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

This Week In Startups is made possible by:IM8 Health - https://IM8health.com/twist Grasshopper Bank - https://grasshopper.bank/twist Northwest Registered Agent - https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist Plaud - https://Plaud.ai/twistToday's show:Is 3D printing the key to not just solving the housing crisis but bringing us all into a more beautiful and utopian future? ICON founder Jason Ballard thinks so. His company is already building homes for the unhoused and delivering barracks to Fort Bliss at half the cost and a fraction of the time. On TWiST, he tells us space construction is also on the agenda. Explore the potential for robot-powered concrete construction can help build cheap homes for the unhoused, modernize our military infrastructure, AND colonize the solar system in this exclusive interview. Then Seby Rubino of Resi Labs demos his real estate "Oracle," which can guess the price of any home with 98% accuracy… for just fractions of a penny. PLUS Jason tells a story of the rare founder who got one over on him, and why he's moving away from vengeance and anger and into love and acceptable. AND we've got more JCal and Lon recommendations in a brand-new Off Duty. Guests :Jason Ballard: https://x.com/JasonDBallardICON: https://www.iconbuild.com/ICON on X: https://x.com/ICON3DTechSeby Rubino: https://x.com/SebyverseResi Labs: https://portal.resilabs.ai/Timestamps:0:00 Intro + "balance the ledger" tease1:10 Jason Ballard (ICON) joins — 3D-printed homes + defense (ICON Prime)5:18 Housing basics: commutes, quality of life, "food/water/shelter"7:15 ICON Prime: military construction, survivability, speed, supply chain10:08 IM8 Health: Start feeling like your best self every day. Go to https://IM8health.com/twist and use the code TWiST to get a free welcome kit, five free travel sachets, and 10% off your order.11:35 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off!12:43 Fort Bliss barracks: 10 in 6 months, half the cost; blast/ballistics20:23 Beautiful + dignified housing: Community First Village; "where's the floor?"20:29 Grasshopper Bank: Time is money. Don't waste either. Go to https://grasshopper.bank/twist and get an exclusive $500 cash bonus just for opening an account.30:10 Northwest Registered Agent - Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist37:27 Audience Q&A: longevity/cracking; plumbing + electrical41:33 ICON Titan printer + channel partners; hiring pitch45:47 Sebi Rubino (Rezzy Labs) joins — BitTensor subnet 46 real estate pricing51:18 Tau/BitTensor explained: subnet competitions, "narrow intelligence"59:15 Rezzy demo: portal + pricing engine; customers + business model1:07:49 "Got shivved for 500k" story: acquisition, investors get zero1:20:36 Bounties: annotated.com + AI sidebar + headless CMS on BitTensor1:31:10 Off-duty: View Buds (camera earbuds) + use cases1:38:13 Off-duty: Anker charger/cable/battery "trio"1:41:12 Off-duty: The Audacity (AMC) quick review1:46:43 Wrap-up + secret TWiST group chat on XSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisCheck out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  I got [BLEEP] for 500K.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  I think we need to hear this story about you getting shiv for half a mil.

• 0:06Jason Calacanis?

  The scumbag who [BLEEP] J-Cow.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 0:09Jason Calacanis?

  Thought he would get away with it, but I'm gonna balance the ledger. [BLEEP] from [BLEEP] company. I'm gonna unload today.

• 0:16Speaker 02

  Okay, grace and loving is the way, man.

• 0:19Jason Calacanis?

  I know, I'm a flawed human. I will have grace for the people who stab me. I'm doing my best. Today's not gonna be my best moment.

• 0:31Speaker 03

  This week in startups is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks in 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twist. Grasshopper Bank. Time is money. Don't waste either. Go to grasshopper.bank/twist and get an exclusive $500 cash bonus just for opening an account. And IM8 Health. Start feeling like your best self every day. 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.

• 1:13Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, everybody. It's Friday, April 17th. This is Twist. I am on fire today. Lon, we've got an amazing docket. We do. You look great. Before we do anything, I just want to take a moment to applaud Claude. I just hit it. I got the haptic. I'm now recording the conversation and all my action items are on here. Action item number one. By the end of the show, explain the scumbag who F'd J-Cow.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:42Jason Calacanis?

  A year ago, thought he would get away with it. But J-Cow has a two-step process in which, no revenge. I'm not a vengeful person. You know that, Lon. But I'm gonna balance the ledger. I got effed for 500K.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Wow, that's a lot.

• 1:59Jason Calacanis?

  And at the end of the show, after we do off-duty, or maybe right before off-duty, remind me

• 2:04Speaker 01

  I'm gonna make a note right now.

• 2:05Jason Calacanis?

  On how I'm gonna balance the ledger. Let's get started. Who's our guest here? I'm so excited.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  We got a great guest to kick things off. We've got Jason Ballard. He is the founder of Icon. They make tools to 3D print houses with concrete, but we're gonna talk about Icon Prime, their new defense-focused arm. Jason, thanks so much for being here. Welcome to the show.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Really excited to be here. Howdy, everybody, and thanks for having me on.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  I'm also excited-

• 2:29Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Jason's one of my guys. He's in my squad, in my Austin squad.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Jay Bell told me before the show that I've now been in Austin long enough where I can get my own hat. I could start rocking the cowboy hat.

• 2:40Jason Calacanis?

  18 months.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  I've crossed the barrier.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  You know, I think it's faster than that, Jay Bell. 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-

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Okay. I was very excited to hear this. I've been waiting to cross the cowboy hat barrier. I think I have.

• 2:58Jason Calacanis?

  I'm not sure what the length of the brim can be for a year-one guy.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  You know, yeah, that's right. You have to find your way into it.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  But it's certainly a journey worth making and not to be too trepidatious about, for sure.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Awesome. I can't wait.

• 3:12Jason Calacanis?

  Jason's a great entrepreneur. Icon 3D Homes, stunningly beautiful. 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 there's all this bad news coming out about AI, right? And if you think about who our top two spokespeople are, Sam Altman, who just had a 270,000-word article in The New Yorker, explaining he's a sociopath from every partner he's ever had, apparently.

• 3:54Jason Calacanis?

  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 gonna get out of control, and we can't control the demon we're waking up.

• 4:24Jason Calacanis?

  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 sixty, seventy, eighty K a year, but you know, an average American makes sixty seven thousand. So let's put it at eighty K. They're working a weekend job and a full time job. And what do they want for their family? What do, what do any of us want? A roof over our heads? A good education? Uh, some healthy food? Right?

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, we, we, we often talk about it. I mean, like, it is like very difficult to imagine that the future can be incredible. And I think the future should be incredible. But it's kind of hard to imagine it if you don't get these like very basic things correct. Uh, and I think food, water and shelter are certainly on that very short list of things. And, um, it almost like getting those things correct, like enables all of the other exciting things that I think get talked about on this podcast and other places. So.

• 5:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's foundation.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  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 like so core. And that I think is something that Americans just have not had a chance to experience in a long time. It's very difficult to live anywhere near where you work if you're around a major American city.

• 5:46Jason Calacanis?

  Is a great point. If you think about, um, the correlation between depression, uh, substance abuse, alcohol abuse, uh, obesity, uh, domestic violence, uh, crime. Uh, 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 show, uh, that have been done that once you get past thirty or forty minutes in a commute, these things dramatically increase. And when you get to over an hour commute. It's like this couple is getting divorced because think about it, if mom or dad are taking this, you know, this hour and a half commute to get to work, they get home an hour 15 minutes.

• 6:29Jason Calacanis?

  Now they've been in a car for two hours and 45 minutes after working for an eight, nine, 10 hour shift. Now what's left? What's left for the fam? Not much.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Thanks to producer Claude, I've got a few studies here. Well, the biggest one was from Sweden. They did a public health study in 2011. An analysis of public health surveys in southern Sweden found that car and public transport commutes exceeding 30 minutes are associated with increased stress, lower vitality, and perceived poor sleep quality. So you hit it exactly. It's that 30 minute threshold. Also the

• 7:00Speaker 02

  All I do is read.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:11Jason Calacanis?

  So Jason, you're here to talk a little bit about, I wouldn't call it a pivot. I think I'd call it a new product line. So tell us what you're working on.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not a pivot. So Icon, you know, 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

• 8:03Speaker 02

  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, 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's. And of course, there's just like a A sharp point on what the technology needs to do. Everybody wants faster and cheaper, but there are some things that are weighted more highly in a military and intelligence environment, you know, survivability.

• 8:42Jason Calacanis?

  What are they? Because I mean, obviously, building faster, but cost for the military is not as important as for the single mom or dad we talked about earlier, who is trying to make a living. But speed, I would think, and quality.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  That's right. Speed is a big deal, and they have a special word for quality called survivability. I mean, these have to be like quite safe, depending on sort of the situations soldiers and people in the military are in. And so they have this like extreme sensitivity to survivability and durability of the things that they build. They also are very sensitive to, they often operate in places where they don't have easy access to a complicated supply chain or a lot of skilled labor. And, you know, a wall system, which is primarily the thing we automate with the technology today, you know, a typical wall system is going to take, you know, 15 to 20 people to build in about 60 days. And our system builds that same wall system in the residential space with about two people in a week.

• 9:41Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  And so like, you know, 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.

• 10:03Jason Calacanis?

  That's the big unlock in my mind, because you use concrete. I like to stay active, you know, I'm getting a little older, but I've started drinking IM8's Daily Ultimate Essentials, and it is delicious. I'm starting to notice a real shift. 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's Daily Ultimate Essentials packs the benefits of 16 different supplements into one tasty drink. It's loaded with 92 nutrient-rich ingredients, including vitamins, minerals, adaptogens, along with pre, pro, and postbiotics. It's giving me a great energy boost. It calms your digestion and it's an easy habit to stick with because it tastes delicious.

• 10:46Jason Calacanis?

  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 chaveral 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.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  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, uh, cause it sets up in the machine. And so, uh, it's, it's some pretty specialized concrete, but the base ingredients are ingredients that are like available everywhere in the world.

• 11:27Jason Calacanis?

  All right, uh, we'll get right back to, uh, what you're doing in terms of forward deployment, the use cases, uh, and then we'll, we'll go to space. First I want to start, Lon, by applauding Plod. I just hit my Plod. I'm recording. I've got all of my notes taken care of. Take a memo. I'm going to unload on, uh, the one person who screwed me in the last five years. Uh, it's been a while since somebody got over on J Cal and, uh, got over on me for about 500 dimes. Uh, 500 boxes of Ziti. Not fun. Uh, 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.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Or your friends.

• 12:09Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, just or of what you gotta do today. Use your Plod.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, you get a Plod.

• 12:13Jason Calacanis?

  And we applaud Plod.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  You want to get a Plod Note Pin S, uh, and you can check it out for yourself at plaud.ai/twist and just use the code TWIST for 10% off your Plod Note Pin S. Keep track of all your enemies list easily with the Plod Note Pin S. There you go.

• 12:29Jason Calacanis?

  We have some discount codes and, uh, the best live question I'm going to pay for a Plod for free. But you gotta ask a great question either on X or on YouTube or the LinkedIn account. So we'll check all of those. All right, uh, Jason, let's talk about that forward deployment. It looked like you were building barracks or storage there. So my understanding is when we are in a conflict or we need to have a presence, they pop up tents. Uh, and these kind of semi-permanent structures, they're a little more than a tent, but obviously a lot less in the building. And based on what I know about material science, which is very little.

• 13:10Jason Calacanis?

  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 when a drone comes in, correct?

• 13:21Speaker 02

  I mean, that's the laundry list of problems in military construction is quite long. But yeah, to simplify it, right now, the two tools the military has to use when they want to build anything, you mentioned barracks and military housing, but whether it's a training center, whether it's like defensive structures, vehicle hides, these, all things we have built for the military, they either have these like, high-speed, low-cost, but low-survivability option, like tents, or they have this very slow, very expensive, very complicated way of doing traditional building. And what they're missing, which they like very sharply need, is a high, the high-speed deployment of survivable structures with a simple supply chain, without needing a bunch of skilled labor hanging around. And that is the tool that robotic construction offers, that you have the automation of the

• 14:06Speaker 02

  labor through the robotics, and then you're building with a very simple supply chain, and a material that is like inherently survivable.

• 14:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so this concrete slurry that you use in the 3D printer, we saw it on the screen just a moment ago, it looks like you tend to do walls that are what, 12, 18 inches thick? And then what could they survive if a drone hit it? I'm assuming the people inside survive, or the tank inside survives because there's a foot or two of concrete, yeah?

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have done vehicle hides, and we've done sort of full, or like an early round. There's more to come for sure, of like blast and ballistics testing against facilities. I'm not allowed to disclose like 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 would pass muster," something like that, so.

• 15:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and this is somebody who stayed at an icon, you had an Airbnb going for a while, but I think somebody bought it, right?

• 15:09Speaker 02

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

• 15:33Jason Calacanis?

  So how much faster can you build a survivable structure in the field versus the equivalent that the military will build? We're talking days, months, weeks, you tell us.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  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 10 in six months for less than half the cost. And these are like higher performance, like if you saw the existing barracks on site, like it's actually like not apples. I'm giving you apples to apples time and cost comparisons, but these are like not apples to apples comparisons.

• 16:18Jason Calacanis?

  So it could be 20, 30, 40 X 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 and I was like, I don't know if I want to be in a pizza oven and I, you know, it's not going to look good or whatever. And then I saw the structure and I was like, wait a second, this looks really beautiful. Uh, Lon, this looks like, you know, Deckard's apartment, it looks like the Innis house, this looks like something Frank Lloyd Wright built, right?

• 17:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:02Jason Calacanis?

  It looks actually great. And then talk about climate and temperature.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe I'll like go back because of course like housing was like the, the, the big issue that like sort of provoked the existence of Icon. And of course, everybody talks a lot about we need to build faster, we need to build more affordably. But you, you kind of do, it's an expensive problem to solve and you kind of need to step back and like, wait a minute. Are we sure like this is the world we want to build faster and cheaper? Like the sort of jet, like these are not the houses you're looking for, like.

• 17:30Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Like where is Wakanda? Like where is Rivendell? Like are we sure like the delivery of this thing that we see? And I think. The housing of the future should feel like, of course, it should be faster and cheaper. But I think like, beauty and dignity like have to be at the table of the requirements that you're solving for.

• 17:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  From day one. And of course, that like happened in housing and it was one of the attractive things about 3D printing. Was if you could imagine, automations do what automations do and they make things faster and cheaper. But because the architecture is digital, and then very importantly, because the building material is fluid. All of your sort of aesthetic aspirations are still on the table, right? Like, if you want a house in the shape of a Fibonacci spiral, we can print a house in the shape of Fibonacci spiral. And it's the same price as a square. And so like, what happens to the world? Like, not only when things are cheaper, but when like, beauty is back on the menu? When like, uh, you know, it's 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?

• 18:31Speaker 02

  And in fact, we're doing 110 more homes for the homeless at Community First Village. Um, I should have maybe brought pictures, like, these do not look like houses for the homeless. We're delivering them for between 99 and 120,000 dollars a home, including our profit.

• 18:46Jason Calacanis?

  Incredible.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  And like, they are incredible.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  It's depressing, and it's somehow funny, it's strangely like, connected to all this like, regulatory runaway that has also happened in the housing space. Because you could, you know, in, in, in some way, you don't want a bunch of like, ugly crappy houses. Like, that's not like, a wicked instinct. Um, and so people have tried to sort of prevent this sort of ugliness, uh, from proliferating in the world. And you sort of get this pileup of, you get this like, pileup of regulations that like, also add cost and expense and time. And somehow resetting with something that is faster and cheaper, but also more beautiful. Perhaps also allows us to like, untangle some of this like, regulatory knot that we've gotten in. That, that, that for sure is driving up housing costs.

• 19:45Jason Calacanis?

  Here's a picture of, um, and listen, this is no dig to the people who made it. Um, and, and this is certainly a lot better than, um, living on the street, but-

• 19:58Jason Calacanis?

  Um, if I'm being honest, it looks like you're in barracks.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Um, and it looks, you know, it doesn't look modern. It doesn't look.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  It does not speak to the human heart. And again, it's like, where's what? Like, this is not the world that we want to build faster and cheaper.

• 20:16Jason Calacanis?

  It's not Elysium.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  This is not correct. Like, we want the same thing for our brothers and sisters who are at different parts of the socioeconomic ladder that we would want for our own family. I don't know if you can Google, like, I.

• 20:26Jason Calacanis?

  Well, here's like, look at this. Here's your 3D printed homes for the homeless. Here's a startup truth bomb. A lot of founders have no idea what's actually going on with their money. If that's true of your company, hey, no judgments. I know you're busy hiring, building your product, go to market, all that important stuff. But your company needs a reliable financial partner, not a lifestyle brand, okay? Grasshopper is a real federally chartered digital bank that's not trying to win you over with a rewards program. Instead, they're building deep integrations, treasury products that are going to actually help you expand your runway, and innovative tools like an MC-based AI connector. Oh, man, that's awesome. We can connect it to all of our agents and do reporting. And that will put you in command of your money.

• 21:08Jason Calacanis?

  As a twist listener, you're going to get $500 cash bonus just for opening an account. Think of that. You open an account, boom, there's $500 in it. So leap on over to grasshopper dot bank slash twist and use the promo code twist. As a twist listener, you're going to get a $500 cash bonus just for opening an account. Grasshopper dot bank slash twist. Again, I'll be honest, there's homes out here in Hill Country, out in Dripping Springs, uh, out in Wimberly, that are selling for 500K that look exactly like that and that are $400 a night Airbnb. You looked at these lawn for your mom.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Can you Google, I don't know if you can search, um, I99 icon, the, the letters I99 icon and see what images come up? Cause I would like to show you some of the newer ones. There it is. We are building that house. That house is already done. Uh, we are building that house for between 99, $120,000 delivered, uh, with our profit included.

• 22:01Jason Calacanis?

  By the way, that house looks like a $4 million LA mansion with a view.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  It looks like you'd go to Los Feliz and tour that. Like, this was built in the 20s and it's been in a hundred films.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  You got it. You got it. You got it. And so we had a, like a global architecture design contest for like. We gave a million dollar prize to, a million dollars end prize of people designing homes that could be built for 99K was sort of the initiative. We've also built that house out at, at Community First Village. This helps us get around this like NIMBY problem, like not in my backyard. It's like, you can sort of weave the, the tapestry of society back together, but beauty really is the key. It's not just a spreadsheet exercise. The spreadsheet matters. Um, but you, but, but like the, these things have to be weighted sort of like in, in a more equal way than we've thought about them in the past of like solving the housing crisis.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Taking a, an unhoused person and putting them in a, in a real community that feels like a real neighborhood, that's inherently stabilizing. I'm putting them in the

• 22:59Speaker 02

  If y'all go out to Community First Village, you would say like, oh my God, a neighborhood of like, uh, homeless people, like it must be like kind of crazy town.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Like, it is completely chill and kind and like, like it is a miracle. And like the, the, uh, I don't, I don't want to keep repeating myself, but like the restoration of dignity and community, like these things are not just spreadsheet. When you're talking about fundamental human needs, food, water, shelter, of course they're maybe they like unlock the rest of the pyramid, right? Of like self-actualization and

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  And this, and this is how you solve these seemingly intractable social issues is you, you have to put the sort of whole human in the picture.

• 23:44Jason Calacanis?

  Listen, I'm, I'm going to invoke Jesus. Lon and I have been talking a lot about Jesus these days.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Always, always.

• 23:49Jason Calacanis?

  Always, a top of my

• 23:51Speaker 01

  I'm telling people the good news every day.

• 23:53Jason Calacanis?

  How you treat, how you treat the meekest amongst us is how you treat me. This is what Jesus said. This is the gospel. He said to us, how you treat the weakest members of society is how you treat God. Let that sink in as a concept, folks.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  What you have done to the sick, the poor, the hungry, the prisoner is what you have done to me.

• 24:14Jason Calacanis?

  Correct. And, 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, you hit some hits, they run away and 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.

• 24:41Jason Calacanis?

  Where's the floor? And has the floor moved up?

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, the whole bracket has to move together.

• 24:47Jason Calacanis?

  Correct.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, if you were like thinking about structuring a society, which we should, um, the whole bracket has to move.

• 24:54Jason Calacanis?

  And let me tell you something, when you are lucky enough to be in the top 1%, 0.1%, top 10%, top 20%, wherever you find yourself in life, and in our industry, you very quickly find yourself in the top 10%, 5%, 1%. You know, it's extraordinary how the upper middle class has grown. We've had the upper middle class in the United States is the fastest growing. These are people who have net worths of 1 to 5 million, which doesn't seem a lot if you live in New York City or Los Angeles, but it is a heck of a lot of money if you live in Nashville or Austin, right? You're doing really well. Uh, you have a lot of optionality. So what can we do to just move the floor up?

• 25:33Speaker 02

  And, yeah. And I mean, like, I can, as an icon of this, um, when you start thinking about technology, I don't think it's an accident, 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 the 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 like also speak to the human heart and are ennobling in their own way.

• 26:16Jason Calacanis?

  In, said another way, this could be a win-win-win.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 26:21Jason Calacanis?

  The investors in these companies and the founders and the team can win, society can win, right? And, uh, all levels of society can win. It doesn't need to just be the top wins, the shareholders in the company.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. These things don't have to be incompetent, like, we can show, with this technology and others, I think. We should be thinking like, we can shelter the homeless, we can revive the American dream, we can defend the West, and we can by God build the moon base. Like, that's the society that I want to be a part of. And that's the technology set that we need to be all working on collectively to unlock the sort of next level of humanity.

• 26:59Jason Calacanis?

  You know what you just unlocked for me? This idea that when you make something that's truly got that craftsmanship, that truly inspires the high end, it's not incongruous to have that hit everybody. And I'll give an example of it. You know, I'm sitting a couple of feet away from the 16th Tesla ever made, the Roadster, that I paid $150,000 for.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:26Jason Calacanis?

  And next to it is the Model S I paid, also Signature 0001, which I paid $150,000 for. Okay, it's $300,000 worth of cars. I'm a very lucky guy. I get to have those two cars. What do I drive every day? I drive a Model Y. Costs 50K. I think you can get it used for 30K with 20,000 miles on it. The FSD I use, the FSD Elon uses, the FSD everybody who has access to a used Model Y or Model 3, which you can get used ones right now, with FSD is 15 to 20K. They're everywhere. And then Cybercap brings it everywhere. Every rich person you talk to, David Sacks started driving again. He used to take Uber.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  He's in Austin now, right?

• 28:08Jason Calacanis?

  He's in Austin, and he showed up for, we had a nice steak dinner the other week. He shows 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, tax..." I'm like, "Why are you driving your stuff?" He's like, "Oh, I have FSD and I have this Model Y. I love it." You know, Sacks doing pretty good, drives the Model Y every day. Chamath, he's doing pretty good, he drives the Model Y every day.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:35Jason Calacanis?

  Freeberg, he's doing very well. Oh, Hall is crushing it. He's got four Model Ys, he said on the program, or four Teslas, all of them in stop traffic. We all drive the same car. It's all converged to one. Perfect. This is what's going to happen with Icon. You'll be a rich person. You'll want to rebuild your Malibu 10,000 square foot beach home or in the hills, and you'll want it to be fire resistant.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:02Jason Calacanis?

  Unpack that for us after we look at this incredible Polly Market. Here it is, folks. I am very excited to be a shareholder in, a fan of, and partners with Polly Market. What will the median home value in Austin, Texas metro area be on April 30? And here it is. What do we have there? If you put it out one week, give us an overview here of what people think the value here will be. And I think this one needs to be traded a lot more heavily.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:29Jason Calacanis?

  But people are betting here.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Volume pretty low on this one. I'm looking.

• 29:33Jason Calacanis?

  That means opportunity.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  There you go. But it's new. 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, that's my take on it.

• 30:10Jason Calacanis?

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• 30:52Jason Calacanis?

  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 U.S. you're operating out of. NorthwestRegisteredAgent.com/Twist.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  And let that sink in. There are people right now.

• 31:16Jason Calacanis?

  In California, New York, Los Angeles, you know, other Boston, who are looking at this and their heads are exploding because they remodeled their kitchen for 800,000. They could have bought two homes in Austin for what they're remod- 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. It's three or 400,000 to remodel a bathroom in Los Angeles. You ask to have your bathroom remodeled in Brentwood, minimum 300,000.

• 32:00Jason Calacanis?

  The cost of a three bedroom here in Austin. Get on it, folks.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  There's no comparison. I mean, if you were talking about 400,000 homes, you're going hours outside of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. If you're in San Bernardino.

• 32:12Jason Calacanis?

  You're in the desert, son.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  You're going to, you're going to River.

• 32:14Jason Calacanis?

  Very Joshua tree for that money.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  San Berdoo. You're going to Victorville. Like, there's just no way you're anywhere near Los Angeles for that price.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  It is the greatest city in the world, huh, Jason? I certainly think so. There's something special happening here that I haven't experienced. And I like going to the Bay. I like going to Washington D.C. I like New York City. Like, I like the, I like those places.

• 32:32Jason Calacanis?

  Great place to visit.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Something very special is happening here. And this is part of it's like there's an instinct to build instead of like hand wringing and like sort of theorize about solutions. It's like, just get out there and do something. Like, figure it out. And I think that the city and the town are like reaping the benefits of that. I mean, the, I don't know if you can pull up, we just built a hundred, a few, couple of years ago now, 100 3D printed homes with Lennar. Lennar Wolf Ranch Icon maybe would be like the thing to search. These are homes that we sold in the 300 to 500K range with like the largest production.

• 33:06Jason Calacanis?

  Lennar, this is the largest home builder in the country.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  It was the first 3D printed neighborhood in the world. It was 100 homes that were 3D printed.

• 33:12Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, there you are. I mean, that's actually, this is done now and sort of occupied.

• 33:17Jason Calacanis?

  Fantastic.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  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?

• 33:25Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  And.

• 33:27Jason Calacanis?

  Now, you don't want to be the.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  It was possible to do something like that in Austin. It was like where I was getting is like. People were like, ready to try and ready to innovate and like it like it was like surprisingly.

• 33:38Jason Calacanis?

  By the way, this was what my experience when I grew up in the eighties and nineties in New York City. This was my experience when 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 goes 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.

• 34:21Jason Calacanis?

  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 gonna go where the other builders are. That's why, if you're listening to my voice right now and you're starting a company, I have no problem with you moving to the Bay Area for the first year or two. When you get to 10 employees, let me tell you what's gonna happen. Everybody who works for you is gonna hate you. And they're gonna 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.

• 35:04Jason Calacanis?

  And if you go to a public school, you're gonna need to supplement it with $20,000 in tutoring. And you're gonna have to hope your child is safe when they go to school. Your, 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.

• 35:30Jason Calacanis?

  Move your company to Austin. Lon came from LA.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  I did.

• 35:35Jason Calacanis?

  Jackie came from San Francisco. What would 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 in line.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 35:48Jason Calacanis?

  And the brunch doesn't cost 250,000.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  You could drive to any anytime. You'd be like, I like bagels from that one place. You could drive there. You could park right in front. You walk right inside. Maybe you wait five minutes. I waited in a seven minute line. It's like you get your bagels, you walk around. It it 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. Cause you're in line, it's where to park. It's it's chaos.

• 36:15Jason Calacanis?

  And I'm worried about my guy Lon.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  You can't put a price on it.

• 36:18Jason Calacanis?

  And he's moving here. I give him 10 dimes to move. I'm like, here's 10 K, you know, whatever, you know, I'll pay for your moving. Whatever, whatever. I mean, so it's the minimum I can do to get that level of talent here. He I'm like, how's it going? What's going on with the apartments? I got a house. I'm like, what? Oh, yeah, I got a house in this really nice neighborhood that I'm looking at living in. I'm like, how's Lon living in my neighborhood now? What the heck?

• 36:40Speaker 01

  For the same price, I was playing for a studio apartment in Silver Lake. I got a two bedroom townhouse to rent in in beautiful.

• 36:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's because also.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  That's three times the space.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Also is full of builders and it's full of people who support and applaud builders. Like, like I suspect in other places, had I tried to start this company somewhere else, we would be very lucky to have built 10 or 20 homes by now and the company would have gone extinct. I mean, like, we would have, we would certainly not be like hundreds of homes in with like hundreds and hundreds of homes in the pipeline. Uh, you've got to be in a place that like supports the builders.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  From a super fan, Fat Don Capital. I thought this was an interesting.

• 37:15Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Fat Don.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  You know, Fat Don.

• 37:16Jason Calacanis?

  That's my meme maker.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Uh, so he says three 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?

• 37:32Speaker 02

  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 the. Existence of concrete is not something we created. And so, concrete has been around for thousands of years. Matter of fact, probably the only technology that civilization actually forget, 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. We have bridges in Alaska standing in saltwater for decades. It is still the, you know, the largest unreinforced dome in the world. And 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,

• 38:16Speaker 02

  to come up with a lower quality building material that would pass building code, then no one would win the prize. Like, it is literally the crappiest thing we can imagine, imagine using, is what we're building with today. So certainly, like, we sort of win the awards on longevity. There's two kinds of cracking in concrete. One is structural cracking. That never happens to us anymore. 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, they're, like, we've been building with concrete and masonry materials so long, like, Icon sort of didn't actually have to invent the playbook for like, long-term care and maintenance.

• 39:00Jason Calacanis?

  100 years is the lifespan of concrete at a minimum.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  At a minimum.

• 39:06Jason Calacanis?

  And by the way, termites, you may have heard of them, when you have wood structures and you have to have somebody, I mean, listen, I've owned a lot of homes at this point. I am bane of my existence. Flooding.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, mold, fire.

• 39:19Jason Calacanis?

  Termites.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Wind.

• 39:20Jason Calacanis?

  And mold and fire. I cannot tell you, I have had mold in three of six homes I've owned.

• 39:30Jason Calacanis?

  I have had flooding in two of six homes I've owned. I have had, thankfully, knock on wood, never had any smoke or fire, and termites in six of six homes I've had to deal with. No, I'm not saying I've had a termite, I only had a termite, like, problem in one of them, my L1 one, my LA1. But all of them, I've had to pay hundred, no, low thousands of dollars every two or three years to deal with this. Concrete, none of it. And by the way, drywall is basically, drywall in Spanish means mold collector.

• 40:13Jason Calacanis?

  It literally is where mold, like, I have cut so much drywall.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  You're like, this is, there's like, we're in a kind of like Stockholm syndrome about the way that we build. It's like, you know that meme where the dog is like drinking coffee and the house is on fire, it's like, this is fine, like, drywall's fine, like, this is all fine. It's like, this is not fine. Like, this is not the way we should be sheltering ourselves.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  One more question, also keeping it practical, Jason, from Nate Day IW8KM, probably kilometers. How does electrical and plumbing work when the house is 3D printed?

• 40:46Speaker 02

  Great question. So one of the cool, 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 the homes actually go in faster and cheaper with less error into a 3D printed wall. Installing, to be fair on the ledger, though, like, installing windows and doors is a bit different. I won't say it's more expensive, but like, you do have to like, learn something new. But plumbing, electrical, and the mechanical systems go in like, very fast, because the wall is not solid. It's sort of engineered to the loads you expect of it, and you control the internal structure of the wall. So it's like, you're not just automating framing, you're automating the whole wall system. So there's like, multiple trades that are automated out.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Right, you can tell the printer, here's what we want the inside to be, yeah.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Yes, correct.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 41:30Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, we got our questions in. Great questions, everybody. Let's keep moving down the dock.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  All right. So thanks to, uh, Jason for being here. Should we drop Jason off and bring on our next guest?

• 41:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, let's drop Jason off and I'll come see Jason. Um, we'll have a little dinner.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, you need to come see the new printer. We got the new multi-story printer. You need to come see it.

• 41:45Jason Calacanis?

  I will come see it. Well, you know what we should do? We should do an onsite. We should bring a couple of folks and do a little onsite. We'll have a little barbecue down there.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  Hey, man, you should operate the printer.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 41:52Jason Calacanis?

  I cannot wait. I'm gonna build my own tower. I'm gonna build my tower and I'm gonna have a seat at the top, my little writer's cabin. Now, how tall can you make these things? It looks like you're getting to two stories, yeah?

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, to two to three stories with the new version of the printer, which is also the one we're starting to release to other builders, like, like, like, time to join the revolution. This is the, the equipment of the future.

• 42:11Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, see, this is a key thing I didn't get into here, but I'll just give you a minute.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Next time. When you come out.

• 42:15Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, no, I'll give you a minute here because this is critical. When you perfect the technology, you are partnering with the greatest home developers in the world. You started at the top. Great way to do it. And then second, construction companies, uh, you're also partnering with because you, you can't possibly deploy every single, um, channel. So tell me about your channel strategy.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we, we, you know, both the most effective way to solve, uh, the global housing crisis and, uh, at, at high speed, it's also turns out to be like the best business is to like, in, 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, the new generation of the printer Titan is the multi-story railless, uh, more automated system that actually prints reinforced concrete, not just concrete. And we launched that business, uh, about a month ago this week, uh, in the uptake.

• 43:13Jason Calacanis?

  So if you're a builder.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  You're a builder.

• 43:15Jason Calacanis?

  You want to be a channel partner, go to, what's the URL?

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Iconbuild.com.

• 43:20Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, and you can always guess. Sometimes the founder gets first name at the domain name. Uh, and you're also hiring, who are you hiring for, Jason?

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Man, we are hiring material scientists, engineers, software engineers, architects, field operators, the whole stack.

• 43:34Jason Calacanis?

  Jason, you can clip this.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:35Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, you can clip this for your hiring.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 43:39Jason Calacanis?

  I am the ultimate judge of character. I am the bestie of all besties. People know, like, hey, if you're having a tough time, you call Jason. He's gonna 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 gonna talk about the guy who shivved me at the end of the show. Stick around.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:18Jason Calacanis?

  I'm gonna unload today.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  Grace and loving is the way, man.

• 44:22Jason Calacanis?

  I know. I'm a flawed human.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:25Jason Calacanis?

  And I will work on grace. I will have grace for the people who stabbed me, right? Like, Jesus forgave people. He forgave them.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  It's a big thing with him. He was all about it.

• 44:34Jason Calacanis?

  And I'm doing my best. I'm doing my best. Today's not gonna be my best moment.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  All right.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 44:40Jason Calacanis?

  I'm gonna try to channel a little grace, but there's no better person you could go work for, and there's no better mission than housing people. Jason is an A-plus character individual. This is the person, if you're effective at what you do in your career, go work for Jason. Clip this. Put it on your hiring page, Jason. I give you permission

• 45:00Speaker 02

  Thank you, yeah.

• 45:01Jason Calacanis?

  to use this endorsement on your social media

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 45:04Jason Calacanis?

  and on your website. Go work for Jason and do something good in the world. Stop working for Zuckerberg. No offense, and trying to make people click on more ads and invade their privacy. Go work and build housing for the military, for [bleep] space. Excuse my French. For the homeless and for rich people. Go do it, people.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  Where else do you get giant robots, homeless housing, and a moon base in one place?

• 45:27Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, come on. Get some of those ZARs. This company's gonna be worth a frickin' fortune, man. I'm gonna do, I can't wait till you IPO. How come I'm not on the cat tab? We need to do a syndicate. All right, that's one of my favorite guys.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Good guest. Good guest.

• 45:38Jason Calacanis?

  Right there. That's my guy.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Always a good guest.

• 45:41Jason Calacanis?

  I know quality guys. Now, this next guy coming on the program, I don't know if he's a quality guy or not. We'll find out.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Quality guy. So we're bringing up

• 45:46Jason Calacanis?

  We'll find out.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Sebi Rubino. He's from Resi Labs, Jason. There, it's a bit tensor subnet. We've been talking to a lot of them. Subnet 46. And Resi stands for Real Estate Superintelligence. So they are hosting a competition for AI models that can accurately price real estate.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  It's a themed show today. We're talking housing. Sebby, thank you so much for being here.

• 46:11Jason Calacanis?

  Hey Sebby, how you doing, brother?

• 46:12Speaker 04

  I'm doing good, brother. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. A big fan of the show. And yeah, I'm glad that we're here.

• 46:18Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  Almost two years. I worked at BankCon Finance and one of the team members there was like sending me clips, not clips, sending me the videos and saying, "Check this out."

• 46:42Jason Calacanis?

  Awesome. And you can help the team out by just doing that. Tell a friend if you get, if there's a quality episode, there's a moment in it, just send the deep link, please, and say, "Hey, Jason's been doing this with Lon for 15 years. We're in year 15, I think."

• 46:56Speaker 04

  Oh, more. 2000.

• 46:57Jason Calacanis?

  Well, 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 Elvick came on for the first episode. That's a quality, that's my guy.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  We'll have to go back and figure out when, but it was early 2008.

• 47:11Jason Calacanis?

  What are you working on? 2008. Sebby, what are you working on? Am I pronouncing it correct? S-E-B-Y, Sebby?

• 47:16Speaker 04

  Sebby.

• 47:17Jason Calacanis?

  Sebby. Oh, so, my name is Sebastian. I, I work for Tyrell Corporation.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  It's from Blade Runner, everybody. It's from a classic film.

• 47:27Jason Calacanis?

  All right. What are you working on, Sebastian?

• 47:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, we are working on the, uh, real estate, uh, it's actually portal.resilabs.ai.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 47:37Speaker 04

  I will, I will suggest, uh, we are actually launching our new website and portal today. I will do a quick screen share, but we're building a, uh, 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.

• 48:12Jason Calacanis?

  Ooh, that's a good idea.

• 48:14Speaker 04

  Platforms, one of them is balcony technology we'll be using our pricing engine for. Uh, they have a trillion dollars in data from counties or housing data from counties. And, uh, they're, you know, bringing that data on chain. Uh, they're doing this avalanche. And what they're doing with us is they're using our pricing engine to reassess property taxes. Sorry about that world. Um, and also, um, to, uh, detect fraud, right? So if someone quit, claimed deeds a house or transfers a house for a hundred K when it's worth a million. Let's check that out. And, um, 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.

• 48:57Jason Calacanis?

  Incredible, incredible. And, 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 opportunity?

• 49:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I have, my whole family is real estate, uh, based. Uncle is a huge developer in Brooklyn. My mom is

• 49:14Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, my hometown.

• 49:14Speaker 04

  Contractor. Oh, there you go. And Red Hook, right? He, he built the Red Hook essentially.

• 49:19Jason Calacanis?

  Red Hook, where we used to dump bodies. Just so everybody knows, uh, your family was working in one of the most dangerous places in the world. I was having dinner the other night with my new friend. This is my new friend, Jimmy Iovine.

• 49:32Speaker 04

  Hmm, yes.

• 49:33Jason Calacanis?

  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. One seminal work. And we sat there talking. I said, let me ask a question. This is like a quality guy. I said, where are you from? Where are you? He said, I'm from Brooklyn. I said, that's where I'm from. I'm from Bay Ridge. Where are you from? He said, Red Hook. I said, you grew up in Red Hook? That's like one of the four places when I was growing up in the seventies and eighties, they told me, Lon.

• 50:07Jason Calacanis?

  Fork Green, Bed-Stuy, Redhook. You don't need to get off at that train stop. The Westies, you're afraid the Westies were 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 Resi Labs make money?

• 50:37Speaker 04

  We essentially sell our models. So right now, we are live on Sheets. So this is another BitTensor subnet. It's essentially the opener outer subnet, right? So you can list your model. They can allow you to list your model. 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.

• 50:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, show, don't tell. Let's do a demo or die here. Remember, most people are listening. If you're not listening, go to YouTube. You can see it. But if you are listening, we'll explain it to you. And I think always good, Sebastian, for people who don't know the magic of Tau, which I am obsessed with. I bought another $50,000 in Tau today. Wow. Explain what, 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. But why are so many intelligent people building with Tau? Explain Tau and the subnets.

• 51:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, Tau has honestly been, I've been a builder for a while. Since I was 18, I was always building something. And Tau 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 given me essentially this economic engine. What does Tau do? Tau allows you, is a network of subnetworks. So I have a subnetwork, 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 provide compute.

• 52:22Speaker 04

  And we're just going to make sure you're ready and available. Or storage. So they're essentially like digital commodity, it's a digital commodity marketplace. And it's powered by these competitions. Now, the the the bow on the the BitTensor box is you can think about BitTensor the same way you think about, say, Google or OpenAI or Claude, or sorry, Anthropic at the company level, because those companies are building out their respective AI stack, right? They're building out compute, they're building out multiple types of inference. On BitTensor, these 128 networks are running, hosting these competitions so that they can offer

• 53:03Speaker 04

  one piece of the AI stack. And where we fit in that AI stack, and the reason why we're using BitTensor, is because we have the thesis that narrow intelligence, faster, cheaper, better, will win in this day and age, and faster, cheaper, better commodities, due to this economic engine, due to the competitive nature and not corporate structure. That allows us to be prepared for this this next age of usage, which is going to be agent-centric instead of human-centric. So whereas the Zillow API is an API, we are a model, right? And as this this change from APIs being used and humans being used for things,

• 53:45Speaker 04

  transitions to digital commodities, these intelligence commodities, BitTensor will be the venue that is selected by most open router, model routers, and agentic model routers, right? And in these meta-agents, I have the OpenClaw stuff, as I've seen you've been on as well. If my meta-agent that I'm chatting to most of the time is selecting the intelligence, it's going to select every single time from BitTensor.

• 54:18Speaker 04

  And that is what we are, what we've plugged ourself into and are involved in. And that's why we're able to see ourselves scaling out this, not just for appraisals, but for inspections with specialized hardware. Maybe we can do a competition for Icon and say, hey, instead of giving out a million bucks, we'll give you out a hundred K 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 pay us and we redistribute that through our token.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  That's a long-winded answer, but.

• 54:50Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's a great one. Now do your demo. It's very important that we explain Tau and BitTetzer to folks here on this program. Why? Sometimes I get a tingle on, I hear a pitch, I get a tingle.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:04Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  You know that meme?

• 55:10Jason Calacanis?

  Is finding the energy.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  The lean forward meme, like here's the moment.

• 55:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  That I can see you physically do that when you hear a pitch that registers. You physically do the little lean forward like, okay, this is a brilliant idea. Here's what I need to know. I've seen you do it.

• 55:25Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I did it with BitTorrent, 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. Shout out to my wife. She's brilliant. And I should have done more. And like a crazy Mossad CIA agent, a famous one with the dark past, like asked me to introduce him to the Bitcoin because he watched my podcast. And I was like, okay, here's the guys. I'll leave it at that. I don't want to go down this rabbit hole here.

• 56:00Speaker 01

  He shall not be named. Yeah.

• 56:01Jason Calacanis?

  He who shall not be named, who I barely knew. And I was like, hey, pal, sure. Just so you know, this is like a nonprofit essentially. These guys are monks. They're techno monks. They're not interested in money. But yeah, I'll introduce you to them, I guess, because my agent was like, can you introduce them to these guys? I always like to help founders out and then of course I get dragged for it. I'll put it all aside. I'm not making that mistake anymore. When I get the spidey sense, you know what I do? I share it and I place bets. I placed a 750K bet on Tau. Yeah. Co-founded Steelcore 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.

• 56:46Jason Calacanis?

  This is not investment advice, but I told Lon, if you have $500, $1,000, 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. Okay. Yeah. Dem or die? Sebastian? Go.

• 57:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, dem or die? So this is our new website powered by the BitTensor subnet. I got, and as you're saying this stuff, Lon, you're explaining that. I mean, that was my exact thought. And it's what happened to me with BitTensor. So I've gotten to the point now where I've dedicated everything. I'm completely invested into either 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 an address, 123 Main Street.

• 57:47Speaker 04

  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. And if we have intelligence to appraise property and we have essentially the intelligence needed to underwrite loans, property sales, we are building that infrastructure.

• 58:28Speaker 04

  Right now, there's a project called Figure Heloc and they have $17 billion in essentially assets under management. And it's, that is like their loan book, right? The money that they have to issue loans and circulating and supply. So they are one mortgage company, one lending company that uses the blockchain.

• 58:50Speaker 04

  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, the financial systems to their business. That's what we are enabling with our intelligence, right? With appraisal inspections in KYC, that allows lenders to act.

• 59:14Jason Calacanis?

  Incredible.

• 59:14Speaker 04

  Fundraise.

• 59:16Jason Calacanis?

  You built an oracle. You built a beautiful oracle. And at scale, somebody could say, hey, I need, you know, we just, we, we just had Jason Ballard on. He could do an analysis and say, with Lennar, where, where should we build our next community? Right? And where's the infill between Basherup, Wimberly? And, you know, take the road south to San Antonio, right? You go west, you go east, you go west to Hill Country, you go east to Basherup, you go south to San Antonio. You could actually map this with the oracle, get the data, look for trends.

• 59:59Jason Calacanis?

  And this would save you, I, I, 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?

• 1:00:10Speaker 04

  You would pay, it's 1% of a penny is the actual cost.

• 1:00:16Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, incredible. Are people doing it yet? Do you have customers yet?

• 1:00:21Speaker 04

  Yes, yes. So we have, like I said, balcony. We have a few protocols, like in the Collaboration Your Estate Protocol. And there's another one, CommerTies and HoneyShares. And what we do there is they essentially have tokenized properties for sale. But there's no third party price. It's like, why would I buy this thing? Why would I buy this house that I can't go and see? It's halfway across the world. I don't have an appraisal. I don't know what this is worth. So we are that third-party appraisal and actually increases the volume on these platforms.

• 1:00:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:00:50Speaker 04

  So, yes, our product has been being, has been in use. We are now launching the portal so it can be used in an easier way. And people can really start to understand our network's potential. But I will say, this is the, this is one track. Intelligence is what you mentioned, that use case. To double down on that, we actually have in our ecosystem, we're building the, and finalizing this, a macro prediction market trader. So the exact type of market that you were just on, on Polymarket, a partner, 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, do that across the entire market.

• 1:01:34Speaker 04

  And you can essentially have an edge on those markets and front-run those markets. And we actually are the data provider to help find equilibrium in those markets. So investors are able to make better decisions. The world has access to more truth.

• 1:01:50Jason Calacanis?

  Is this a company, or is it just a subnet? Are you a Delaware C corp or a Texas corp, hopefully? What, what, what are you doing here in terms of the company versus the tokens? 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, and you're, I think, subnet 46. Am I correct?

• 1:02:15Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:02:16Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. And then you have investing in the corporation. So walk us through, are you a corporation? And then what's the opportunity here for, for investors who are listening? If there is one.

• 1:02:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, one, we're a Wyoming C corp.

• 1:02:28Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Why Wyoming? Is that because they have good? Dow and you know, those kinds of things.

• 1:02:35Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah, definitely, specifically like crypto, crypto native companies Wyoming, Wyoming C corps are normally the the route to go. But how does that that C corp, how does it gain value, right? How does it compound and grow upon itself? How does it? How does that entity go public? Right, right. And that that question goes to how does it gain value? We are essentially a DAT. Our job is to monetize and build this technology, but every dollar of revenue doesn't go to us. It goes back into buying back the token.

• 1:03:11Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:03:28Jason Calacanis?

  OK, let's wrap on the portal. Show us the portal real quick.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  Let's take a quick look. Yeah, I looked up my own house, by the way, just out of curiosity. It works. It works.

• 1:03:36Speaker 04

  OK, great. Beautiful.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  It's worth a little bit more than the average home in Austin, based on our previous.

• 1:03:41Jason Calacanis?

  Is your rent 5%, 4%, 6%? Your yearly rent?

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Great question.

• 1:03:47Jason Calacanis?

  Of the value of the home?

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  Great question. I'm gonna do the do some.

• 1:03:49Jason Calacanis?

  Just times your monthly rent.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  I'm gonna do some quick.

• 1:03:51Jason Calacanis?

  Don't tell anybody the address or the rent.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  No, I didn't tell.

• 1:03:53Jason Calacanis?

  I'm not doxing you like Mondami doxed.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  I didn't tell.

• 1:03:56Jason Calacanis?

  Ken Griffin, I don't want anybody visiting Lon's house. What percentage your yearly rent is to the value of the home?

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  It's about, oh, yearly, yearly. Let's see. OK.

• 1:04:08Jason Calacanis?

  This is a cap rate is the concept here. Should be 5%. So if you were paying.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  It is 5.4%.

• 1:04:15Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect. See, you got you. That means you have a good deal and the person who owns the property got a good deal.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  I feel I feel like we did. Bronda, Bronda and I did well. My landlord.

• 1:04:26Jason Calacanis?

  Go ahead, Smash.

• 1:04:27Speaker 04

  It seems like your pricing engine is quite accurate, so.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Nailed it.

• 1:04:31Jason Calacanis?

  That's it. There you go.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  Nailed it to the wall.

• 1:04:35Speaker 04

  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 the million properties, and we've hidden a sign of 98%.

• 1:04:51Jason Calacanis?

  98% what?

• 1:04:54Speaker 04

  Sorry, accuracy on price. So if you plug in an address, we're going to be 98% accurate to the price that someone's willing to pay for it. So it's very actionable data. That's important. This dashboard gives you the insight of like, why can I trust this? How can I trust this? Boom, beautiful, it's there. But this is what people are using the system for. And it's the plugin addresses. I can plug in, right? When I dug on 18 Birch, I can find that property right here. As I plug that in, I'm getting outputs in one second. Let's just do an example test of this property here. 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.

• 1:05:39Speaker 04

  We have people helping the county, and yeah, 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 tools.

• 1:05:56Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, put in an address for me. 108 South Woodburn Drive. 108 South Woodburn Drive, Los Angeles.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  Is that your old place?

• 1:06:07Jason Calacanis?

  This was the first home I ever bought. I bought it. They wanted 3.5. This is 20 years ago, I think. And I think I paid 2.4 million. I put a couple of hundred grand into it.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  This was the Brentwood, the Brentwood place with the pool house.

• 1:06:18Jason Calacanis?

  This is where I lived in Brentwood. This was the pool house.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Where we started mahalo.com.

• 1:06:22Jason Calacanis?

  We started mahalo in the pool house. Lon worked there. My friend Nick Jurecki, 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 I gave, and my incredible wife gave him a custom food order every week from Whole Foods. I mean, I'm not saying I'm a mensch, but... Uh, when my friend was down on his luck, I, I, you know, I always came through for him.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  It was a nice pool.

• 1:06:54Jason Calacanis?

  There it is, South Woodburn Drive, and.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  It's like 1.18.

• 1:06:58Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, that's wrong. It needs to be done over again. It's wrong. We need the oracle to go to work on this. So, how do you deal with, um, an error in the system? Uh, cause this is taking a guess, I guess, square footage, whatever, right now, or is this the oracle did it?

• 1:07:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, um, this is the, not the oracle, it's the model itself.

• 1:07:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:07:17Speaker 04

  Oracle's a bit more, uh, checked and, uh, what is it, validated by real world professionals. But yeah, we have, we have these bugs come in right out of four here. Uh, one of them is incorrect. Right, these are all within that.

• 1:07:30Jason Calacanis?

  No problem. And, and that's the opportunity is to do this, all right? Uh, Sebastian, great job. Uh, let's stay in touch and, uh, yeah, come back in a year and show us your progress.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:39Jason Calacanis?

  I'm, I'm, I'm rooting for you.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:07:41Jason Calacanis?

  There it is, folks. Are we going off duty? Uh, am I doing my, um?

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  We can, we've got so much to talk about. Let's go off duty. There's so much going on and I know.

• 1:07:49Jason Calacanis?

  Or should I do my little, uh, tirade?

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  That's what we should lead off off duty. You've teased it. I think we need to hear this story about you getting shiv for half a mil. That's what the people want to know.

• 1:08:00Jason Calacanis?

  Ah, okay.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Now you're story.

• 1:08:03Jason Calacanis?

  Now I'm a story. I'm gonna tell the story without names.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:08:07Jason Calacanis?

  And then I'm gonna allow Alon to let me know if I should name names.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Okay, I'll, I'll be the adjudicator here.

• 1:08:13Jason Calacanis?

  I'm on the board of a company. It's a founder who I love, pivots the company. They've got an extraordinary brand name. They've got a great vision to build a content management system, uh, a CMS, right? 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, uh, syndicate puts a couple of hundred thousand in. We're okay with, with failure. It's not a big deal. But.

• 1:08:42Jason Calacanis?

  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, for their content management system, which by all appearances is doing extraordinarily well. They love the team, they want to buy it, yada, yada. So they, and one of the board members is already an investor in this company. So there's a bit of a conflict, but that's okay. There's conflict, no conflict, no interest. So this is all going down and they make an offer. And the offer is like, okay, the founders get taken care of. They get these great deals.

• 1:09:26Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, it's not life-changing money, but it's a soft landing. And I said, okay, well, what do the investors get? And the guy says to me, well, you get nothing. And I said, okay, well, let's jump on a phone call. Listen, here's what I propose.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:09:42Jason Calacanis?

  I'll be super supportive of the transition. I want to see the founders have a great exit, even if it's just landing the plane. And sometimes you just land the plane in this game. And you see, oh, a company was acquired on TechCrunch. And it turns out, nobody made any money.

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:09:58Jason Calacanis?

  And, but-

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  It was a space saving, everybody gets a soft landing. That happens all the time.

• 1:10:04Jason Calacanis?

  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 a proposition for you. I want to be a supporter of the transaction. And I'm going to support it either way. Because you don't want to be a scumbag and be like, I'm going to block the thing. But, you know, so I get on the phone with the founder. I said, here's an idea. Why don't you give the investors a token number of shares in your company?

• 1:10:45Jason Calacanis?

  So you could get us a save and then you, as the founder of this company who wants to acquire companies and talent in the future, can say, hey, you took care of the people in the investment community. I'm not asking for my cash back.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:11:00Jason Calacanis?

  I just want a token. So I can go back to my investors and say, hey, this wasn't a great acquisition, but we got, let's say, 500K on our 1.4 million invested. I think we're about 1.4 million invested in this company, which isn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. I just told you, I put 750K into.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  But it's the gesture.

• 1:11:18Jason Calacanis?

  It's literally a gesture. It's a goodwill gesture.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:11:23Jason Calacanis?

  This founder says, I don't have to do that. Because I'm hiring the entire team and this company's out of money and there's nothing you can do about it. So I'm hiring the team when this, because this company's going belly up, they can't make payroll.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:11:46Jason Calacanis?

  And you're SOL, Jay Cow, so why would I do that? And I say, okay, fair enough. Blank from blank company. Fair enough. I understand. And sure enough, he tells me that, essentially in so many words, to F off.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't have to and there's nothing you could do about it is the ver- is that F off in this sort of world? Yeah.

• 1:12:14Jason Calacanis?

  You know, listen, I'm not trying to throw my weight around. This happened over a year ago.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 1:12:18Jason Calacanis?

  But.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  I had a guess, but my guess was wrong because this happened over a year ago.

• 1:12:21Jason Calacanis?

  It's well over a year ago now.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:12:23Jason Calacanis?

  So I say to the guy, listen, I understand. I talked to the other board members of his company, who happens to be a great friend of mine. I say, do me a favor. This is making me mental now and it's not. It's because I'm being told that I'm gonna get screwed, that I'm deliberately gonna get screwed. There's a massive conflict of interest here because the asset and the team goes to this company.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:12:44Jason Calacanis?

  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 gonna change my life. It's for my LPs. It's for my syndicate members.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 1:13:15Jason Calacanis?

  He basically has the audacity to tell me that he's a huge fan of my work. And then he writes me essentially an apology letter.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:13:27Jason Calacanis?

  The first interaction, I'll just quote, "I have reflected on our conversation. Don't think it was a great first interaction between us and don't like that it ended the way, ended that way. So I wanted to share a couple of reflections. I'm sorry this didn't turn out." Uh, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  That's very diplomatic.

• 1:13:44Jason Calacanis?

  And then he's like, "I'll let you invest in our next round."

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  He almost got there. It was so close.

• 1:13:49Jason Calacanis?

  He almost got there.

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  It was so close.

• 1:13:51Jason Calacanis?

  And he, so close. So I talked to his, my friend who's on his board, chairman of his board, made a lot of money from this. I said, "Do me a favor. Just, just talk to this kid." Because he, he just literally, it's like you're in a basketball game and somebody throws an elbow at you on purpose.

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:10Jason Calacanis?

  And bust your nose. And then you say, "Hey, listen, that was not cool. You, you hit me in the nose with your elbow." You know, it was a flagrant.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:20Jason Calacanis?

  The flagrant foul.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:21Jason Calacanis?

  The guy, 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." And then he basically just tells me to F off. I've been sitting on this for a long time.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:32Jason Calacanis?

  Now I'm at a crossroads.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:34Jason Calacanis?

  Jason Ballard just told me, my, my, my brother in Christ told me.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  With peace and love.

• 1:14:39Jason Calacanis?

  I gotta have peace and love and grace.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:42Jason Calacanis?

  So, the company has a spectacular domain name.

• 1:14:48Jason Calacanis?

  And they're clearing out the assets and like the 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. How about just the domain? How much is the domain? Right. And they're like, well, we got 100 K off, 150 K off. I said, listen, let me stop you right there. I think the domain's worth 500 K, a million. I'm going to put in a, I'll double whatever the last bid was. I'll put in 250 K. Now I'm dealing with the lawyers doing the liquidation. And I said, listen, I insist that we do this right because the shareholders on the other side and I'll, just tell me what the bid is. I'll beat the

• 1:15:31Jason Calacanis?

  bid. He's like, well, I can't in fairness have you do that. I said, great. What was the last bid? Because we all need to know the last bid. Yeah. It's X amount. I said, okay, I'll put it up. I can't remember. I think it was like 250 K. Wow. I put up 250 K. I win the bid. 250 K goes to the investors in the, in the washout. So now I have that domain name. Yesterday, I realized that domain name would be the ultimate domain name for an AI-based browser. Hmm. Okay. So I talked to an old collaborator of mine. I said, listen, I want to build an AI-based browser with this domain name. He said, well, that's the, that's one of your best ideas ever. There's somebody I've worked with before. And I'm about to seed this company and launch it there. Yeah. But while I was thinking about it, you know, I did a little study of, you know,

• 1:16:16Jason Calacanis?

  these CMS systems, these headless CMS systems, et cetera. This is a huge, huge space. What's the headless CMS? It's like you store the data. You can use any presentation level. I mean, it is like one of the great spaces. And my friend, you know, I've had friends who have built content management systems. I was just gonna say. Movable type WordPress. Yeah, it's like a. There's tons of these things out there. And I looked at the Tao thing and boom, it hit me. A headless CMS, a content management system powered by Tao would be incredibly disruptive. Okay.

• 1:16:54Jason Calacanis?

  So I'm not naming this founder. I'm not naming the companies involved. Well, but you'll have to because the URL, we're going to figure it out eventually. At some point, you'll figure it out when I launch my AI browser. It will all come out in the wash. But now I need your counsel. Okay.

• 1:17:14Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  I mean, here's, 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, 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 gonna be in five years. The whole table gets shook up in five years. You never know who you're gonna be sitting across from, who you're gonna want to make a deal with, who's gonna be in a posi- So it's never really worth-

• 1:17:48Jason Calacanis?

  So don't name names, is your best advice.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:17:54Jason Calacanis?

  Thank you for talking me off a ledge. Thank you.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  Dead and gone. Like, if they're dead in the ground, they're never gonna be an issue again.

• 1:18:00Jason Calacanis?

  But I'm looking at the, you know what, my, I just, I'm looking at the picture of the founder.

• 1:18:06Jason Calacanis?

  And my Irish is up now, because-

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  The temptation, for sure, but you don't know, that guy and you might be in the same room in 10 years and you'll wish you hadn't picked a fight with them. You'll wish you could just have a drink and it's all-

• 1:18:17Jason Calacanis?

  Even though I got jumped, even though I got shipped, even though he got the better of me.

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  I mean, you got, you know, you're from one J.C., I think you gotta look to another and you gotta, you gotta turn the other cheek on this one.

• 1:18:27Jason Calacanis?

  So you're saying J.C. has to ask J.C. what J.C. would do?

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  I think W.W.J.D., you gotta ask yourself what the other-

• 1:18:34Jason Calacanis?

  What would Chris do? I'm gonna, I'm going to talk to Jesus right now.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  I think he'd forgive. I think he'd-

• 1:18:40Jason Calacanis?

  Jesus.

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  I think he'd say, "Yay, my son."

• 1:18:42Jason Calacanis?

  I've been wronged. What should I do?

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, the right, the righteous path is forgiveness and-

• 1:18:47Jason Calacanis?

  Jesus is coming in?

• 1:18:52Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, he says I should take the high road.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 1:18:55Jason Calacanis?

  I should do on to others as I would want to be done on to me, and I should turn the other cheek.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  That's, yes.

• 1:19:01Jason Calacanis?

  So I am turning the other cheek.

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  There you go. Very close.

• 1:19:05Jason Calacanis?

  However. However.

• 1:19:10Jason Calacanis?

  There is a business opportunity. And this person decided that his business interests were... I mean, I literally was asking him to give me, I think, 500K in options. I would, and I was willing, on the options, by the way, to pay the current price, just have warrants, which would have been point oh, point, it would have been 10 basis points, maybe, in the value of his company. And if he had done it, I would have him on this podcast, I would be tweeting for him, I'd be helping him. Just what I did with Jason, I said, "Hey, let me help you fill some things." He would have been on the podcast twice.

• 1:19:46Speaker 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 have been without hostility, you should have been..."

• 1:19:53Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  You know, like, you should have been more gracious and, like, make, figure out a way to make this feel okay so everybody feels like they got treated fairly. That's always how, how these situations should be.

• 1:20:04Jason Calacanis?

  So I put into my agent, "Give me a business plan, an open source, bit tensor business plan based on content CMSs." And I got back the most brilliant business plan.

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:20:18Jason Calacanis?

  I am, I did last week, two bounties. A thousand dollar bounty I did on Twitter, somebody can 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 a thousand dollars to whoever makes the most interesting one and open sources it." And I did five thousand dollars to build the real-time commentary agents on the podcast. And I think we got five people who built something?

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, more, more than five now, we're, we're, we're in business. It's gonna take-

• 1:20:58Jason Calacanis?

  So I now-

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  It's gonna take Jacob, like, a week to get through all of these different proposals that we've had.

• 1:21:04Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so this is, which one is this? Explain to people this.

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:21:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so like Wayback Machine plus Delicious, if you remember that bookmarking service.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  Oh, sure, wow, it's been a long time since I thought about that one.

• 1:21:24Jason Calacanis?

  So what I need is, I need a Chrome browser extension. I'm on a YouTube video- You know, like this video and somebody, anybody wants to either anonymously, pseudonymously, like Reddit or, you know, Twitter or whatever, they say, give me seconds, 30 to 60, clip it, put a transcript, analyze it with AI, and I want to put some commentary on it. I want to let my friends put some commentary. Completely fair use. Don't want to steal and rip other people's content, but if there's a story in the New York Times and you want to fisk it, if you remember fisking, F I S K I N G, pull up fisking from the Wikipedia. There was a dude on Usenet who used to fisk people and it became, fisking became the art of taking

• 1:22:05Jason Calacanis?

  apart somebody's argument by line by line annotating it. So that's my concept here.

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  Dude, it's, it's named for, uh, it's a Supreme Court. I'm going to look up the, the, the actual origin of fisking. Yeah, it was, uh, described the critical deconstruction of articles by British journalist Robert Fisk. That's what they were saying.

• 1:22:24Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Is he still alive? I want to have him on the program because fisking to me was like one of the most interesting things, uh, in the early days of the internet. I think this is like 90s internet, like it might've even been like pre web.

• 1:22:36Speaker 01

  No, we lost Robert Fisk in October of 2020 sadly.

• 1:22:40Jason Calacanis?

  Oh no, rest in peace. This guy was, this guy was a provocateur, uh, but he also raised the intellectual level. And when we started the web, Lon, fisking was like a way to engage intelligently and move a forward, uh, 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.

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  Yes, we've got the other one. We're, we're checking out the live sidebars. You're all, I'll, I'll pull up the tweet now. Uh, we do, we've gotten a lot. If you have submitted to us an AI sidebar based on this tweet, we are checking them all out. It's just going to take us a while because we're trying to do it live on the show. So Jacob is actually playing with our first, uh, submission today, uh, and we will-

• 1:23:24Jason Calacanis?

  And this will be in enhanced show notes, right? We'll put the, all the links in the enhanced show notes. If you look at the show notes on your- A podcast player or on YouTube's, you know, description.

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:37Jason Calacanis?

  We're doing enhanced show notes where we put like 20, 30, 40, 50 links in.

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  Can I, I designed a Claude skill to do this. It's working incredibly. So I, all I do is I take the transcript of the episode. I give it to Claude. It goes through, it gets it perfectly organized and it finds great URLs for everything that we talk about. I have to correct it. I would say one out of every 15 times it gets the link wrong and I have to fix it. But it's incredible. It's saving so much time.

• 1:24:03Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:24:03Speaker 01

  What a, what a discussion.

• 1:24:04Jason Calacanis?

  So if you're the type of person who takes notes and wants to learn from podcasts like I do and Lon does, this is like our gift to you and OpenClaw's gift to you is that you get in there. So we have two of these.

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  Not OpenClaw. My OpenClaw, he's locked away.

• 1:24:19Jason Calacanis?

  Great. Shout out Claude Cowork, shout out Perplexity Computer. Love the whole category. So we did a thousand dollars. We did $5,000.

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:28Jason Calacanis?

  I'm going to announce another $5,000 next week.

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 1:24:32Jason Calacanis?

  I'll do it a week from today. I have to have the time to write this. I got a big schedule.

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  We'll be back. We'll be right here.

• 1:24:36Jason Calacanis?

  I'm going to write my headless CMS, BitTensor, open source, $5,000 prize to build this opportunity. And the prize in this case, if it becomes a company, I'm going to ask for, I don't know, the ability to buy 5% of the company for, you know, whatever, 50K or something. Like be, be the original seed investor. You know, I just want the option.

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:25:06Jason Calacanis?

  If it works to have a little skin in the game. Why? Because if this works and I can get warrants or whatever, I might be able to make some of my previous investors whole. I don't want revenge here, but I do have unfinished business. I want to, I want to fix the ledge.

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:25:20Jason Calacanis?

  There's a ledger. We're going to fix the ledger. Now, what does this mean for the person who shivved me?

• 1:25:26Jason Calacanis?

  What is Tao good at, Lon?

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  Tao?

• 1:25:29Jason Calacanis?

  What is Tao good at? At its core, when you put a service on Tao versus a commercial proprietary service, what happens?

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  I think Tao, you've got this huge incentivizing plat... 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. You get... It's like a normal employee. But in Tao, you're creating these communities that are financially incentivized to create or to validate the things that are being created.

• 1:26:01Jason Calacanis?

  Correct.

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  So you create... It's sort of a...

• 1:26:02Jason Calacanis?

  What happens to the product category? The customer, what did they experience then? What did they experience when they engage those products? What value does a customer get?

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  Well, it's constantly being iterated and improved because you've got these huge incentivized communities that are...

• 1:26:18Jason Calacanis?

  A better product?

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  ...iterating constantly and creating the better, the better...

• 1:26:22Jason Calacanis?

  You nailed it. A better version. Then there's a second piece. Not only is it better, but it could be, if it works, better and...

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  Faster?

• 1:26:36Jason Calacanis?

  Cheaper.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  Oh, of course, cheaper, yes. Because...

• 1:26:39Jason Calacanis?

  Cheaper.

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  Right, because, because we are...

• 1:26:40Jason Calacanis?

  It's deflationary.

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  We're decentralizing everything. So if you think about it in terms of like, a company, a hyperscaler having to buy room after room after room full of GPUs to produce their work. With Tao, you're just sending that out to everybody who's got a GPU to spare.

• 1:26:55Jason Calacanis?

  Correct.

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:56Jason Calacanis?

  So what's happened here? I'm just gonna recap it.

• 1:26:59Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:27:02Jason Calacanis?

  When somebody does this to you, you have to be forgiving. Okay. Namaste. I've talked myself up the ledge. Thank you, Jason Ballard. Thank you, Lon, for your counsel. I'm taking the high road. But it also educated me on, hey, there's this really interesting company with a shark... Like who elbowed me in the face like this guy has this guy broke my nose in a basketball game for no good reason. And when I said, hey, you broke my nose, he told me to F off.

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  There's nothing you could do about it.

• 1:27:34Jason Calacanis?

  Nothing you could do about it. Hey, what are you gonna do? Sue me? No, I'm not gonna sue you. I'm gonna sue the founders. I'm gonna 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. It 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.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:07Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 1:28:23Speaker 01

  I think you hear that that narrative all the time from successful people is like, that that lit a fire under me. That negativity is what spurred me on. It's that it's that that Michael Jordan quote from The Last Dance, like, and I took that personally. Like, you know, I think.

• 1:28:37Jason Calacanis?

  Somebody make make a video.

• 1:28:42Speaker 01

  I'll try to.

• 1:28:43Jason Calacanis?

  Of me. Somebody make me looking at the iPad and saying, I took that personally. And then I will release the 5K bounty next week with the conditions, you know, of what.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  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 the back and forth with this person who wronged you.

• 1:29:05Jason Calacanis?

  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 something happened. He told me to F off.

• 1:29:19Jason Calacanis?

  I'll take you at your word. It wasn't personal. And me launching a Tao subnet

• 1:29:25Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:49Jason Calacanis?

  Together. And I'm bringing a squad with me. And our goal is to take the price of a content headless CMS. And we would like to take out 90% of the expense. That's the goal.

• 1:30:06Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:30:06Jason Calacanis?

  Remove 90% of the expense and make it available to everybody in the world, essentially, for free. Because when you take 90% of the cost out, you're essentially saying, I'm going to make this free for the good of humanity. And we'll play another basketball game.

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:24Jason Calacanis?

  We'll have round two. And this time, I'm not getting elbowed. And I'm not getting my nose broken.

• 1:30:31Speaker 01

  I mean, the Klingons say revenge is a dish best served cold. So that's...

• 1:30:36Jason Calacanis?

  It's not even revenge. I just, you know what? I'm in the arena. You showed me this incredible game. I'd like to try playing the game. Maybe it's only a 1% chance I make a business out of this, but maybe I could then go to my LPs who lost money in this and gift them some equity warrants that they didn't get. That's it. Enough already. I am at peace with this, but with peace and love, I'm going to suit up. And I took that person.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, there you go. That's what he did.

• 1:31:07Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's go off duty. Let's go off duty very quick. What do you got for me?

• 1:31:11Speaker 01

  So much stuff. Did you want to talk about these view buds? This was a thing you sent me on Twitter the other day. They're they're

• 1:31:16Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  There's a camera inside your earbuds that can...

• 1:31:21Jason Calacanis?

  Show me the, let's play the video and I'll give my feedback.

• 1:31:24Speaker 01

  I will, I will pull up the video as soon as I can get my, my mouse back over here.

• 1:31:28Jason Calacanis?

  This is, I saw this and I said, this is like a school project.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  Jacob's got it already. There it is. So view but.

• 1:31:33Jason Calacanis?

  Alright, so hit play.

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  So tiny cameras in each ear. Yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll play the video. So these are, yeah, you, 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 L L 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 one. Cameras activate, they stream images over Bluetooth to your phone or laptop. This is really clever. It's only going for a quick, like, three seconds after you say, "Hey, view." It's basically taking very quick photos

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:32:36Jason Calacanis?

  Very cheap.

• 1:32:37Speaker 01

  Can run on your device. So that's how you're sort of moving around the world, and it could do this without you hauling a data center on your back, and it could process the image, answer any spoken question, and it responds to you, Jason, right in your earbuds. So it's like you're having this conversation with your AI, but that has finally a.

• 1:32:56Jason Calacanis?

  This is brilliant.

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:33:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, right in the middle, like Poindexter, where you put the tape on your nerd glass.

• 1:33:16Speaker 01

  But they get around it with binocular vision. So by combining the left and right cameras, like, just like your eyeballs do, you don't see your nose, because it's, 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, that is really clever. And.

• 1:33:36Jason Calacanis?

  And this will lead me to my off-duty. Okay, let me just say this. This idea is brilliant.

• 1:33:43Speaker 01

  So good.

• 1:33:44Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, 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.

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  The team leader, he is Maruchi Kim. He's a PhD in CompSci and Engineering from University of Washington Seattle. He's now working at Google. He works on XR audio at Google.

• 1:34:07Jason Calacanis?

  We gotta get him out of Google and make this a startup if he wants to, or if anybody else wants to pursue something similar and they have hardware chops or they're just super motivated and have two friends. I'd love to incubate something similar because um, 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 PixelBuds or whatever. But you're in Japan and you're looking at the sushi menu or you're looking at the eel menu.

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:40Jason Calacanis?

  And it's in Japanese and it just starts reading to you what your options are and you're talking to it.

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  Amazing in Japan. I would have used this constantly in Japan. Yeah.

• 1:34:48Jason Calacanis?

  Correct. And now you're skiing. And I'm skiing and it's seeing what's in front of me and it says, hey, uh, these are the conditions. This is the route you're gonna go. This is, uh, you know, how you get back down to this lodge. Sometimes I'm in a new mountain. I, I, 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 the three minute wait. The one on the right has a 15 minute wait. There's all kinds of interesting things that developers will do when they get their hands on this.

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  The more you start thinking about it, the more you're like, oh, I would use this like constantly. I mean, they would just be all like shopping. Imagine like if you're in a store and you go live around like, how like look at the product. How much is this on Amazon right now? Like you can only imagine all of the uses.

• 1:35:38Jason Calacanis?

  Incredible. And when I saw this, I immediately thought, I am a fan of Sony AirBuds. Now, everybody goes for the Apple ones. The Sony ones are so much better and these are expensive folks. These are $300.

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:50Jason Calacanis?

  Um, and I've, I've bought two different versions of these. The Sony WF 1000XM6.

• 1:35:56Jason Calacanis?

  These are great noise cancelling, they, they, the batteries last forever. They're extraordinary. Now, they're expensive. Okay, fair enough. The last version is 50 bucks off, Sony WF1000XM5. And I actually prefer my, my, my XM5s better, they fit better. Um, if anybody has any tips on how to get the foam things to fit, that's what I've been having a, a challenge with is making them so they fit, so they're not, um, they don't hurt from extended use and they, and they don't fall out. You have a, like a real, um, decision you have to make. Yeah. So anyway, this is my, uh, that's my off duty for today is I really think this is just a great, great product. Uh, and then I have another amazing product.

• 1:36:40Jason Calacanis?

  I just want to add to our off duty because you know, I love gadgets, I love a good charger. And, uh, you know, I got the daughters and, um, I saw Anchor, my favorite brand. And they made a beautiful charger, uh, and what's really unique about this one, this is the Anchor, 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. And, uh, you gotta plug your thing in. Look at the 180 degree flexibility for your ideal view.

• 1:37:21Jason Calacanis?

  It's like maybe the fifth image down in, on the Amazon and what you'll see in the fifth image down, uh, is you can rotate the plug. There it is. See that one? Yes, yes. One more. The, 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.

• 1:37:47Jason Calacanis?

  For this specific phone, it knows I have an iPhone Air, it knows that you have iPhone 17. And then I have a bunch of different cables laying around. Turns out some of the USB C cables I have are not charging as fast and then other ones do.

• 1:38:01Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:38:01Jason Calacanis?

  So knowing what your charge speed is, is such an unlock with the 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 long. And they're dirt cheap. They're 30 bucks. This is so much better than anything Apple produces. Uh, you know, and they charge twice as much for half the product. Anyway, I love these chargers. I love all anchor products. Highly recommend you get this one. And then anchor says sells a two-headed USB C cable. So you, you, you got the daughters, you're, you've got iPads, you've got phones, you know, you're at the airport, you're on the road, you're in an Airbnb.

• 1:38:45Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, the dual sided cable that anchor makes, there it is.

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:49Jason Calacanis?

  This is a four foot two in one.

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  I have these.

• 1:38:51Jason Calacanis?

  USB C to USB C cable, 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.

• 1:39:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:05Jason Calacanis?

  This thing's a godsend. You put these two things together. They don't take up any space. You've got your phone and your laptop charging.

• 1:39:10Speaker 01

  It's events. 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, you just keep your anchor in your bag. It's the easiest solution in the world.

• 1:39:28Jason Calacanis?

  I gave you the charger, right?

• 1:39:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:31Jason Calacanis?

  I gave you the cable. Now I will give you one more in my anchor trio of happiness. I buy these two or three at a time. And then when I'm with a friend, I hand it to them and I gift it to them. I did this, uh, with a member of my, I got a high profile, uh, friend, one of my high profile friends, their chief of staff, we're, we're at an event. I think we're at the all in summit. I won't say who it was, but you can look at the people on stage and get an idea. And I'm charging my phone with this. They said, what's that? I said, this is a giant 25,000 milliamp. I don't know what these ratings are. And it's got two built in cables and it has pass through charging. So you plug those two USBcs, one of them into the wall, one of them into your phone.

• 1:40:12Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 1:40:19Speaker 01

  Milliamp hours. That's what M A H is right there. 25,000 milliamp hours. It measures electrical charge and watt hours to measure energy and voltage.

• 1:40:30Jason Calacanis?

  So you can plug four things into this. You can plug a cable into it, the holes and the cables and the outputs. It comes with two built in cables. So you're not searching for a cable. One of them's like a handle and cable. I put this in my backpack. I put one in my luggage. You've been with me in Japan. I pull this thing out. I'm not looking for, even when I'm on a plane, you know, the plugs on the plane are like eight watts. They 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 J Cal for dealing with battery issues. And anchor is chef's kit. You got your charger, you got your cable, you got your battery pack. I'm done, folks. That's my off duty.

• 1:41:13Speaker 01

  AMC has a new Silicon Valley show, Jason. Did you hear about this?

• 1:41:16Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I heard about this. This has got Galifianakis, my cousin. People don't know, but we're actually cousins.

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  It's got Billy Magnuson. 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, it's interesting. It's funny. There are some good characters. I could see it developing into something, but it does have, it's a, it's a sameness. It feels like the same kind of vibe as Silicon Valley. It feels like the same kind of vibe.

• 1:41:42Jason Calacanis?

  It's derivative.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  It's a little bit of that Mountain Head. Remember we watched that, 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, I, I didn't hate it, but I was hoping it was going to be a little bit more of a different angle.

• 1:42:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, they've been. The person who's the writer is a Silicon, is a secession, I guess, writer.

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:42:20Jason Calacanis?

  And they've been marketing it, not as the creative secession, but somebody who was in the writer's room, who knows what their providence is.

• 1:42:26Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, their name is Jonathan. Jonathan Glazer, they worked on secession, but they also worked on Better Call Saul, which I loved.

• 1:42:32Jason Calacanis?

  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, um, with the live, I've been looking for a new show. But when you watch these things, like, um, it's becoming a bit on the nose in terms of outsiders trying to write about the inside space and

• 1:42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:57Jason Calacanis?

  This secession 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 vacpid people who don't care about soc- It's just like, well, what if there, what if there's somebody in there who's like actually Jason Ballard, who actually is a good person? What if there's somebody like me, who actually is an empathetic-

• 1:43:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:43:28Jason Calacanis?

  -moderate person, who doesn't care about politics, doesn't want to dominate the world, just wants to make cool shit?

• 1:43:33Speaker 01

  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- And I'm not saying there's nobody in Silicon Valley that's like that.

• 1:44:15Jason Calacanis?

  Of course there are.

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:44:24Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it's in the name, the audacity of these people, you know? Oh, they're mendacious ass.

• 1:44:30Speaker 01

  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 already where it's coming from.

• 1:44:41Jason Calacanis?

  Let me tell you what would actually work. Let me tell you what would actually work, and maybe I should. Maybe you and I need to write a treatment.

• 1:44:48Speaker 01

  I think so. I think we could have the insider.

• 1:44:50Jason Calacanis?

  I think the treatment is really industry. Like, industry is not like, um, hey, we have an axe to grind. It's just young people and it's money and it's power.

• 1:45:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:04Jason Calacanis?

  And.

• 1:45:05Speaker 01

  It's more, it's gray area. Nobody on that show is.

• 1:45:08Jason Calacanis?

  It's all gray.

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  People on that show aren't evil or good. They're flawed. They're, they're three dimensional and, and.

• 1:45:15Jason Calacanis?

  They're people.

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:45:25Jason Calacanis?

  Gavin Belson, you know, um, the guy who runs the incubator, um, in that show.

• 1:45:33Speaker 01

  In Silicon Valley.

• 1:45:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I forgot his name and the actor's name who was in Deadpool.

• 1:45:38Speaker 01

  That's, um.

• 1:45:39Jason Calacanis?

  Called him.

• 1:45:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:40Jason Calacanis?

  They claimed he called in a bomb threat on a train.

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:43Jason Calacanis?

  Remember that?

• 1:45:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:44Jason Calacanis?

  Fiasco.

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm, I've, I've met this guy and now I'm, but TJ Miller, right? Is that him?

• 1:45:49Jason Calacanis?

  TJ Miller, who crushed it. And then some people were like, oh, that's Jake Allen.

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  Well, but Gavin Belson, in, in Silicon Valley, that's a different character. Gavin Belson is the guy who runs Hooly, the Google.

• 1:45:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, the Google owner was nothing like Sergey or Larry.

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  TJ Miller was a different, different guy. And then this one too.

• 1:46:04Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, all the.

• 1:46:05Speaker 01

  It's all, it's, it's an alternate reality. There's no real companies in this show, The Audacity, but the big company that everybody is sort of wants to be, Cupertino is the name of that company. So you could.

• 1:46:15Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so it's Apple.

• 1:46:16Speaker 01

  It's obvious who it's supposed to be. You know, but it's, I, I don't know. I feel like it's not as realistic.

• 1:46:21Jason Calacanis?

  I'll watch it. I'll give my judgment on, uh, off duty next.

• 1:46:24Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 1:46:24Jason Calacanis?

  Friday, when I release my headless CMS towel project.

• 1:46:30Speaker 01

  Exciting.

• 1:46:30Jason Calacanis?

  And I release my bounty and my, uh, and my, uh, instructions on, uh, what the competition will be. All right, everybody. It's been another great week of twists. Uh, there's a secret twist, um. Uh, group on-

• 1:46:43Speaker 01

  Oh wow, the group chat, yeah.

• 1:46:45Jason Calacanis?

  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 TWY Startups account and we'll add you if you're a true fan of the show.

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  We'll think about it. We'll think about it. It's getting protected.

• 1:46:56Jason Calacanis?

  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. So we just talk about the show every day and what we're gonna have in the next episode.

• 1:47:02Speaker 01

  A lot of memes.

• 1:47:03Jason Calacanis?

  Have a great weekend. Bye-bye.