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Jason Calacanis
I got for 500k.
Lon Harris
I think we need to hear this story about you getting shiv for half a mil.
Jason Calacanis
The scumbag who jcal. Wow. Thought he would get away with it. But I'm gonna balance the ledger from company. Okay.
Jason Ballard
Grace and lovin is the way man.
Jason Calacanis
So like I know I'm a flawed human. I will have grace for the people who stabbed me. I'm doing my best. Today's not gonna be my best moment.
Sebastian Rubino
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Jason Calacanis
Hey everybody, it's Friday, April 17th. This is Twist. I am on fire today. Lon, we've got an amazing docket. You look great. Before we do anything, I just want to take a moment to applaud Claude. I just hit it. I got the haptic. I'm now recording the conversation and all my action items are on here. Action item number one by the end of the show, explain the scumbag who f'd Jaycal a year ago and thought he would get away with it. But JCal has a two step process in which no revenge. I'm not a vengeful person, you know that Lon. But I'm going to balance the ledger. I got f'd for 500k.
Lon Harris
Wow, that's a lot.
Jason Calacanis
And at the end of the show after we do off duty or maybe right before off duty, remind me.
Lon Harris
I'm going to make a note right
Jason Calacanis
now on how I'm going to balance the ledger. Let's get started. Who's our guest here? I'm so excited.
Lon Harris
We got a great guest. To kick things off, we've got Jason Ballard. He is the founder of Icon. They make tools to 3D print houses with concrete. But going to talk about Icon prime, their new defense focused arm. Jason, thanks so much for being here. Welcome to the show.
Jason Ballard
Really excited to be here. Howdy everybody and thanks for having me on.
Lon Harris
I'm also excited.
Jason Calacanis
Jason's one of my guys. He's in My squad, in my Austin squad.
Lon Harris
J. Bell told me before the show that I've now been in Austin long enough where I can get my own hat. I can start rocking the cowboy hat.
Jason Calacanis
18 months, I've crossed the barrier.
Jason Ballard
You know, I think it's faster than that. Jcal. I think like the moment a person residence is west of the Mississippi River, I think your, your rights and privileges extend to new haberdashery. So I think.
Lon Harris
Okay, I was very excited to hear this. I've been waiting to cross the cowboy hat barrier. I think I have.
Jason Calacanis
I'm not sure what the length of the brim can be for a year. One guy, you know, you.
Jason Ballard
Yeah, that's right. You have to find your way into it. Yeah, but, but, but it's certainly a journey worth making and not to be too trepidatious about for sure.
Lon Harris
Awesome. Yeah, I can't wait.
Jason Calacanis
Jason's a great entrepreneur, icon. 3D homes, stunningly beautiful. I thought, I don't know about this model. And then I saw the homes and once you see the homes, they're gorgeous. And there are three problems in society right now. And I did a little tweet about this earlier today. Just total serendipity. Jason, I was on fire this morning because there's all this bad news coming out about AI.
Jason Ballard
Right.
Jason Calacanis
And if you think about who our top two spokespersons are, Sam Altman, who just had a 270,000 word article in the New Yorker explaining he's a sociopath from every partner who he's ever had. Apparently I'll let people make their own decision there. He kind of admits he's had some challenges. And then you have Dario on the other side. And these are two hyper competent people, but they are scaring the bejesus, speaking of Jesus out of Americans. And the dialogue continues to be jobs, economic uncertainty and that this is going to get out of control and we can't control the demon. We're waking up. That's not who we need. In my estimation, Lon, leading the charge for technology today, we need to imagine as entrepreneurs a single mom or dad with two kids makes 60, 70, 80K a year. But you know, an average American makes 67,000. So let's put it at 80K. They're working a weekend job and a full time job and what do they want for their family? What do any of us want? A roof over our heads, a good education, some healthy food. Right? Yeah.
Jason Ballard
I mean we often talk about it. I mean like, it's like very difficult to imagine that the Future can be incredible. And I think the future should be incredible. But it's kind of hard to imagine it if you don't get these like very basic things correct. And I think food, water and shelter are certainly on that very short list of things. And it almost like getting those things correct, like enables all of the other exciting things that I think get talked about on this podcast and other places. Places.
Jason Calacanis
So it's foundational, the ability to just
Lon Harris
to live relatively close to where you work. Like, we don't think of that as being like a huge life changing thing, but it really does matter. Like that's like so core. And that I think is something that Americans just have not had a chance to experience in a long time. It's very difficult to live anywhere near where you work if you're around a major American city.
Jason Calacanis
There's a great point if you think about the correlation between depression, substance abuse, alcohol abuse, obesity, domestic violence, crime, all of these things. There's literally studies that have been made. We'll ask producer Glaude to pull it up. There have been countless studies made that show that have been done that once you get past 30 or 40 minutes in a commute, these things dramatically increase. And when you get to over an hour commute, it's like this couple's getting divorced. Because think about it, if mom or dad are taking this, you know, this hour and a half commute to get to work, they get home an hour and 15 minutes. Now they've been in a car for 2 hours and 45 minutes after working for an 8, 9, 10 hour shift. Man. What's left? What's left for the fam? Not much.
Lon Harris
Thanks to producer Claude. I've got a few studies here. The biggest one was from Sweden. They did a public health study in 2011. An analysis of public health surveys in southern Sweden found that car and public Transport commutes exceeding 30 minutes are associated with increased stress, lower vitality and perceived poor sleep quality. So you hit it. Exactly. It's that 30 minute threshold.
Jason Calacanis
Also, all I do is read the
Lon Harris
UK Office for National Statistics. The ONS found that commutes of more than 30 minutes by train lead to higher anxiety levels on average. So there you go.
Jason Calacanis
So, Jason, you're here to talk a little bit about. I wouldn't call it a pivot. I think I'd call it a new product line. So tell us what you're working on.
Jason Ballard
Yeah, it's not a pivot. So icon, you know, for those who don't know or haven't heard of We're a construction technology company. Sort of the charismatic megafauna of our company are like the large scale 3D printing robotics for printing buildings of all kinds. In the very earliest versions of my, Our seed round in fact said like, we think this technology is disruptively important. We think the most impactful areas for this to be deployed, of course are in residence, just like the sort of global housing crisis. But even in the seed deck, we were saying we think there's a profound opportunity here for the military and for military construction. And we think when it's time to build on other worlds, like this is going to be like the only game in town when it comes to building in space. That sort of seemed crazy eight years ago, but in fact that is what has been happening all along. And so we've been working with the military, the intelligence communities and NASA for six or seven years now. And it has sort of finally come to a head where like that business inside of Icon will grow about 500% this year. And it's now worth like a dedicated, focused effort. Because there's interesting ways that you do business development with a government customer. There's interesting legal arrangements, there's. And of course there's just like a sharp point on what the technology needs to do. Everybody wants faster and cheaper, but there are some things that are weighted more highly in a military and intelligence environment. Survivability.
Jason Calacanis
What are they? Because I mean, obviously building faster cost for the military is not as important as for the single mom or dad we talked about earlier who's trying to make a living. But speed, I would think.
Jason Ballard
Yes, quality. That's right, speed. Speed is a big deal. And they have a special word for quality called survivability. I mean, these have to be like quite safe depending on sort of the situations soldiers and people in the military are in. And so they have this like extreme sensitivity to survivability and durability of the things that they build. They also are very sensitive to. They often operate in places where they don't have easy access to a complicated supply chain or a lot of skilled labor. And you know, a wall system, which is primarily the thing we automate with the technology today, you know, a typical wall system is going to take, you know, 15 to 20 people to build in about 60 days. And our system builds that same wall system in the residential space with about two people in a week. And so like, you know, you shrink the labor requirement by 6/7. Right? And our supply chain are things that are like globally and ubiquitously available in Fact, some of the next generation work we'll be doing for the military is literally learning to use in situ resources like the materials around you to build whatever you need in the moment.
Jason Calacanis
That's the big unlock in my mind. Because you use concrete, I like to stay active. You know, I'm getting a little older, but I've started drinking IMH Daily Ultimate Essentials and it is delicious. I'm starting to notice a real shift. I drink it every morning and I just feel less tired. Right. Which allows me to really, you know, catch up and attack the day. IMH's daily Ultimate Essentials packs the benefits of 16 different supplements into one tasty drink. It's loaded with 92 nutrient rich ingredients including vitamins, minerals, adaptogens, along with pre, pro and postbiotics. It's giving me a great energy boost. It calms your digestion and it's an easy habit to stick with because it tastes delicious. So start feeling like your best self every day with im8. Go to im8health.com twist and use the code twist to get a free welcome kit, five free chavel sachets and 10% off your order. These statements have not been evaluated by the fda. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
Jason Ballard
It form crete it's a concrete that needs to do some special things and take form. If you use, you know, standard concrete, it flows and then you end up with a puddle instead of a house. And if you use a lot of the traditional ways to like quick set concrete, you end up with a brick instead of a robot because it sets up in the machine. And so it's some pretty specialized concrete. But the base ingredients are ingredients that are like available everywhere in the world.
Jason Calacanis
All right, we'll get right back to what you're doing in terms of forward deployment, the use cases, the and then we'll go to space. First, I want to start lon by applauding plaudit my plot. I'm recording. I've got all of my notes taken care of. Take a memo. I'm going to unload on the one person who screwed me in the last five years. It's been a while since somebody got over on jcal and got over on me for about 500 dimes. 500 boxes of ziti. Not fun. But I'm going to balance the ledger at the end of the show. So I just gave myself a note about that. If you want to keep track of your enemies, of the people who screw you or your friends or of what you got to do today.
Lon Harris
Use your plot, get applaud.
Jason Calacanis
We applaud Pl.
Lon Harris
You want to get applaud note PIN s. And you can check it out for yourself at Plaud AI Twist and just use the code TWIST for 10% off your plaud notepad. S. Keep track of all your enemies. Listen easily with the Plaud. No PIN s. There you go.
Jason Calacanis
We have some discount codes and the best live question. I am going to pay for Plaud for free. But you got to ask a great question either on x or on YouTube or the LinkedIn account. So we'll check all of those. All right, Jason, let's talk about that forward deployment. It looked like you were building barracks or storage there. So my understanding is when we are in a conflict or we need to have a presence, they pop up tents and these kind of semi permanent structures. They're a little more than a tent, but obviously a lot less than a building. And based on what I know about material science, which is very little, the bullets, bombs, and these new drones, when they hit a tent, A canvas based on my boy scout memories is not gonna help you when a drone comes in. Correct.
Jason Ballard
I mean, the laundry list of problems in military construction is quite long. But yeah, to simplify it right now, the two tools the military has to use when they want to build anything. You mentioned barracks and military housing. But whether it's a training center, whether it's like defensive structures, vehicle hides these, all things we have built for the military, they either have these, like, high speed, low cost, but low survivability option, like tents, or they have this very slow, very expensive, very complicated way of doing traditional building. And what they're missing, which they like very sharply need, is the high speed deployment of survivable structures with a simple supply chain without needing a bunch of skilled labor hanging around. And that is the tool that robotic construction offers that you have the automation of the labor through the robotics. And then you're building with a very simple supply chain and a material that is inherently survivable.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. So this concrete slurry that you use in the 3D printer, we saw it on the screen just a moment ago. It looks like you tend to do walls that are what, 12, 18 inches thick. And then what could they survive if a drone hit it? I'm assuming the people inside survive or the tank inside survives because there's a foot or two of concrete.
Jason Ballard
Yeah, yeah. We have done vehicle hides and we've done sort of full or like an early round. There's more to come for sure. Of like blast and ballistics testing against the facilities. I'm not allowed to disclose like the full performance characters as you might imagine, but I think the email we got back from the testing officer was like, we subjected your structure to immense pressure and are confident that subjected to similar pressure in the field would pass muster. Something. Something like that.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. And this is somebody who stayed at an icon. You had an Airbnb going for a while, but I think somebody bought it, right?
Jason Ballard
Yeah. I mean, yeah, if that's the project. I think that was from that project there is from like 2019. So that was like some of our early work. We have like 250 buildings that we have delivered in the world to date, most of which are housing. A few dozen of those are like military structures. But it's been a fun journey of trying to really give humanity new tools with which to build.
Jason Calacanis
So how much faster can you build a survivable structure in the field versus the equivalent that the military will build? If we're talking days, months, weeks, you tell us.
Jason Ballard
The most recent project we're doing is out at Fort Bliss in West Texas. And we just had a little ceremony out there and the Deputy Secretary of the army showed up and spoke about their experiences with the technology and said that typically it takes them one to two years to build our barracks. We are delivering 10 and six months from for less than half the cost. And these are like higher performance. Like if you saw the existing barracks on site, like, it's actually like not apples. I'm giving you apples to apples time and calls comparisons. But these are like not apples to apples comparisons.
Jason Calacanis
So it could be 20, 30, 40x in terms of just the amount of square feet and the cost. You know, the somewhere in like half the price and 10 times the structure is like a 20, 30, 40 multiple. And talk to me about. Because what people typically get wrong here is aesthetics and climate. I first looked at it and I was like, I don't know if I want to be in a pizza oven and it's not going to look good, whatever. And then I saw the structure and I was like, wait a second. This looks really beautiful. Lon, this looks like Deckard's apartment. It looks like the Innis house. This looks like something Frank Lloyd Wright built.
Jason Ballard
Yeah, we actually.
Jason Calacanis
Great. And then talk about climate and temperature.
Jason Ballard
Yeah, maybe I'll like go back. Because of course, like, housing was like the big issue that sort of provoked the existence of icon. And of course everybody talks a lot about we need to build faster, we need to build more affordably, but you kind of do. It's an expensive problem to solve and you kind of need to step back and be like, wait a minute, are we sure, like this is the world we want to build faster and cheaper? Like the sort of Jedi, like these are not the houses you're looking for? Like, right, like where is Wakanda? Like where is Rivendell? Like, are we sure, like the delivery of this thing that we see. And I think the housing of the future should feel like, of course it should be faster and cheaper, but I think like beauty and dignity, like have to be at the table of the requirements that you're solving for from day one. And of course that like happened in housing. And it was one of the attractive things about 3D printing was you could imagine automations do what automations do and they make things faster and cheaper. But because the architecture is digital and then very importantly because the building material is fluid, all of your sort of aesthetic aspirations are still on the table. Right? Like if you want a house in the shape of a Fibonacci spiral, we can print a house in the shape of Fibonacci spiral and it's the same price as a square. And so like what happens to the world, like not only when things are cheaper, but when like beauty is back on the menu, when like, you know, maybe in like the iPhone, like the billionaire has the same iPhone as like the college student. Like what happens when the same sort of high end looking esthetics are available? In fact, we're doing 110 more homes for the homeless at Community First Village. I should have maybe brought pictures. Like these do not look like houses for the homeless. We're delivering them for between 99 and $120,000 a home, including our profit.
Jason Calacanis
Incredible.
Jason Ballard
And like they are incredible.
Lon Harris
That's awesome because I mean so often when you're hearing about, you know, these well intentioned programs to the homeless, it's like, well, we're going to build them like this little one room closet and we'll put it in a parking lot and you could have a thousand of them. And it's so cheap and it's like, yeah, but it's depressing. It's like living in a refugee camp.
Jason Ballard
And it's somehow funny, it's strangely like connected to all this like regulatory runaway that has also happened in the housing space. Because you could, you know, in, in some way, you don't want a bunch of like ugly, crappy houses. Like that's not like a wicked instinct. And so people have Tried to sort of prevent this sort of ugliness from proliferating in the world. And you sort of get this pile up of. You get this pile up of regulations that like also add cost and expense and time and somehow resetting with something that is faster and cheaper but also more beautiful perhaps also allows us to like untangle some of this like regulatory knot that we've gotten in that for sure is driving up housing costs.
Jason Calacanis
Here's a picture of. And listen, this is no dig to the people who made it. And this is certainly a lot better than living on the street. But if I'm being honest, it looks like you're in barracks and it looks, you know, it doesn't look modern.
Jason Ballard
It doesn't look, it does not speak to the. Again, it's like, where's what kind of.
Lon Harris
Like, this is not the world that
Jason Ballard
we want to build faster and it's not a lease. This is not correct. Like, we want the same thing for our brothers and sisters who are at different parts of the socioeconomic ladder that we would want for our own family. I don't know if you can Google like I.
Jason Calacanis
Well, here's like, look at this. Here's your 3D printed homes for the homeless. Here's a startup truth bomb. A lot of founders have no idea what's actually going on with their money. If that's true of your company, hey, no judgments. I know you're busy hiring, building your product, go to market, all that important stuff, but your company needs a reliable financial financial partner, not a lifestyle brand. Okay? Grasshopper is a real federally chartered digital bank that's not trying to win you over with a rewards program. Instead, they're building deep integrations, treasury products that are going to actually help you expand your Runway, and innovative tools like an MC based AI connector. Oh man, that's awesome. We can connect it to all of our agents and do reporting and that will put you in command of your money. As a twist listener, you're going to get $500 cash bonus just for opening an account. Think of that. You open an account, boom, there's $500 in it. So leap on over to Grasshopper Bank. Twist. And use the promo code Twist as a twist listener, you're going to get a $500 cash bonus just for opening an account. Grasshopper bank.
Jason Ballard
Twist again.
Jason Calacanis
To be honest, there's homes out here in Hill country, out in Dripping Springs, out in Wimberley that are selling for 500k that look exactly like that and that are $400 a night. Airbnb you looked at these lawn for your mom.
Jason Ballard
Can you google. I don't know if you can search i99 icon, the i99 icon and see what images come up because I would like to show you some of the newer ones. There it is. We are building that house. That house is already done. We are building that house for between 99, $120,000 delivered with our profit included.
Jason Calacanis
By the way, that house looks like a 4 million dollar LA you mansion with a view.
Lon Harris
It looks like you'd go to Los Feliz and tour that. Like this was built in the 20s and it's been in 100 films.
Jason Ballard
You got it, you got it, you got it. And so we had a, like a global architecture design contest for like we gave a million dollar prize to a million dollars in price of people designing homes that could be built for 99k was sort of the initiative. We've also built that house out at, at Community First Village. This helps us get around this like NIMBY problem. Like not in my backyard. It's like you can sort of weave the tapestry of society back together, but beauty really is the key. It's not just a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet matters. But these things have to be weighted sort of like in a more equal way than we've thought about them in the past of solving the housing crisis,
Lon Harris
taking an unhoused person and putting them in a real community that feels like a real neighborhood that's inherently stabilizing.
Jason Ballard
If y' all go out to Community First Village, you would say like, oh my God, a neighborhood of like homeless people. Like, it must be like kind of crazy town, right? Like it is completely chill and kind and like it is a miracle. And like the. I don't want to keep repeating myself, but like the restoration of dignity and community. Like these things are not just spreadsheet. When you're talking about fundamental human needs. Food, water, shelter, of course they're baby, but they like unlock the rest of the pyramid, right? Of like self actualization. And this is how you solve these seemingly intractable social issues is you, you have to put the sort of whole human in the picture.
Jason Calacanis
Listen, I'm going to invoke Jesus. Lon and I have been talking a lot about Jesus these days. Always, always, always top of mind. I'm telling people how you treat. How you treat the meekest amongst us is how you treat me. This is what Jesus said. This is the gospel. He said to us, how you treat the weakest members of society is how you treat God. Let that sink in.
Jason Ballard
As a concept, folks, what you have done to the sick, the poor, the hungry, the prisoner is what you have done to me.
Jason Calacanis
Correct. And this is, I think, a great north star for our society here in America. The reason it's important and the reason I did my tweet this morning is I think it's very easy as technologists, it's very easy as capital allocators. You hit some hits, they run away. Oh, my God. Uber Robinhood. I'm a victim of it myself. But we have to ask ourselves, as society becomes so wealthy, where's the floor? And has the floor moved up?
Jason Ballard
Yeah. The whole bracket has to move together, correct? Yes. And if you were, like, thinking about structuring a society, which we should. The whole bracket has to move.
Jason Calacanis
And let me tell you something. When you are lucky enough to be in the top 1%, 0.1%, top 10%, top 20%, wherever you find yourself in life and in our industry, you very quickly find yourself in the top 10%, 5%, 1%. It's extraordinary how the upper middle class has grown. We've had the upper middle class in the United States is the fastest growing. These are people who have net worths of 1 to 5 million, which doesn't seem a lot if you live in New York City or Los Angeles, but it is a heck of a lot of money if you live in Nashville or Austin. Right. You're doing really well. You have a lot of optionality. So what can we do to just move the floor up?
Jason Ballard
Go ahead. As an icon of this, when you start thinking about technology, I don't think it's an accident. The very same technology that we're using to reimagine the way we do social and affordable housing in America is the very same technology that will also allow us to build the moon base. Somehow when you sort of frame these things as bigger problems, civilization just needs a better way to build, as opposed to, like, what's a little widget that could save us a few dollars per square foot or something like. It actually unlocks tremendous potential for human flourishing, sort of across the board, both for solving intractable problems, but also for these grand challenges that I think also speak to the human heart and are ennobling in their own way.
Jason Calacanis
Said another way, this could be a win, win, win.
Jason Ballard
Yes.
Jason Calacanis
The investors in these companies and the founders and the team can win. Society can win.
Jason Ballard
Right.
Jason Calacanis
And all levels of society can win. It doesn't need to just be the top wins. The shareholders in the company.
Jason Ballard
That's Right. These things don't have to be incompetent. Like we can shelter with this technology and others, I think we should be thinking like we can shelter the homeless, we can revive the American dream, we can defend the west, and we can by God build the moon base. That's the society that I want to be a part of. And that's the technology set that we need to be all working on collectively to unlock the sort of next level of humanity.
Jason Calacanis
You know what you just unlocked for me this idea that when you make something that's truly got that craftsmanship that truly inspires the high end, it's not incongruous to have that hit everybody. And I'll give an example of it. I'm sitting a couple of feet away from the 16th Tesla ever made, the Roadster that I paid $150,000 for. And next to it is the Model S. I paid also signature 0001, which I paid $150,000 for. Okay, it's $300,000 worth of cars. I'm a very lucky guy. I get to have those two cars. What do I drive every day? I drive a Model Y cost 50k. I think you can get it used for 30k with 20,000 miles on it. The FSD. I use the FSD. Elon uses the FSD. Everybody who has access to a used Model y or Model 3, which you can get used ones right now with FSD is 15 to 20k. They're everywhere. And then Cybercap brings it everywhere. Every rich person you talk to, David Sachs started driving again. He used to take Ubers in Austin.
Jason Ballard
He's in Austin now, right?
Jason Calacanis
He's in Austin and he showed up for. We had a nice steak dinner the other week. He shows up, he's like, how do I park my car? I'm like, david, there's a valet. He's like, okay, I give it to the valet. I'm like, yeah, you have to have your key though, because you know, textile. I'm like, why are you driving your stuff? He's like, oh, I have FSD and I have this Model Y. I love it. Sacks doing pretty good. Drives the Model Y every day. Chamath, he's doing pretty good. He drives the Model Y every day. Yeah. Freeberg, he's doing very well. Oh, Hollow's crushing it. He's got four Model Ys he said on the program, or four Teslas, all of them in self traffic. We all drive the same car. It's all converged to one. Yeah, perfect. This is what's going to happen with Icon? You'll be a rich person. You'll want to rebuild your Malibu 10,000 square foot beach home or in the hills. And you'll want it to be fire resistant.
Jason Ballard
You'll build, by the way, two to three hour fire rating standard out of the box cost, the same prices to build in a non, non fireproof way
Jason Calacanis
like unpack that for us after we look at this incredible poly market. Here it is.
Lon Harris
Sure.
Jason Calacanis
I am very excited to be a shareholder in, a fan of and partners with polymarket. What will the median home value in Austin, Texas metro area be on April 30th? And here it is. What do we have? You put it out one week. Give us an overview here of what people think the value here will be. And I think this one needs to be traded a lot more heavily. Yes, the volume people are betting here,
Lon Harris
volume pretty low on this one. I'm looking.
Jason Calacanis
That means opportunity.
Lon Harris
There you go. But it's new. It's new in fairness. So only 110,000 volumes so far. But it's new. Winning so far over 439k. That's what people are betting. By the end of this month, the median Austin home value will be then 435 to 439, then 431. Basically as expensive as you can go is what people are leaning on. And as a person who has been home hunting in Austin recently, I don't disagree. If you find a decent house in Austin for under 400, you should buy it immediately. That's my, that's my take on it.
Jason Calacanis
It's easier than ever to build a great new product. And launching a startup, even as a solopreneur, is getting easier and easier. But as my experienced founders already know, there's a lot more to starting a company than just putting up a website or even building a product. If you're serious about going into business, you. You need a Delaware C corp that's going to give you a serious leg up on your competition and you can be taken seriously by investors. That's where Northwest Registered Agent comes in. Just a few clicks. They're going to give you the perfect start to your new enterprise. A real identity, a domain, a custom website, a business email, all the public filings done and even a phone number. And you'll complete this process in under 10 minutes. Plus, you're going to get all sorts of free tools and resources from step to step guides, compliance reminders, and an online account that's going to keep everything organized even as your business Grows. So get all the advantages of a Delaware C corp, regardless of where in the US you are operating out of. Northwestregisteredagent.com twist and let that sink in. There are people right now in California, New York, Los Angeles, you know, other Boston who are looking at this and their heads are exploding because they remodeled their kitchen for 800,000. They could have bought two homes in Austin for what they're remodeling. I am not joking and I'm not talking about remodeling your 2,000 square foot, you know, European kitchen that I had at my houses. I'm talking about a modest kitchen with GE appliances. It's 6, 7, $800,000. It's 3 or 400,000 to remodel a bathroom in Los Angeles. You asked to have your bathroom remodeled in Brentwood. Minimum 300,000. The cost of a three bedroom here in Austin. Get on it, folks.
Lon Harris
There's no comparison. I mean, if you were talking about $400,000 homes, you're going hours outside of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. If you're in San Bernardino, you're in
Jason Calacanis
the desert, you're going to Joshua Tree for that money.
Lon Harris
You're going to Victoria, Victorville. Like, there's just no way you're anywhere near Los Angeles for that price.
Jason Calacanis
It is the greatest city in the world, huh, Jason?
Jason Ballard
I certainly think so. There's something special happening here that I haven't experienced. And I like going to the Bay, I like going to Washington D.C. i like new York City. Like, I like the. I like those places.
Jason Calacanis
Great place to visit.
Jason Ballard
Something very special is happening here. And this is part of. It's like there's an instinct to build. Instead of like handering and like sort of theorized about solutions. It's like just get out there and do something like figure it out. And I think that the city and the town are like reaping the benefits of that. I mean the. I don't know if you can pull up. We just built 100 a couple of years ago. Now, 100 3D printed homes with Lennar, Lennar, Wolf ranch icon, maybe would be like the thing to search. These are homes that we sold in the 3-500k range with like the largest production, Lennar.
Jason Calacanis
This is the largest home builder in the.
Jason Ballard
It's the first 3D printed neighborhood in the world. It was 100 homes that were 3D printed.
Jason Calacanis
Wow.
Jason Ballard
Yeah, there you are. I mean that's actually an image. This is done now and sort of occupied, but it was like Lennar's number One selling community in Central Texas, it's had like their lowest warranty claims. Like, this was the big sort of like, does this work at the community scale? And now you don't want to. Like it was possible to do something like that in Austin was like, where I was getting is like people were like ready to try and ready to innovate and like, like, it was like, surprisingly, by the way, this was what
Jason Calacanis
my experience when I grew up in the 80s and 90s in New York City. This was my experience when I lived in California for 20 years. There was a sense that anything was possible and you could build stuff. And then in both of those people, both of those places, the entire gestalt has changed. The entire modus operandis has been, how do I get mine? This is a shrinking pie. Nothing can get done. All problems are intractable. The taxes only go up, the spending and the deficit only goes up. There is no way out. It's a death spiral. And the greatest pilots in the world, whether it's Sachs, Elon, I put myself down the list. But people who actually can solve the problems in those places are like, you know what? I'm tired of being hated for trying to solve problems and build things. Peace out. I'm going to go where the other builders are. That's why if you're listening to my voice right now and you're starting a company, I have no problem with you moving to the Bay Area for the first year or two. When you get to 10 employees, let me tell you what's going to happen. Everybody who works for you is going to hate you and they're going to put their hatred on you as the owner of the business. Because it's $6,000 to have a two bedroom apartment and it's $4 million to have a three bedroom house. And it's 60 to $90,000 to put your kids in a decent school. If you go to a public school, you're going to need to supplement it with $20,000 in tutoring. And you're going to have to hope your child is safe when they go to school. Your employees then start to figure out, well, who do I resent for this? And they say the rich VCs and the CEOs of these companies are the reason that my life sucks. And they're making $400,000 in RSUs and salary. Move your company to Austin. Lon came from la. Jackie came from San Francisco. The reaction they had, Jason, when they came to this town was this town's dope. Lon Made an incredible observation. I can go get brunch and not wait online.
Lon Harris
Oh man.
Jason Calacanis
And the brunch doesn't cost 250,000.
Lon Harris
You could drive to any time. You'd be like, I like bagels from that one place. You could drive there, you could park right in front, you walk right inside. Maybe you wait five minutes. I've waited in a seven minute line. I think you get your bagels, you walk around. Totally changes your entire lifestyle in Los Angeles. That's a two hour mission to go get bagels at a good place that people like because you're in line. It's where to park. It's, it's chaos.
Jason Calacanis
And I'm you I'm worried about my guy Lon can't put a price and he's moving here. I give him 10 dimes to move. I'm like, here's 10k. You know, whatever, you know, I'll pay for your moving. Whatever, whatever. I mean, so it's the minimum I can do to get that level of talent here. I'm like, how's it going? What's going on with the apartment? I got a house. I'm like, what? Oh yeah. I got a house in this really nice neighborhood that I'm looking at living in. I'm like, how's long living in my neighborhood now? What the heck?
Lon Harris
For the same price I was playing for a studio apartment in Silver Lake, I got a two bedroom townhouse to rent in in Buen.
Jason Ballard
Yeah, three times. The space also is full of builders and it's full of people who support and applaud builders. Like, like I suspect in other places. Had I tried to start this company somewhere else, we would be very lucky to have built 10 or 20 homes by now and the company would have gone extinct. I mean like, we would have, we would certainly not be like hundreds of homes in. With like hundreds and hundreds of homes in the pipeline. You've got to be in a place that like supports the builders.
Lon Harris
From super fan Fat Don Capital. I thought this was an interesting, you know, fat dog.
Jason Calacanis
That's my meme maker.
Lon Harris
So he says 3D Pratts printed houses. Super interesting. He likes the cool designs. He says, I'm curious about longevity though, whether the concrete mixture cracks over time and then what do you do about cracks if they do appear after the house has been printed?
Jason Ballard
Yeah, so. So fortunately, one of the reasons we started with concrete is like, there's a lot of innovative things we had to do with concrete formulation, but the, the existence of concrete is not something we created and so concrete has been around for thousands of years. Matter of fact, probably the only technology that civilization actually forgot how to do during the dark ages was make concrete. We didn't forget metalworking and all these other things. We forgot how to make concrete. And so we know it's one of the most resilient materials on planet Earth. We have bridges in Alaska standing in salt water for decades that are still up the, you know, the largest unreinforced dome in the world in Rome is made of concrete. And so we sort of have the empirical evidence to show that like, this is like far better than the building materials. We're using drywall. If we offered actually a million dollar prize on this show to come up with a lower quality building material that would pass building code than dry, no one would win the prize. Like, it is literally the crappiest thing we can imagine imagine using is what we're building with today. So certainly, like we sort of win the awards on longevity. There's two kinds of cracking in concrete. One is structural cracking. That never happens to us anymore. That is a resolve. There is occasionally a thing called shrinkage cracking, which is just like, as the material dehydrates, it leads a void. It's only aesthetic that is very, very minimal today. Sometimes people say it adds character, but like, if you want to paint over it, seal it, these kind of things, like there's a whole. I won't get into it here, but like, they're like, we've been building with concrete and masonry material so long, like icon sort of didn't actually have to invent the playbook for like long term care and maintenance.
Jason Calacanis
100 years is the lifespan of concrete at a minimum. And by the way, termites, you may have heard of them. When you have wood structures and you have to have somebody. I mean, listen, I've owned a lot of homes at this point. I am bane of my existence. Flooding.
Jason Ballard
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
Mold, fire, termites, wind and mold and fire. I cannot tell you. I have had mold in three of six homes I've owned. I have had flooding in two of six homes I've owned. I have had, thankfully, knock on wood, never had any smoke or fire. And termites in six of six homes I've had to deal with. No, I'm not saying I've had a termite. I only had a termite problem in one of them, my LA one. But all of them I've had to pay hundred, no low, thousands of dollars every two or three years to deal with this, to get them treated. Concrete, none of it. And by the way, drywall.
Lon Harris
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
Is basically drywall in Spanish means mold collector. It literally is where mold, like I
Jason Ballard
have cut so much, you're like, this is. There's like, we're in a kind of like Stockholm syndrome about the way that we build. It's like, you know that meme where the dog is, like drinking coffee and the house like this, this is fine. Like, drywall's fine. Like, this is all fine. It's like, this is not fine. Like, this is not the way we should be sheltering ourselves.
Lon Harris
One more question, also keeping it practical. Jason From Nate Day IW 8km probably kilometers. How does electrical and plumbing work when the house is 3D printed?
Jason Ballard
Great question. So one of the cool things about 3D printing is you actually control the internal structure of what you're building. And so plumbing, electrical, and usually the mechanical systems actually go in faster and cheaper with less error into a 3D printed wall. Installing. To be fair, on the ledger, though, like, installing windows and doors is a bit different. I won't say it's more expensive, but you do have to learn something new. But plumbing, electrical, and the mechanical systems go in very fast because the wall is not solid. It's sort of engineered to the loads you expect of it. And you control the internal structure of the wall. It's like you're not just automating framing, you're automating the whole wall system. So there's like multiple trades that are automated out.
Lon Harris
You can tell the printer, here's what we want the inside to.
Jason Ballard
Yes, Correct.
Jason Calacanis
Awesome. We got our questions in. Great questions, everybody. Let's keep moving down the dock.
Lon Harris
All right, so thanks to Jason for being here. Should we drop Jason off and bring on our next guest?
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, let's drop Jason off and I'll come see Jason. We'll have a little dinner.
Jason Ballard
Yeah, you need to come see the new printer. We got the new multi story printer. You need to come see it.
Jason Calacanis
I will come see it. Well, you know what we should do? We should do an on site. We should bring a couple folks and do a little on site, A little barbecue down there.
Jason Ballard
Amen. You should operate the printer.
Lon Harris
There you go.
Jason Calacanis
I cannot wait. I'm going to build my own tower. I'm going to build my tower and I'm going to have a seat at the top. My little writer's cabinet cabin. How tall can you make these things? Looks like you get into two stories.
Jason Ballard
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Two to three stories. With the new version of the printer, which is also the one we're starting to release to other builders. Like, like, like time to join the revolution. This is the, the equipment of the future.
Jason Calacanis
Oh, see, this is a key thing I didn't get into here, but I'll just.
Jason Ballard
Next time when you come out.
Jason Calacanis
No, no, no. I'll give you a minute here because this is critical. When you perfect the technology, you are partnering with the greatest home developers in the world. You started at the top. Great way to do it. And then second, construction companies you're also partnering with because you can't possibly deploy every single channel. So tell me about your channel strategy.
Jason Ballard
Yeah, yeah. Both the most effective way to solve the global housing crisis and at high speed. It also turns out to be like the best business in the long run. Be a technology company. So really the game all along has been to arm the revolution, so to speak. We were like providing the tools by which humanity will build its future. And the new generation of the printer titan is the multi story rail, less, more automated system that actually prints reinforced concrete, not just concrete. And we launched that business about a month ago this week in the uptake.
Jason Calacanis
So if you're a builder, you're a builder. Want to be a channel partner? Go to what's the URL icon?
Jason Ballard
Build.com.
Jason Calacanis
okay. And you can always guess. Sometimes the founder gets first name at the domain name. And you're also hiring. Who you hiring for?
Jason Ballard
Jason, man, we are hiring material scientists, engineers, software engineers, architects, field operators, the whole staff.
Jason Calacanis
Jason, you can clip this.
Jason Ballard
Yes.
Jason Calacanis
Okay. You can clip this for your hiring.
Jason Ballard
Okay.
Jason Calacanis
I am the ultimate judge of character. I am the bestie of all besties. People know like, hey, if you're having a tough time, you call Jason. He's going to come and chop it up with you. Talk about your problems. I pride myself on trying to be a good friend to my friends. And I immediately can tell when somebody is that person. Somebody is true, honest, a just person. Jason, I knew Jason Ballard. I knew from the moment I met you that you're a quality guy. And I collect quality guys. You know why? Because some guys like to shiv me. And I'm going to talk about the guy who shiv me at the end of the show. Stick around. Yeah.
Jason Ballard
Hey, I'm going to unload. Okay. Grace and loving is the way, man.
Jason Calacanis
So like, I know I'm a flawed human.
Jason Ballard
Yeah, yeah.
Jason Calacanis
And I will work on grace. I will have grace for the people who stabbed me. Right? Like Jesus forgave people. He forgave them.
Lon Harris
Big thing with him. He was all about it. Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
And I'm doing my best. All right. Yeah, I'm doing my best. Today is not going to be my best moment.
Jason Ballard
All right? Okay.
Jason Calacanis
I'm gonna try to channel a little grace, but there's no better person you could go work for, and there's no better mission than housing people. Jason is an A plus character individual. This is the person. If you're effective at what you do in your career, go work for Jason. Clip this. Put it on your hiring page. Jason, I give you permission. Thank you. This endorsement on your social media.
Jason Ballard
Okay.
Jason Calacanis
And on your website. Go work for Jason and do something good in the world. Stop working for Zuckerberg and no offense, and trying to make people click on more ads and invade their privacy. Go work and build housing for the military, for space, excuse my French. For the homeless and for rich people. Go do it, people.
Jason Ballard
Where else do you get giant robots, homeless housing, and a moon base in one place?
Jason Calacanis
I mean, come on and get some of those RSU's. Comments going to be worth the fricking fortune, man. I'm going to. I can't wait till you ipo. I'm going to. How come I'm not on the captain? We need to do a syndicate. All right. That's one of my favorite guys.
Lon Harris
Good guest, good guy right there.
Jason Calacanis
That's my guy.
Lon Harris
Always a good guy.
Jason Calacanis
I know quality guys. Now this next guy coming on the program, I don't know if it's a quality guy or not. We'll find out guy.
Lon Harris
So we're bringing up.
Jason Calacanis
We'll find out.
Lon Harris
Sebi Rubino. He's from Rezi Labs. Jason there, it's a. It's a bit Tensor Subnet. We've been talking to a lot of them. Subnet 46 and Resy stands for real estate super intelligence. So they are hosting a competition for AI models that can accurately price real estate. It's a theme show today. We're talking housing. Sebi, thank you so much for being here.
Jason Calacanis
Hey, Sebi, how you doing, brother?
Sebastian Rubino
I'm doing good, brother. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. A big fan of the show and
Jason Calacanis
yeah, I'm glad that we're here. How long you been listening to Twist? How long you been listening to Twist? I always. It's okay if it's a year. It's okay if it's 10. But I always like to ask people because I've been getting so many people DMing me and it makes my day when somebody tweets at me or does a LinkedIn that they've been listening to the show and it had some impact on their entrepreneurial journey.
Sebastian Rubino
Almost two years I worked at Hong Kong Finance, and one of the team members there was, like, sending me clips. Not clips, sending me the videos and saying, yeah, check this out. Awesome.
Jason Calacanis
And you can help the team out by just doing that. Tell a friend if you get. If there's a quality episode, there's a moment in it. Just send the deep link, please, and say, hey, Jason's been doing this with Lon for 15 years. We're in year 15, I think.
Lon Harris
Oh, more.
Jason Calacanis
We gotta have a. You know what? We have to start celebrating the community here. I want to do a yearly party on the anniversary of the show. I don't know when Brian Alvy came on for the first episode. That's a quality. That's my guy.
Lon Harris
We'll have to go back and figure out when, but it was early.
Jason Calacanis
All right, what are you working on? Yeah, 2008 CB. What are you working on? Am I pronouncing it Chris? S, E, B, Y, C, B. Sebi. Sebi. Oh, my name is Sebastian. I. I work for Tyre Rail Corporation.
Lon Harris
It's from Blade Runner, everybody. It's from a classic film.
Jason Calacanis
All right, what are you working on, Sebastian?
Sebastian Rubino
Yeah, we are working on the real estate. It's actually portal resilabs. AI.
Jason Calacanis
Okay, I will.
Sebastian Rubino
I will suggest. We are actually launching our new website and portal today. I will do a quick screen share, but we're building a real estate intelligence network. Our first competition, like Lon said, is an appraisal model. So right now we're doing property appraisals remotely without ever seeing the property in person. And our AI models can price homes in the USA at 98% accuracy. So that beats out Zestimate. That beats out even in person appraisers. And now we are injecting our intelligence into the agents that real estate agents or real estate investors are building.
Jason Calacanis
That's a good idea.
Sebastian Rubino
Platforms. One of them is Balcony Technology. We'll be using our pricing engine for. They have a trillion dollars in data from counties or housing data from counties. And they're, you know, bringing that data on chain. They're doing this avalanche. And what they're doing with us is they're using our pricing engine to reassess property taxes. Sorry about that, world. And also to detect fraud. Right. So if someone quit, claim deeds a house, or transfers a house for 100k when it's worth a million. Let's check that out. And yeah, so that's. That's our intelligence track. We have some other tracks, but that has been where we've had the most progress so far.
Jason Calacanis
Incredible. Incredible. And so what's your background and how did you come to this idea? I always like to know how the founder kind of found this. How did you find it?
Sebastian Rubino
Yeah, so I have. My whole family is real estate based. Uncle is a huge developer in Brooklyn. My mom is. Oh, my hometown contractor. Oh, there you go.
Jason Calacanis
In Red Hook. Right.
Sebastian Rubino
He. He built up Red Hook, essentially.
Jason Calacanis
Red Hook, where we used to dump bodies. Just so everybody knows, your family was working in one of the most dangerous places in the world. I was having dinner the other night with my new friend. This is my new friend, Jimmy Iovine. Yes, Jimmy Iovine. And I was lucky enough to sit at a table with him at an event. This is the guy who did my favorite album, Dire Straits making movies. This is the guy who did Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen, another favorite album on seminal work. And we sat there talking. I said, let me ask a question. This is like a quality guy. I said, where are you from? Where are you? He said, I'm from Brooklyn. I said, that's where I'm from. I'm from Bain Ridge. Where are you from? He said, red Hook. I said, you grew up in Red Hook? That's like one of the four places. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, they told me, Lon Fort Greene, Bed Stuy, Red Hook. You don't need to get off at that train stop.
Lon Harris
The Westies. You're afraid the Westies are going to. We're going to bother you.
Jason Calacanis
Just be careful. Just be careful. And I knew this is a legit guy. Okay, so that means, Sebastian, you're a legit guy. What's the business model here? How do you make money? I always want to know how the company makes money. Now we know what you're doing, we know how you came to the idea. You had personal insights here. But how does it make money? How does resilabs make money?
Sebastian Rubino
We essentially sell our models. So right now we are live on shoots. So this is another bittensor subnets, essentially the open router subnet, Right? So you can list your model, if they can allow you to list your model. And then from there users can go and access that model.
Lon Harris
Right?
Sebastian Rubino
So with the portal that I'd love to take a second and show you guys.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, show, don't tell. Let's do a demo or die here. Remember, most people are listening. If you're not listening, go to YouTube. You can see it. But if you are listening, we'll explain it to you. And I think always good, Sebastian, for people who don't know the magic of Tao, which I am obsessed with. I bought another $50,000 in Tao today.
Sebastian Rubino
Wow.
Jason Calacanis
Explain what. I'm 750k into this, which, which is a small bet for me. That's not. I'm just giving that a context and I made this as a, this is a personal bet. This is for my family office. But why are so many intelligent people building with Tao? Explain Tao and the subnets.
Sebastian Rubino
Yeah, Tao has honestly been. I've been a builder for a while. Since I was 18. I was always building something. And Tao has changed my life as a builder. One, it's given me access to talent. Two, it's given me access to resources. And three, it's given me a community of people. These even 2,900 holders of a token. And like it's giving me essentially this economic engine. What does Tao do? Tao allows you is a network of sub networks. So I have a sub network. As lon mentioned, it's 46 out of these 128 networks in BitTensor. And these networks are really just competitions. My competition is submit an AI model. There's other competitions that provide compute and we're just going to make sure you're ready and available or storage. So they're essentially like digital commodity. It's a digital commodity marketplace and it's powered by these competitions. Now the, the, the bow on the, the Bittensor box is you can think about Bittensor the same way you think about say Google or OpenAI or Claude or sorry, Anthropic at the company level. Because those companies are building out their respective AI stack, right? They're building out compute, they're building out multiple, multiple types of inference on bittensor. These 128 networks are running, hosting these competitions so that they can offer one piece of the AI stack and where we fit in that AI stack. And the reason why we're using Bittensor is because we have the thesis that narrow intelligence, faster, cheaper, better will win in this day and age. And faster, cheaper, better commodities due to this economic engine, due to the competitive nature and not corporate structure that allows us to be prepared for this, this next age of usage which is going to be agent centric instead of human centric. So whereas the Zillow API is an API, we are a model, right? And as this, this change from APIs being used and humans being used for things transitions to digital and digital commodities, these intelligence commodities, Bittensor will be the venue that is selected by most open router model routers and agentic model routers.
Jason Calacanis
Right.
Sebastian Rubino
In these meta agents, I have the openclaw stuff, as I've seen you've been on as well. If my meta agent that I'm chatting to most of the time is selecting the intelligence, it's going to select every single time from Bittensor, and that is what we've plugged ourself into and are involved in. And that's why we're able to see ourselves scaling out this not just for appraisals, but for inspections with specialized hardware. Maybe we can do a competition for icon and say, hey, instead of giving out a million bucks, we'll give you out 100k because we can really do this in a competitive manner. And now you can get your designs. We could be your design firm.
Jason Calacanis
Right?
Sebastian Rubino
And they pay us and we redistribute that through our token. So that's a long winded answer, but
Jason Calacanis
no, it's a great one. Now, to your demo. It's very important that we explain Tao and Bid Tetsner to folks here on this program. Why Sometimes they get a tingle on. I hear a pitch, I get a tingle.
Sebastian Rubino
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
I get a Spidey sense. I'm good at this. This is one of the things I found I'm good at in life, you know, that is finding the energy, the lean forward meme.
Lon Harris
Like, here's the moment that I can see you physically do that. When you hear a pitch that registers, you physically do the little lean forward. Like, okay, this is a brilliant idea. Here's what I need to know. I've seen you do it.
Jason Calacanis
Well, I did it with bittorrent by. Not bittorrent, Bitcoin, by the way. And I made a mistake. I had some bitcoin on Mount Gox. It got hacked. I had it on another thing. I lost my bitcoin. Okay, whatever. My wife bought it. We did great. Shout out to my wife. She's brilliant and I should have done more. And like, a crazy Mossad CIA agent, a famous one with the dark past, like, asked me to introduce him to the bitcoin because he watched my podcast and I was like, okay, here's the guys. I'll leave it at that. I don't want to go down this rabbit hole here. He who shall not be named, who I barely knew. And I was like, hey, pal, sure. Just so you know, this is like a nonprofit, essentially. These guys are monks. They're techno monks. They're not interested in money. But, yeah, I'LL introduce you to them, I guess, because my agent was like, can you introduce them to these guys? I always like to help founders out. And then, of course, I get dragged for it. I'll put it all aside. I'm not making that mistake anymore. When I get the Spidey sense, you know what I do? I share it and I place bets. I place a 750k bet on Tao. Co founded Stillcore Capital with Mark Jeffrey. I leaned in and put some money of my own in. And I did the same thing with Opencloth. Right. These two things are my Spidey senses. In 2026, those are my two Spidey sense bets. This is not investment advice. But I told Lon, if you have $500, $1,000, and you asked me, should I buy some Tao, I'd say, yeah, go for it. Luan, I feel comfortable giving you that advice, but I'm not giving anybody else advice. Okay, Dem or a Dai Sebastian, Go.
Sebastian Rubino
Yeah, Dem or die. So this is our new website, powered by the Bittensor subnet I got. And as you're saying this stuff, Lon, you're explaining that meme. That was my exact thought and it's what happened to me with Bittensor. So I've gotten to the point now where I've dedicated everything. I'm completely invested into either Tao or my own alpha token. The subnet tokens are called alpha tokens. And yeah, let me explain what we do and show you through this new website and portal environment. Simply put, we have an institutional grade property pricing. You can use it here as an API. It's very simple to use, but a model that powers that API right away. You can go and plug in an address, 123 Main Street. And if I click this, it's going to bring me into the app. I don't want to do that quite yet. And what we are building is not just this intelligence track right now I'm showing on the screen for those listening, analyze, tokenize and capitalize, the three things that users can do on our network. Remember, this is not a company, this is a network. Right now, that network is building the intelligence and offering it, but we're also building this infrastructure so that we can use this intelligence for something. But if we have intelligence to appraise property and we have essentially the intelligence needed to underwrite loans, property sales, we are building that infrastructure. Right now there's a project called Figure Heloc, and they have $17 billion in essentially assets under management. And that is like their loan book. Right? The money that they have to issue loans and circulating in supply. So they are one mortgage company, one lending company that uses the blockchain and no AI automation, no proprietary tech, just uses the blockchain to run their book of business. It's allowed them to get better capital in their system and also streamline the financial systems to their business. That's what we are enabling with our intelligence, right? With appraisal inspections and KYC that allows lenders to act. Incredible fundraise fundraiser.
Jason Calacanis
You built an oracle. You built a beautiful Oracle. And at scale somebody could say, hey, I need, you know, we just had Jason Ballard on, he could do an analysis and say, with Lennar, where should we build our next community? Right, and where's the infill between Bastrop, Wimberley and you know, take the road south to San Antonio, right? You go west, you go east, you go west to Hill country, go east to Bastrop, you go south of San Antonio. You could actually map this with the Oracle, get the data, look for trends and this would save you, I got to think like hundreds of thousands of dollars in research. And you could get that same research for how much, Sebastian? What would I pay?
Sebastian Rubino
You would pay. It's 1% of a penny is the actual cost.
Jason Calacanis
Wow. Incredible. Are people doing it yet? Do you have customers yet? Yes, yes.
Sebastian Rubino
So we have, like I said, balcony. We have a few protocols like in the collaboration, your estate protocol. And there's another one, commerce and honey shares. And what we do there is they essentially have tokenized properties for sale, but there's no third party price. It's like, why would I buy this thing? Why would I buy this house that I can't go and see? It's halfway across the world. I don't have an appraisal. I don't know what this is worth. So we are that third party appraisal and actually increases the volume on these platforms. Yes. So yes, our product has been being, has been in use. We are now launching the portal so it can be used in an easier way and people can really start to understand our network's potential. But I will say this is the, this is one track intelligence is what you mentioned. That use case to double down on that we actually have in our ecosystem. We're building and finalizing this a macro prediction market trader. So the exact type of market that you were just on, on polymarket, a
Lon Harris
partner,
Sebastian Rubino
what we're able to do is say, hey, we're going to use this micro precision pricing engine that we have this ability to price specific homes Single homes. And then we're going to extrapolate that, do that across the entire market and you can essentially have an edge on those markets and front run those markets. And we actually are the data provider to help find equilibrium in those markets so investors are able to make better decisions. The world has access to more truth.
Jason Calacanis
Is this a company or is it just a subnet? Are you a Delaware C corp or a Texas corp? Hopefully. What are you doing here in terms of the company versus the tokens? Because if we're investors in these things, this is one thing I bring up. You can buy Tao and you get access to essentially all the subnets because the subnets use Tao to a certain extent. Then you have buying the subnet token and you're I think subnet 46, am I correct? Yes. Got it. And then you have investing in the corporation. So walk us through. Are you a corporation? And then what's the opportunity here for investors who are listening, if there is one for them.
Sebastian Rubino
So one, we're a Wyoming C Corp.
Jason Calacanis
Okay. Why Wyoming? Is that because they have good Dow and you know those kind of things?
Sebastian Rubino
Yes, yeah, definitely. Specifically like crypto. Crypto native companies. Wyoming, Wyoming C Corp Are normally the, the route to go. But how does that. That C Corp. How does it gain value? Right. How does it compound and grow upon itself? How does it. How does that entity go public? Right, right. And that, that question goes to how does it gain value? We are essentially a dat. Our job is to monetize and build this technology. But every dollar of revenue doesn't go to us. It goes back into buying back the token. And we, as the owner of the subnet, we get tokens. Right. So we are buying tokens and we are also receiving tokens. Our job is to increase the value of those tokens and increase the rate at which we're accumulating them. I don't want to die here. It's demo or die. I do want to show you guys the portal.
Jason Calacanis
Okay, let's wrap on the portal. Show us the portal real quick.
Lon Harris
Take a quick look. Yeah, I looked up my own house by the way, just out of curiosity.
Jason Calacanis
Okay, it works. Okay, great.
Jason Ballard
Beautiful.
Lon Harris
It's worth a little bit more than the average home in Austin based on our previous.
Jason Calacanis
Is your rent 5%, 4%, 6%, your yearly rent. Great question of the value of the home.
Lon Harris
Great question. I'm gonna do the.
Jason Calacanis
Do some times your monthly rent. Don't tell anybody the address or the rent.
Lon Harris
No, I didn't tell.
Jason Calacanis
Not doxing you like mandami docs.
Lon Harris
I didn't.
Jason Calacanis
Ken Griffin. I don't want anybody visiting Lon's house. What percentage your yearly rent is to the value of the home?
Lon Harris
It's about. Oh, yearly. Yearly. Let's see.
Jason Calacanis
Okay, this is the cap rate is the concept here. Should be 5%. So if it's a.
Lon Harris
It is 5.4%. Jason.
Jason Calacanis
Perfect. See, you got that means you have a good deal and the person who owns the property got a good deal.
Lon Harris
I feel like we did Rhonda and I did well, my landlord.
Jason Calacanis
Go ahead.
Sebastian Rubino
It also seems like your pricing engine is quite accurate, so.
Jason Ballard
Nailed it.
Jason Calacanis
That's it.
Lon Harris
Nailed it to the wall.
Sebastian Rubino
Yeah. Okay, so this is our portal. First thing you do is you see the dashboard. Here is where you can see every day we run this competition. We've given out $230,000 in rewards. Analyze the million properties and we've hidden high of 98%. So.
Jason Calacanis
98% what?
Sebastian Rubino
Sorry, accuracy on price. So if you plug in an address, we're going to be 98% accurate to the price that someone's willing to pay for it. So it's very actionable data that's important. This dashboard gives you the insight of like, why can I trust this? How can I trust this? Boom. Beautiful. It's there, but this is what people are using the system for. And it's the plugin addresses. I can plug in right when I done 18 birch. I can find that property right here as I plug that in. I'm getting outputs in one second. Let's just do an example test of this property here.
Lon Harris
Boom.
Sebastian Rubino
It's going to show up and then formulate and that's it. This is the portal. We have people negotiating with banks using these appraisal reports. We have people helping the county and yet you're going to get that same output. People are helping counties fight fraud and assess taxes. And yeah, this intelligence track is. Is quite exciting. And this is a new chapter for us as people can start easily using tools.
Lon Harris
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
Hey, put in an address for me. 108 South Woodburn Drive. 108 South Woodburn Drive. Los Angeles.
Lon Harris
Is that your old place?
Jason Calacanis
This was the first home I ever bought. I bought it. They wanted 3.5 this 20 years ago, I think, and I think I paid 2.4 million. I put couple of hundred grand into it.
Lon Harris
This is the Brentwood. The Brentwood place.
Jason Calacanis
This is where I lived in Brentwood. This was the pool house where we started. We started Mahalo in the pool house. Lon worked there. My Friend, Nick Jarecki, the famous director, lived there for a year when he moved there. And my friend Josh Harris lived in the pool house from We Live In Public. When he was down on his luck, I let him live in my pool house and I gave him my Corvette and my incredible wife gave him a custom food order every week from Whole Foods. I mean, I'm not saying I'm a mensch, but when my friend was down on his luck, I always came through for him.
Lon Harris
It was a nice pool.
Jason Calacanis
There it is, South Woodburn Drive.
Lon Harris
And it's like 1.18.
Jason Calacanis
Okay, that's wrong. It needs to be done over again. It's wrong. We need the Oracle to go to work on this. So how do you deal with an error in the system? Because this is taking a guess, I guess square footage, whatever, right now. Or is this. The Oracle did it?
Sebastian Rubino
Yeah. So this is the. Not the Oracle, it's the model itself. Yes. Oracle's a bit more checked and what is it? Validated by real world professionals. But yeah, we have these bugs come in right. Out of four here, one of them is incorrect.
Jason Calacanis
Right. These are all within that 2%. And that's. The opportunity is to do this. All right, Sebastian, great job. Let's stay in touch and. Yeah, come back in a year and show us your progress. Yeah, I'm rooting for you. All right, there it is, folks. Are we going off duty? Am I doing my.
Lon Harris
We can. We've got so much to talk about. Let's go. Off duty. There's so much going on and. I know.
Jason Calacanis
Or should I do my little tyrant?
Lon Harris
That's what we should lead. Off, off duty. You've teased it. I think we need to hear this story about you getting shiv for half a mil. That's what the people want to know.
Jason Calacanis
Okay, now you're stored. Now my story. I'm going to tell the story without names.
Jason Ballard
Okay.
Jason Calacanis
And then I'm going to allow Lon to let me know if I should name names. Okay.
Lon Harris
I'll be the adjudicator here.
Jason Calacanis
I'm on the board of a company. It's a founder who I love pivots. The company, they've got an extraordinary brand name, they've got a great vision to build a content management system, a cms. Right. And to build tools. It doesn't work out. I'm not stung by that. The fund puts in a couple hundred thousand and the syndicate puts a couple of hundred thousand in. We're okay with failure. It's not a big deal. But the company is looking to sell. They find a potential buyer who has a giant company worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The company is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. They've raised over 100 million, I believe they've got. Tens of millions of dollars is all public information for their content management system, which by all appearances is doing extraordinarily well. They love the team, they want to buy it, yada yada. And one of the board members is already an investor in this company. So there's a bit of a conflict, but that's okay. There's conflicts, no conflict, no interest. So this is all going down and they make an offer and the offer is like, okay, the founders get taken care of, they get these great deals, okay, it's not life changing money, but it's a soft landing. And I said, okay, well what do the investors get? And the guy says to me, well, you get nothing. And I said, okay, well, let's jump on a phone call. Listen, here's what I propose. I'll be super supportive of the transition. I want to see the founders have a great exit, even if it's just landing the plane. And sometimes you just land the plane in this game and you see, oh, a company was acquired on TechCrunch and it turns out nobody made any money, right?
Lon Harris
It was a space saving. Everybody gets a soft landing. That happens all the time.
Jason Calacanis
And I am totally okay with that. I am okay with losing my money on 90% of bets. I've done extraordinarily, extraordinarily well being year zero, the first investor. Now, this company was going to go out of business. They pivoted, I got them back in business. I worked for years on the company, went to the board meeting. So I say to this incredibly successful founder, here's a proposition for you. I want to be a supporter of the transaction and I'm going to support it either way. Because you don't want to be a scumbag and be like, I'm going to block the thing. But, you know, so I get on the phone with the founder, I said, here's an idea, why don't you give the investors a token number of shares in your company so you could get us a save. And then you, as the founder of this company who wants to acquire companies and talent in the future, can say, hey, you took care of the people in the investment community. I'm not asking for my cash back. I just want a token so I can go back to my investors and say, hey, this wasn't a great acquisition, but we got, let's say, 500k on our 1.4 million invested. I think we're about 1.4 million invested in this company, which isn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. I just told you. But 750k into the gesture. It's literally a gesture. It's a goodwill gesture.
Lon Harris
Exactly.
Jason Calacanis
This founder says, I don't have to do that because I'm hiring the entire team and this company is out of money and there's nothing you can do about it. So I'm hiring the team because this company's going belly up. They can't make payroll, and you're Sol jcal, so why would I do that? And I say, okay, fair enough. Blank from blank company. Fair enough. I understand. And sure enough, he tells me that essentially, in so many words, to F off.
Lon Harris
Yeah, I don't have to. And there's nothing you could do about it. Is the vert is that's F off in this sort of world. Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
You know, listen, I'm not trying to throw my weight around. This happened over a year ago.
Lon Harris
Oh, okay. But I had a guess, but my guess was wrong because this happened over a year ago.
Jason Calacanis
Well over a year ago now. Okay, So I say the guy, listen, I understand. I talk to the other board members of his company, who happens to be a great friend of mine. I say, do me a favor, this is making me mental now. And it's not. It's because I'm being told that I'm going to get screwed, that I'm deliberately going to get screwed. There's a massive conflict of interest here because the asset and the team goes to this company. Correct. That another board member is already an investor and I don't have any shares in this company. And it's not for me. It's not going to change my life. It's for my LPs, it's for my syndicate members.
Lon Harris
I feel like that's the real lesson here, is if this person had gone about this with a different attitude and a approach, I feel like this might not have overflowed into a. A negative situation. This, to me feels like a, you know, an unforced error. Like you could have probably not spent that much money but not angered your investor to this point that it becomes about a personal grudge.
Jason Calacanis
He basically has the audacity to tell me that he's a huge fan of my work and then he writes me essentially an apology letter.
Lon Harris
Okay.
Jason Calacanis
The first interaction I'll just quote, I have reflected on our conversation. Don't think it was a great first interaction between us and don't like that it ended the way. Ended that way. So I wanted to share a couple of reflections. I'm sorry this didn't turn out. Blah, blah, blah.
Lon Harris
That's very difficult.
Jason Calacanis
And then he's like, I'll let you invest in our next round.
Lon Harris
He almost got there.
Jason Ballard
It was so close.
Jason Calacanis
He almost got there.
Lon Harris
He was so close.
Jason Calacanis
And he. So close. So I talked to his. My friend who's on his board, chairman of his board, made a lot of money from this. I said, do me a favor, just talk to this kid. Because he just literally, it's like you're in a basketball game and somebody throws an elbow at you on purpose and bust your nose. And then you say, hey, listen, that was not cool. You hit me in the nose with your elbow. It was a flagrant, right? The flagrant foul.
Lon Harris
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
The guy. And so my friend says, yeah, that was a flagrant. I apologize on his behalf. We'll take care of you, Jake. Al, he's a fan of yours. And then he basically just tells me to F off. I've been sitting on this for a long time now. I'm at a crossroads, right? Jason Ballard just told me, my brother in Christ told me I got to
Lon Harris
have peace and love.
Jason Calacanis
I got to have peace and love and grace.
Lon Harris
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
So the company has a spectacular domain name, and they're clearing out the assets. And this domain name I know is worth a bunch. So I say, hey, listen, just so we get some money back for the shareholders who lost 3, 4, 5 million bucks, and I was 1.4 million of it.
Lon Harris
How about just the domain?
Jason Calacanis
How much is the domain? And they're like, well, we got 100k offer, 150k offer. I said, listen, let me stop you right there. I think the domain's worth 500k a million. I'm going to put in. I'll double whatever the last bid was. I'll put in 250k. Now I'm dealing with. The lawyer was doing the liquidation. And I said, listen, I insist that we do this right, because the shareholders on the other side and just tell me what the bid is. I'll beat the bid. He's like, well, I can, in fairness, have you do that. I said, great. What was the last bid? Because we all need to know the last bid. It's X amount. I said, okay, I'll put it up. I can't remember. I think it was like 250k. Wow. I put up 250k. I win the bid, 250k goes to the investors in the washout. So now I have that domain name. Yesterday I realized that domain name would be the ultimate domain name for an AI based browser.
Lon Harris
Okay.
Jason Calacanis
So I talked to an old collaborator of mine. I said, listen, I want to build an AI based browser with this domain name. He said, well, that's one of your best ideas ever. This is somebody I've worked with before and I'm about to see this company and launch it.
Lon Harris
There's a.
Jason Calacanis
But while I was thinking about it, I did a little study of these CMS systems, these headless CMS systems, et cetera. This is a huge, huge space. What's the headless cms? It's like you store the data, you can use any presentation level. It is one of the great spaces. And my friend, I've had friends who have built content management Systems, Movable Type, WordPress. It's tons of these, these things out there. And I looked at the Tao thing and boom, it hit me. A headless cms, a content management system powered by Tao, would be incredibly disruptive. Okay, so I'm not naming this founder, I'm not naming the companies involved.
Lon Harris
Well, but you'll have to, because the URL. We're going to figure it out eventually.
Jason Calacanis
At some point, you'll figure it out. When I launch my AI browser, it'll all come out in the wash. But now I need your counsel.
Lon Harris
Okay?
Jason Calacanis
I don't want to start another war. I've been involved in too many of these things. I'm like Obi Wan Kenobi right now. I mean, I fought so many battles in the Clone Wars, I'm an old Jedi.
Lon Harris
I mean, here's the only thing I would say is, it's probably. As much as I would like to hear this person's name, I think it's probably not worth it. Just because you never know.
Jason Calacanis
If.
Lon Harris
If I've learned anything about this world, it's that you never know where everybody's going to be in five years. The whole table gets shook up in five years. You never know who you're going to be sitting across from, who you're going to want to make a deal with, who's going to be in a position. So it's never really.
Jason Calacanis
So don't name names is your best advice.
Lon Harris
Yeah, I don't think it's ever really. If I'm being honest, I don't think it's worth starting stuff with people.
Jason Calacanis
Thank you for talking me off the ledge. Thank you.
Lon Harris
Dead and gone. Like if they're dead in the ground, they're never gonna be.
Jason Calacanis
But I'm looking at the. You know what my. I just. I'm looking at the picture of the founder and my Irish is up now
Lon Harris
because said the temptation for sure. But you don't know that guy. And you might be in the same room in 10 years and you'll wish you hadn't picked a fight with them. You'll wish you could just have a drink.
Jason Calacanis
And even though I got jumped, even though I got shipped, even though he got the better of.
Lon Harris
I mean you got from one jc I think you got to look to another and you gotta, you gotta turn the other cheek on this one.
Jason Calacanis
I think you're saying JC has to
Lon Harris
ask JC what JC I think wwjd you gotta ask yourself what the other.
Jason Calacanis
What would Crest do? I'm gonna. I'm going to talk to Jesus right now.
Lon Harris
I think he'd forgive. I think he Jesus, I think he'd say, yay, I've been wronged.
Jason Calacanis
What should I do?
Lon Harris
Yeah, the right, the righteous path is forgiveness.
Jason Calacanis
Jesus is coming in. Okay. He says I should take the high road. I think so I should do on to others as I would want to be done on to me. And I should turn the other cheek.
Lon Harris
That's. Yes.
Jason Calacanis
So I am turning the other cheek.
Lon Harris
There you go. Very cross.
Jason Calacanis
However.
Jason Ballard
However,
Jason Calacanis
there is a business opportunity and this person decided that his business interests were. I mean I literally was asking him to give me, I think 500k in options. And I was willing on the options by the way, to pay the current price, just have warrants which would have been 0.0. It would have been 10 basis points maybe in the value of his company. And if he had done it, I would have him on this podcast. I would be tweeting for him. I'd be helping him. You saw what I did with Jason. I said, hey, let me help you find fill some things. He would have been on the podcast
Lon Harris
twice if that guy was here right now. I give him the same advice. I'd say you shouldn't have approached it this way. You should have been without hostility. You should have been okay, you know, like you should have been more gracious and like make. Figure out a way to make this feel okay so everybody feels like they got treated fairly. That's always how. How these situations should be.
Jason Calacanis
So I put into my agent, give me a business plan, an open source Bittensor business plan based on content cmss. And I got back the most brilliant business plan.
Lon Harris
Wow.
Jason Calacanis
I did last week, two bounties, $1,000 bounty I did on Twitter. Somebody could pull it up, Please to make annotated.com which is an annotation service. I just need for myself where I want to highlight 5 seconds from a video, 10 seconds from a video and give my commentary on it. And I got all these people who built me like a Wayback Machine style annotation device and I said I'll give $1,000 to whoever makes the most interesting one and open sources it. And I did $5,000 to build the real time commentary agents on the podcast. And I think we got five people who built something.
Lon Harris
Yeah. Oh, more. More than five. Now we're in business. It's going to take. So I now it's going to take Jacob like a week to get through all of these different proposals that, that.
Jason Calacanis
Okay, so this is. Which one is this? Explain to people this.
Lon Harris
You need a genius technical co founder to build you an annotation tool for the web that is like the Wayback Machine but with AI. That's this one.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. So like Wayback Machine plus delicious, if you remember that bookmarking service.
Lon Harris
Sure. Wow. It's been a long time since I thought about that.
Jason Calacanis
Right. So what I need is I need a Chrome browser extension. I'm on a YouTube video, you know, like this video. And somebody, anybody wants to either anonymously, pseudonymously, like Reddit or you know, Twitter or whatever they say, give me seconds 30 to 60, clip it, put a transcript, analyze it with AI and I want to put some commentary on it. I want to let my friends put some commentary. Completely fair use. Don't want to steal and rip other people's content. But if there's a story in the New York Times and you want to Fisk it, if you remember Fisking, F I s K I n G pull up Fisking from the Wikipedia. There was a dude on Usenet who used to Fisk people. And it became Fisking became the art of taking apart somebody's argument by line by line, annotating it. So that's my concept here, dude.
Lon Harris
It's named for. It's a Supreme Court. I'm going to look up the actual origin of Fisking. Yeah. It was described the critical deconstruction of articles by British journalist Robert Fisk. That's what they were saying.
Jason Calacanis
Okay. Is he still alive? I want to have him on the program because Fisking to me was like one of the most interesting things in the early days of the Internet. I think this is like 90s Internet. Like it might have even been like pre web.
Lon Harris
We lost Robert Fisk in October of 2020.
Jason Calacanis
Sadly, rest in peace. This guy was, this guy was a provocateur, but he also raised the intellectual level. And when we started the web, Lon Fisking was like a way to engage intelligently and move forward the ball forward. So anyway, I put a thousand dollar thing out and people started building already. So now I'm bounty. Crazy thousand dollar bounty. Yes.
Lon Harris
We've been, we're, we're checking out the live sidebars here. I'll. I'll pull up the tweet now. We do. We've gotten a lot. If you have submitted to us an AI sidebar based on this tweet, we are checking them all out. It's just going to take us a while because we're trying to do it live on the show. So Jacob is actually playing with our first submission today. And we will.
Jason Calacanis
And this will be an enhanced show notes, right? We'll put all the links in the enhanced show notes. If you look at the show notes on your podcast player or on YouTube's, you know, description, we're doing enhanced show notes where we put like 20, 30, 40, 50 links in can.
Lon Harris
I designed a Claude skill to do this. It's working incredibly. So I. All I do is I take the transcript of the episode, I give it to Claude, it goes through it gets it perfectly organized, and it finds great URLs for everything that we talk about. I have to correct it. I would say one out of every 15 times it gets the link wrong and I have to fix it. But it's amazing. Incredible. It's saving so much time, right?
Jason Calacanis
What a disgust. So if you are the type of person who takes notes and wants to learn from podcasts like I do and Lon does, this is like our gift to you. And openclaw's gift to you is that you get in there.
Lon Harris
So just close.
Jason Calacanis
We have two of these.
Lon Harris
Not openclaw, my openclaw. He's locked away.
Jason Calacanis
Great. Shout out claw, cowork, shout out perplexity, computer. Love the whole category. So we did $1,000. We did $5,000.
Lon Harris
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
I'm gonna announce another $5,000 next week. I'll do it a week from today. I have to have the time to write this.
Sebastian Rubino
I got a big screen.
Lon Harris
We'll be back. We'll be right here.
Jason Calacanis
I'm gonna write my headless CMS bittensor open source. $5,000 prize to build this opportunity. And the prize in this case, if it becomes a company, I'm going to ask for, I don't know, the ability to buy 5% of the company for whatever, 50k or something, be the original seed investor. I just want the option, if it works, to have a little skin in the game. Why? Because if this works and I can get warrants or whatever, I might be able to make some of my previous investors whole. I don't want revenge here, but I do have unfinished business. I want to fix the ledge. There's a ledger. We're going to fix the ledger now. What does this mean for the person who shivved me? What is Tao good at? Lon, what is Tao good at? At its core? When you put a service on Tao versus a commercial proprietary service, what happens?
Lon Harris
I think Tao, you've got this huge incentivizing plat. It's, it's. It's incentives. It's that a regular company, you would have to hire people and pay them to do this work for you, and then you're getting out of them, you know, whatever. If they feel good about how they're being paid or what you get, it's like a normal employee. But in Tao, you're creating these communities that are financially incentivized to create or to validate the things that are being created. So you create. It's sort of a.
Jason Calacanis
What happens to. To the product category, the customer, what did they experience then? What did they experience when they engage those products? What value does the customer get?
Lon Harris
Well, it's constantly being iterated and improved because you've got these huge incentivized communities that are better products, iterating constantly and creating the better, the better.
Jason Calacanis
You nailed it. A better version. Then there's a second piece. Not only is it better, but it could be if it works better and faster, cheaper.
Lon Harris
Oh, of course. Cheaper, yes. Because cheaper. Right. Because we are.
Jason Calacanis
It's deflationary.
Lon Harris
We're decentralizing everything. So if you think about it in terms of like a company, a hyperscaler, having to buy room after room after room full of GPUs to produce their work with Tailard, you're just sending that out to everybody who's got a GPU to spare.
Jason Calacanis
Correct. Yeah. So what's happened here? I'm just going to recap it.
Sebastian Rubino
Sure.
Jason Calacanis
When somebody does this to you, you have to be forgiving. Okay. Namaste. I've talked myself up the ledge. Thank you, Jason Ballard. Thank you, Lon, for your counsel. I'm taking the high road, but it also educated me on. Hey, there's this really interesting company with a shark who elbowed me in the face. Like this guy has. This guy broke my nose in a basketball game for no good reason. And when I said, hey, you broke my nose, he told me to f off.
Lon Harris
There's nothing you could do about it.
Jason Calacanis
Nothing you could do about it. Hey, what are you going to do? Sue me? No, I'm not going to sue you. I'm going to sue the founders. I'm going to block the transaction. No. Mazel tov. Go for it. I considered it. Of course I considered it. I have LPs. I considered. Do I take legal action? The amount it would cost $10 million to fire up a lawsuit for 1.4 million invested doesn't make any sen sense. Who's going to fund the lawsuit? It's going to be five years later. But I now have become tuned in to this incredible business opportunity. And so that's what happens sometimes when you treat somebody incredibly unfairly. You might have also educated them and highlighted to them there's a major opportunity here. And hey, we live in a free market where the best idea wins. I might want to have an entry in this market.
Lon Harris
I think you hear that that narrative all the time from successful people is like that. That lit a fire under me. That negativity is what spurned me on. It's that Michael Jordan quote from the Last Dance. Like, and I took that personally.
Jason Calacanis
Like, you know, I think somebody make, make a video. I'll try to me somebody make me looking at the iPad and saying, I took that personally. And then I will release the 5K bounty next week with the conditions, you know of what.
Lon Harris
That's the productive thing to do. It's like, let this motivate you to do something great. Let this drive you to your next win rather than getting caught up in the back and forth with this person
Jason Calacanis
who wronged you and to the person who broke my nose, I forgive you. It's not. I'll take you at your word. It was impersonal. I haven't spoken to the person since this. Something happened. He told me to f off. I'll take you at your word. It wasn't personal. And me launching a Tao subnet in this vertical of content headless content management systems is also not personal. It's not personal. But I've got Mark Jeffrey. I've got all these developers in our community who like to build stuff with me and they love a bounty and they love a competition to show off their work. And now perhaps we'll be in another basketball game together. And I'm bringing a squad with me. And our goal is to take the price of a content, headless CMS and we would like to take out 90% of the expense. That's the goal. Sure. Remove 90% of the expense and make it available to everybody in the world, essentially for free. Because when you take 90% of the cost out, you're essentially saying, I'm going to make this free for the good of humanity. And we'll play another basketball game. We'll have round two, and this time I'm not getting elbowed and I'm not getting my nose broken.
Lon Harris
I mean, the Klingons say revenge is a dish best served cold. So that's.
Jason Calacanis
It's not even revenge.
Lon Harris
It's just.
Jason Calacanis
I just. You know what? I'm in the arena. You showed me this incredible game. I'd like to try playing the game. Maybe it's only a 1% chance I make a business out of this, but maybe I could then go to my LPs who lost money in this and gift them some equity warrants that they didn't get. That's it. Enough already. I am at peace with this. But with peace and love, I'm going to suit up. And I took that person.
Lon Harris
Yeah, that's what it is.
Jason Calacanis
All right, let's go off duty. Let's go off duty. Very quick. What do you got for me?
Lon Harris
So much stuff. Did you want to talk about these view buds? This was the thing you sent me on Twitter the other day. There's a camera inside your earbuds that
Jason Calacanis
can show me that. Let's play the video and I'll give my feedback.
Lon Harris
I will pull up the video as soon as I can get my mouse back over here.
Jason Calacanis
I saw this and I said, this is like a school project.
Lon Harris
Jacob Scott at our house already. There it is. So view.
Jason Calacanis
But hit play.
Lon Harris
So tiny cameras in each ear. Yeah, we'll play the video. So these. Yeah, they took regular Sony earbuds, opened them up, put these cameras and some batteries in them, and now they're connected to an on device vision language model so that you could basically talk to your ll or your vision language model, show it things around you, and it could just talk to you about whatever you're looking at, whatever you're. So you'd say a phrase. Hey, view is the. Is the sample one. Cameras activate. They stream images over Bluetooth to your phone or laptop. This is really clever. It's only going for a quick like three seconds after you say, hey, view, it's basically taking very quick photos so that it can see the thing you're looking at. But it's not, you know, it's not just filming all the time. That's what allows it to be quick and fast and not use up too much data. Because it's not a camera. It's not like a video camera. It's just taking quick images of what you see. And then they're tying it into the Quen 2.5 VL7B Vision language model, which can run very cheap, can run on your device. So that's how you're sort of moving around the world. And it could do this without you hauling a data center on your back. And it could process the image, answer any spoken question, and it responds to you, Jason, right in your earbuds. So it's like you're having this conversation with your AI, but that has finally a visual element. There's one other thing I want to mention because I thought this was so smart. So if you think about what if you had cameras in your ears, the immediate issue is, well, your face is blocking a lot of their view. Right. Like, that's why it's hard to have a camera back here. We always think of like you put the camera in the glasses so it's pointing directly out.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, right in the middle, like Poindexter, where you put the tape on your nerd glasses.
Lon Harris
But they get around it with binocular vision. So by combining the left and right cameras like, just like your eyes do, you don't see your nose because your brain is interpreting both eyes together. So you don't see your face because they're interpreting both cameras together at once. That is really clever.
Jason Calacanis
And this will lead me to my off duty. Okay, let me just say this. This idea is brilliant.
Lon Harris
So good.
Jason Calacanis
This is a founding team. If they have any entrepreneurial ability, I would love to invite them to my accelerator and give them 125k or their first 25k to incorporate whatever it is. If they're decent entrepreneurs and they seem like they're pretty great Team leader.
Lon Harris
He's Maruchi Kim. He's a PhD in Comp Sci and Engineering from university in Washington, Seattle. He's now working at Google. He works on XR Audio at Google.
Jason Calacanis
We got to get him out of Google and make this a startup. If he wants to or if anybody else wants to pursue something similar and they have hardware chops or they're just super motivated and have two friends. I'd love to incubate something similar because this could be incredibly accretive to blind people who are navigating the world. This could be incredibly accretive to when you're in another country. We already have auto translate in like Pixel Buds or whatever. But you're in Japan and you're looking at the sushi menu or you're looking at the eel menu and it's in Japanese and it just starts reading to you what your options are and you're talking to it.
Lon Harris
So amazing. In Japan. I would have used this constantly in Japan.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, correct. And now you're skiing and I'm skiing and it's seeing what's in front of me. And it says, hey, these are the conditions. This is the route you're going to go. This is, you know how you get back down to this lodge. Sometimes I'm in a new mountain. I ski when I was in Davos for one day. I don't know the terrain, I don't have the map. You got to take the map out in the cold. It's a blizzard, it's very inconvenient. But if it told you, hey, there's a quick way to the left and that lift only has the three minute wait. The one on the right has a 15 minute wait. There's all kinds of interesting things that developers will do when they get their hands on this.
Lon Harris
The more you start thinking about it, the more you're like, oh, I would use this like constantly. I mean, there would just be all like shopping. Imagine like if you're in a store and you go look around, like how, like, look at the product. How much is this on Amazon right now? Like, you can only imagine. All of the use is incredible.
Jason Calacanis
And when I saw this, I immediately thought, I am a fan of Sony earbuds. Everybody goes for the Apple ones. The Sony ones are so much better. And these are expensive, folks. These are $300. And I've bought two different versions of these. The Sony WF1000XM6. These are great. Noise canceling. The batteries last forever. They're extraordinary. Now they're expensive. Okay, fair enough. The Last version is 50 bucks off Sony WF1000XM5. And I actually prefer my XM5s better. They fit better. If anybody has any tips on how to get the phone things to fit, that's what I've been having a challenge with, is making them so they fit. So they're not, they don't hurt from extended use and they don't fall out. You have a real decision you have to make. So anyway, that's My off duty for today is I really think this is just a great, great product. And then I have another amazing product I just want to add to our off duty because, you know, I love gadgets, I love a good charger. And you know, I got the daughters and I saw Anker, my favorite brand, and they made a beautiful charger. And what's really unique about this one, this is the Anker Nano 45W Max Charger. This is like a fast one, so really good, but it's so tiny. And what's really unique about this one is sometimes you're on a plane or you're in a hotel and you gotta plug your thing in. Look at the 180 degree flexibility for your ideal view. It's like maybe the fifth image down on the Amazon. And what you'll see in the fifth image down is you can rotate the plug. There it is. See that one?
Lon Harris
Oh yes, yes.
Jason Calacanis
One more. The plug will go different directions depending on what you need. And it has a display on it. I don't know how they do this, but the display knows what you plugged in. So it'll say charging at this watt for this specific phone. It knows I have an iPhone air it knows that you have an iPhone 17. And then I have a bunch of different cables laying around. Turns out some of the USB C cables I have are not charging as fast and then other ones do. So knowing what your charge speed is, is such an unlock with this screen and it looks really cute. You press the button, you can turn the screen off or turn it on. My daughters love it. It comes in orange, my favorite color. I just bought two of these. You throw two of these in your bag when you're going to Japan lawn and they're dirt cheap. They're 30 bucks. This is so much better than anything Apple produces, you know, and they charge twice as much for half the product anyway. I love these chargers. I love all Anker products. Highly recommend you get this one. And then Anker sells a two headed USB C cable. So you got the daughters, you got iPads, you got phones, you know, you're at the airport, you're on the road, you're in an Airbnb, the dual sided cable that Anker makes. There it is. Yeah, this is a 4 foot 2 in one USB C to USB C 140 watt max, 18 bucks. Now this isn't a data cable. I don't think this will do data. It might do data, but it doesn't do data to the best of my knowledge. But you can get like different length ones, right? This thing's a godsend. You put these two things together, they don't take up any space. You got your phone and your laptop charging.
Lon Harris
It's a vet. The clutch thing is when you're at an event, you're not always near a plug. You want to be on your phone all day. You're tweeting, you're checking updates, you're checking your email. By halfway through the day you're at 13% power. You just keep your anchor in your bag. It's the easiest solution in the world.
Jason Calacanis
I gave you the charger, right? I gave you the cable. Now I will give you one more. In my anchor trio of happiness, I buy these two or three at a time and then when I'm with a friend, I hand it to them and I gift it to them. I did this with a member of my, I got a high profile, one of my high profile friends, their chief of staff. We're, we're at an event, I think we're at the all in summit. I wouldn't say who it was but you can look at the people on stage and get an idea. And I'm charging my phone with this. They said, what's that? I said this is a giant 25,000 milliamp. I don't know what these ratings are. And it's got two built in cables and it has pass through charging. So you plug those two USB Cs, one of them into the wall, one of them into your phone. And I carry this thing with me, doesn't weigh all that much, but you can charge your phone four times, five times. You can actually charge your laptop milliamp hours.
Lon Harris
That's what MAH is right there, 25,000 milliamp hours. It measures electrical charge and watt hours to measure energy and volts.
Jason Calacanis
So you can plug four things into this, you can plug a cable into it. The holes and the cables and the outputs. It comes with two built in cables so you're not searching for a cable. One of them is like a handle and cable. I put this in my backpack, I put one in my luggage. You've been with me in Japan. I pull this thing out. I'm not looking for, even when I'm on a plane, you know, the plugs on the plane are like 8 watts. They never charge your laptop. I just bring this thing with me, charge it up in my hotel. It's fantastic.
Lon Harris
Game changer.
Jason Calacanis
There's your trio of off duty from jcal for dealing with battery issues. And anchor is Chef's kiss. You got your charger, you got your cable, you got your battery pack. I'm done, folks. That's my off duty.
Lon Harris
AMC has a new Silicon Valley show. Jason, did you hear about this?
Jason Calacanis
Oh, I heard about this. This has got Galifianakis, my cousin. People don't know, but we're actually cousins.
Lon Harris
It's got Billy Magnuson, it's got Zach Galliford Act. It's called the Audacity. The first two are on AMC now, and I gave it a watch. You know, it's interesting, it's funny. There are some good characters. I could see it developing into something, but it does have kind. It's a sameness. It feels like the same kind of vibe as Silicon Valley. It feels like the same kind of vibe.
Jason Calacanis
It's derivative.
Lon Harris
It's a little bit of that mountain head. Remember we watched that Jesse Armstrong movie? It's all a little bit of the same joke that people in Silicon Valley, they think they're so great, they think they're so disruptive, they're changing the world, but it's really, you know, they're kind of the same doofuses as everyone else, and they're sort of lying. And it's all this kind of bs thin veneer of technological supremacy where really they're just recycling the same sort of old ideas. And I didn't hate it, but I was hoping it was going to be a little bit more of a different angle.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, they've been. The person who's the writer is a Silicon is a secession, I guess, writer. And they've been marketing it not as the crank, but somebody who was in the writer's room who knows what their providence is.
Lon Harris
But I knew that this was Jonathan Glatzer. They worked on Secession, but they also worked on Better Call Saul, which I loved.
Jason Calacanis
Okay. Both of those I love. So it's super legit. The problem with all of these is, I think, and I haven't seen it, so I'll reserve judgment. I'll watch it this weekend, maybe with the wife. We've been looking for a new show, but when you watch these things, like, it's becoming a bit on the nose in terms of outsiders trying to write about the inside space. And this session kind of nailed it. But I knew this one because I heard the writer on a bunch of the woke anti tech podcasts and they were over the moon. The hosts him of just how terrible everybody in Silicon Valley was. How, you know, oh, my God, these are vapid people who don't care about Society. It's just like, well, what if there, what if there's somebody in there who's like, actually Jason Ballard, who actually is a good person? What if there's somebody like me who actually is an empathetic, moderate person who doesn't care about politics, doesn't want to dominate the world, just wants to make cool?
Lon Harris
I feel like you're not really allowed to make that show right now. The public, I mean, we talk about it all the time. People are very down on AI, they're very down on the wealthy. We're having this big sort of populist moment. And so I think there's. The timing just doesn't feel right. I think creatives know you couldn't come out with a show about rich people in Silicon Valley who are doing good things and trying to change the world right now. That's not where the culture is at. So if you want to do a Silicon Valley show, I guess it sort of has to be, oh, aren't these people all ridiculous? And they're so narcissistic and self involved and they're only, they're really just about the money and the prestige, and then they just pretend that it's about doing good and people.
Jason Calacanis
And I, I'm.
Lon Harris
And I'm not saying there's nobody in Silicon Valley that's like that, but of course there are. Of course there are. But it just feels like, it feels a little samey and it feels like, well, what, what is this show's message specifically that we haven't already heard from Silicon Valley?
Jason Calacanis
What's in the name, the audacity of these people? You know, oh, they're mendacious.
Lon Harris
It's really, it's about the relationship between this CEO founder and his therapist, and they begin sort of colluding on financial fraud together. Like, that's the core premise of the show. So you kind of get.
Jason Calacanis
Let me tell you what would actually work. Let me tell you what would actually work. And maybe I should. Maybe you and I need to write a treatment.
Lon Harris
I think so. I think we could have the inside.
Jason Calacanis
I think the treatment is really the industry. Like, industry is not like, hey, we have an ax to grind. It's just young people and it's money and it's power and it's more, it's gray area.
Lon Harris
Nobody on that show is all gray. People on that show aren't evil or good. They're flawed. They're, they're three dimensional and, and they're people. Some of them you like, some of them you don't they're morally gray, just like reality. And I feel like all these Silicon Valley shows, everybody's always like, dumb and evil and that's kind of the premise.
Jason Calacanis
Gavin Balson, you know the guy who runs the incubator in that show in Silicon Valley. Yeah, I forgot his name and the actor's name who was in Deadpool.
Lon Harris
That's called in. Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
Oh, they claimed he called in a bomb threat on a train. Remember that fiasco?
Lon Harris
I'm glad I've met this guy. And now I'm. But T.J. miller, right? Is that him?
Jason Calacanis
T.J. miller, who crushed it. And then some people were like, oh, that's JCal. Okay.
Lon Harris
In Silicon Valley, that's a different character. Gavin Belson is the guy who runs who the Google.
Jason Calacanis
Yes. The Google owner was nothing like Sergey
Lon Harris
or Larry J. Miller was a different. Different guy. And then this one.
Jason Calacanis
Anyway, all the.
Lon Harris
It's all. It's an alternate reality. There's no real companies in the show. The Audacity. But the big company that everybody is sort of wants to be. Cupertino is the name of that company. So you could.
Jason Calacanis
Okay, so it's Apple.
Lon Harris
It's obvious who it's supposed to be, you know, but it's. I. I don't know. I feel like it's not as.
Jason Calacanis
Anyway, I'll watch it. I'll give my judgment on off duty next Friday when I release my headless CMS towel project and I release my bounty and my. And my instructions on what the competition will be. All right, everybody, it's been another great week of twist. There's a secret twist group on.
Lon Harris
Wow, the group chat.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, there's a secret group chat on X that's been brewing. It's got about 100 people in it. If you want to be in that group, dm, the TWI startups account and we'll add you. If you're a true fan of the show.
Lon Harris
Think about it. It's getting.
Jason Calacanis
No, no, it's a fun group. It's a fun group of people who love the show. Like 100 of us and we just talk about the show every day and what we're going to have in the next episode. Have a great weekend. Bye.
Sebastian Rubino
Bye.
Podcast: This Week in Startups
Host: Jason Calacanis
Episode: “3D-Printed Homes for $99K: ICON’s Jason Ballard on the future of housing” (E2277)
Date: April 18, 2026
This episode delves into the transformative potential of 3D-printed construction, featuring Jason Ballard, co-founder and CEO of ICON, a pioneer in 3D-printed homes. The discussion ranges from affordable, beautiful housing solutions for everyday Americans to military applications, regulatory barriers, and opportunities for both investors and builders. The show also illustrates the broad significance of construction innovation—touching on social, psychological, and economic outcomes—plus a lively exchange on personal and professional experiences in startup life.
Quote:
“If mom or dad are taking this hour and a half commute to get to work... What’s left for the fam? Not much.”
— Jason Calacanis (05:46)
Quote:
"You shrink the labor requirement by 6/7 ... and our supply chain are things ... available everywhere in the world."
— Jason Ballard (09:47)
Quote:
“Maybe in the iPhone, the billionaire has the same iPhone as the college student... What happens when the same high-end-looking esthetics are available?”
— Jason Ballard (17:05)
Quote:
“Where else do you get giant robots, homeless housing, and a moon base in one place?”
— Jason Ballard (45:22)
Quote:
“Move your company to Austin… The reaction they had when they came to this town was this town’s dope.”
— Jason Calacanis (35:39)
“This is the person. If you’re effective at what you do in your career, go work for Jason.”
— Jason Calacanis (44:40)
“We can shelter the homeless, revive the American dream, defend the West, and build the moon base. That’s the society I want to be a part of.”
— Jason Ballard (26:35)
“I collect quality guys. You know why? Because some guys like to shiv me.”
— Jason Calacanis (43:39)
The discussion is dynamic and wide-ranging, balancing technical depth with social philosophy and humor. Calacanis is candid, passionate, and unfiltered; Ballard is idealistic yet practical. Both are bullish on technology’s potential as a force for good, emphasizing action, partnership, and solving real human needs. Throughout, the tone is energetic, irreverent, and community-oriented, peppered with personal anecdotes and provocative calls to action.
This episode offers a comprehensive look at how 3D-printed construction could reshape not just housing affordability, but the quality, dignity, and societal role of shelter around the world. ICON’s innovations suggest a future where advanced engineering serves everyone—from the homeless to astronauts—while fostering greater social cohesion, opportunity, and hope.
For more information:
Visit iconbuild.com if you’re a builder, technologist, or would-be revolutionary interested in shaping the future of housing.