Two Legendary Founders: Travis Kalanick & Michael Dell Live from Austin, Texas

Summary

Recorded live at Arena Hall in Austin, Texas during SXSW, this episode features back-to-back interviews with Travis Kalanick and Michael Dell. Kalanick officially exits stealth mode, revealing that his company — formerly known as City Storage Systems and now rebranded as “Atoms” — has been building physical-world automation infrastructure with thousands of employees who were forbidden from putting the company name on LinkedIn for seven years. Kalanick describes a vision of “digitizing the physical world” by treating manufacturing, real estate, and logistics as components of an “atoms-based computer,” with current operations spanning digital kitchens, mining automation, and food machine robotics.

Michael Dell joins to discuss the transformation of computing from 60 years of “calculating” to machines that now “think,” and how Dell Technologies’ $50 billion AI infrastructure bet is positioned to capture the enterprise inference wave. Dell argues that 80% of corporate data has never been used for AI and that the biggest opportunity is running inference at the edge where data is created. He emphasizes that successful AI adoption requires top-down organizational reimagination rather than superficial chatbot deployments, and that the primary barriers are culture and leadership rather than technology.

The episode also features the announcement of Michael Dell’s $6.25 billion “Invest America” contribution — a program creating investment accounts for 25 million American children at birth. Dell and Kalanick discuss the declining American dream and how giving every child an ownership stake in the economy could reconnect the 70% of people who feel left out. The live audience segment touches on the California-to-Texas migration, self-driving timelines, robot hands and actuator challenges, and how sovereign wealth funds impacted by the Iran war are reshaping capital flows to the Middle East.

Highlights

”Their Parents Thought They Worked for the CIA”

“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, 0:51

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”If You Go to China Right Now…”

“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, dude, where am I?” — Travis Kalanick, 32:27

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”60 Years of Calculating, Now Machines Are Thinking”

“We had about 60 years of calculating and now we have thinking. And that’s a pretty big change.” — Michael Dell, 47:24

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”Michael Dell’s $6.25 Billion Gift”

“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.” — Travis Kalanick, 63:50

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”Capital as a Weapon” and Middle East Sovereign Wealth

“Capital as a weapon. Middle East sovereign wealth funds impacted by the Iran War are reshaping global capital flows.” — Discussion, 25:51

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Key Points

• Atoms Exits Stealth (0:51) - Travis Kalanick’s company (formerly City Storage Systems) rebrands as “Atoms” after seven years in stealth with thousands of secret employees
• Digitizing the Physical World (5:52) - Kalanick describes treating physical resources like manufacturing, real estate, and logistics as components of an “atoms-based computer”
• Self-Driving: Tesla, Waymo, and the Race (11:00) - Discussion of autonomous vehicle competition and timelines
• California to Austin Migration (16:17) - Kalanick left LA for Austin, citing the decline of truth and justice in California
• Robot Hands and Actuators (25:51) - Kalanick discusses challenges in the non-humanoid robotics space; actuators as key constraint
• China Manufacturing Dominance (32:27) - China’s rare earth, motors, and manufacturing base is far ahead; implications for robotics supply chain
• Dell: Dorm Room to $140B Revenue (36:00) - Michael Dell tells the story of building Dell Technologies and why Texas attracts founders
• $50B AI Infrastructure Bet (43:46) - Dell Technologies’ massive investment in AI infrastructure for enterprise inference
• 80% of Corporate Data Untouched (43:46) - Most enterprise data has never been used for AI; biggest opportunity is inference at the edge
• Culture Is the Barrier, Not Technology (48:59) - Successful AI adoption requires top-down organizational reimagination, not superficial chatbot deployments
• Keep Data Private, Build Advantage (58:21) - Enterprise strategy is to keep proprietary data private and build competitive advantage from unique datasets
• Invest America: $6.25B Gift (63:50) - Michael Dell’s $6.25 billion contribution to create investment accounts for 25 million American children at birth
• Reconnecting the 70% (63:50) - Kalanick and Dell discuss how 70% of Americans feel left out of the American dream
• Pro-Growth Texas Environment (38:42) - Austin’s rapid physical development contrasted with over-regulation in coastal cities

Mentions

Companies

• Atoms (0:51) - Travis Kalanick’s newly unveiled company, formerly City Storage Systems
• Dell Technologies (36:00) - $140B annual revenue, making a $50B AI infrastructure bet
• Tesla (11:00) - Self-driving competitor discussed in autonomous vehicle segment
• Waymo (11:00) - Self-driving competitor
• Boring Company (8:08) - Referenced by Kalanick in context of mining automation
• Invest America (63:50) - Child investment account program, Dell contributing $6.25B
• EY (0:00) - Event co-sponsor
• Forge Global (0:00) - Event partner for private company liquidity

Products & Technologies

• Shopify/Etsy (54:05) - Referenced as platforms anyone could use with personal robots

People

• Travis Kalanick (0:00) - Uber co-founder, now CEO of Atoms, interview subject
• Michael Dell (36:00) - Dell Technologies founder and CEO, $6.25B Invest America contributor
• Jason Calacanis (0:00) - Angel investor in Uber, primary interviewer
• Elon Musk (11:00) - Referenced for Tesla self-driving and Boring Company

Surprising Quotes

“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, 0:51

“Their parents thought they worked for the CIA.” — Travis Kalanick, 1:03

“We had about 60 years of calculating and now we have thinking. And that’s a pretty big change.” — Michael Dell, 47:24

“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.” — Travis Kalanick, 63:50

“If you go to China right now and you go and just take a tour of the manufacturing that’s going on there… you’re like, dude, where am I?” — Travis Kalanick, 32:27

Transcript

Jason Calacanis: 0:00 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? 1, 2, 3? Thank you. Give it up, Travis Kalanick.

Travis Kalanick: 0:23 Appreciate you. All right. Wow.

Jason Calacanis: 0:26 Uh, on a big news day. Travis is here on a very big news day. You spent, uh, 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 All-In Summit? You want to…’ you said ‘Nah, it’s like, I’m going to just chill, I’m building.’ Next year, ‘Hey, you know, it’s always available to you.’ ‘No, no, you don’t understand, I’m stealth.’

Travis Kalanick: 0:51 Yeah, 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.

Jason Calacanis: 0:59 Thousands of employees that weren’t allowed to put the company name on LinkedIn. I mean, incredible. And I’m like, okay, and then…

Travis Kalanick: 1:03 Their parents thought they worked for the CIA.

Jason Calacanis: 1:05 Yeah, and then he’s like, ‘And by the way, J-Cal, you can invest, you can’t announce it, and you have to sign an NDA, you can’t mention you’re an investor.’ It’s like, ‘Okay, no problem, I’m just happy to be on the cap table.’

Chamath Palihapitiya: 1:13 Is he like, kind of like, secret saying what he wasn’t supposed to say?

David Friedberg: 1:17 Right, exactly.

Jason Calacanis: 1:18 And now he’s doing it, that’s what’s just happened. Well, you’re out now. Fuck it, let’s go.

Travis Kalanick: 1:22 You’re out! It’s out! You came out of stealth today.

Jason Calacanis: 1:25 It’s so funny. Okay.

Travis Kalanick: 1:26 It’s so great.

Jason Calacanis: 1:27 You came out of stealth—well, you talked a little bit, you came to All-In Summit last year.

David Sacks: 1:31 Is that true? Is that fair to say you’re coming out of stealth today? Is that right?

Travis Kalanick: 1:36 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 hard… they were… they were living life on hard mode.

Jason Calacanis: 1:59 It was kind of fun too, right? I mean…

Travis Kalanick: 2:01 I mean, yeah, it was like, ‘What the… what is this? Why are there… why is there this massive density of stealth startup people in Los Angeles? What is happening over there?’

Jason Calacanis: 2:14 Yeah. Yeah. Also technically the name of the company in different countries was very generic names of companies.

Travis Kalanick: 2:22 I mean, everything was designed to be stealth. So we operate in 30 countries. In the US, the kitchens product is known as CloudKitchens. In Korea, it’s Kitchen Valley. In the Middle East, it’s Nama. In Latin America, parts of Latin America, it’s Cocinas Ocultas. I mean, you get the idea.

Jason Calacanis: 2:52 You can’t even remember all the names of all the code words.

Travis Kalanick: 2:54 I have to think about it. I have to think it through. We have four in China, you know, it’s like all over the place, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 3:00 But things have gone well… 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: 3:12 for those who I mean know how I thought about things in the Uber day a lot of this stuff’s not surprising I I would often talk about digitizing the physical world I think I even did it at all in summit the quick version of this I’ll try to do it quickly but it’s like uh 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 in a second I know this is a little 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 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 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 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 the they have like 20% capacity Uber Eats and DoorDash fill it but the infrastructure to do high capacity high scale sort of industrial production’s 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 okay

Jason Calacanis: 5:46 Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: 5:47 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 it’s let’s say The mission is physical automation to transform industries and move the world. And so we have our food computer talk about, then we do we’re doing mining.

Jason Calacanis: 6:12 Mining as in mining, not data mining? We’re talking about atoms, guys.

Travis Kalanick: 6:17 Yeah. So, of course, you do some mining data mine 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 wheel base 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’ve got to have a wheel base. 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 we’re inches from closing is the way to put it.

Jason Calacanis: 7:14 What were they doing? What was their business, Pronto?

Travis Kalanick: 7:19 Automating mining equipment.

Jason Calacanis: 7:21 Where are they based?

Travis Kalanick: 7:23 Uh, they’re based in San Francisco.

David Friedberg: 7:24 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 the big issue with mining, number one, is just surveying, like finding the 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 is distance squared, right? So the energy cost is like how deep are you going to the to the second power. So it becomes, you know, 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?

Travis Kalanick: 8:08 Automation definitely does. I mean, because you I mean, also it’s like, man, does Boring Company have some good stuff going? Like I hope we were like we’re doing the mining thing, like and Boring goes makes, you know, some good tunnels for for cars to do the thing. But like there’s some kind of boring mechanism, automated tunneling to do some of it. But to be honest, 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 the… sorry. Yeah. But the… It’s not rare. It’s not uncommon. Guys, it’s not rare. It’s what you have to do to the land is aggressive. And what’s rare is the is is where where are the places they’ll let you do it that you can also sort of get people to.

David Friedberg: 9:14 When you automate you can go to a lot of places uh well first is all the mines that exist are way more productive. Uh and the second is you can then sort of justify going to places you wouldn’t have been able to go before because um 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: 9:35 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. Yeah. You can send robots and have people monitoring them remotely.

Travis Kalanick: 9:51 Yeah.

David Friedberg: 9:52 And and this is like a- a future that feels like a little bit like science fiction.

Travis Kalanick: 9:54 Look, we’re here in Austin. Yeah, you gotta 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 physical AI models and I’ve got 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 in the stack. When you look at the stack, you’re like damn Tesla’s got this shit. 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 uh why isn’t why isn’t Google going to kill you or why isn’t Google just gonna do it? Why are Google just going to do it? And before that Google’s gonna do it and they’ll know that they killed you.

Jason Calacanis: 10:43 And before that was Microsoft.

Travis Kalanick: 10:44 And before that was Microsoft in the late nineties.

David Friedberg: 10:46 Uber had a time, 2010s, it was like what if Uber puts that in the app.

Travis Kalanick: 10:50 Come on. It was like dude, this is Uber. And like, but you know I think in the physical AI space that’s a- that’s sort of a Tesla thing. Um but there’s so many things to do. You gotta shoot your shot, you gotta do some stuff.

Jason Calacanis: 11:04 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.

David Sacks: 11:17 Pick a winner. Like pick a winner between Tesla, Waymo, Uber.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 11:22 or- or like Uber- Uber seems to be building a network of stuff but like

Jason Calacanis: 11:27 The number of- pick a winner. The number of players in this space is crazy now right?

Travis Kalanick: 11:31 So funny. Yeah look, there’s I think there’s more noise- there’s more bark than there is bite right now. Um look I think Waymo obviously is ahead, the existence proof is there. Their issue is manufacturing and scale um and urgency and fierceness like let’s- come on, 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 point is that so you got Waymo, then you’ve got Tesla, fundamentals, science, hard mode times a hundred and the question is do they get there in what time scale? If they can and like 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 like what’s the timeline on it? Yeah. Um, 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.

Travis Kalanick: 12:46 There’s nobody standing out just yet of of the others.

Jason Calacanis: 12:51 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, like 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’s still work, and is that like a Google OS or like where does that OS come from?

Travis Kalanick: 13:26 Well I think there’s a there 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 shit.

Jason Calacanis: 13:43 Yeah, it’s legit.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 13:44 Whoa.

Travis Kalanick: 13:45 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 shit getting real. Is it about to happen? Is it about to happen for physical AI? And that’s what this is about.

Jason Calacanis: 14:00 Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: 14:01 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: 14:22 Yeah. It’s like oh just like how we roll.

Travis Kalanick: 14:24 Because if somebody does that you’re like you’re like ‘Honey that’s like 200 meters away we’re going to be okay’.

David Friedberg: 14:32 We’re okay. Jason and I don’t call each other honey, but I got you.

Jason Calacanis: 14:37 Sweetie.

David Friedberg: 14:38 You know. Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: 14:39 Okay so anyway so that was odd wasn’t it? Okay okay I didn’t mean it that way. I didn’t mean it. Yeah you know what I meant. Okay. Language is a beautiful compression mechanism that humans use a hundred watts of energy like and you put that in a schema… 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 so language, we’ve there 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 um we need to find ways to compress because like when you think about 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 freaking data point and processing everything and 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: 16:18 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. You moved here in December so now you’re a resident of Austin.

Travis Kalanick: 16:31 Yeah, I was about thank you.

Jason Calacanis: 16:35 It’s very exciting for me, we’ve been getting to play some backgammon, backgammon cards, cards, we’re having a good job.

Travis Kalanick: 16:43 So, I’ve had a place on Lake Austin since 2021 and uh I go there, I’m an avid water skier, like you’re impressive at water skiing, I have to say. So I’ve had a place in Austin for five years, freaking love it. It’s my week, I would go 15 weekends a year.

Jason Calacanis: 16:58 What do you think’s gonna happen in California?

Travis Kalanick: 17:01 It’s pretty messed up, look, I I grew up in Cali, like I grew up in Los Angeles, uh my parents were born and bred in Los Angeles, which basically makes them the founders of LA, okay? But um so I have a lot of heart, like my whole family, everything, you know, it’s pretty it’s pretty, I don’t want to get the violin out, but it’s just but it’s heartbreaking, you totally it’s just the place you grew up is your home, you know, when you have to leave, uh but it’s getting weird out there and uh it feels like it’s getting weirder and at some point that’s it’s just too weird.

Jason Calacanis: 17:43 Do you think everyone’s gonna leave?

Travis Kalanick: 17:46 I mean, it started with Elon and it was like yeah, he was number one, we don’t we don’t want Elon here and then he’s like message received, he’s out. 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 you…

Jason Calacanis: 18:00 …it’s kind of gotten so broad in terms of the groups of people—

Chamath Palihapitiya: 18:03 Joe Rogan, comedy, music, New Yorkers, restaurateurs. I mean, this place is much—

Jason Calacanis: 18:09 I’m not even talking about this, I’m just talking about everyone leaving LA, or sorry, leaving California is almost like working down the path of—

Travis Kalanick: 18:19 Look, my— the rest of my team’s like, “When are we moving?” You know? They’re like—

Jason Calacanis: 18:24 And how are you dealing with that? So that was the question, was like—

Travis Kalanick: 18:26 Gotta buy homes on the lake.

Jason Calacanis: 18:27 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: 18:43 Yeah, 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 mourning process I went through. And that’s just what it is.

Jason Calacanis: 19:09 And you’re setting up a team here.

Travis Kalanick: 19:10 Yeah, of course. Um, and I got that office right on the lake.

Jason Calacanis: 19:14 Did you get that?

Travis Kalanick: 19:16 It’s— it’s— we’re negotiating right now. But I’m going to jet ski to work.

Jason Calacanis: 19:23 No, literally, is it a true story? Last year we were 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, “Fuck yeah, I looked at that.” And I was like, “That’s— that would be a nice one.”

Travis Kalanick: 19:36 But the truth is, you know, and I had a couple of 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 we’re all positive.” And you know, 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, you know, like all these different industries and people pursuing stuff. I think this is the future. 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. Um, I still get the, you know, the butterflies just— I do. 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 bike in them—

Chamath Palihapitiya: 20:42 And cost $400 million to build one mile.

Travis Kalanick: 20:44 And you’re like, “And it’s literally is 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.”

David Sacks: 21:00 No, they literally took Market Street and they’re like, “What would be the optimal way to fuck this up and virtue signal at the same time?” And they’re like, “Yeah, buses.”

Jason Calacanis: 21:10 And it’s like, nobody’s on the bus. Nobody takes the bus. It’s a beautiful small town.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 21:15 San Francisco is Austin. That whole street is empty. That whole street is empty and it’s painted red. And you’re like…

Jason Calacanis: 21:19 Okay, so look, okay, so we all bitch and complain non-stop on our group chat, like a hundred times a day. I’m number one, I get it. But like, Friedberg, when are you leaving? Okay, well, on the chat you’re the best, by the way. By the way, there’s 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, “Fuck these people! These fucking morons are heartless! They’re destroying society!” He is like Darth Friedberg in group chat. Am I lying? Am I lying? Is he the most correct?

David Sacks: 21:54 Especially after a couple glasses of wine.

David Friedberg: 21:56 Yeah, when I start drinking, then I go… I fall off a cliff. And then I’m like, I’ll go and attack this congressman on Twitter, which I realize is probably not what I like to do.

Jason Calacanis: 22:04 Yes, and then he’s got to delete the tweet.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 22:06 Go on, delete the tweet.

David Friedberg: 22:08 Yeah, I delete the tweets. Okay, so…

Jason Calacanis: 22:10 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 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 that people can actually get their shit 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?

David Sacks: 22:45 I don’t think that, look, I would go… I would… 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 stayed out of politics and that kind of… it was that kind of vibe. It was just everybody was like that. “Leave me alone, I want to make stuff.” Yeah, just, I’m not… I don’t do that. And that’s obviously, it’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, it’s 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.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 24:00 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: 24:15 Well, I mean, and you look at the homeless industrial complex, you look at Chesa Boudin, which the All-In Pod, Sacks, myself, and the pod, like, we literally led the recall of him. And then you had the same thing going on in LA where they were just like, if somebody…

David Friedberg: 24:31 Gascón. I mean, Gascón, 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.

Jason Calacanis: 24:41 Oh! You want to arrest the criminals? I was born in the darkness! I mean, these guys are lunatics.

David Friedberg: 24:49 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, their 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.

Jason Calacanis: 25:16 Yeah, nobody’s got their back and they’re not allowed to do their job. It’s crazy, and it’s getting weird. Okay, hey, I want to just go back to AI for a sec.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 25:24 Sorry for the darkness.

Jason Calacanis: 25:26 No, no, no, I think it’s good.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 25:27 I was trying to induce, I’m trying to induce dark Friedberg.

David Friedberg: 25:28 I brought it up. I mean, someone bring me a tequila, I’ll get going.

Jason Calacanis: 25:31 Yeah, let’s do it! Can we get a couple tequilas? It was funny, I went on this podcast yesterday and 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, the energy went 10X and it was…

Chamath Palihapitiya: 25:46 Who is this? David Sacks? Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 25:49 So, that’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.

David Friedberg: 25:55 Yeah. So, one of the… 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 like big things of metal and motors and like 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, break apart not just the software but the hardware layer, and where we at in evolving things like actuators and the materials and everything else that’s going to make physical AI work and scale?

David Sacks: 26:43 Look, a lot of the questions you’re asking are going down humanoid lane, which is like this thing. And everybody talks about how do you do the hands. 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…

Travis Kalanick: 27:00 quote-unquote Achilles heel of any of these machines and you’re like that’s where the action is this this there’s a couple other places Um… 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 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 a bowl in a paper bag without tearing the paper bag but I am less into the I forget the name proprio- they’re the- the senses to understand awareness and touch I’m not in that game um so in your mining you’re like kshhh you’re not like you know

Jason Calacanis: 27:39 Yeah you’re not threading a needle

Travis Kalanick: 27:41 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 freaking fast but any humanoid demo starts with dancing and martial arts

Jason Calacanis: 27:59 Yeah

Travis Kalanick: 28:00 And we’re sort of down specialized robot lane which is gainfully employed robots

Jason Calacanis: 28:03 Yeah

Travis Kalanick: 28:04 So I know I didn’t totally answer the question on like the technology piece but

Jason Calacanis: 28:08 Well put productive robots I just like do you agree that there’s probably like a big opportunity for venture money and research to go into material science actuators

Travis Kalanick: 28:14 Yes

Jason Calacanis: 28:14 Yeah

Travis Kalanick: 28:15 For sure Because if the physical AI stack manipulation and all of the related things around it is massive

Jason Calacanis: 28:21 And so if you get the software working it’s almost like the hardware has to catch up and we got a lot of investment to be made to catch up

Travis Kalanick: 28:27 There’s a lot, I do, 100%

Jason Calacanis: 28:30 Well actually as- 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 be 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 hmm 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: 28:53 Yeah

Jason Calacanis: 28:54 now that you’ve got and people are starting to understand just starting today how big your vision is capital as a weapon this is I guess in your plan yeah?

Travis Kalanick: 29:01 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 it didn’t matter how good your app was Because Masa is going to put a billion dollars into your competitor better 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 and you need to do it better than everybody else and if you don’t you are going to lose.

Jason Calacanis: 30:13 Let me ask one follow-up to that. Sorry, you go ahead.

Travis Kalanick: 30:15 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 30:16 But the Middle East. Yeah. I’ve heard theories the last couple days that big capital seekers are kind of fucked right now because of what’s gone 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: 30:30 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 of it’s- 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- like, 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 a war is going on and saying, ‘Hey guys, you got some money?’ Um, so I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but if you are an optimist then you’re like, okay, this isn’t- 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 kicks in. And a lot of it is about all the things that are happening in AI, in physical AI, and- and just the productivity gains that are coming in very massive ways.

Jason Calacanis: 31:50 Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, it 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 and replace it with 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. What do you hope comes out of this Chinese thing?

David Friedberg: 32:18 And what did you learn in China?

Jason Calacanis: 32:20 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: 32:27 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. 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 is Kansas City sometimes, but you go there now and it’s like- Like one-upping Singapore, right? Or so that’s the city view. You’re just experiencing a very awesome, you’re like whoa, 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, ugh.

Jason Calacanis: 33:28 They’re hungry.

Travis Kalanick: 33:29 So does anybody remember the 2008 Olympics in Beijing? Anybody? Does anybody, this is a little bit down the rabbit hole, does anybody remember the opening ceremony? And you’re like, these motherfuckers 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 ideas 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?

David Sacks: 34:12 Yes.

David Friedberg: 34:13 Don’t go into the stands.

Jason Calacanis: 34:15 Yeah. Yeah, you know.

Travis Kalanick: 34:16 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. Um, I have an employee who because we, we for a long time were the largest 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 wanted one of them 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 there 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? Is an example.

Jason Calacanis: 35:18 Some normalcy would help.

Travis Kalanick: 35:21 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 to like a lot of great innovators all over the place came from other places for their own version of the American dream, God bless. 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 uh, yeah, China’s, China’s wild. So let’s, let’s keep our eye on the ball and let’s, let’s give them a run for their money too.

Jason Calacanis: 35:59 Alright, give it up for TK! That’s good. Good to see you, brother. Well done, brother.

Travis Kalanick: 36:03 Thanks man.

Jason Calacanis: 36:03 Wow. Michael Dell. My lord. Texas native. Michael…

Michael Dell: 36:10 Yes, born… born in Houston.

Jason Calacanis: 36:12 Well, I missed the opening, we jumped to the music, but you started Dell Computer here in Austin with a thousand bucks.

Michael Dell: 36:20 42 years ago, in my dorm room at Dobie at UT, about 10 days before I finished my freshman semester.

Jason Calacanis: 36:31 Amazing. And it’s been working out pretty good.

Michael Dell: 36:34 Yes, there’s been some bumps in the road, but generally… generally worked out okay. Yeah, we’ll have about 140 billion in revenue this year. So, yeah, it’s okay.

Jason Calacanis: 36:47 It compounds over time, doesn’t it?

Michael Dell: 36:50 Yeah. You know, you start small and just keep adding, and there you go.

Jason Calacanis: 36:55 That’s how it goes. Exactly.

David Friedberg: 36:58 But why Texas? Like, I think this is an important thing. We’re in Austin. Jason lives here. David Sacks 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 or is it just always worked?

Michael Dell: 37:15 You know, I think Texas has had a, you know, low-tax, pro-growth environment for a long time and pro, you know, sort of progressive business climate. And, you know, if you sort of look at the growth of the Texas economy relative to the rest of the United States without Texas, you know, Texas just kind of looks like a better version of the U.S. economy. And, uh, you now you’ve got Austin is sort of just about in the top ten cities in the United States. So you’ve got when that happens, you’ll have four of the ten largest cities in America in Texas. One out of ten 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, uh, you know, you’ve got 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, um, you know, long history of of innovative pioneering spirit and entrepreneurship. And it’s been a fantastic place for us.

Jason Calacanis: 38:42 And part of this I think, Friedberg 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 ten years in LA and the last 12 in the Bay Area. And what’s happening there is incredibly un-American and… and they’re decelerating when compared and I think maybe the gap maybe and 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, LA or in the Bay Area.

Michael Dell: 39:22 Yeah, well, I’ve got a lot of new friends and neighbors, you know, that have 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 when you look at the environment here and compared it to the other kind of situations that are going on, it’s it’s very attractive. But you know, 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: 39:56 Yeah Elon had a great experience when he was building the gigafactory over here. They let you do stuff here basically, 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 factory that’s 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.

Michael Dell: 40:32 Sure. Well, there’s you know, obviously been enormous build-out of AI infrastructure and that requires, you know, lots of new data centers, lots of power. Texas you know has an enormous advantage there relative to other states. A lot of power, a lot of land and and you can build stuff, right? So there’s been a massive build-out particularly in some of the cities and 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. You know, we’ve been building these AI data centers not just here in Texas, but around the world and you know, the growth in that has been tremendous. You know, we introduced the the first H100 server, literally a couple weeks before ChatGPT was announced and you know, 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 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 and computing, now we have machines that are thinking and helping us think. And so the demand for that kind of intelligence and, you know, 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, you know, like Palantir and, you know, people want to protect their data but also use AI on it, they want to bring the AI to where their data is. And, you know, when this kind of started a few years ago, we had some really sophisticated large companies, think of like Fortune 100, and they started, you know, buying these AI servers from us and they kind of knew what they were doing, right? And we said, well, what are you doing? And they were kind of taking and 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.

Jason Calacanis: 43:48 How do you think about the payback time on the investment that’s being made? The administration put in place this accelerated depreciation rule, right? Or the concept?

Michael Dell: 43:59 Yes, that’s very helpful actually, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 44:01 Right. So just for folks to understand that a little bit, like if you spend $100 billion this year building a data center and buying infrastructure for those data centers, you get to write off 100% of that this year to deduct it so you don’t pay taxes, you pay way much fewer taxes. And that’s in place for 10 years, I think. It’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: 44:51 You know, I can tell you in our business, in our company, we definitely see plenty of use cases where the ROI or the business payback is extremely fast. Improvement in productivity efficiency is 20% or or greater.

Jason Calacanis: 45:06 Right away gets there.

Michael Dell: 45:07 I mean, you know, it’s not like you just hit a button and you get 20%, right? There’s there’s work required in thinking through the processes and it’s worth a little bit describing that. So, you know, when you have a 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, alright, 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 kind of a top-down way. Uh, you can’t sort of do it spontane— you know, in in— silos are not going to spontaneously improve themselves. And often that means that you’re completely changing the way the organization works.

Jason Calacanis: 46:12 It’s like a wholesale re-architecture.

Michael Dell: 46:15 It’s it’s a reimagining of the way a company works. And, you know, I mean, the way I described this to our team about three years ago is, you know, uh, we were going to have a new competitor five years from now, that would be two years from now, you know, that was 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 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. Uh, but I actually believe that that’s what’s going to happen. And 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 at our infrastructure business last quarter grew 73%. Well, that’s kind of unusual for a business of this size. And, uh, you know, this quarter we guided that it would grow even faster, like 100%. So.

Jason Calacanis: 47:24 You’ve lived through a couple of paradigm shifts here. The PC revolution, obviously you led that. Um, and then you of course had, you know, client-server, the network revolution, online, uh, internet,

Michael Dell: 47:38 Cloud, mobile.

Jason Calacanis: 47:40 Yeah. So each one of those we saw massive disruption. We were talking in in the green room about hey, we used to have a typing pool, there was a mailroom, all these things got abstracted away by the PC and networked PC revolution. Um, but it took a decade or two, and this one’s happening a lot faster, yeah?

Michael Dell: 47:57 Yeah, this one I think it’s it’s like, uh, you know, uh…

Travis Kalanick: 48:00 Quarter is like a year, maybe it’s five times faster or something like that. But back to your question, I’d say maybe 10 or 15% of large companies have really figured this out and the rest of them are kind of fumbling around. You know, there’s a tendency when you hear about a new technology to like, oh, let’s just go do it, you know, show the boss, hey, we did AI.

Jason Calacanis: 48:24 The board said we gotta do AI.

Travis Kalanick: 48:25 We gotta do AI.

David Sacks: 48:26 We did AI.

Jason Calacanis: 48:27 Are you proud of me, boss?

David Friedberg: 48:28 Yeah.

Travis Kalanick: 48:29 Look at what I made.

Jason Calacanis: 48:32 Exactly.

Travis Kalanick: 48:34 And I also think, you know, it’s an important point about this, which is, you know, the barrier to technology adoption is not technology. It’s culture and leadership and courage, right?

David Friedberg: 48:52 Willingness to change and to disrupt yourself.

David Sacks: 48:55 Particularly if your bonus is dependent on not messing things up.

Jason Calacanis: 48:59 But let’s go, 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 Macys.com versus Sears Roebuck, right? Maybe Macy’s did a better job of taking advantage of the internet than Sears. 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 became, 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, are we going to see AI native businesses in every industry come in and just disrupt everything?

Travis Kalanick: 49:32 I believe we will and certainly, you know, 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…

Jason Calacanis: 50:08 Oh, because they see all the new companies on their platform.

Travis Kalanick: 50:10 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. Um, 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. Which is exactly the speech I gave to our team you know three years ago. And I think…

Michael Dell: 51:00 You know, you have to be bold and you gotta 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 the 2030s?

Jason Calacanis: 51:17 Right, isn’t it like it’s much more kind of the storyline? There’s more to do than there ever was. It’s like when the internet arose, kind of came around, Sears doesn’t just need to sell locally, they can sell to the world.

Michael Dell: 51:31 Well sure, I mean this is the point. I mean when we have better tools, we can do way more things. And you know, when I hear people say, ‘Oh you know, 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 you know, that’s super exciting.

David Friedberg: 52:01 That’s the thing, that’s what I’m most excited about.

Jason Calacanis: 52:03 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? Is it on the edge? Where does the intelligence, where does the inference sit and how does that really change or kind of re-architect the industry, do you think?

Michael Dell: 52:40 It’s really all of 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 rebalancing as companies have figured out, you know, sort of everybody loves the public cloud, right, until they get the bill. Right? When they get the bill, they’re like, ‘Wait, this was supposed to save us money, it 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, you know, think medical devices, security, all sorts of things in hospitals and industrial plants and, you know, any any kind of, you know, data-driven activity, right, requires some kind of computing network storage infrastructure.

Jason Calacanis: 54:20 Yeah. 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 powerful desktop they can and all these hobbyists who were your customers who were calling you up and ordering from, you know, Dell, their bespoke PC.

Michael Dell: 54:43 dell.com.

Jason Calacanis: 54:44 What did I say?

Michael Dell: 54:45 Dell.com. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 54:46 You said ordering from Dell, calling us up.

Michael Dell: 54:48 They order online usually. They have this thing called the internet, Jason, so it works out pretty well.

Jason Calacanis: 54:54 They do. Yes, it works out pretty well. Um, but this is incredible that they’re like all stacking computers and running, you know, local models. And I was just thinking back to how much the first couple of computers I owned cost $4,000 in 1980 dollars. And then the prices came down. You could buy a Dell for 500 bucks, 800 bucks, like really nice laptops for that price.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 55:21 Use promo code all-in.

Jason Calacanis: 55:23 That’s not as- that’s a joke. Um, 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: 55:47 I don’t know if everyone will have a $10,000 desktop, but that would be great. I mean, you know, uh… so we have this Dell portal on Hugging Face and we have all of these open models and we’ve 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: 56:35 How many people have set up open claw? Raise your hand. Oh my lord, that’s about what, 20% of the audience here?

Michael Dell: 56:44 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 we need to be able to authenticate and validate who these agents are and… what they’re doing and, you know, had the right controls and and that sort of thing.

Jason Calacanis: 57:05 Yeah. And and your take on AGI and when we’re going to hit it? Like, do you actually think about super intelligence and AGI and the the two sets of problems that get solved 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: 57:27 I I don’t really know, Jason. Uh, you know, I I think if it feels like with the latest releases, we’re talking about this backstage, uh, you know, the Gemini 3.1, the Opus 4.6, the OpenAI 5.4, it feels like we’ve sort of uh hit some kind of threshold where the just the quality of the of the models are are just tremendous. And and we, you know, when I listen to what our teams are able to accomplish in a day or two weeks that would have taken them, you know, a few months or nine months’ time, you know, it’s it’s just amazing the speed of of innovation. And so it 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…

Travis Kalanick: 58:14 I think the auto researchers, that’s the the key with auto research, the capacity to take a standard model and then retrain it on your private data

Michael Dell: 58:21 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.

Jason Calacanis: 58:31 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: 59:10 It’s a great question. I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about that. You know, I’m thinking about how how do I run our company. I mean, that’s that’s hard enough. So yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 59:23 Everyone I talk to, that’s the question. They’re like, everyone goes to these offsites and they’re like, I’m actually doing this with my management team on Monday or doing like a teardown be like, hey, how would we build the business differently today knowing what we know?

Michael Dell: 59:35 Yeah, I mean, the what what we’ve been thinking a lot about is it sort of this this reimagining question. You know, sort of alright, we know the trajectory of the tools. What are the tools going to be in 27, 28, 29, and how do we accelerate, you know, our path to that?

Jason Calacanis: 59:56 How worried are you about social issues? AI recently ranked as the most unfavorable term of a list of terms, including President Trump.

David Friedberg: 60:05 I saw that. It was somewhere between ISIS, the Democrats…

Jason Calacanis: 60:08 ISIS and the Democrats.

David Friedberg: 60:10 ICE, ISIS and the Democrats.

Jason Calacanis: 60:12 ICE was better than AI. People liked ICE, mass agents, more than they like AI.

David Friedberg: 60:16 Yeah.

David Sacks: 60:18 Well I think part of the problem is it’s been, you know, maybe sold as, it sort of presents itself like a human would. Yeah, right. And you know, maybe if we called it linear algebra,

David Friedberg: 60:34 Matrix multiplier.

David Sacks: 60:35 matrix multiplication and statistics instead of AI, maybe that would be more friendly. I don’t know.

David Friedberg: 60:41 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 60:43 But do you think we’re going to have… No, I think you’re right. The positioning is wrong and then we’re not communicating to people, hey, this could help healthcare, 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 costs for working…

Chamath Palihapitiya: 60:57 Well messaging aside, I mean how much do you actually worry about disruption or dislocation in employment, about acceleration of earnings for some people and deceleration for others in society that feel left behind, and that starts to fuel more of the kind of social concerns and politicians saying “Hey, we gotta stop building all the data centers,” you know, like that kind of stuff. And how much are you really…

Travis Kalanick: 61:26 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. I mean education could dramatically improve, scientific discovery, healthcare, energy, you know, all sort of these unsolved problems can be accelerated. And ultimately I think it’s amplification of human potential and capability.

Michael Dell: 62:08 Extending the frontier too.

David Sacks: 62:11 And by the way we should also remember that basically what we’re talking about here beyond sort of some of the advanced semiconductors and the, you know, big data centers, we’re talking about software, right?

David Friedberg: 62:25 Yeah.

David Sacks: 62:26 Right? It’s like software that runs on your computer. So you know if somebody says well we don’t want that, it’s like how do you stop software?

David Friedberg: 62:32 Yeah, no, it’s… how are you going to stop someone from 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.

Jason Calacanis: 62:44 I don’t know that it’s passed, right? It’s being proposed.

David Friedberg: 62:46 Proposed. That you can’t give legal and health advice.

Jason Calacanis: 62:49 Yeah, we’re anti-software. Yeah we’re also anti-books and advice. So if you were going to look it up in a book, books would be burning…

David Sacks: 62:55 Were you dropping into your Bernie Sanders right there?

Jason Calacanis: 62:58 That was my Bernie Sanders. Michael Dell. 1%! What are you doing with your data centers? Why are you doing this to the people of our great nation while you give your money to children in the Invest America accounts?

Michael Dell: 63:11 Yeah. This is a good one you’re doing.

Jason Calacanis: 63:14 Yeah. Can we talk about Invest America?

Chamath Palihapitiya: 63:15 I think he might have even criticized that, but you know…

Michael Dell: 63:18 Well, that’s the problem.

Jason Calacanis: 63:20 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!

Michael Dell: 63:28 Well, they don’t actually get the money till they’re 18 years old, so that’s…

Jason Calacanis: 63:34 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: 63:43 Well, I see my great friend Brad Gerstner here.

Jason Calacanis: 63:45 Brad’s here? That’s incredible. Brad, come up for this little segment here. Sit for a second. Let’s talk about Invest America. We’ve got five minutes left here.

Michael Dell: 63:54 The billionaire fifth-best, give him a round.

Jason Calacanis: 63:56 I didn’t know he was going to be here.

Michael Dell: 63:57 All right.

Jason Calacanis: 63:58 How did this go down, Michael? How did it go?

Michael Dell: 64:03 I heard about this idea in 2021 from Brad and I thought, you know, that’s 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 anything about that, unfortunately. And you know, 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 $150,000 or less.

Jason Calacanis: 64:54 I mean, Michael, let’s just pause right here for a second here. This is one of the greatest— What do you think Bernie? Do you approve? I’m gonna go join Cal on this one.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 65:02 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 five, six, seven billion dollars or this is—

Michael Dell: 65:28 Well, 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.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 65:41 I mean, and I just want to say something, because you know we live at a time where—

Michael Dell: 65:48 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 now a day signing up.

Jason Calacanis: 65:59 Yeah. First things first.

Travis Kalanick: 66:00 Thanks for having me up. 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’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, 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, you know, this big beautiful bill, the reconciliation bill. And so I call up Michael and I said, ‘Michael, we gotta 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 have… I have to get in the Oval Office, we have to get in the Oval Office.’ And, you know, Michael said, you know, ‘What should the text say?’ And you and I had a conversation, and then you, you know…

Chamath Palihapitiya: 67:00 The text to DJT.

Travis Kalanick: 67:01 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, wherever your politics are, that’s just the truth and the last administration didn’t.

David Friedberg: 67:23 Yeah, and 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, right?

Chamath Palihapitiya: 67:34 Exactly.

Travis Kalanick: 67:39 So thank you. And to the prior conversation, when Michael and I first talked about it, you know, it was ‘this is the right thing to do,’ right? Like, we have to reconnect the 70% of people who feel left out and left behind to the American dream, right? 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. And so at any rate…

David Sacks: 68:20 Michael Dell, tremendous American. I have one… just one punch up: The name ‘Invest America,’ ‘Trump accounts.’ What do you think?

Jason Calacanis: 68:28 Were you considering this in the context of other philanthropy? I mean, how do you kind of put this together in the spectrum of how you think about giving back?

Michael Dell: 68:37 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…

David Friedberg: 69:00 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. Right? 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’d just go bigger.

Jason Calacanis: 69:26 And what happens, Brad, if, you know, ten more Michael Dells show up? And there are dozens of them.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 69:33 There’s not a lot of Michael Dells, let’s be honest, but…

Jason Calacanis: 69:36 There- there is a number of folks who could make an equal size or even greater gift. There are people who, you know, many hands makes for light work. There are a thousand people who could make a gift of significance. What if this actually becomes a movement and we change the out?

David Sacks: 69:51 And I- and I think it actually is becoming a movement instead of a moment and and we’ve, you know, we’ve got a lot of that queued up, Brad.

Jason Calacanis: 70:00 Once you- have you called anybody, Michael? Have you called Bezos and asked them?

David Sacks: 70:03 Michael and I chair the Invest America giving committee. And we’re ambitious guys.

Jason Calacanis: 70:09 So you’re knocking on doors. You’re texting people.

David Friedberg: 70:14 And- so- so- so just- 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 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 1st, 2027 will automatically get an inve- 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- in 50 years. 3.7 million kids a year will get an account that can compound as a 401(k) 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 five trillion dollars into the pockets of families that would have otherwise had zero. Five trillion dollars. 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 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. By the way, two things on this…

Chamath Palihapitiya: 72:00 If this moved through government programs, it would get incinerated.

David Sacks: 72:02 Exactly.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 72:03 That’s what we see happen. There’s just 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 won’t have to have this fake Ponzi scheme that we call Social Security.

David Sacks: 72:33 If Australia can do it, we can do it.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 72:34 Well, they—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 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. Friedberg’s getting angry.

David Friedberg: 72:54 On July 4th of this year. So for all the—there are four and a half million kids who have claimed their account, almost 150,000 a day while we’re 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 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 five, 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 account, when companies add to the account, all of this they see it growing and it unlocks the human potential. It’s not just the money. It’s the ‘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, right? 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—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.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 74:43 And—and Brad, thank you. Yeah, let’s give it up for Brad. And finally, I’m just going to say, you know, Brad also adopted his home state of Indiana. We have Ray and Barbara Dalio adopting their home state of Connecticut and many, many more to come. And 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: 75:28 It’s going to be amazing. Give it up for one of the great entrepreneurs of our time and an incredible philanthropist!