3D-Printed Homes for $99K: ICON’s Jason Ballard on the future of housing | E2277

Summary

This Friday TWIST opens with Jason Calacanis teasing a story about being “shivved for 500k” by a founder who denied his investors any equity in an acquisition — a thread that loops back at the end of the show as the spark for a brand-new BitTensor project. But the heart of the episode is a long, philosophy-meets-technology conversation with Jason Ballard, founder of ICON, the Austin-based construction-technology company that is large-scale 3D-printing buildings out of “formcrete.” Ballard walks the hosts through ICON Prime, a focused defense business growing 500% YoY that just delivered ten survivable barracks at Fort Bliss in six months for less than half the cost of the legacy 1-2 year process. He pivots to housing-for-the-homeless at Community First Village — 110 dignified homes priced between $99K and $120K including profit — and argues that beauty, dignity, and short commutes (Sweden’s 30-minute threshold for stress and depression) are foundational, not aspirational, layers of any serious housing strategy. Calacanis ties it back to a Texas growth thesis: when builders can’t get permits in California or New York, they decamp to Austin where Lennar’s Wolf Ranch — the first 3D-printed neighborhood in the world — became the developer’s #1-selling Central Texas community.

Guest two is Sebi Rubino, founder of Rezi Labs (BitTensor subnet 46, “Real Estate Super Intelligence”). Rezi runs a daily competition where AI models price US homes at 98% accuracy — beating Zestimate and in-person appraisers — and the winning model is monetized at one-hundredth-of-a-penny per appraisal. Rubino, a Brooklyn native whose mom GC’d Red Hook before it was hip, explains how Bittensor’s incentive structure delivers narrow intelligence “faster, cheaper, better” than corporate hyperscalers. Customers like Balcony Technology (running $1T of county housing data on Avalanche) plug Rezi’s pricing engine into property-tax reassessment and fraud detection; Figure HELOC’s $17B AUM lending business demonstrates the on-chain underwriting opportunity.

The off-duty segment is dominated by Calacanis’s slow-burn revenge story. After being told “there’s nothing you can do about it” by a content-management-system founder who refused to give wiped-out investors even token warrants on an acquisition, Calacanis bought the company’s domain name in the wash-out for ~$250K — and at 1:29:19 announces a $5K bounty next week to launch a decentralized, open-source headless CMS on BitTensor whose explicit goal is to remove 90% of the cost from proprietary CMS pricing. He also breaks down Maruchi Kim’s Viewbuds (camera-equipped earbuds with binocular vision running Qwen 2.5-VL-7B locally), endorses the Anker Nano 45W charger and 25,000 mAh dual-cable power bank, and pans AMC’s new Silicon Valley show The Audacity as too cynical compared to Industry’s morally gray realism.

Highlights

Fort Bliss: 10 barracks in 6 months for less than half the cost

“The most recent project that we’re doing is out at Fort Bliss in West Texas… 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 a barracks. We are delivering ten in six months for less than half the cost. And these are like higher performance — if you saw the existing barracks on site, it’s actually not apples to apples.” — Jason Ballard, 15:03

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”Where is Wakanda? Where is Rivendell?”

“Where is Wakanda? Where is Rivendell? Are we sure the delivery of this thing that we see — and I think the housing of the future should feel like the future. Of course it should be faster and cheaper, but I think beauty and dignity have to be at the table of the requirements that you’re solving for from day one.” — Jason Ballard, 16:24

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$99K homes for the homeless — including profit

“We are building that house for between $99,000 and $120,000 delivered, with our profit included… We had a global architecture design contest where we gave a million-dollar prize to people designing homes that could be built for 99K. We’ve also built that house out at Community First Village. This helps us get around the NIMBY problem. Beauty really is the key. It’s not just a spreadsheet exercise.” — Jason Ballard, 21:10

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Shelter the homeless, defend the West, build a moon base

“These things don’t have to be in competition. With this technology and others, we can shelter the homeless, we can revive the American dream, we can defend the West, and we can, by God, build a moon base. That’s the society 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 next level of humanity.” — Jason Ballard, 25:51

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Rezi Labs: 98% appraisal accuracy beats Zestimate

“We are working on the real estate intelligence network. Our first competition is an appraisal model. 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.” — Sebi Rubino (via Rezi Labs segment), 46:54

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”Take 90% of the expense out” — JCal’s headless-CMS Tao counter

“Our goal is to take the price of a content, headless CMS, and we would like to take out 90% of the expense. 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.” — Jason Calacanis, 1:29:19

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Key Points

• The 30-minute commute and the Sweden study (5:54) - Producer Claude pulls a 2011 Lund analysis: car/transit commutes >30 minutes correlate with stress, lower vitality, poor sleep; UK ONS data confirms higher anxiety on >30-min trains
• ICON Prime growing 500% this year (6:34) - Defense + intelligence + NASA business spun out as a “new product line” inside ICON; building for the military for 6-7 years already
• Survivability is the military’s word for quality (8:14) - Wall systems that take 15-20 people 60 days now built by 2 people in a week; in-situ resource utilization is the next-gen target
• Formcrete and the brick-vs-puddle problem (10:25) - Standard concrete flows into a puddle; quick-set sets up in the printer like a brick; ICON’s specialized concrete with globally available base ingredients
• Tents to tanks: vehicle hides and blast testing (13:31) - 12-18 inch concrete walls with classified blast/ballistics performance; testing officer’s verdict was “we’re confident it would pass muster” under similar field pressure
• 250 buildings delivered, mostly housing (14:13) - Including dozens of military structures; Airbnb-bought ICON home from 2019 still in service
• Beauty as a non-spreadsheet input (15:30) - Lon’s “Deckard’s apartment / Ennis house / Frank Lloyd Wright” reaction to ICON’s aesthetic; fluid-material 3D printing means a Fibonacci-spiral house costs the same as a square
• Drywall as Stockholm Syndrome (39:32) - “If we offered a million-dollar prize to come up with a lower-quality building material that would pass building code than drywall, no one would win”
• 100-year minimum lifespan + flooding/mold/termite immunity (38:18) - Calacanis: 3 of 6 owned homes had mold, 2 had flooding; concrete sidesteps all of it
• Plumbing and electrical print faster, not slower (40:03) - 3D printing controls the internal wall structure; multiple trades are automated out alongside framing
• Lennar Wolf Ranch: the first 3D-printed neighborhood in the world (31:38) - 100 homes priced $300-500K; Lennar’s #1 selling Central Texas community with their lowest warranty claims
• Titan: ICON’s multi-story railless printer (41:55) - New printer prints reinforced concrete, two-to-three stories; ICON now sells the equipment to other builders
• ICON’s Polymarket: Austin median home value April 30 (28:46) - Sharps leaning $439K+ as the median; Alex notes anything under $400K should be bought immediately
• Fat Dime Capital question on cracking (36:51) - Ballard: structural cracking doesn’t happen anymore; shrinkage cracking is aesthetic; “the largest unreinforced dome in the world in Rome is made of concrete”
• “How you treat the meekest amongst us is how you treat me” (23:16) - Calacanis invokes Matthew 25 as the North Star for moving the floor of society
• Tesla Roadster #16, Model S #0001, Cybertruck convergence (26:58) - Sacks, Chamath, Friedberg all drive Model Ys with FSD; “we all drive the same car”
• Rezi monetization model: $0.0001 per appraisal (59:34) - One percent of a penny per home priced; revenue buys back the subnet token
• Bittensor subnets vs corporate AI stacks (51:00) - 128 networks each running competitions for one piece of the AI stack; Rezi sits on subnet 46
• Figure HELOC’s $17B on-chain loan book (57:00) - Cited as proof a single mortgage company already runs its book on blockchain rails; Rezi’s appraisal layer enables the next wave
• Calacanis $750K Tao position (50:54) - Buying another $50K of Tao that day; co-founded Stillcore Capital with Mark Jeffrey for the thesis
• Wyoming C-Corp + DAT model (1:01:51) - Rezi is a Wyoming C-Corp; revenue buys back tokens, the company accumulates its own subnet alpha
• Calacanis’s “shivved for 500K” story (1:08:54) - CMS founder refuses 500K in token warrants on $1.4M invested; Calacanis buys the company’s domain in liquidation for $250K
• The 5K Bittensor headless-CMS bounty (1:24:00) - Following $1K Annotated.com and $5K real-time-commentary-agent bounties; “I took that personally”
• Viewbuds: Qwen 2.5-VL-7B + binocular vision (1:30:51) - Cameras stream over Bluetooth in 3-second bursts after “Hey View” wakeword; left + right cameras stitch like eyeballs to ignore the wearer’s face
• Maruchi Kim of Google XR Audio (1:33:13) - University of Washington PhD; Calacanis offers him $25K-$125K accelerator slot
• Anker Nano 45W charger with rotating plug + display (1:36:00) - 180-degree flexibility, screen shows charge wattage and detected device, $30; Calacanis’s “trio of off-duty happiness”
• AMC’s The Audacity and Industry as the better template (1:40:31) - Glatzer’s Succession/Better-Call-Saul pedigree; “Cupertino” stand-in company; HBO’s Industry praised as morally gray vs. The Audacity’s “outsider writing about insiders”

Mentions

Companies

• ICON (1:06) - Jason Ballard’s Austin-based 3D-printing construction company; ICON Prime is the new defense product line
• Lennar (32:22) - Largest US home builder; partner on the Wolf Ranch 100-home 3D-printed neighborhood in Central Texas
• Community First Village (16:53) - Austin nonprofit community where ICON builds dignified $99K-$120K homes for the homeless
• Rezi Labs / portal.rezilabs.ai (45:00) - Sebi Rubino’s BitTensor subnet 46 for real-estate appraisal
• Compound Finance (46:13) - Rubino’s prior employer; team member sent him TWIST clips
• Balcony Technology (47:30) - $1T in county housing data on Avalanche; uses Rezi’s pricing engine for tax reassessment and fraud detection
• Avalanche (47:30) - Layer 1 chain Balcony chose for on-chain housing data
• Estate Protocol, Commeritize, Honey Shares (59:38) - Tokenized real-estate platforms partnering with Rezi for third-party appraisal
• Figure HELOC (57:00) - $17B AUM blockchain-native lender used as proof point for on-chain mortgage rails
• Stillcore Capital (55:25) - Calacanis’s Bittensor-focused fund with Mark Jeffrey
• Tesla (26:21) - Roadster #16 and Model S #0001 in Calacanis’s collection; daily-driver Model Y
• Polymarket (28:25) - Median Austin home value market discussed; ~$110K volume
• Mt. Gox (54:42) - Where Calacanis lost his early Bitcoin in the hack
• OpenClaude / Perplexity Computer / Claude Co-worker (1:23:33) - Lon’s enhanced-show-notes Claude skill runs on Co-worker
• HBO Max / AMC (1:10:32) - Dust Bunny on HBO Max; The Audacity on AMC
• Anker (1:36:00) - Calacanis’s preferred charging brand; Nano 45W charger and 25,000 mAh battery pack endorsed
• Sony (1:34:56) - WF-1000XM5 and XM6 earbuds; basis for the Viewbuds prototype
• Northwest Registered Agent / IM8 / Grasshopper / Pilot - sponsors

Products & Technologies

• Formcrete (10:25) - ICON’s specialized concrete that stays printable but cures into structure
• Titan printer (42:00) - Multi-story, railless, prints reinforced concrete; just made commercially available
• BitTensor / Tau / Subnet 46 (45:03) - Network of 128 sub-network competitions; Rezi runs subnet 46 with $230K paid in rewards
• Zestimate (46:54) - Zillow’s pricing tool, beaten by Rezi at 98% accuracy
• Qwen 2.5-VL-7B (1:30:51) - Vision-language model running on-device for Viewbuds
• Viewbuds (1:29:30) - Camera-equipped earbuds prototype using binocular vision and Bluetooth-streamed images
• Anker Nano 45W charger (1:36:00) - Rotating plug, display showing detected device and watt rate
• Anker 25,000 mAh battery + dual-cable (1:38:05) - Pass-through charging with two built-in USB-C cables; charges laptop multiple times
• Plaud NotePin / NotePin S (0:35) - Sponsor wearable note-capture device
• Annotated.com bounty (1:19:21) - Calacanis’s $1K bounty for a wayback-machine-style web annotation tool with AI

People

• Jason Ballard (1:13) - Founder of ICON, “Austin squad” insider
• Sebi Rubino (45:03) - Founder of Rezi Labs; Brooklyn-raised; mom GC’d Red Hook
• Sam Altman / Dario Amodei (2:39) - Cited as the AI faces who scare Americans about jobs and existential risk
• Jimmy Iovine (48:50) - Music producer (Dire Straits, Springsteen) Calacanis recently dined with; Red Hook native
• Maruchi Kim (1:33:13) - PhD in Comp Sci/EE from University of Washington Seattle, currently at Google XR Audio; Viewbuds creator
• Mark Jeffrey (1:28:41) - Co-founder of Stillcore Capital with Calacanis
• David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Friedberg (27:23) - All driving Model Ys daily in Austin/Bay
• Robert Fisk (1:21:27) - British journalist whose name became “fisking” — line-by-line article rebuttal; died October 2020
• Brian Fuller / Mads Mikkelsen (1:10:32) - Dust Bunny on HBO Max
• Zach Galifianakis / Billy Magnussen (1:40:33) - Stars of AMC’s The Audacity
• Jonathan Glatzer (1:41:44) - The Audacity writer; Succession + Better Call Saul alum
• TJ Miller (1:44:58) - HBO Silicon Valley co-star; called the “JCal”-coded character despite Calacanis’s denial
• Ken Griffin (1:03:05) - Mentioned as the recent Mondavi-doxxing victim (no doxxing of Lon’s address)

Surprising Quotes

“If we offered a million-dollar prize on this show to come up with a lower-quality building material that would pass building code than drywall, no one would win the prize. It is literally the crappiest thing we can imagine using is what we’re building with today.” — Jason Ballard, 37:25

“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 member of society is how you treat God. Let that sink in as a concept, folks.” — Jason Calacanis, 23:10

“Where else do you get giant robots, homeless housing, and a moon base in one place? I mean come on — and get some of those RSUs.” — Jason Ballard, 44:22

“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 sense. 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.” — Jason Calacanis, 1:27:00

“It is the greatest city in the world… Something very special is happening here. There’s an instinct to build instead of hand-wring and theorize about solutions. It’s just like get out there and do something, figure it out.” — Jason Ballard on Austin, 31:38

Transcript

Jason Calacanis: 0:00 I got effed for 500k.

Lon Harris: 0:02 I think we need to hear this story about you getting shived for half a mil.

Alex Wilhelm: 0:04 The scumbag who effed JCal.

Lon Harris: 0:08 Wow. Thought he would get away with it.

Jason Calacanis: 0:11 But I’m going to balance the ledger.

Alex Wilhelm: 0:13 From [company name].

Jason Ballard: 0:15 Hang on. J-Cal, okay. Grace and loving is the way man, so like I…

Jason Calacanis: 0:19 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 going to be my best moment.

Alex Wilhelm: 0:28 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.

Jason Calacanis: 0:35 Before we do anything, I just want to take a moment to applaud applaud. 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…

Lon Harris: 0:45 Mm.

Jason Calacanis: 0:46 …who effed JCal a year ago.

Lon Harris: 0:48 Wow.

Jason Calacanis: 0:49 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 effed for 500k.

Lon Harris: 0:56 Wow, that’s a lot.

Jason Calacanis: 0:57 And at the end of the show, after we do off duty, or maybe right before off duty, remind me on how I’m going to balance the ledger.

Lon Harris: 1:03 I’m going to make a note right now.

Jason Calacanis: 1:04 Let’s get started. Who’s our guest here? Mm, I’m so excited.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:06 We’ve 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 we’re going to talk about Icon Prime, their new defense-focused arm. Jason, thanks so much for being here, welcome to the show.

Jason Ballard: 1:21 Really excited to be here. Howdy everybody, and thanks for having me.

Jason Calacanis: 1:25 I’m also excited. Jason’s one of my guys. He’s in my squad, in my Austin squad.

Lon Harris: 1:31 J-Ball 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: 1:38 18 months. Cross the barrier.

Jason Ballard: 1:40 You know, I think it’s faster than that, JCal. I think like the moment a person’s residence is west of the Mississippi River, I think your rights and privileges extend to new haberdashery, so I think…

Lon Harris: 1:47 Okay. I was very excited to hear this. I’ve been waiting to cross the cowboy hat barrier. I think I have.

Jason Calacanis: 1:52 I’m not sure what the length of the brim can be for a year one guy.

Jason Ballard: 1:56 You know, you- you- yeah, that’s right, you have to find your way into it. But- but it’s certainly a journey worth making and not to be too trepidatious about, for sure.

Lon Harris: 2:00 Awesome. I can’t wait.

Jason Calacanis: 2:02 Jason’s a great entrepreneur. Icon 3D homes…

Alex Wilhelm: 2:04 Stunningly beautiful.

Jason Calacanis: 2:05 I thought, eh, I don’t know about this model. And then I saw the homes, and you know, 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 all this bad news coming out about AI, right? And if you think about who our top two spokespersons are: Sam Altman and… We just had a 270,000 word article in the New Yorker explaining he’s a sociopath from every partner 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? I mean, healthcare…

Alex Wilhelm: 4:15 We often talk about it that, I mean, like it is 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’s almost like getting those things correct enables all of the other exciting things that I think get talked about on this podcast and other places.

Jason Calacanis: 4:44 It’s foundational. The ability to just 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 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. It’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 is literally studies that have been made, I’ll ask Producer Claude to pull it up. There have been countless studies made that have been done that show 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 the—this hour-and-a-half commute to get to work, they get home in an hour and 15 minutes, now they’ve been in a car for two hours and 45 minutes after working for an 8, 9, 10-hour shift, then what’s left? What’s left for the fam? Not much. Thanks to Producer Claude, I’ve got a few studies here. One, the biggest one was from Sweden. They did a public health study…

Lon Harris: 6:00 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: 6:16 All I do is read.

Lon Harris: 6:17 The 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.

Alex Wilhelm: 6:27 So Jason, you’re here to talk a little bit about—

Jason Ballard: 6:30 I wouldn’t call it a pivot. I think I’d call it a new product line. So tell us—

Alex Wilhelm: 6:33 Tell us what you’re working on.

Jason Ballard: 6:34 Yeah, I mean, so ICON, for those who don’t know or haven’t heard, 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 like interesting ways that you do business development with the government customer, there’s interesting legal arrangements there. And of course, there’s just like a sharp point on what the technology needs to do. Everybody wants faster and cheaper, but there’s some things that are weighted more highly in a military and intelligence environment, you know, survivability…

Alex Wilhelm: 7:58 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, but speed I would think—

Jason Calacanis: 8:11 Speed and quality.

Alex Wilhelm: 8:13 That’s right.

Jason Ballard: 8:14 Yeah, speed is, 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 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 in about two people in a week.

Jason Calacanis: 8:58 Wow.

Jason Ballard: 9:00 You shrink the labor requirement by six sevenths, 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: 9:19 That’s the big unlock in my mind because you use concrete.

Lon Harris: 9:24 I like to stay active, you know, I’m getting a little older, but I’ve started drinking IM8 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. IM8 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 travel 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: 10:25 We call it formcrete. 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.

Alex Wilhelm: 10:45 All right, we’ll get right back to what you’re doing in terms of forward deployment, the use cases, and then we’ll go to space. But first, I want to start by applauding Plaud. I just hit my Plaud. 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 J-Cal 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. Use your Plaud. Get a Plaud. You’re going to want to get a Plaud NotePin S and you can check it out for yourself at plaud.ai/twist and just use the code TWIST for 10% off your Plaud NotePin S. Keep track of all your enemies list easily with the Plaud NotePin S. There you go. We have some discount codes and the best live question, I’m going to pay for a 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.

Jason Calacanis: 12:00 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 going to help you, correct?

Alex Wilhelm: 12:01 All right Jason, let’s talk about ICON.

Jason Ballard: 12:41 I mean, that’s the laundry list of problems military construction has. It’s 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 defensive structures, vehicle hides, these are all things we have built for the military—they either have these high-speed, low-cost but low-survivability options like tents, or they have this very slow, very expensive, very complicated way of doing traditional building. And what they are missing, which they very sharply need, is a 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. You have the automation of the labor through the robotics, and then you’re building with a very simple supply chain in a material that is inherently survivable.

Lon Harris: 13:31 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, yeah?

Jason Ballard: 13:51 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 blast and ballistics testing against these facilities. I’m not allowed to disclose the full performance characteristics, 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, it would pass muster,’ something like that. So…

Lon Harris: 14:13 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: 14:26 Yeah, I mean, yeah, that project there is from like 2019, so that was some of our early work. We have like 250 buildings that we have delivered in the world today, most of which are housing. A few dozen of those are military structures. But it’s been a fun journey of trying to, like, really give humanity new tools with which to build.

Jason Calacanis: 14:50 So how much faster can you build a survivable structure in the field versus the equivalent that the military would build? But we’re talking days, months, weeks, you tell us.

Jason Ballard: 15:03 The most recent project that 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 a barracks. We are delivering ten in six months for more than… 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 not apples to apples, I’m giving you apples to apples time and cost comparisons, but these are like not apples to apples comparisons.

Lon Harris: 15:30 So 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 the… 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, you know, 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. A lot. This looks like, you know, Deckard’s apartment. It looks like the Ennis house. This looks like something Frank Lloyd Wright built. Right? I mean, it looks actually great. And then talk about climate and temperature.

Jason Ballard: 15:52 Yeah, maybe I’ll go back because of course like housing was like the the big issue that sort of provoked the existence of ICON. Um and of course everybody talks about we need to build fast, we need to build more affordably. But you you kind of do, before it’s an expensive problem to solve and you kind of need to step back and it’s like, wait a minute, are we sure like this is the world we want to build faster and cheaper? Like, these are not the houses you’re looking for, like…

Jason Calacanis: 16:23 Right.

Jason Ballard: 16:24 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 the future. 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 of course you could imagine, you know, automations do what automations do and they make things faster and cheaper.

Alex Wilhelm: 16:31 Right.

Jason Ballard: 16:31 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 a Fibonacci spiral and it’s the same price as a square.

Lon Harris: 16:53 Right.

Jason Ballard: 16:54 And so like what happens to the world like not only when things are cheaper but but when like beauty is back on the menu? When like, uh, 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 aesthetics are available and in fact we’re doing 110 more homes for the homeless at Community First Village. Uh, I should have maybe brought pictures, like these do not look like houses for the homeless.

Jason Calacanis: 17:44 Yeah.

Jason Ballard: 17:45 We’re delivering them for between 99 and 120,

Lon Harris: 17:51 Yeah.

Jason Ballard: 17:52 thousand. 10,000 dollars a home including our profit.

Alex Wilhelm: 18:04 Incredible.

Lon Harris: 18:05 Yes.

Jason Ballard: 18:05 And like, they are incredible.

Jason Calacanis: 18:06 That’s awesome because I mean so often when you’re hearing about, you know, these well-intentioned programs to like help 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: 18:21 It’s depressing. And it’s somehow strangely like connected to all this like regulatory runaway that has also happened in the housing space. Because you know, in some ways 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 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 it to like untangle some of this like regulatory knot that we’ve gotten in that for sure is driving up housing cost.

Alex Wilhelm: 19:03 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 it doesn’t look

Jason Ballard: 19:26 It does not speak to the human heart and again it’s like where’s icon this is not the world that we want to build faster and cheaper 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 families. I don’t know if you can Google like I-

Alex Wilhelm: 19:45 Well here is like look at this, here’s your 3D printed homes for the homeless.

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Jason Ballard: 20:46 Again I’ll 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 dollar a night Airbnb as you looked at these ones for your mom. Can you Google please- So I don’t know if you can search I-99 ICON, I-9-9, the letters I-C-O-N, and see what images come up, because I’d like to show you some of the newer ones. There it is.

Jason Calacanis: 21:08 I think I got it. Oh lord.

Jason Ballard: 21:10 We are building that house—that house is already done. We are building that house for between $99,000 and $120,000 delivered, with our profit included.

Lon Harris: 21:17 By the way, that house looks like a $4 million LA mansion with a view.

Jason Calacanis: 21:22 You would think. 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: 21:28 You got it, you got it, you got it. And so we had like a global architecture design contest for, like, we gave a million dollar prize to people designing homes that could be built for 99K was sort of the initiative. We’ve also built that house out at Community First Village. This helps us get around this like NIMBY problem of 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 exercise. The spreadsheet matters, but like, these things have to be weighted sort of in a more equal way than we’ve thought about them in the past of solving the housing crisis.

Alex Wilhelm: 22:06 Taking an unhoused person and putting them in a real community that feels like a real neighborhood, that’s inherently stabilizing.

Jason Ballard: 22:17 You would not, if y’all go out to Community First Village you would say like, ‘Oh my god, a neighborhood of like homeless people, it must be kind of crazy town.’ Right. Like, it is completely chill and kind and, like, it is a miracle. And like, the restoration of dignity and community—like, these things are not just spreadsheet exercises. When you’re talking about fundamental human needs, food, water, shelter, of course they’re big, but they like unlock the rest of the pyramid, right, of like self-actualization and… and this is how you solve these seemingly intractable social issues, is you have to put the sort of whole human in the picture.

Jason Calacanis: 22:59 Listen, I’m going to invoke Jesus. Lon and I have been talking a lot about Jesus these days.

Lon Harris: 23:04 Always, always.

Alex Wilhelm: 23:06 Always top of mind.

Jason Calacanis: 23:07 I’m telling people the good news every day.

Lon Harris: 23:10 How you treat the meekest amongst us is how you treat me.

Jason Calacanis: 23:16 This is what Jesus said. This is the gospel. He said to us, how you treat the weakest member of society is how you treat God. Let that sink in as a concept, folks.

Lon Harris: 23:26 What you have done to the sick, the poor, the hungry, the prisoner, is what you have done to me.

Jason Calacanis: 23:30 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 know, you hit some hits, they run away—oh my god, Uber, Robinhood—you know, 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 progressed? Moved up.

Alex Wilhelm: 24:01 The—the whole bracket has to move together.

Jason Calacanis: 24:04 Correct. Yes. And if you were like thinking about structuring a society, which we should, the whole bracket has to move. 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%, you know, it’s—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 have net worths of one to five 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. Uh, you have a lot of optionality. So what can we do to just move the floor up? Jason, go ahead.

Lon Harris: 24:48 Yeah.

Jason Ballard: 24:49 And I mean, like—and I—like, icon- as an icon of this, um, when you start thinking about technology, I don’t think it’s an accident that like the very same technology that we’re using to like reimagine the way we do social and affordable housing in America is like the very same technology that will also allow us to build a moon base. Somehow like when you like when you sort of frame these things as like bigger problems of like 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 like tremendous potential for human flourishing sort of across the board both for solving intractable problems but also for like these like grand challenges that I think also speak to the human heart in an ennobling in their own way.

Jason Calacanis: 25:31 In—said another way, this could be a win-win-win.

Alex Wilhelm: 25:36 Yes.

Jason Calacanis: 25:37 The investors in these companies and the founders and the team can win. Society can win, right? And all levels of society can win. It doesn’t need to just be the top wins, the shareholders in the company.

Lon Harris: 25:50 That’s right.

Jason Ballard: 25:51 These things don’t have to be in competition—like, we can shel- with this technology and others, I think, we should be thinking about—like, we can shelter the homeless, we can revive the American dream, we can defend the West, and we can, by God, build a moon base. Like—like that- that’s the society like that I want to be a part of and that’s the technology set that we need to be all working on collectively to like unlock the sort of next level of humanity.

Jason Calacanis: 26:15 You know what you just unlocked for me? This idea that when you make something that’s truly got that craftsmanship, that truly uh inspires uh the—the high-end, it’s not incongruous to uh have that hit everybody. And I’ll give an example of it. You know, I’m sitting a couple of feet away from the 16th Tesla ever made, the Roadster uh that I paid $150,000 for. Next to it is the Model S I paid also signature signature 0001, which I paid $150,000 for. Okay, $300,000 for a couple 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, costs 50k, I think you can get it used for 30. Okay, which we’re 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 Cybertruck brings it everywhere. Every rich person you talk to, David Sacks started driving again. He used to take Uber everywhere.

Lon Harris: 27:23 He’s in Austin now, right?

Jason Calacanis: 27:24 He’s in Austin and showed up for…

Lon Harris: 27:26 And David…

Jason Calacanis: 27:27 We had a nice steak dinner the other night. He showed up and 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, Tesla.’ I’m like, ‘Why are you driving yourself?’ He’s like, ‘Oh, I have FSD and I have this Model Y, I love it.’

Alex Wilhelm: 27:43 Really? Sacks doing pretty good, drives a Model Y every day.

Jason Calacanis: 27:46 Chamath, he’s doing pretty good. He drives a Model Y every day.

Alex Wilhelm: 27:49 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 27:51 Friedberg, he’s doing very well. All of us crushing it. He’s got four Model Ys he said on the program, or four Teslas, all of them with self-driving.

Alex Wilhelm: 27:59 We all drive the same car. It’s all converged to one.

Jason Calacanis: 28:00 Perfect car. 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. You’ll build an Icon.

Jason Ballard: 28:13 By the way, two to three hour fire rating standard out of the box, costs the same prices to build in a non-fireproof way. Like, it’s…

Jason Calacanis: 28:21 Unpack that for us after we look at this incredible Polymarket. Here it is, folks. 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 here? If you put it at 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.

Alex Wilhelm: 28:46 Yes. The volume pretty low on this one. I’m looking…

Jason Calacanis: 28:50 That means opportunity.

Alex Wilhelm: 28:51 There you go. But it’s new, in fairness. So only 110,000 volume 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 take on it.

Jason Calacanis: 29:27 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 need a Delaware C Corp. That’s going to give you a serious leg up on your competition and you’ll 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

Alex Wilhelm: 30:00 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, 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 their remodel—I am not joking, and I’m not talking about remodeling your 2,000 square foot, you know, European kitchen that, you know, I had at my houses. I’m talking about a modest kitchen with, you know, GE appliances. It’s six, seven, 800,000 dollars. It’s three or four hundred thousand to remodel a bathroom in Los Angeles. You ask 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: 31:23 Yeah, there’s no comparison. I mean, if you were talking about 400,000 dollar homes, you’re going hours outside of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. If you’re in San Bernardino—

Jason Calacanis: 31:31 You’re in the desert, son.

Lon Harris: 31:32 Yes. You’re going to Joshua Tree for that money. You’re going to San Berdoo, you’re going to Victorville. Like, there’s just no way you’re anywhere near Los Angeles for that price.

Alex Wilhelm: 31:37 It is the greatest city in the world, huh, Jason?

Jason Ballard: 31:38 I certainly think so. Um, 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 those places.

Jason Calacanis: 31:48 Great place to visit.

Jason Ballard: 31:49 Something very special is happening here, and and this this this is part of its like—there’s an instinct to build instead of like hand-wring and like sort of theorize about solutions. It’s just like get out there and do something, like, figure it out. Um, and I think that the city and the town are like reaping the benefits of that. I mean, the, uh, I don’t know if you can pull up, we just built a hundred, a few years ago now, a hundred 3D-printed homes with Lennar. Lennar Wolf Ranch Icon, maybe would be the thing to search. These are homes that we sold in the three to 500k range with like the largest production—

Jason Calacanis: 32:22 Lennar, this is the largest home builder in the country, basically.

Jason Ballard: 32:24 It was the first 3D-printed neighborhood in the world. It was a hundred homes that were 3D-printed.

Alex Wilhelm: 32:30 Wow.

Jason Calacanis: 32:31 Yeah, there you are. I mean, look at those images. This is done now and sort of occupied.

Lon Harris: 32:36 Fantastic.

Jason Ballard: 32:38 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? Um, and yeah, there you are.

Jason Calacanis: 32:44 Now, you don’t—

Jason Ballard: 32:45 By the way, 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 it was surprisingly—

Jason Calacanis: 32:54 By the way, this was my experience when I grew up in the 80s and 90s in New York City. This was my experience when—

Jason Ballard: 33:00 I, you know, 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 operandi has been how do I get mine? There - this is a shrinking pie, nothing can get done, all problems are intractable, the taxes only go up, the spending and the deficit only go up, there is no way out. It’s a death spiral. And the greatest pilots in the world, whether it’s Sacks, Elon, you know, put myself down the list, but, you know, 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 ten 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 $60,000 to $90,000 to put your kids in a decent school, and 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.

Jason Calacanis: 34:56 Mhm.

Jason Ballard: 34:57 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 on line.’

Jason Calacanis: 35:24 What was the reaction they had, Jason, when they came to this town?

Jason Ballard: 35:26 What the reaction they had Jason when they came to this town was this town’s dope… I can, Lon made an incredible observation: ‘I can go get brunch and not wait on line.’

Jason Calacanis: 35:34 Oh man.

Lon Harris: 35:35 And the brunch doesn’t cost 250,000. I’m tellin’ you, you could drive to any place at any time, you be like, ‘I like bagels from that one place.’

Alex Wilhelm: 35:40 I’m with you.

Lon Harris: 35:41 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. It’s like… You get your bagels, you walk right out. It 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 chaos.

Jason Calacanis: 35:44 Yeah, and you can’t put a price on that.

Jason Ballard: 35:45 And I’m worried about my guy Lon and he’s moving here. I give him ten times to move. I’m like, ‘Here’s 10k, whatever, I’ll pay for your moving van, whatever.’ I’m like, ‘How’s it going? What’s going on with the apartment?’ He’s like, ‘Oh, I got a house.’ I’m like, ‘What?’ ‘Yeah, got a house in this really nice neighborhood that I’m looking at living in.’ I’m like, ‘How’s Lon living in my neighborhood now? What the heck?’

Lon Harris: 35:59 For the same price I was paying for a studio apartment in Silver Lake.

Jason Calacanis: 36:00 I got a two-bedroom townhouse to rent in in beautiful Austin.

Alex Wilhelm: 36:03 Yeah, it’s because also three times the space.

Jason Ballard: 36:04 Austin’s full of builders and it’s full of people who support and applaud builders. 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 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: 36:29 From a super fan Fat Dime Capital, I thought this was an interesting one. You know Fat Dime.

Jason Calacanis: 36:33 Oh Fat Dime. You know Fat Dime. That’s my meme maker.

Lon Harris: 36:35 So he says 3D 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: 36:51 Yeah 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 existence of concrete is not something we created. 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. I mean we have bridges in Alaska standing in saltwater for decades that are still up. 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 drywall, no one would win the prize. Like it is literally the crappiest thing we can 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. Like that is a result… There is occasionally a thing called shrinkage cracking which is just like as the material dehydrates it leaves 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 the 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: 38:18 100 years is the lifespan of concrete at a minimum.

Jason Ballard: 38:22 At a minimum.

Jason Calacanis: 38:23 And by the way, termites, you may have heard of them when you have wood structure and you have to have somebody… I mean listen, I’ve owned a lot of homes at this point. Bane of my existence: flooding,

Jason Ballard: 38:36 Yeah, flooding, mold, termites, wind, and fire.

Jason Calacanis: 38:41 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… and thankfully, knock on wood, never had any smoke or fire. And termites in…

Lon Harris: 39:00 …in six of six homes I’ve had to deal with. No, you… and I’m not saying I’ve had a termite, I only had a termite problem in one of them, my L1 one… my LA one. But all of them I’ve had to pay hundreds… no, low thousands of dollars every two or three years to deal with this.

Jason Ballard: 39:19 To get them treated.

Lon Harris: 39:21 Concrete, none of it. And by the way, drywall is basically… drywall in Spanish means mold collector. It literally is where mold like… I have cut so much drywall.

Jason Ballard: 39:32 No, you’re right. 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 drinking coffee and the house is on fire? ‘This is fine.’ 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: 39:51 Uh, one more question, also keeping it practical, Jason, from Nate Day IWK, probably kilometers. How does electrical and plumbing work when the house is 3D printed?

Jason Ballard: 40:03 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 of homes actually go in faster and cheaper with less error into a 3D printed wall. Installing- to be fair on the ledger though, installing windows and doors is a bit different. Uh, I won’t say it’s more expensive but you do have to like learn something new. But plumbing, electrical and the mechanical systems go in like very fast and easy 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. So it’s like you’re not just automating framing, you’re automating the whole wall system and so there’s like multiple trades that are automated out with the technology.

Lon Harris: 40:43 Right, you could tell the printer here’s what we want the inside to be, yeah.

Jason Ballard: 40:46 Yes, correct.

Alex Wilhelm: 40:47 Awesome. We got our questions in, great questions. Everybody, let’s keep moving down the dock.

Lon Harris: 40:50 Alright, so thanks to Jason for being here. Should we drop Jason off and bring on our next guest?

Jason Calacanis: 40:53 Yeah, let’s drop Jason off and I’ll come see Jason, um, we’ll have a little dinner.

Jason Ballard: 40:57 Yeah, you need to come see the new printer. We got the new multi-story printer, you need to come see it.

Jason Calacanis: 40:59 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 have a little barbecue down there.

Jason Ballard: 41:06 Amen. You should operate the printer.

Jason Calacanis: 41:07 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 in my little writer’s cabin. Now, how tall can you make these things? Looks like you’re getting to two stories, yeah?

Jason Ballard: 41:18 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, time to join the revolution, this is the equipment of the future.

Jason Calacanis: 41:29 Oh see, this is a key thing I didn’t get into here, but we’ll just give you a minute…

Jason Ballard: 41:37 Next time… next when you come out.

Jason Calacanis: 41:38 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: 41:55 Yeah, we, you know, both the most effective way to solve… of the global housing crisis and at high speed it also turns out to be like the best business is to like in the long run be a technology company so really the the game all along has been to like 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 railless 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: 42:30 So if you’re a builder, if you’re a builder you want to be a channel partner go to what’s the URL?

Jason Ballard: 42:34 iconbuild.com

Jason Calacanis: 42:36 Okay and you can always guess sometimes the founder gets first name at the domain name.

Jason Ballard: 42:41 That’s right.

Jason Calacanis: 42:42 And you’re also hiring who you hiring for Jason?

Jason Ballard: 42:44 I mean we are hiring material scientists engineers software engineers architects field operators the whole stack.

Jason Calacanis: 42:51 Jason you can clip this. Yes. Okay you can clip this for your hiring. Okay. I am the ultimate judge of character. Okay? I am the bestie of all besties people know like hey if 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 shivved me at the end of the show stick around I’m going to unload.

Jason Ballard: 43:36 Yeah hey man grace and loving is the way man so like…

Jason Calacanis: 43:39 I know I know I’m a flawed human.

Jason Ballard: 43:42 Yeah yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 43:43 And I will work on grace I will have grace for the people who stabbed me right? like Jesus forgave people he forgave them.

Jason Ballard: 43:51 It was a big thing with him he was all about it yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 43:53 And I’m doing my best alright yeah I’m doing my best today’s not going to be my best moment alright okay I’m going to 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+ 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 to use this endorsement on your social media 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 fucking space excuse my French and for the homeless and for rich people go do it people.

Jason Ballard: 44:22 That’s right where else do you get giant robots homeless housing and a moon base in one place?

Jason Calacanis: 44:27 I mean come on and get some of those RSUs come on it’s going to be worth a freaking fortune man I’m going to I can’t wait till you IPO I’m going to how come I’m not on the cap table we need to do a syndicate alright that’s one of my favorite guys.

Alex Wilhelm: 44:56 Good guest, good guest.

Jason Calacanis: 44:57 Right there that’s my guy.

Lon Harris: 44:58 Always a good guest.

Jason Calacanis: 44:59 I know quality guys. Now this next guy coming on the program I don’t know… Is he a quality guy or not? We’ll find out.

Lon Harris: 45:01 Quality guy.

Jason Calacanis: 45:02 We’ll find out.

Lon Harris: 45:03 So we’re bringing on Sebi Rubino, he’s from Rezi Labs, Jason. They’re, it’s a BitTensor sub-network, we’ve been talking to a lot of them. Sub-network 46. And Rezi stands for Real Estate Super Intelligence. So they are hosting a competition for AI models that can accurately price real estate. It’s a themed show today, we’re talking housing. Sebi, thank you so much for being here.

Jason Calacanis: 45:27 Hey Sebi, how you doing, brother?

Jason Ballard: 45:29 I’m doing good, brother. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. Big fan of the show. And yeah, I’m glad that we’re here.

Jason Calacanis: 45:33 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.

Jason Ballard: 45:51 Almost two years. I worked at Compound Finance and one of the team members there was like sending me clips, not clips, sending me the videos and saying you should check this out.

Jason Calacanis: 45:59 Awesome. And you could 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 what, for 15 years? We’re in year 15, I think.

Alex Wilhelm: 46:13 Oh more. 2008.

Jason Calacanis: 46:15 But 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 Alvey came on for the first episode.

Lon Harris: 46:23 Wow, we’ll have to go back and figure out when that was. But it was early 2008.

Jason Calacanis: 46:27 All right, what are you working on?

Lon Harris: 46:28 Sebi, what are you working on?

Alex Wilhelm: 46:30 Yeah, 2008.

Jason Calacanis: 46:31 Am I pronouncing it correctly? S-E-B-Y? Sebi?

Jason Ballard: 46:34 Sebi.

Jason Calacanis: 46:35 Sebi. Oh, Seba-. My name is Sebastian, I work for Tyrell Corporation. That’s from Blade Runner, everybody, it’s from a classic film. All right, what are you working on, Sebastian?

Jason Ballard: 46:46 Yeah, we are working on the real estate, it’s actually portal.rezilabs.ai.

Jason Calacanis: 46:53 Okay.

Jason Ballard: 46:54 I will, 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: 47:29 Ooh, that’s a good idea, Sebi.

Jason Ballard: 47:30 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 on 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 quitclaim deeded 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: 48:13 Incredible, incredible. And, so what’s your background and how did you come to this idea? I always like to know where how the founder kind of found this. How did you find this?

Jason Ballard: 48:23 Yeah, so I have my whole family is real estate based, uncle is a huge developer in Brooklyn, my mom is a general contractor.

Jason Calacanis: 48:30 Oh my hometown.

Jason Ballard: 48:31 Oh, there you go. In Red Hook, right he built up Red Hook essentially.

Jason Calacanis: 48:34 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 day 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 of mine. Seminal work. And we sat there talking, I said let me ask you a question. This is like a quality guy. I said where you from? Where are you? He said I’m from Brooklyn. I said that’s where I’m from. I’m from Bay Ridge, where 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 don’t land. Fort Greene, Bed-Stuy, Red Hook, you don’t need to get off at that train stop. The Westies, you’re the Westies, we’re gonna we’re gonna bother you. 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 Rezi Labs make money?

Jason Ballard: 49:53 We essentially sell our models. Um, so right now we are live on Bittensor subnets, essentially the open-source subnet, right, so you can list your model if they can allow you to list your model. Um, and then from there users can go and access that model, right. So with the portal, that I’d love to take a second and show you guys.

Jason Calacanis: 50:16 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, um, 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. I’m $750k into this, 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. Um, but why are so many intelligent people building with Tao? Explain Tao and the subnets.

Jason Ballard: 50:54 Yeah, Tao has honestly been, I’ve been a builder for a while since I was 18 I was always building something, uh, and 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 it’s like—it’s given 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 are, uh, provide compute and we’re just going to make sure you can—you’re ready and available, or storage. So they’re essentially, uh, like digital commodity—it’s a digital commodity marketplace, and it’s powered by these competitions. Now the, the bow on the BitTensor box is, uh, you can think about BitTensor the same way you think about, say Google or, 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 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, um, that allows us to, uh, be prepared for 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, uh, and humans being used for things transitions to digital intelligence, these intelligence commodities, BitTensor will be the venue that is selected by most open router, model routers and agentic model routers, right? In these meta agents, I have the Open Claude stuff as I 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 are—what we’ve plugged ourselves 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, right? And they’d pay us in—…and we redistribute that through our token. So that’s a long-winded answer, but—

Jason Calacanis: 54:06 No, it’s a great one. Now do your demo. It’s very important that we explain Tau and Bittensor to folks here on this program. Why? Sometimes they get a tingle on—I hear a pitch, I get a tingle, I get a spidey sense. I’m good at this. This is one of the things I’ve found I’m good at in life, finding the energy.

Lon Harris: 54:27 You know that meme, the lean forward meme? Like ‘Here’s the moment.’

Jason Ballard: 54:30 Yes. 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: 54:42 Well, I did it with Bittorrent, by the way—not Bittorrent, Bitcoin, by the way. And I made a mistake. I had some Bitcoin on Mt. Gox, it got hacked, I had it on another thing, I lost my Bitcoin, okay, whatever. My wife bought it, we did great. Shoutout to my wife, she’s brilliant. And I… I should have done more. And like a crazy Mossad CIA agent, a famous one with a dark past, 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.

Alex Wilhelm: 55:18 He who shall not be named.

Jason Calacanis: 55:21 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 non-profit 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 him to these guys?’ I always like to help founders out, and then of course I get dragged through 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 placed a 750k bet on Tau. We 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 OpenClaw, 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 dollars, 1,000 dollars, and you ask me should I buy some Tau? I’d say yeah, go for it Lon. I feel comfortable giving you that advice.’ But I’m not giving anybody else advice.

Jason Calacanis: 56:18 Okay, demo or die, Sebastian, go.

Jason Ballard: 56:20 Yeah, demo or die. So, this is our new website powered by the Bittensor subnet. I’ve 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. And so I’ve gotten to the point now where I’ve dedicated everything. I’m completely invested into either Tau 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 a—

Alex Wilhelm: 57:00 an address, 1-2-3 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. 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 dollars in essentially assets under management, and it’s—that is like their loan book. 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 their financial systems to their business. That’s what we are enabling with our intelligence, right? With appraisals, with inspections and KYC. That allows lenders to actually fundraise—

Jason Calacanis: 58:31 Incredible. 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 is 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 to San Antonio. You could actually map this with the Oracle, get the data, look for trends, and this would save you, I gotta think, like hundreds of thousands of dollars in research. And you could get that same research for how much, Sebastian? What would I pay?

Alex Wilhelm: 59:27 You would pay—it’s one percent of a penny is the actual cost.

Jason Calacanis: 59:34 Wow, incredible. Are people doing it yet? Do you have customers yet?

Alex Wilhelm: 59:38 Yes, yes. So we have, like I said, Balcony. We have a few protocols, like in the collaboration area, Estate Protocol, and there’s another one, Commeritize 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—

Jason Ballard: 1:00:00 how much this is worth, so we are that third party appraise on actually increases the volume on these platforms. Yes. Um, 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 networks potential. Um, 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 the and finalizing this a macro prediction market trader. So the exact type of market that you were just on on polymarket a partner. Um, what 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 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, um, investors are able to make better decisions. The world has access to more truth. Um.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:01:06 Is this a company or is it just a subnet? Do are you a Delaware C corp or Texas corp? Hopefully what what what are you doing here in terms of the company versus the tokens? Uh, because like if we’re investors in these things, this is one thing I bring up. You have you can buy tau and you get access to essentially all the subnets because the subnets use tau to a certain extent. Then you have buying the subnet token. Uh, in 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 what’s the opportunity here for for investors who are listening? If there is one. Yeah. So.

Jason Ballard: 1:01:51 one were a Wyoming C Corp. Um, we’re Okay. Why Wyoming? Is that because they have good, uh, dao and, uh, you know, those kind of things? Yes. Uh, yeah, definitely. Uh, specifically like crypto, uh, crypto native companies. Wyoming, uh, Wyoming C Corp

Alex Wilhelm: 1:02:00 is 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 how does that entity go public? Right, right. And that that question gets 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. Um, and we as the owner of the 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: 1:02:45 Um Okay. Let’s wrap on the portal. Show us the portal real quick and then we’ll take a quick look. Yeah.

Lon Harris: 1:02:48 I looked up my own house by the way, just out of curiosity. Oh, okay. It worked. Okay, great. Beautiful.

Jason Calacanis: 1:02:56 It’s worth a little bit more than the average home in Austin based on our previous conversation. Is your rent 5%?

Alex Wilhelm: 1:03:00 6% your yearly rent of the value of the home.

Lon Harris: 1:03:01 Great question. I’m going to do the deuces.

Jason Calacanis: 1:03:03 Just times your monthly rent, don’t tell anybody the address or the rent. No, I didn’t tell. I’m not doxxing you like Mondavi doxed 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: 1:03:20 It’s about, oh yearly, yearly, let’s see. Okay.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:03:25 This is a cap rate is the concept here.

Jason Calacanis: 1:03:27 Should be 5%. So if you were paying—

Lon Harris: 1:03:29 It is about, it is 5.4% Jason. 5.4%.

Jason Calacanis: 1:03:32 See, you got, that means you have a good deal and the person who owned the property got a good deal.

Lon Harris: 1:03:38 I feel, I feel like we did. Rhonda and I did well. My landlord.

Jason Calacanis: 1:03:42 Go ahead, Smitty. Seems like your pricing engine is quite accurate, so.

Jason Ballard: 1:03:47 Nailed it. That’s it. Nailed it to the wall. 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, analyzed a million properties, and we’ve hit accuracy on price of 98%. So—

Alex Wilhelm: 1:04:04 98% what?

Jason Ballard: 1:04:05 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 plug in addresses. I can plug in, right when I jumped on, 108 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. Boom. 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 you’re going to get that same output. People are helping counties fight fraud and assess taxes. And yeah, this intelligence track is quite exciting and this is a new chapter for us as people can start easily using our tools.

Jason Calacanis: 1:04:52 Hey, put in an address for me. 108 South Woodburn Drive. 108 South Woodburn Drive, Los Angeles.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:05:01 Is that your old place?

Jason Calacanis: 1:05:02 Uh, 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 a couple of hundred grand into it.

Lon Harris: 1:05:08 This was the Brentwood, the Brentwood place with the pool house.

Jason Calacanis: 1:05:11 This was my, this was where I lived in Brentwood. This was the pool house. This was where we started Mahalo.com. 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 uh Whole Foods. I mean I’m not saying I’m a mensch, but uh when my friend was down on his luck I you know I always came through for him.

Lon Harris: 1:06:09 It was a nice point. There it is. Woodburn Drive and uh it’s like 1.18.

Jason Calacanis: 1:06:13 1.18. 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 uh an error in the system uh ‘cause this is taking a guess I guess where footage whatever right now or is this the Oracle did it?

Jason Ballard: 1:06:29 Yeah, so uh this is the not the Oracle, it’s the model itself. The Oracle’s a bit more uh checked and uh what is it validated by real world professionals? But yeah, we have these bugs come in right out of four here uh one of them is incorrect, right? These are all within that 2%.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:06:45 Got it. No problem. And and that’s the opportunity is to do this. All right.

Jason Calacanis: 1:06:48 Sebastian, great job. Uh let’s stay in touch and uh yeah come back in a year and show us your progress. I’m I’m rooting for you. All right. There it is folks. Are we going off duty? Uh am I doing my…

Lon Harris: 1:06:58 We got 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: 1:07:03 Or should I do my little uh tyrant?

Lon Harris: 1:07:05 Father… That’s what we should lead off off duty. You’ve teased it, I think we need to hear this story about you getting shivved for half a mil. That’s what the people want to know. Alright, okay. Now your story.

Jason Calacanis: 1:07:19 Now my story. I’m going to tell the story without names.

Lon Harris: 1:07:21 Okay.

Jason Calacanis: 1:07:22 And then I’m going to allow Lon to let me know if I should name names.

Lon Harris: 1:07:24 Okay. I’ll be the adjudicator here.

Jason Calacanis: 1:07:26 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 uh a CMS. Right? And and to build tools. It doesn’t work out. I’m not stung by that. The fund puts in a couple of hundred thousand and the syndicate puts a couple of hundred thousand in. We’re okay with with failure. It’s not a big deal.

Lon Harris: 1:07:46 It happens.

Jason Calacanis: 1:07:47 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 a hundred million I believe. They’ve got tens of millions of dollars is all public information uh for their content management system which by all uh appearances is doing extraordinarily well. They love the team, they want to buy it, yada yada. So they and and one of the board members is already an investor in this company so there’s a there’s a bit of a conflict but that’s okay, there’s conflict, no conflict no interest. So this is all going down and and they make an offer and the offer is like, okay, the founders get taken care of, they they get these great deals, okay, it’s not life-changing money but it’s it’s a soft landing. And uh I said okay well what do the investors get? And the guy said to me well you get nothing.

Lon Harris: 1:08:54 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 1:08:55 And I said okay well let’s jump on a phone call. Listen, here is what I propose. Right. I’ll be super supportive of this… 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.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:09:13 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 1:09:14 And but it was a face-saving, everybody gets a soft landing. That happens all the time.

Lon Harris: 1:09:19 Exactly.

Jason Calacanis: 1:09:20 And I’m totally okay with that. I am okay with losing my money on 90% of bets. I’ve done 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 meetings. So I say to this incredibly successful founder, here’s the proposition for you: I want to be a supporter of the transaction and I’m going to support you 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 a soft-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.’

Alex Wilhelm: 1:10:13 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 1:10:14 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 were 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 I put 750k into Bittensor.

Lon Harris: 1:10:31 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:10:32 It’s literally a gesture. It’s a goodwill gesture.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:10:35 Exactly.

Jason Calacanis: 1:10:37 This founder says, ‘I don’t have to do that.’

Alex Wilhelm: 1:10:38 Mm.

Jason Calacanis: 1:10:39 ‘Because I’m hiring the entire team and this company’s out of money and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

Lon Harris: 1:10:46 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 1:10:47 So I’m hiring the team when this because this company’s going belly up, they can’t make payroll. And uh you’re SOL J-Cal, so why would I do that?

Alex Wilhelm: 1:10:54 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 1:10:54 And I say, ‘Okay, fair enough, blank from blank company. Fair enough. I understand.’ And sure enough, uh he tells me to essentially in so many words to f-off.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:11:08 Yeah. ‘I don’t have to and there’s nothing you could do about it’ is the version - that’s eff off in this sort of world, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:11:11 Uh you know listen, I’m not trying to throw my weight around. This happened over a year ago.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:11:22 Oh, okay.

Lon Harris: 1:11:23 I had a guess but my guess was wrong because it’s happened over a year ago.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:11:29 It’s well over a year ago now.

Lon Harris: 1:11:30 Okay.

Jason Calacanis: 1:11:30 So I say to 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 hey do me a favor. This is making me mental now. And it’s not 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 So this company correct, that another board member is already an investor in, 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: 1:12:10 Yeah. I feel like that’s the real lesson here is if this person had gone about this with a different attitude and approach, I feel like this might not have overflowed into 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: 1:12:31 He basically has the audacity, um, to tell me that he’s a huge fan of my work. And then he writes me essentially an apology letter. Uh, the first interaction, I’ll just quote, ‘I have reflected on our conversation and don’t think it was a great first interaction between us and don’t like that it ended the way it ended. So I wanted to share a couple of reflections. I’m sorry this didn’t turn out… blah blah blah…’

Alex Wilhelm: 1:12:44 Okay.

Lon Harris: 1:12:45 That’s very diplomatic.

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:47 And then he’s like ‘I’ll let you invest in our next round.’

Alex Wilhelm: 1:12:54 Mmm, he almost got there.

Jason Ballard: 1:12:55 He was so close.

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:56 He was so close.

Lon Harris: 1:12:57 So close.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:12:58 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:59 So close. So I talk to his, my friend who’s on his board, chairman of his board, made a lot of money from this and I said, ‘Do me a favor, just 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 busts your nose. And then you say hey listen, that was not cool, you hit me in the nose with your elbow. You know, it was a flagrant.’

Alex Wilhelm: 1:13:28 Right.

Lon Harris: 1:13:29 The flagrant foul.

Jason Calacanis: 1:13:30 The flagrant foul. The guy said… and so my friend says, ‘Yeah that was a flagrant. I apologize on his behalf. We’ll take care of you J-Cal. He’s a fan of yours or whatever.’ 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 gotta have peace and love and grace.

Jason Ballard: 1:13:49 Right.

Lon Harris: 1:13:52 Yeah, exactly.

Jason Calacanis: 1:13:54 I’ve got a lot of peace and love and grace.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:13:55 Peace and love and grace.

Lon Harris: 1:13:57 Yes.

Jason Calacanis: 1:13:58 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, you know, three, four, five million bucks, you know, and I was 1.4 million of it…

Lon Harris: 1:14:22 How about just the domain?

Jason Calacanis: 1:14:24 How much is the domain? And they’re like ‘well we got a 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 who’s doing the liquidation. And I said, ‘Listen, I insist that we do this right because there’s shareholders on the other side and I… just tell me what the bid is so I’ll beat the bid.’ He’s like ‘well I can’t in fairness I do that.’ I say ‘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 up… I can’t remember, I think it was like 250k.’

Jason Ballard: 1:14:49 Wow.

Jason Calacanis: 1:14:50 I put up 250k. I win the bid. 250k goes to the… investors and in the wash-out. So now I have that domain name. Yesterday, I realized that domain name would be the ultimate domain name for an AI-based browser.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:15:11 Hmm. Okay.

Jason Calacanis: 1:15:13 So I talked to an old collaborator of mine and I said, ‘Listen, I want to build an AI-based browser with this domain name.’ He’s like, ‘Well, that’s the… that’s one of your best ideas ever. That’s somebody I’ve worked with before.’ And I’m about to seed this company and launch it there.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:15:26 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:15:27 But while I was thinking about it, you know, I did a little study of, you know, these CMS systems, these headless CMS systems, etc. This is a huge, huge space.

Lon Harris: 1:15:39 Sure.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:15:40 What’s a headless CMS? It’s like you store the data, you can use any presentation layer. I mean, it is like one of the great spaces.

Lon Harris: 1:15:46 I was just going to say, people talk about Contentful, Movable Type, WordPress. It’s like, there’s tons of these things out there.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:15:52 It’s like tons of these things out there.

Jason Calacanis: 1:15:55 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.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:16:08 Okay.

Jason Calacanis: 1:16:10 So, I’m not naming this founder. I’m not naming the companies involved.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:16:16 Well, but you’ll have to because the URL, we’re going to figure it out eventually because you mentioned it.

Jason Calacanis: 1:16:21 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.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:16:28 Okay.

Jason Calacanis: 1:16:29 I don’t want to start another war. I’ve been involved in too many of these things. I’m like… I’m like Obi-Wan Kenobi right now. I mean, I fought so many battles in the Clone Wars. I’m an old Jedi.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:16:42 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 if… 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…

Jason Calacanis: 1:17:08 So don’t name names is your best advice.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:17:10 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: 1:17:12 Okay, thank you for talking me off the ledge. Thank you.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:17:15 I mean, just let it dead and go. Like if they’re dead in the ground, they’re never going to be in any position—

Jason Calacanis: 1:17:18 No, 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 because—

Jason Ballard: 1:17:22 I mean, you had 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.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:17:30 You wish you could just have a drink and…

Jason Calacanis: 1:17:31 Even though I got jumped, even though I got shivved, even though he got the better of me.

Jason Ballard: 1:17:40 I mean, you got… you know from one JC, I think you gotta look to another and you gotta… you gotta turn the other cheek on this one.

Lon Harris: 1:17:45 You’re saying JC has to ask JC what JC… what JC what JC would do.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:17:48 I think WWJD, you gotta ask yourself what would the big…

Jason Calacanis: 1:17:51 Alright, what would Christ do? I’m going to… I’m going to talk to Jesus right now.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:17:53 I think he’d forgive.

Lon Harris: 1:17:56 I think he’d say, ‘Yea, my son.’

Jason Calacanis: 1:17:58 Jesus, I’ve been wronged.

Jason Ballard: 1:18:00 What should I do?

Alex Wilhelm: 1:18:02 Yeah, the- the righteous path is forgiveness.

Jason Ballard: 1:18:03 Jesus is coming in.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:18:07 Okay.

Jason Ballard: 1:18:08 He says I should take the high road. I should do unto others as I would want to be done unto me, and I should turn the other cheek. I am turning the other cheek.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:18:19 There you go. Very Christ-like.

Jason Ballard: 1:18:21 However… However, 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. I would- and I was willing on the options, by the way, to pay the current price just have warrants which would have been 0.0- point zero- it would have been 10 basis points maybe in the value of his company. And if he had done it, I would have them on this podcast, I would be tweeting for him, I’d be helping him. Just what I did with Jason, I’d said, hey, let me help you fill some things. He would have been on the podcast twice.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:19:01 If that guy was here right now, I’d give him the same advice. I’d say, you shouldn’t have approached it this way. You should’ve been without hostility. You should’ve been, you know, like, you should’ve been more gracious and, like, figure out a way to make this feel okay so everybody feels like they got treated fairly. That’s always how these situations should go.

Jason Ballard: 1:19:21 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. I am- 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, like, highlight, you know, five 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.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:20:14 Yeah. Oh, more- more than five now. We’re- we’re in business. It’s going to take- it’s going to take Jacob, like, a week to get through all these different proposals that we’ve had.

Jason Calacanis: 1:20:22 Okay, so this is- which one is this? Explain to people this.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:20:24 This is- 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 Ballard: 1:20:34 Yeah, so like wayback machine plus a Delicious, if you remember that bookmarking service.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:20:39 Oh, sure. Wow. It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about that.

Jason Ballard: 1:20:41 Right. So what I need is- I need a- a Chrome browser extension. I’m on a YouTube video, at- 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-

Jason Calacanis: 1:21:00 It’s with AI and I want to put some commentary on it and I want to let my friends put some commentary on it. 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.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:21:27 Dude, it’s named for… it says Supreme Court, I’m going to look up the actual origin of fisking. Yeah, it was described as the critical deconstruction of articles by British journalist Robert Fisk, that’s what they’re saying.

Jason Calacanis: 1:21:40 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 nineties internet, like… I think it might have even been pre-web.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:21:52 No, we lost Robert Fisk in October of 2020, sadly.

Jason Calacanis: 1:21:58 Oh, man. Rest in peace. This guy was a provocateur, but he also raised the intellectual level and when we started the weblog, fisking was like a way to engage intelligently and move 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…

Lon Harris: 1:22:17 Yes, we’ve got one, we’re checking out the live sidebars. You’re all, I’ll pull up the tweet now. 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.

Jason Calacanis: 1:22:40 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 description, we’re doing enhanced show notes where we put like 20, 30, 40, 50 links in.

Lon Harris: 1:22:57 Can I tell you, I designed a Claude skill to do this? It’s working incredibly. So 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 incredible. It’s saving so much time.

Jason Ballard: 1:23:17 Amazing.

Jason Calacanis: 1:23:30 What a discovery. Just Claude Co-worker, though, not Open Claude, right?

Lon Harris: 1:23:33 Just Claude Co-worker, not Open Claude. My Open Claude, he’s locked away. He’s my AI…

Jason Calacanis: 1:23:36 Great, shoutout Claude Co-worker, shoutout Perplexity Computer, love the whole category. So we did a thousand dollars. We did five thousand dollars. I’m going to announce another five thousand dollars next week. I’ll do it a week from today. I have to have the time to write this. I got a big prize. I’m going to write my headless CMS BitTensor open-source five thousand dollar prize.

Lon Harris: 1:23:59 We’ll be back, we’ll be right here.

Jason Calacanis: 1:24:00 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, you know, whatever, 50k or something. Like, being the original seed investor. You know, I just want the option

Lon Harris: 1:24:22 Sure. If it worked to have a little skin in the game. Why?

Jason Calacanis: 1:24:25 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- I want to fix the ledge.

Lon Harris: 1:24:36 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 1:24:37 There’s a ledger, we’re going to fix the ledger. Now, what does this mean for the person who shivved me? What is Tau good at, Lon? What is Tau good at? At its core, when you put a service on Tao versus a commercial proprietary service, what happens?

Lon Harris: 1:24:52 I think Tao, you’ve got this huge incentivizing- 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 whatever. 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 when you create it, it’s sort of a-

Jason Calacanis: 1:25:13 What happens to the product category? The customer, what did they experience then? What did they experience when they engaged those products? What value does the customer get?

Lon Harris: 1:25:21 Well, it’s constantly being iterated and improved because you’ve got these huge incentivized communities that are iterating constantly and creating the better, the better version.

Jason Calacanis: 1:25:31 You nailed it. A better version. And then there’s a second piece. Not only is it better, but it could be if it works, better and-

Lon Harris: 1:25:42 Faster, cheaper.

Jason Calacanis: 1:25:44 Cheaper. Oh of course, cheaper. Yes.

Lon Harris: 1:25:45 Cheaper. Because- right. Because- because we are decentralizing everything. So, 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 Tao, you’re- you’re just sending that out to everybody who’s got a GPU to spare.

Jason Calacanis: 1:26:04 Correct. Yeah. So what’s happened here? I’m just going to recap it.

Lon Harris: 1:26:07 Sure.

Jason Calacanis: 1:26:08 When somebody does this to you, you have to be forgiving. Okay. Namaste. I’ve talked myself off 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- 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: 1:26:30 He said there’s nothing you could do about it.

Jason Calacanis: 1:26:32 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 not going to sue the founders. I’m not 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 sense. Who’s gonna fund the lawsuit? It’s gonna 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: 1:27:41 I think you hear that narrative all the time from successful people. It’s like, that, that lit a fire under me. That negativity is what spurred me on. It’s that—it’s that—it’s that Michael Jordan quote from The Last Dance, like, ‘and I took that personally.’ Like, you know, I think—

Jason Calacanis: 1:27:57 Somebody make a video of me—

Lon Harris: 1:28:01 I’ll try to figure that out.

Jason Calacanis: 1:28:03 —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—

Alex Wilhelm: 1:28:09 And I think 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 who wronged you.

Jason Calacanis: 1:28:21 That’s it. And to the person who broke my nose, I forgive you. It’s not—I’ll take you at your word, it wasn’t personal. I haven’t spoken to the person since this whole thing happened, he told me to eff off. I’ll take you at your word, it wasn’t personal. And me launching a Tau 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, they love a competition to show off their work. And now, perhaps we’ll be in another basketball game together.

Jason Ballard: 1:29:07 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:29:08 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.

Jason Ballard: 1:29:18 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:29:19 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.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:29:30 Sure.

Jason Calacanis: 1:29:31 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.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:29:41 Yeah.

Lon Harris: 1:29:48 I mean the Klingon say, revenge is a dish best served cold, so that’s—

Jason Calacanis: 1:29:54 It’s not even revenge. It’s 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: 1:30:22 Yeah, there you… that’s… that’s what…

Jason Calacanis: 1:30:24 All right, let’s go off duty. Let’s go off duty very quick. What do you got for me?

Lon Harris: 1:30:27 So much stuff. Did you want to talk about these Viewbuds? This was the thing you sent me on Twitter the other day. They’re… it’s a camera inside your earbud that um…

Jason Calacanis: 1:30:34 Okay. Show me the… let’s play the video and I’ll give my feedback.

Lon Harris: 1:30:39 I… I will pull up the video as soon as I can get my mouse back over here.

Jason Calacanis: 1:30:44 This is… I saw this and I said this is like a school project. I think Scott’s got it already. There it is.

Lon Harris: 1:30:51 Alright, so hit play. So Viewbuds… tiny cameras in each ear. Yeah, we’ll… 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 seeing. So you’d say a phrase, ‘Hey View’ is the— is the sample… um cameras activate, they stream images over Bluetooth to your phone or laptop. This is really clever. It’s only going for a quick like 3 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 Qwen 2.5-VL-7B vision language model which can run— can run on your device.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:31:22 Very cheap.

Lon Harris: 1:31:24 So that’s how you’re sort of moving around the world and it can do this without you hauling a data center on your back and it can process the image, answer any spoken question and it responds to you, Jason, right in your earbud. 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.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:31:54 Yeah, right in the middle. I’d point Dexter where you put the tape on your nerd glasses.

Lon Harris: 1:31:57 But they get around it with binocular vision. So by combining the left and right camera…

Alex Wilhelm: 1:32:02 Stitches them together.

Lon Harris: 1:32:03 …just like your eyeballs do, you don’t see your nose because your— your brain is interpreting both eyes together. So you don’t see your face because they’re interpreting both cameras together at once. That— that is really clever.

Jason Calacanis: 1:32:16 And this will lead me to my off-duty. Okay, let me just say this. This idea is brilliant.

Lon Harris: 1:32:19 So good.

Jason Calacanis: 1:33:00 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.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:33:13 The team leader, he is Maruchi Kim. He’s a PhD in Comp Sci and engineering from University of Washington, Seattle. He’s now working at Google. He works on XR audio at Google.

Jason Calacanis: 1:33:23 We gotta get him out of Google and 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, you know, 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.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:33:59 Oh man, it’s so amazing in Japan. I would have used this constantly in Japan, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:34:05 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 gonna go. This is, you know, how you get back down to this lodge.’ Sometimes I’m in a new mountain—I skied when I was in Davos for one day—I don’t know the terrain. I don’t have the map. You gotta 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 a 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 it.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:34:41 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 could go look around, like, ‘How much is this on Amazon right now?’ Like you can only imagine all of the uses. Incredible.

Jason Calacanis: 1:34:56 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 dollars. And I’ve I’ve bought two different versions of these, the Sony WF-1000XM6. These are great noise-canceling, they the batteries last forever, they’re extraordinary.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:35:11 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:35:12 Now, they’re expensive, okay fair enough. The last version is 50 bucks off, Sony WF-1000XM5. And I actually prefer my my XM5s better. They fit better. And if anybody has any tips on how to get the foam things to fit, that’s what I’ve been having the a challenge with is making them so they fit, so they’re not um they don’t hurt from extended use and and they don’t fall out. You have a like a real uh decision you have to make. So anyway, this is my uh 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 gadgets. The charger and uh you know I got the daughters and um I saw Anker my favorite brand and they made a beautiful charger in uh and what’s really unique about this one this is the Anker um uh Nano 45W Max charger this is like a fast one so really good um but it’s so tiny and what’s really unique about this one is you know sometimes you’re on a plane or you’re in a hotel

Lon Harris: 1:36:19 Okay.

Jason Calacanis: 1:36:20 And uh you gotta plug your thing in. Look at the 180 degree flexibility for your ideal view. It’s like maybe the fifth image down in 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?

Jason Ballard: 1:36:46 Oh yeah, yes, yes.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:36:50 One more.

Jason Calacanis: 1:36:51 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 you have iPhone 17.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:37:18 Whoa.

Jason Calacanis: 1:37:19 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.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:37:28 Oh.

Jason Calacanis: 1:37:29 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 Lon and they’re dirt cheap. They’re 30 bucks. They’re so much better than anything Apple produces uh you know when 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 says sells a two-headed USB-C cable. So uh you you got the daughters you you got iPads you got phones you you’re at the airport you’re on the road you’re in an Airbnb. Uh the dual-sided cable that Anker makes there it is. This is a 4-foot 2-in-1 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. Um it might do data but it doesn’t do data to the best of my knowledge but you can get like different length ones.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:38:27 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 1:38:28 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.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:38:34 It’s the best! And the the clutch thing is when you’re at an event, you can’t 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 Anker in your bag, it’s the easiest solution in the world.

Jason Calacanis: 1:38:51 Now, I gave you the charger, right?

Alex Wilhelm: 1:38:53 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:38:54 I gave you the cable. Now, I will give you one more in my Anker 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 friend, their chief of staff, we were at an event, I think we were at the All-In Summit, I won’t say who it was but you can look at the people on stage and get an idea. But I’m charging my phone, 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.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:39:36 Milliamp hours, that’s what mAh is right there. 25,000 milliamp hours, it measures electrical charge, and watt hours to measure energy and voltage.

Jason Calacanis: 1:39:47 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… when even when I’m on a plane, you know the plugs on the plane are like eight watts, they’ll never charge your laptop. I just bring this thing with me, charge it up in my hotel, it’s fantastic, game changer. There’s your trio of off-duty from JCal for dealing with battery issues. And Anker 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: 1:40:31 AMC has a new Silicon Valley show Jason, did you hear about this?

Jason Calacanis: 1:40:33 Oh I heard about this. This has Galifianakis, my cousin… people don’t know, but we’re actually cousins.

Lon Harris: 1:40:40 It’s got Billy Magnussen, it’s got Zach Galifianakis, it’s called The Audacity. The first two are on AMC now, and I gave it a watch. I, 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 of… it’s a sameness. It feels like the same kind of vibe as Silicon Valley, it feels like the same kind of vibe as… it’s a little derivative. 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 of a different angle.

Jason Calacanis: 1:41:32 Yeah, they’ve been… the person who’s the writer is a Succession I guess writer, and they’ve been marketing it not as the creator of Succession, but somebody who was in the writer’s room. Who knows what their provenance is. But I knew that this was…

Alex Wilhelm: 1:41:44 Yeah, their names are Jonathan Glatzer, they worked on Succession but they also worked on Better Call Saul, which I loved. So…

Jason Ballard: 1:41:52 Okay, so 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…

Alex Wilhelm: 1:42:00 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…

Jason Calacanis: 1:42:13 Yeah.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:42:14 Succession kind of nailed it, but I knew this one because I heard the writer on, like, 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’s somebody in there who’s 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 shit?

Jason Calacanis: 1:42:51 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 for people.’ And I’m not saying there’s nobody in Silicon Valley that’s like that, but…

Alex Wilhelm: 1:43:38 Of course there are.

Jason Calacanis: 1:43:39 But of course there are, but it just feels like… it feels a little samey and it feels like, well, what is this show’s message specifically that we haven’t already heard from Silicon Valley?

Alex Wilhelm: 1:43:46 Well, it’s in the name, ‘The Audacity’ of these people, you know, oh they’re mendacious. It’s the premise, 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 where they’re coming from. Let me tell you what would actually work. And maybe I should… maybe you and I need to write a treatment.

Lon Harris: 1:44:04 I think so. I think we could have the inside…

Alex Wilhelm: 1:44:08 I think the treatment is really Industry. Like, Industry is not like, ‘Hey, we have an axe to grind’, it’s just young people and it’s money and it’s power.

Lon Harris: 1:44:22 Yeah, and it’s more gray area. Nobody on that show is evil or good. People on that show aren’t evil or good, they’re flawed, they’re three-dimensional, 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: 1:44:42 Gavin Belson, you know, the guy who runs the incubator in the show Silicon Valley…

Lon Harris: 1:44:51 Yeah, I forgot his name and the actor’s name who was in Deadpool. That’s… um… Miller.

Jason Ballard: 1:44:58 TJ Miller.

Lon Harris: 1:45:00 TJ Miller. They claimed he called in a bomb threat on a train, remember that?

Jason Calacanis: 1:45:00 fiasco. I’m blanking… I’ve met this guy and now I’m… T.J. Miller, right? Is that him?

Alex Wilhelm: 1:45:03 Yeah. T.J. Miller, who crushed it. And then some people were like, “Oh, that’s J-Cal.” Like, it’s not J-Cal. But okay.

Lon Harris: 1:45:09 But Gavin Belson in Silicon Valley, that’s a different character. Gavin Belson’s the guy who runs Hooli, the Google plus…

Jason Calacanis: 1:45:15 Yes, the Google owner, who was looking like Sergey or like Larry. T.J. Miller was a different, different guy.

Lon Harris: 1:45:20 Anyway, it’s an alternate reality. There’s no real companies in the show, the audacity. But the big company that everybody sort of wants to be, “Cupertino” is the name of that company. So you can deduce—

Jason Calacanis: 1:45:30 Okay, so it’s Apple.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:45:32 So it’s obvious who it’s supposed to be. You know, but it’s like, I don’t know, I feel like it’s not as realistic…

Jason Calacanis: 1:45:38 Anyway, I’ll watch it, I’ll give my judgment on Off Duty next Friday when I release my Headless CMS Tao project, and I release my bounty and my instructions on what the competition will be. All right, everybody. It’s been another great week of Twist.

Jason Ballard: 1:45:52 Oh wow, the group chat, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:45:53 There’s a secret group chat on X that’s been brewing. It’s got about a hundred people in it. If you want to be in that group, DM the TWISTartups account and we’ll add you if you’re a true fan of the show.

Jason Ballard: 1:46:02 We’ll think about it. We’ll think about it. It’s getting pretty hectic.

Jason Calacanis: 1:46:04 No, no, it’s a fun group. It’s a fun group of people who love the show. There’s like a hundred of us and we just talk about the show every day and what we’re going to have in the next episode.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:46:11 Lots of memes.

Jason Calacanis: 1:46:12 Have a great weekend. Bye-bye.