oh, there's nothing for this kind of flat earth search." Therefore they're just like, "Yeah." So we used to call that the evil unicorn problem. Or at least I used to call it that because people come to Google and they'll search for something like flat earth, right? And there's no good answers because you're looking for the most reputable, useful results to give people. And like there's not that many legitimate folks who are like, "Oh yeah, it's totally flat." So, but you still have to show 10 results unless you like change the interface to say you're in an untrusted area, which we experimented with that later. And so like the folks who realized they can make flat earth content or whatever were filling in a gap. And so at that point, you're just like, "Hey, listen, we're a common carrier to a certain extent, whatever comes through." So it gets really hard with common carrier and publisher and 230 and all sort of stuff. So there were literally people who sued us because we took action on them because we considered them spammers. Like there was literally selling PageRank like, "I will link to you," and the amount of money is based on the amount of PageRank I have. And then we took action and they were like, "That's unfair." And we're like, "Wow, like we rank the search results." And so there was one called Search King, and a result of that lawsuit was that search results are protected by the First Amendment. So that was a useful court precedent. And then there was one called KinderStart where they were saying PageRank is an algorithm. And so you have no ability or right to like zero out somebody's PageRank or to take action. But if you follow that to the natural logical extreme, like then you'd never be able to like tweak or adjust the search engine or like manually say, "Oh, I haven't, you know, this one's spam, but we haven't caught it yet," or algorithms aren't ready yet, so we're not allowed to take action on it. And so we won that lawsuit as well. But it was super interesting to see how people thought about search whether it was like a newspaper or whether it was like a card catalog at a library or like a magazine.

Host: You know, people just want high-quality, relevant results. They don't want to delve too deeply into, you know, I don't want it. We tried giving people knobs, yeah, you know, where you could, you know, tweak how reputable something would be, and nobody, nobody, nobody ever used it.

Matt Cutts: Now they click on the first five or whatever, typically. Yes.

Host: So where do you fall now with things like YouTube, where you just go deep, deep, deep, and you might not even know you're in it?

Matt Cutts: So I think one good thing about Google, you know, having left there several years ago now, is that the people really care about trying to do the right thing. Yeah. So trying to return high-quality, relevant results. And the same thing for YouTube, it's a different silo within Google, but a lot of the DNA is the same. And so when you see, you know, searches for something that doesn't actually exist and so spammers are ranking for it on YouTube, like YouTube wants to take care of that. And so I think some of the recent stuff where people are like getting down a rabbit hole, I'm sure that there are engineers thinking very hard about how do we solve this problem and make it work better.

Host: Yeah. Okay. I could talk to you about Google back in the day for a very long time. I want to be careful. But I was curious, so being early on the web spam team and then running web spam, you've read these stories about content moderators like oversees looking at horrible stuff. Yeah. Were you exposed to that?

Matt Cutts: Yeah, I mean, yes. More so with SafeSearch where you were trying to detect, you know, pornography and non-family safe things. And for a while, Larry and Sergey shared an office for a long time because they were on the road and that, you know, we were tight on real estate. And so for a long time, I had the cubicle right outside of there in his office, and this was right when I was working on SafeSearch. And so I was like, "Oh man, I’m trying to see if I could find stuff that had slipped through." And if I did, I would, you know, try to tweak word weights and stuff like that. And so at some point, Kohl Preet, who was our first lawyer at Google, came by and he was like, "Hey, um, hey Matt, we know you have to look for pornography. It's part of your job. It's a vital thing that you do, but like, oh, it kind of weirds out when visitors are coming! It looks kind of like you're looking at porn, and we know you're doing it for work, but could you put like a whiteboard up to why?"

Host: I was like, "Okay, I can do that." So, yeah, I did. I did end up seeing a lot of stuff, but it was a little bit of a different time. Like SafeSearch was just towards pornography, and spam was more like buy cheap Viagra and loan consolidation stuff. And so it wasn't nearly as bad as a lot of the content moderators had to deal with. There is one aspect though in which, once you've seen all the different ways in which people try to spam and cheat and break the rules, you can't unsee that. Like it's the blackhat mindset! Like once you realize, "Hey, here's the thing where people can recycle the conference badges," my mind immediately goes to, "What if that's not the conference?" And then people have free conference badges that they can then use for their friends on the last two or three days of a conference. Like, I literally can't look around the world and not think about how is somebody gonna abuse that system.

Host: Right. So now, do you feel that people are fundamentally evil?

Matt Cutts: No, no. So even it was funny, whenever we were working with a lot of publishers and websites that do search engine optimization (SEO), there was a little bit of folks early on who were like, "Oh, that's all evil! That's a hundred percent! You're trying to manipulate things, therefore bad, therefore take action." And there was a VP of Engineering, his name was Wars, who really had the right approach. He was like, "Look, these are small businesses. They're trying to do the best they can to make sure that they rank well because they think they have some of the best services on the internet." So we shouldn't begrudge trying to rank well; we should give them good things that they can do, like make your site better, you know? Make it faster, make it easy to navigate. And so that was really kind of a turning point where a lot of folks who might have been like antagonistic towards SEO sought more like, "This is energy which can be channeled in a positive way," which I think is critical because, you know, folks are just trying to do the best thing for their business.

Host: There's a few that are...yeah, of course sad actors, yeah, but for the most part, you know, people just want to know, "Give me the ground rules, make sure that everybody's behaving consistently by that." If there's somebody I see violating the ground rules, can I tell you about that, and will you take action on that? And so trying to make sure that people know the right positive things to work on and the right negative things to avoid, yeah, I think helped defuse a lot of the tension where it shouldn't be SEOs or websites versus Google. It should be or a search engine. It should be working together to give the best results.

Host: Yeah, that makes sense. Another thing that's interesting about your time at Google was just how long it was. Thank you! I think the average tenure now is two years or less at a tech company.

Matt Cutts: I don't know, yes. I stayed there for a month short of 17 years.

Host: It's a good run.

Matt Cutts: Yeah! So how did you think about your work over that long, long period? Because you came right out of a PhD, right? You didn't finish.

Matt Cutts: Yeah! Maybe someday my dad's like, "You, I don't think I'm gonna go back." Dad, I'm good!

Host: In the beginning, like, how long was it before you were managing people? What would have that whole progression look like?

Matt Cutts: Yeah, I got to code for about five years before they...it's like in 2004 or 2005.

Host: Yeah.

Matt Cutts: Okay. So worked on SafeSearch, worked in the ads group, and then I was on quality for the rest of my time at Google. And it was funny because for a while I was like spam's gonna be an issue, and it was not a popular opinion within Google. For a long time, people thought because they had the algorithm, it was so good. Yes, they thought Google couldn't be spammed. And it was because I worked on SafeSearch, and I found a loophole that I was like, "Oh no! Oh, there's gonna be a problem here!"

Host: Yeah, so you used an example on the history of the internet podcast where like someone bought an expired domain, turned it into a porn site!

Matt Cutts: Yes! Stuff like that. Exactly! And so after that, you know, I remember having an argument with a very early employee of Google who was like, "Well, that's easy! You just solve expired domains, and then you're done!" But that doesn't take into account guest books and award programs and fake awards that you'd give just to get links to people and social engineering and data. And so it was almost like you could see this thing coming down the horizon, and everybody else was busy. They were working on other stuff. Google was great at the time. Like back in 2000, you’d have a hard time convincing people like there was ever gonna be spam! So there was some tension there for a little while.

Host: But eventually, started work on spam, and after a little while longer, again, this one great VP of Engineering named Doors was like he invited me to his office one day and he was like, "Matt, bearing in mind that you can't say no, how would you like to manage the web spam team?" At the time, I was just a lowly engineer as well!

Matt Cutts: Oh, I guess I can't say no, right? So I guess I'm a manager now!

Host: That you're managing tactic now! Negotiation!

Matt Cutts: Because if they realize, think I'm like, or I could go work somewhere else, or I could just say no! Yeah, but it actually worked out because you become less productive, but you enable so many more people to become productive. Yeah. And so really kind of worked on it for the rest of my time at Google being a manager, and trying to guide and help people to, you know, partner with them to figure out how to make the quality of the search results better.

Host: If you were thrown back into Google right now, how would you be thinking about deep fakes?

Matt Cutts: Oh man! So the idea that you can create a video which has somebody, you know, falsely superimposing someone else's picture is a super hard problem because like, in theory, okay, you could do content and we're hashes where you could say this video is extremely similar to this other video, except for like these pixels. But then people can like change the histogram and like add some noise and hide a Chiron or something, so it's fundamentally a hard problem.

Matt Cutts: In general, with web spam, the philosophy was do as much as you can with an algorithm, catch the residual with, you know, manual spam people who are, you know, well-trained and extremely good at being able to catch things, and then use that as the training data for the next wave of algorithms. Okay, but fundamentally, like when you're synthesizing new content, as opposed to just republishing old content, that's a lot harder to detect.

Host: Okay, that's a tricky one. So yeah, the job is not over yet at Google.

Matt Cutts: No! And I think the main thing is just have policies like if you have a good reason to believe that there's a deep fake, how do you handle that process? Because I don't think you'll be able to completely automate the detection, but that's a problem already, right? With like de-platforming, de-monetizing or monetizing, yeah, it's the same issue, totally!

Host: So after that quite amazing tenure at Google, what motivated you to join USDS?

Matt Cutts: So it was interesting. I was in Nebraska at the time with my wife because I was working part-time, and my wife had said, "Why don't we do something fun?" And I was like, "Okay, you get to pick what's next!" Yeah! And she's like, "Well, my family lives in Nebraska." Seems great! So I'm like, "Alright, let's try that!" And after like eight or nine months, I was like, "Nebraska is wonderful! The people are really nice! But I also want to try something new for a little while."

Host: Did you go to the Berkshire meeting?

Matt Cutts: I did!

Host: You did the Berkshire Hathaway meeting! You buy one share of Berkshire Hathaway, which you can buy for like a hundred forty bucks!

Matt Cutts: Yeah! And then you can go to this meeting and watch them grilled, you know, Warren Buffett for eight hours. Like, and they also give you like free, you know, honey but listen! Dairy Queen stuff! So that was a fun, like April-May kind of ado. But it was interesting because I saw a ton of people that I really respect going to DC to try to make a difference in government. And Mikey Dickerson, who was the first guy to run the U.S. Digital Service, had come back to Google! He'd given a talk and talked about the impact that you could have. And so at that point, you know, I was like, "Alright, something interesting is going on here! I want to see what's going on!" And had an amazing six months! The election happened, and they needed somebody who could sort of steward the U.S. Digital Service and make sure it would still be in good shape because the person in front of me was an appointed official! Mikey was a political appointee!

Host: Yeah!

Matt Cutts: And so they needed a sort of interim Acting Administrator, and so I was willing to fill in for that, be the acting administrator!

Host: Well, and to be clear, like a bunch of people stepped up!

Matt Cutts: Like yes, you know some folks left! But at this point, something like 75% of the people who are in the U.S. Digital Service joined during the Trump administration because we've got this sort of two-to-four-year tour of duty model.

Host: Mm-hmm!

Matt Cutts: So we're not supposed to stay forever. We're supposed to come in and bring in skills from the tech industry, make systems work better inside government, and then head back out again. Yeah!

Host: And so a fair number of people, like, I...there's about 10% of us, yes, have been around longer than I have! So at some point, I need to find the next version!

Matt Cutts: Yeah! Yeah! Hand the baton too!

Host: So can you just...everyone maybe has heard about it but doesn't exactly know what you work on. Can you just like break it down?

Matt Cutts: Absolutely! So the U.S. Digital Service started when healthcare.gov went down. Caught on fire! The website was spinning shrapnel everywhere! They turned on CNN to see whether the website was back up or not! And it turns out like, you know, a bunch of contractors had done good work, but the integration points, when things were supposed to connect, were not really all that well-tested. And so bringing in best practices like, "Let's get everybody in a room, try to do a blameless postmortem, let's head monitor monitoring, you know, site reliability engineering practices," those kinds of things like that was what allowed healthcare to go up to make it through the enrollment period. And so after that, people said, "You know, we need more technologists in government."

Matt Cutts: How many hundred million dollar boondoggles do you have where you spend a bunch of money, you spend three years writing the requirements, then four more years writing the tech, and by the time you're done, it doesn't work or it doesn't work as well as you expect it? And so the U.S. Digital Service is sometimes, we're a little like a SWAT team when a system goes down! You know, U.S. Transcom has a database, it's down or something like that, we try to work with them and try to figure out how to get it back up!

Host: We also do discovery sprints where we'll come in for two weeks and we'll say, "We think this is the problem, you might think this is the problem, but it turns out over here is the bigger constraint." And then we'll do anything from months-long engagements to years-long engagements. So we've worked with USCIS, you know, to try to help immigrants become citizens faster, Veterans Affairs trying to claim, you know, health benefits and everything like that.

Matt Cutts: And so it's fascinating because you're a federal employee, but you come in for a limited tour of duty, anywhere from six months to two years to four years, and then a lot of folks head back into industry. But a surprisingly large number of them say it turns out I'm ruined for private industry!

Host: Like yeah!

Matt Cutts: Once you have helped make a student loan wizard that literally helps your sister, you know, fix her student loan and be able to get a car and have a better life. Like, you're like, "Why am I gonna go work on Uber for dog walkers or how to deliver weed to people better?" Which is fine work on, but you're not saving the world if you're doing that.

Host: And so a lot of people are like forming startups in civic tech! They're helping to build state digital services. They're, you know, doing consultancies all the way down to some folks who decide to stay in government, which is really exciting because then you've got, you know, people with good emotional intelligence, hopefully good technical ability who can say, "That's not the way a computer works!"

Host: Oh dude, we're gonna get to that! That's like the whole Facebook hearing! Oh my God!

Matt Cutts: But I'm curious about who makes up your team? Like, do you have people like writing COBOL patches?

Host: We do have one guy who taught himself COBOL for fun!

Matt Cutts: Really?

Host: Yeah, because there's a lot of COBOL!

Matt Cutts: Yeah! Like a bunch! And in fact, I could show you a picture of a...and there's...I won't name the agency, but there's a room where they file bugs by printing out COBOL on paper and being like, "The room is sorted by line number!"

Host: Yeah!

Matt Cutts: Yeah! It's super scary!

Host: But so we're about a third engineers, one-third designers, one-third product managers. We also have people who are like procurement experts, you know, who help decide how to buy things better. We've got an amazing talent team, you know. It's always good to have a lawyer to help you make sure you know how big is it?

Matt Cutts: How many folks? We are about a hundred eighty people, and it's fascinating because you've got everything from folks who, you know, have been in government and wanted to maximize the amount of bureaucracy that they could hack to, you know, folks who are like Facebook engineers. You know, we had a staff software engineer come from Google who she could only come for the summer, but we were like, "Come on down!" You know? And let's see how much work we can get done! And it's really gratifying to see people do that!

Host: That's cool! So yeah, do you have a different kind of onboarding process, given that, you know, the tour of duty is limited?

Matt Cutts: Yeah! Okay, most of the time, if you want to join the federal government, you can go to USAJOBS.gov. Okay? We, you know, if you're interested in joining the U.S. service, go to USDigitalService.gov/apply, and you can literally do it in 90 seconds!

Host: Michael, if your browser has autocomplete, it's like your name, email address, that kind of stuff in a resume. So if you've got a resume ready, you just upload that guy! What happens then is, you know, if you're a designer, designers look at your resume. If you're a product manager, product managers look at your resume.

Matt Cutts: We actually do one sort of technical interview that's like, "Okay, you know, how good of an engineer are you? Can you write some code?" And then if that goes well, then we'll do a follow-up technical interview and one emotional intelligence interview. You know, we don't want to hire jerks!

Host: Mm-hmm.

Matt Cutts: It goes to a hiring committee that determines whether this person is minimally qualified. Okay, so it's... And then we're always hiring! We have sort of this rolling...it's not like we have batches! We're like, "The application phase is always open."

Host: And it's fascinating because, like, you know, these folks could probably earn a little bit more money, although the government can pay up to a hundred sixty-five thousand dollars a year. It's not best!

Matt Cutts: So not a salary that's cheaper and deceiving in San Francisco right now, and so we try to streamline the candidate experience and make sure it's not, you know, as government-y as it often is. You're trying to join a server, like yeah, hiring it's startups and knowing what that experience is like!

Host: Yes, very different!

Matt Cutts: Yes!

Host: Let's go back to the Facebook or...yeah, the tech in government! How are you guys thinking about educating people in government about how the computers actually work?

Matt Cutts: Yeah, so, you know, there's Jen Pahlka at Code for America, which is an amazing nonprofit. I think has said, and there's a lot of people who use this phrase that "government is who shows up." And so there's a, you know, there's an amazing amount of passionate people on Capitol Hill and throughout government, but I'll give you one stat: HUD, Housing and Urban Development has 8,000 plus employees according to the statistics. The number of IT experts, like there's a job classification 2210, blah blah blah. We'll just say IT people. The number of IT people under 30 at HUD is zero!

Host: So, you know, if you can get one good technical person to come in, it can make a huge difference!

Matt Cutts: You can have a huge impact! And so, you know, a lot of the times, you might have thousands of people on Capitol Hill, but you know, they have to be experts on a bunch of stuff, farm bill and, you know, all kinds of stuff. And so technology is not necessarily their core expertise. And so getting some technologists who are willing to like come and say, "You know, this particular product is actually snake oil," you know? Or, "We evaluated this and it looks great!" You know?

Host: People are even, if it's just the process of selecting a contractor. Like the dirty little secret is the government doesn't do as much work as the contractors who, you know, they bring on board to do stuff!

Matt Cutts: And so if you get a bad contractor, or if you don't know what good looks like because they write agile, agile, agile all over the requests from...I'm a certified Scrum Master 9,000 or whatever it is! I'm sure there's great! Yeah, I'm not saying it's...

Host: But it is, I'm gonna start using the line if you don't mind!

Matt Cutts: Yeah, but it's also the case that, like, for one procurement, we said, "Okay, instead of writing a pile of paper which says how good you are, why don't you submit some code to it and work to us, and we're gonna have engineers actually grade the quality of your code?"

Host: And so if you get better contractors, you get better results whenever, you know, the finished work product is done, and have you figured out a way to give someone a feedback loop that's fast enough that makes them feel like they're having an impact? Because like, alright, say let's just say I'm like, "I'm amazing! I'm the best software engineer at Google. I'm gonna go join HUD. Am I not just gonna be pushing a rock up a hill for my entire career?"

Matt Cutts: Okay, so there are definitely days where you feel like in government you were pushing a rock up a hill. Yeah, we sometimes use the metaphor of paper cuts!

Host: Oh no!

Matt Cutts: And so it took us four years to get access to Slack, for example! Get permission to be able to use Slack, at least within our particular group, but every so often you have those breakthrough days where you're like, "We actually convinced this person that this policy doesn’t help people and actually hurts people!"

Host: Or...yeah, I could...

Matt Cutts: On the scale of the impact is large! It's huge! Like if you can shift the ship of state by one degree, yeah, that's tens of thousands of veterans who are getting benefits or tens of thousands of small businesses getting certified faster and more accurately! And so yeah, there's hard days, but it is super deeply meaningful! And if you absorb a few of the paper cuts, you make it a little bit easier for the next person. So like if by the time they show up, they can get a good laptop on day one that has access to some modern tools, they're like, "Oh, you know what? Working for government’s not that bad! I'll take the next three paper cuts!" And then the person behind me totally has an easier job!

Host: That's great! Yeah! I remember hearing that VA story about like you need to like downgrade your version of Acrobat to use this product. It's so sad! But, yeah, and I have to say, like the one thing that I try to avoid, and I've not done it well so far in this interview, is giving more credit to our federal partners because like what you find is people who know the right answer or who are deeply dedicated, committed, passionate, but for whatever reason, don't always have the power to like get the right answer, knew the right level, or to push through some, some regulation or, or, you know, we overcome some resistance.

Matt Cutts: And so if our goal is to come in and find those amazing people who are trying their darndest to try to make sure that the right thing happens, and give a little bit of extra wind beneath their wings, you like that's a fantastic model because it's not like we're not the world experts on, you know, how this part of government is! Also 180 people, so it's like you couldn't...exactly, yeah!

Host: So, and that's why, you know, just being able to find the leverage points where we can enable good things to happen and work with and collaborate with federal partners who are the true subject matter experts and the real, like heroes and the story, like that's when things really go well.

Matt Cutts: Okay, so sometimes you kind of like drop in and you're like a PM basically, like making that happen. Okay! I got you!

Host: Alright, there are a bunch of questions for you!

Matt Cutts: Yeah!

Host: From the Internet!

Matt Cutts: Yes!

Host: So we're gonna just knock some out! Okay!

Host: So Michael Wang asks, "How does USDS decide whether to outsource something to a private company or build the software in-house?"

Matt Cutts: Yeah, that's a great question because it kind of goes back to this last thing we talked about. Like fundamentally, that's going to be the federal partner that we work with that's making that decision. And so it's like, do you buy? Do you build? You know, can you use something open-source or off the shelf, you know? You know, commercial technology? And so it's rarely the case that U.S. Digital Service is making that precise call. It's more like we might do a discovery sprint, dig into something for two weeks and be like, "You know what? This off-the-shelf software as a service product will work just fine for the 90% case." And then sometimes it's like, "No, you have to build your own grants management software," but we'll help you find a good contractor or help vet them or help make sure that the contract is written well, those kinds of things. And so, you know, if you can just buy something commercially or repurpose some open source, like great! You should not reinvent the wheel, but if you've got a really unique need, then U.S. Digital Service is there to try to help figure out, "Okay, how do we fill that with the minimum amount of work and money?"

Host: Cool! Alright, next question! Spencer Claw Clark asks, "It would seem that the government is far behind in private industries technology." To what extent is this true, and what can be done about it? In addition to that, how should we gauge the product and here go after we gauge the progress of institutions like the USDA?

Matt Cutts: Oh, that's such a good question! So I sometimes joke, and this is not intended to be a knock against them again—the amazing people who are trying their very best to make things happen in government—but I sometimes joke that government technology is frozen in 1995! And the reason that I picked that date is because bug bounties, which you know are just an idea of like if I find a security hole, I'm gonna alert a company, and the company gives you money and says thank you—bug bounties were invented in 1995 by Netscape, which was a browser that came before Firefox for those of you who weren't...

Host: Morrison, yeah, exactly!

Matt Cutts: And then the federal government had never done bug bounties before 2016! So the Defense Digital Service, which is an amazing group of individuals at the Pentagon, ran something called Hack the Pentagon and later Hack the Army, Hack the Air Force, Hack the Marines—they've done a ton of bug bounties, and it increases the security of our country in all kinds of different ways! It's cheaper, faster, you find more security holes! It's like, bug bounties are fantastic!

Host: You like! You look at your quiver of tools—it's a great tool!

Matt Cutts: So that bug bounties were not put into place until like 2016. Now, the government is sort of thinking more about vulnerability disclosure policies, bug bounties, that kind of stuff. Now, we're kind of at a phase where I've seen, even just in the three years that I've been in government, a lot of folks like, "Okay, how do I move to the cloud? How do I make sure that it's secure?" You know, so if you think Amazon Web Services was introduced in like 2006-ish—if you can in three-ish years go from 1995 to 2006, instead of going on one year per year, you're doing like three years per year!

Host: So like if...and again, not to claim that that is all the work of the U.S. Digital Service because there's amazing groups—there's 18F, which is a group in the General Services Administration. There are a ton of super leaning-forwards Chief Information Officers (CIOs), so a whole bunch of people all collectively pushing the government means that, you know, if we're moving through bug bounties, through, you know, on-premises email on to people thinking about how do I move my stuff to the cloud? My gauge of progress is, "Hey, we're only 13 years behind instead of, you know, 23 years behind!"

Matt Cutts: And so, so that's pretty good progress from our standpoint!

Host: That seems awesome. And in particular your progress, like how do you rank yourself there?

Matt Cutts: Yeah, you know, I think the fact that we are the U.S. Digital Service is still here, we're still working on projects that matter, we're hiring, and we're able to have an impact, for me that's like if we've got good work to do, that's the primary, you know, measure success that I care about.

Host: Okay, cool! Steven Sturgis asks, "With GANs (General Adversarial Networks) getting more and more powerful, is the USDS thinking about the future of data authenticity?"

Matt Cutts: That is such a good question, and it makes me put my webspam hat on! So you can use GANs to like make a fake person that doesn't actually exist and so, you know, a picture of someone that looks completely real, but is just invented by a computer, which is a huge problem for someone like spam because you can ask for a turf comments and be like, "I am Bob Smith," and here's a picture that doesn't look like any other—you haven't just stolen someone else's picture! So it makes it harder to figure out, is this comment authentic and is this data authentic? Luckily, the profit motive to spam government, like there is some, but primarily the sorts of spam that we've seen are things like fake comments, you know, on the FCC or, you know, various other places.

Matt Cutts: The Wall Street Journal had a good article about that! So typically, the U.S. Digital Service is more like, we're implementers! You know, if there's a system or a process that needs to be examined, we are happy to help! There's this amazing group called the Office of the Federal CIO, and they think more about policy—okay? So, you know, what should the federal government data strategy look like? Which should the federal cloud strategy look like? Those kinds of things! And so, you know, how much open data should people have? And so I think all of those are hugely important! Data authenticity, at least as far as with people spamming or creating fake data, is a little bit outside the scope of the kinds of things that we typically see, you know, as we do see more movement toward data interoperability. So that might be a way where you could be like, "Okay, this seems like fake data because it's like two standard deviations out from what the typical stuff seems like."

Matt Cutts: So you could do those kinds of things, but we haven't honestly—the kinds of problems we run into at the U.S. Digital Service are more like, "Here's a paper process! Can we make it electronic?" "Here's an electronic process, but it sucks! Can we make it, you know, like private industry would do, where you can do it on your phone and it's, you know, no obvious glitches? And there's so much work to be done just on that sort of metaphor! You hit bleeding edge! Can totally—yeah, that makes so much sense!

Host: Alright, we have another Google question! So John Dougherty asks, "How difficult was it to communicate Google's algorithm changes and evolving SEO best practices without leaking new spam tactics?"

Matt Cutts: Oh man, good question from John! So it was... it was interesting because I would go to search conferences and a lot of Googlers would go to search conferences, and we would pick up, you know, what are people talking about as far as blackhat tips and tricks or like what are they talking about on search forums and stuff like that. So we got a lot out of that participation. We would learn, and then we had to be careful about how we communicated. But at a very high level, my goal and I think a lot of how Google communicated the goal was to say, "Look, here's where the puck is! Here's where the puck is going to be! Like move toward where the puck is going to be!" Like make a site that works on, like we were saying you need to have a mobile site, you know, way early before everybody realized mobile was gonna be such a big thing! You need your site to be fast! You know, you need to think about, you know, are you practicing, you know, good design? Those sorts of things.

Matt Cutts: And so it usually wasn't that hard because you're like, "Look, most sites, if you do a site audit, there's things where you could just say, move toward this mountain top, and you'll be good." There were definitely a couple of signals or dimensions that I had to be careful about! I talked to a partner at YC at demo day, and they were sort of saying, "I just have to be a hundred percent honest because it's like five thousand founders! I can't keep them all in mind!"

Host: And so like, as if you're honest, you don't keep track of what you're saying. So there might be times when I could, you know, I was... I did my best to always be honest, but I might, you know, frame things in a way that's like, "Here's the positive way to talk about it," and leave out, you know, "And you could probably make some money in the short term doing it this way!" But it historically wasn't too bad! It wasn't that big of a deal!

Host: Okay, Vaneman zero to five for exactly! Totally legit! Completely trust this comment! "How can smart tech folks better contribute to regulatory and policy discussions in government?"

Matt Cutts: Mmm-hmm! It's a great question! I mean, there's a lot of stuff happening at the federal level, but there's also a lot of stuff happening at the state level and even down municipal, city, county sort of stuff! So what I would say is, you know, show up! Show up to the City Council meeting! Show up to, you know, the state legislature and say, "I can help answer some policy questions!" There's a guy who literally was like buying DVDs of the Virginia State Legislature and their transcripts and like getting them turned into, you know, actual transcripts and then just making that available to more people!

Matt Cutts: And so there's like all these grassroots ways to like encourage people to understand how government works! The other thing I would say is like smart tech folks, you should run for office! Like we need people who... like we don't have that many computer scientists who are elected officials, especially at the federal level!

Host: So like it's not, you know, it's hard, I'm sure, but like it is a thing that is possible to do, right? And so especially at the state level or at the federal level, like you would be amazed how much of a difference it makes to just show up and be like, "Hey, I'm a resource if you want to hear about X, Y, or Z!" You know? I'm kind of the world expert on this part!

Matt Cutts: So like if you have questions about whatever, happy to help!

Host: Yeah, cool! I mean, also, not for nothing, there are a bunch of government tech startups that have gone through YC!

Matt Cutts: Yeah, based in DC, man, in other places! Totally!

Host: There, yeah! You can do this in a for-profit way!

Matt Cutts: Yeah! Yeah! And there's a whole new generation of contractors that are like, "Hey, you know, we see a bunch of opportunity!" So like yes, you can go the nonprofit route, you can go into government, you can offer your resources to free, you know, you can be a consultant, but you can also form a company!

Host: Like people have started to gnaw on our own healthcare and there's so much, you know, redundant waste in there! There's like a decade's worth or a generation's worth of stuff to be done there!

Matt Cutts: There's a bunch of stuff to be done in government as well!

Host: Totally! Alright, Roenick asks, well they say hi Matt! Nice to hear! Yes! "What's your best pitch to high-performing startups in the Bay Area to adopt more of a human-centered design?"

Matt Cutts: Mmm-hmm! Says something that the government has been moving towards surprisingly well, but that fast-moving startups have neglected!

Host: Yeah, you know, there's this myth that like the lore about Steve Jobs was always like, "Well, if I ask people what they want, you know, they'll tell me they want faster horses and cars," or something, and so yes, there is room for the occasional fifth standard deviation genius who's like, "I know they think they want this, but they really need this!" Right? An iPod or whatever!

Matt Cutts: But most of us are not Steve Jobs! We're just not! And so if you talk to users, you can only get so far off base! Like, it's amazing to me—you know, I went to a some place recently and I was filling out the, you know, the register on the iPad and the lobby kind of thing, and they asked for an email address! And but they don't have like the @ sign!

Host: Yeah!

Matt Cutts: So you have to hunt down and press shift shift shift, you know, to find the @ sign! And it's just like watching a user doing the journey map, seeing what the pain points are! Like, people underestimate how important it is to be beloved!

Host: Like just goodwill!

Matt Cutts: Like one of the things that people love the most about Google was the logo, right? And it's like, that's not hard to do! But it's like, it's worth putting a few people on coming up with cool, fun Pac-Man logos! You don't think it contributes to your bottom line, but, but it kind of does! Like whenever Zuckerberg got testified in front of Congress, the market cap went down like a hundred and twenty-nine billion dollars in one day!

Host: And I always had a hard time at Google, you know, saying, "Okay, yes, we should talk to webmasters and publishers and SEO search engine optimizers, but how do you know how many people should be allocated to that?"

Matt Cutts: Like it should be at least one, right? The first one helps, but then you don't know how far you go until you get to diminishing returns. So we always had a hard time quantifying like what is the value of goodwill. And I think like losing 129 billion dollars in market cap in one day is like one really good measure of goodwill about whether people like you or not!

Host: And so like don't wait until the congressional hearings roll around!

Matt Cutts: This is a dangerous conversation, right? Because I think a lot of tech companies like, "Okay, how do I get out there more without offending the other side?" Right? So they're just like wading through very carefully! Like oh, if I make just to make it very simple.

Host: Yeah.

Matt Cutts: Like if I make the right call, could I allow, you know, gun videos and whatever gun has. Whatever the left will hate me! So like how do you do that?

Host: So I would say yes, there's like two percent of issues that might be hyper-partisan and divide people and polarize people, but there's like 98 percent of issues that are like, "I was literally trying to buy insurance the other day," and there had two websites open. And the first website was like, "Okay, step one, we're gonna need you to make a login; it's going to be this password six to thirty characters! Do that!" The second website was like, "Tell us your personal information, tell us your credit card number!"

Matt Cutts: Which one do you think I gave my four hundred dollars' worth of insurance money to? The second one! That was like super easy and like no pain points!

Host: Yeah!

Matt Cutts: And you could literally see like one was like 1980-style static websites, and the other one was like hero images, you know, and cool stuff! So, but design is not just what is pretty! Of course it's not! It is thinking about the user and how to make sure that they have a good experience!

Matt Cutts: And I honestly think that is like a secret competitive advantage! Whenever you talk to, you know, a random company and they think about, you know, what is my Net Promoter Score, and yes, you know, Net Promoter scores have their own issues, but like if you're not seeing keen about how much your customers like you, you probably have a competitor who is thinking about that!

Host: Totally!

Matt Cutts: I mean it's a so much that it's a cliché!

Host: Oh I see!

Matt Cutts: But we're basically shoving people out the door! You can go talk to their...

Host: Yeah!

Matt Cutts: And like you'll learn! And we see that with search engine optimization as well! If you talk to five users and say, "What would you type to find this page?" or, you know, "What would you—here's your problem—how would you type it?" Like, you will be radically surprised by the kind of words they use! You know, is it a USB Drive, thumb drive, you know, USB disk? Like this kind of stuff!

Host: So if you've got a friend who's afraid to insert, you know, a USB Drive into their computer, you know, you gotta think about why are they afraid?

Matt Cutts: What makes them afraid? What kind of words are they using? All that kind of stuff!

Host: Yeah! Do you have an opinion on the size of your data set? This is like a constant debate among some folks!

Matt Cutts: I mean, I feel like the first nine or ten people you talk to, get you the biggest amount of value!

Host: Yeah!

Matt Cutts: The team that we have at Veterans Affairs has literally talked to 5,000 veterans! Now, that's over a course of like four years, right? But I mean, we built one feature, and it was so if you've been discharged for like other than honorable reasons, so traumatic brain injury, PTSD, Don't Ask, Don't Tell, whatever! And it's really hard to get your paper upgraded because you have to like...it depends on the service! You might have to fill out a form, you might have to send it to VA or DOD (Veterans Affairs or Department of Defense)!

Host: What is paper upgraded?

Matt Cutts: Okay! So that you can get an honorable discharge, okay? So that you're eligible for health benefits and all sorts of other stuff! And it was crazy because we launched it, people love it, and somebody was like, "Well who told you to build this? You know, where does this fit into the software development lifecycle and the enterprise planning, you know, whatever?" And the answer was the veterans told us to build this!

Host: Yeah!

Matt Cutts: And so it took one person, her name was Natalie by the way, taking the ball and pushing really hard! And she got this amazing group of folks who helped her! And now that community of veterans has like a tool that they really want! And it is amazing! Like, yep, the first ten veterans you talk to are the most helpful! But the 5,000th will still help you make your product better!

Host: Super interesting!

Matt Cutts: Yeah!

Host: I remember one time I was at a post office in Japan, and they had a bunch of different grade glasses tied to the stand where you filled it. I was like, "This is so perfect!"

Matt Cutts: Wow!

Host: Like, you would never think about it until you see the four-hundredth person like leave their glasses there!

Matt Cutts: Yeah!

Host: Oh, this is what they want right here!

Matt Cutts: Yes! And it's crazy to me that like there are some companies that people love!

Host: Yeah!

Matt Cutts: You know, Vanguard or TiVo or pick your favorite, right? And typically they love them because they delighted them in some way or, or it can just be like a lot of people like Google because it's just like, "I show up, it's always up, I get the answers I need, it's fast, it is as relevant as I think humans can reasonably achieve..." or whatever! And then I leave!

Matt Cutts: And just the sheer, like being able to deliver over deck, you know, two decades now, a product that just works and then gets out of your way and doesn't annoy you, doesn't show pop-up ads or whatever, like that is a way to engender a lot of goodwill with people!

Host: Yeah!

Matt Cutts: Yeah! I mean, just thoughtful. This is like, so it doesn't have to be cute, you know, to be thoughtful, right?

Host: Right!

Matt Cutts: Whimsy is, you know, maybe...

Host: God, you know, but yeah.

Matt Cutts: But delight or just caring for the user is huge!

Host: Yeah! Alright, Adam Hoffman asks, "What are legislators, the government, and the general populace most getting wrong in how they conceptualize the internet?"

Matt Cutts: Oh man! That is such a good question! I'm not sure I have a great answer! I mean most people are not at the level of like Ted Stevens, where he was like, "The internet is just a series of tubes!" You know! Like people have a more sophisticated conceptualization now!

Host: I think you know the internet is a huge big place and you've got everything from great actors to bad actors. A lot of the times the kinds of times when people like want to pass a law or something to forbid something on the internet, you can just say like, "Well, what if somebody were doing it offline? How would you treat it?"

Matt Cutts: And a lot of the same metaphors apply! The other thing is like you don't need to specify the specific mechanism! You don't need to say, "You can fax something!" Because if you, if you bake in the code or into law that this has to be faxed, right, that's gonna affect things for the next 30 years until there's a new law that supersedes it! And so like baking in the idea of what you want but not hard coding the specific technologies that are used are a little more likely to make something evergreen!

Matt Cutts: So that it's just like the data can be electronically transmitted, and then you don't care if it's via fax or chat or whatever you or protocol buffers or JSON, whatever might!

Host: Yeah, it does! You know, you don't need hard coding and something to a specific technology! I think that that's probably the best I can offer on that one!

Matt Cutts: Okay! Makes sense! Next question! Rafael Ferreira asks, "Is it possible to live without Google?"

Matt Cutts: I think there are some interesting questions like beneath this step! So he says, "How do you think Google affected people and searching for answers in content now that everything is just in one click?"

Host: Mmm-hmm!

Matt Cutts: That's such a good question because, yeah! People lived without Google at least up before 1998, right? Then tens of thousands of years! But now I've been to a restaurant up in Toronto where they literally have a little indentation where you both put your phone in and then you put the wooden thing like a Faraday cage.

Host: Yeah!

Matt Cutts: It's like it tucks your phone away where you have to be present with the person! And it was hilarious because I went to a dinner that was at that restaurant, and like three or four times during dinner, I was like, "Oh, well, I can just look up, you know, when the Eiffel Tower was invented," or whatever! And then, and but the food plate is sitting on the little, you know, phone holder! And so you're not able to get to your phone! But at the same time, I do think that we're a little more like, I feel like my attention span has gone down! You know, you got...you don't have time for boredom anymore! Instead, you just hop on Twitter when you have five minutes to waste! Twitter is a great way to waste thirty-five minutes! You know, I see it oftentimes with friends—I haven't! I did it myself too, like online dating as an example!

Matt Cutts: You get in this like eternal optimization problem! Yeah! Oftentimes you don't think like, "Oh, I have to do a full load out if I'm gonna load something else in here!" But, but you see people like, "Oh, I can get someone who's like 10 percent more funny!"

Host: Or, "Yeah, oh, same with restaurants, right?"

Matt Cutts: "Yeah, this place could be better!"

Host: Right? Could be a cooler phone-holding thing.

Matt Cutts: Well, and it's strange to me that, you know, there's somebody who just wrote a book called "How to Break Up with Your Phone in 30 Days!"

Host: Okay!

Matt Cutts: So you start doing that! By the way, I...it failed horribly! I tried that as a thirty-day challenge! I'd still have my...so clearly didn't break out that much!

Host: But just like I have been trying to spend a little more time being active on weekends instead of being on my computer all the time, I've actually lost like five pounds doing that! So I'm like, yeah, we could all step away and do a little forest bathing or, you know, that kind of thing as opposed to just like you spend three hours on the computer, and then you're like, "What did I actually accomplish?"

Matt Cutts: Yeah! So I think this is kind of putting their finger right on the pulse! Which is like maybe the pendulum will swing the other way! Maybe we'll be a little bit more mindful and like, "Okay, I will do this thing with the computer, and then I'll put the computer away and talk to a friend," or, "You know, visit with somebody!"

Host: Hopefully we'll see!

Matt Cutts: Meanwhile, all the dark patterns in the world and all the infinite scroll! No indication—no way!

Host: Yeah!

Matt Cutts: Hmm, I did use like pie hole to block most of my time-wasting sites.

Host: Okay!

Matt Cutts: So like I have too many stuck to it! You like to open the browser on your phone, and then as you do, I like have to turn off Wi-Fi to like be able to access Twitter now! But it helps because then you're like you think at least for a second before you get back on there!

Host: I like grayscale!

Matt Cutts: Makes your phone terrible! It's so boring!

Host: Let's say you take a picture and you're like, "I don't know if it's a good picture or not!"

Matt Cutts: Yeah!

Host: And it's crazy!

Matt Cutts: And also just taking time, I feel like, you know, I've gone away for like a week, but offline, and it's shocking how quickly you can like batch process at all!

Host: When you think about it, it's like, "Wait, I probably spend like 10 hours a week in email!"

Matt Cutts: Yeah!

Host: Then I just did a whole week of email in one hour!

Matt Cutts: Yeah!

Host: Like, why am I refreshing this cousin?

Matt Cutts: Totally! It feels like, you know, with the latest version of the iPhone and with the latest version of Android, like the pendulum's starting to swing the other way! Like digital well-being, they store the features! I think that's super cool!

Host: Yeah, it's exciting!

Matt Cutts: Yeah! Okay, so Tim Woods asks, "Which job was more fun and why?"

Matt Cutts: That is not fair! I love all my jobs! Okay! So at Google, you know, you could get a haircut and oil change and do your laundry on-site and, you know, see Taco Powell and like...yeah, I mean crazy! It was a great place!

Host: Yeah!

Matt Cutts: It was a ton of fun! The people were phenomenally talented! So on a sheer superficial fun level, Google is pretty fun! But I gotta say, like working at the U.S. Digital Service, often hard, often difficult, often frustrating, off the charts meaningful!

Matt Cutts: Like there's a lot of people who say happiness is not this hedonism kind of, "Did you enjoy your day?" and "How much candy did you eat?" It's like, "Did you work on something that you're gonna feel good about, you know, on your deathbed?" kind of stuff!

Host: Yeah!

Matt Cutts: So they're radically different! And I would not have been able to do the job at the U.S. Digital Service without my time at Google, and I'm incredibly grateful for it! And there are a ton of people work hard to make Google a fun place and a, you know, a great place to work!

Matt Cutts: But man, the people at the U.S. Digital Service are folks who are just incredibly noble and will sacrifice and will wake up every day and try to sometimes push a rock up a hill! And a lot of days, the rock just comes back down ninety percent of the way!

Host: Yeah!

Matt Cutts: So that kind of perseverance and seeing people willing to do that in order to try to make services work better for the American public is super inspiring! Fundamenteally, they're just different though! Like I say, all else equal in some like crazy alternate reality where Google salary and USD salary equalizes, do you think there would be a swing?

Host: Because I mean, purpose is super important, right? You see like even these people who like go for early retirement, like they need to do something!

Matt Cutts: You have to do something!

Host: With, yeah!

Matt Cutts: Yeah!

Host: Do you think more, do you think it's really like a salary difference?

Matt Cutts: Yeah! Salary is part of it! I've heard people say, "Why on earth do you have to take a drug test, which you do, haven't to join the U.S. trailer service? Or why do I have to move to D.C.? The summers, they are hot and humid!...And they suck!"

Matt Cutts: All good feedback!

Host: And I'm like, "Oh, we can solve some of those problems! We would solve those!"

Matt Cutts: I hear from a lot of people who are looking for more mission and purpose right now! Yeah! Like if you think about, you know, the MeToo movement, you know, some of the stuff affecting the tech industry, like people don't always feel good to admit which company they're working for now! Or they don't feel good to say, "Yeah, I'm just making a little, you know, a little bit more money for this particular billionaire!"

Matt Cutts: Or I'm adding infinite scrolling so that people spend more time, you know, or in my game or my app or something like that!

Host: Yeah!

Matt Cutts: And so it is super interesting to me, if I go to a random conference like XOXO, which is a neat design conference, and I'm like, "Have you, you know, considered government service?" The hit rate is incredibly high!

Host: Hmm.

Matt Cutts: It might not be the right time for that person! They might want to, you know, work at a different level of government, or you know, they might have certain political proclivities, but like a large fraction of people are like, "No, that's on my list! At some point, maybe I need..." I was talking to somebody earlier today who was like "For right now, I need to earn a little more salary, but you know, in two years or in four years, I would love to do this!"

Host: To the point where they were like, "Let me come shadow you for a little while!"

Matt Cutts: That's cool!

Host: And yeah! So, um, so it's really inspiring to see that! That a lot of folks are like, "They..." And if you think about it, there's folks who have student loans, you know, who are a veteran, or their mom or dad is a veteran!

Matt Cutts: Like almost everybody interacts with the government, and almost everybody sees ways that those interactions could be better!

Host: Well, I mean, as I told you before we started recording, I just interacted with the USCIS!

Matt Cutts: Yeah! I have some opinions about the product! Right?

Host: And, okay, so a lot of folks are like, "I am NOT the world's 10x best engineer! Can I still contribute something to government?"

Matt Cutts: And as we were saying before you started recording, like a lot of the stuff that we do at the U.S. Digital Service is not rocket science! It's like, "Hey! Show me the status of my claim online so I know do I need to wait two years for my disability claim, or am I going to get helped in two months?"

Matt Cutts: And like, you know, adding a progress bar to see where you are in the process! Or making a form work on a phone! Like a lot of people have those skills! So if you're listening right now, like you can do, you know, like a six-month tour. You can get a leave if you're at a big company for six months and not have to, you know, give up all your stock options or stuff like that!

Matt Cutts: That's what I did! I signed up for a six-month tour, and that was three years ago! And so we do practice commitment escalation! Full disclosure!

Host: But it is also a hundred percent the case that, like, you know, there is good work to be done and at, you know, two-thirds of trust in government according to McKinsey!

Matt Cutts: So maybe take it with a grain of salt, and two-thirds—I'm always scared when it's such a random number ID! But they say two-thirds of trust in government is driven by the interactions that you have with government!

Host: Hmm!

Matt Cutts: So if you want people to trust government more and for it to function more effectively and efficiently and sort of regain trust in an important critical pillar of society, you know, consider a short tour!

Host: We got a couple more! We're gonna knock it out! We good?

Matt Cutts: Yeah!

Host: Helpers! Okay! So Sneha Curry asks, "What is Matt's view of the ongoing debate about backdooring encryption for so-called, in quotes, lawful interception?"

Matt Cutts: Mmm-hmm! So fundamentally, I'm a technologist! I have a math degree! I have a computer science degree! I have a Master's in computer science! I have a PGP, you know? Like I have done the public key encryption!

Matt Cutts: And my technical assessment is that, well, let me start answering in a slightly different way. A lot of the value that the U.S. Digital Service does is not within a specific silo, but looking at the seams between silos!

Host: Because maybe Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs don't talk to each other!

Matt Cutts: And so it's when those service treatment records are transitioning from a service member to a veteran that things might get lost in translation or fall in between the cracks! And it's the same way with security! Like you can have a full frontal assault with a really great protected system that's, you know, really locked down!

Matt Cutts: But if you have some little seam over here on the side, like a recovery method that's not two-factor authentication, that's actually just tied to your phone, then all somebody has to do is SIM swap and maybe socially engineer, you know, a customer support rep but pick your favorite carrier to maybe get access to your accounts and then drain your bank account or your blockchain wallet, whatever it is!

Matt Cutts: So like, it is often not the case that it's the primary system that gets cracked! The hackers don't care about how elegant it is! They just want to get in!

Matt Cutts: And so it's those seams where two systems join that things often, you know, where there's a problem! So as a technologist, I do not support having a backdoor in encryption! At the same time, that's my personal opinion—that's my personal technical assessment!

Matt Cutts: But I'm also a government employee! And so there's processes in which, you know, people participate in making policy decisions! So if I'm looped in, that's gonna be my point of view! You shouldn't have backdoors because it represents a vulnerability where bad actors and criminals and all sorts of folks and other nation-state governments would totally attack it!

Host: But I also abide by whatever policy processes are run! So I say my best! I try to convince people of what I think! But then when the policy decision gets made, you know, that's the policy!

Host: Just, you know, and then that's what party lines!

Matt Cutts: Yeah!

Host: Anyone asks you about breaking up tech companies only in a personal capacity?

Matt Cutts: Okay! No, yet! Although I will say, so unexpected plug, the Federal Trade Commission is looking for a technology sort of coordinator who can basically bridge between two worlds and translate government to technology and back!

Matt Cutts: And look at, you know, you know, if a technology company is doing A, B, or C, you know, why are the potential reasons for that? You know, what is the business model, and why would they structure things that way?

Host: So if that's an area of interest to you, the FTC has an open application! I think I've tweeted about it recently! I'll try to retweet about it! And so that's a super interesting position where you, you could go in and just like I talked about, you know, having my opinions about encryption and how that might or might not affect policy, you could go in and say, "Here, here's my take, FTC on, you know, this small company or this big company or this technology practice!"

Matt Cutts: And it's not necessarily an engineering kind of position! It might be like a product manager, you know? Because those are the sorts of folks who often translate between the different worlds!

Host: Okay, so there's a bunch of places in government to slot in! There's also a group called Tech Congress that tries to bring technology people into Congress as staffers!

Matt Cutts: So that you can help translate policy and say, "Here's a good idea! Here's a bad idea!" You know, be a sounding board for people within Congress! And so there's a bunch of ways to participate in those kinds of discussions!

Host: That's awesome!

Matt Cutts: Alright, last time! What's a website if someone wants a job?

Host: If you would like a job, please go to USDigitalService.gov/apply. We will have actual people looking at your resumes! We could use engineers, product managers, designers, lawyers, recruiters!

Matt Cutts: Like if you are a person who can get to yes and you're a good bureaucracy hacker, we would love to talk to you!

Host: Cool!

Matt Cutts: Thanks, Matt!

Host: Thanks so much for having me!