CEOInterviews.AITravis Kalanick & Michael Dell Live from Austin, Texas

J

Jason Calacanis0:00

I don't know if some of you knew, I was an angel investor in some companies. On the count of three, what's my favorite angel investment of all time? One, two, three.

Thank you. Give it up, Travis Kalanick.

T

Travis Kalanick0:21

Appreciate you. All right. Wow. On a big news day, Travis is here on a very big news day. You spent, I guess, like seven years just in the lab building. Last year every year I ask you, 'Hey, you want to come to the end summit?' You want to say, 'Nah, I'm going to just chill. I'm building.' Next year, 'Hey,' you know, just always, 'You understand, I'm stealth, stealth, I'm stealth. Nobody knows where I am. Nobody knows what I'm doing. The employees are not allowed to put the name of the company on their LinkedIn.'

J

Jason Calacanis0:54

Thousands of employees that weren't allowed to put the company name on LinkedIn. I mean, incredible. And I'm like, 'Okay.' And

T

Travis Kalanick1:02

Their parents thought they worked for the CIA.

J

Jason Calacanis1:04

Yeah. And then he's like, 'And by the way, Jason, you can invest. You can't announce it and you have to sign an ID. You can't mention you're an investor.' It's like, 'Okay, no problem. I'm just happy to be on the cap table.' Is he like kind of secretly saying what he wasn't supposed to say, right? Now he's doing that just happened.

T

Travis Kalanick1:21

Well, you came.

J

Jason Calacanis1:21

No, you're out now. Let's go. You're out. It's out. You came out of stealth today.

T

Travis Kalanick1:27

It's so funny. Okay.

J

Jason Calacanis1:28

It's so great. You came out of stealth. Well, you talked a little bit. You came to Allen Sign Lab. Is that true? Is that fair? You say you're coming out of stealth today. Is that right?

T

Travis Kalanick1:35

Well, look, let's just start with what that meant for our employees, because again, imagine if you're at a multi-thousand person company and every single employee has 'stealth' on their LinkedIn, including salespeople, including recruiters. Like, they were living life on hard mode.

J

Jason Calacanis2:00

It's kind of fun too, right? I mean

T

Travis Kalanick2:01

I mean, yeah, it was like, what the, what is this? Why is there this massive density of stealth startup people in Los Angeles? What is happening over there?

J

Jason Calacanis2:13

Yeah. Yeah.

T

Travis Kalanick2:14

Also, technically the name of the company in different countries was very generic names of companies. I mean, everything was designed to be stealth, right? So we operate in 30 countries. In the US, the kitchens product is known as Cloud Kitchens. In Korea, it's Kitchen Valley. In the Middle East, it's Nama. In Latin America, parts of Latin America, it's Casina Aquelas. I mean, you get the idea. You can't even remember all the names and all the code words to think it through. But we're four in China, you know, it's all over the place. Yeah.

J

Jason Calacanis2:59

But things have gone really well and you've been a little inquisitive. So tell us about the branding today that you're announcing and then maybe some of the acquisitions and evolution of the company. You're not just renting kitchen space.

T

Travis Kalanick3:13

Those who know how I thought about things in the Uber day, a lot of this stuff's not surprising. I would often talk about digitizing the physical world. I think I even did it here at Summit. The quick version of this, I'll try to do it quickly, but it's like: we know the bits world, the computer world, the one that Michael Dell essentially invented for us. CPU, storage, network. These are three core computing resources when you go to computer science class your first day. Three core computer resources. CPU manipulates the bits. Storage stores the bits. Network moves bits from point A to point B. But if you're digitizing the physical world, you're treating atoms like bits. You're building an atoms-based computer. And I'll explain what I mean. I know this is a little out there. CPU manipulates bits. What manipulates atoms? Manufacturing. Storage stores bits. What stores atoms? Real estate. Network moves bits from point A to point B. What moves atoms? That's transportation or logistics. So you have these three core computing resources in an atoms-based computer. The name of my company was very obtuse and purposely designed to be as boring as hell. It was called City Storage Systems. So that's digitized real estate in an atoms-based computer. Our first computer being a food computer. What does that mean? Manufacturing, real estate, and logistics for food. And so you start to get there and the idea, the mission, was infrastructure for better food. The idea was, can you get a meal that's prepared and delivered to you so efficient that it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store? If you can do that, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car. But in the Uber day, the roads were there. The cars are unused. You just had to put an app in the app store. Wasn't that easy, but kind of that easy. In this world, you can't do this on a restaurant. A restaurant doesn't have it. When I left Uber, 13% of all San Francisco miles were Uber miles. You can't get that on food with restaurants. They have like 20% capacity. Uber Eats and DoorDash fill it, but the infrastructure to do high-capacity, high-scale, sort of industrial production is just not there. And the logistics just not there. It just doesn't work. That's why on e-commerce you go through Amazon's big ass warehouses with awesome logistics. You've got to do the same thing when food goes to e-commerce. That was a lie. Okay. So bottom line is, it's awesome. We do this food computation stuff. We're doing more computers now. And so the name of the company is called Atoms. And the mission is physical automation to transform industries and move the world. So we have our food computer I talked about, then we do mining.

J

Jason Calacanis6:13

Mining as in

T

Travis Kalanick6:14

Mining data mining.

J

Jason Calacanis6:17

We're talking about atoms, guys.

T

Travis Kalanick6:18

So, well, of course you do some mining, data mining too, but the point is physical mining. So automation of mines. And the mission there is more productive mines to power earth's industries. Right? So it's got this industrial atoms vibe to it. And then on the transport side, it's a wheelbase for robots. Because if you're doing specialized robots, not humanoids, specialized robots, you need to be able to move and act in the physical world. But the minute you're moving, you got to have a wheelbase. So it's just part of the equation. And a lot of people go, 'Look at Tesla. It's great. Look at Waymo. Awesome. They're cruising around Austin, of course.' But there's so many things that move. It's not just a ride sharing thing. And so, obviously including mining equipment that's doing its thing. So, you guys, that's the general sort of idea. And we acquired a company on the mining stuff, a company called Pronto, or it's about to close. We're inches from closing, is the way to put it.

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Jason Calacanis7:30

What were they doing? What was their business? Pronto?

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Travis Kalanick7:32

Automating mining equipment.

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Jason Calacanis7:34

Were they based?

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Travis Kalanick7:35

They're based in San Francisco.

J

Jason Calacanis7:36

So you and I were starting to talk about this backstage, but there's some folks I talked to in the mining industry who mentioned, you know, like the big issue with mining number one is just surveying, like finding the locations, right? Is there an advantage to be created there? Because I know there's a couple startups that are trying to be really smart about selecting locations to get the targets out of the ground. And then the other one is like, well, can you go deep? Because pretty much anywhere on Earth, you can get whatever you want if you're willing to go deep enough. But the cost is distance squared, right? So the energy cost is like how deep you're going to to the second power. So it becomes geometrically more expensive to go deeper. But the deeper you go, the more you're able to kind of not worry about getting the right location. So does automation unlock that capacity?

T

Travis Kalanick8:23

Automation definitely does. I mean, but you have also, does Boring Company have some good stuff going? Like I hope we're doing the mining thing and Boring makes some good tunnels for cars to do the thing, but there's some kind of boring mechanism, automated tunneling to do some of this. But to be honest, you know, they have this thing like rare earths. I don't know why they put plural. Rare earths? Isn't it 'rare earth'? I don't know.

J

Jason Calacanis8:55

But rare earth?

T

Travis Kalanick8:58

Rare earth. But it's not rare.

J

Jason Calacanis9:01

Uncommon minerals.

T

Travis Kalanick9:02

It's not rare. It's what you have to do to the land is aggressive. And what's rare is where are the places they'll let you do it that you can also sort of get people to.

J

Jason Calacanis9:15

When you automate, you can go to a lot of places.

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Travis Kalanick9:16

Well, first is all the mines that exist are way more productive. And the second is you can then sort of justify going to places you wouldn't have been able to go before because you don't have as much of a labor footprint or a safety issue or a whole bunch of other things that then

J

Jason Calacanis9:36

So if it's inhospitable, if it's regulated, if it's like I don't want to live there, it's the end of the earth.

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Travis Kalanick9:43

You can send robots and have people monitoring them remotely.

J

Jason Calacanis9:48

Yeah. And this is like a future that feels a little bit like science fiction.

T

Travis Kalanick9:54

Look, we're here in Austin. You got to do the shout out to Tesla and all the things because I like to sort of break down the physical AI stack. It includes not just like, oh yeah, computation and I've got to have physical AI models and all the things you sort of think of. What about land development? That should be in that stack. What about chemistry? That needs to be in the stack. Manufacturing needs to be the stack. When you look at the stack, you're like, damn, Tesla's got this. They are the Google of this era. What I mean by that is in the 2000s, if you were doing a startup in the 2000s, the first question you would get is, 'Why isn't Google going to kill you? Or why isn't Google just going to do it?'

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Jason Calacanis10:40

Google, they're not going to know that they killed you.

T

Travis Kalanick10:42

And before that, Microsoft.

J

Jason Calacanis10:43

And before that was Microsoft, the late 90s. Uber had a time 2010. 'What if Uber puts that in the app?' Come on. It's like, dude, this is Uber. I'm like,

T

Travis Kalanick10:51

But you know, I think in the physical AI space, that's sort of a Tesla thing. But there's so many things to do. You got to shoot your shot. You got to do some stuff.

J

Jason Calacanis11:01

And rumors that, hey, you might not be done with self-driving, something that you were very early on. How do you think about what you're seeing in the playing field of self-driving? Because my lord, you know, Waymo's making great progress. Tesla's making great progress. Pick a winner between Tesla, Waymo, Uber, or like Uber seems to be building a network of stuff.

T

Travis Kalanick11:26

Yeah. I mean, the number of players in this space is crazy now, right? Like

J

Jason Calacanis11:31

Yeah.

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Travis Kalanick11:31

Look, there's more noise. There's more bark than there is bite right now. Look, I think Waymo obviously is ahead. The existence proof is there. Their issue is manufacturing and scale and urgency and fierceness. Like let's come on, let's go. Yeah. You know, Uber had an autonomy project back in the day. So and they have a different strategy these days. I haven't been there for a while. So, but the point is that you got Waymo, then you've got Tesla fundamentals, science, hard mode times 100. And the question is, do they get there in what time scale? If they, and honestly everybody's like, could happen tomorrow, could happen in five years. And I think that it's like, when does the ChatGPT moment happen for vision is basically the thing. Let's call it vision without other sensors. So super inspiring, but what's the timeline on it? Yeah. And then there's a lot of other little guys that don't really have the stuff I believe yet.

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Jason Calacanis12:46

There's nobody standing out just yet of the others. Do you think we're at a point now, obviously now that you're getting into more of these kind of autonomous systems that move around, do we have these vision language action models tuned and ready for prime time? There's been a conversation like who's going to have the Android, the operating system for vision language action where I can use my voice tell it to do something and it knows what I'm saying and then it identifies the objects and does the thing in the physical world. Do those models exist today or is there still work? And is that like a Google OS or like where does that OS come from?

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Travis Kalanick13:24

Look, I think this is an area of a lot of energy, a mix of research and implementation. I think there's a lot of hope and interesting stuff. I mean the high level is we all remember what happened when you used ChatGPT 3.5 and you're like, holy. Yeah, it's legit. Whoa. And then it went to four and you're like, okay, some stuff just changed. The world just changed and I can sort of connect some dots and it's getting real. Is it about to happen? Is it about to happen for physical AI? And that's what this is about. Yeah. And the fun part about it is machine learning, deep learning, this kind of thing for many years, decades was like inscrutable. I don't know what the thing is thinking. It just spits out an answer and I know it's correct. Well, now you can have a conversation with it, right? Like imagine if it's driving your car and there's different agents and one's just driving, the other's like, 'Yo, look out over there.' Yeah. It's like, 'Oh, just like how we roll.' Like somebody does that, you're like, 'Honey, that's like 200 meters away. We're going to be okay. We're okay.' Yeah.

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Jason Calacanis14:33

Jason and I don't call each other honey, but I got you. Yeah. Like, sweetie, you know. Yeah. Okay. So anyway, that was odd, wasn't it? Okay. I didn't mean it that way.

T

Travis Kalanick14:45

Yeah. You know, I meant it. Okay.

Language is a beautiful compression mechanism that humans use 100 watts of energy. And you put that in the scheme of things of like AI training, AI energy, the power plants that are built to do the thing that isn't even at human strength yet. Okay, the Waymo machine takes a hundred times more energy to drive a Waymo than a human does to drive a Waymo. So, language, we are still things that humans are great at and that unbeatable, like the GOAT, we're still the GOAT at certain things. Language is this epic compression. And we need to find ways to compress because when you think about how we first started looking at the physical world is we saw everything and you know what, guys, this is sort of obvious. It doesn't matter what the cloud is doing if I'm driving. But the car doesn't know that it's pulling in every freaking data point and processing everything. They've been about sort of carving out the things that don't matter and things like this, but there's ultra awesome versions of this. And you can imagine how you can use language or things that look like language to communicate either amongst agents or sort of safety systems with a driving system to sort of get very efficient answers and to identify safety issues very efficiently.

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Jason Calacanis16:18

People don't know that you've moved to Texas as of well, or most people don't know, but it's out there.

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Travis Kalanick16:25

Yeah.

J

Jason Calacanis16:25

You moved here in December. So now you're a resident of Austin.

T

Travis Kalanick16:29

Yeah, I was. I... thank you.

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Jason Calacanis16:33

It's very exciting for me. We've been getting to play some backgammon, backgammon cards.

T

Travis Kalanick16:37

Cards. We're having a good time.

So I've had a place on Lake Austin since 2021 and I go there. I'm an avid water skier.

J

Jason Calacanis16:48

You're impressive at water skiing, I have to say.

T

Travis Kalanick16:51

So I've had a place in Austin for 5 years. Freaking love it. It's my weekend. I would go 15 weekends a year.

J

Jason Calacanis16:58

What do you think's going to happen in California?

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Travis Kalanick17:00

It's pretty messed up. Look, I grew up in Cali. Like I grew up in Los Angeles. My parents were born and bred in Los Angeles, which basically makes them the founders of LA. Okay. But, so I have a lot of heart, my whole family, everything, you know? It's pretty... it's... I don't want to get the violin out, but it's heartbreaking.

J

Jason Calacanis17:24

The plot totally... It's just a place you grew up. It's your home, you know, when you have to leave.

T

Travis Kalanick17:29

But it's getting weird out there and it feels like it's getting weirder and at some point it's just too weird.

J

Jason Calacanis17:41

It's too weird. Do you think everyone's going to leave?

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Travis Kalanick17:44

I mean, it started with Elon and it was like

J

Jason Calacanis17:47

'We don't want Elon here.' And then he's like, 'Message received,' right? And then it kind of worked its way down the tech industry and the kind of world of people building businesses and whatnot. And now it's kind of gotten so broad in terms of the... Joe Rogan comedy, music, New Yorkers, restaurant tours. I mean, this place is funny.

T

Travis Kalanick18:10

I'm not even talking about this. I'm just talking about everyone leaving LA or sorry, leaving California is almost working down this path of...

J

Jason Calacanis18:19

Look, the rest of my team's like, 'When are we moving?' You know, they're like

T

Travis Kalanick18:24

And how are you dealing with that? So that was the question.

J

Jason Calacanis18:25

Got to buy homes on the lake.

There are literally dozens of startup CEOs of successful or growing companies that I talked to who were like, 'Dude, I want to leave but I got employees here. I got an office here. I got a facility here. I build stuff here. How am I going to leave?'

T

Travis Kalanick18:42

Yeah, I totally get it. It's a real thing. So, look, I think like most things, when it's time and it feels painful to do something, sometimes it's actually not as bad as you think and you just got to make the move and lead and do it. And that's kind of what I went through. And you're setting up a team here.

J

Jason Calacanis19:10

Yeah, of course. And I got that office right on the lake.

T

Travis Kalanick19:15

Did you get that?

J

Jason Calacanis19:16

We are negotiating. No, it's all good. We're negotiating right now.

T

Travis Kalanick19:21

But I'm going to jet ski to work.

J

Jason Calacanis19:23

No, literally, is it true story? Last year we're driving up the thing and I was like, 'Wow, I wonder who owns that.' He's like, 'I will.' And I was like, 'Did you look at it?' I looked at that and I was like, that would be a nice one. But the truth is, I had a couple people move here a couple years ago and they all had the same reaction: 'Oh my god, I'm living in a place that's twice as big for half as much. The people here are dope. The food is dope. Everybody here has this sense that we're building the future.' And it's just fun and world positive. And for me, I got to live New York, LA, San Francisco. I did three of the great cities in this country. This one feels the most like home to me, which is a very strange feeling to me, but it feels like everybody here wants to build the future and it's very diverse. All these different industries and people pursuing stuff. I think this is the future.

T

Travis Kalanick20:18

Yeah. Here's the thing. Like you go to San Francisco and I still have a little nostalgia when I go to San Francisco just having built Uber there and the whole thing. I still get the butterflies. It does have something magical. You just can't take it away. And then you look at all of these bike lanes and these bus lanes that never have a bus or a bike in them and cost $400 million to build one mile. And it's literally this subconscious desire to choke the city off. Now remember, I look at things through roads. That's how I think. So I'm just like, obviously the city is totally busted. Yeah. They literally took Market Street and they're like, 'What would be the optimal way to f*** this up and virtue signal at the same time?' And they're like, 'Yeah, buses.' And it's like, nobody's on the bus. Nobody takes the bus. It's a beautiful small town. San Francisco, that whole street is empty and painted red.

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Jason Calacanis21:19

Okay. So we all f****** complain non-stop. 'When are you leaving?' Like I'm number one. I get it. But when are you leaving?

T

Travis Kalanick21:27

Okay. Well,

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Jason Calacanis21:28

On the chat, you're the best, by the way. I'm like,

T

Travis Kalanick21:30

Okay, so let me just

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Jason Calacanis21:31

By the way, there's a couple glasses of wine in public facing Friedberg and he's like, 'You know, I think there's a better way to do this.' And then there's like Darth Friedberg in group chat. He's like, 'These people, these morons, they're destroying society.' He is like Darth Friedberg in group chat. Am I lying?

T

Travis Kalanick21:50

Am I lying? Is he the most

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Jason Calacanis21:52

Correct. Especially after a couple glasses of wine.

T

Travis Kalanick21:55

Yeah. When I start drinking a Cliff and he takes pictures, he's like, 'Fourth beverage.' And we're like, 'Oh, it's worth staying up on the group chat.'

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Jason Calacanis22:04

And then I'm like, 'I'll go and attack this congressman on Twitter,' which I realize you go delete the tweet.

T

Travis Kalanick22:09

Yeah.

J

Jason Calacanis22:10

Don't delete the tweet.

T

Travis Kalanick22:11

Yeah. I delete the tweets. Okay. So, there's a group of people trying to raise $500 million to create a tech/business coalition to go to Sacramento, which arguably is something that everyone's left and avoided doing forever because no one wants to spend time in freaking Sacramento fighting politicians. But it's almost like we're all falling off a cliff. It's time to do something. Do you think there's a realistic path back? Do you think the people can actually get their s*** together that even if $500 million came in, there's a way to kind of turn around the state, fix some of the policies? Do you think it's too late?

I don't think that... Look, anybody who's doing anything to fix things, I'm like hell yeah, let's do something. The issue is we all grew up in the tech world which was like a libertarian place where you stay out of politics and that kind of vibe. 'Leave me alone. I want to make stuff.' Yeah. I just don't do that. And that's obviously not a thing anymore. In California, I think the ballot initiatives are very powerful and there's very clean ways to get something on the ballot. Love that. I think that the DAs decided we do not enforce crime at all anymore. That's like a sweet spot. I have this aphorism: Truth and justice are the immune system for society. When the immune system is suppressed, all the social ills flare up. So look for the places where truth and justice are being deteriorated, are being degraded, and say, 'How do we get at that?' Because if you get at that, everything else downstream will be better. So that's kind of how I look at things and how I also determine whether the world's getting better or worse. When I say weird, I'm talking about truth and justice. That's what I mean when I say, 'Oh man, it's getting weird. It's getting weirder.' I'm just talking about truth and justice.

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Jason Calacanis24:15

Well, I mean, and you look at the homeless industrial complex, you look at Chesa Boudin, which the All-In Pod, Sachs, myself, and the pod, we literally led the recall of him. And then you had the same thing going on in LA where they were just like... Gascon. Yeah, Gascon. I mean, we basically lost the script. You're running the city for the criminals. It literally is like a Batman movie. It's like Bane.

T

Travis Kalanick24:40

I mean, you want to arrest the criminals.

J

Jason Calacanis24:43

Look.

T

Travis Kalanick24:44

'I was born in the darkness.' I mean, these guys are lunatics.

J

Jason Calacanis24:48

Yeah. Look, I know police officers in Los Angeles who are no longer police officers, and these are lifelong guys who protect and serve. That's in their blood or DNA. They want to protect people. They want the bad guys to be dealt with. And they almost have PTSD from what it is like to want to serve and see bad things happening and not being allowed to stop it.

T

Travis Kalanick25:15

Yeah. Nobody's got their back and they're not allowed to do their job. It's crazy. And it's getting weird.

J

Jason Calacanis25:21

Okay. Hey, I want to just go back to AI. Sorry for the darkness.

T

Travis Kalanick25:24

No, no, no. I think it's good.

J

Jason Calacanis25:25

I was trying to induce dark Friedberg.

T

Travis Kalanick25:27

Well, I brought it up. I mean, someone bring me a tequila. I'll get going.

J

Jason Calacanis25:33

Yeah, let's do it. Can we get a couple tequilas?

T

Travis Kalanick25:35

It was funny. I went on this podcast yesterday and the guy, the first hour was middle of the road. I was talking about tech and science. And then politics came up. He's like, 'So socialism,' and he said like, 'You lost it.' And then he's like, 'The energy went 10x.' Yeah. So it'll come out in a couple weeks. But I was like, it got me going. Okay. I want to talk about physical AI one more time.

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Jason Calacanis25:54

Yeah. So one of, now that you're doing this, I saw a presentation the other day. Someone showed like a video of a squirrel jumping from one tree to another tree and they're like a tenth of a watt or something. Like the biology is tuned and it's so perfect in terms of its efficiency of energy utilization to do physical things. And we're taking these big things of metal and motors and actuators and if you compound all of the inefficiencies in the system, it's like 1,200 watts to get the robot to walk 4 feet. Like break apart not just the software but the hardware layer and where are we at in evolving things like actuators and the materials and everything else that's going to make physical AI work and scale?

T

Travis Kalanick26:41

A lot of the questions you're asking are going down the humanoid lane, which is this thing. And everybody talks about how do you do the hand? It's almost like Terminator 2 type obsession with the hand, which is fair. It's a very critical part of it. I mean, look at the, I like to look at the Achilles tendon of any of these machines and you're like, that's where the action is. There's a couple other places. Look, I'm in the non-humanoid space. Mechanical engineers have been dealing with actuators and all the sort of electromechanical interactions that make machines do certain things. But I'm in the food machine space, so I can tell you how to open a paper bag and put a bowl in a paper bag without tearing the paper bag. But I am less into the, I forget the name, the senses to understand awareness and touch. I'm not in that game. So when you're mining, you're like, you're not playing tennis. Certain things may be equivalent to tennis. So, look, the bottom line is we're seeing, all you have to do is go online and look at where the humanoids are going over time and how much better they're getting. It's wild and it's happening so freaking fast. But any humanoid demo starts with dancing and martial arts. Yeah. And we're sort of down the specialized robot lane, which is gainfully employed robots.

J

Jason Calacanis28:28

Yeah. So I know I didn't totally answer the technology piece, but I just... Do you agree that there's probably a big opportunity for venture money and research to go into material science, etc.? For sure.

T

Travis Kalanick28:41

Sure. Because the physical AI stack, manipulation and all of the related things around it is massive. And so if you get the software working, it's almost like the hardware has to catch up. Yes, we got a lot of investment.

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Jason Calacanis28:58

Well, actually, it's good that you bring this up. You know, one of the things you pioneered at Uber was capital as a weapon, and you were very thoughtful about, 'Hey, if we can take this capital off the table, then that's going to give an advantage versus the competitors, and these other competitors couldn't get that capital.' That's now I think people have seen that playbook and they're like, 'Hmm, that was smart. Let me try.' And it's at a different scale now that you've come out of stealth, now that people are starting to understand just starting today how big your vision is. Capital as a weapon, this is in your plan, yeah.

T

Travis Kalanick29:39

Well, I mean, here's the thing, right? Capital as a strategic weapon for its own sake is not a thing. But when it is actually a strategic weapon, then it is a thing. What I mean by that is like in the Uber world early days, if you didn't have capital, it didn't matter how good your app was because Masa was going to put a billion dollars into your competitor and you're going to lose 20% market share tomorrow. So a critical competency, in fact, your world-class competencies, one of them has to be raising capital. You need to do it better than everybody else. And if you don't, you are going to lose.

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Jason Calacanis30:13

Let me ask one follow-up to that. Sorry, you go ahead. But the Middle East, yeah, I've heard theories the last couple days that big capital seekers are kind of, right now because of what's going on in the Middle East with the Iran war, Dubai, Qatar, Saudis are kind of going to close up the capital flowing to the US right now. Is that real? I mean, do you think that's a real threat?

T

Travis Kalanick30:35

Look, our Middle East business was supposed to go public in January and the Saudi market went down 20% over like a two month period, and that was like a massive damper on the situation. Now part of that was because the oil prices had gone down so dramatically. And if you went into KSA, you went to the kingdom, everybody's like, 'We need oil prices to go up.' You know, that's the other side of the equation. So I don't know what happens. Look, I'm not in the market raising money right at this moment and this is a two-week old thing that I, you know, I see the news just like everybody else. And I'm not out there calling while a war is going on and saying, 'Hey guys, you got some money?' So I don't know exactly what's going to happen. But if you are an optimist and you're like, okay, this isn't going on forever. Just like the tariffs, it was the end of the world and then it wasn't very quickly. Yeah. If you're an optimist about this situation and it won't be the end of the world, maybe even a better world, then we get to a better place. And I think progress, abundance, the golden age happens, and a lot of it is about all the things that are happening in AI, in physical AI, and the productivity gains that are coming in very massive ways. Yeah.

J

Jason Calacanis32:00

Yeah. I mean it was shock and awe and then, hey, now we've got a steady state. And let's hope that's what happens in Iran, is that we can depose these evil dictators and replace it with something a little more stable. And related to this, before we wrap, they're going to China. There's big trade deal being negotiated. What do you hope comes out of this Chinese thing? And what did you learn in China?

T

Travis Kalanick32:22

Yeah. What would you learn and what do you think would be great for America? Like what would you like to see and be like, 'Man, that's going to set us all up.' No more

J

Jason Calacanis32:29

Look, here's the thing. If you go to China right now and you go and just take a tour of the manufacturing that's going on there, just the manufacturing base, the cities, especially if you've gone to China for a couple decades in a row, you're like, damn. Yeah. So let's just do two things. Go to Shenzhen, which before felt like Kansas City 50 years ago and really humid, which I guess Kansas City sometimes, but you go there now and it's like one-upping Singapore. So that's the city view. You're just experiencing something very awesome. You're like, this is advanced and you just get the vibe and it's everywhere. And then you go and you start seeing the manufacturing base and you see what Xiaomi is doing or any of the other, there's so many scrappy guys, badass guys everywhere and you're like, 'F***.' They're hungry.

T

Travis Kalanick33:29

So does anybody remember the 2008 Olympics in Beijing? Anybody? Does anybody, this is a little down a rabbit hole. Does anybody remember the opening ceremony? And you're like, 'These motherf***ers are taking over.' At least that's what they want to do. That s***'s happening. So I don't have any issue, this is not negativity for me. I'm like, these guys are killing it. The best idea is winning. They're fiercely going after truth and progress and they're making s*** happen. Let's step up our game. Okay. But we can also have a friendly game. Like we don't have to be like the Detroit Pistons in the 90s, you know?

J

Jason Calacanis34:10

Yes. We can, there's a way

T

Travis Kalanick34:11

Go into the stands.

J

Jason Calacanis34:13

Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's a way to do this, right? And there's a way to do it like adults. I hope that's where we end up. I have an employee who, because we for a long time were the largest build kitchen builders in China. I have an employee in China who has an American wife. Okay. They both live in China. They're both from China originally. Okay. But I want him to, it would be great for him to work here on some things I'm doing. It's very hard to make that happen right now. Now, that's selfish like, I'm like, there's a person I've been working with for over a decade, I'd love to continue here. Maybe there's other bigger picture items that I'm not dealing with. I'm not the geopolitical guy, but I'd love for there to be good relations. If you have a significant other who is an American citizen, do we have to make that hard, as an example?

T

Travis Kalanick35:18

Something normally would... you know, I'm just saying.

J

Jason Calacanis35:21

I agree. There are ways to do immigration properly. We effed it up super bad. Don't even get me started. But there's also good migration too. Like a lot of great innovators all over the place came from other places for their own version of the American dream. God bless Friedberg. And we don't have to, that doesn't have to be a negative thing. And so I'd like to see more of that. And yeah, China's wild. So let's keep our eye on the ball and let's give them a run for their money too.

Give it up for TK. All right. Well done, brother. Thanks, brother. That was good. Good to see you, brother. Wow. Michael Dell. My lord. Texas native.

M

Michael Dell36:10

Michael.

J

Jason Calacanis36:11

Yes. Born in Houston.

M

Michael Dell36:12

Well, I missed the opening. We jumped to the music, but you started Dell Computer here in Austin with a thousand bucks.

42 years ago in my dorm room at Dobie at UT.

About 10 days before I finished my freshman semester.

J

Jason Calacanis36:31

Amazing. And it's been working out pretty good.

M

Michael Dell36:37

Yeah, it's been some bumps in the road, but generally worked out okay. Yeah, we'll have about 140 billion in revenue this year. So,

J

Jason Calacanis36:47

Yeah, it's okay. It compounds over time, doesn't it?

M

Michael Dell36:50

Yeah.

J

Jason Calacanis36:51

Yeah.

M

Michael Dell36:51

You know, you start small and just keep adding and there you go. That's how it goes. It's just that easy. [laughter]

J

Jason Calacanis36:59

But why Texas? Like, I think this is an important thing. We're in Austin. Jason lives here. David Sax lives here now. More people are moving from California to Austin. Why Austin? Why Texas? Why does it work here? And is it getting better? Has it just always worked?

M

Michael Dell37:16

I think Texas has had a low tax, pro-growth environment for a long time and a pro-business climate. And if you look at the growth of the Texas economy relative to the rest of the United States without Texas, Texas just kind of looks like a better version of the US economy. And now you've got Austin is sort of just about in the top 10 cities in the United States. So when that happens, you'll have four of the 10 largest cities in America in Texas. One out of 10 children born in the United States are born in Texas. More New York Stock Exchange companies in Texas than in New York or anywhere else. And you've got the University of Texas here in Austin, which I always think of as kind of the wellspring for a lot of the companies that are here, certainly ours, and a long history of innovative pioneering spirit and entrepreneurship. And it's been a fantastic place for us.

J

Jason Calacanis38:42

And part of this I think, Freeberg and Michael, is what's happened in the other great cities or what were once great cities. My hometown New York, I got to spend 10 years in LA and the last 12 in the Bay Area, and what's happening there is incredibly un-American. And they're decelerating when compared, and I think maybe the gap and the disparity from these two locations has gotten greater. Yeah. And you're seeing a lot more people say life here in Austin seems a lot better than the life I'm living in New York, LA, or in the Bay Area.

M

Michael Dell39:21

Yeah. Well, I've got a lot of new friends and neighbors that have come. And certainly, if you look at the migration statistics, Texas has attracted an enormous number of people. And look, when you look at the environment here and compare it to the other situations that are going on, it's very attractive, but it's kind of been great for a long time. So it's not really new news to us that have been here a while.

J

Jason Calacanis39:56

Yeah. Elon had a great experience when he was building the Gigafactory over here. They let you do stuff here basically.

M

Michael Dell40:04

They let him build it.

J

Jason Calacanis40:06

Which he said was like an incredible experience for him because in California they didn't let him build these factories, and in fact the Tesla factory in Fremont was just an old ancient factory that he was able to retrofit. So there's something going on here as well with the data centers, and that's actually I think very close to what you're working on at Dell. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the data center boom that's going on in Texas that maybe people aren't paying attention to.

M

Michael Dell40:30

Sure. Well, there's obviously been enormous buildout of AI infrastructure, and that requires lots of new data centers, lots of power. Texas has an enormous advantage there relative to other states, a lot of power, a lot of land, and you can build stuff. So there's been a massive buildout particularly in some of the cities and towns in West Texas where there's not a lot of population, so they're not really too opposed to having data centers out in the middle of nowhere where there's land and power. So the demand for tokens is enormous. We've been building these AI data centers not just here in Texas, but around the world. And the growth in that has been tremendous. We introduced the first H100 server. It was literally a couple weeks before ChatGPT was announced. And the progression of our business in that area has gone from like 2 billion to 10 billion to 25 billion to this year it'll be like 50 billion. So tremendous growth. And when you think about what these models are creating, there's this phase change that's happened in computing. We had 60 years of calculating computing. Now we have machines that are thinking and helping us think. And so the demand for that kind of intelligence, the models are amazing but they're also the worst they'll ever be and they continue to improve. And so we just see a lot more demand than supply. And it's happening not just in the hyperscalers and the cloud service providers. It's happening in 4,000 enterprises where we're building these Dell AI factories. It's happening in sovereign AI, like with Palantir, and people want to protect their data but also use AI on it. They want to bring the AI to where their data is. And when this kind of started a few years ago, we had some really sophisticated large companies, think of like Fortune 100, and they started buying these AI servers from us and they kind of knew what they were doing. And we said, 'What are you doing?' And they were kind of building their own models, they were taking open-source models, they were running them. Some of them were algorithmic traders or derivatives of machine learning. And of course they needed a lot of help in doing that because it was sort of a complicated thing. So about two years ago, we put together this product that we called the Dell AI Factory, and now we've got 4,000 plus of these and it's kind of running rampant across enterprises.

J

Jason Calacanis43:49

How do you think about the payback time on the investment that's being made? The administration put in place this accelerated depreciation rule...

M

Michael Dell44:00

Yeah, that's very helpful actually. Yeah. So just for folks to understand that a little bit...

J

Jason Calacanis44:05

If you spend a hundred billion this year building data centers and buying infrastructure for those data centers, you get to write off 100% of that this year, correct?

M

Michael Dell44:15

To deduct it. So you don't pay taxes, you pay way fewer taxes.

J

Jason Calacanis44:18

And that's in place for 10 years, I think.

M

Michael Dell44:20

That's a 10-year deal. So it's accelerating the investment.

J

Jason Calacanis44:22

How much is that helping versus how are you seeing folks rationalize the investment relative to the return they're going to make and over what time scale? This is still the big question. Is the money really there? The hyperscalers maybe they're starting to come up, but end usage, end states, are we kind of wait and see? We don't know yet. Or folks are getting 20% ROIC starting in year one after they've made the investment.

M

Michael Dell44:50

You know, I can tell you in our business, in our company, we definitely see plenty of use cases where the ROI or the improvement in productivity efficiency is 20% or greater.

J

Jason Calacanis45:06

Right away. It gets there.

M

Michael Dell45:07

Yeah. I mean, it's not like you just hit a button and you get 20%. There's work required in thinking through the processes. And it's worth a little bit describing that. So when you have a company, its processes and tools and technology are a function of what was available at the time it created those things. And so what you have to do is step back and say, 'All right, what's the trajectory of the improvement of the tools? What outcome are we trying to create?' And now let's simplify and standardize the processes. Get all the tools together. Get all the data together. And then apply the technology. And this really has to be done in a top-down way. You can't do it spontaneously in silos. Silos are not going to spontaneously improve themselves. And often that means that you're completely changing the way the organization works.

J

Jason Calacanis46:10

It's like a wholesale rearchitecture.

M

Michael Dell46:12

It's a reimagining of the way a company works. And the way I described this to our team about three years ago is, we were going to have a new competitor five years from now that would be two years from now in every business that we're in, except they were going to be faster and more innovative and more successful and lower cost, and they were going to put us out of business. And the only way we were going to prevent that is we're going to become that company. And here's how we're going to do it. And it excited some people, it scared some people. But I actually believe that's what's going to happen. And so we've been dramatically changing our business. I would say the biggest benefit by far is speed. We're much faster at being able to apply innovations. And so, you look at our infrastructure business last quarter grew 73%. That's kind of unusual for a business of this size. And this quarter we guided that it would grow even faster, like 100%.

J

Jason Calacanis47:24

You've lived through a couple of paradigm shifts here. The PC revolution, obviously you led that. And then you of course had client server, the network revolution, online, internet, cloud, mobile.

M

Michael Dell47:38

Yeah. So each one of those we saw a massive disruption. We were talking in the green room about how we used to have a typing pool, there was a mail room. All these things got abstracted away by the PC and the PC revolution. But it took a decade or two, and this one's happening a lot faster.

J

Jason Calacanis47:56

Yeah. This one I think it's like a quarter is like a year, maybe it's five times faster or something like that. But back to your question, I would say maybe 10 or 15% of large companies have really figured this out and the rest of them are kind of fumbling around. And there's a tendency when you hear about a new technology to just go do it. You show the boss, 'Hey, we did AI.' The board said we got to do AI. We did AI. Are you proud of your boss? Look at what I made. Exactly. And I also think there's an important point about this, which is the barrier to technology adoption is not technology, it's culture and leadership and courage. Willingness to change. And if you're in a business that you don't think is changing very much, hard change is really hard. It can be very uncomfortable. You're like, 'Well, we're going to stop doing that. We don't need this anymore.' Particularly if your bonus is dependent on not messing things up. But let's use the internet as an analogy, which you saw up close. There were businesses that were internet transition successful. They made the transition. Maybe Macy's.com versus Sears Roebuck, right? Maybe Macy's did a better job of taking advantage of the internet than Sears.

M

Michael Dell49:32

But then there were internet native businesses that seemed to blow them all out, and maybe Amazon's a good example or CSN stores, whatever they be, Wayfair, etc. What's the right way to think about this evolution in industries generally? Are we going to have businesses that are going to transition successfully and those that aren't and they're going to die? And is this really going to see AI native businesses in every industry come in and just disrupt everything? I believe we will. And certainly, when you talk to the Collison brothers at Stripe, they'll tell you that the rate of growth of the 2025 cohort companies is about four times faster than the 2018 companies. And so every year the new batch of companies are growing faster and faster because they're starting with all these new tools.

J

Jason Calacanis50:24

Because they see all the new companies on their platform.

M

Michael Dell50:27

Exactly. And so when you think about an incumbent company that already exists, it has brands, balance sheets, customer relationships, whatever stuff. But those are expiring value assets. If it doesn't change quickly and get onto the other side of this, I think it will go out of business. And that's exactly the speech I gave to our team three years ago. And I think you have to be bold and go make those changes to not only survive this but to thrive. And I think about it as how do we prepare our company to be ready for the 2030s.

J

Jason Calacanis51:17

Right? Isn't it like there's more to do than there ever was? It's like when the internet came around, Sears doesn't just need to sell locally, they can sell to the world.

M

Michael Dell51:31

Well, sure. I mean, this is the point. When we have better tools, we can do way more things. And when I hear people say, 'Oh, maybe we're just going to have all these great tools and we won't do more things. We'll just do the same things with fewer people.' That doesn't sound right to me. There'll be some of that, but I think most of it will be we're just going to do a whole lot more things. We're going to solve a lot more problems. We're going to accelerate scientific discovery. We're going to invent all sorts of new things. We're going to solve all sorts of problems that haven't been solved.

J

Jason Calacanis52:11

And that's super exciting. What do we have wrong on infrastructure? So the original build cycle looked a lot like everything's in a data center. Everything's got to sit there. That's where all the intelligence, it'll all be in these kind of hosted proprietary cloud models. Do you think that it's open source? Is it distributed on the edge? Where does the intelligence, where does the inference happen? And how does that really change or rearchitect the industry?

M

Michael Dell52:39

It's really all of the above. It's not like there's one answer. Certainly if you go to any industrial company or natural resources company, advanced manufacturing, retail, logistics, there's tons of inference at the edge and that's growing very fast. And we make a lot of that embedded equipment. Certainly telcos are doing that too. It's pretty much every industry. Think about wherever data is being created, you want the AI infrastructure and the inference close to the data. There has been this rebalancing as companies have figured out, everybody loves the public cloud until they get the bill. They get the bill and they're like, 'Wait, this is supposed to save us money.' Costs quite a bit more. So the lowest cost token is going to be the one that's generated right where the data is on the device. You're going to have tokens being generated on your phone, on your PC, in every embedded piece of equipment. And look, we have an interesting perspective on this business because we have 10,000 customers where they embed our product in their product. This is medical devices, security, all sorts of things in hospitals and industrial plants. Any data-driven activity requires some kind of computing, network, storage infrastructure.

J

Jason Calacanis54:19

Yeah. So when you look at the desktop where you started, it's coming full circle and this must be very interesting or intriguing to you that you see this open claw movement. Everybody trying to buy the most powerful desktop they can and all these hobbyists who were your customers who were calling you up and ordering from Dell, their bespoke PC. Now they're...

M

Michael Dell54:43

Dell.com.

J

Jason Calacanis54:45

What did I say? Dell.com. Yeah.

M

Michael Dell54:47

He said ordering from Dell. Calling us up. They order online usually.

J

Jason Calacanis54:50

They order online now. Yes.

M

Michael Dell54:52

We have this thing called the internet.

J

Jason Calacanis54:53

They do. Yes. It works out pretty well. But this is incredible that they're all stacking computers and running local models. I was just thinking back to how much the first couple of computers I owned cost $4,000 in 1980. And then the prices came down. You can buy a Dell for 500 bucks, 800 bucks, really nice laptops for that price. Use the promo code All-In. It's not a sponsor, as a joke. But do you think there's a world where we're going to start to see the desktop because people want to protect that data? They want to protect the skills they're building. They don't want to give it to Sam Altman, put it in a cloud somewhere. They don't want to give it to Google, whoever it happens to be. And that the desktop revolution comes back and everybody's got a $10,000 desktop. Is that coming?

M

Michael Dell55:46

I don't know if everyone will have a $10,000 desktop, but that would be great. I mean, we have this Dell portal on Hugging Face and we have all these open models and we qualified them on every kind of machine we have. And there's been enormous progress in the open source models. Google has these Gemma models, and they work really well on small machines. OpenAI has their open source models. You've got the Nvidia NeMo models. You've got an enormous ecosystem of open source that is thriving. And certainly open claw, there'll be some good discussion about that.

J

Jason Calacanis56:35

How many people have set up OpenClaw? Raise your hand. Oh my lord. That's about 20% of the audience here.

M

Michael Dell56:42

Yeah. So autonomous agents, big deal. And certainly inside companies, there's going to be a lot more autonomous agents. There are significant security requirements that need to go with that. We need to be able to authenticate and validate who these agents are and what they're doing and have the right controls and that sort of thing.

J

Jason Calacanis57:05

Yeah. And your take on AGI and when we're going to hit it? Do you actually think about super intelligence and AGI and the two sets of problems that could solve? And do you have a personal definition that you like to use for those when you're talking internally with your team about how things are moving?

M

Michael Dell57:28

I don't really know, Jason. I think it feels like with the latest releases, we were talking about this backstage, the Gemini 3.1, the Opus 4.6, the OpenAI 5.4. It feels like we hit some kind of threshold where the quality of the models is just tremendous. And when I listen to what our teams are able to accomplish in a day or two weeks that would have taken them a few months or nine months, it's just amazing the speed of innovation.

J

Jason Calacanis58:09

Yeah. And so it seems to be continuing and we get all the reinforcement learning and there's also tons of private dark data that these models haven't been applied to, and that's sort of what's happening with these...

M

Michael Dell58:27

I think the auto research is the key. The capacity to take a standard model and then retrain it on your private data and keep it private and build an advantage for your organization based on the history of your data that no one else has. That seems to be what a lot of folks are thinking about that have the capacity. But if you were to start a company today that was not in computing and you were to build a business from the ground up, how would you architect your people and your organizational principles as an AI-first company, knowing what you know about computing and where things are headed? Are you hiring people? Are you hiring a bunch of people to run a bunch of agents? How do you think about architecting a new business today? It's a great question. I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about that. I'm thinking about how do I run our company? That's hard enough.

J

Jason Calacanis59:16

That's what the rest of us are thinking about.

M

Michael Dell59:17

How do I run our company? I mean, that's hard enough. So...

J

Jason Calacanis59:22

Yeah, everyone I talk to, that's the question. They go to these off sites and they're like, 'I'm actually doing this with my management team on Monday. We're doing a teardown. How would we build the business differently today?'

M

Michael Dell59:34

I mean, what we've been thinking a lot about is this reimagining question.

J

Jason Calacanis59:41

You know, sort of all right, we know the trajectory of the tools. What are the tools going to be in '27, '28, '29, and how do we accelerate our path to that? How worried are you about social issues? So AI recently ranked as the most unfavorable term of a list of terms including president.

M

Michael Dell1:00:06

It was somewhere between ISIS, the Democrats, ICE, ISIS and the Democrats.

J

Jason Calacanis1:00:11

ICE was better than AI.

M

Michael Dell1:00:13

People liked ICE more than they like AI.

J

Jason Calacanis1:00:16

More than they like AI.

M

Michael Dell1:00:17

Yeah. Well, I think part of the problem is it's been maybe sold as...

J

Jason Calacanis1:00:26

As it sort of presents itself like a human would.

M

Michael Dell1:00:30

Yeah.

J

Jason Calacanis1:00:30

Right. And maybe if we called it linear algebra...

M

Michael Dell1:00:35

Matrix multiplication.

J

Jason Calacanis1:00:37

Statistics instead. Maybe that would be more friendly. I don't know.

M

Michael Dell1:00:42

Yeah.

J

Jason Calacanis1:00:42

But do you think we're going to have...

M

Michael Dell1:00:44

No, I think you're right. The positioning is wrong. And we're not communicating to people, 'Hey, this could help, this could make you live longer, this could help your kids get educated more, this could help with housing costs, this could help with food cost.' Messaging aside, how much do you actually worry about disruption or dislocation in employment, about acceleration of earnings for some people and deceleration for other people in society that feel left behind? And that starts to fuel more social concerns and politicians saying, 'Hey, we got to stop building all the data centers.' How much are you really...

I tend to be more optimistic. I do think that in all technology cycles, you get these network effects, and that's kind of inevitable. But I also think we're going to do more with the tools. You do have this acceleration of all sorts of great things. Education can dramatically improve, scientific discovery, healthcare, energy, all the unsolved problems can be accelerated. But ultimately it's amplification of human potential and capability and extending the frontier.

J

Jason Calacanis1:02:07

Extending the frontier too.

M

Michael Dell1:02:09

And by the way, we should also remember that basically what we're talking about here beyond some of the advanced semiconductors in the big data centers, we're talking about software. It's software that runs on your computer. So if somebody says we don't want that, it's like, how do you stop software?

J

Jason Calacanis1:02:32

How are you going to stop someone putting an open source model on their computer at home and asking it for medical advice? New York just passed a law saying AI models can no longer give medical advice, right? It's being proposed.

M

Michael Dell1:02:44

Oh, proposed. Being proposed. You can't give legal and health advice.

J

Jason Calacanis1:02:47

We're anti-software.

M

Michael Dell1:02:49

Yeah. Well, we're also anti-books and advice. So if you were going to look it up in a book, but were you dropping into your Bernie Sanders right there?

J

Jason Calacanis1:02:56

That was my Bernie Sanders.

M

Michael Dell1:02:57

Michael D., the 1% of the 1% that you're enabling with your data centers.

J

Jason Calacanis1:03:03

Why are you doing this to the people of our great nation while you give your money to children in the Invest America accounts?

M

Michael Dell1:03:12

Yeah.

J

Jason Calacanis1:03:12

This is a good one you're doing.

M

Michael Dell1:03:14

Yeah. Can we talk about Invest America?

J

Jason Calacanis1:03:15

I think he might have even criticized that, but you know...

M

Michael Dell1:03:18

Well, that's the problem. The billionaires are giving our children money and they're not asking us permission, and then those kids are going to buy things that their parents never asked for. Well, they don't actually get the money till they're 18 years old. So that's that's...

J

Jason Calacanis1:03:34

But what gives you the right to give our children an education? What is this philanthropy?

M

Michael Dell1:03:39

It makes no sense.

J

Jason Calacanis1:03:41

No, I mean, honestly...

M

Michael Dell1:03:42

Well, I see my great friend Brad Gerstner here.

J

Jason Calacanis1:03:45

Brad's here.

M

Michael Dell1:03:47

There he is. Brad, come up for this little segment here. Sit for a second. Let's talk about America. We got five minutes left here.

J

Jason Calacanis1:03:53

So, you know, I heard about...

M

Michael Dell1:03:54

The fifth bestie. Give him a round. I know he's going to be here.

J

Jason Calacanis1:04:00

All right. How did this go down, Michael?

M

Michael Dell1:04:03

I heard about this idea in 2021 from Brad, and I thought, that's a great idea. That's an awesome idea. And I think there were some discussions with the prior administration, but they didn't do anything about that, unfortunately. And here we are, a miracle, the Invest America Act was passed. And now we have thousands of companies that are joining in and matching the government's contribution. And Susan and I made a big announcement giving $250 to 25 million children in zip codes where the median income is...

J

Jason Calacanis1:04:54

I mean, Michael, let's just pause for a second here. This is one of the greatest. What do you think, Bernie? Do you approve? I'm going to go with Jake on this one. I just want to pause on this because it is one of the greatest philanthropic gifts in the history of humanity. And people have just kind of glossed over it because there's a lot of big numbers in the world, but we're talking about you personally, you and Susan sat down and said, 'We're going to give a number.' And that number was 567 billion or this is...

M

Michael Dell1:05:27

It's $250 to 25 million children ages 2 to 10 in zip codes where the median income is $150,000 or less. It's $6.25 billion. I mean, and I just want to say something. We live at a time where...

J

Jason Calacanis1:05:48

But they have to sign up to clean the accounts. Yes.

M

Michael Dell1:05:51

They have accounts, but they have to sign up to clean the accounts.

J

Jason Calacanis1:05:54

You know, I think we're getting 100,000 plus kids now a day signing up.

M

Michael Dell1:05:59

Yeah.

J

Jason Calacanis1:05:59

First, thanks for having me up. I mean, what a national hero and national asset that my friend Michael Dell is. He understates this because I've been working on this for four years. We've been talking about it on the All-In Pod. We had a lot of momentum, but behind the scenes, Trump gets elected. And so it's April that we're in the middle of the tariff strife, April 25. We realize there's only going to be one piece of legislation that gets passed during Trump's first two years. It'll be the big beautiful bill, the reconciliation bill. And so I call up Michael and I said, 'Michael, we got to go. We've got five days. We have it drafted in the Senate. We have bipartisan support, but we have a window.' And I have to get in the Oval Office. We have to get in the Oval Office. And Michael said, 'You know what? What should the text say?' And you and I had a conversation.

M

Michael Dell1:07:02

You know, the text to DJT.

J

Jason Calacanis1:07:04

Yes. I'm not talking out of school. Listen, Biden, wherever you sit on the political divide, I will say I've said this, Trump seeks out ideas from business leaders and he has deep respect for business leaders like Michael Dell. Like you, wherever your politics are, that's just the truth. And the last administration didn't, and it may have done the same thing...

M

Michael Dell1:07:26

And this, I just have to say this, Invest America is not a red idea or a blue idea. It's a red, white, and blue idea.

J

Jason Calacanis1:07:35

And to the prior conversation, when Michael and I first talked about it, it was this is the right thing to do. We have to reconnect the 70% of people who feel left out and left behind to the American dream. But this isn't our self-interest, this is about defending the ownership society and capitalism that for 250 years created the greatest experiment in the history of the world. But that's at risk. Less than half of people under the age of 40 have a favorable view of capitalism. So when I talked to you about it the first time, Michael understood both sides of it. It's the right thing to do and it's the right thing for the country. So at any rate, Michael Dell, tremendous American. I have one just one punch up the name Invest America Trump accounts. What do you think? Were you considering this in the context of other philanthropy? How do you kind of put this together in the spectrum of how you think about giving back?

M

Michael Dell1:08:38

Yeah, great question. So we have a foundation that's very focused on children in urban poverty. That's basically the central focus of the foundation, although folks in central Texas would know that we do a few other things here in our local community. And when I heard about this idea, one of my thoughts was, wow, this is like a platform for directly giving to the people that we're targeting. And we actually thought about doing it just in Texas first, and things have gone pretty well with the company and all that. So we thought we'd just go bigger.

J

Jason Calacanis1:09:25

And what happens, Brad, if 10 more Michael Dells show up and there are dozens of...

M

Michael Dell1:09:33

There's not a lot of Michael Dells, let's be honest.

J

Jason Calacanis1:09:36

There are a number of folks who could make an equal size or even greater gift. There are people who, many hands make light work. There are a thousand people who can make a gift of significance. What if this actually becomes a movement and we...

M

Michael Dell1:09:51

I think it actually is becoming a movement instead of a moment. And we've got a lot of that queued up. Brad, why don't you...

J

Jason Calacanis1:10:00

Wait, have you called anybody? Michael, have you? Did you call any? Michael and I chair the Invest America Giving Committee and we're ambitious guys. So you're knocking on doors.

M

Michael Dell1:10:11

We've had a few conversations.

J

Jason Calacanis1:10:12

You're texting people.

M

Michael Dell1:10:13

Yeah. Yeah.

J

Jason Calacanis1:10:14

So there's a question earlier. First, it's really important to understand and for you guys to spread the word. Every child under the age of 18 is eligible to claim their account. Number one. Number two, you've heard this like, 'Oh, kids born between 25 and 28.' No, this is forever more. The legislation creates this account forever more. Every child born in America starting January 1st, 2027 will automatically get a Trump account right at birth stapled to their social security card. The $1,000 has to be reauthorized every four years. But the accounts don't. So every kid, this is Social Security 2.0. This is the biggest change to the social contract in America in 50 years. 3.7 million kids a year will get an account that can compound. It's a 401k from birth. And yes, we're going to have a lot of announcements, but it's not just billionaires. It's going to be companies that are donating stock on their IPOs into these accounts. It's going to be wealthy people. It's going to be states. It's going to be moms and dads. It's going to be corporations. And the estimate is over 15 years, we can move $5 trillion into the pockets of families that would have otherwise had zero. $5 trillion, right? And so to me, the leadership that Michael showed, not only in helping me get the meeting that ultimately got this passed into law. And it does take people like that. Those moments either happen or they don't happen. And if they don't happen, there's no law. And this doesn't change kids' lives.

M

Michael Dell1:11:56

By the way, two things on this.

J

Jason Calacanis1:11:58

If this $5 trillion moved through government programs, it would get incinerated.

M

Michael Dell1:12:03

Exactly.

J

Jason Calacanis1:12:04

That's what we see happen. There's a million crony structures that take it away and destroy it. So to give it directly into the accounts is the circumstance. The second thing is it makes a lot of sense that you guys can... I'll be the lead, but can we replace Social Security in this country with a defined benefit or defined contribution like this and eventually everyone has a Trump account or whatever you call it and we don't have to have this fake Ponzi scheme that we call it. We can do it. Well, they have a defined benefit program, but I'm saying like everyone has an account and they all own a piece of their future. And every time you get a payroll tax deduction, instead of it getting incinerated and destroyed and vaporized, that money actually goes into an account and you buy a piece of a company and maybe you can direct it.

M

Michael Dell1:12:50

Freeberg's getting...

J

Jason Calacanis1:12:51

On July 4th of this year. You're getting me wound up. So for all the, there are $4.5 million kids who've claimed their account, almost $150,000 a day will have, on the trajectory we're on, 10 million by July 4th or the 250th anniversary of the country. Every one of those kids' accounts, the parents and the kids on July 4th, they'll see an app on their phone that looks a lot like a Robinhood app that'll see them owning. It'll say you've received your $1,000 or your $250 and it will show a little bit of Nvidia, a little bit of Walmart, a little bit of Dell. We decompose the S&P 500 which they own into the constituent parts so they can get excited about being an owner in the upside of America. And when moms and dads double-click and Apple Pay $5 or $10 into the account, when they send their QR codes to their friends on their birthday and now their friends all add to the account or on Christmas or bar mitzvah and they add to the accounts, when companies add to the accounts, all of this they see it growing and it unlocks the human potential. It's not just the money, it's that I'm in the game, I have a shot. Which to David's point, I think the biggest crime of Social Security, and we made very clear Social Security is a sacred promise. We refused, and many people tried to get us to take on the broader struggle, and we didn't do it because we knew it would kill this program. But let's be clear about this. Our government requires all of us to give 10% of what we earn into Social Security. It was the social contract evolution in the industrial revolution that kept the country together. The only problem is it goes into a black hole. Nobody sees it. Nobody knows what's there. But it is your savings. Now imagine if that same money was required to, government took it away, but it was in an account with your name on it. You could see it grow. You knew exactly what was there. You could get excited and say, 'Hey, I'm going to add a little bit more to that.' And you had a little bit of choice. That to me is the possibility. And I think we will end up there.

M

Michael Dell1:14:58

And Brad, thank you for...

J

Jason Calacanis1:15:05

Yeah. I was just going to say, Brad also adopted his home state of Indiana. We have Ray and Barbara Dalio adopted their home state of Connecticut. And many, many more to come. And look, it's going to be super easy for anybody to add a hundred kids in your neighborhood, adopt a zip code, adopt a school district, adopt a town. It's going to be amazing. Give it up for one of the great entrepreneurs of our time and an incredible... I'm going all in.

Travis Kalanick & Michael Dell Live from Austin, Texas

About Michael Dell