Transcript of Antonio Gracias’ Interview on All-In Live from Miami

Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. It’s great to be down here to see everybody. 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 to 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 government trying to help. So let me start with that.

INTERVIEWER: It’s a sacrifice, right? You’re taking time out of your day job.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: It’s definitely a sacrifice. But really, I feel very grateful that I have the capacity and 30 years of training in operations that I can be useful. That feels very… I feel gratitude.

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 D.C., I’ve mapped now as an example the entire system 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 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.

Waste, Fraud and Abuse in Government

INTERVIEWER: Okay, if we were to, and I’m sure Chamath has some questions and Friedberg, but if we were to look at $1 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.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: Here’s what I’d say. If you go into any company, any company you guys have ever seen that is not like super well run, it probably is like easy cut 15%. Easy, easy, easy. This is where the 15%, this is where the trillion dollar number came from. 15% of $7 trillion. 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 who are screaming about this because we’re taking money from them. And whatever you read in the news media, I gotta 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. There’s nine months or so of severance and they’re voluntary.

And I’ll 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 people have reported to OIG, like sex trafficking, and they turn it in and nothing happens. 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 not just about the cost cuts. 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 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 things 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.

Return to Office Initiatives

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

ANTONIO GRACIAS: Oh, I’ll tell you. So we have been pilloried often in the press for Social Security 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 like end to end to 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 seven people, three had 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 once 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 that have 25 open and three of the people are taking phone calls and you’re waiting. I mean, talk about customer service.

Incentives for Civil Servants

INTERVIEWER: 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?

ANTONIO GRACIAS: Look, I think the people that work in the government, it’s a normal distribution of everything. 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, they’re 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 at Social Security, we were criticized for the website uptime. Well, turns out website uptime has been better since we got there than before. We have engineers and we’ve now published the metrics on the website publicly so people would 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.

The Singapore Model vs. American Approach

INTERVIEWER: Like, for example, if you look at Singapore…

ANTONIO GRACIAS: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: 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 more 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?

ANTONIO GRACIAS: I mean, 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. They want 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 you will get them. There are very good people that are on mission. I met them. They are the ones pointing all this stuff out to us.

Finding Talented Young People for Government

INTERVIEWER: Can you talk about… You guys went on Fox the other day with the Doge team. 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? I mean, where do these guys come from?

ANTONIO GRACIAS: So we do have a recruiting team, actually. They’re great. Baris 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. And they’re like any one of us would be. They’re 10x engineers. We would all be thrilled to have them in 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 an extraordinary difference to the country. And that is a flywheel that brings more people, right? So they bring their friends and you recruit other people in. And there are extraordinary, extraordinary people there. So you saw the people at the table in that particular interview? I didn’t say a word. It wasn’t… They cut me. I actually…

INTERVIEWER: It was you and the other guy.

Finding ‘Big Balls’ – Talent Recruitment

ANTONIO GRACIAS: 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 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. I work with an engineer named Aram is great. And I gotta 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 Josh is working on the college stuff and a few of the things these guys are. I mean, this guy was a senior executive rising star at KKR, left his job to come do this. And there’s 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.

INTERVIEWER: Can I tell you an answer to this? Yeah, but I just want 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, you know, 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.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: Yeah, I think it’s a great point. It’s a great point about Singapore actually. I should have brought that up when Chamath has a question. I think that we’re proving there’s two types of people in government today. There’s careers, they call them in 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 SG or you know, it’s a couple of years as 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.

INTERVIEWER: It’s like what part of the government did you work in for your two year service or your 18 months? Right.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: This would be a great thing for America and a great thing for our society.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: Because that culture of public service, I think would bring us closer together.

INTERVIEWER: Chamath, you were going to say something about the.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: I had.

INTERVIEWER: 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.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: Time, and he’s much shorter.

INTERVIEWER: Much shorter. And one of. I say that a very good friend.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: Of his.

INTERVIEWER: 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, as just like, 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 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, 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 and 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 the 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.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: Impressive.

INTERVIEWER: 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.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: He is proud. He is proud.

Voter Fraud Investigation

INTERVIEWER: 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 are 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 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.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: Yes, this is actually true. So we’ve 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 in the cards you sign when you vote. We had already three arrests here in Florida actually, and one indictment.

INTERVIEWER: And is that publicly known?

ANTONIO GRACIAS: Yes, we posted it, the DoJ, but.

INTERVIEWER: The media is not covered. Like I haven’t seen much about this. So you’re saying these are three individuals who illegally secured or. No, legally secured a Social Security.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: The illegally secured Social Security numbers through the process, talked about last time, asylum or some special program or whatever. And they were given, you know, they give an associate number by filing a 765 and getting 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, $160,000 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 at HSI, and to DOJ for tracking this down. I gotta tell you guys, it’s difficult, laborious work. It really is. But think about that a minute.

INTERVIEWER: 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 four? 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?

ANTONIO GRACIAS: Great question. And I want to be careful 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 what you’re asking me, my opinion is actually, let me step back and tell you what we did a second and then tell you 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. Okay. You’re literally pulling one, snapping a name out of the work authorization database, DHS checking that against the voter roll and had 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 20ish cases. So a DOJs for was 20-10-20 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 you know how many there are. Right. That’s going on.

INTERVIEWER: Are you shocked that people don’t care about this more?

ANTONIO GRACIAS: I think people really do care.

INTERVIEWER: Should we care more?

ANTONIO GRACIAS: Yeah. Yes. Well, 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, 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. It doesn’t matter if it’s one vote.

INTERVIEWER: 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.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: I mean, I. 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, making it work properly, is a thing called SAVE. There’s a database called SAVE that is available to states in the Biden administration. They raised the price. When I think about a dollar, an API call to $3 and change the API call and all the states stop using it. SAVE is a database that has the actual citizenship data for the entire country. Okay, we’re cleaning up now and making the actual UI much better. If the states have real ID and they use SAVE, you will solve this problem. And I cannot understand why a state would not do this.

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

ANTONIO GRACIAS: So, great question, Chamath, the Secretary of Homeland Security, I want to thank her for. Secretary Noem has just signed a memo, a policy memo to make it free.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah. Why is the charge anyway? It doesn’t make any sense to me.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, that’s the right. Very simple.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: Senator Noemi made this free.

INTERVIEWER: Your parents. I know. Your dad is an immigrant.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: My parents are both immigrants.

INTERVIEWER: Both immigrants. Two immigrants sitting here.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: My mother came here last week. English.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah. So to be clear, pick me.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: Me too.

INTERVIEWER: You’re an immigrant, also an immigrant. 7th generation.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: Which ways does it fit? I don’t know. Who’s not, is it. Oh, Jason, who do you think?

INTERVIEWER: Seventh generation. I’m the all in presidential candidate by default. So. I don’t know.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: You’re from Mount Olympus though. Yes.

Immigration Policy Discussion

INTERVIEWER: 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, etc. 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 do you. 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?

ANTONIO GRACIAS: 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. I’m so grateful for this country, for my woods and 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 7 million job openings roughly in America. We need people to work.

INTERVIEWER: Yes.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: 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 broader view in that we also need labor. We do. Our farmers need labor. 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.

INTERVIEWER: We’ve got that H2A program.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: There is the H2A program. I will tell you, these programs, I map 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 work on this.

INTERVIEWER: I think this is like 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.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: Steve.

INTERVIEWER: I’ll call the Steve Bannon camp. He’s not in the administration.

Border Security and Immigration Values

ANTONIO GRACIAS: 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 closers. You have to have closers. You have to have a border that is controlled.

INTERVIEWER: Agree on that.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have legal immigration.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: 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.

INTERVIEWER: I really hope that you guys work this out and can have a positive influence like you’ve had with doing DOGE on the administration and really work on this one, which is sensible, kind, you know, empathetic immigration because you’re all immigrants.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: I mean, the values I set for our team, let’s tell you, the valor, execution values are focus, intensity and discipline. I added a fourth value here to our team, for our team, compassion.

INTERVIEWER: 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.

ANTONIO GRACIAS: That’s the best part.

Closing Remarks

INTERVIEWER: But like, I know the work you’re doing 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 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.

Related Posts

• Joe Rogan Experience: #2429 with Tom Segura (Transcript)
• This Past Weekend: #630 with Stephen Wilson Jr. (Transcript)
• Shawn Ryan Show: SRS #264 with Hunter Biden (Transcript)
• Tucker Carlson Show: Matt Gaetz on ADL, Israel Policy, and Identity Politics (Transcript)
• TRIGGERnometry: Christina P on Woke Culture, Feminism, and More (Transcript)