The Daily Stoic - Michael Dell on Calculating Risk and Playing Nice But Winning

Episode Date: November 6, 2021

Ryan talks to founder and CEO of one of America’s largest technology companies Michael Dell about his new book Play Nice But Win: A CEO's Journey from Founder to Leader, the balance between trusting yourself and trusting the opinions of experts, focusing on what you can control, and more. Michael Dell is chairman and chief executive officer of Dell Technologies, an innovator and technology leader providing the essential infrastructure for organizations to build their digital future, transform IT and protect their most important information. He is ranked 24th richest person in the world by Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He founded Dell Technologies with $1000 in 1984 at the age of 19. In 1992, Michael became the youngest CEO ever to earn a ranking on the Fortune 500.Cometeer partners with the best locally owned roasters in the world and through their breakthrough brewing technology, provides a delicious, high-quality, balanced cup of coffee for a fraction of the price. For a limited time, you can save 20 Dollars off your first order - that’s 10 free cups on your first order, and shipping is always free - but only when you visit cometeer.com/STOICTalkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the Talkspace platform 24/7. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show.LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Michael Dell: Homepage, TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly to prepare for what the week

ahead may bring. Hi I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast, let me tell you a story that takes me way back to the first week of March 2020. Obviously, I'd vaguely heard of this pandemic thing, but I was out to dinner with my wife and my kids. And I'm just leaving.

I'm walking back to my car to drive to the house, and I noticed I hadn't been, I hadn't had my phone on me. And a whole bunch of texts and emails are there. No joke from Michael Dell. Where are you? Are you coming? What happened? Are you okay? Stuff like that.

Because I was supposed to have dinner with him that. Well, not really. So, okay, here's what happened. I thought we were having dinner on the sixth, and I think it was actually on the fifth. I'm trying to remember. I won't say who's to blame. I would say I didn't introduce the mistake,

but ultimately I have to own the mistake, and I missed a dinner, a chance to have dinner with one of the most successful businessmen in the world, someone whose products I have used for many, many, many, many years. I think my first computer was probably Adele, and there I was, not just not going to dinner, but flaking and missing a dinner. I was, as you can imagine, completely mortified, so upset and embarrassed, and I didn't know what to do.

So this is gonna sound like name-dropping, but I hope it's just, it is the insane story. So I remembered that Michael Dell and Lance Armstrong know each other and I know Lance a little bit, and so I said Lance, I needed to do me a huge favor. You gotta tell Michael Dell that I am not a piece of crap who just blows off dinner plans. Please reach out to him and tell him that I did not mean to do this. And it was a total accident. And that I

am worth giving a second chance to. And then we couldn't have dinner because there we he was like, okay, yeah, we'll reschedule. And of course, we could not reschedule for months and months and months because it was impossible to have dinner because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And I thought there was a chance that I missed my one and only chance to have dinner with someone I really wanted to meet. And anyways, we ended up rescheduling many months later, we had an outside dinner at his beautiful home in Austin with his wife, Susan, and two of his children.

And it was just a wonderful experience. I had such a good time. And that leads us where we are today, which is Michael Dell is my guest on the Daily Stove podcast. Michael and his son, Zach, had reached out to me originally because they'd read some of my books. And so to hear that Michael had a book coming out, I was very excited to read. If you don't know who Michael Dell is, and this name is it ringing a bell, Michael Dell is the chairman chief

executive officer and founder of Dell Technologies, one of the biggest infrastructure and computer companies in the world. He's ranked the 24th richest person in the world by the Bloomberg's billionaire index. He founded Dell with a thousand bucks in 1984 to age of 19, ran it out of his dorm room and college apartment while he went to UT. It was the youngest CEO ever to earn a ranking on the Fortune 500. He and his wife, Susan, who is a lovely person, established the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation to accelerate opportunities for children growing up in urban poverty in the US, India, and South

America, the Dell Foundation. Also has the D Dell Children's Medical Center here in Austin, Texas. He is a wonderful booster and supporter of this town. You can go to Dell.org of course to read more or follow at Michael Dell on all platforms. But more importantly, he is the author of a new book, Play Nice But Win, a CEO's journey from founder to leader, published also by Portfolio, which publishes my books. This idea of playing Nice But Win is fascinating. I think it's a great way to think about business and life. You want to be successful.

You want to do your best. You want to play by a certain set of ethics, but as Mark's really says, we can't go around expecting Plato's Republic. We got to play to win as well. And that ties into something that Michael and I talked about at the beginning of the interview, which is another little expression, another little rule that they have over at Dell that we did a daily stoke email about a few months back, which I won't spoil, but tune in. There's a great philosophical and business conversation between Michael Dell and myself, and Michael, if you're listening, again, I do apologize for belonging that off. That never happens.

I'm not only don't belose stuff off, I hate being late, and I never do it on purpose, and I'm so mortified that that happened, but I'm glad we came back around, and I appreciate him taking some time out of his very busy schedule to do this interview. Hello. Hey Ryan, how you doing? I'm doing amazing. How are you? Doing great. Awesome. Well, I'm really excited. I'm excited too. Great to be with you. Are you in Texas? I am. Wonderful. Me too. I'm the Austin. All right. It's a good place to be. It is. This is the best part of the year to be in you. Are you in Texas? I am. Wonderful. I'm the Austin. All right. It's a good place to be. It is. This is the best part of the year to be in Texas. Exactly. Yeah. Well, to start, before we get into the book, which I told you I would read and I loved,

I want to start with the title is Play Nice, but Win, which is a nice little motto. I wanted to start with a little motto, you told me you also have, which I thought might be the title of the book when you told me we were working one. PBNS, will you tell people what that means? And how you try to live that too? Yeah, so PBNS is pleased, but never satisfied, or sometimes pleased, but not satisfied. And sort of the idea behind this is, you know, continuous improvement is important and

complacency kills. And, you know, when you're succeeding, it can be really intoxicating and also very dangerous because your brain kind of turns off, right? And so, you know, when you're in an industry that's always evolving, you need to be thinking about what are the future problems. And, you know know it's just super dangerous to sort of believe your own nonsense you know and and I have this I have this this cover from Fortune magazine in my office and it's and I'm not on

the cover it's it's a guy named Ken Olson. And he was the CEO of Digital Equipment. It says basically America's most successful entrepreneur, Ken Olson, CEO of Digital Equipment. And 1986, that was the story they wrote. And if you were a digital equipment, and you believe that, right? You were not thinking about all the things that were about to happen in the industry. And so, yeah, I just think it's a really important approach. It's an interesting tension, right?

Because I think when we think of like champions, when you think of Tom Brady, you think of someone who's never satisfied, right? Who's always trying to get better, always pushing themselves. But that's also can be, I don't know if you saw the Michael Jordan documentary last year, but also a recipe for misery,

both for yourself and for other people in a way. So when I heard that, what struck me about it was the emphasis on the first part, which is also being pleased and happy, Those two ideas need to be balanced out. Yeah, yeah, and I think it took me some time to learn how to appreciate and celebrate our successes. And partly because when people would bring accolades to me, I was generally skeptical that they wanted something for me because they often did, right? And so I kind of just never really needed that, but I figured out that other people did

and it's important to celebrate and, you know, to, yeah, to talk about the successes. One of the stoic ideas that I try to work on and I'm not perfect at it is this idea of being very strict with yourself, but also tolerant with others. And so where I think this motto makes sense or is important, I have to imagine in management,

which is like you can be never satisfied with your own performance. But if you're never pleased as a boss, you will grind the people that work for you down into dust. They will hate you. They will hate working for you. And you actually won't get better performance out of them because eventually they'll just go, it's impossible to please Michael, he's never satisfied. Yeah, that's that's absolutely true and so it is important to celebrate and recognize achievement and also recognize that every person is motivated by something a little bit different and you know when you're running a big organization, you kind of need to have a place where anybody can succeed,

no matter what their proclivities and background is. So when I was reading the book, it's very rare that the first sentence in a book will provoke a reaction in me and yours did because my first reaction, and it doesn't, it eventually gets a dress later in the book. But I remember thinking, I'm supposed to believe that Carl Icon's wife cooks meatloaf.

Yeah, well, you know, I struggled with whether I should put that, you know, in the book. But, you know, it was really the definition of Carl as a character. And how he explained his life and circumstance to me that brought into sharp clarity, sort of what kind of character he actually is. And yeah, I mean, it was a pivotal moment in my process of, you know, trying to take the company private. And, you know, I confronted him and sort of started the story out with being at his house and having dinner with him over his wife's meatloaf. But actually, to go to the idea, please please but never satisfied, there's this exchange you have

at that meeting where he's sort of like, I don't know, it's jealous, but also like impossible to please, he's like upset at his son's success, right? And it struck me as kind of an interesting embodiment of like please but, sort of never satisfied where it just struck me like, it must not be fun to be Carl Icon son or wife. You know, I'll also what you have him say about his wife's cooking doesn't seem like the nicest dude either.

Yeah, and I normally wouldn't go there, but he sort of attacked me, and eventually I had to sort of respond in some way. But the way he talked about his son was particularly disturbing to me, because you know, as a father, I've heard you talk about being a father and fatherhood, I mean, kind of the thing you hope most for is that your children are successful. Right?

And even more, you'd like to be surrounded by grandchildren that love you. And so, yeah, it was a pretty striking was a pretty striking way in which he kind of dealt with the whole concept of his son actually doing something that was working. Yeah, it was very surreal. Well, let's back up. Let's talk about the acquisition because that's how you open the book and talk about it. And I thought about this actually a little bit when I was writing my book on ego. There is something, it's kind of an interesting metaphor, the idea of like taking a company private

or buying back shares of a company on the open market. Obviously, some people do this for financial manipulation reasons or sometimes it's a sign of a lack of innovation in a company. But it also struck me metaphorically as this idea of like the market, which is supposed to be this all-knowing, efficient thing, is saying X, right? It's saying that you are worth X, and they're required either a delusional amount of ego or a very evidence-based form of confidence that is able to say actually were worth X plus 20%, or that in the future we're gonna be worth three X or whatever it happens to be.

Walk me through how you get to a place where you feel like you know more about something than all the smartest people in the world as ostensibly like, and then are willing to take that bet. And in this case, one of the biggest bets, or I think at the time, the biggest bet in the history of tech.

Well, first, first of all, you have to say you never know for sure, right? You just kind of have an idea or a hunch. And, you know, what was happening then, and I think this has happened a couple of times during my career, the popular narrative had kind of swung too far. And the popular narrative at the time was that smartphones were everything. And the smartphone and the tablet were on the rise. And the PC was dead. And we're never going to use PCs anymore.

We'll just use smartphones. And well, it's true that there are five billion smartphones in the world. We're actually shipping way more PCs than we've ever shipped. And people continue to use PCs as part of their productivity. But more than that, we were investing in lots of areas way beyond the PC, in software and services and security and all these things.

And the market sort of didn't really buy it or understand it. And we wanted to transform the company. And when you're a public company, you're kind of on this 90-day shot clock, right? And so by going private, we were able to free ourselves from that 90-day shot clock and accelerate the transformation. Our public shareholders got a significant premium to the price of the stock without having to take any of the risk.

We got the chance to roll the dice at work and get very aggressive and hire thousands of additional engineers and salespeople and then a couple of years later we did the biggest merger acquisition ever in technology and come out of a transform company. Yeah, it's not obviously the courage of running into a burning building or something, but that must have been a deeply scary thing to do to essentially go all in. I mean, as you say a couple times in the book, or you're actually negotiating this from your house and who are you? Must have thought, I could just hang out here. I don't have to do any of this. Instead, you're going all in and, yeah, one of the biggest transactions

in history, which no one can guarantee you is going to succeed in fact it may end disastrously. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't have done it if I thought it was going to fail. And I thought the downside was actually pretty limited. I mean, just being objective, I mean, this is a company that had for a long time generated very strong cash flows and tons of revenue. And while it was true that the smartphone was playing a bigger role in technology, I just thought the popular narrative had run too far. So even if we hadn't grown, we could have done quite well, paid off a lot of debt, had a lot of flexibility.

It turns out we did way better than we thought, and it all worked out really well. And actually, there was another popular narrative that came, which was that everything was going to the public cloud. And while it's true that public cloud was growing, you know, things like the edge where everything in the physical world is becoming intelligent, and this idea of multi-cloud have emerged. And, you know, that was kind of what enabled us to combine with EMC and VMWare and create even more opportunities. So, it made a bit of a career in going against

popular narratives that have swung too far. I remember when I was talking to Peter Teal, he said something about his investing strategy, which was like, what do I know that they don't know? Right? And so maybe it's like, the narrative is this. And if the narrative is true, obviously, you listen to the narrative. But if you have some sort of, it's not the same as inside knowledge, but you have some sense or deeper experience that lets you know that there is something wrong with the narrative, then you feel confident making the bet that you're making. Because you know something that the people who believe in the narrative, then you feel confident making the bet that you're making, because you know something that the people who believe in the narrative don't know or have willed

themselves not to see. And it's not as if we were acting with secret information either, right? I mean, if you go back, I was giving speeches in public in 2012, I'm talking about everything we were doing and why it was important, why I believed it would work, but you know, market didn't agree with me. So, you know, right. Yeah, what's that that thing like, don't worry about people stealing your ideas, you'll have to ram it down their throats. Like, you were public about it and then people still doubted you. And then I think about that as a writer,

like, because you probably went through with your book and we're both at Portfolio, is like, you do the book, and then you get a bunch of notes. And how do you decide what notes to listen to and what notes not to listen to, right? And I think this is true in life. You get feedback. How do you know if the market is,

sometimes the market is saying X and it's true. Sometimes the market is saying Y and it's actually X. And so how do you know what to listen to? If it's just I always trust myself, you're gonna be right sometimes with an terribly wrong other times. And then also if you always listen to what other people say, you're probably gonna be far too conservative

and risk averse and wrong in a lot of other ways. Yeah, and in the market, it's never binary. There's always like degrees of all these things. And I think having big years and listening and being reflective and spending a lot of time with our customers, you know, you feel like you have some understanding of what the situation is. And then maybe that's where you get to the title, which is, okay, you're right. You think you're right. And then you put out what you think is a fair, you try to do it. And then, of course, life is much more complicated than just simply being correct. Then you get in a fair, you try to do it. And then, of course, life is much more complicated

than just simply being correct. Then you get in a street fight about it. And the one who emerges victorious is the one who is who is right. Yeah, I wasn't expecting all of that to happen. And it turned out to be way more complicated than I thought, but in the end, it all turned out well. Well, so don't you find that people, and maybe this is why you have the motto, is people sometimes think that being right is enough, or that having a good idea is enough, or that, you know, having a good product is enough. It also is that street fight. Like you do have to go toe to toe with the Karl icons or you do have to buck a bunch of people telling you you're wrong or any event, it's always more complicated

and more difficult than it probably should be. Yeah, that's right. And you know, when I was going through it, you know, it was kind of reminded of the Winston Churchill, you know, if you're going through hell, just keep going, right? It's like, you don't really have any choice. I mean, you know, you could give up or stop, but that wouldn't be the right answer or our outcome. So you just keep going.

And every day you wake up and figure out what's the most right next step to be taking to get to where you want to go. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellissi. And I'm Sydney Battle. And we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us?

The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other.

And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wunder app. But so how do you manage that when you are against someone or in some industry where either it's rigged or people are fighting quite unfairly. Like it's, it seemed like just from the way you talk about it, it really bothered you the way people could just sort of go on television and lie about things.

And then you were forced to both respond and address that as if it was the same as playing fairly. Like how do you, how have you found over the years that you navigate sort of tricky terrain like that? Well, and of course, the reason for it was he was a magnet for the media, right? And he was entertaining. It's not that they actually agreed with what he was saying. Sure. People watched him because it was like a dumpster fire or something. It's like really interesting to watch him just mouth off about all this stuff. Which is why I ultimately decided to confront him face to face because I wanted to understand what was he really thinking? It turns out he wasn't really thinking much of anything. And so then I knew it would still be a grind, but I knew he wasn't really thinking much of anything. And so then, I knew it would still be a grind,

but I knew he wasn't going to make good on any of the ridiculous promises or claims that he thrown out there. So it was kind of just letting the truth ultimately bubble itself up and persevering outlasting him. And also calling his bluff and telling him, okay, you want to do it, go right ahead. You're going to screw it up by the way and I'll come back and buy it from you at a lower price. And that was when I saw he was truly terrified.

And that gave me a better understanding of what I was dealing with. Yeah, some of these characters that maybe we hear about on television or we see, we read about it, we think, live these sort of glamorous or interesting lives. I'm sure you've met your fair share of them, and then you sort of, you get to peek behind the curtain and you kind of go, oh, it's probably not actually fun to be that person, or they're almost acting under a kind of compulsion or addiction, or they just like,

they can't stop. They just sort of are who they are. And what you see, there's that expression that character is fake. It's just sort of, this is who they are, this is how they'll always be. And you sort of just have to leave them as they are. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a sad human being. And I think his challenges, not the psychoanalyze, probably came from the way his father treated him, based on what he told me. But, you know, at this stage in his life, he probably should be doing other things to help others, but that's not what he's generally doing.

But that also goes back to the idea, please, but never satisfied, is that often the person who is, like, let's say early on, you pick up some idea that, like, to make my dad proud, I just always have to do X, Y, or Z, or that, like, if I ever stop trying to get better, you know, people will laugh. Like, we can pick up these sort of early compulsions that can be quite adaptive as far as making us deeply specialized and talented at a singular thing. And then they sort of get us there, they get us

to the top of a certain mountain, but at what cost? Yeah. Yeah. Can't, can't argue with that. Yeah, can't argue with that. But I mean, I don't know you super well. You do seem to be for one of the richest, most successful people in the world who employees hundreds of thousands of people. You do seem to be fairly well adjusted. I hope so. Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, I don't think I've changed a lot of my super core beliefs from when I was, let's say, in a less fortunate position. And yeah, I continued to learn and grow, but yeah,

I think I've kept my feet on the ground and focused on the right things. How much of that is your wife? I mean, you've been married for what, 32 years? Yeah, I think it's a big part of it. You know, having that, Yeah, I think it's a big part of it. Having that, actually, tomorrow is our 30-second anniversary. Congratulations. Thank you. Having that strength of relationship and having her as a thought partner and a sounding board against all the things that are going on in not just my life, but our collective life together

has been incredibly important. And she has tons of unique insights and perspectives that I don't have. I imagine it's also the continuity and the consistency that helps keep a person grounded. It's like as when becomes more and more successful, you can sort of cast off certain things or level up in certain things, but you become untethered as a result because you are, you've lost sort of who you once were or what was once important to you. I'm sure you've seen

that many times with people that you know. I've seen that happen with others and, you know, I, fortunately, I don't think I've, that's not the path I've taken. Yeah. And then, you know, when you're with someone for a very long time, they have the ability, no matter who you are, what you've done to call you out on your bullshit. Yeah, and, you know, I'd say the same for some of my other

family members, right? My brothers, my dad, other other family members that have known me pretty much my whole life. So, I think that's super important. Well, how much is staying in one spot also done that, right? Like, I'm sure you could be based anywhere in the world, but you're still sort of right where you started. Yeah, it's home, my type. I love Austin. It's, you know, I came here when I was a freshman at UT

and fell in love with the place and never thought of really leaving. Yeah, yeah. I like the story in the book about your parents and their struggling to understand just what the hell you are doing in your dorm room. Why do you think, and now that you're your parent, and all your kids are out of college now, right? Yes.

So, did it give you more empathy for your parents and their struggles to understand you wanting to leave college or not taking college seriously? Oh, yeah, I mean, and I totally understood how my parents thought about it. I mean, you know, they were the first,

you know, of their generation to go to college, right? And so the idea of giving up this opportunity for an education just was a total enathem up to them. And so they're like, you gotta be out of your mind, right? To be thinking about it that way. So I totally understood that. Yeah, it's just, it's the irony of like, you're making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month and they're like, but why aren't you going to chemistry class or whatever it is, right? Like there's this sort of, I think as a parent, you probably just want your kid to be safe as opposed to maximize their potential

or fulfill their dreams. Yeah, and ultimately what I figured out was that you could take a semester off and go back to college with no academic penalty. And so I kind of convinced them that that was okay. We sort of developed a bit of a compromise. Yeah, I remember when I decided to drop out of college, I went into the registrar's office to drop out.

I went to the University of California Riverside. So similar to UT. And I remember going in and being like, I'm here to drop out. And they were like, you don't have to do that. You can just take a break and come back whenever you want. So this sort of decision that was so terrifying to me and sort of so life altering,

it was like, I only had to do 10% of the risk. You know what I mean? I think you often think these things, it's like, hey, I'm gonna end up living under a bridge somewhere if I make this decision. But in fact, when you really get up and close with those risks, and maybe this is what you're saying about buying Dellback, that it's not actually as potentially catastrophic as it might feel when you haven't really kicked the tires. Yeah, and for me, if I had not started anything and didn't

have this business sort of thriving in my dorm room, then dropping out of college might have been a pretty big risk, right? But, but, you know, I had de-rested it pretty significantly and I felt confident, you know, I could 10X the business, you know, just by sort of moving from my little tiny dorm room, you dorm room into a little tiny office. That's kind of the weird mythology about dropouts, whether it's Steve Jobs or... Well, Steve Jobs actually kind of was a dropout, but when you look at Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, they weren't just dropping out to go find themselves. They had businesses that, in some cases cases were making millions of dollars, like

they had employees. Exactly. They were like, I can't go sit in a classroom. I have staff meetings all day. Exactly. Yeah. So, I think people think dropping out is this, this hugely risky thing, which as you said, it is if you don't know what you can do instead.

But if you know what you can do instead, it's a very different thing. Yep. For slides, Lee. When you think about, because again, to go back to icon, it seemed like it was also the way you were sort of setting it up as a sort of a contrast of approaches to life. Sort of like your builder, and then there is also a type of person who is very successful, but doesn't actually make or do anything. It seemed like maybe what you really objected to was the sort of financial engineering of it as opposed, like it seemed like he was utterly indifferent, and this maybe what you

talk about in that meeting is like, what's your plan? And he's like, I don't know, I have people. The idea that Dell was a company comprised of human beings who make things seemed to be more your style and not the style of the people you were up against. Yeah, to him, it was a poker game, sort of a form of entertainment, and something that he kind of had fun doing.

And to me, it was much more, right? It was like people's lives, like what we're doing really matters in the world. You know, I carry, you know, in my conscious, at this pretty heavy burden of all the people that I'm in some way responsible for. And it's not a poker game, right? This is like super important stuff. And you can't just go on TV and lie about things. And the negative impact that that has on people psyche

and on actual real outcomes, just didn't really appreciate his approach at all. Yeah, like we're obviously in the middle of some discussions as a country about taxation, for instance, and it does strike me that we do a bad job distinguishing between sort of people who make things and people who make lots of money. And that those are obviously different,

but both can be paths to wealth, but that like we obviously, and we saw this during the pandemic, we're seeing it now with these logistical issues and all that. It's like, we really do need people who make things, who know how to do things, who can solve hard problems, and that that is different than just say people who are good at moving numbers around on spreadsheets

or are good at playing poker, but that builders are a really important part of making the world work. Yeah, and maybe on bias, but I think we need more of that in the future. And if you think about all the sort of big challenges that are out there in decarbonization, energy, environment, health environment, you know, healthcare, you know, etc. You know, these are some pretty big challenges to go after and you're going to have to have some bold risk-taking entrepreneurs and capital to fund them to be able to go solve those

problems. And we should be kind of proud that we have a fair number of those here in this country, you know, I'm not looking for accolades, but I do think a lot of countries would really crave to have more of them, you know, not less of them. Yeah, I'm not the world's biggest iron ran fan, but the premise of Atlas Shrugged is, I don't think you want to live in a world where all those people go away. Yes. But why do you think we struggle to solve tough problems? Mark Andreessen wrote that essay at the beginning of the pandemic about building things. Why do you think the most successful, sort of most naturally rich in resources,

country in the world seems to, it's not that we have an innovation problem because we're brilliantly innovative in some ways, but we seem to lack the ability to solve tough problems. Obviously, the vaccines are a great example of what it looks like when it goes right, but then we also seem to be able to not solve the tough psychosocial issue of getting people to take them, right? But why do you think we're struggling

to solve these tough problems, whether it's climate change or whatever? Well, first, let's say I don't know. But I think there are parts of society where there's more government involvement and more regulation. And I think those are areas where you tend to have less innovation. regulation and I think those are areas where you tend to have less innovation. So, you know, if you take education and health care as two obvious examples, you know, these are areas where the government's very involved and there's a lot of regulation and you don't have a lot of innovation.

So, just an observation. So, I think, you know, think as a full red blooded capitalist, I'm more in the camp of let's let innovation solve a lot of these challenges. I don't think government is going to address many of these challenges. There's a role for government to play, but if I look at the things that we're doing, and thousands of companies are voluntarily doing in some of the big challenging areas like in decarbonization, I think that's actually gonna move the needle much more than government regulation.

Yeah, I had RC Bufer on a few weeks ago, and we were talking about Adam Silver, so did the idea of sort of government versus private. I was like, why can't Adam Silver be in charge of everything? He seems like he's done a hell of a job. He has done a great job and dealt with many crises and geopolitical issues. And yeah, it's complex.

And, you know, it's like we're not sending our best, right? We clearly have the talent. We clearly have the capital. I was just thinking about this because so my oldest turns five in two weeks. So he'll just write. So basically, right when he turns five, then he'll be eligible for the vaccines, which they're just a bet to roll effort kids. And so obviously, I've been following the news on it and it was like, you

know, like, this is at the beginning of October. It's like, you know, FDA set to meet about the approval of vaccines for kids and blah, blah, blah, phyzer turns in the data in, you know, late September and the FDA is like, okay, we'll meet about it on October 26. And you know, just like, who sets a meeting four months, you know, four weeks from now, in the middle of a pandemic, and it did strike me as a contrast between sort of the private and the public approach

of like, what makes you think you can afford to take four weeks, right? And sort of the plain nice, but when, obviously you gotta be accommodating the people's schedule, but when, obviously you've got to be accommodating to people's schedule, but also get your assing gear kind of a thing. Yeah, and I have the same frustration, you know, unfortunately, I don't know what we can do about it. You know, given the democratic system that we have, which as much as we might say, it could be better, people still want to come to this country, and I still think it's the greatest country in the world, by a lot. But you can certainly see some other systems out there where they have a deterministic strategy, their

investing in strategic industries in aggressive ways, and they're advancing quite rapidly. I think it's good you're starting to see you know the the the American government start to focus on things like semi-cut occurs like duh hello you know these are important things. These strategic industries that play a role in so many aspects of the future and if we just give up on those and we get hollowed out by other nation states that have a more deterministic strategy around those, that's a super dangerous thing over a long period of time. Yeah, it's playing nice, but trying to win. also, that you can't just expect these things to take care of themselves or problems to resolve themselves. You do have to sort of fight for the important

things. And bureaucratically, we seem to struggle with deterministic things. What is the outcome that we're trying to achieve, and let's back it out from there, not simply follow the process that we have always followed. And there are also things that have a duration, which is well outside the boundaries of the next election cycle or two. And so they require a level of thought and planning that we don't seem to be really great at. Well, so actually, let's take that back to Delvin, because you have experienced it in all

the different ways. You were talking, if the election is a sort of shot clock, right, and you were saying you were stuck on a 90-day shot clock, then you went private. Now you're public again. How have you thought about managing this shot clock, which is a real constraint, just as the way midterms are a constraint and presidential elections are a constraint, and then in politics, they're all overlapping with each other. But how do you think about it and how could we do a better job thinking long-term within

these short-term constraints? Yeah, I think for companies, there are times in various market cycles and in the life of a company where the market may or may not give it permission to think with a longer term, time horizon. We're in a better place now and we're able to do that and it's working well. But there's no guarantee that I'll continue and the market definitely goes through cycles.

We had a tough time, 2012, 2013. at a tough time, you know, 2012, 2013. You know, there is a lot of risk capital out there that are funding big, hard-tech problems. And that's certainly a reason to be very optimistic about the future of not just the US, but the world. But this question of how does the system of democracy address those kind of challenges? I think first of all, it takes bipartisanship, right? Which isn't a ton of. I think one of the things that happened in the last five years or so was a greater understanding of the threats of China specifically. specifically to America's continued growth and success. And that, I think, is leading to some of the investments around

semiconductor actors, which are a good thing. And hopefully, we'll see more of that. And it's been a much more bipartisan agreement that it's a national priority. It's not sort of a blue party or a red party kind of a thing. Well, maybe it's just, yeah, what do we decide to focus on? You look at some countries a lot less innovative than America. And you can get a COVID test for a dollar

at a grocery store in Germany. Meanwhile, to get your results back on a PCR test in America, it takes three days, you know, two years into the pandemic. And it's because, you know, we decided to get bogged down in this mask discussion instead of innovating our way out of not that masks are not important, obviously they are. But, you know, we, it's like, we seem to get locked in on these intractable, like issues

where 50% thinks this and 20% thinks this and 30% doesn't care. Instead of focusing on alternative solutions to the whole discussion entirely, it seems weird how we get stuck in these quagmires. Yeah, again, you know, I'm not really sure what to do about that. And, and, you know, we try to try to stay out of things that we can't do, you know, do a whole lot about. Yeah, I just mean, to me, the lesson from that is like, what are you going to choose to focus your attention on? Is it going to be on something you don't control? Or is it going to be something that you might have some as our mutual friend Matthew McCotta says, where you have some green lights? Right? Like, are you going to focus on where you can get some momentum going? And I think strategically, we get stuck on like, what's right, or what I want, as opposed

to, well, what are the most, what are the actual possible solutions to this problem that would allow us to move forward in some way? Yeah, and we focus on the things we can control and where we can, where we can make a difference and, you know, where we think technology is specifically our technology can help, you know, democratizing access and, you know, opening up the, the, the opportunity set. I mean, there's a lot of work going on on 5G and broadband. And we kind of saw during the pandemic, you know, the kind of fault lines in our society where some people weren't connected, they didn't have the right devices, and they couldn't access education or healthcare or, you know, their jobs

or entertainment or anything else. And, you know, that's something we can actually help with, right? And so we're focused on that. Yeah, I mean, I'm at my bookstore right now, but where I live, which is like 30 minutes from you, I have a broadband satellite broadband that downloads it like 10 kilobytes a second. I can barely stream Netflix. I can almost see downtown Austin from my place

and I am buffering on reruns of the office because the digital divide is still literally divided in some case. People just don't have access to these basic things, which again goes to the point of like, how can we not innovate our way out of these problems? These seem like if any country could solve it, it should be us.

Yeah, I think we can innovate our way out of these, and I think the government can play a role in catalyzing some of know, some of that. Yeah, I think about that. Have you read the Robert Carlos series on Lyndon Johnson? No. Oh, it's epic. It's obviously, I think some of the best books ever written about Texas. But this is where Johnson makes his name as a politician is that like, the Texas Hill country just didn't have electricity until like the 40s. Because they basically, both government and business was sort of like, we don't care about these people, right? Like they don't vote, they don't have any money.

What do they matter? And Johnson uses his bureaucratic competence to wield the levers of power to solve an intractable problem. And so, he becomes this sort of political hero in Texas because he brought lights to an electric power to people well after everyone thought this was solved, but of course, it wasn't solved. And yeah, we were just driving across the country, we visited that we drove over the Hoover Dam Dam and you're just like, man, we used to do

some crazy things as a country. We don't do that much of that anymore. And we did them a lot faster, too, than we do them now. So yeah, I mean, I think there are a lot of protections in place. There's a lot of friction, and not all of it is helping us build the future that we need. But do you think part of it is also that it's just so much easier to build an app or a website,

and in many cases, so lucrative, that some of the best talent of a generation has been misallocated towards maybe superficial problems. Like, like instead of having engineers who are designing the next Super Dam, they're designing algorithms that make you more angry at your neighbor had faced, you know, on Facebook. Yeah, the confirmation bias reinforcement algorithms. Yes, I mean, I think that's been very lucrative and certainly whatever is lucrative often attracts, a number of the top talent and top graduates. But I think there's also another thing going on, which is more

and more people are looking for more meaning in their life and more purpose. And they are attracted to these more noble and meaningful endeavors. And so, yeah, I guess I remain optimistic that we won't have a problem attracting the best and brightest if the necessary conditions are there to allow them to succeed. And again, I go back to, there is an enormous amount, you know, there's never been as much funding as there is now for huge complicated problems to be solved, even with all the challenges and obstacles that are out there. So how do you think about that philanthropically as you decide where you're going to direct time or resources, what problems excite you as being problems one that you think can be solved, and two, you think you can contribute or your foundations can contribute to solve it.

Yeah, we focus a lot on children in urban poverty, which takes us to education and improving the education system, you know, bit by bit, you know, and piece by piece, and also in healthcare, and you know, healthcare outcomes, family economic stability, And, you know, how do you change the life trajectory that somebody's on and help them get on a completely new path? And, you know, I think I think philanthropy can play a big role there and we're doing a lot there. I also think what's interesting is you're seeing a lot more for-profit businesses that have a social purpose as they're underlying

objective and in many cases those for-profit organizations are moving the needle even more than the philanthropic ones. And so it's a combination of factors that I think will ultimately drive progress. Yeah, so something like the Dell Children's Hospital, what do you think about when you decide to endow something like that? What is, let's say flash forward 20 years and it's a success. What does that success look like to you?

Well, in that case, it was pretty straightforward, right? The city has been doubling in size every decade for four decades, Which is kind of amazing, you know, it doesn't seem like it's slowing down. Yeah, 250,500, a million, two million, four million, just kind of keeps going. And so the capacity for the healthcare system you know, wasn't keeping up. And certainly if a child or an adult had any serious medical condition, they're going

to use nerdallas. That's just the way it was. And that wasn't great. And so it was kind of an obvious place where there was a need. And we also felt that, you know, I mean Austin was kind of the biggest city in the country that didn't have a medical school also. Really, okay. And it also had this great university, University of Texas at Austin. And so, you know, the Children's Hospital and the Pediatric Research Institute

that we helped create in some ways were precursors to ultimately creating a residency program and then ultimately a medical school. So this has been kind of like a 20 year plus plan to improve the healthcare infrastructure and attract world class academics and care providers. And also create this ecosystem of biotech companies that's starting to spring up. So yeah, it's been fun and it's certainly something the community has needed. And I'll tell you,

every so often, Susan and I will get a letter from a parent. And these are like the most meaningful letters you ever get. When you understand how a place like a children hospital affects a single child's life, understand how a place like a children hospital affects, you know, a single child's life, you know, it's just super touching. I do think that's one hopefully good outcome that comes out of the pandemic.

I was reading an article that was basically saying that sort of post the Second World War, America especially took a very individualistic approach to health care. You have your doctor, you take care of yourself, you do what you want to do, because we've solved a lot of the big sort of public health issues, and the pandemic is sort of serving as a reminder that health is also public health and vice versa, right? And the way that we are tied up together, even though we maybe live very different lives or in very different socioeconomic brackets, that the position of the most vulnerable or the least affluent parts of society expose everyone else to risk that our fates

are all tied up with each other. And I do hope we take from this, we carry that energy forward because when everyone's in their silo, it might seem like you're taking care of yourself, but you're also putting yourself at risk as a result. Yeah, I think one thing we can hope for is that there's been an outbreak of empathy among humans as we've kind of seen the challenges that everyone has faced. And how can we help each other and create a better world?

Well, just how interdependent we all are with each other. When suddenly people, you are reliant on people to do things either because you can't do them yourself or you don't want to do them yourself. And you go, oh, yes, somebody people to do things either because you can't do them yourself or you don't want to do them yourself. And you go, oh, yes, somebody has to do this. And it's probably not fun to be them. And it's probably hard not to have these things that I take for granted, whether that's

healthcare or child care or any of these things that we just assume. Everyone has. They don't, and it makes their life very hard. And as a result, it puts potentially everyone at some kind of risk. Yep. Great. Well, this was so awesome.

I was really glad to talk. I loved the book. I particularly loved, maybe that's the last thing. I loved the appendix, the things I believe. What made you decide to put this, what is it? 21 commandments at the end. Did you have to think of these for the book or is this something that you have organizationally or in your office? Like, how do you think about that? What do you think about that? You know, as I was working on the book,

it occurred to me that it'd be a good idea to have something like this, toward the end of the book. And so I just kind of refined it and honed it. I mean, anybody who's worked at our company could probably recite all of these in one form or another. And, you know, but they're definitely, you know, as I said, I think the kind of principles, things I believe, ideals, and yeah, they've worked well for me.

Your mileage may vary, but, you know, those are the things that I believe are super important. Yeah, my favorite was 13, confidence not arrogance, humility, not ego, which sort of goes to the betting on yourself thing that we were talking about. If you're betting on yourself out of ego, it's probably not gonna go well, but if you're betting on yourself

because you have a strong sense of both the strengths and weaknesses of your position, that's maybe a good place to be. Yep, agreed. Love it. Well, I hope to see you soon. Absolutely, Ryan, great to be with you. Stay well. It was awesome. All right, I'll let you go. Okay, thanks. Take care. Hey, it's Ryan. You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa. The Stoa, Poquile, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place.

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