Reimagining the Govtech Talent Pool

All right, TGIF everyone, and welcome back to In Case You Missed It. You got me this Friday. Joe is out today, but we've got a big topic and a great new guest to unpack this topic. As we think about the number one thing as I travel the country talking to state and local government leaders, outside of cyber being the number one priority, the real thing that we keep hearing is workforce, workforce, workforce, workforce. Agencies have constraints, they have challenges, they're trying to figure out new creative ways to tackle this growing challenge and the reinforcements are not coming. So today we're gonna dig into reimagining the GovTech talent pool. Now, a few weeks back, I had the opportunity to meet our next guest, and as a Gen Zer, his expertise and ideas around this, as well as many other things, really stood out to me. And so I wanted to make sure that we brought him on and gave him an opportunity to talk a little bit about that. So let's welcome to the show first-time guest Zach Nandapakar, the Senior Solutions Engineer for SLED at Axonius. Zach, thanks for carving some time out on a Friday Yeah, Dustin, thanks for having me.

And you know what I have to say here is, um, been a big fan of the show, um, and it's pretty crazy to, uh, I've done it, I've done a couple of podcasts before for you with, with you guys, um, notably one with, uh, um, the CIO, uh, Denise Riley Hughes for the state of Vermont was nice enough to kind of do a risk scoring podcast with me, but I have to admit being able to follow some of the legends of the industry, as I would like to say, such as Jennifer Polka and Marina Nitsa on this podcast. This is new. So this is going to be pretty cool.

We're glad to have you on. And I have a feeling that this is going to be the first of many more times that we'll see you on In Case You Missed It. So maybe to start, love for you to share a little bit about your journey into this market. What sparked your interest? I mean, I think this goes way back to your sophomore year in college.

Yeah, so I think, you know, the takeaway here is that inspiration is a powerful thing. I can't, you know, I can't really pinpoint exactly why, from an existential perspective, I got into GovTech, but I do know when I was a kid, I watched 2 types of movies. I watched movies about spies and always liked to pretend that I was that dude that helps the James Bond get the job done who stays back at the HQ. And then I like to watch a lot of shows and movies about the state of California. And one of my favorite movies was The Internship. So somewhere along the lines of that, I ended up, you know, really wanting to move out to California and study technology, study computer science. It was at the point— I grew up in Chicago, but it was at the point where I actually just applied to college up and down the California coast, did not even look back, and ended up going to USC. And one of the things that I think is really important to kind of mention here is that from 0 to 18, you really spend— like, your goal is just to get into college. Right? Like, that's the only thing we're thinking about. That's the only reason why I'm kind of taking classes. And sometimes you kind of lose sight of what really— what you really want to learn, what you really want to study. I remember my dad and I were even just talking about the fact that computer science was kind of recession-proof at that time, at least. And we don't know if that's the case anymore. But, you know, that's the thought that was going through my head. And I got to USC and I realized pretty quickly that I did not have the chops to become a full-time software engineer. Ended up taking a 2-unit course, a course that really didn't progress me over to graduation as much, but it's called something like From Hackers to CEOs, how to— introduction to cybersecurity. It was taught by a professor named Joe Greenfield. I owe that man. Because, you know, that's what really, what really set me on the right path here. And one of the things that, that, you know, that class did that no other class really did for me was it brought the practical side to it, actually doing the labs, actually compromising a machine, bringing industry folks in to guest lecture. We had guest lectures from CrowdStrike, from the NSA, from the Secret Service. So you could really picture yourself in that role, and I think that kind of took me back to my love for the James Bond, for the Top Gun movies, where, you know, I had this opportunity to see a career helping, you know, state and local governments and government as a whole.

I think you also had a little bit of a project with some drone vulnerabilities in college that seemed to be a part of that shaping process. Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah. So again, takeaway here is a lot of the coursework that these universities teach is up online. The syllabus, you know, what the students are studying, what kind of work they're doing. It's definitely worth the time if you're a CIO or CISO to check that out, reach out to some of the professors. You know, one of the capstone courses, kind of the grand finale of the computer science program at USC, You have to go out and do a project with a real stakeholder. That could be the university. In my case, it was a defense contractor that was sponsoring a project that involved discovering vulnerabilities with a drone and also potentially developing exploits for them. And I think that the lesson learned there was that it wasn't actually as hard as I thought to find an exploit that allowed us to take control of the drone. We're talking, you know, we're talking about some pretty insecure methods and protocols there. So I just remember that's when I kind of learned the difference between a vulnerability and a zero-day vulnerability. Like, oh, vulnerabilities, not super hard to discover, right? But zero days, completely different ballgame. And I actually discovered that that defense contractor had done that project year after year. And, you know, the same one that we discovered was discovered in the past, but it was still amazing practical experience.

Yeah, I love it. Good takeaways and good opportunities there for my government fans that are watching right now to plug into the university system. Now, your journey in the GovTech industry began kind of 5 months post-graduation, you took a senior role at Tanium. What was it like stepping into that, you know, coming out of kind of the college ecosystem? How did you manage expectations? Tell me a little bit about that transition from academia into now the world of GovTech.

Yeah, it was a very lucky match made in heaven for me my junior year where I was looking for job opportunities and an opportunity came around to intern at Tanium. And actually it was the first time Tanium had done an internship for their technical account management program. And, you know, it's technical account management is certainly a job that requires a level of experience, right? I think the only way I was able to actually make progress and get better was to just be kind of thrown, I say thrown out there into the fire, thrown out there into the wolves, right?

Yep.

And, you know, that was pretty intimidating at the beginning. Like, I remember my first customer. I was on a train to Sacramento, nervous, hands shaking. All I had to do was just have a meeting and answer some questions. And when I got with that customer, I actually was able to answer 80% of the questions that they needed, right? I just needed backup on the last 20%. And that kind of held true. I was able to prepare, especially when we're talking about state and local governments. Where I didn't have knowledge to walk in cold to these meetings, I was able to look things up like the digital government plan, the state cybersecurity plan for the state of California, NIST 800-53, CISA requirements, and just do some preparation there so that I could walk in a little bit more prepared to these meetings. And I think the takeaway there is that, you know, we, we can handle 80% of that work, but there is some 20%, 10% where having someone to back you up is good. But getting out there, getting in front of it was the best experience I could have had. And I'm pretty grateful for Tanium for giving me that opportunity.

Now you've had a lot of success since you've been in market. You notably also won a really key NACIO award and NACIO Major organization, all of the state information, you know, officers. So tell me a little bit, and this was relevant to a cyber risk project you did in Hawaii, so tell me a little bit about that project and what you did.

Yeah, so Dustin, I hate to do this to you, but I'm gonna give you a little— I'm gonna answer this a little bit like a politician where I address it a little bit and then I go off and answer a slightly different question that I think is more important. So, you know, that— I wanna start by just kind of real quick highlighting what an amazing culture the State of Hawaii, especially the Enterprise Technology Services, Doug Murdock and Vince Huang, have built. And, you know, I was helping them out as a TAM, and, you know, we were kind of doing some patching work, we were doing asset management, But, you know, I was a little bit nervous to kind of reveal how much experience I had in the industry, just because, you know, it's so— you just didn't see that kind of situation happening. But once I walked into that room, I remember I landed in Honolulu around 5:30 PM, and I went straight there to see if we could just get started because I was like, I'm gonna need all the time I can get. And you find that the team is operating like a startup. And I don't— I say that with, you know, with the connotation of super hardworking, willing to help each other out. It's like this tight-knit group that's just supporting everyone. And they kind of took like me as the vendor, they took me in. And I remember, you know, meetings that went on, you know, 3, 4 hours. And not to say that it's a good thing to create 3 to 4 hour meetings, but we were just testing ideas. And for me, Vince had principles, right? He had a culture that he was building rather than these strict policies. And the number one thing was, if you're going to break, break small, test a lot, right? And we saw testing as more of a diligence thing. If we were willing to test and make sure that things were working, redundancy, we were allowed to kind of try some new ideas in there and see how we could innovate. And that's how that got created. A lot of stars have to align for this too. You have to get executive buy-in. So we really worked together on this type of a project where Vince just said, I like the idea of risk scoring. And, you know, Tanium had released a risk scoring project or product at the time, but it's up to us as the implementation team to take what, you know, what your product is, what the vendor builds, and actually turn it into something that delivers a service, right? Or make it a service delivery project where it answers a key question and it also solves a challenge in the format that needs to be solved. So in this case, You know, Vince and Doug, they needed something where they could make a split-second decision about cyber risk in the state. And we had to take what we had and made sure that in 15 seconds you could look at this dashboard and make an inference on what the cyber risk was in the state. And that's what we really wanted to do.

Love it. Data applied decision-making. So now let's kind of shift gears and talk about this workforce challenge. And, you know, kind of as a Gen Zer, I'd love to get your take, you know, from your perspective, perspective, what are those key attributes that Gen Z bring to the government, you know, kind of GovTech sector? Uh, we'll start with that one.

Yeah, so I will go practical with this one. I'm, I'm trying to look for the answers that are not in the existing stories, not in the statistics. So I have 3, kind of 4. Um, first one is passion and energy. Um, I put those 2 together. You could look at those as separate ones, but You know, for us, we're coming out of colleges, universities, or maybe we're coming out of programs that have inspired us. And, you know, for me, my experience was I started to work on these projects and I started to feel like I needed to go a little bit further to really deliver good service to my customers. So, you know, while I was working on some of these projects with the state and local government customers that I was a TAM for at the time, That's when I started to read books like Recoding America, Citizenville, Hack Your Bureaucracy were 3 notable ones. And I'm still working on that one. That one's a little bit of a, you know, when I need that situation, I'll go through the table of contents.

Reference book.

Exactly. But, you know, that kind of leads into number 2 for me, which is time. You know, we have And coming out of school, right, that's when we have the most time that really we may have. So, you know, these things like testing and the willingness to perform unit tests to, you know, to push something across the table, you know, the ability to go off and create a, you know, slide deck that presents the project in a way that, you know, would normally be a little bit too much for the— project's requirements, but may communicate that project a whole lot better. I think, you know, that it's not something that we want to put on people necessarily to go off and work beyond the hours that you're supposed to be working, but some people do want to do that and will, and they have the time for it. And then finally, the incentives. So, you know, for me, when I made the transition to Axonius, I have 2 things going on here, right? It's not just financial incentive for me, but I'm just getting started in this industry. I cannot afford to go off and sell something that's not going to work. I can't go off and afford to not implement something with the same level of passion and care that I've been doing for my previous customers because I got, I got, you know, 20, 30 years left. I, you know, want to do a stint in the public sector one day. So I'm very incentivized as, you know, an early career individual to do great work for state and local governments, to spend the time doing research outside of, outside of the normal working hours to understand the policy that you have to implement. So, you know, for me, Right. It's just any type of information that we can get about the end goal. How does the product that you bought from us fit into the larger picture of your strategic plan, of your digital government plan? Even taking us and putting us through the training with some of your team, I think, you know, I think we'd be willing to do that as well. So bringing us into the team. So those, those are my 3: passion, you know, time, and incentives.

Those are great. Now, as you think about the industry as a whole, there's so many different books that are out there that try to break down Gen Z tactics of recruitment and retention and the psychology of what they think. So in your opinion, what are some of the concrete steps that people in our market can take to attract and retain some of these Gen Z younger talent individuals that have so much that you said that they bring to the table?

Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. And I'll try to be practical with this one too. So I got 3, you know, options, brand, and location. I'll be— I'll stay practical with these. So, you know, I particularly, and I do want to transition into the public sector for a stint, and even for longer than that, right? That's kind of been my dream. But what I'm looking at right now is I really love living in California. And, you know, in the back of my head, it's like, you gotta buy a house at some point. And, you know, for the roles that I think I would be qualified for right now in San Francisco, that's hard. In many other places, it may not be hard. The general rule that, you know, we get told by these, you know, by financial advisors is 30% of income, you know, or less for rent. So, you know, if you're, if you're kind of looking at hiring Gen Z, I'd take a peek at, you know, how that works out in your area. And I think that can be a good, you know, guide to maybe some, some other ideas. Right. And I'm not saying that that's anyone's fault, but options. So the NFL, sports, college sports are all doing this thing where, you know, take NIL in college sports where athletes are coming in, they're getting scholarships, but they have this opportunity to kind of make money on their name, image, and likeness. This might be a little bit of a far-fetched idea, but, you know, if there's incentives for people to go above and beyond, I don't know, work on a project, an unsolvable challenge, and someone can be incentivized to go after that and Maybe there's some financial gain within the government system to achieve that goal. I think that's one thought, right? Some sort of a prize type, you know, solve this challenge and get a grant or something like that. I think number 2 is brand.

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, you'll see I have, you know, maybe more CISA branding behind me than I do my own company. And I think that, you know, if you look up the CISA strategic plan for, I think, 2024 to '26 or '23 to '27, the newest one, it's just so clear. It is, you know, branded really well. I think they've got this kind of Captain America, but also Department of Homeland Security. And I was fortunate enough this week to get to meet Jen Easterly, at RSA, and she's got this brand herself of making DHS approachable. Not to say it wasn't before, but just, you know, make it seem a little bit more like it's got the tech culture, and that's really inviting. I actually spent a ton of time trying to build relationships with CISA because they had a booth, you know, they had the giveaways. It was like very inviting, and their brand was, you know, was really on display, and that That really pulls me in. And then location. A lot of capital cities don't coincide, don't, you know, aren't necessarily the largest city in your state or aren't necessarily the city that a lot of folks out of college are moving to in the state. Sometimes they are, like Austin, sometimes they may not be. So, you know, opportunities to kind of bring people in, in the big cities, right? An office in San Francisco for the state of California or something like that, or Chicago for the state of Illinois, New York City for the state of New York. That could just be an easy, quick way to do that. And City of Las Vegas, I have to, I have to shout out them. They had a fantastic idea for this where they set up a coworking space called the Las Vegas Innovation Lab, where they united government technology employees with, you know, the vendors. with just startup founders. And just by doing that, just by having that shared space, you have a lot of folks that are able to connect and share ideas, you know, from the cutting edge of technology to, you know, what the vendors are doing to what the, you know, city is trying to do. I think that is a great way to do it. And I would spend a lot of time in one of those incubators if You know, if we had something like that here.

Yeah, those are great ideas. Now, you know, the other thing that I often hear is around empowerment and that the newer generations are very mission and kind of social-minded when it comes to what they want to do, but they also want to see the output of their input creating some value in society. So tell me a little bit about how you think government and industry partners should focus on empowering Gen Z employees to kind of make those real-world impacts.

Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. So, you know, I, I think for myself, really making sure we reveal the why, right? Whether you have somebody who's Gen Z, who's on the contractor side or the vendor side, or whether they're within your organization, talking about the history of why we got to the position we're in, what the challenge is today. from a very high level. I think that, you know, to borrow a page out of, out of Jennifer Polka's book, there's a little bit of a disconnect between who writes the policies and how they get drafted and why I'm staring at a NIST 800-53 checklist. Like, that's something that I'd love to know how we got to that point. And it can give me a lot of additional context. I think You know, another, another thing that the private sector can do, right, is teach with case studies.

Mm-hmm.

So, you know, we have this information online about digital government plans, challenges. NASIO hosts an entire website full of awards and projects that have been done in the past. There's no reason why the private sector can't train employees based on case studies where, you know, you take maybe a BDR, and you take a junior technical account manager and a junior sales engineer, and you say, you know, you're walking into a customer with 8 departments, you know, 4 different AV products, and now go, you know, tell me how you would build an asset management solution for that, or something like that. So we have all of that data, and I think that we can use that case study approach to accelerate folks in delivering good service. at a young age, especially on the private sector side.

Yeah, those are great ideas. Now, as you think back, you know, on your journey, who have kind of been the mentors in this field that, that have kind of helped shape your journey, and what have you learned from them?

Yeah, so for me, mentors come from all different areas, and some of the folks, most of the folks here I've at least met, but, you know, I do consider authors to be mentors as well, even though I haven't met them yet. Starting with folks that have been customers of mine. So over at the State of Hawaii ETS, Vince, the CISO, right? He's a customer. I work for him as a Tanium TAM, but at the same time, he actually was the most consistent authority figure for me across my entire time at Tanium. I actually had a few different managers, but, um, you know, I was working with Vince pretty much cradle to grave there, um, and hope to work with him again. So his advice, his just the culture building there, I picked up a lot from that. And, um, whether he knows it or not. And then, um, you know, the same thing happened when I started to be exposed to the state of Arizona. Um, you know, if, if no one has had her on the podcast yet, I would suggest Jennifer Pittman Leeper, JPL. You know, she really came into Tanium after years and years and years of working for the state of Arizona and started talking about this idea of whole-of-state cybersecurity. And I, shame on me, thought that that was a buzzword at the time, and it ended up probably being the policy that we're seeing make significant change in cybersecurity right now. Having someone to be able to bounce ideas off of that's had experience in the industry that can tell me whether things are gonna work or not and why and spends that kind of time with you is so, so valuable. It really takes a village. But, you know, if you're one of the people that is training the young one, you know, you don't have to put necessarily all your time into it, but even answering some of those questions can help. And then the authors, you know, Jen Pahlka, Marina Nizza, even Governor Newsom's book, Citizenville, which is about you. And, you know, your journey in GovTech, Dustin, in the, in the town of Maynard, with, you know, the idea to curate ideas from the ground up and try to build policy leveraging the implementation, you know, those are— that's the inspiration that I needed, right, to think outside of the box and anticipate some of the environmental challenges that were going to come up. So That's how I kind of aggregate and correlate that information into a set of principles for myself.

Yeah, I love that. Great group. Some of my same, you know, mentors and other individuals that I've gleaned insights from. So, you know, looking ahead, you know, what are your longer-term plans in GovTech? Where do you see yourself? I know you mentioned, you know, potential career stint in the public sector as well, somewhere on that line.

Yeah, no, that's a great question. And you know what? I have one more mentor, and that would be Chris Cruz. And he's a former deputy CIO for the state of California, and now he's the public sector CIO at Tanium. But he really exposed me to the different roles that exist and who fills those roles, how they got there, how he got to his position. And it's made me think about some non-traditional paths.

Mm-hmm.

So, you know, we always talk about this path where somebody goes into government and they stay there and they work their way up and they become the CISO, and then they transition to private sector and become this lead CTO. For me, I think it's going to be potentially the opposite where, you know, I get as much experience in the private sector working for the public sector. And a lot of that does have to do with just being able to build up my life in the city that I want to, the remote work, right? And I know some of that is starting to become reality in government, which is great. But, you know, working at a place like CISA or the California Department of Innovation or, you know, any of those that are working on these next-generation service challenges, the digital ID, you know, the smart city initiatives that come up, I think those are, you know, those have the potential to really make widespread change for government. So, you know, I'm looking at it from the challenge perspective rather than, hey, I want to be this title or that title. You know, I'd love to be in a position to lead a project that solves a challenge that affects the taxpayers, that has that kind of widespread impact.

Yeah, I think that's a great point and indicative of the market, right? Like the normal path of you know, a public sector career is changing, and now people are doing kind of what I refer to as tours of duty, where they go in and they influence something. But you're exactly right, there's other ways to kind of impact the public sector, and it's not always just, I work for an industry partner and I work for government. There's, you know, a lot of different things, even like what, you know, Nancy Rainesek and Amanda Crawford are doing in Texas with their volunteer program tied to, you know, DIR. It's just so much, you know, there that is really starting to shape this. Now, you know, when we've talked, you mentioned some hopefully not so crazy ideas for governments to appeal to Gen Z. I'd love for you to, you know, share a couple of those with us as well.

Yeah, so I have a few, and I think they'll go from more possible to maybe, you know, more of a hopeful thing or a fun thing. But my first, you know, suggestion or idea here that comes to mind is I'm just now starting to get exposed to the world of policy and policymakers and their background. And then, you know, being out in the field, as it was referred to, you know, there's a kind of a different persona, different background. So some sort of an exchange program where, you know, let's get congressional staffers behind the keyboard and see whether they can implement the CISA binding operational directives using a product. And then let's get the implementers into a position where they're a staffer for, you know, a legis— a member of the legislature or something like that for a little bit. Maybe, you know, as a vendor, I would love and certainly take up any government agency that gives me the opportunity to just spend a week with them, right? We don't even have to work on what our product is being used for, just to kind of understand how things work.

Mm-hmm.

You know, some sort of a program like that where we can be immersed in it. I think I don't— I haven't seen that yet. I'm sure it's happening somewhere. I know there's some great programs like TechCongress out there that do give that opportunity. And then, you know, I've got a couple of other ideas. I think more volunteer opportunities like what Texas is doing and like what Mandy is doing. I think Mandy is another person that's inspiring in this industry because she is— she's got the brand, DIR's got the brand, but they're also reinventing opportunities to provide service. And, you know, if there was— all I gotta say is if there was a, you know, CISA volunteer opportunity where we met at some incubator in San Francisco and, you know, I got some CISA patch, I would volunteer.

Listen up.

Exactly. And then, you know, some— I think young people, really everyone, you know, who's a vendor in this industry, especially on the technical side, needs an opportunity to build their brand and reputation. You know, I really like what Salesforce does with that Trailhead website where you can earn badges. It would be kind of cool if, you know, it wasn't tied to the company, but it was tied to the individual, and you can maybe earn a badge from a government customer or client if you really did go above and beyond for them, and that could be seen by others. So, You know, those are my, those are my 3 ideas that— Love it.

You brought some gamification in there as promised, so that's great. Now, if you could recommend one change that could impact how GovTech operates, what would that be? My big question for you today.

One change. I think that it is going to be to bring together as many folks from the 3 different areas of service delivery that we have, right? So maybe this could happen at the next DGS, Dustin. That's all I'm gonna say. But if we can bring, you know, the policymakers, if we can bring the implementers, and then I'm gonna add 2 more to this. I'm gonna add the vendors in.

Mm-hmm.

And then I'm gonna add students. And, you know, maybe do some sort of a tabletop exercise at a conference or have some sort of competition or something like that where you mix and match the teams and everyone has to work together towards a common problem and just understands the different backgrounds that people are going through. I think we just need to mix the different folks, you know, from those 4 areas together so that we can build more policy that's easier to implement. And, you know, students are exposed to what the problems are in the future, and they can start to build their skills around that. And the vendors can start to build products that meet the needs of, you know, government, state and local government, and these federated environments that exist within them. So I really think that melting pot, right, if I'm thinking of what we can do today and what's accomplishable, that's what I put on the table.

Love it, connecting the ecosystem together. So tell me a little bit about what you're doing at Axonius and a little bit about, you know, what Axonius does for the market. I know we didn't hit that at the beginning, but I would love for you to share a little bit and then we'll talk about where everyone can connect with you.

Yeah, so, you know, for starters here, I think going back to that reputation point, when I was, you know, being contacted by a few companies that were interested in me coming over, I definitely had to do some research to make sure that they were in a good position to invest the, the, you know, to make the investment in the SLED business that they, that they had to make. And Axonius demonstrated that to me. You know, what, what Axonius does is, you know, it's cybersecurity asset attack surface management. But if you can imagine this situation where, you know, Department of Health has or you have this policy and, you know, take CalSecure in the state of California, and every department must have a patching tool, an asset management tool, a vulnerability scanner. And those people that write the policy have to enforce the policy, but all of those different departments have different patching tools and asset management tools and vulnerability scanners. and they have different reports and they have different outputs. And so what Axonius is doing is, you know, through an API-driven approach, pulls all those assets in and correlates them so that you can perform this type of oversight across federated environments. And that for me was the palette that I needed to build solutions that addressed policy on top of them, because I view The product is the palette, and I view myself and the solutions engineers and the, you know, the architects on the public sector side as the artists who, you know, need to go build that into something that's going to solve the problem.

Love it. And you can see the URL on the screen right there for learning more. But tell me a little bit, you know, final question for you, easiest question, where can our audience go to learn more about what you're doing in market and connect with you?

Yeah, so I love Government Technologies Digital Government Summit, so you'll probably be able to find me at one of those. You know, if anyone's in the Chicagoland area on Monday, I'll be at the Chicagoland Regional Digital Government Summit. You know, I typically use LinkedIn, so, you know, if you want to find me online, that's a great place, and, you know, we can get the conversation going from there. But Would love to hear from the community and hear your thoughts.

All right. Well, Zach, thanks so much for carving some time out. It's been super insightful for me. I know for our audience as well, as you kind of helped us get inside the mind of a Gen Zer, but you've got a ton of insights and ideas just about connecting this wider ecosystem. So I know this is not gonna be the last time you're on In Case You Missed It and look forward to having you back in the future. And thanks to our audience for hanging out with us. And you can definitely catch the recap on GovTech.com in the coming days. This will also be available on your favorite podcast player in the next few hours. Have a great rest of your day. And Zach, thanks again for joining.

Thank you, Dustin. Thanks to, uh,