Travis Kalanick & Michael Dell Live from Austin, Texas
Guests: Travis Kalanick, Michael Dell
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents8 chapters
§01Travis Kalanick: Officially exiting stealth mode, what he's been working on§02How to automate the physical world, markets to go after§03Return to self-driving: Tesla, Waymo, and the autonomous race§04Leaving Los Angeles for Austin, the decline of truth and justice in California§05Actuators, robot hands, "Capital as a weapon," Middle East SWF impacted by Iran War§06Michael Dell: Dorm room to $140B in annual revenue, why Texas attracts founders§07Dell's $50B AI infrastructure bet§08Invest 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. T§01Travis Kalanick: Officially exiting stealth mode, what he's been working on
I don't know if some
of you knew I was an angel investor in some companies. On the count of three, what's my favorite angel investment of all time? One, three. Uber. Thank you.
Give it up, Travis Kalanick.
Appreciate you. All right. Wow.
On a big news day, Travis is here on a very big news day. You spent, wow, I guess like seven years just in the lab building. Last year, every year I ask you, Hey, you wanna come to the women's summit? You wanna say nah, it's like, I'm gonna just chill. I'm building.
Next year, hey, know, just toys available. You don't
understand I'm stealth.
I'm 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.
Thousands of employees that weren't allowed to put the company name on LinkedIn.
I mean, incredible. And I'm like, okay. And Their parents thought
they worked for the CIA.
Yeah. And then he's like, and by the way, Jay 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.
Is he, like, kinda, like, secret saying what he wasn't supposed to say?
Yeah. Right.
No. He's all about
four. That just happened. No. You can
But no.
You're out now. It. Let's go.
You're out. It's out. You're you came out of stealth today.
It's so funny.
Okay. It's so great. You came out of stealth. Well, you you talked a little bit. You came to All In Summit
last Is fair? You say you're coming out of stealth today. Is that right?
Well, look.
Let's just start with what that meant for our employees, because again, imagine if you're at a multi thousand person company and every single employee has stealth on their LinkedIn, including salespeople. Okay. Including recruiters. Like it was, they were living life on hard mode.
It was kind of fun too, right?
Mean, yeah. It
was like, it's kind
of cool. What the, what's, what is this? Why are there why is this massive density of stealth Right. Startup people in Los Angeles? What is happening over there?
Yeah. Yeah. Also, technically, name of the company in different countries was very generic names of companies.
I mean, everything was designed to be stealth. Right. So we operate in 30 countries. In The US, the kitchens product is known as Cloud Kitchens. In Korea, it's Kitchen Valley.
In The Middle East, it's Nama. In Latin America, parts of Latin America, it's Casino Sequeltas. I mean, you get the idea.
You can't even remember all the names or all the code I
have think about it.
Yeah. Have think it through. We have
four in China, you know, it's like all over the place. Yeah.
But things have gone really well and you've been a little acquisitive. So tell us about the branding today that you're announcing and then maybe some of the acquisitions and evolution of the company. You're not just renting kitchen space.
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 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 this is a little out there. CPU manipulates bits, manipulates atoms? Manufacturing. Storage stores bits, what stores atoms? Real estate.
Network moves bits from point A to point B, what moves atoms? That's transportation or logistics. So you have these three core computing resources in an atoms based computer. The name of my company was very obtuse and purposely designed to be as boring as hell was called City Storage Systems. So that's digitized real estate in an atoms based computer.
Our first computer being a food computer. What does that mean? Manufacturing, real estate and logistics for food. And so you start to get there and the idea that the mission was infrastructure for better food. The idea was, can you get a meal that's prepared and delivered to you so efficient that it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store.
If you can do that, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car. But in the Uber day, the roads were there. The cars are unused. You just had to put an app in the app store. It wasn't that easy, but kind of that easy.
In this world, you can't do this on a restaurant. Restaurant doesn't have When I left Uber, 13% of all San Francisco miles were Uber miles. You can't get and that was ten, nine years ago. You can't get there on food, on restaurants. They they have like 20% capacity.
Uber Eats and DoorDash fill it, but the infrastructure to do high capacity, high scale sort of industrial production is just not there. And the logistics just not there. It just doesn't work. That's why on e commerce you go through Amazon big ass warehouses with awesome logistics. You've got to do the same thing when food goes to e commerce.
That was a lie. Yeah. Okay. So bottom line is it's awesome. We do this food computation stuff.
§02How to automate the physical world, markets to go after
We're doing more computers now. And so the name of the company is called Adams. And it's, let's say the mission is physical automation to transform industries and move the world. And so we have our food computer I talked about, then we do, we're doing mining.
Mining as in mining Not data mining.
We're talking about atoms guys. Yeah. So of course you do some mining data mine 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 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 gotta have a wheelbase. So it's just part of the equation. And a lot of people go look at Tesla, it's great. Look at Waymo, awesome.
They're cruising around Austin, of course. But there's so many things that move. It's not just a ride sharing thing. And so obviously including mining equipment, that's doing its thing. So you guys, that's the general sort of idea.
And we acquired a company on the mining stuff, a company called Pronto. Or it's about to close. It's we're we're inches from closing is the Right. Way to put it.
What were they doing? What was their business, Pronto? Automating mining equipment. Were they based?
They're based in San Francisco.
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 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. Yeah.
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 this to to the second power. So it becomes, you know, geometrically more expensive to go deeper.
But the deeper you go, you're the more you're able to kind of not worry about getting the right location. So does automation unlock that capacity?
Automation definitely does. Mean, because you mean, also, it's like, man, does Boring Company have some good stuff going? Like, hope we were like, we're doing the mining thing, and Boring Goes makes, you know, some good tunnels for for cars to do the thing. But they're like, there's some kind of boring mechanism, 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 Sorry.
Rare. Sorry.
Rare earth.
Yeah. But it's not rare. Not uncommon in
many not of those.
Rare. It's what you have to do to the land is aggressive. And what's rare is is where the where are the places they'll let you do it, that you can also sort of get people to. When you automate, you can go to a lot of places. Well, first is all the mines that exist are way more productive.
And the second is you can then sort of justify going to places you wouldn't have been able to go before because you don't have as much of a labor footprint or a safety issue or a whole bunch of other things that then
So if it's become inhospitable, if it's regulated, 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. Yeah. And this is like a future that feels like a little bit like science fiction.
Look, we're here in Austin. 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 gotta 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, Tesla's got this. They are the Google of this era, which is what I mean by that is in the February.
If you were doing a startup in the February, the first question you would get is why isn't why isn't Google gonna kill you? Or why isn't Google just gonna do
Why are Google
They're gonna not do know that they killed you.
And before that Microsoft.
And before that was Microsoft, the late nineties. Uber had a time, 2010.
Yeah. If Uber puts that in the app?
Come on. It's like, dude, this is Uber.
I'm like,
but
you know, I think in the physical AI space, that's sort of a Tesla thing. But there's so many things to do. You gotta shoot your shot, gotta do some And
§03Return to self-driving: Tesla, Waymo, and the autonomous race
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, know, Waymo's making great progress. Tesla's making great progress.
Pick a winner. Like pick a winner between Tesla, Waymo, Uber, or or like we're we're Uber Uber Uber seems to be building a network of stuff.
Yeah. I mean, number of
Pick a winner.
The number of
players in this space
is crazy now. Right? Like
Yeah. Look. There's I think there's more noise. There's more bark than there is bite right now. Look, I think Waymo obviously is ahead, the existence proof is there.
Their issue is manufacturing and scale and urgency and fierceness like
let's come on. Let's win. Let's go.
Yeah.
You know, Uber had an autonomy project back in the day to 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, fundamentals, science, hard mode times a 100. And the question is, do they get there in what timescale? If if they and, like, honestly, everybody's like, could happen tomorrow, could happen in five years.
And I think that it 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? Yep. Those are the pace.
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.
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 gonna 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?
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 chat GPT 3.5. And you're like, holy
Yeah. It's legit.
Woah. 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. Yeah. And the fun part about it is machine learning, deep learning, this kind of thing for many years, decades was like inscrutable. I don't know what the thing is thinking, it just spits out an answer and I know it's correct. Well, now you can have a conversation with it, Right?
Like, imagine if it's driving your car and there's different agents and one's just driving, the other's like, yo, look out over there. Yeah. It's like, oh, just like how we roll. It was like somebody does that, you're like you're like, honey, that's like 200 meters away. We're gonna be
okay. Yeah.
Jason and don't call each other honey,
but I got you. Yes. Like, sweetie.
You know? Yeah. Okay. So anyways, that was odd, wasn't it?
Okay. That was strange. Okay.
I didn't mean it that way.
He always does.
Yeah. Didn't mean it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I meant it.
Yeah. Okay. Language is a beautiful compression mechanism that humans use a 100 watts of energy. Like and you put that in the scheme of things of like AI training, AI energy, the power plants that are built to do the thing that isn't even at human strength yet. Okay?
The Waymo machine takes a 100 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. And you know what guys, and this is sort of obvious, like it doesn't matter what the cloud is doing if I'm driving.
But like the car doesn't know that, it's pulling in every fricking data point and processing everything. It's, 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.
§04Leaving Los Angeles for Austin, the decline of truth and justice in California
People don't know that you've moved to Texas as of most people don't know, but it's it's out there. Yeah. You moved here in December. So now you're a resident of Austin.
Yeah. I was I brought thank you. It's
very exciting for me. We've been getting to play some backgammon.
Backgammon cards.
Cards. We're having a good job.
So I've had a place on Lake Austin since 2021, and, I go there. I'm an avid water skier, like
You're impressive at water skiing, I have to say, like
So I've had a place in Austin for five years, freaking love it. It's my weekend. I would go 15 weekends a year.
What do think is gonna happen in California?
It's pretty messed up. Look, I I grew up in Cali. Like, I grew up in Los Angeles. My parents were born and bred in Los Angeles, which basically makes them the founders of LA. Okay?
But so I have a lot of heart, like my whole family, everything, you know? It's pretty it's pretty it's yeah. I don't wanna
A lot a lot of us feel that way.
I don't wanna get the violin out, but it just Yeah. But It's heartbreaking. The play yeah. Totally. Wait.
It's just a place you grew up. It's your home, you know? When you have to leave. But it's getting weird out there, and, it feels like it's getting weirder. And at some point, that's it's just too weird.
It's too weird.
Do you think everyone's gonna leave? I mean, it started with Elon, and it was like
Yeah. He was
gonna leave. Don't want Elon here. And then he's like, message received.
It announced.
Right. And then it kinda 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 Like, Joe
Rogan, comedy, music, New Yorkers, restaurateurs. I mean, this place is the
I'm fun 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
Look. My the rest of my team's like, we're when are we moving? You know? They're like
And how are you dealing with that? So that was the question was
like Gotta buy HOKA's on the lake.
There are literally dozens of startup CEOs of, call it, successful or growing companies that I talked to who are like, dude, I wanna leave, but I got employees here. I got an office here. I got a facility here. I build stuff here. Yeah.
How am I gonna leave?
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 gotta make the move and lead and do it. And so that's kinda what that's kinda the process almost like a mourning process I went through, and that's just what it is.
And you're setting up a team here?
Yeah. Of course. And I got that office right on the lake.
Did you get that?
It's The one we are negotiating no. All good. No. No. It's all good.
We're negotiating right now.
Good.
But I'm gonna jet ski to work.
No, literally, it's a true story. Last year, we were 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 would be a nice one. But the the truth is, you know, and I had a couple people move here a couple years ago, and they all had the same reaction. Oh my god. I'm living in a place that's twice as big for half as much. The people here are dope.
The food is dope. Everybody here has got this sense that we're building the future and it's just fun and world positive. And, you know, for me, I got to live New York, LA, San Francisco. I 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. 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.
And cost $400,000,000
And it's to build one 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.
Totally. Yeah.
They 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.
San Francisco is Austin. That whole street
is empty. It's painted red. Okay. So we all bitch and complain nonstop. Okay.
I I remember the chat. When are you leaving? Like, I'm number one. I get it.
Free bird, when are you leaving?
Okay. Well,
so On the chat, you're the best, by the I'm
like Okay.
Let me just By the way, there's Yeah.
Couple glasses Public of wine
facing free bird.
Yeah. 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
Correct. Especially after a couple glasses of wine.
Yeah. When I start drinking,
like, he's like, I fall off
a cliff.
And he
takes pictures.
He's like, fourth beverage. And we're
like Yeah. Oh, it's worth staying
in that bubble group chat.
Yeah. And then I'm like, I'll go and attack this congressman on Twitter, which I realized
that you're
probably not
gonna tweet. Yeah. Don't delete the tweet.
Yeah. I delete the tweets. Okay. So there's a group of people trying to raise $500,000,000 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 pack? Do you think that people can actually get their together that even if 500,000,000 came in, there's a way to kinda turn around the state, fix some of the policies. You think it's too
late?
I don't think that but look, I would go I 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 You failed. It was that kind of vibe.
It was just everybody was like that.
Leave me alone. Wanna make stuff.
Yeah. I just I I'm not I don't do that. And that's obviously this is not a thing anymore. In California, I think the 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've 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, and justice are the immune system for society. When the immune system is suppressed, all the social ills flare up. So look for the places where truth and justice are being deteriorated, are being degraded, and say how do we get at that? Because if you get at that, everything else downstream will be better.
So that's kind of how I look at things and how I also determine whether the world's getting better or worse. When I say weird, I'm talking about truth and justice. That's what I mean when I say, oh, man, it's getting weird. It's getting weirder, which means it's weird. I'm just talking about truth and justice.
Well, I mean, and 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
Gascon.
Yeah. Gascon. I mean, we basically lost the script. You're running the city for the criminals. It literally is like a Batman movie.
It's like Bane.
I mean, here You want
to arrest the criminals.
Look. I was born in the darkness. I mean, these guys are lunatics.
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 wanna protect people.
They want the bad guys to be dealt with, and they 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.
Yeah. Nobody's got their back, and they're not allowed to do their job.
It's it's crazy, and I it's getting weird.
Okay. Hey. I wanna just go back to AI.
Sorry for the darkness.
Don't know. I think it's good.
I was trying to induce I'm trying to induce Yeah. Dark free bird.
Oh, I
brought dark. Yes.
I mean, someone bring me a tequila. I'll get going.
Yeah. Let's do it. Can we get
a couple tequila?
It was funny.
I went on this podcast yesterday, and the guy and the 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 went 10 x and
it
was Who is this? Yeah. So it'll come out in a couple weeks, but I was like, it got me going. Okay. I wanna talk about physical AI one more time.
§05Actuators, robot hands, "Capital as a weapon," Middle East SWF impacted by Iran War
Yeah. 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. Yeah.
Like like, the 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 Yeah. Like, break apart not just the software, but the hardware layer.
And where are we at in evolving things like actuators and the materials and everything else that's gonna make physical AI work and scale?
Well, look, a lot with the questions you're asking are going down humanoid lane, which is like this thing. And 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 other places. Look. I'm in the nonhumanoid 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 a bowl in a paper bag without tearing the paper bag.
But I am less into the, I forget the name, perio they're they're the the senses to understand awareness and touch. I'm not in that game. So when you're mining, you're like, you're not like, you know, you know.
You're not threatening a
new one. 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.
Yeah. And we're sort of down specialized robot lane, which is gainfully employed robots. Yeah. So I know I didn't totally answer
the question on like the
technology piece, but I just like, do you
agree that there's probably like opportunity for venture money and research to go into material science, extra points? Yes.
For sure. Because if the physical AI stack manipulation and all of the related things around it is massive.
And so if you get the software working, it's almost like the hardware has to catch up. Yes.
But we got a lot of investment to idea.
To catch actually, it's 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 gonna be an advantage versus the competitors, and these other competitors couldn't get that capital. That's now, I think people have seen that playbook and they're like, Sam Walton's like, that was smart.
Let me try. And it's at a different scale. Now that you've come out of Stealth
Yeah.
Now that you've got and and people are starting to understand
Yeah.
Just starting today
Yeah.
How big your vision is, capital as a weapon. Yeah. This is, I guess, in your plan. Yeah?
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's gonna put a billion dollars into your competitor, and you're gonna 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.
Let me ask one follow-up to that. Sorry. You go ahead. But The Middle East. Yeah.
I've heard theories the last couple days that big capital seekers are kinda right now because of what's going on in The Middle East with the Iran war. Dubai, Qatar, Saudis are kind of gonna close-up the capital flowing to The US right now. And is that real? I mean, you think that's a real threat?
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 it's part of that was because the oil prices had gone down so dramatically. And if you went into KSA, 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 like, I don't I'm not in the market raising money right at this moment, and this is a two week old thing that I, you know, look, I see the news just like everybody else, and I'm not out there calling while a war is going on and saying, hey, guys, you got some money? So I don't know exactly what's gonna 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. Yeah. Very quickly.
Yeah.
If you're an optimist about this situation and it won't be the end of the world, maybe even a better world, then we get to a better place and I think progress, abundance, the golden age happens. And a lot of it is about all the things that are happening in AI, in physical AI, and and and just the productivity gains that are coming in very massive ways. Yeah.
Yeah. And 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.
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?
And what did you learn in China?
What would yeah. What would you learn and and what do you think would be great for America? Like, what would you like to see and be like, man, that's gonna set us all up? No more
Look. Here's the thing. If you go to China right now and you go and just take a tour of the manufacturing that's going on there, just the manufacturing base, the cities, especially if you've gone to China for a couple decades in a row, you're like, damn. Yeah. You so let's just do two things.
You go to Shenzhen, which before felt like Kansas City, but fifty 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, f.
They're hungry.
So does anybody remember the two thousand eight 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 mofos are taking over.
At least that's what they wanna 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 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 nineties, you know?
Yes. We can we there there's
a Don't way go into the stands.
Yeah. Yeah. You know? There's a way to do this right, and there's a way to do it like adults. I hope that's where we would end up.
I have a employee who because we we'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. K? They both live in China. They're both from China originally.
K? But wanna want 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 that 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?
Some normalcy would
Something. You know, I'm just saying. Now I agree, like, there are ways to do immigration properly. Like, we f'd it up super bad. Don't even get me started.
But there's also there's good migration too. Like, a lot of great innovators all over the place came from other places for their own version of the American dream, God bless. Friedberg. And we don't have to That doesn't have to be a negative thing. And so I'd like to see more of that and yeah, China's 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.
Give it up for TK.
Alright. Well done, brother. Thanks, bro.
§06Michael Dell: Dorm room to $140B in annual revenue, why Texas attracts founders
That's good.
Good to see you, brother. Wow. Michael Dell. My lord.
Texas native.
Michael Yes. Born born in Houston.
Well, I missed the the opening. We we jumped to the music, but you started Dell Computer here in Austin with a thousand bucks.
Forty two years ago in my dorm room at Adobe at UT about ten days before I finished my freshman semester.
Amazing. And it's been working out pretty good.
Yeah. There's been some bumps in the road but Right. Yeah. It's generally generally worked out okay. Yeah.
We'll have about a 140,000,000,000 in revenue this year. So
Yeah. It's
okay. It it compounds over time, doesn't it?
Yeah. Yeah. You know, you start small and just keep adding and
there you
go. That's how
it goes.
Yeah. It's just that easy.
But why Texas? Like, think this is an important thing. We're in Austin. Jason lives here. David Sachs lives here now.
More people are moving from California to Austin. Why Austin? Why Texas? Why does it work here? And is it getting better?
Is it just always worked?
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 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've got, Austin is sort of just about in the top 10 cities in The United States so you've got, when that happens, you'll have four of the 10 largest cities in America in Texas. One out of 10 children born in The United States born in Texas. More New York Stock Exchange companies in Texas than in New York or anywhere else and you know, you've got 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.
And part of this, think Freeburg 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 twelve 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 in the Bay Area.
Yeah. Well, I've got a lot of new friends and neighbors, you know, that that have that have that have come and certainly, I mean, if if you look at the the the migration statistics, Texas has attracted an enormous number of people and look, I mean when you look at the environment here and compare it to the other kind of situations that are going on, it's very attractive but 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.
Yeah. Elon had a great experience when he was building the gigafactory over here.
They let you do stuff here basically, They you
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 the data center boom that's going on in Texas that maybe people aren't paying attention to.
Sure. Well, there's obviously been enormous build out of AI infrastructure. And that requires lots of new data centers, lots of power. Texas has an enormous advantage there relative to other states. A lot of power, a lot of land.
And 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 the 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 h 100 server.
It was literally a couple weeks before ChatGPT was announced. And, you know, the progression of our business in that area sort of gone from, like, 2,000,000,000 to 10,000,000,000 to 25,000,000,000 to this year it'll be like 50,000,000,000. 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 sixty 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 the models are amazing, but they're also the worst they'll ever be and they continue to improve. And so we just see a lot more demand than supply. And it's happening not just in the hyperscalers and the cloud service providers. It's happening in 4,000 enterprises where we're building these these Dell AI factories. It's happening in Sovereign AI, you know, like with 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 think of, like, Fortune 100. And they started, you know, buying these AI servers from us. And and they kinda knew what they were doing.
Right? You know? And and we said, well, what what are you doing? Right? And 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.
§07Dell's $50B AI infrastructure bet
How do you think about the payback time on the investment that's being made? The administration put in place this accelerated depreciation rule or the
Yeah. That's very helpful, actually.
Yeah. Yeah.
Just for folks to understand that a little bit, like, if you spend a $100,000,000,000 this year building data centers and buying infrastructure for those data centers, you get to write off a 100% of that this year Correct. To deduct it. So you don't pay taxes. You pay way much fewer taxes.
And that's in place for ten years, I think.
That's a
ten year deal.
Right. Right.
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 gonna 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, 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?
You know, I I I can tell you in in our business, in in our company, we definitely see plenty of use cases where the ROI or the improvement in productivity efficiency is 20% or or greater.
Right away, it gets there.
I mean, it it you know, it's not like you just hit a button and you get 20%. Right? There 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 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. And this really has to be done in kind of a tops down way. You can't sort of do it spontaneously in, 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.
It's like a wholesale rearchitecture.
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 gonna be faster and more innovative and more successful and lower cost, and they were gonna put us out of business. And the only way we were gonna prevent that is is we're gonna become that company. And here's how we're gonna 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. 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 Yeah. Of this size. And, you know, this quarter we guided that it would grow even faster, like a 100%.
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, mobile. Cloud, mobile. 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 mail room. All these things got abstracted away by the PC and networked PC revolution but it took a decade or two and this one's happening a lot faster. Yeah?
Yeah. This one I think it's it's like, you know, a quarter is like a year. May maybe it's five times faster or something like that. But but back to your question, I 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. Know, show the boss, hey, we did AI, you know.
The board said we got to do AI. Yeah. Got to do AI guys.
We need AI. Are you
you proud of me boss, you
know.
Yeah. Look at what I made.
Exactly. 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? So Willingness to change and
to stop Yeah and
you know, if you're in a business that you don't think is changing very much or you know, change is really hard, right? Have to be very uncomfortable. You're like, well, we're gonna stop doing that. Well, maybe we don't need this anymore.
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?
Right.
Right. Maybe Macy's did a better job of taking advantage of the Internet than Sears. But then there was Internet native businesses that seemed to blow them all out. And maybe Amazon's a good example or CSN stores, whatever they be, Wayfair, etcetera. What's the right way to think about this evolution in industries generally?
Are we gonna have their businesses that are gonna transition successfully and those that aren't, 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?
I believe we will. And certainly, you know, when you talk to the Carlson brothers at Stripe, they'll tell you that the rate of growth of the twenty twenty five cohort companies is about four times faster than the twenty eighteen companies and so every year, new batch of companies are growing faster and faster because they're starting with all these new tools
that Because they see all the new companies on their platform.
Exactly. And so when you think about an incumbent company that already exists, it has, let's say it's got brands, it's got balance sheets, it's got 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 and which is exactly the speech I gave to our team, you know, three three years ago and I think, you know, you you you have to be bold and you gotta go make those changes to to not only survive this, but but to but to thrive. And and, you know, I think about it is how do we prepare our company to be ready for the twenty thirties?
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 kinda came around, Sears doesn't just need to sell locally. They can sell to the world.
Well, sure. I mean, this is the point.
I mean, AI lets everyone do When
we have better tools, we can do way more things.
Right?
And you know, when it when, you know, when I hear people say, oh, you know, maybe we're just gonna have all these great tools and we we won't do more things. We'll just do the same things with fewer people. It doesn't sound right to me. I 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. Most excited about. We're we're
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 that's super exciting.
What do we have wrong on infrastructure? So the original build cycle looked a lot like everything's in a data center. Everything's gotta 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?
It's really all the above. I mean, it's not like there's one answer. I mean, 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, close to the data. There has been this rebalancing as companies have figured out everybody loves the public cloud until they get the bill. When they get the bill, they're like, wait, this is supposed to save us money. Yes. Costs quite a bit more.
So the lowest cost token is going to be the one that's generated right where the data is on the device. You're gonna 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, kind of, you know, data driven activity, right, requires some kind of computing network storage infrastructure.
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 Dell, bespoke PC. Now they're dell.com.
What did I say? Dell dot com.
Yeah. You said ordering from Dell, calling us up. They order online usually.
They order online now. Yes.
They have this thing called the internet.
They do, yes. It works out pretty well. But this is incredible that they're like all stacking computers and running local models. I was just thinking back to how much the first couple of computers I owned cost $4,000 in $19.80 dollars. And then the prices came down.
You could buy a Dell for $500, $800, like really nice laptops for that price. Use the promo code all in. It's not as
much as a
joke. But do you think there's a world where we're gonna start to see the desktop because people wanna protect that data. They wanna protect the skills they're building. They don't wanna give it to Sam Altman, put it in a cloud somewhere. They don't wanna 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?
I don't know if everyone will have $10,000 desktop but that would be great. I mean, 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 there's been enormous progress in the open source models. Google has these Gemma models, G E M M A, and they work really, really well on small machines. 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, thriving and certainly OpenCLaw and there'll be some good discussion about that.
How many people
have set up OpenCLaw? Raise your hand. Oh my Lord, that's about what, 20% of the audience here.
Yeah, so autonomous agents, big deal and certainly inside companies, there's going to be a lot more autonomous agents. There are significant security requirements that need to go with that. We need be able to authenticate and validate who these agents are and what they're doing and have the right controls and that sort of thing.
Yeah. And your take on AGI and when we're gonna hit it? Like you actually think about super intelligence 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?
I don't really know Jason. You know, think it feels like with the latest releases, we're talking about this backstage, you know the Gemini 3.1, the Opus 4.6, the OpenAI 5.4, it feels like we sort of hit some kind of threshold where the just the quality of the the models are are just tremendous and when I listen to what our teams are able to accomplish in a day or two weeks that would have taken them a few months or nine months time, it's just amazing the speed of innovation. Yeah. And so it seems to be continuing and we get all the reinforcement learning and there's also tons of private dark data that these models haven't been applied to, and that's sort of what's happening with these I
think the auto research is the that's the 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?
It's a great question. I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about that. You know, I'm I'm thinking about how how do I
Well, the rest of us are thinking
about How do I how do I run our company? I mean, that's hard enough.
Yeah. Everyone I talk to, that's the question. They're like, everyone goes to these off sites and they're like, I'm actually doing this with my management team on Monday. We're doing like a teardown be like, hey, how would we build the business differently today?
No one would know. What we've been thinking a lot about is the sort of this this reimagining question. Yeah. You know, sort of, alright. We know the trajectory of the tools.
What are the tools gonna be in twenty seven, twenty eight, twenty nine? And how do we accelerate, you know, our path to that?
How worried are you about social issues? So AI recently ranked as the most unfavorable term of a list of terms, including
president Yeah.
I saw somewhere between ISIS, the Democrats ICE, ISIS, and the Democrats. ICE was better than AI. People liked ICE, masked agents.
More than they like AI. Yeah.
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 it sort of presents itself like a human would. Yeah. Right? And, you know, maybe if we called it linear algebra Matrix multiplication. And statistics instead.
Matrix
multipliers. Maybe that would
be more friendly.
I
don't Yeah. But do we're gonna 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. Messaging aside, I mean, 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
I I tend to be, you know, more optimistic and and, you know, I I do I do think that in all technology cycles, get sort of these network effects and that's kind of inevitable. But I also think, you know, we're gonna do more with the tools. You do have this acceleration of all sorts of great things. Education can dramatically improve, scientific discovery, health care, energy, all sort of the unsolved problems can be accelerated. And ultimately, I think it's amplification of human potential and capability
and Extending the frontier too.
And by the way, we should also remember that basically what we're talking about here beyond sort of some of the advanced semiconductors and the, you know, big data centers, we're talking about software. Right?
Yeah.
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? I mean
Yeah. No. It's How are gonna how 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.
Yeah. Right? It's being proposed.
Oh, proposed. Yes.
It's being proposed. So you're You can't give legal and
health We're anti software. It's like
Yeah. Well, we're 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?
That was my Bernie Sanders.
Michael Dowell.
Do do
you 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.
Yeah.
This is a good one you're doing.
Yeah. Can we talk about Invest America?
I think he might have even criticized that, but but you know.
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.
They they don't they don't actually get the money till they're 18 years old. So that that's
that's 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.
Well, I see I see my great friend Brad Gerstner here.
Brad's here? There
he is.
Brad, come
up for this little segment here. Sit sit for a second. Let's talk about domestic America.
§08Invest 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. T
We got five minutes left here. So, you know, I
heard Everybody about the fifth bestie. Give him a round.
I know he's gonna be here.
Amen. Nice. How did this
go down, Michael? I heard
about this idea in 2021 from Brad And I thought, you know, 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 anything about that, unfortunately. And, you know, here we are, you know, a miracle. You know, the the Best America Act was was passed and, you know, now we have thousands of companies that are joining in and matching the government's contribution and, you know, Susan and I made a
big
announcement giving $250 to 25,000,000 children in zip codes where the median income is
I mean, Michael, let's just let's pause
for a second here. This is one of the greatest What
do think, Bernie? Do you approve? I
could go with J Cal this way. I just
wanna pause on this, because it is one of the greatest philanthropic gifts in the history of humanity. And I I people have just kinda glossed over to it, because there's a lot of big numbers in the world. But we're talking about you you personally, you and Susan, sat down and said, we're gonna give a number. And that number was $5.06, $7,000,000,000 or this is
It's it's $250 to 25,000,000 children ages two to 10 in zip codes the median income is a $150,000 or less. Billions of dollars. It's $6,250,000,000.
I mean, Amber, and I just wanna say something. You know, we've lived at a time where
But they have to sign up to clean the accounts. Yes. They they have accounts, but they have to sign up to clean the accounts. You know, I think we're getting a 100,000 plus kids now a day signing up. Yeah.
First, thanks for having me up. Yeah. I mean, what 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 that we're in the middle of the tariff strife, April 25. We realized there's only gonna 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 it's drafted in the senate. We have bipartisan support, but we have a window. And, like, we I have to get in the Oval Office. We have to get in the Oval Office.
And, you know, Michael said, you know, what what should the text say? And you and I had a conversation, and you, you know The You know?
The text to DJT.
Yes. I I'm not talking out of school. Listen. Biden where 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 was Yeah.
And and and the
may have done the same thing.
And 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, blue idea. Right? It's it's So
and to and to
the prior conversation, well, Michael and I first talked
about it,
This is the right thing to do. We have to reconnect the 70% of people who feel left out and left behind to the American dream. But this isn't our self interest. This is about defending the ownership society and capitalism that for two hundred and fifty 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
Michael Dell, tremendous American. I have one just one one punch up. The name, Invest America, Trump accounts. What do you think?
Were were you considering this in the context of other philanthropy? I mean, how do you how do you kinda put this together in the spectrum of how you think about giving back?
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. And 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 we just go bigger.
And what happens Brad if, you know, 10 more Michael Dells show up? And and there are dozens
of It's not a lot of Michael Dells. Let's be honest. But
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 can make a gift of significance. What if this actually becomes a movement and we change
the dialogue? Think it actually is becoming a movement instead of a moment. And and and we've, you know, we've got a lot of that queued up. Brad, why don't you Wait.
Have you called anybody, Michael? Have you did you call me? Michael and
I chair the Invest America Giving Committee.
Got it.
And we're ambitious guys. So you're You're knocking on doors.
We've we've had a few conversations.
You're texting people.
Yeah. Yeah. And so 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'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 01/01/2027 will automatically get an 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 two point o. This is the biggest change to the social contract in America in in fifty years. 3,700,000 kids a year will get an account that can compound.
It's a 401 k from birth. And, yes, we're gonna have a lot of announcements, but it's not just billionaires. It's gonna be companies that are donating stock on their IPOs into these accounts. It's gonna be wealthy people. It's gonna be states.
It's gonna be moms and dads. It's gonna be corporations. And the estimate is over fifteen years. We can move $5,000,000,000,000 into the pockets of families that would have otherwise had zero, dollars 5,000,000,000,000, 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 two things on this. If this $5,000,000,000,000 moved through government programs, it would get incinerated.
Exactly.
That's what we see happen. Yeah. 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 I'll I'll be the lead.
But can we replace Social Security in this country with a defined benefit or defined contribution like this? And eventually, everyone has a Trump account or whatever you call it. And we don't have to have this fake Ponzi scheme
that we call Social Security. We can do it.
Well, they 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 to tax deduction, instead of it getting inviscerated and destroyed and vaporized, that money actually goes into an account, you buy a piece of a company, and maybe you can direct it.
Freeburg's getting bigger.
On July 4. You're getting me wound up. So for all the there are four and a half million kids who've claimed their account, almost a $150,000 a day will have on the trajectory around 10,000,000 by July 4, our two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the country. Every one of those kids accounts, the parents and the kids on July 4, 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 thousand dollars or your $250. You're and it will show a little bit of Nvidia, a little bit of Walmart, a little bit of Dell. We decompose the S and P five hundred, 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 $510 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 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 we refused, and many people tried to get us to to to take on the broader struggle.
And we didn't do it because we knew it it it would kill this program. But but let's be clear about this. Our government requires all of us to give 10% of what we earn into Social Security. Right? It was the social contract evolution in the industrial revolution that kept 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 gonna add a little bit more to that. Right? And and and you had a little bit of choice. That to me is is the possibility, and I think we will end up there.
And and and Brad, thank you for Yeah.
Let's get it. For and
Finally. Yeah.
I'm just gonna say, you know, Brad Brad also adopted his home state of Indiana. We have Ray and Barbara Dahlia adopted their home state of Connecticut and many, many more to come. And and and look, it's gonna be super easy for anybody to add a 100 kids in your neighborhood, adopt a zip code, adopt a school district, adopt a town.
It's gonna be amazing. Give it up for one of the
great entrepreneurs of our time and an incredible pledges.