Ethan Watson looks at Gen Z's opinion of DOGE

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Alabama's Morning News. My name is John Mountsin. If you've
been following along in what's going on in Washington, the
Department of Government Efficiency is hard at work trying to
make some important assessments as to how efficient or not
efficient our government is, and I guess more importantly, how
efficient or non efficient those employees are who are working
for the government. Joining me now to talk about this

(00:21):
is Ethan Watson. He is a young Voices contributor, and Ethan,
your voice is especially important on this because we've heard
that these people working for the DOGE they're not just
a bunch of like say, seventy four year old bureaucrats
or fifty four year old bureaucrats. They're young people, right.
They're in their twenties in their teams. In some cases
that's exactly right.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
They're people that are part of my generation. They're nineteen, twenty,
twenty three, twenty five year olds, and they're being mocked
in the media for you know, maybe some online jokes
that they've made in the past that were a little
bit off color, or some corny usernames. But the fact
of the matter is that Elon's got some really young,
really intelligent people working on this, and their youth and

(01:01):
inexperience is actually the reason why they're perfectly qualified for this,
because they're not weighed down by all of the preconceived
notions and structural inefficiencies that make our government move so sluggishly.
They're from the outside and they're looking at it and saying,
I reject your premise entirely. Let's tear this thing down
and build it back up from a more efficient standpoint.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
And from what I've understood, these are not just like
we went and found some high school kids so you know,
had nothing better to do with the seventh period. These
are actually young people, but they are very They are
very I guess I should say well educated and a
very efficient young people who their backgrounds are in computer science.
That backgrounds are in things that would actually lend them

(01:44):
to know what they're doing in the job, their role they're.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
Put in right exactly. I mean, they're not just like
you're you're run of the mill college kids, frack guys, whatever.
These kids are geniuses, right. One of them decoded an
ancient Roman scroll using AI. Another one was a pioneer
to model you and organizations. That these are not your
average high school and college kids. And frankly, if you're
a government bureaucrat and you can't explain the value of

(02:07):
your program or the value of your work to an
extremely intelligent twenty two year old twenty five year old,
then it's probably too complicated for the vast majority of
Americans to understand. And then that is contrary to the
principle of government transparency, and it probably doesn't even need
to exist in the first place. And there's plenty of
highly intelligent people that have done really good things before

(02:28):
they've hit twenty five or thirty, like Dell, for example,
was started by a twenty two year old. So age
in experience or agent intelligence can be correlated, but they're
not necessarily correlated. So I don't think we should hold
it against them, and said we should look at what
these doge worker bees quote unquote are digging up and
assess that not try to dig up a corny LinkedIn
use your name from one of their pasts.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
And one of the things I think that Elon has
always been about is he's a disruptor and he likes
to think look at something and go why is it?
Does it have to be this way? Let's look at
it a different way. He's great at looking something and saying,
you know, we could change the way things are being done,
and we could do it this way instead of that way.
And that's something that I think that we should really
consider when we look at when we look at people

(03:14):
to work for us in the government. It shouldn't be
all about let's just get more of the same, because
you do that and you get more the same and
we're never going to get anywhere, and we need to
actually probably reassess a lot of things the government are doing.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
First of on the list should be the retirement mine.
I'm sure you and all your viewers have read that
story about the literal limestone mine that they're carrying around
paper retirement forms. That needs to be the first to go.
But yeah, you're exactly right. Elon is all about sort
of disrupting industries, coming in with the entirely fresh perspective,
and that's why it's so important. Again he has these

(03:46):
young government outsiders leading the charge. And another reason why
it's very inspiring to me to see people my age
taking the lead on this one is, you know, where
are the people with the most stake in it? Right?
Like we're the generation that needs to live in America
for the next sixty years or hopefully longer than that.
Even we are the people that have the most stake
in it. We're trying to bring up families, we're trying
to start our lives, start our careers, buy houses, and

(04:08):
we're being crushed by a bureaucracy that taxes our paychecks
to a high level. They're stealing our nest Egge before
we even have a chance to lay it and funneling
it to the retired mind or funneling it to DEI
programs in Honduras, or whatever the case may be. And
you know, I think those people need to be a
little bit more upset about that. I certainly am, and
it frustrates me a lot. And I really hope that
this DOGE team inspires people my age to take a

(04:31):
stronger role in dictating where their money goes.

Speaker 1 (04:33):
Ethan Watson, a contributor with Young Voices, Thank you so
much for joining us and giving your young perspective on
this is a very clarion voice to talk about the
people working for DOGE and with Elon Musk, and I'm
very excited to see what comes of it next.