Travis Kalanick & Michael Dell Live from Austin, Texas
75m 56s
Travis Kalanick announces his company's emergence from stealth mode, rebranding from the obscure City Storage Systems to "Adams." The company's mission is to automate the physical world. Its foundational philosophy treats atoms like bits in a computer, with manufacturing, real estate, and logistics serving as the core components of an "atoms-based computer." The first application is a "food computer" through Cloud Kitchens, aiming to create ultra-efficient food preparation and delivery infrastructure. Adams is now expanding into automating mining operations, with an acquisition of Pronto pending, and developing mobility platforms for specialized robots. Kalanick analyzes the physical AI competitive field, noting Tesla's integrated strength and the uncertain timeline for a breakthrough "ChatGPT moment" for vision-based autonomy. He also confirms his relocation to Austin, Texas, expressing frustration with California's direction and enthusiasm for Austin's supportive, growth-focused environment for building the future.
I don't know if some of you knew I was an angel investor in some companies. [Laughter] On the count of three, what's my favorite angel investment of all time? One, two, three. [Cheers] Thank you. Give it up, Travis Kalanick. [Applause] 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 asked, "Hey, you want to come to the one in Summit?" You want to, "Send that." It's like, "I'm going to just chill, I'm building." Next year, "Hey, you know, it's just a business." I'm going to understand I'm stealth. I stealth. I'm stealth. Nobody knows where I am. Nobody knows what I'm doing. The employees are not allowed to put the name of the company on their LinkedIn. Thousands of employees that weren't allowed to put the company name on LinkedIn. I mean, incredible. I'm like, "Okay." Their parents thought they worked for the CIA. Yeah. By the way, Jake, you can invest. You can't announce it. You have to sign in it. You can't mention you're an investor. It's like, "Okay, no problem. I'm just happy to be able to be on the cap table." Is he like kind of like secret saying what he wasn't supposed to say? Yeah, right. You're the only one who's doing that. You're out now. You're out. You're out. It's out. You came out of stealth today. It's so funny. It's so great. You came out of stealth? Well, you've talked a little bit. You came to all ensemble. Is that fair? You say you're coming out of stealth today? Is that right? Well, 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. Many recruiters, they were living life on a hard mode. That's kind of fun, too, right? I mean, yeah. It was like, "What the, what is this? Why is this massive density of stealth start up people in Los Angeles? What is happening over there?" Yeah. Also, technically, the name of the company in different countries was very generic names of companies. I mean, everything was designed to be stealth. So we operate in 30 countries. In the US, the Kitchens product is known as Cloud Kitchens. In Korea, it's Kitchens Valley. In the Middle East, it's Nama. In Latin America, parts Latin America, it's Cassinus Aqualtus. I mean, you get the idea. You can't ever remember all the names, all the code words. I have to think about it. Yeah. To think it through. We have four in China. Yeah. It's like all over the place. Yeah. But things have gone really well. And you've been a little inquisitive. So tell us about the branding today that you're announcing and then maybe some of the acquisitions and evolution of the company. You're not just renting kitchen space. 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 a bit, 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, a little out there. CPU manipulates bits, what manipulates atoms, manufacturing, storage stores bits, what stores atoms, real estate, network moves bits from point A to point B, what moves atoms. That's transportation or logistics. So you have these three core computing resources in an atoms-based computer. The name of my company was very obtuse and purposely designed to be as boring as hell was called city storage systems. So that's digitized real estate in an atoms-based computer, our first computer being a food computer. What does that mean? Manufacturing, real estate, and logistics for food. And so you start to get there. And the idea that the mission was infrastructure for better food, the idea was can you get a meal that's prepared and delivered to you. So efficient that it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store. If you can do that, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car. But in the Uber day, the roads were there. The cars are unused. You just had to put an app in the app store. It wasn't that easy, but kind of that easy. In this world, you can't do this on a restaurant. When I left Uber, 13% of all San Francisco miles were Uber miles. You can't get- and that was 10-9 years ago. You can't get there on food, on restaurants. They have like 20% capacity. Uber eats in DoorDash, fill it. But the infrastructure to do high capacity, high-scale sort of industrial productions 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 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 Adams. And let's say the mission is physical automation to transform industries and move the world. And so we have our food computer talk about. Then we do we're doing mining. Mining as in- Mining, not data mining. We're talking about Adams guys. So of course you do some mining data mining too, but the point is physical mining. So automation of mines. And the mission there is more productive mines to power earth industries. Right? So it's got this industrial Adams vibe to it. And then on the transport side, it's a wheelbase for robots. Because if you're doing specialized robots, not humanoids, specialized robots, you need to be able to move and act in the physical world. But the minute you're moving, you got to have a wheelbase. So it's just part of the equation. And a lot of people go look at Tesla. It's great. Look at Waymo. Awesome. They're cruising around Austin, of course. But there's so many things that move. It's not just a ride sharing thing. And so obviously, including mining equipment that's doing its thing. So you guys, that's the general sort of idea. And we acquired a company on the mining stuff, a company called Pronto. Or it's about to close. It's where inches from closing is the 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, like the big issue with mining, number one is just surveying, like finding the locations, right? Is there an advantage to be created there? Because I know there's a couple startups that are trying to be really smart about selecting locations to get the targets out of the ground. And then the other one is like, well, can you go deep? Because pretty much anywhere on Earth, you can get whatever you want if you're willing to go deep enough. But the cost is distance squared, right? So the energy cost is like, how deep are you going to the second power? So it becomes geometrically more expensive to go deeper. But the deeper you go, the more you're able to kind of not worry about getting the right location. So does automation unlock that capacity? The automation definitely does. I mean, also it's like, man, just boring company has some good stuff going. Like I hope we were like, we're doing the mining thing. And boring goes makes some good tunnels 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, you know, they have this thing is like rare earths. I don't know why they put plural rare earths, isn't it rare earth? I don't know. But the rare rare earth. Yeah, but it's not rare. It's uncommon. It's not rare. It's what you have to do the land is aggressive. And what's rare is the is is where the where are the places they'll let you do it that you can also sort of get people to when you automate, you can go to a lot of places. Well, first is all the 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 all the 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 become inhospitable. If it's regulated, if it's like, I don't want to live there, it's the end of the earth. 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 Osay. You got to do the shout out to Tesla and all the things because I like to sort of
or break down the physical AI stack includes not just like, oh yeah, computation and I've got that physical AI models and I've got all the things you sort of think of. What about land development? That should be in that stack. What about chemistry? That needs to be in the stack, manufacturing needs to be a stack. When you look at the stack, you're like, damn, Tesla's got this (beep) they are the Google of this era, which is what I mean by that is in the 2000s. If you were doing a startup in the 2000s, the first question you would get is, why isn't Google gonna kill you? Or why isn't Google just gonna do it? - Why are Google gonna do it? - Yeah, I know that you killed you. - And before that Microsoft. - And before that Microsoft, the late 90s. Uber had a time, 2010s. - Yeah, what if Uber puts that in the app? - Come on. - It's like, dude, this is Uber, haven't I? 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, you gotta do some stuff. - And rumors that, hey, you might not be done with self-driving, something that you were very early on. How do you think about what you're seeing in the playing field of self-driving, because my Lord, you know, Waymo's making great progress, Tesla's making great progress. - Pick a winner. - Like Pick a winner between Tesla Waymo Uber. - Or like Uber. - Or like Uber. - Uber Uber Uber. - Uber Uber seems to be building a network of stuff. - Yeah, I mean, like number of Pick a winner. - The number of players in the space is crazy now, right? - Yeah, look, there's, I think there's more noise, if there's more bark than there is bite right now. Look, I think Waymo obviously, the head, the existence proof is there. Their issue is manufacturing and scale, and urgency and fierceness like, - Yes. - Yes. - Come on. - Let's go. - Yeah. - Uber had a Tommy project back in the day and they have a different strategy these days. I haven't been there for a while. So, but the point is, is that you, so you got Waymo, then you've got Tesla, fundamentals, science, hard mode, times a hundred, and the question is, do they get there in what time scale? If they, 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 vision without other sensors. So, super inspiring, but like, what's the timeline on it? - Yeah. - 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 the others. Do you think, or at a point now, like obviously now that you're getting into more of these kind of autonomous systems that move around, like, do we have these vision language action models tuned and ready for prime time? There's been a conversation like, who's gonna have the Android be 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? - Look, I think there's a, this is an area of a lot of energy, a mix of research and implementation. I think there's a lot of hope and interesting stuff. I mean, the high level is, we all remember what happened when you used Chat GPT 3.5 and you're like, holy s**t. - Yeah, it's legit. - 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 s**t getting real. Is it about to happen? Is it about to happen for physical AI? And that's what this is about. 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 ones just driving the others like, yo, look out over there. - Yeah. - 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. - We're okay, yeah. - Jason, I don't call each other honey, but I got you. - Yeah. - Like, sweetie. - You know. - Okay, so anyways, that was odd, wasn't it? - Okay, that was right. Okay, okay, I didn't mean it that way. - It always does, yeah. - 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. Like, and you put that in the scheme of things of like, AI training, AI energy, the power plants that are built to do the thing that isn't even at human strength yet. Okay, the Waymo machine takes 100 times more energy to drive 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, 'cause like when you think about how we first started looking at the physical world, is we saw everything. And you know what guys, and this is sort of obvious, like it doesn't matter what the cloud is doing if I'm driving. But like the car doesn't know that. It's pulling in every fricking data point and processing everything. And it's, you know, look, they've been about sort of carving out the things that don't matter and things like this, but there's ultra awesome versions of this and you can imagine how you can use language or things that look like language to communicate either amongst agents or sort of safety systems with a driving system to sort of get very efficient answers and to identify safety issues very efficiently. - People don't know that you've moved to Texas as of what most people don't know, but it's out there. You moved here in December, so now you're a resident of Austin. - Yeah, I was about, thank you. (audience applauds) - It's very exciting for me. We've been getting to play some backgammon. - Backgammon cards. - It's all hard. - We're having a good time. - So I've had a place on like Austin since 2021. And I go there, I'm an avid water skier. Like, you're impressed about water skiing, I have to say. Like, 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. - What do you think's gonna happen in California? - It's pretty messed up. Look, I grew up in Cali. Like I grew up in Los Angeles. My parents were born in bread 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, I don't want it. - A lot of us feel that way. - I don't want to get the violin out, but it just, but it's heartbreaking. - It's hard breaking. It's just a place you grow up at 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, we don't want Elon here, and then he's like, message received getting lost. - Right, and then it kind of worked its way down the tech industry and then the kind of world of people, building businesses and whatnot. And now it's kind of gotten so broad in terms of the global growth in general. - Joe Rogan, comedy, music, New Yorkers, restaurant tours. I mean, this place is the fun. - 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. - Look, my, the rest of my teams, like we're when we're moving, you know? They're like, you know? - And how are you dealing with that? So that was the question was like, - Got a nice homes on the lake. - There are literally dozens of startup CEOs of call it successful or growing companies that I talk 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. How am I gonna leave? - Yeah, I totally got it. It's a real thing. So look, I think like most things, sort of when it's time, and it feels painful to do something, sometimes it's actually not as bad as you think. And you just got to make the move and lead and do it. And so that's kind of what, that's kind of the process, almost like a morning 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, we are the no-shaking. - No, no, no, no, no, it's okay, we're negotiating right now. But I'm gonna jet ski to work. - No, literally, it's really scary. 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, he's like, (beep) I looked at that. And I was like, that would be a nice one. But the truth is, you know, and I had a couple people move here a couple years ago and they all had the same reaction. Oh my God, I'm living in a place that's twice as big for half as much. The people here are dope, the food is dope. Everybody here is got this sense that we're building the future. And it's just fun and world positive. And for me, I got to--
to live New York LA San Francisco. I did three of the great cities in this country. This one feels the most like home to me, which is a very strange feeling to me, but it feels like everybody here wants to build the future, and it's very diverse. All these different industries and people pursuing stuff, I think this is the future. - Yeah, here's the thing, like you go to San Francisco, and I still have a little nostalgia when I go to San Francisco just having built Uber there and the whole thing, I still get the butterflies. 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 million dollars - And you're like, and it's literally, it's sort of like this subconscious desire to choke the city off. Now remember, I look at things through roads, that's how I think, so I'm just like, obviously the city is totally busted. - Yeah, they literally took market street and they're like, what would be the optimal way to f**k 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 empty. - San Francisco is empty. - That whole street is empty and it's painted red. - Okay, so look, okay, so we all bitch and complain nonstop on the truck. - Okay, I'll take it on the truck. - I'm like, what are you doing in Freedburg? - I'm number one, I get it. - Freedburg, when are you leaving? - Okay, well, so-- - On the chat, you're the best by the way. - Okay, so let me just say-- - There's a couple glasses of wine in. - Public fencing, Freedburg. And he's like, you know, I think there's a better way to do this. And then there's like, Darth Freedburg in group chat. He's like, f**k, these people, these f**k more as they're f**kards, they're destroying society. He is like, Darth Freedburg 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 a glass of wine, he takes pictures, he's like, fourth beverage. I'm like, oh, it's worth staying up on the merchant. - And then I'm like, I'll go and attack this congressman on Twitter, which I'm gonna-- - Yes, I think we go to lead the tweet. - Yeah. - Don't delete the tweet. - Yeah, I delete the tweets. Okay, so there's a group of people trying to raise $500 million to create like a tech/business coalition to go to Sacramento, which arguably is something that everyone's left and avoided doing forever, 'cause 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 f**k 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? - I don't think that would look-- I would go up-- 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-- - You felt it. - It was that kind of vibe. It was just everybody was like that. - And-- - No, no, no, I wanna make stuff. - Yeah, 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 aphorosamist, truth and justice are the immune system for society. When the immune system is suppressed, all the social ills flare up. So look for the places where truth and justice are being deteriorated, are being degraded and say how do we get at that? Because if you get at that, everything else downstream will be better. So that's kind of how I look at things and how I also determine whether the world's getting better or worse. When I say weird, I'm talking about truth and justice. That's what I mean when I say, oh man, it's getting weird, it's getting weirder, which means it's weird. I'm just talking about truth and justice. - Well, I mean, and you look at the homeless industrial complex, you look at Chesa Budin, which the all-in-thogd sacks myself and the pod, like we literally led the recall of him. And then you have 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. - Oh, you want to arrest the criminals. (audience laughs) Look, I was born in the darkness. I mean, these guys are (beep) lunatics. - Yeah, look, I know police officers in Los Angeles who are no longer police officers. And these are lifelong guys who protect and serve that's in their bloods or DNA. They want to protect people. They want the bad guys to be dealt with. And they almost have PTSD from what it is like to want to serve and see bad things happening and not being allowed to stop it. - Yeah, nobody's got their back and they're not allowed to do their job. - It's crazy and it's getting weird. - Okay, hey, I wanna just go back to AI for the darkness. - Sorry for the darkness. - I don't know, I think it's good. - I was trying to induce dark, free bird. - Oh, I brought it up. - Yes, I mean, someone bring me a tequila, I'll get going. - Yeah, let's do it. Can we get a couple tequila? - I went on this podcast yesterday and I was like, the first hour with middle of the road, I was talking about tech and science. And then politics came up, he's like, so socialism. And he said, you lost it. And then you were like, he's like, the energy with 10x and it was so big. - Who is this (beep) - So yeah, so it'll come out in a couple of weeks, but it got me going. Okay, I wanna talk about physically, I want more time. So now that you're doing this, I saw a presentation every day. Someone showed a video of a squirrel jumping from one tree to another tree. And they're like a tenth of a watt or something. Like the biology is tuned and it's so perfect in terms of its efficiency of energy utilization to do physical things. And we're taking these big things of metal and motors and actuators. And if you add up or you compound all of the inefficiencies in the system, it's like 1200 watts to get the robot to walk four foot. Like break apart, not just the software, but the hardware layer. And where we add 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 everybody talks about how do you do the hand? It's almost like terminator two type obsession with the hand, which is spare. 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 is a couple other places. Look, I'm in the non-humanoid space. I mean, but mechanical engineers have been dealing with actuators and all the sort of electro-mechanical 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 bowl in a paper bag without tearing the paper bag. But I am less into the, I forget the name, perio, 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're not threatening and-- 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 frickin 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. So I know I didn't totally answer the question-- The robot. The technology piece. But-- I just like, do you agree that there's probably like a big opportunity for venture money and research to go into real science, actually work 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. We got a lot of-- There's a lot. I do. I do. Actually, it's good that you bring this up. 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 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, some moments like, that was smart. Let me try. And it's at a different scale. Now that you've come out of stealth, now that you've got-- And people are starting to understand just starting today. How big your vision is, capital as a weapon-- This is, I guess, in your plan, yeah? Well, I mean, here's the thing. 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. What I mean by that is, in the Uber world, early days, if you didn't have capital, didn't matter how good your app was. because Masa's gonna put a billion dollars in your compassion.
and you're gonna lose 20% market share tomorrow. So a critical competency, in fact, to 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. - Yeah, yeah. - Sorry, you got it. But the Middle East, I've heard theories the last couple days that big capital seekers are kind of f***ing 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, do 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 that was because the oil prices had gone down so dramatically. And if you went into KSA, you went to the kingdom, everybody's like, we need oil prices to go up. That's the other side of the equation. So I don't know what hat, look, I'm not in the market raising money right at this moment, and this is a two week old thing that I, you know, look, I see the news just like everybody else, and I'm not out there calling wallet wars 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 very quickly. If you're an optimist about this situation and it won't be the end of the world, maybe even a better world, then we get to a better place, and I think progress, abundance, the golden age happens. And a lot of it is about all the things that are happening in AI, in physical AI, and just the productivity gains that are coming in very massive ways, yeah. - Yeah, I mean, it was shock and awe, and then, hey, now we've got a steady state, and let's hope that's what happens in Iran, is that we can depose this evil dictatorial, sorry, replace it with something a little more stable. - And related to this, before we wrap, they're going to China, the big trade deal being negotiated. What do you hope comes out of this Chinese thing? - And what did you learn in China? - 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 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. So, let's just do two things. You go to Shenzhen, which before felt like Kansas City, but 50 years ago, and really humid, which I guess, Kansas City sometimes, but you go there now and it's like, one-up in 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, they're hungry. 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 mofos are taken over. At least that's what they want to do. That shit's happening. So, I don't have any issuers, this is not negativity for me. I'm like, these guys are killing it. The best idea is winning. They're fiercely going after truth and progress, and they're making shit happen. Let's step up our game, okay? But we can also have a friendly game. Like, we don't have to be like the Detroit pistons in the '90s, you know? - Yes. - We can, there's a way. - So, don't 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 an employee who, 'cause we're for a long time where the largest kitchen builders in China, I have an employee in China has an American wife, okay? They both live in China. They're both from China originally, okay? But, 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, 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, do we have to make that hard as an example? - Some normalcy would ask. - Something, I'm just saying. Now, I agree, there are ways to do immigration properly. Like, we effed it up, super bad. Don't even get me started. But there's also, there's good migration to like, a lot of great innovators all over the place came from other places for their own version of the American dream. God bless. - Free of birth. - And we don't have to, that doesn't have to be a negative thing. And so I'd like to see more of that and yeah, China's wild. So let's keep our eye on the ball and let's give 'em run for their money too. - Give it up for TK. (audience applauding) - All right, love you guys. - Thank you. - That's good. - Good to see you, brother. Wow, Michael Dow. My lord, Texas native. - Michael. - Yes, born, born, he used to. - Well, I missed the opening. We jumped to the music, but you started Dell computer here in Austin with a thousand bucks. - 42 years ago in my dorm room at Dobie at UT about 10 days before I finished my freshman semester. - Amazing. And it's been working out pretty good. (audience laughing) - Yeah, it's been some bumps in the road, but yeah, it's generally worked out okay. We'll have about 140 billion in revenue this year. So. (audience laughing) - Yeah, it's okay. 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, exactly. - It's just that easy. (laughing) - 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 is it work here? And it's getting better, it just always worked. - You know, I think Texas has had a low tax, pro growth environment for a long time and pro progressive business climate. And if you sort of look at the growth of the Texas economy relative to the rest of the United States, without Texas, you know, Texas just kind of looks like a better version of the US economy. And, you know, now you've got Austin is sort of just about in the top 10 cities in the United States. So you've got, when that happens, you'll have four of the 10 largest cities in America in Texas, one out of 10 children born in the United States, born in Texas, born in New York, Stock Exchange companies in Texas then 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 well spring for a lot of the companies that are here, certainly ours. And, you know, long history of innovative, pioneering spirit and entrepreneurship. And it's been a fantastic place for us. And part of this, I think, Freeberg and Michael is what's happening in the other great cities, or what were once great cities, my hometown New York, got to spend 10 years in LA and the last 12 in the Bay area. And what's happening there is incredibly un-American and they're decelerating when compared. 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. - 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 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. - Elon had a great experience when he was building the,
the gigafactory over here. They let you do stuff here. Yeah, basically. 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 these factories. And in fact, the Tesla factories that didn't free-mount was just an old ancient factory that he was able to retrofit. So there's something going on here as well with the data centers. And that's actually, I think, very close to what you're working on at Dell. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the data center, boom, that's going on in Texas, that maybe people aren't paying attention to. Sure. Well, there's obviously been an 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 in towns and west Texas, where there's not a lot of population. And so they're not really too opposed to having data centers out in the middle of nowhere, where there's land and power. And so, yeah, I mean, the demand for tokens is enormous. We've been building these AI data centers, not just to your Texas, but around the world. And the growth in that has been tremendous. We introduced the first H100 server. It was literally a couple of weeks before chat, GPT was announced. And the progression of our business in that area has gone from like $2 billion to $10 billion to $25 billion to this year will be like $50 billion. So tremendous growth. And when you think about what these models are creating, there's this phase change that's happened in computing, right? We had 60 years of calculating 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 to ever be, and they're continue to improve. And so we just see a lot more demand than supply. And it's happening not just in the hyper-skillers 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 the Palantir. And you know, people want to protect their data, but also use AI on it. They want to bring the AI to where their data is. And you know, when this kind of started a few years ago, we had some really sophisticated large companies think of like Fortune 100. And they started, you know, buying these AI servers from us. And they kind of knew what they were doing, right? And we said, well, what are you doing? And they were kind of taking building their own models. They were taking open source models. They were running them. Some of them were algorithmic traders or, you know, derivatives of machine learning. And of course, they needed a lot of help in doing that, because it was sort of a complicated thing. So about two years ago, we put together this product that we called the Dell AI factory. And now we've got 4,000 plus of these and it's kind of running rampant across enterprises. How do you think about the payback time on the investment that's being made? The administration put in place this accelerated depreciation rule by the company. Yeah, that's very helpful actually. Yeah. Yeah. Just for folks to understand that a little bit, like if you spend $100 billion this year building and data centers and buying infrastructure for those data centers, you get to write off 100% of that this year to deduct it. So you don't pay taxes. You pay way much fewer taxes. And that's in place for 10 years, I think. That's a 10 year deal. So 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 on over what time scale? This is still the big question. Is the money really there? The hyper scalers maybe they're starting to come up, but end usage and 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 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. Right away it gets there. I mean, 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. 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. And this really has to be done in kind of a top-down way. You can't sort of do it spontaneously. In silos, they're 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 re-architecture. It's a re-imagining of the way a company works. And the way I described this to our team about three years ago is we were going to have a new competitor five years from now. That would be two years from now. In every business that we're in, except they were going to be faster and more innovative and more successful and lower cost and they were going to put us out of business. And the only way we were going to prevent that is we're going to become that company. And here's how we're going to do it. And excited, some people, it's scary, some people. But I actually believe that that's what's going to happen. And so we've been dramatically changing our business. I would say the biggest benefit by far is speed. We're much faster at being able to apply innovations. And so you look at our infrastructure business last quarter group 73%. So that's kind of unusual for a business of this size. And this quarter we guided that it would grow even faster, like 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 a client server, the network revolution, online, internet, cloud, mobile. Yeah. So each one of those, we saw massive disruption. We're talking in the green room about it, 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 like a quarter is like a year. Maybe it's five times faster or something like that. But back to your question. I would say maybe 10 or 15% of large companies have really figured this out. And the rest of them are kind of fumbling around. And there's a tendency when you hear about a new technology to like, oh, let's just go do it. Show the boss. Hey, we did AI. You know, the board said we got to do AI. Yeah, we got to do AI. We need an AI. Are you proud of your boss? Yeah. Yeah. And look at what I made. Exactly. I also think, you know, it's an important point about about this, which is, you know, the barrier to technology adoption is not technology. It's culture and leadership and courage. Right. And so willing to change and if you're in a business that you don't think is changing very much or, you know, hard changes really hard, right? You have to be very uncomfortable here. Like, well, we're going to stop doing that. We don't need this anymore. Particularly if your bonus is dependent on not messing things up. But let's 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 masees.com versus Sears Roboc, right? Right. Maybe masees 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, Wayfarer, etc. What's the right way to think about this evolution in industries generally? Are we going to have businesses that are going to transition successfully and those that aren't and they're going to die? And is this really going to, are we going to see AI native businesses in every industry Come in and just. disrupt everything. I believe we will. And certainly, when you talk to the Carlson 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. Because they see all the new companies on their platform. Exactly. 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. But that's sort of like. Those are expiring value assets. If it doesn't change quickly and get onto the other side of this, I think it will go out of business. Which is exactly the speech I gave to our team three years ago. And I think you have to be bold and you've got to go make those changes to not only survive this, but to thrive. And I think about it is, how do we prepare our company to be ready for the 2030? Right. Isn't it like. It's much more. It's kind of the storyline. It'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 the world. Well, sure. I mean, this is the point. And the AI. When we have better tools, we can do way more things, right? And when I hear people say, "Oh, maybe we're just going to have all these great tools and we won't do more things, we'll just do the same things with fewer people." It doesn't sound right to me. I mean, there'll be some of that, but I think most of it will be, we're just going to do a whole lot more things. We're going to solve a lot more problems. We're going to accelerate on scientific discovery. That's what I'm most excited about. We're going to invent all sorts of new things. We're going to solve all sorts of problems that haven't been solved. And that's super exciting. 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? 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 we make a lot of that embedded equipment. Certainly, telcos are doing that too. I mean, it's pretty much every industry. I mean, I think about wherever data is being created, you want the AI infrastructure and the inference close to the data. There has been this sort of rebalancing as companies have figured out, everybody loves the public cloud, until they get the bill. When they get the bill, this is supposed to save us money. Yes. It costs quite a bit more. So the lowest cost token is going to be the one that's generated right where the data is on the device. You're going to have tokens being generated on your phone, on your PC, in every embedded piece of equipment. And look, we have an interesting perspective on this business because we have 10,000 customers where they embed our product in their product. This is, you know, I think medical devices, security, all sorts of things in hospitals and industrial plants and any kind of data-driven activity requires some kind of computing network storage infrastructure. 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 are your customers who are calling you up and ordering from, you know, Dell, their spoke PC, now they're- Dell.com. What did I say? Dell.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. It works out pretty well. But this is incredible that they're all stacking computers 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 $19.80. And then the prices came down. You could buy a Dell for 500 bucks, 800 bucks. Like really nice laptops for that price. Use the promo code all in. I don't know, he's not as much as a joke. But do you think there's a world where we're going to start to see the desktop because people want to protect that data, they want to protect the skills they're building. They don't want to give it to Sam Altman, put it in a cloud somewhere. They don't want to give it to Google, whoever it happens to be. And that the desktop revolution comes back and everybody's got a $10,000 desktop. Is that coming? I don't know if everyone will have $10,000 desktop, but that would be great. So we have this Dell portal on a hugging face. And we have all these open models. And we qualify them on every kind of machine we have. And there's been enormous progress in the open source models. Google has these Gemma models, EMMA. And they work really, really well on small machines. Open AI has their open source models. You've got the NEMOTron model. You've got enormous ecosystem of open source that is thriving and certainly open clawed. And there'll be some good discussion about that. How many people have set up open claw? Raise your hand. Oh my lord. That's about what a 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 to be able to authenticate and validate who these agents are and what they're doing and have the right controls and that sort of thing. Yeah. And your take on AGI and when we're going to hit it, 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. I think it feels like with the latest releases, we were talking about this backstage, the Gemini 3.1, the Opus 4.6, the Open AI 5.4, it feels like we 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 a few months or nine months time, it's just amazing the speed of innovation. And so it seems to be continuing and we get all the reinforcement learning and there's also tons of private dark data that these models haven't been applied to. And that's sort of what's happening with these. I think the auto research is 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. I'm thinking about how do I. To the rest of us are thinking about that. How do I run our company? That's hard enough. Yeah. Everyone I talk to, that's the question. Everyone goes to these off sites and they're like, "I'm actually doing this with my management team on Monday." We're doing a tear down and be like, "Hey, how would we build the business differently today?" No, we're not. Yeah. What we've been thinking a lot about is this reimagining question. We know the trajectory of the tools. One of the tools going to be in 27, 28, 29. How do we accelerate our path to that? How worried are you about social issues?
AI recently ranked as the most unfavorable term of a list of terms, including press call. It was somewhere between ISIS, the Democrats, ISIS, and the Democrats. ISIS was better than AI. People liked it. I had mass agents more than they like AI. Yeah. Well, I think part of the problem is it's been, it's been, you know, maybe sold as, and it sort of presents itself like a human would. Yeah. Right. And, you know, maybe if we called it linear algebra, matrix, calculus, statistics instead. Majority, multiply, maybe that would be more friendly. I don't know. Yeah. But you think, you think we're going to have, 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. Messing messaging aside. I mean, how much do you actually worry about disruption or dislocation and employment, about acceleration of earnings for some people and deceleration for other people in society that feel left behind. And that starts to fuel more of the kind of social concerns and politicians saying, hey, we got to stop building all the data centers, you know, like that kind of stuff. And how much are you really? I tend to be more optimistic. And, and, you know, I do, I do think that in all technology cycles, you get sort of these network effects. And that's kind of inevitable. But I also think, you know, we're going to do more with the tools. You do have this acceleration of all sorts of great things. I mean, education could dramatically improve scientific discovery, healthcare, energy, you know, all sort of the unsolved problems can be accelerated. Ultimately, I think it's amplification of human potential and capability. And extending the frontier to. 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 in 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 want that. It's like, how do you stop total software? Yeah, no, it's how you get enough, you can stop someone from putting an open source model on their computer at home and asking it for medical advice. You know, New York just passed a law saying, AI models can no longer give medical advice. Yeah. It's being proposed. A proposed. Yes. So you're like, we're, we're anti software. So, yeah, we're also anti books and advice. So if you were going to look at a book, but we are shopping into your Bernie Sanders right there. That was my Bernie Sanders. Michael Dowell, do you think the one percent of the one percent that you're enabling with your data centers? Why are you doing this to the people of all great nation? Well, you'll give your money to children in their investment America accounts. Yeah. This is a good one you're doing. Yeah. Can we talk about investment America? I think you might have even criticized that, but, but you know, that's the problem. The billionaires are giving them like children money and they're not asking us permission and then those kids are going to buy things that their parents never asked for. Well, they don't actually get the money till they're 18 years old. So that's, that's, what gives you the right to give all children an education? What does this philanthropy? It makes no sense. No, I mean, honestly, well, I see, I see my great friend Brad Gerson or here. Brad's here. There he is. Brad, come up for this little segment here. Sit for a second. Let's talk about a mess America. We've got five minutes left here. So, you know, I heard about a fifth bestie. Get him around. 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 anything about that, unfortunately. And, you know, here we are. You know, America, you know, the the the West America Act was past 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 million children in zip codes where the median income is. I mean, Michael, this is, this is one of the greatest. What do you think, Bernie? Do you approve? I can go to J. Cal. This is what 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, 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 it's $6.25 billion. I mean, and I just want to say something, you know, we live at a time where, but they have to sign up to clean the accounts. Yes, they have accounts, but they have to sign up to clean the accounts. You know, I think we're getting a hundred thousand plus kids nowadays signing up. Yeah. First, thanks for having me up. Yeah. I mean, what a national hero and national asset that my friend Michael Delas, but he understates this because I've been working on this for four years. We've been talking about it on the island pod. We had a lot of momentum. But behind the scenes, Trump gets elected. And so it's April that we're in the middle of the tariff strife, April 25. We realize there's only going to be one piece of legislation that gets passed during Trump's first two years. It'll be the, you know, this big beautiful bill, the reconciliation bill. And so I call up Michael and I said, Michael, we got to go. We've got five days. We have the, it's drafted in the Senate. We have bipartisan support, but we have a window. And like, we 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 tech say? And you and I had a conversation and you, you know, uh, you know, the tax to DJT. Yes. I'm not talking about 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 Del. And like, wherever your politics are, that's just the truth. And the last administration didn't. And, you know, if it was, yeah, and it may have done the same thing. And this, and I just have to say this is West America. It's not a red idea or a blue idea. It's a red, white and blue idea. Right? Yeah. So into the prior conversation, while Michael and I first talked about it, um, you know, it was, this is the right thing to do. Right. Like, we have to reconnect the 70 percent 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 talk 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 Dowell, tremendous American, I have just one one punch up. The name, "Invest America," Trump accounts. What do you think? Were you considering this in the context of other philanthropy? I mean, how do you kind of put this together in the spectrum of how you think about giving back? 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've heard about this idea, one of my thoughts was, wow, this is like a platform for directly giving to the people that we're targeting. Right. And, you know, we actually thought about doing it just in Texas first. And, you know, things have gone pretty well with the company and all that. So, you know, we thought we just go bigger. And what happens, Brad, if, you know, 10 more Michael Dowell show up? And there are dozens. It's not a lot of Michael Dowell's. Let's be honest. But 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. And I think it actually is becoming a movement instead of a moment. And we've, you know, we've got a lot that cute up, Brad.
one shoe. Have you called anybody Michael? Did you call Michael? Michael and I chair the investment America giving committee and we're ambitious guys. So we've had a few conversations. Detecting people. Yeah. So there's a question earlier. First, it's really important to understand and for you guys to spread the word every child under the age of 18, every child under the age of 18 is eligible to claim their account number one. Number two, you heard this I go kids born between 25 and 28. No, this is forever more. The legislation creates as account forever more 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. 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 as a 401k from birth. And yes, we're going to have a lot of announcements, but it's not just billionaires. It's going to be companies that are donating stock on their IPOs into these accounts. It's going to be wealthy people. It's going to be states. It's going to be moms and dads. It's going to be corporations. And the estimate is over 15 years, we can move $5 trillion into the pockets of families that would have otherwise had zero $5 trillion, right? And so to me, the leadership that Michael showed not only in helping me get the meeting, they ultimately got this passed into law. And it does take people, like those moments either happen or they don't happen. And if they don't happen, there's no law and this doesn't change kids lives. By the way, two things on this, if this $5 trillion moved through government programs, it would get incinerated. Exactly. 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 we're certainly people, 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 detached deduction, instead of it getting invisorated and destroyed and vaporized, that money actually goes into an account and you buy a piece of a company and maybe you can direct it. Freeberg's getting a million. On July 4th of this year. You're getting me $1.5 million. So they're 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 or 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 that'll see them owning. It'll say you've received your $1,000 or your $250 and it will show a little bit of Nvidia, a little bit of Walmart, a little bit of Dell. We decompose the S&P 500, which they own into the constituent parts so they can get excited about being an owner in the upside of America. And when moms and dads double click and Apple pay $5, $10 bucks into the account, right? When they send their QR codes to their friends on their birthday and now their friends all add to the account or on Christmas or Bar Mitzfas and they add to the accounts when companies add to the accounts, all of this they see it growing and it unlocks the human potential. It's not just the money. It's that I'm in the game. I have a shot which to David's point, I think the biggest crime of Social Security and we made very clear. Social Security is a sacred promise. We refused and many people tried to get us to take on the broader struggle and we didn't do it because we knew it would kill this program. But let's be clear about this. Our government requires all of us to give 10% of what we earn into Social Security. 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 know exactly what was there. You could get excited and say, "Hey, I'm going to add a little bit more to that." You had a little bit of choice. That to me is the possibility and I think we will end up there. And Brad, thank you for. Yeah, let's give him a round of applause. Yeah, I'm just going to say, you know, Brad also adopted his home state of Indiana. We have Ray and Barbara Dahlio adopted their home state of Connecticut and many, many more to come. And look, it's going to be super easy for anybody to add 100 kids in your neighborhood, adopt a zip code, adopt a school district, adopt a town. It's going to be amazing. Give it up for one of the great entrepreneurs of our time and an incredible flanges. [Music]
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Travis Kalanick's company, formerly operating in stealth mode as City Storage Systems, is now publicly named "Adams" with a mission of physical automation to transform industries.
The company's core concept is building an "atoms-based computer" for the physical world, analogous to computing (CPU, storage, network), using manufacturing, real estate, and logistics as its fundamental components.
Its initial and primary application is a "food computer" (Cloud Kitchens) aimed at revolutionizing food delivery infrastructure to approach grocery store efficiency.
The company is expanding into new verticals, including the automation of mining (with an impending acquisition of Pronto) and developing a wheelbase platform for specialized robots.
Kalanick discusses the competitive landscape in physical AI and autonomous vehicles, comparing Tesla's integrated approach to Google's dominance in the early internet era.
He shares his recent move to Austin, Texas, citing California's challenging business and social environment, and praises Austin's community, cost, and future-oriented culture.
Summary:
" The company's mission is to automate the physical world. " The first application is a "food computer" through Cloud Kitchens, aiming to create ultra-efficient food preparation and delivery infrastructure. Adams is now expanding into automating mining operations, with an acquisition of Pronto pending, and developing mobility platforms for specialized robots.
Kalanick analyzes the physical AI competitive field, noting Tesla's integrated strength and the uncertain timeline for a breakthrough "ChatGPT moment" for vision-based autonomy. He also confirms his relocation to Austin, Texas, expressing frustration with California's direction and enthusiasm for Austin's supportive, growth-focused environment for building the future.
FAQs
The company is called Adams, with a mission focused on physical automation to transform industries and move the world.
It means the company is ending its secretive operational phase, allowing employees to publicly disclose their association and revealing its brand and activities after years of operating in secrecy.
It digitizes the physical world for food by treating atoms like bits, combining manufacturing (CPU), real estate (storage), and logistics (network) to create efficient, scalable food production and delivery infrastructure.
Adams is expanding into mining automation and robotics, with acquisitions like Pronto for automating mining equipment and developing a wheelbase for specialized robots.
He moved due to California's challenging business and living environment, seeking a more affordable, positive, and future-focused community in Austin, which he now considers home.
Adams builds high-capacity, industrial-scale infrastructure for food production and delivery, aiming to make prepared meals as cost-effective as grocery shopping, unlike traditional restaurants with low capacity utilization.
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