Antonio Gracias: DOGE updates, Voter fraud arrests, Finding 'Big Balls' | All-In Live from Miami

Where's Antonio Gracias?

Bring him up.

How bad is it?

How messed up is our government?

So, if Twitter was like the JV League, this is like the NBA.

It's the most complex thing I've ever seen.

How is he able to find big balls?

Where do they show up?

Do they just apply out of the blue?

I mean, where do these guys come from?

You found some people who were illegal immigrants who registered to vote?

Yes, this is actually true.

Every vote that is cast in League of America nullifies the vote of an American citizen.

So Antonio, we know you're very busy because you decided, like a couple of our other friends, to take a second job working in our government for 100 or so days.

You can give him a round of applause for that.

You know, Trump is a unique individual in all the world.

There's maybe polarizing in some ways, but one thing that's not polarizing is Doge.

I think everybody wants to see waste, fraud, and abuse and controlled spending in government.

Maybe there's some questions about how fast it's going, but we all know you and Elon like to go, you know, at a brisk pace.

You laid back and you joined a little later in the process.

Like a stat, you joined maybe, what, 15, 20 days ago?

I've been there for eight weeks.

Eight weeks, okay, so it's been eight weeks.

Yeah, 60 days.

And you went public with it maybe a couple of weeks ago.

Yeah.

I was in Woodlawn, Maryland for the first four weeks, so you didn't know I was there.

Yes.

So

how

bad is it?

How messed up is our government?

How insane are the processes?

You're a process guy.

You know, we both worked on the Twitter acquisition and the transfer there, and did all the zero-based budgeting.

I mean, maybe compare and contrast it to that, which was maybe one of the most horrific corporate entities I've ever seen in my life.

Yeah, so now that was being run.

It was tough.

Well, let me start with thank you guys.

Thank you for having me.

I really appreciate it.

It's great to be down here to see everybody.

And And let me also say that it's an honor to serve America.

Like, whatever I am doing, I am grateful to be able to do it.

I'm grateful my partners for allowing me to do it and my clients for supporting it.

And it truly is an honor to be there.

There's many great people in the government trying to help.

So let me just start with that.

It is a sacrifice, right?

You're taking time out of your day job.

It's definitely a sacrifice, but it really, I feel very grateful that I have the capacity and 30 years of training in lead operations that I can be useful.

You know, that feels very,

I feel with gratitude.

Yeah, how bad is it?

So if Twitter was like the JV league, this is like the NBA.

It's the most complex thing I've ever seen.

I have in our office in DC, I have a, I've mapped now, as an example, the entire system of

basically from the border to the benefits programs.

It's about a 40-foot board.

And it looks like a basquiat.

I mean, it's an incredible, like spaghetti gram of stuff.

And yeah, I've never seen anything so complex in my life.

So the answer to your question is, it's worse than I thought, much, much worse than what we saw at Twitter Now X.

And America, Americans, and all of you, we deserve better.

Okay.

If we were to,

and I'm sure Shabaf has some questions at Freeberry, but if we were to look at one dollar spent by our government, waste, fraud, abuse,

How many pennies of the dollar is it?

If you had to, just based on what you've seen so far, a range.

Here's what Seth, if you go into any company, any company you guys ever seen, that is not like super well run, it probably is like easy cut 15%.

Easy, easy, easy.

This is where the trillion dollar number came from, 15% of $7 billion.

I think if we had the political will, you'd easily get that 15%, no problem.

not without any problem at all, and without cutting the core entitlement programs.

So it's definitely there.

The question is, do people want to do it or not?

And remember every dollar we take we are taking from an NGO or a Beltway consultant.

You know it's actually the people are screaming about this because we're taking money from them.

And it is, whatever you read in the news media, I got to tell you, it isn't true.

I mean

the cuts, I think it's 88% of the people that have left the government have taken packages.

The packages are very lucrative.

They're sort of nine months or so of severance, and they're voluntary.

So, yeah, I tell you, and I also say the people that work in government who are good, there's lots of good people in the government that I have met and have pointed this at all this stuff, they deserve better.

Okay, imagine trying to be a civil servant, you want to do the right thing, you're working there because you care about America, and you're in this like massive bureaucratic morass with all this stuff on top of you.

And man,

I've seen OIG reports where the people have reported to OIG like sex trafficking, and they turn it in and nothing happens.

Like literally nothing happens.

Okay, so That's very frustrating and they stick it out, they keep going, and they keep working hard for America.

So I think it's it's not just about the cost guts, it's about the culture.

Like the culture change of

allowing good people who are in the government to understand that someone's listening, that when they want to make improvement and change, or when they find fraud, waste, and abuse, they can do it, and there's an avenue now to do it.

I think that's actually going to be one of the most important, lasting thing we leave, is this idea that your voice matters in the government, that there are good people in the government, and when they want to do the right thing, there's a way to do it.

And you got people coming back to work in the office.

Oh, I have to to tell you, so we have been pilloried often in the press for social administration where I started.

And here are the facts.

When I got there, just like at Twitter, the parking lot was empty.

And I'm talking about stadium-sized parking, okay?

Empty.

The office was empty.

There was no one in the corporate office, the headquarters office in Woodland, Maryland.

And then,

because we follow our process of mapping from end-to-end to the system, we went to visit a couple offices.

I went to one myself.

The one that I went to, there were about 20 people in the waiting room.

There were seven people in the windows.

Of the seven people, three had their shades half down.

Those people were taking phone calls because during COVID, they turned everyone into phone operators.

What we learned is they were still running on COVID operations.

So we have now, through our efforts and efforts of the interim administrator, brought everyone back to the office and back to the offices in the field.

We haven't closed one field office, not one since we've been there.

Everything you're reading about service levels is not true.

What I saw, imagine how frustrating that is if you're waiting in the waiting room, you see seven windows out of 25 open, and three other people are taking phone calls, and you're waiting.

I mean, total customer service.

So look, like in all the companies that we all run,

we always talk about using incentives to shape the outcome you want.

And I think you keep insisting, which I think is right, that civil servants, by and large, want the right things to happen.

That's why they chose to go and work for the government.

So what is the incentive we need to change?

Is it a compensation incentive?

Is it, like,

what is it?

Look, Look, I think the people that work in the government, it's a normal distribution of everything, right?

It's two and a half million people in the government plus contractors.

And some people are great, some people aren't great, and a lot of people in the middle.

And the people in the middle react to the incentives, as you point out.

I think the most important thing here is transparency of the metrics, because these folks aren't there for the money.

Many of them are very good, could make money somewhere else.

The incentives we should create are transparency and some basic metrics.

They know how they're doing.

You know, we were, for example, at Social Security, we were criticized for the website uptime.

Well, turns out website uptime has been better since we got there than after imagine we have engineers.

And we've now published the metrics in the website publicly so people could see it.

So the engineering team now managing the website can see

that they're doing a good job or not doing a good job.

And the public can see they're doing a good job or not doing a good job.

I don't think

financial incentives are always useful, but this is not just about money.

Like for example, if you look at Singapore,

the Singaporean approach from Lee Kuan Yew was: let's create a government that is extremely

empowered, but let's also make it quite small, let's make them well compensated, and let's try to find sort of an elite cadre of folks.

Is that approach possible in the United States, or should we even think that we should try something like that?

I mean, look, Singapore is a

unique experiment in the world.

It's also a place where you

might end up getting caned if you drop chewing gum on the ground.

Okay, so

in America, we have a different level of,

I would say, of freedom and rights, you know, we should strive for a civil service that is professional, well-compensated, and mission-oriented.

And that mission-orientation is serving the United States.

And I think that gets back to, look, there are very good people that want to do the right thing, serve their country, that's why they're there.

And

I wouldn't make it about the money.

I would make it about the mission.

And

there are very good people that are there on mission.

I met them.

They are the ones pointing all this stuff out to us.

Right.

Yeah.

Can you talk about...

You guys went on Fox the other day with the Doge team.

Big Balls.

And Big Balls was there.

We were talking about this backstage.

All of those guys were like 12 years old.

What is it about the role, the opportunity, the way it was presented that attracted this group of what were incredibly well-spoken, highly intelligent, clearly extraordinarily motivated individuals.

It's the sort of caliber of talent that all of us aspire to hire and first of all, find, hire, and then they're on the mission.

Is it Elon's inspiration and the reach he has that made this happen?

Is this a particular moment in American history?

Because I was looking at that table and I was thinking about like the founding fathers and the age of the founding fathers when they wrote the Declaration of Independence.

They were all super young.

And I was like, man, this is an opportunity to kind of rewrite how government operates in America today.

But I was just struck by the age and the talent and how that came together and kind of where do they show up?

Do they just apply out of the blue?

And you guys have recruiters out there?

I mean, where do these guys come from?

So

we do have a recruiting team, actually.

They're great.

Barish and Emily do the recruiting.

And I'll tell you, I just want to stop for a second and say this.

This is extraordinary.

These people are extraordinary, all of them.

The young people you saw at the table are extraordinary.

They're amazing engineers.

I mean, they're like any one of us would be, they're 10x engineers.

We would all be thrilled to have our companies.

Elon obviously is an extraordinary leader, so they come

for him.

But I think they're really motivated by the mission.

They're motivated by the idea that this is a moment where they can actually make it extraordinary to the country.

And that is a flywheel that brings more people, right?

So they bring their friends and it's, you know, you recruit other people in.

And there are extraordinary, extraordinary people there, man.

So you saw the people at the table.

In that particular interview, I didn't say a word.

I literally, it wasn't the company.

I'd actually say, it was you and the other guy.

Yeah, I didn't say anything.

And the reason I didn't say anything was because I didn't need to.

These guys are extraordinary.

And

one of the young men there spoke about this, Ethan.

He's in my son's class at Harvard.

He dropped out of Harvard with two classes left to come do this.

Big Ball is an example.

He's great.

Ram, the guy I work with.

I mean, I work with an engineer named Aram is great.

And then, and I got to tell you, there's a whole other strata of people that you didn't see there who are kind of in their 30s.

I think

my buddy buddy Josh is working on the college stuff and a few other things.

These guys are, I mean, this guy was a senior executive, rising store at KKR, left his job to come do this.

And there's an innumerable number of people like this.

It's an extraordinary group.

I feel honored to be part of it.

I feel honored to work with them.

But it really is.

Can I tell you an answer to this?

Yeah, but I just want to, like, do you think that this...

Because these guys aren't going to work in the government forever.

They're coming in, they're building something, they're activating, and they're moving on back to their private life, like the founding fathers did at the start of the American government.

Is that a better model for how government should operate rather than have career employees, career politicians, but treat it more like civil service, where everyone has some role that they should play at some point, like they do in Israel, where you have to

go to the Army for a few years and everyone is required, same in Singapore, actually,

where everyone kind of has to go spend their time in the government, contribute, participate, but it doesn't become a mechanism where there's an incentive to grow it and get more money flowing through it because that's how I individually as a politician or employee long-term would benefit from the government.

Yeah, I think it's a great point.

It's a great point on Singapore, actually.

I should have brought that up when Jamath asked a question.

I think that we're proving there's two types of people in the government today.

There's careers, they call them, and politicals, right?

I think there should be a third type, which is what you're talking about.

People that are doing public service for a short duration, shorter duration, whether it's me 130 as a SGE or it's a couple of years as an engineer or something.

I think a culture of this in America would be great for America and great not just for what it does to the government, but how it binds us as a people.

Right?

Serving your country, going there, seeing how hard it is, seeing the way it works, understanding really from the inside what's going on.

Listen, I had no idea.

It's like, what part of the government did you work in for your two-year service or your 18 months, right?

This would be a great thing for America and a great thing for our society

because that culture of public service I think would bring us closer together.

Shamath, you were going to say something about the I had,

I mean, without saying too much, but you can guess.

So

all of us have known Elon for a really long time.

I also worked for another person that's of that same stature for a long time.

He's much shorter.

Much shorter.

And one of

a very good friend of his

came to see me recently for lunch.

And he asked me this exact same question about Elon.

He said,

like it was kind of like just like the, that's the question that they were grappling with.

How is he able to find big balls?

And so many big balls.

I actually can tell you.

I've seen him find big balls.

Yeah.

It's a serious strategy.

What he does is he responds to emails or tweets.

Twitter, people will say, like, I have a solution to this.

We should do that.

And then I've been CC'd on messages where he sends them to the right person.

He has people to vet them and see if this idea actually works.

And I think he's like very opportunistic and doesn't prejudge where you went to school, what your credentials is.

It's almost the opposite.

The less credentials you are, he has a predisposition to think you're more right.

Have you solved a problem?

By the way, this is a Peter Thiel.

But my answer to this was,

there's a lot of people that can be responsive in email.

I think there's a handful of people that are real northern stars for technical talent.

But he's the only one that when you walk in the room, he says, here's this mission.

And it is so generally otherworldly nobody else can really say that it is a flywheel as you said that is extremely unique the fact that you can direct that entropy to the united states government i think is a blessing now the question is how do we follow up and make it attractive because to your point

i saw those kids on that interview and any of my five kids if they had done what they did I would have been so proud.

I was so impressed with these kids.

It's impressive.

And you're like, you're proud to be an American watching these kids.

You saw Elon's face nodding while they were speaking with a grin ear to ear.

He was proud.

They were his principal.

He is proud.

Yeah, he is proud.

I think it's important for maybe people to sit back and say, this has all been done in 100 days from a cold start.

It's not like

you brought in people, you brought in people who were like, I know the lay of the land here.

It was like, we're going to figure this out from first principles, do zero-based budgeting, whatever it is, look at the data and see where it leads us.

And I think one of the disturbing things about the data and most controversial issues in America today is the border.

And why did Biden let so many people through the border?

It was kind of a question if it was even happening.

Should we trust these border encounter numbers?

It doesn't seem real.

And there's a lack of trust in the government.

One side is saying, hey, we let all these people in.

There's 15, 20 million extra people here in order to vote Democratic.

Doesn't make a lot of sense to me since the Republicans have become the working party.

But putting all that aside, you started looking at this and we had a discussion privately privately about, hey, are these people signing up to vote?

Because that would be an indicator that this

theory that people were streaming across the border in order to vote,

you found some people who were illegal immigrants who registered to vote?

This is confounding.

Yes, this is actually true.

We have sampled a handful of states, and in those handful of states, we found people registered to vote, and we have found people who actually voted.

And this is all being done by sampling, okay?

So we are sampling DHS data and then have to go to the voter rolls, check the voter rolls, and then check the, give that to HSI, Homeland Security Investigations, who goes and checks the voter record by subpoena and the voter and the cards you sign when you vote.

We had already three

arrests here in Florida, actually.

And one indictment.

And is that publicly known?

Yes,

we posted it.

The DOJ.

So the media has not covered, like, I haven't seen much about that.

So you're saying

these are three individuals who illegally secured, or no, legally secured a social security number.

They legally secured social security numbers

through the process we talked about last time, asylum or some special program or whatever, and they were given,

you know, they're given a social security number by filing a 765 and getting with authorization, and they registered to vote.

And they actually voted in 2020 and or 2024.

Three have been arrested.

I just want to say this carefully.

Three have been arrested and one has been indicted.

The one we indicted, I want to just stop on this guy for a minute.

He's an Iraqi national.

He voted in 2020 in New York.

He went to prison for shooting somebody, shot some guy's hand off, has charged, if I remember correctly,

$60,000 or $70,000 of benefits through Medicaid, and we think is now in Iraq because he's active on his Facebook page, and the IP address is from Iraq.

And credit to our friends at HSI, our partners HSI, and to DOJ for tracking this down.

I got to tell you guys, it's difficult, laborious work.

It really is.

But think about that a minute.

Is that the tip of the iceberg, Antonio, do you think?

Or did you guys do a lot of mining and a lot of digging to come up with those for how big of a magnitude of a problem do you think this is?

What's your intuition tell you honestly right now about whether there's massive voter fraud or not?

Great question, and I want to be careful how I answer it.

I'm going to leave the data.

So I'm not leaving the data and I'm entering the area of my opinion, which is what you're asking me.

My opinion is, and actually let me step back into what we did a second and then take my opinion.

We are sampling by hand.

So when you say data mining, we're not mining.

We're actually like pick and shovel going into like by hand.

This is not mechanized.

There's no AI being applied.

We're using SQL queries.

You're literally pulling money.

I'm literally sampling a name out of the work authorization database, DHS.

checking that against a voter roll and have to go run it down to the state.

Super laborious, okay?

So

with that in mind, my opinion is that this is the tip of the iceberg.

How big the iceberg is, I don't know, and I don't want to speculate because I think it would be not the right thing we can do at this moment.

I think we'll have more data over time.

But for sure, if we can sample out of a database and it takes an engineer about a day to find 20-ish cases, so what DOJ asks for was 10 to 20 cases per state.

It just gives you a sense of what's happening.

It takes an engineer about a day to find 10 to 20 cases per state in sampling.

That gives you an idea of

how many there are, right?

That's going on.

Are you shocked that people don't care about this more?

I'm shocked.

I think people really do care.

Should we care more?

Yeah, yes.

Yes, I want to separate the questions.

I think people care more.

My guess is everyone here cares a lot, okay, a lot about this.

I think for some reason the news media doesn't care more.

Now, should you care?

Yes.

You know, there's this idea, like, it's always a little bit of fraud, it's pervasive.

It's not a big deal, wrong.

Here's the reality.

Every vote that is cast illegally in America nullifies the vote of an American citizen.

It is your constitutional right to vote in America.

And if we don't have a zero defect system, we are violating your constitutional rights.

And I will tell you, you deserve, the American public deserves, that we strive for a zero defect system.

We make medical devices in America with a zero defect system.

We shouldn't make votes with a zero defect system.

If we don't strive for a zero defect system, we will get a lot more fraud.

This is what the real idea is so important.

We should strive for this.

And it doesn't matter if it's one vote.

It's easily solved with the last 15 states that don't require voter ID to simply do that.

And that would pretty much end this debate, I think.

I mean,

well, I want to tell you, there are states that do require ID.

I think Real ID will solve it.

Because one of the things that our engineers are building, and it was already there, but they're making it, cleaning up and making it work properly, is a thing called Save.

There's a database called Save that is available to the states.

In the Biden administration, they raised the price from, I think, about a dollar, an API call, to $3 and change an API call, and all the states stopped using it.

Save is a database that has the actual citizenship data for the entire country.

We're cleaning it up now and making the actual UI much better.

If the states have real ID and they use SAVE, you'll solve this problem.

And

I cannot understand why a state would not do this.

Whose decision would it be to just change the cost of that API?

So, great question, Jamath.

The Secretary of Homeland Security, I want to thank her, Secretary Nome, has just signed a memo, a policy memo, to make it free.

Yeah, but why is that charge anyway?

It doesn't make any sense to me.

Thank you.

Yes.

Yeah, that's a very simple thing.

Second generation has made this free.

Your parents.

I know your dad is an immigrant.

My parents are both immigrants.

Both immigrants.

Two immigrants sitting here.

My mother came here last week English.

Yeah.

So to be picky.

Pick me.

Me too.

You're an immigrant, also an immigrant, seventh generation, nobody else.

Which ways does it fit?

I don't know who's not.

Is it?

Oh, Jason.

Who do you think?

Seventh generation.

I'm the all-in presidential candidate by default.

I don't know.

You're from Mount Olympus, though.

Yes.

Yeah.

And the five points.

But

how should immigration work in this country?

You know, we've talked about it on our pod, the point-based system, et cetera.

We still want immigration.

We need high-skilled immigration.

We talked to President Trump about that.

He said he was committed to giving people green cards who have diplomas.

And this is a little out of your purview, but just how does Antonio Gracias feel about immigration,

you know, deporting people, you know, deporting people with maybe less due process than maybe some of us are comfortable with?

What do you think we should be doing here as a country?

There's a lot in that question.

Yes.

So look, I'm an enormous fan of immigration.

I mean, you will not find a guy who's more pro-immigration than I am

because my parents are immigrants.

They came here with nothing and built a life, and I am the American dream.

And I'm so grateful this country for what it's done for my family.

You won't find it.

I am so grateful for this country.

It has been great for us, okay?

And for all of you.

The reality is that we need...

Thank you.

American GDP is simply the function of number of people working, times productivity.

We have seven million job openings roughly in America.

We need people to work.

Yes.

This is the reality.

The system should very simply be: there's a skilled immigration group, and we figure out what that should be, what jobs you want.

And by the way, America is the best place to live in the world.

We all know that.

I believe that if we make this easy, they will come, right?

No problem.

And I think there's broad agreement in that.

We also need labor.

We do.

Our farmers need labor, need labor in the food industry, restaurants, et cetera.

I think there should be both high-end skilled immigration and there should be a very sensible program for unskilled labor, a work permit program.

And you can...

We've got that H-2A program.

There is the H-2A program.

I will tell you, these programs, I've mapped the entire system now.

They go from DHS to State Department to labor.

They're very disconnected and they're hard to manage.

So we are going to work on this.

One of the things we're going to work on and hopefully leave behind is both a sensible answer to the illegal problem and a sensible answer to the legal problem.

It's very important the team working on this.

They just brought up this.

This is super important for Trump's administration because there seems to be a bit of a, I don't want to call it a civil war, but heated debate internally between people like yourself and Elon and others who believe immigration is critical and then other people who just want to lock the border and deport 20 million people.

I'll call the Steve Banning camp.

He's not in the administration, clearly.

Locking the borders, I want to be clear on this something.

I don't believe in open borders.

When a country opens a border, this country cedes its sovereignty.

Yes, you have to close the borders.

You have to have a border that's controlled.

I agree on that.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't have legal immigration.

Right.

It should be a proper process where people can come in that are great for the country and they believe in our values.

And they should have a chance to become citizens if they believe in our values, support our country.

I really hope that you guys work this out and can have a positive influence like you've had with Doge on the administration and really work on this one, which is sensible, kind,

you know, empathetic immigration

because you're all immigrants.

I mean, the values I set for our team, I'll just tell you, the valor execution values are focus, intensity, and discipline.

I added a fourth value here to our team for our team, compassion.

Yes.

Antonio, I just want, and I want anyone else to join me in saying, look, you're a successful, wealthy,

incredibly handsome, handsome man.

That's the best part.

But,

like, I know the work you're doing is super hard.

We talked backstage about how hard it's been.

I just want to honestly say, as an American, thank you for the work you're doing.

And a lot of Andrew.

Thank you, bro.

All right.

Thanks to my friend Antonio Gracias for joining us.

And thanks to you, the audience, for tuning in for that important discussion about Doge.

If you want to come to our next event it's the all-in summit in los angeles fourth year for all in summit go to allin.com slash events to apply a very special thanks to our new partner okx the new money app okx was the sponsor of the mclaren f1 team which won the race in miami thanks to hyder and his team an amazing partner and an amazing team we really enjoyed spending time with you and okx launched their new crypto exchange here in the u.s if you love all-in go check them out And a special thanks to our friends at Circle.

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We couldn't have done it without y'all.

Thank you so much.

And it says, We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

Let your winners ride.

We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orb because they're all just useless.

It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

What you're beat beat.

What your original feet.

We need to get murdered.

Besties are.

I'm going all

the way.

I'm going all in.