00:41:01 · Scott Kupor
[00:41:01] S2: hate I don't know anything else but his name. It's it's very hard to say it on air. But, anyways, his... He... As I mentioned to somebody who talked this morning, he actually has a name. His name is Ed. So apologies to his mom that basically Big Balls has become his name. He joined the government. He joined DOGE. He joined Elon's team. I think he was 19 years old. He went to Northwestern. I think he dropped out as a sophomore. Okay? And he's one of, like, the most brilliant software developers around, basically. And he's like, look. I got motivated by Elon, and I wanna do this stuff. And he's still there, by the way. He works for Gebbia now as part of this national design studio, which is, like, redesigning all of the, like, web sites for the government. Anyway, when I saw this article come out a few months after he joined, this was in the height of the DOGE stuff when, of course, everyone was, you know, thinking the world had come to an end, and there was a quote from a government employee that said, We would never hire, he didn't say big balls, he said Ed. Said, He we would never hire Ed in government because he didn't have a college degree, and he didn't have five years of work experience. And when I saw that, like, literally, like, I wanted to pull my fucking hair out because I was like, this is exactly the problem. Right? This guy's awesome. We should hire him because he actually has the skills to help us. And literally, every job description in government, almost all of them have, like, a college degree requirement. Well, in my mind, like, that is a proxy for skill that may be indicative of something but may not. Right? Like, the fact that Ed didn't have a college degree had no bearing on his software engineering skill set, but it would have been used to basically kept him out of a job because he would not have qualified, or we would have hired him at like this low level where we would have paid him like $40,000 a year, which he never would do. Of course, he would go to Silicon Valley and get paid like 10 times that. Right? So part of this is like, if we're gonna get great people, we have to be able to actually have them walk into a culture that actually believes in performance, that believes in accountability, that allows them to progress the organization, that pays them at the level that's appropriate for them.
00:42:45 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
Look, we're never gonna, like, pay what Silicon Valley does, and that's fine, and that's okay. But we ought to at least level people appropriately so that, like, Ed should not come in at this GS five, which is, like, the most entry level for government. He should come in at a GS-fourteen or 15, which is the highest levels, because his merit shows that he's capable of performing at that level. But the system as it existed would not have allowed that to happen. So this is what we've doing from a policy perspective, to fix all that stuff and say like, Merit matters, take a test, take an assessment, and everything else, quite frankly, we shouldn't worry about. [00:43:15] S1: So big balls kind of gives you the blueprint where he says, I'm super talented. Yes. Dropout, maybe never wouldn't qualify for the set of requirements in federal government, but I heard this person I admire tell a compelling story. Exactly. Right. You came in before, during, after DOGE? Like, what was...
00:43:15 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
[00:43:15] S1: So big balls kind of gives you the blueprint where he says, I'm super talented. Yes. Dropout, maybe never wouldn't qualify for the set of requirements in federal government, but I heard this person I admire tell a compelling story. Exactly. Right. You came in before, during, after DOGE? Like, what was... [00:43:33] S2: Yeah. So I came in with... Basically, I got interviewed, and I came in with the DOGE guys. So it was obviously Elon, but of course, there were guys like Steve Davis was kind of the day to day person running it. And, I had the opportunity to spend a bunch of time with them pre inauguration. So kind of, you know, end of... I got nominated, like, first week of December or something, and so kind of December and first part of January late to inauguration. Then what happens is they tell you, okay. Like, until you get through your nomination process, you basically have to be persona non grata and, like, stop communicating with folks because otherwise, it can, like, foul your nomination process. So we had developed a bunch of plans and ideas for what we would do once, the administration turned over, but I wasn't there day one to be able to actually execute those things. [00:44:13] S1: But you were observing a lot of what was going on. [00:44:15] S2: That's exactly right. And they were executing it literally out of my office, so it turns out my office was ground zero for
00:44:15 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
[00:44:15] S2: That's exactly right. And they were executing it literally out of my office, so it turns out my office was ground zero for [00:44:22] S1: everything So that regardless of controversy over anything that happened there, I'm not even interested in that. I'm interested, is there any ideas that you saw coming out of that that you thought were good and valuable and should be spread further?
00:44:35 · Scott Kupor
[00:44:35] S2: Yeah. Here's my view overall on it, is part of the issue is... Okay, just to give you a sense of the numbers, right? So there were roughly 2,300,000 federal civilian employees on day one when President Trump took office. Today, we're just about 2,000,000. So we've reduced by close to 300,000 people the size of the federal government, which puts the federal government at the lowest level it's been as a percentage of the workforce since, like, 1960. And you literally have to go back to Clinton Gore before you have anywhere even close to that. The numbers that president has is much higher, but still, like, that's the last time he had any serious effort. So part of it is, look, the entire apparatus of government is... Travels in one direction only, which is budgets get get... Just get bigger every year. Every time an agency wants to do something new, they go back to congress, they say, great. He wants to do that thing? Give us more headcount to do it. So, like, that's been the path of, like, travel basically for the last, I don't fifty years probably or something like that. So the way I think about what Elon did was, like, Elon had to come in and to... Like, change the direction of a 2,300,000 person, like, oil tanker, you can't do gradual incremental stuff. Like, you have to have a big bang approach. Right? Now people can argue and debate about his tactics, and it's it's fair. I think there's, you know, there's fair arguments to have on to have on both sides. But, like, the idea that you had to have someone come in with a mission and actually try to, like, do some serious change, like, I don't think there's any argument that you could ever make the change that we did without effectively like a big bank strategy. Look, he got a lot of shit for it. Lots of people got a lot of shit for it. And, you know, look, history will will will write a story about that one. What we're trying to do now, like, when I came in was... I was like, great. All the... They did all this work. Now we have to institutionalize this. That's kind of how I think about my role, which is, okay, like, Ivan, Steve Davis, all these guys did an amazing job of breaking glass, basically, and saying, like, this is how things are gonna be. Now we have to do the long term institutionalization of it, which means we have to now go through and say, great. Are you actually working on?
00:46:26 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
Tell me the 20 things you're working on. Which ones are really important? Which ones should we not be doing? We never take stuff off the plate in government. We just keep adding. [00:46:35] S1: This inertia- It is.... Is insane. [00:46:38] S2: It's crazy. [00:46:38] S1: The story of you oversee retirement benefits We overall, were on the phone the other day, and you told me a story I just could not believe. We were talking about the fact that, Hey, know what? America's full of dynamic, really smart, high agency young people that don't even know this is a path and this is an opportunity, and maybe we should just shine a light on this and maybe be beneficial regardless of what you think. If you have a choice between a better functioning government or not, you're going to choose that. It has to do with the people that are in that organization. But then you're like, Do you know about the mind full of 4,000,000 pages of documents? [00:47:17] S2: 400,000,000. I'm like, [00:47:20] S1: Scott, what the hell are you talking about? I know. Can you tell the story?