Travis Kalanick & Michael Dell Live from Austin, Texas

(0:00) Travis Kalanick: Officially exiting stealth mode, what he's been working on (5:52) How to automate the physical world, markets to go after (11:00) Return to self-driving: Tesla, Waymo, and the autonomous race (16:17) Leaving Los Angeles for Austin, the decline of truth and justice in California (25:51) Actuators, robot hands, "Capital as a weapon," Middle East SWF impacted by Iran War (36:00) Michael Dell: Dorm room to $140B in annual revenue, why Texas attracts founders (43:46) Dell's $50B AI infrastructure bet (1:03:50) Invest America: Michael Dell's $6.25B gift - A 401k from birth for 25M kids This podcast was recorded LIVE at Arena Hall in Austin, Texas. Thanks to our partners for making this event possible!: EY: Austin vibes meet AI innovation. Thanks to EY for co‑hosting with us at #SXSW. Discover what executives are saying about AI transformation in the latest AI Pulse Survey. https://ey.com/en_us/insights/emerging-technologies/pulse-ai-survey Forge Global: We're proud to highlight our partners at Forge Global, who are helping the world's most innovative private companies and their teams gain #liquidcourage on their terms. Learn more here: https://forgeglobal.com/who-we-serve/private-companies/ De'Longhi Athena Polymarket

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know if some of you knew I was an angel investor in some companies.

• 0:05Jason Calacanis?

  On the count of three, what's my favorite angel investment of all time? One, two, three? Oh, yeah. Thank you. Give it up, Travis Kalanick.

• 0:21Jason Calacanis?

  Appreciate you. All right. Wow.

• 0:25Jason Calacanis?

  On a big news day, Travis is here on a very big news day. You've 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 online summit? You want to? Nah, it's like, I'm gonna just chill, I'm building. Next year, hey, you know, it's just always available to you.

• 0:45Travis Kalanick?

  No, you don't understand, I'm stealth.

• 0:46Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 0:54Travis Kalanick?

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

• 0:59Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:01Travis Kalanick?

  Their parents thought they worked for the CIA?

• 1:03Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:13Travis Kalanick?

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

• 1:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, right. No, now he's all aboard.

• 1:19Travis Kalanick?

  Did that just happen?

• 1:20Jason Calacanis?

  You know.

• 1:21Travis Kalanick?

  No, you're out now. Fuck it, let's go.

• 1:23Jason Calacanis?

  You're out. It's out. You came out of stealth today.

• 1:27Travis Kalanick?

  It's so funny.

• 1:28Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:32David Friedberg?

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

• 1:35Travis 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.

• 1:53Travis Kalanick?

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

• 2:00Jason Calacanis?

  It was kind of fun, too, right?

• 2:01Travis Kalanick?

  I mean, yeah, it was like, what the, what is this? Why are there, why is this massive density of stealth?

• 2:08Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 2:09Travis Kalanick?

  Startup people in Los Angeles? What is happening over there?

• 2:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 2:14Travis Kalanick?

  Yeah.

• 2:14Jason Calacanis?

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

• 2:23Travis Kalanick?

  I mean, everything was designed to be stealth.

• 2:25Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 2:26Travis Kalanick?

  So, we operate in 30 countries. In the US, the kitchens product is known as Cloud Kitchens. In Korea, it's Kitchen Valley. In the Middle East, it's Nama. In Latin America, parts of Latin America, it's Casino Secultas. I mean, you get the idea.

• 2:51Jason Calacanis?

  You can't even remember all the names and all the code words.

• 2:54Travis Kalanick?

  Think about it, yeah.

• 2:54Jason Calacanis?

  Think it through.

• 2:55Travis Kalanick?

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

• 2:59Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 3:12Travis 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 at Summit. The quick version of this, I'll try to do it quickly, but it's like, we know the bits world, the computer world, the one that Michael Dell essentially invented for us. CPU, storage, network, these are three core computing resources when you go to computer science class your first day. Three core computer resources. CPU manipulates the bits, storage stores the bits, network moves bits from point A to point B. But if you're digitizing the physical world, you're treating atoms like bits. You're building an atoms-based computer, and I'll explain what I mean to say. I know there's a little out there.

• 3:57Travis Kalanick?

  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.

• 4:41Travis Kalanick?

  The idea was, can you get a meal that's prepared and delivered to you so efficient that it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store? If you can do that, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car. But in the Uber day, the roads were there, the cars are unused. You just had to put an app in the app store. Wasn't that easy, but kind of that easy. In this world, you can't do this on a restaurant. 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.

• 5:23Travis Kalanick?

  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 with food, when food goes to e-commerce. That was a lot. Yeah. Okay, so, bottom line is, it's awesome. We do this food computation stuff. We're doing more computers now. And so the name of the company is called Atoms. And it's, let's say, the mission is, is physical automation to transform industries and move the world.

• 6:09Travis Kalanick?

  And so we have our food, Kepira talked about it, then we do, we're doing mining. Mining as in mining minerals? Not data mining. 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 mines to power Earth's industries. Right? So it's got this industrial atoms vibe to it. And then on the transport side, it's a wheelbase for robots. Because if you're doing specialized robots, not humanoids, specialized robots, you need to be able to move and act in the physical world.

• 6:54Travis Kalanick?

  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, that's great. Look at, uh, 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. Um, and so, um, 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.

• 7:30David Friedberg?

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

• 7:32Travis Kalanick?

  Automating mining equipment.

• 7:34David Friedberg?

  Where they based?

• 7:35Travis Kalanick?

  Uh, they're based in San Francisco.

• 7:36David Friedberg?

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

• 7:55Travis Kalanick?

  Yeah.

• 7:56David Friedberg?

  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, you're, the more you're able to kind of not worry about getting the right location. So does automation unlock that capacity?

• 8:22Travis Kalanick?

  I mean, automation definitely does. I mean, yeah, 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 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? Rares earth? I don't know. But the, but Rare, rare, rare, rare earth. Yeah, but it's not rare.

• 9:01Jason Calacanis?

  It's uncommon minerals.

• 9:02Travis Kalanick?

  Guys, it's not rare. It's what you have to do, 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. When you automate, you can go to a lot of places. Uh, well, first is all the mines that exist are way more productive. Um, 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

• 9:35Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 9:42Travis Kalanick?

  Yeah.

• 9:43Jason Calacanis?

  You can send robots and have people monitoring them remotely.

• 9:47Travis Kalanick?

  Yeah.

• 9:48Jason Calacanis?

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

• 9:54Travis Kalanick?

  Look, we're here in Austin. You, 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 to have physical AI models and I gotta, 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, uh, why isn't, why isn't Google gonna kill you? Or why isn't Google just gonna do it?

• 10:39Jason Calacanis?

  Why, uh, Google just did it.

• 10:41Travis Kalanick?

  They're not gonna know that they killed you.

• 10:42Jason Calacanis?

  And before that, Microsoft.

• 10:43Travis Kalanick?

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

• 10:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, what if Uber puts that in the app?

• 10:48Travis Kalanick?

  Come on. It's like, dude, this is Uber. I'm like, but, you know, I think in the physical AI space, that's a, that's sort of a Tesla thing. Uh, but there's so many things to do. You gotta shoot your shot, gotta do some stuff.

• 11:01Jason Calacanis?

  And rumors that, um, 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 progress.

• 11:16David Friedberg?

  Pick a winner, like pick a winner between Tesla, Waymo, Uber.

• 11:21Jason Calacanis?

  Or like.

• 11:22David Friedberg?

  Or Uber, Uber seems to be building a network of stuff.

• 11:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, the number of.

• 11:27David Friedberg?

  Pick a winner.

• 11:28Jason Calacanis?

  The number of players in this space is crazy now, right?

• 11:30Travis Kalanick?

  Yeah, look, there's, I think there's more noise, there's more bark than there is bite right now.

• 11:37Travis Kalanick?

  Look, I think Waymo obviously is ahead, the existence proof is there. Their issue is manufacturing and scale and urgency and fierceness, like let's, come on.

• 11:51Jason Calacanis?

  Let's win.

• 11:51Travis Kalanick?

  Let's go.

• 11:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 11:53Travis Kalanick?

  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 Tesla.

• 12:05Travis Kalanick?

  Fundamentals, science, hard mode times a hundred. And the question is, do they get there in what time scale? 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?

• 12:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 12:38Travis Kalanick?

  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. There's nobody standing out just yet of, of the others.

• 12:49David Friedberg?

  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, 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 they're still work? And is that like a Google OS? Or like, where does that OS come from?

• 13:23Travis Kalanick?

  Look, 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 use ChatGPT 3.5. And you're like, holy

• 13:41David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it's legit.

• 13:42Travis 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.

• 13:54Travis Kalanick?

  Is it about to happen? Is it about to happen for physical AI? And that's what this is about?

• 13:59David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 14:00Travis 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.

• 14:22David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 14:22Travis 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 gonna be okay.

• 14:31David Friedberg?

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

• 14:37David Friedberg?

  Sweetie.

• 14:38Travis Kalanick?

  You know. Okay. So anyways, that was odd, wasn't it?

• 14:41David Friedberg?

  It always does.

• 14:43Travis Kalanick?

  Okay, I didn't mean it that way. I didn't mean it. Yeah, you know, I meant it. Okay. Language is a beautiful compression mechanism that humans use 100 watts of energy.

• 14:57Travis Kalanick?

  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 a hundred times more energy to drive a Waymo than a human does to drive a Waymo. So, so language, there are still things that humans are great at and that unbeaten, 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.

• 15:40Travis Kalanick?

  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 frickin' 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.

• 16:17Jason Calacanis?

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

• 16:24Travis Kalanick?

  Yeah.

• 16:25Jason Calacanis?

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

• 16:29Travis Kalanick?

  Yeah. I was, I'm, thank you.

• 16:31Jason Calacanis?

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

• 16:35Travis Kalanick?

  Backgammon cards.

• 16:36Jason Calacanis?

  Cards. We're having a good time.

• 16:38Travis Kalanick?

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

• 16:48David Friedberg?

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

• 16:51Travis Kalanick?

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

• 16:58David Friedberg?

  What do you think's gonna happen in California?

• 17:00Travis 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, um, 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.

• 17:21David Friedberg?

  A lot, a lot of us feel that way.

• 17:22Travis Kalanick?

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

• 17:24David Friedberg?

  It's heartbreaking.

• 17:25Travis Kalanick?

  The plate, it totally, it's just a place you grew up, it's 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.

• 17:41David Friedberg?

  It's too weird. Do you think everyone's gonna leave? I mean, it started with Elon and it was like.

• 17:47Travis Kalanick?

  Yeah, he was number one.

• 17:47David Friedberg?

  We don't want Elon here. And then he's like, message received and he passed. Right. And then it kind of worked its way down the tech industry. And then 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 group of people.

• 18:04Jason Calacanis?

  Joe Rogan, comedy, music, New Yorkers, restaurateurs. I mean, this place is the fun.

• 18:10David Friedberg?

  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.

• 18:19Travis Kalanick?

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

• 18:24David Friedberg?

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

• 18:26Travis Kalanick?

  Gotta buy homes on the lake?

• 18:27David Friedberg?

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

• 18:41Travis Kalanick?

  Yeah, I totally get it. It's a real thing. So, look, I think like most things, uh, 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. Um, and so, uh, 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.

• 19:08Jason Calacanis?

  And you're setting up a team here.

• 19:10Travis Kalanick?

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

• 19:15Jason Calacanis?

  Did you get that?

• 19:16Travis Kalanick?

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

• 19:21Jason Calacanis?

  Good.

• 19:21Travis Kalanick?

  But I'm gonna jet ski to work.

• 19:23Jason Calacanis?

  No, literally, we, it's 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, I looked at that. And I was like, that's a, that would be a nice one. But the, the truth is, you know, and I had a couple of people move here a couple of 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 is 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, I did three of the great cities in this country.

• 20:04Jason Calacanis?

  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 it, it, all these different industries and people pursuing stuff. I, I think this is the future.

• 20:18Travis 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. Um, I still get the, you know, the butterflies, just 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 bike in them.

• 20:42Jason Calacanis?

  And cost $400 million to build one mile.

• 20:44Travis 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.

• 20:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. 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. And it's like, nobody's on the bus. Nobody takes the bus. It's a beautiful, small town.

• 21:15Travis Kalanick?

  That whole street is empty. That whole street is empty and painted red.

• 21:19David Friedberg?

  Okay, so we all bitch and complain nonstop.

• 21:22Jason Calacanis?

  When are you leaving?

• 21:23David Friedberg?

  I'm number one, I get it.

• 21:26Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, when are you leaving?

• 21:27Travis Kalanick?

  On the chat, you're the best, by the way.

• 21:29David Friedberg?

  Okay, so let me just say.

• 21:31Jason Calacanis?

  By the way, there's

• 21:32Travis Kalanick?

  Couple glasses of wine in.

• 21:33Jason Calacanis?

  Public facing Friedberg. And he's like, you know, I think there's a better way to do this. And then there's like Darth Friedberg in group chat. He's like, these people, these morons are, they're destroying society. He is like Darth Friedberg in group chat. Am I lying? Am I lying? Is he the most?

• 21:53Travis Kalanick?

  Correct. Especially after a couple glasses of wine.

• 21:56David Friedberg?

  When I start drinking, I fall off a cliff.

• 21:58Jason Calacanis?

  And he takes pictures, he's like, fourth beverage. I'm like, oh, it's worth staying up on the group chat.

• 22:03David Friedberg?

  And then I'm like, I'll go and attack this congressman on Twitter, which I realize is probably not like them.

• 22:08Jason Calacanis?

  Delete the tweet.

• 22:09David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 22:10Jason Calacanis?

  Don't delete the tweet.

• 22:11David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I delete the tweets. Okay, so there's a group of people trying to raise 500 million dollars 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 frigging 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 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?

• 22:44Travis Kalanick?

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

• 23:04Jason Calacanis?

  Leave me alone. I want to make stuff.

• 23:06Travis 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 have 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.

• 23:47Travis Kalanick?

  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.

• 24:15Jason Calacanis?

  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, 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.

• 24:30Travis Kalanick?

  Gascon.

• 24:31Jason 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. Oh, you want to arrest the criminals?

• 24:44Travis Kalanick?

  Look.

• 24:45Jason Calacanis?

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

• 24:49Travis 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.

• 25:09Travis Kalanick?

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

• 25:15Speaker 03

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

• 25:18Travis Kalanick?

  It's it's crazy and I it's getting weird.

• 25:21David Friedberg?

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

• 25:23Travis Kalanick?

  Sorry for the darkness.

• 25:24David Friedberg?

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

• 25:24Travis Kalanick?

  I was trying to induce, I'm trying to induce dark Free Bird.

• 25:29David Friedberg?

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

• 25:32Speaker 03

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

• 25:35David Friedberg?

  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.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  Who is this?

• 25:48David Friedberg?

  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 AI one more time.

• 25:54Travis Kalanick?

  Yeah.

• 25:54David Friedberg?

  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.

• 26:04Travis Kalanick?

  Yeah.

• 26:05David Friedberg?

  Like, 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 1,200 watts to get the robot to walk four foot. Like, like break apart, not just the software, but the hardware layer. And where we add in evolving things like actuators and the materials and everything else that's going to make physical AI work and scale.

• 26:41Travis Kalanick?

  Look, a lot 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 two 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 of other places.

• 27:09Travis Kalanick?

  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, put a bowl in a paper bag without tearing the paper bag, but I am less into the, I forget the name, peri- the senses to understand awareness and touch.

• 27:46Travis Kalanick?

  I'm not in that game. So when you're mining, you're like, you're not like, you know, you know,

• 27:53David Friedberg?

  You're not threading a needle.

• 27:54Travis Kalanick?

  You're not playing tennis.

• 27:57Travis Kalanick?

  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 frickin' fast, but any humanoid demo starts with dancing and martial arts.

• 28:20David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 28:21Travis Kalanick?

  And we're sort of down specialized robot lane, which is gainfully employed robots.

• 28:28David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 28:29Travis Kalanick?

  So I know I didn't totally answer the question on like the technology piece, but-

• 28:33David Friedberg?

  I just like, do you agree that there's probably like a big opportunity for venture money and like research to go into material science?

• 28:39Travis Kalanick?

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

• 28:48David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 28:49Travis Kalanick?

  is massive.

• 28:50David Friedberg?

  And so if you get the software working, it's almost like the hardware has to catch up.

• 28:54Travis Kalanick?

  Yeah.

• 28:54David Friedberg?

  We got a lot of investments to be made.

• 28:57Travis Kalanick?

  There's a lot, yeah.

• 28:58Jason Calacanis?

  Well, actually, it's good that you bring this up. You know, one of the things you pioneered at Uber was capital as a weapon. And you were very thoughtful about, hey, if we can take this capital off the table, then that's going to, 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.

• 29:28Travis Kalanick?

  Yeah.

• 29:29Jason Calacanis?

  Now that you've got, and people are starting to understand.

• 29:32Travis Kalanick?

  Yeah.

• 29:32Jason Calacanis?

  Starting today.

• 29:33Travis Kalanick?

  Yeah.

• 29:33Jason Calacanis?

  How big your vision is, capital as a weapon.

• 29:37Travis Kalanick?

  Yeah.

• 29:37Jason Calacanis?

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

• 29:39Travis 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, it didn't matter how good your app was. Because Masa is going to put a billion dollars into your competitor and you're going to lose 20% market share tomorrow. So a critical competency, in fact, your world-class competencies, one of them has to be raising capital. Need to do it better than everybody else. And if you don't, you are going to lose.

• 30:13David Friedberg?

  Let me ask one follow-up to that. Sorry, you go ahead. But the Middle East.

• 30:16Travis Kalanick?

  Yeah.

• 30:17David Friedberg?

  I've heard theories the last couple of 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?

• 30:34Travis Kalanick?

  So, look, our Middle East business was supposed to go public in January. And the Saudi market went down 20% over like a two-month period. And that was like a massive damper on the situation. Now, part of that was because the oil prices had gone down so dramatically. And if you went into KSA, you went to the Kingdom, everybody's like, we need, we need oil prices to go up. You know, that's the other side of the equation. So I don't know what hap- 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.

• 31:17Travis Kalanick?

  And I'm not out there calling while a war is going on and saying, hey, guys, you got some money. So I don't know exactly what's going to happen. But if you are an optimist and you're like, okay, this isn't, this is not going on forever, just like the tariffs. It was the end of the world and then it wasn't.

• 31:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 31:35Travis Kalanick?

  Very quickly.

• 31:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 31:37Travis Kalanick?

  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.

• 31:49Jason Calacanis?

  Kicks in.

• 31:50Travis Kalanick?

  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.

• 31:58Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 31:58Travis Kalanick?

  In very massive ways, yeah.

• 32:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, it, 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.

• 32:14David Friedberg?

  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?

• 32:21Jason Calacanis?

  And what did you learn in China?

• 32:22David Friedberg?

  Well, 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.

• 32:28Travis 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 of decades in a row, you're like, damn.

• 32:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 32:45Travis Kalanick?

  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 is 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.

• 33:27Jason Calacanis?

  They're hungry.

• 33:29Travis Kalanick?

  So, does anybody remember the 2008 Olympics in Beijing? Anybody? Does anybody, this is a little bit, you're down a 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 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?

• 34:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 34:11Travis Kalanick?

  We can, there's a way-

• 34:12Jason Calacanis?

  Don't go into the stands.

• 34:14Travis 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. Um, I have a employee who, because we, we're, 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 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.

• 34:59Travis Kalanick?

  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? As an example.

• 35:18Jason Calacanis?

  Some normalcy would-

• 35:19Travis 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-

• 35:36Travis Kalanick?

  All over the place, came from other places for their own version of the American dream, God bless.

• 35:42Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg.

• 35:42Travis Kalanick?

  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, China's wild. So let's, uh, let's keep our eye on the ball and let's, let's give them a run for their money too.

• 35:56Jason Calacanis?

  Give it up for TK. All right, well done, brother.

• 35:59Speaker 04

  Thank you. That's great.

• 36:01Jason Calacanis?

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

• 36:09David Friedberg?

  Texas native.

• 36:10Speaker 04

  Yes, born, born in Houston.

• 36:12David Friedberg?

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

• 36:20Speaker 04

  Forty-two years ago in my dorm room at Dobie at UT, uh, about 10 days before I finished my freshman semester.

• 36:30David Friedberg?

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

• 36:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's been some bumps in the road, but yeah, it's generally, generally worked out okay. Yeah, we'll have about a hundred and forty billion in revenue this year, so.

• 36:46David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it's okay.

• 36:48Jason Calacanis?

  It compounds over time, doesn't it?

• 36:50Speaker 04

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

• 36:55David Friedberg?

  That's how it goes.

• 36:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:57David Friedberg?

  It's just that easy. 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 has it just always worked?

• 37:15Speaker 04

  You know, I think Texas has had a, uh, you know, low tax, pro-growth, uh, environment for a long time and pro, you know, sort of progressive business climate. And, you know, if you sort of look at the, 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 US economy. And, you know, you 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

• 38:00Speaker 04

  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, a long history of innovative pioneering spirit and entrepreneurship. And it's been a fantastic place for us.

• 38:42Jason Calacanis?

  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, got to spend 10 years in LA and in the last 12 in the Bay Area. And what's happening there is incredibly un-American, and they're decelerating when compared. And I think maybe the gap, 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, LA, or in the Bay Area."

• 39:21Speaker 04

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

• 39:55Jason Calacanis?

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

• 40:01Speaker 04

  They let you do stuff here, basically, you know?

• 40:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, 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. And 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.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  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. Lot of power, lot of land. And it's, and you can build stuff, right? So there's, 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,

• 41:15Speaker 04

  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, we introduced the, the first H100 server. It was literally a couple of weeks before ChatGPT was announced. And, you know, the progression of our business in that area has sort of gone from like 2 billion to 10 billion to 25 billion to this year will be like 50 billion. So, so tremendous growth. And when, when you think about what these models are creating.

• 41:59Speaker 04

  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're continuing to improve. And so we just see a lot more demand than supply. And it's happening not just in the hyperscalers and the cloud service providers. It's happening in 4,000 enterprises where we're building these Dell AI factories. It's happening in Sovereign AI, you know, like Palantir.

• 42:42Speaker 04

  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, uh, large companies. Think of like 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 we said, well, what, what are you doing? And they, they were, they were kind of taking, uh, 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.

• 43:25Speaker 04

  And of course, um, they needed a lot of help in, in doing that because it was sort of a complicated thing. So about two years ago, we, we put together this product that we, we, 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.

• 43:49David Friedberg?

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

• 43:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's very helpful, actually.

• 44:01David Friedberg?

  So just for folks to understand that a little bit, like 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.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 44:15David Friedberg?

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

• 44:18Speaker 04

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

• 44:20David Friedberg?

  That's a 10-year deal.

• 44:21Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 44:22David Friedberg?

  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?

• 44:50Speaker 04

  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.

• 45:06David Friedberg?

  Right away, it gets there.

• 45:07Speaker 04

  I mean, it, 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 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, all right, what's the trajectory of the improvement of the tools? What outcome are we trying to create? And now let's simplify and standardize the processes, get all the tools together, get all the data together, and then apply the technology.

• 45:52Speaker 04

  And this really has to be done in kind of a tops-down way. You can't sort of do it spontane- you know, in, silos are not going to spontaneously improve themselves and often that means that you're completely changing the way the organization works.

• 46:10David Friedberg?

  It's like a wholesale re-architecture.

• 46:12Speaker 04

  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, 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 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, and so we've been dramatically changing our business.

• 46:57Speaker 04

  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%.

• 47:23Jason 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, you know, client server, the network revolution, online, internet.

• 47:36Speaker 04

  Internet, cloud, mobile.

• 47:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So each one of those, we saw a massive disruption. We're talking 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. But it took a decade or two, and this one's happening a lot faster, yeah?

• 47:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, this one, I think it's, it's like, you know, a quarter is like a year. Maybe it's five times faster or something like that. But, but back to your question, I, 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, you know, 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, and show the boss, hey, we did AI, you know? The board said, we gotta do AI. We gotta do AI. We made an app. Are you proud of you, boss? Yeah. And. Look at what I made. Exactly. And I also think, you know, is an important point about, about this, which is.

• 48:40Speaker 04

  You know, the barrier to technology adoption is not technology. It's culture and leadership and courage, right? And so

• 48:51David Friedberg?

  Willingness to change and

• 48:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, 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 have to be very uncomfortable. You're like, well, we're gonna stop doing that. Well, we don't need this anymore.

• 49:06David Friedberg?

  Particularly if your bonus is dependent on not messing things up. 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 Macy's.com versus Sears Roebuck, right?

• 49:27Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 49:27David Friedberg?

  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 gonna have their businesses are gonna transition successfully and those that aren't, and they're gonna die? And is this really gonna, are we gonna see AI native businesses in every industry? Come in and just disrupt everything?

• 50:01Speaker 04

  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,

• 50:24David Friedberg?

  Because they see all the new companies on their platform.

• 50:26Speaker 04

  Exactly. And so when you, 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 on to 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, three years ago. And I think, you know, you, you, you, you have to be bold and you gotta go make those changes to, to

• 51:09Speaker 04

  Not only survive this, but to thrive. And I think about is how do we prepare our company to be ready for the 2030s?

• 51:17David Friedberg?

  Right, 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.

• 51:30Speaker 04

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

• 51:33David Friedberg?

  And the AI lets everyone do everything.

• 51:35Speaker 04

  When we have better tools, we can do way more things, right? And when I hear people say, oh, you know, maybe we're just gonna 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 gonna do a whole lot more things. We're gonna solve a lot more problems. We're gonna accelerate scientific discovery.

• 52:03David Friedberg?

  That's what I'm most excited about, yeah.

• 52:04Speaker 04

  We're gonna invent all sorts of new things. We're gonna solve all sorts of problems that haven't been solved. And, you know, that's super exciting.

• 52:14David Friedberg?

  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 re-architect the industry, do you think?

• 52:38Speaker 04

  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 industry. Think about wherever data is being created, you want the AI infrastructure and the inference, you know, close to the data.

• 53:20Speaker 04

  You know, there, there, 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.

• 53:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 53:34Speaker 04

  Costs quite a bit more. So, you know, the, 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, you know, tokens being generated on your phone, on your PC, in every embedded piece of equipment. And, 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.

• 54:19Jason Calacanis?

  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, now they're

• 54:43Speaker 04

  Dell.com.

• 54:44Jason Calacanis?

  What did I say? Dell.com. Yeah.

• 54:47Speaker 04

  You said ordering from Dell, calling us up. They, they, they order online usually.

• 54:50Jason Calacanis?

  They order online now. Yes.

• 54:51Speaker 04

  We have this thing called the internet.

• 54:53Jason Calacanis?

  They do. Yes. It works out pretty well. But this is incredible that they're like all stacking computers and, and running, you know, 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 ALLIN.

• 55:26Jason Calacanis?

  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?

• 55:46Speaker 04

  I don't know if everyone will have a $10,000 desktop, but that would be great. I mean, you know.

• 55:53Speaker 04

  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 Nematron models. You've got, you know, enormous ecosystem of open source that is, you know, thriving. And certainly OpenClaw and, you know, there'll be some good discussion about that.

• 56:35Jason Calacanis?

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

• 56:42Speaker 04

  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, have the right controls and that sort of thing.

• 57:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And your take on AGI and when we're going to hit it? Like, 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?

• 57:28Speaker 04

  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've sort of hit some kind of threshold where just the quality of the models 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, you know, a few months or nine months' time, you know, it's just amazing the speed of innovation. Yeah.

• 58:10Speaker 04

  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.

• 58:27David Friedberg?

  I think the auto research is, 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?

• 59:10Speaker 04

  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?

• 59:16David Friedberg?

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

• 59:17Speaker 04

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

• 59:21David Friedberg?

  Yeah. 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. We're doing like a teardown, be like, hey, how would we build the business differently today?

• 59:33Speaker 04

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

• 59:41David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 59:42Speaker 04

  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, you know, our path to that.

• 59:55David Friedberg?

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

• 1:00:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I saw that.

• 1:00:06Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:00:11David Friedberg?

  ICE was better than AI.

• 1:00:13Jason Calacanis?

  People liked ICE, masked agents.

• 1:00:16David Friedberg?

  More than they like AI.

• 1:00:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Speaker 04

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

• 1:00:30David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  Right? And, you know, maybe if we called it linear algebra.

• 1:00:35David Friedberg?

  Matrix multiplication.

• 1:00:36Speaker 04

  Calculus and statistics instead.

• 1:00:38David Friedberg?

  Matrix multiplier.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

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

• 1:00:41David Friedberg?

  Yeah. But do you think, do you think we're gonna have?

• 1:00:44Jason Calacanis?

  No, I, 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. That this could help with housing costs. This could help with food costs.

• 1:00:57David Friedberg?

  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 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 gotta stop building all the data centers. You know, like that kind of stuff. And, and how much are you really?

• 1:01:23Speaker 04

  I, I tend to be, you know, more optimistic and, and, um, you know, I, I do, I do think that in all technology cycles, you get sort of these network effects. And, uh, that's kind of inevitable. But I also think, you know, uh, we're gonna do more with the tools. You, you do have this acceleration of all sorts of great things. I mean, education can dramatically improve. Scientific discovery, healthcare, energy, you know, all sort of the, the unsolved problems can, can be accelerated. Ultimately, I think it's, it's amplification of human potential and capability. And

• 1:02:07David Friedberg?

  Extending the frontier too.

• 1:02:08Speaker 04

  And, and, and, 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?

• 1:02:22Speaker 04

  Right, it's like software that runs on your computer. So, you know, somebody says, "Well, we don't, we don't want that." It's like, how do you stop total software?

• 1:02:32David Friedberg?

  How are you gonna, how are you gonna 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.

• 1:02:42Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know that it's passed, right? It's being proposed.

• 1:02:43David Friedberg?

  Oh, proposed, yes.

• 1:02:44Jason Calacanis?

  It's being proposed that you can't give legal and health advice.

• 1:02:47Speaker 04

  We're anti-software, it's like...

• 1:02:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, well, also anti-books and advice. So if you were gonna look it up in a book, but were you dropping into your Bernie Sanders right there?

• 1:02:55David Friedberg?

  That was my Bernie Sanders.

• 1:02:57Jason Calacanis?

  Michael Dowd, the 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?

• 1:03:11David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:12Jason Calacanis?

  This is a good one you're doing.

• 1:03:14David Friedberg?

  Yeah. Can we talk about Invest America?

• 1:03:15Speaker 04

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

• 1:03:18Jason 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 gonna buy things that their parents never asked for.

• 1:03:29Speaker 04

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

• 1:03:34Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:03:42Speaker 04

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

• 1:03:45Jason Calacanis?

  Brad's here?

• 1:03:47Speaker 04

  There he is.

• 1:03:47Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:03:52Speaker 04

  So, you know, I heard about...

• 1:03:54Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:04:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right.

• 1:04:01Speaker 04

  I, I...

• 1:04:02Jason Calacanis?

  How did this go down, Michael?

• 1:04:03Speaker 04

  I, I heard about this idea in 2021 from Brad. And I thought, you know, that's a, 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 Invest America Act was, was passed. And you know, now we have thousands of companies that are joining in and matching the government's contribution.

• 1:04:40Speaker 04

  And you know, Susan and I made a big announcement, giving $250 to 25 million children in zip codes where the median income is.

• 1:04:52Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:05:01Speaker 04

  What do you think Bernie? Do you approve?

• 1:05:03Jason Calacanis?

  I could go J. Cal this way. I just want to pause on this because it is one of the greatest philanthropic gifts in the history of humanity. And I, 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 five, six, seven billion dollars or this is?

• 1:05:27Speaker 04

  It's $250 to 25 million children, ages two to 10, in zip codes where the median income is $150,000 or less. It's 6.25 billion dollars.

• 1:05:40Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:05:48Speaker 04

  But they have to sign up to claim the accounts.

• 1:05:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:05:52Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:05:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:59Speaker 03

  First, thanks for having me up.

• 1:06:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Speaker 03

  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'd been talking about it on the All In Pod. We had a lot of momentum. But behind the scenes, Trump gets elected. And so it's April, that we're in the middle of the tariff strife, April 25. We 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, 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.

• 1:06:44Speaker 03

  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 should the text say? And you and I had a conversation and you, you know, uh...

• 1:07:02David Friedberg?

  The text to DJT.

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  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. And, you know, if it were Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton may have done the same thing.

• 1:07:26Speaker 04

  And this, 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?

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  Exactly. So, and to the prior conversation, while Michael and I first talked about it,

• 1:07:42Speaker 03

  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...

• 1:08:17Jason Calacanis?

  Michael Dell, tremendous American. I have one, just one, one punch up. The name Invest America, Trump accounts. What do you think?

• 1:08:30David Friedberg?

  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?

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, great question. So, 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, 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...

• 1:09:23Speaker 04

  We thought we'd just go bigger.

• 1:09:25Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:09:33Speaker 03

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

• 1:09:35Jason Calacanis?

  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 dialogue?

• 1:09:52Speaker 04

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

• 1:09:59Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, have you called anybody, Michael? Did you call them and ask them?

• 1:10:04Speaker 03

  Michael and I chair the Invest America Giving Committee. And we're ambitious guys.

• 1:10:09Jason Calacanis?

  You're knocking on doors.

• 1:10:10Speaker 04

  We've had a few conversations.

• 1:10:12Jason Calacanis?

  You're texting people.

• 1:10:14Speaker 03

  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'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 1st, 2027, will automatically get an event, will get a Trump account, right? At birth, stapled to their social security card. The $1,000 has to be reauthorized every four years. Okay? But the accounts don't. So every kid, this is social security 2.0.

• 1:10:58Speaker 03

  This is the biggest change to the social contract in America in 50 years. 3.7 million kids a year will get an account that can compound. It's a 401k from birth. And yes, we're going to have a lot of announcements, but it's not just billionaires. It's going to be companies that are donating stock on their IPOs into these accounts. It's going to be wealthy people. It's going to be states. It's going to be moms and dads. It's going to be corporations. And the estimate is over 15 years. We can move $5 trillion into the pockets of families that would have otherwise had zero.

• 1:11:37Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:11:55David Friedberg?

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

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:12:04David Friedberg?

  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 don't have to have this fake Ponzi scheme that we call social security. If Australia can do it, we can do it. Well, they have a defined benefit program. But I'm saying, like, everyone has an account, and they all own a piece of their future. And every time you get a payroll to tax deduction, instead of it getting eviscerated, and destroyed, and vaporized, that money actually goes into an account,

• 1:12:48David Friedberg?

  and you buy a piece of a company, and maybe you can direct it. Friedberg's getting angry.

• 1:12:51Speaker 03

  On July 4th of this year.

• 1:12:53David Friedberg?

  You're getting me wound up.

• 1:12:54Speaker 03

  So, there are four and a half million kids who've claimed their account. Almost $150,000 a day will have on the trajectory. We're on 10 million by July 4th, 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 Robin Hood app. It'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.

• 1:13:34Speaker 03

  And when moms and dads double-click into "Apple Pay $5, $10" 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 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

• 1:14:18Speaker 03

  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 and 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, 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 gonna add a little bit more to that," right? And you had a little bit of choice. That, to me, is the possibility, and I think we will end up there.

• 1:14:58Speaker 04

  And Brad, thank you for...

• 1:15:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, let's give it up for Brad Gerstein.

• 1:15:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was just gonna say, you know, 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 gonna be super easy for anybody to add 100 kids in your neighborhood, adopt a zip code, adopt a school district, adopt a town.

• 1:15:28Jason Calacanis?

  It's gonna be amazing. Give it up for one of the great entrepreneurs of our time, and an incredible fledge.