Travis Kalanick & Michael Dell Live from Austin, Texas

Summary

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All-In Podcast Live from Austin: "Travis Kalanick & Michael Dell"

Date: March 17, 2026
Featuring: Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, David Friedberg
Special Guests: Travis Kalanick (ex-Uber, founder of Adams), Michael Dell (Dell Technologies), Brad Gerstner (Invest America)

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Episode Overview

Broadcasting live from Austin, Texas, this episode brings together industry icons Travis Kalanick and Michael Dell for wide-ranging, energetic, and often humorous conversations with the All-In squad. The show dives deep into stealth entrepreneurship, automation, AI, Texas’ economic ascendancy, decaying coastal cities, and a transformative new “Invest America” initiative. The guests offer candid insights on building world-changing businesses and tackling big societal challenges.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Travis Kalanick: From Stealth to “Adams”

• Coming Out of Stealth

  • Travis recounts building his company in secret over seven years, operating under intentionally generic names across 30 countries (Cloud Kitchens, City Storage Systems, Kitchen Valley, etc.).

    "Thousands of employees that weren't allowed to put the company name on LinkedIn. Their parents thought they worked for the CIA."
    — Travis Kalanick [01:03]

• The “Atoms-Based Computer” Vision

  • Kalanick pitches his new company Adams as focused on automating the physical world, drawing a parallel between bits in computing (CPU, storage, network) and the manipulation of physical “atoms” (manufacturing, real estate, logistics).

    "When you're digitizing the physical world, you're building an atoms-based computer. Our first computer being a food computer… infrastructure for better food."
    — Travis Kalanick [03:16]

• Business Expansion

  • Adams not just about food—expanding into physical mining ("automation of mines, more productive mines to power Earth's industries") and robotic wheelbase systems.
  • Acquisition of Pronto, a SF-based autonomous mining equipment firm, is close to completion.

• Comparing Physical AI Players

  • Kalanick sees Tesla as the "Google of this era" for physical AI, pushes back on the idea of one winner, but suggests a Cambrian explosion of approaches.

    "In this world, you can't do this on a restaurant. The infrastructure...is just not there."
    — Travis Kalanick [05:16] "Tesla's got this. They are the Google of this era..."
    — Travis Kalanick [09:54]

• Self-Driving Landscape

  • Praises Waymo for progress but questions their scale and urgency; sees Tesla as taking the “hard mode” approach with vision-focused AI but uncertain on the timeline for a ChatGPT-like leap in physical perception.

    "More noise, more bark than bite right now...when does the ChatGPT moment happen for vision?"
    — Travis Kalanick [11:31]

• Physical AI Stack & Language/Compression

  • Language as an “epic compression” for human cognition, but robots/AI still lack comparable efficiency—argues for honing which data matters at the edge.

    "There are still things humans are great at…language is this epic compression..."
    — Travis Kalanick [14:39]

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2. Migration, Tech Exodus, and the State of California

• Why Move to Austin?

  • Kalanick's shift to Austin/Texas (“I go there...15 weekends a year...I'm an avid water skier” [16:38]) motivated by feelings of alienation from an increasingly “weird” California lacking truth and justice.

    "It's just a place you grew up...you know when you have to leave. But it's getting weird out there."
    — Travis Kalanick [17:25]

• California’s Decline

  • All-In hosts and guests grieve for the state, pointing to failed policies, infrastructure decay (“bike lanes...cost $400 million, one mile”), and political failures.

    "It's sort of like this subconscious desire to choke the city off."
    — Travis Kalanick [20:44]

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3. Texas’ Growth Model: Michael Dell’s Perspective

• Texas as a Magnet for Business

  • Dell highlights Texas’ long-term pro-growth policy, low taxes, and accommodating business climate.

    “Texas has had a low tax, pro-growth environment for a long time...now you’ve got four of the ten largest cities in America in Texas.”
    — Michael Dell [37:16]

• Austin’s Boom

  • Not just big tech—“one out of ten children born in the U.S. born in Texas”; more NYSE companies than New York.
  • An influx of “new friends and neighbors” from places like NY, LA, Bay Area, drawn by these advantages.

• Culture of Building

  • Emphasis on the permissionless ability to try and build (“they let you do stuff here”) [40:01], cited as a core reason innovators like Elon Musk and Kalanick relocated.

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4. AI, Data Centers & Changing Business Models

• Exploding Compute Demand

  • Dell describes a massive, global buildout of AI data centers—Texas as an epicenter, with ample power, land, and favorable regulation.

    “We introduced the first H100 server...before ChatGPT was announced...from $2B to $50B in this segment.”
    — Michael Dell [41:40]

• Enterprise Productivity Gains

  • Companies are starting top-down “reimagination” of processes for the AI era; Michael Dell estimates at least 10–15% of large companies are executing successfully.

    “The biggest benefit by far is speed...We’re much faster at being able to apply innovations.”
    — Michael Dell [46:13]

• AI Native vs. Legacy Businesses

  • Prediction: every industry will see “AI native” disruptors outpace sluggish incumbents, much like Amazon vs. the retail legacy giants in earlier tech waves.

    “I think most of it will be...we’re just going to do a whole lot more things...That’s super exciting.”
    — Michael Dell [51:38]

• Future of AI Infrastructure

  • Intelligence will be everywhere: cloud, edge, devices. Open source and local models (Gemma, Nemotron, “Openclaw” experiments) are booming, with hobbyists even stacking powerful desktops at home.

    “The lowest cost token is going to be the one generated right where the data is.”
    — Michael Dell [53:35]

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5. Social Impact: Invest America (“Trump Accounts”)

• Historic Initiative

  • Detailed discussion between Michael Dell and Brad Gerstner on "Invest America"—accounts seeded at birth for every U.S. child starting in 2027, inspired by U.K. child trust funds.
  • Dell and his wife donate $6.25B ($250 to 25M low/mid income kids) in a landmark philanthropic act.

    “One of the greatest philanthropic gifts in the history of humanity.”
    — Jason Calacanis [65:01]

• Bipartisan Support and Social Reform

  • The initiative, championed across political spectrums, aims to connect the “disconnected 70%” with tangible ownership in America’s future and corporate prosperity.

    “Less than half under 40 have a favorable view of capitalism...this is about defending the ownership society...”
    — Brad Gerstner [67:41]

• Transformative Vision

  • Over 4.5 million kids have signed up. The goal: $5 trillion redirected from government inefficiency into direct, compounding ownership for millions, with hopes to eventually reform Social Security altogether.

    "If this $5 trillion moved through government programs, it would get incinerated...to give it directly into the accounts is the circumstance."
    — David Sacks [72:03]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Company Stealth:
  “The employees are not allowed to put the name of the company on their LinkedIn...”
  — Jason Calacanis [00:46]
• On Tech Migration:
  “I still get the, you know, the butterflies...but you look at all these bike lanes and bus lanes that never have a bus or a bike in them and cost $400 million, and you're like, one mile.”
  — Travis Kalanick [20:30]
• On Texas:
  “They let you do stuff here.”
  — Michael Dell [40:01]
• On Social Security Reform:
  “The only problem is it [Social Security contributions] 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 in an account with your name on it…”
  — Brad Gerstner [74:20]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Travis Kalanick’s Stealth Era & Adams Reveal: [00:23] – [07:30]
• Automation, Mining, and AI Stack: [07:30] – [16:00]
• California Decline & Move to Texas: [16:18] – [21:30]
• Physical AI, Hardware, and Capital as a Weapon: [25:54] – [30:13]
• China, Trade, and Global Manufacturing: [32:21] – [35:56]
• Michael Dell Joins – Texas Economic Model: [36:08] – [40:31]
• AI Data Centers and Enterprise Transformation: [40:31] – [48:49]
• AI Native Disruption and Open Source Models: [48:49] – [56:42]
• AGI Outlook & Societal Concerns: [57:05] – [62:33]
• Invest America Deep Dive: [63:15] – [75:28]

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Tone & Style

The episode is energetic, improvisational, and at times irreverent—full of inside jokes (“Darth Friedberg”), playful banter (impersonations, especially Bernie Sanders), and frank, no-holds-barred observations about the state of tech, governance, and society.

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For Listeners

This episode is essential for an insider’s view of the leading edge of entrepreneurship, AI, and social reform. Whether you’re watching tech move to Texas, worried about the future of jobs, or intrigued by the potential of AI in the physical world, the perspectives here are both forward-looking and rooted in real operating experience.

[End of summary.]

Transcript

[Jason Calacanis]

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. Appreciate you. All right.

[Travis Kalanick]

Wow.

[Jason Calacanis]

On a big news day. Travis is here on a very big news day. You spent, wow, I guess like seven years just in the lab building last year. Every year I ask you, hey, you want to come to the summit? You want to say, nah, it's like, I'm going to just chill. I'm building next year. Hey, you know, just toys of building.

[Travis Kalanick]

You understand? I'm stealth.

[Jason Calacanis]

I 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.

[Travis Kalanick]

Thousands of employees that weren't allowed to put the company name on LinkedIn.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, incredible. And I'm like, okay.

[Travis Kalanick]

And their parents thought they worked for the CIA.

[David Sacks]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And then he's like, and by the way, Jake, Al, you can invest. You can't announce it and you have to sign an idiot. You can't mention you're an investor. It's like, okay, no problem. I'm just happy to be on the cap table.

[Travis Kalanick]

Is he like kind of like secret saying what he wasn't supposed to say?

[David Sacks]

Yeah. Right now he's all that just happened.

[Travis Kalanick]

Well, you know, you're out now. It. Let's go.

[Jason Calacanis]

You're out.

[David Sacks]

It's out. You're.

[Jason Calacanis]

You came out of stealth today.

[Travis Kalanick]

It's so funny.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's so great. You came out of stealth. Well, you talked a little bit. You came to all in summit last year.

[David Sacks]

Is that fair? You say you're coming out of stealth today. Is that right?

[Travis Kalanick]

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. Okay. Including recruiters. Like it was, they were, they were living life on hard mode.

[David Sacks]

It was kind of fun too, right?

[Travis Kalanick]

I mean, I mean, yeah, it was

[David Sacks]

like kind of cool.

[Travis Kalanick]

What is this? Why are there. Why is this massive density of stealth right. Startup people in Los Angeles? What is happening over there? Yeah, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Also technically, the name of the company in different countries was very generic names of companies.

[Travis Kalanick]

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 Namah

[David Sacks]

in

[Travis Kalanick]

Latin America, parts of Latin America, it's casinos, acueltas. I mean, you get the idea.

[Jason Calacanis]

You can't even remember all the names and all the code words. Think about it, think it through.

[Travis Kalanick]

But you have four in China. You know, it's like all over the place.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, but things have gone really well and you've been a little acquisitive. 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.

[Travis Kalanick]

Those who I mean 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 all on 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 to say. 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, 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 that 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. It wasn't that easy, but kind of that easy in this world. You can't do this on a restaurant. Restaurant doesn't have. When I left Uber, 13% of all San Francisco miles were Uber miles. You can't get. And that was 10, nine years ago. You can't get there on food. On 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 big ass warehouses with awesome logistics. You've got to do the same thing when food, when food goes to E commerce. That was a lot.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Travis Kalanick]

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 Adams and it's, let's say the mission is, is physical automation to transform industries and move the world. And so we have our food computer talked about then we do, we're doing mining.

[Jason Calacanis]

Mining as in mining minerals, data mining.

[Travis Kalanick]

We're talking about atoms, guys. Yeah, so. Well of course you do some mining data mining too. But the point is, is physical mining. So automation of mines and the mission there is more productive minds to power Earth's industries. It's got this industrial atoms vibe to it. Then on the transport side it's 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 gotta 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. It's where we're inches from closing is the way to put it.

[David Sacks]

What were they doing? What was their business?

[Travis Kalanick]

Pronto Automating mining equipment.

[David Sacks]

Where they based?

[Travis Kalanick]

They're based in San Francisco.

[David Sacks]

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 of startups that are trying to be really smart about selecting locations to get, get the targets out of the ground.

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah.

[David Sacks]

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, is distance squared. Right. So the energy cost is like, how deep are you going to the, to. To the second power? So it becomes, you know, geometrically more expensive to go deeper. But the deeper you go, you're the more you're able to kind of not worry about getting the right location. So does automation unlock that capacity?

[Travis Kalanick]

Automation definitely does. I mean, also, it's like, man, does boring company have some good stuff going. Like, I hope we're like, we're doing the mining thing and boring goes 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, there's, there's, you know, they have this, this thing is like rare earths. I don't know why they put plural rare Earths. Isn't it rare's Earth? I don't know. But the, but rare. Rare earth. Sorry, rare.

[David Sacks]

Rare earth.

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah, but it's not rare.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's uncommon mineral.

[Travis Kalanick]

It's not rare. It's what you have to do. The land is aggressive. And what's rare is the. Is, is where the, where are the places they'll let you do it that you can also sort of get people to. When you automate, you can go to a lot of places. Well, first is all the minds 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

You can send robots and have people monitoring them remotely.

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Travis Kalanick]

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 includes not just like, oh yeah, computation. And I've got to have physical AI models and I got to. 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 a stack. When you look at the stack, you're like, damn, Tesla's got this. They are, they are the Google of this era, which is 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. Why isn't Google going to kill you? Or why isn't Google just going to do it? They're not going to know that they killed you.

[Jason Calacanis]

And before that Microsoft.

[Travis Kalanick]

And before that was Microsoft late 90s. Uber had a time. 2010.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, what if Uber puts that in the app?

[Michael Dell]

Come on.

[Travis Kalanick]

It's like, dude, this is Uber. I'm like, yeah, but you know, I think in the physical AI space, that's a, 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

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 is making great progress. Tesla's making great.

[David Sacks]

Pick a winner. Like pick a winner between Tesla, Tesla, Waymo, Uber, or like Uber. Uber seems to be building a network of stuff.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, I mean like number of.

[David Sacks]

Pick a winner. The number of players in this space

[Jason Calacanis]

is crazy now, right?

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah, look, there's. I think 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, yes, come on, let's win, let's go. Yeah, you know, Uber had an autonomy project back in the day and they have a different strategy these days. I haven't been there for a while, so. But the, but the point is, is that you. So you got Waymo, then you've got tesl, Fundamentals, science, hard mode times a hundred. And the question is, do they get there in what timescale if, if they. And like, honestly, everybody's like, could happen tomorrow, could happen in five years. And I think that it's like, when does the chat. GPT moment happen? For Vision is basically the thing. Let's call it vision without other sensors. So super inspiring. But like, what's the timeline on it? Yeah, those are the base. This is basically the. And then there's a lot of other little guys that don't really have the stuff I believe yet. There's nobody standing out just yet of the others.

[David Sacks]

Do you think we're at a point now, like, 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 there still work? And is that like a Google OS or, like, where does that OS come from?

[Travis Kalanick]

Look, I think there's a. 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 use chat GPT 3.5 and you're like, holy.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, it's legit.

[Travis Kalanick]

Whoa. And then it went to four and you're like, okay, like, some stuff just changed. The world just changed. And I can sort of connect some dots and getting real, is it about to happen? Is it about to happen for physical AI? And that's what this is about.

[David Sacks]

Yeah.

[Travis Kalanick]

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.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Travis Kalanick]

It's like, oh, just like how we roll. Like, somebody does that. You're like. You're like, honey, that's like 200 meters away. We're going to be okay.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[David Sacks]

Jason and I don't call each other honey, but I got you. Yeah.

[Travis Kalanick]

Like, sweetie, you know?

[David Sacks]

Yeah. Okay.

[Travis Kalanick]

So anyways, that was odd, wasn't it? Okay, okay. I didn't mean it that way. I didn't mean it. Yeah, yeah, you know I meant it. Okay. Language is a beautiful compression mechanism that humans use a hundred watts of energy. Like, 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 100 times more energy to drive away than a human does to drive away. So. So language, we. There are still things that humans are great at and that unbeat, 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, like, when you think about how. How we first started looking at the physical world is we saw everything. And you know what, guys? And this is sort of obvious. Like, it doesn't matter what the cloud is doing if I'm driving, but, like, the car doesn't know that it's pulling in every fricking data point and processing everything. And it's. It's, you know, look, 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah, I was. I. Thank you.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's very exciting for me. We've been getting to play some basketball. Backgammon.

[Travis Kalanick]

Backgammon cards.

[Jason Calacanis]

We're having a good time.

[Travis Kalanick]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Travis Kalanick]

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

[David Sacks]

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

[Travis Kalanick]

It's pretty messed up. Look, I. 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. Like, my whole family, everything, you know, it's pretty. It's pretty. It's. I don't want to.

[David Sacks]

A lot of us feel that way.

[Travis Kalanick]

I don't want to get the violin out, but it just.

[Jason Calacanis]

But it's heartbreaking.

[Travis Kalanick]

The plate, you totally. It's just a place you grew up. It's your home. You know when you have to leave. But it's getting weird out there, and it feels like it's getting weirder. And at some point that's. It's just too weird.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's too weird.

[David Sacks]

Do you think everyone's going to leave? I mean, it started with Elon and it was like, yeah, he was. We don't want Elon here. And then he's like, message received. Cool, right? And then it kind of worked its way down the tech industry and in the kind of, you know, world of people building businesses and whatnot. And now it's kind of gotten so broad in terms of the Joe Rogan

[Jason Calacanis]

comedy music, New Yorkers, restaurateurs. I mean, this place is before.

[David Sacks]

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

[Travis Kalanick]

Look, my. The rest of my team's like, we're. When are we moving? You know, they're like, and how are

[David Sacks]

you dealing with that? So that was the question was like,

[Travis Kalanick]

gotta buy homes on the lake.

[David Sacks]

There are literally dozens of startup CEOs of, call it successful or growing companies that I talk to who are 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?

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah, I totally get it. It's a real thing. So, look, I think like most things, sort of 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 so that's kind of what. That's kind of the process, the almost like a morning process I went through. And that's just what it is.

[David Sacks]

And you're setting up a team here?

[Travis Kalanick]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Did you get that?

[Travis Kalanick]

It's the one. We are negotiating. No, it's all good. No, no, it's all good. We're negotiating right now. But I'm gonna jet ski to work.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, Literally last year, we're like 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? He's like, I looked at that. And I was like, that's a. That would be a nice one. But the truth is, you know, and 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 got this sense that we're building the future and it's just fun and world positive. And, you know, for me, I got to live. New York, Louisiana, San Francisco. I did three of the great cities in this country. This one feels the most. 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, you know, like, all these different industries and people pursuing stuff. I think this is the future.

[Travis Kalanick]

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, you know, the butterflies.

[David Sacks]

Just.

[Travis Kalanick]

I do, you know, but 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

[David Sacks]

bike in them and cost $400 million, and you're like, one mile.

[Travis Kalanick]

And it's literally. It's sort of like 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

They literally took Market street. And they're like, what would be the optimal way to this up and virtue signal at the same time? And they're like, yeah, buses. It's like, nobody's on the bus. Nobody takes the bus. It's a beautiful small town. San Francisco is Austin.

[Travis Kalanick]

That whole street is empty, painted red.

[David Sacks]

Okay, okay. So we all bitch and complain nonstop. When are you leaving? I'm number one. I get it.

[Jason Calacanis]

But Freebird, when are you leaving?

[David Sacks]

Okay, well, on the chat, you're the.

[Travis Kalanick]

The best, by the way.

[David Sacks]

I'm like, okay, so let me just.

[Jason Calacanis]

By the way, there's a couple glasses

[Travis Kalanick]

of wine in public facing Freedberg.

[David Sacks]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

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 are. They're destroying society. He is like Darth Friedberg in group chat. Am I lying? Am I lying?

[Travis Kalanick]

Is he the most correct? Especially after coming. Couple glasses of water.

[Brad Gerstner]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

When I start drinking, he takes pictures. He's like, fourth beverage. And we're like, oh, it's worth staying

[David Sacks]

up on the group chat.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[David Sacks]

And then I'm like, I'll go and attack this congressman on Twitter. Which I realize. The tweet. Yeah. Don't delete the tweet. Yeah, I delete the tweets. Okay. So there's a group of people trying to raise $500 million to create, like, a tech slash 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 Friggin 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 pack? Do you think that people can actually get their sh. T together? That even if 500 million came in, there's a way to kind of turn around the state, fix some of the policies? You think it's too late?

[Travis Kalanick]

I don't think that. Look, I would go, 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. It was that kind of vibe. It was just everybody was like that,

[David Sacks]

leave me alone, I want to make stuff.

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah, I just, I'm not. I don't do that. And that's. Obviously there's 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 your DAs who have decided we do not enforce crime at all anymore, that's like a sweet spot. Like, I believe that I sort of had this aphorism is truth and justice are the immune system for society. When. 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. Which means it's weird. I'm just talking about truth and justice.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, I mean, and you look at the homeless industrial complex. You look at Chesa Boudin, which the all in pod sax, myself and the pod, like we, we literally led the recall of him. And then you had the same thing going on in L. A where they were just like if somebody.

[Travis Kalanick]

Gascon.

[Jason Calacanis]

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.

[Travis Kalanick]

I mean, here you want to arrest the criminals.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah, look, I. 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 bloods or DNA. They want to protect people. They want the bad guys to be dealt with. And they. They almost have PTSD from

[David Sacks]

what it

[Travis Kalanick]

is like to want to serve and see bad things happening and not being allowed to stop it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. Nobody's got their back and they're not allowed to do their job.

[Travis Kalanick]

It's. It's crazy. And I. It's getting weird.

[David Sacks]

Okay. Hey, I want to just go back to AI.

[Travis Kalanick]

Sorry for the darkness.

[David Sacks]

I don't know. I think it's good.

[Travis Kalanick]

I was trying to induce. I'm trying to induce Dark Friedberg.

[David Sacks]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[David Sacks]

It was funny. I went on this podcast yesterday, and the guy. And the first. The guy was like. The first hour was middle of the road. I was talking about tech and science, and then like, politics came up. He's like, so socialism. And he said like, you lost it. And then you were like. He's like, the energy with 10x.

[Jason Calacanis]

Who is this?

[David Sacks]

Yeah, so it'll come out in a couple of weeks. But I was like, it got me going. Okay, I want to talk about physically, I. One more time.

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah.

[David Sacks]

So one of. Now that. 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. 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 add up or you compound all of the inefficiencies in the system, it's like 1200 watts to get the robot to walk four foot. Like. 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 Look, a lot

[Travis Kalanick]

with the questions you're asking are going down humanoid lane, which is like 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. Like, it's a very critical part of it. I mean, look at the. I like to look at the Achilles, the quote unquote Achilles tendon of any of these machines. And you're like, that's where the action is. This, this is a couple other places. Look, I'm in the non humanoid space. I mean, but mechanical engineers have been dealing with actuators and you know, all the sort of electromechanical sort of interactions that non make Machines do certain things. But like I'm in the food machine space, so I can tell you how to open a paper bag and put a, put a, a bowl in a paper bag without tearing the paper bag. But I am less into the I, I forget the name Perio. They're, they're the, the senses to understand awareness and touch. I'm not in that game. So when you're mining, you're like, you're not like, you know, you know, you're not threatening, you're not playing tennis. Certain things may be equivalent to tennis. So look, the bottom line is we're seeing, obviously 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 fricking fast. But, but any humanoid demo starts with dancing and martial arts.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Travis Kalanick]

And we're sort of down specialized robot lane, which is gainfully employed robots. Yeah. So I know I didn't totally answer the technology piece, but I just like.

[David Sacks]

Do you agree that there's probably like a big opportunity for venture money and research to go into material science? Exactly.

[Travis Kalanick]

For sure. Because if the physical AI, stack manipulation and all of the related things around it.

[David Sacks]

Yeah.

[Travis Kalanick]

Is massive.

[David Sacks]

And so if you get the software working, it's almost like the hardware has to catch up. And we got a lot of investigations.

[Jason Calacanis]

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, let's call it what it is. It's going to be 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 Sam Altman's like, that was smart. Let me try. And it's at a different scale now that you've come out of stealth.

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Now that you've got. And people are starting to understand, just starting today, how big your vision is. Capital as a weapon.

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is, I guess, in your plan. Yeah.

[Travis Kalanick]

Well, I mean, here's the thing, right. So 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. And what I mean by that is like in the Uber world early days, if you didn't have capital, didn't matter how good your app was because MAS is going to put a billion dollars into your competitor and you're going to lose 20% market share tomorrow. So, so a critical competency, in fact your world class competencies, one of them has to be raising capital and you do it better than everybody else and if you don't, you are going to lose.

[David Sacks]

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. And is that real? I mean do you think that's a real threat?

[Travis Kalanick]

So look, our Middle east business was supposed to go public in January and the Saudi market was, went down 20% over like a two month period. And that was like a massive damper on the situation. Now part is, 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, we need oil prices to go up. You know, that's the other side of the equation. So I don't know what ha. Look, I don't, I'm not in the market raising money right at this moment and this is a two week old thing that I, you know, look, I see the news just like everybody else and I'm not out there calling while it 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 is not going on forever, just like the tariffs, it was the end of the world and then it wasn't very quickly. 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, and, and just the productivity gains that are coming in very massive ways.

[Michael Dell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And I mean was shock, 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 replace it with

[David Sacks]

something a little more stable and related to this before we wrap, they're going to China. There's a big trade deal being negotiated with. What do you hope comes out of this Chinese thing?

[Jason Calacanis]

And what did you learn in China?

[David Sacks]

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.

[Travis Kalanick]

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, you. So let's just do two things. You go to Shenzhen, which before felt like Kansas City, but 50 years ago, and really humid, which I guess Kansas City sometimes. But you go there now and it's like one upping Singapore, right? Or so that's the city view. You're just experiencing a 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 like 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. So does anybody remember the 2008 Olympics in Beijing? Anybody? Does anybody. This is a little bit. You were down a rabbit hole. Does anybody remember the opening ceremony? And you're like, these mofos are taking over. At least that's what they want to do. That shit's happening. So I don't have any issue or. This is not negativity for me. I'm like, these guys are killing it. The best idea is winning. They're fiercely. They're fiercely going after truth and progress and they're making shit happen. Let's step up our game, okay? But we can also have a friendly game. Like, we don't have to like be like the Detroit pistons in the 90s, you know? Yes, we can.

[Jason Calacanis]

There's a way into the stands.

[Travis Kalanick]

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 would end up. I have a employee who. Because we, we, we for. For a long time, we're the largest built kitchen builders in China. I have an employee in China, has an American wife, okay? They both live in China. They're both from China originally, okay? But want to 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, like, maybe 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 them to be sort of good relations and good. Like. Like, if you have a significant other who is an American citizen, like, do we have to make that hard as

[Jason Calacanis]

an example, some normalcy would.

[Travis Kalanick]

Something. You know, I'm just saying. Now, I agree. Like, there are ways to do immigration properly. Like, we effed it up super bad. Don't even get me started. But there's also. There's 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 Freeberg. 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

Give it up for tk.

[Michael Dell]

All right.

[David Sacks]

Well done, brother.

[Travis Kalanick]

Thanks, bro. That's great.

[Jason Calacanis]

Good to see you, brother. Wow. Michael Dell. My Lord.

[David Sacks]

Texas native.

[Michael Dell]

Michael, born in Houston.

[David Sacks]

Well, I missed the opening. We jumped to the music. But you started Dell Computer here in Austin with a thousand bucks 42 years

[Michael Dell]

ago in my dorm room at Adobe at UT about 10 days before I finished my freshman semester.

[David Sacks]

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

[Michael Dell]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Michael Dell]

Yeah, yeah. You know, you start small and just keep adding and there you go.

[David Sacks]

That's how it goes.

[Michael Dell]

Yeah.

[David Sacks]

It's just that easy. But why Texas? Like, I think this is an important thing. We're in Austin. Jason lives here. David Sachs lives here. Now more people are moving from California to Austin. Why Austin? Why Texas? Why is it work here? And is it getting better? Is it just always worked?

[Michael Dell]

I think Texas has had a low tax, pro growth environment for a long time and pro sort of progressive 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 you've got. 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, born in Texas. More New York stock exchange companies in Texas than in New York or anywhere else. And, you know, 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, you know, long history of. Of innovative, pioneering spirit and entrepreneurship, and it's been a fantastic place for us.

[Jason Calacanis]

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, 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. I think maybe the gap, maybe in the disparity from these two locations has gotten greater. Yeah. And you're seeing a lot more people say life there, here in Austin seems a lot better than the life I'm living in New York, Louisiana, or in the Bay Area.

[Michael Dell]

Yeah, well, I've got a lot of new friends and neighbors that have come. And certainly, I mean, if you look at the. The migration statistics, Texas has attracted an enormous number of people. And look, I mean, when you look at the environment here and compare it to the other kind of 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 news to us that have been here a while.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, Elon had a great experience when he was building the gigafactory over here.

[Michael Dell]

They let you do stuff here.

[Travis Kalanick]

Basically.

[Jason Calacanis]

You know, they let him build it, which he said was like an incredible experience for him, because in California, they didn't let him build, you know, these factories, in fact, the Tesla factories, that 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. Sure.

[Michael Dell]

Well, there's obviously been enormous Build out 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 it's, and, and you can build stuff, right? So there's, there's been a massive build out, particularly in some of the cities in towns in West Texas where there's not a lot of population. And so they're not really too opposed to having data centers out in the middle of nowhere where there's land and power. And so, yeah, I mean, 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.

[Travis Kalanick]

And

[Michael Dell]

the progression of our business in that area sort of 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, right? 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 and 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've been 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 Fortune 100 and they started, you know, buying these AI servers from us. And, and they kind of knew what they were doing, right? You know, and, and we said, well, what, what are you doing? And they, they were, they were kind of taking and building their own models. They were taking open source models, they were running them. Some of them were, were algorithmic traders or, you know, 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.

[David Sacks]

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

[Michael Dell]

Yeah, that's very helpful actually, just for

[David Sacks]

folks to understand that a little bit. If you spend $100 billion this year building data centers and buying infrastructure for those data centers, you get to write off 100% of that this year.

[Michael Dell]

Correct.

[David Sacks]

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

[Michael Dell]

And that's in place for 10 years.

[David Sacks]

I think that's a 10 year deal. So it's accelerating the investment. 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, hey, wait and see, we don't know yet. Or folks are getting 20% ROIC starting in year one after they've made the investment.

[Michael Dell]

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.

[David Sacks]

Right away it gets there.

[Michael Dell]

I mean, you know, it's not like you just hit a button and you get 20%. Right. There's work required in thinking through the processes and it's worth a little bit describing that. So you know, when you have any 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 sort of have to do is step back and say, all right, what's the trajectory of these, 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 kind of a tops down way. You can't sort of do it. Spontaneous silos are not going to spontaneously improve themselves. And often that means that you're completely changing the way the organization works.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's like a wholesale rearchitecture.

[Michael Dell]

It's a reimagining of the way a company works. And I mean 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. That was in every business that we're in, except there 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 you know, it excited some people, it scared some people, but I actually believe that 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 know, you look at our, at our infrastructure business, last quarter grew 73%. Well, that's kind of unusual for a business of this size. And you know, this quarter we guided that it would grow even faster, like 100%.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Michael Dell]

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, when you hear about a new technology to like, oh, let's just, let's just go do it. You know, show the boss, hey, we did AI.

[David Sacks]

You know, the board said, we got to do AI. We got to do AI.

[Jason Calacanis]

We need an AI.

[Michael Dell]

Are you proud of me, boss? You know, yeah.

[David Sacks]

And look at what I made.

[Michael Dell]

Exactly. And I also think, you know, it's an important point about, about this, which is, you know, the barrier to technology adoption is, is not technology. It's culture and leadership and courage. Right.

[David Sacks]

And, and so willingness to change and to think.

[Travis Kalanick]

Yeah.

[Michael Dell]

And, you know, if you, if you're in a business that you don't think is changing very much or, you know, hard change is really hard. Right. You, you have to, it can be very uncomfortable. You're like, well, we're going to stop doing that. Well, we don't need this anymore.

[David Sacks]

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. But then there was Internet native businesses that seemed to blow them all out. And maybe Amazon's a good example or CSN stores, whatever they be, Wayfair, et cetera. 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. Are we going to see AI native businesses in every industry come in and just disrupt everything?

[Michael Dell]

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 that, you know.

[David Sacks]

Because they see all the new companies on their platform.

[Michael Dell]

Exactly. And so when you think about an incumbent company, okay, that already exists, it has, let's say it's got brands, it's got balance sheets, it's got, you know, customer relationships, whatever stuff. Right? Okay. But that's sort of like 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 which is exactly the speech I gave to our team, know, three, three years ago. And I think, you know, you have to be bold and you got to go make those changes to not only survive this, but to thrive. And you know, I think about it as how do we prepare our company to be ready for the2030s, right.

[David Sacks]

Isn't it like, it's much more. It's kind of the storyline. There's more to do than there ever was. It's like when the Internet kind of came around. Sears doesn't just need to sell locally, they can sell to the world.

[Michael Dell]

Well, sure, I mean, this is the point.

[David Sacks]

And the AI lets everyone know everything.

[Michael Dell]

When we have better tools, we can do way more things.

[David Sacks]

Right.

[Michael Dell]

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, it doesn't sound right to me. I mean, 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. And that's super exciting.

[David Sacks]

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 sit? And how does that really change or kind of rearchitect the industry?

[Michael Dell]

Do you think it's really all the above? I mean, it's not like there's one answer. I mean, 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, very fast. And you know, we make a lot of that embedded equipment. Certainly, you know, telcos are doing that too. I mean it's pretty much every, every industry think about wherever data is being created, you want the AI infrastructure and the inference, you know, close to the data. You know, there has been this sort of rebalancing as companies have figured out. You know, sort of everybody loves the public cloud, right? Until they get the bill, right? They get the bill. They're like, wait, this is supposed to save us money? Yes, costs quite a bit more. So, you know, 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 think medical devices, security, all sorts of things in hospitals and industrial plants. And any kind of data driven activity requires some kind of computing network, storage infrastructure.

[Jason Calacanis]

So when you look at the desktop where you started, it's coming full circle. And this must be at least very interesting or intriguing to you that you see this open claw movement, everybody trying to buy the most, 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 Dell.com? what did I say? Dell.com?

[Michael Dell]

yeah, you said ordering from Dell, calling us up. They order online usually.

[Jason Calacanis]

They order online now.

[Michael Dell]

Yes, they have this thing called the Internet.

[Jason Calacanis]

They do, yes. It works out pretty well. But this is incredible that they. 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 could buy a Dell for 500 bucks, 800 bucks, like really nice laptops for that price. Use the promo code all in. No, 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?

[Michael Dell]

I don't know if everyone will have $10,000 desktop, but that would be great. I mean, you know, you know, so 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, you know, there's been enormous progress in the open source models. You know, Google has these Gemma models, G E M M A, and they work really, really well on small machines. You know, OpenAI has their open source models. You've got the Nvidia Nemotron models. You've got, you know, enormous ecosystem of open source that is, you know, thriving and certainly open claw. And, you know, there'll be some good discussion about that.

[Jason Calacanis]

How many people have set up openclaw? Raise your hand. Oh, my Lord. That's about what, a 20% of the audience here?

[Michael Dell]

Yeah. So, you know, 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?

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Michael Dell]

I don't really know, Jason. I think it feels like with the latest releases. We were talking about this backstage, you know, the Gemini 3.1, the Opus 4.6, the OpenAI 5.4. It feels like we sort of hit some kind of threshold where just the quality of the market are 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 time, it's just amazing the speed of innovation. 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.

[David Sacks]

I think the auto research is the. That's the key with auto research. 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, kind of first, 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?

[Michael Dell]

It's a great question. I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about that. You know, I'm thinking about how do I.

[David Sacks]

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

[Michael Dell]

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

[David Sacks]

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

[Michael Dell]

What we've been thinking a lot about is it's sort of this, this reimagining question. Yeah, 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?

[David Sacks]

How worried are you about social issues? So AI recently ranked as the most unfavorable term of a list of terms including president.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[David Sacks]

ICE was better than AI. People liked ICE mass agents more than they like AI.

[Michael Dell]

Yeah, well, I think, I think part of the problem is it's been, it's been, you Know, maybe sold as, you know, it sort of presents itself like a human would.

[David Sacks]

Yeah.

[Michael Dell]

Right. And, you know, maybe if we called it linear algebra, matrix multiplication statistics instead.

[David Sacks]

Right.

[Michael Dell]

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

[David Sacks]

You know. Yeah, but do you think, you think we're going to have.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think you're right. The positioning is wrong and then we're not communicating to people. Hey, this could help health care, this could make you live longer. This could help your kids get educated more that this could help with housing costs, this could help with food.

[David Sacks]

Cost messaging aside, I mean, how much do you actually worry about disruption or dislocation and 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 of the kind of social concerns and politicians saying, hey, we got to stop building all the data centers, you know, like that kind of stuff. And how much are you really?

[Michael Dell]

I tend to be, you know, more optimistic. And, you know, I do think that in all technology cycles you get sort of these network effects and that's kind of inevitable. But I also think, you know, 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, you know, all sort of the unsolved problems can be accelerated. And ultimately, I think it's amplification of human potential and capability and extending the frontier too. And by the way, we should also remember that basically what we're talking about here, beyond sort of some of the advanced semiconductors in the big data centers, we're talking about software, right? Yeah, right. It's like software that runs on your computer. So, you know, if somebody says, well, we don't, we don't want that, it's like, how do you stop total software?

[David Sacks]

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

[Brad Gerstner]

Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's being proposed.

[David Sacks]

Oh, proposed, yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

You can't give legal and health advice.

[Michael Dell]

We're anti software.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's like, well, 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?

[David Sacks]

That was my Bernie Sanders.

[Jason Calacanis]

Michael Dallas, 1% of the 1% that you're enabling with your data centers? Why are you doing this to the people of our great nation while you give your money to children in their Invest America accounts? Yeah, this is a good One you're doing.

[David Sacks]

Yeah. Can we talk about Invest America?

[Michael Dell]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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.

[Brad Gerstner]

Well, they.

[Michael Dell]

They don't. They don't actually get the money till they're 18 years old. So that's. That's.

[Jason Calacanis]

But what gives you the right to give our children an education? What is this, philanthropy? It makes no sense. No, I mean, honestly.

[Michael Dell]

Well, I see. I see my great friend Brad Gerstner here.

[Jason Calacanis]

Brad's here.

[Michael Dell]

There he is.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Michael Dell]

So, you know, I heard about everybody,

[Jason Calacanis]

the fifth bestie, give him a round. I know he's gonna be here.

[Travis Kalanick]

All right.

[Jason Calacanis]

How did this go down, Michael?

[Michael Dell]

I heard about this idea in 2021 from Brad, and I thought, you know, that's a.

[David Sacks]

That's.

[Michael Dell]

That's just a great idea. That's an awesome idea. And, you know, I think there were some discussions with the prior administration, but they didn't do. Do anything about that, unfortunately. And, you know, here we are, you know, a miracle. You know, the. The. The Best America act was. Was passed. And, you know, 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, Michael, let's pause for a second here. This is one of the greatest.

[Michael Dell]

What do you think, Bernie? Do you approve?

[Jason Calacanis]

I could go with Jake Allen this way. 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 to 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 5, 6, $7 billion.

[Michael Dell]

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.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, and I just want to say something. You know, we live at a time where.

[Michael Dell]

But they have to sign up to claim the accounts. Yes, they have accounts, but they have to sign up to claim the accounts. You know, I think we're getting 100,000 plus kids nowadays signing up.

[Brad Gerstner]

Yeah, first, thanks for having me up.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Brad Gerstner]

I mean, what a national hero and national asset that my friend Michael Dell is. But he understates this because I've been working on this for four years. We had 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. And April 25, we realized there's only going to be one piece of legislation that gets passed during Trump's first two years. It'll be the, you know, this 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 the, it's drafted in the Senate. We have bipartisan support, but we have a window. And like we, I have to get in the Oval Office. We have to get in the Oval Office. And you know, Michael said, you know, what, what should the text say? And you and I had a conversation. And you, you know the text to djt. 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 know, wherever your politics are, that's just the truth. And the last administration didn't. And you know, if it may have done the same thing and this, and

[Michael Dell]

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

[Travis Kalanick]

Right?

[Brad Gerstner]

So into the prior conversation, when Michael and I first talked about it,

[David Sacks]

you

[Brad Gerstner]

know, it was, this is the right thing to do.

[Travis Kalanick]

Right.

[Brad Gerstner]

Like, we have to reconnect the 70% of people who feel left out and left behind to the American dream.

[David Sacks]

Right.

[Brad Gerstner]

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, it's the right thing to do and it's the right thing for the country. And so at any rate, Michael Dell, tremendous American.

[Jason Calacanis]

I have just one, one punch up the name Invest America, Trump accounts. What do you think?

[David Sacks]

Were you considering this in the context of other philanthropy? I mean, how do you how do you kind of put this together in the spectrum of how you think about giving back?

[Michael Dell]

Yeah, great question. So, you know, 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, you know, 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

Right.

[Michael Dell]

And, you know, we actually thought about doing it just in Texas first. And, you know, things have gone pretty well with the company and all that. So, you know, we thought we just go bigger.

[Jason Calacanis]

And what happens, Brad, if, you know, 10 more Michael Dells show up? And there are dozens.

[David Sacks]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

But there is a number of folks who could make an equal size or even greater gift. There are people who. Many hands makes for light work. There are a thousand people who can make a gift of significance. What if this actually becomes a movement and we change the.

[Michael Dell]

And I think it actually is becoming a movement instead of a moment. And, and, and we've, you know, we've got a lot of that queued up. Brad, I want to show you.

[Jason Calacanis]

Wait, have you called anybody? Michael, have you.

[Brad Gerstner]

Did you call Michael And I chair the Invest America giving committee, and we're ambitious guys.

[Jason Calacanis]

So you're knocking on doors.

[Michael Dell]

We've had a few conversations.

[Jason Calacanis]

Texting people.

[David Sacks]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

So just.

[Brad Gerstner]

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. 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 forevermore. The legislation creates this account forevermore. Every child born in America starting January 1, 2027, will automatically get an event. Will get a trump account right at birth stapled to their Social Security card. The thousand dollars has to be reauthorized every four years. Okay, 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 $05 trillion.

[Travis Kalanick]

Right.

[Brad Gerstner]

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 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.

[David Sacks]

By the way, two things on this. If this $5 trillion moved through government programs, it would get incinerated.

[Brad Gerstner]

Exactly.

[David Sacks]

That's what we see happen. There's just a million crony structures that take it away and destroy it. So to get 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 Social Security. We can do it.

[Jason Calacanis]

We can do it.

[David Sacks]

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 to tax deduction instead of it getting eviscerated 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.

[Brad Gerstner]

Freeburg's getting on July 4th of this year.

[David Sacks]

You're getting me wound up.

[Brad Gerstner]

So for all the there are four and a half million kids who've claimed their account. Almost $150,000 a day. We'll have on the trajectory we're on 10 million by July 4th, our 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. It'll see them owning. It'll say you've received your thousand dollars 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, 10 bucks into the account, right? 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 mitzvahs 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, we refused and many people tried to get us to, to, to take on the broader struggle. And we didn't do it because we knew it would kill this program. But, but let's be clear about this. Our government requires all of us to give 10% of what we earn into Social Security. Right? It was the social contract evolution in the industrial revolution that kept, 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, you know, 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. Right. And you had a little bit of choice. That to me is, is the possibility and I think we will end up there.

[Michael Dell]

And Brad, thank you for.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, let's give Brad Gerson.

[David Sacks]

And

[Jason Calacanis]

finally, yeah, I'm just going to

[Michael Dell]

say, you know, Brad, 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 100 kids in your neighborhood. Adopt a zip code, adopt a school district, adopt a town.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's going to be amazing. Give it up for one of the great entrepreneurs of our time and an incredible flag.