00:43:17 · Scott Kupor
[00:43:17] S1: Big I hate peanut butter. I don't know anything else, but his name. It's very hard to say it on air, but anyways, his... He had... As I mentioned to somebody I 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 want to 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 dough 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. He said, 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, 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 skillset, 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 going to 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.
00:45:01 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
Look, we're never going to 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 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 14 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 been doing from a policy perspective is to fix all that stuff and say like merit matters, take a test, take an assessment and everything else quite frankly, you know, like we shouldn't worry about. [00:45:31] S0: 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. [00:45:45] S1: Exactly. Right. [00:45:46] S0: You came in before, during, after Doge, like what was?
00:45:46 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
[00:45:46] S0: You came in before, during, after Doge, like what was? [00:45:49] S1: Yeah. So I came in with... Basically, I got interviewed and I came in with the Doge guy. So it was obviously Elon, but of course, 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 lead 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, fail your nomination process. So we had developed a bunch of plans and ideas for what we would do once, like, the administration turned over. But I wasn't there day one to be able to actually execute those things. [00:46:30] S0: But you're observing a lot of what was going on. [00:46:31] S1: That's exactly right. And they were executing it literally out of my office. So it turns out like my office was like the like ground central for ground zero for like everything was happening. [00:46:39] S0: So regardless of controversy over anything that happened there, I'm not even interested in that. I'm interested if there any ideas that you saw coming out of that that you thought were good and valuable and should be spread further?
00:46:52 · Scott Kupor
[00:46:52] S1: 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 like Clinton Gore before you have anywhere even close to that. The numbers that president has is 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 just get bigger every year, every time an agency wants to do something new, go back to Congress and they say, you want us 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 know, 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 change... 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 write the 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 Elon, Steve Davis, all these guys did amazing job of like breaking glass basically and saying like, this is how things are gonna be. Now we have to like do the long term institutionalization of it, which means we have to now go through and say, great, what are you actually working on?
00:48:42 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
Tell me the 20 things you're working on. Like, 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. [00:48:51] S0: This like inertia. It is. It's insane. [00:48:54] S1: It's crazy. [00:48:55] S0: The, the, the story of you oversee retirement benefits And for all, we were on the phone the other day and you told me the story I just could not believe. I was like, do you understand? Like we were talking about the fact that, hey, you know what, America is full of like dynamic, really smart, high agency young people that don't even know this is a path and this is an opportunity. Maybe we should just shine a light on this and maybe beneficial regardless of what you think. If you have a choice between a better functioning government or not, course, you're gonna choose that. It has to do with the people that are in it, like in any other organization. But then you're like, do you know about the mind full of 4,000,000 pages of documents and like... [00:49:33] S1: 400,000,000. I mean, 100,000,000. [00:49:36] S0: And I'm like, Scott, what the hell are you talking about? [00:49:38] S1: I know. [00:49:39] S0: Can you tell the story?
00:49:40 · Scott Kupor
[00:49:40] S1: This is a great this is a great story. So... And and credit to Elon, right, because Elon made this story a real one. So we, OPM, manage retirement. So roughly 100,000 to 200,000 people retire every year from government. And when you retire, there's a whole process, right? You have to fill out a bunch of paperwork. It has to go to your HR department who has to confirm it. One of the like literally crazy problems by the way in government is we do not have the canonical history of your government service until you literally decide to retire. So most people to this day are in government for thirty plus years. They go to different agencies over time. Each of those agencies has different HR systems, has different payroll systems. And so I cannot look at, you know, David's record and say, hey, you spent five years here and you spent this. Literally part of the retirement process is we have to create that record. Now we're changing that, by the way, one of the other big projects I'm gonna come back to the mind is we are consolidating the entire HR IT system in government from 120 different systems into a single system, and we're gonna go from spending $2,000,000,000 a year to $40,000,000 a year. We're literally gonna save 95% by actually getting to a single system, and we will now have, like, the record of David Senra that you can look at every day and see all the stuff. So, anyways, you wanna retire. What you did prior to last year was you literally filled out paperwork, you put a fucking stamp on it, you mailed it by mail to your HR department, okay? They did their stuff, they put a stamp on it, they mailed it to a payroll department, which is different by the way in the federal government from the HR department, payroll is a totally separate thing, And then they've... The final piece is they mail it literally to an underground mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania. Now nobody probably here has ever heard of Boyers, Pennsylvania. It actually happens to be in Butler County, which is where, you know, the president's assassination attempt in July, I guess, of '24 was. It's what you would expect, like, you know, rural Middle America looks like. The federal government happens to be actually one of the largest employers out there. So people go to work every day in an underground mine that used to be an actual working limestone mine.