3D printing a housing revolution with Jason Ballard of ICON

“If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, then we’re going to get what we’ve got—and what we got ain’t working.” ICON Co-founder/CEO and proud Texan Jason Ballard believes that a radically different approach to construction holds the key to creating affordable housing and solving homelessness for the entire globe. This week on How I Built This Lab, Jason’s venturesome path to inventing advanced technology that prints disaster-resilient homes from concrete—at a fraction of the traditional time and cost. Plus, a look at the Moon for more of Earth’s building solutions... This episode was researched and produced by Carla Esteves, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Neal Rauch. You can follow HIBT on X https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 5:07Guy Raz?

  Visit mobilefuels.com for details. Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So a lot of places in the US and in cities around the world are dealing with housing shortages. And these shortages are leading to all kinds of social and economic problems, things like really high home prices and even homelessness. Part of the problem is zoning, but the other part is the cost to build a house, especially with inflation. But imagine you could cut those costs by 2/3 or even more, and you could still build a great, high-quality, energy-efficient home.

• 5:47Guy Raz?

  Well, this is what Jason Ballard set out to do. A few years ago, he started a company called Icon, and the idea was to use 3D printing technology to build houses. Fast forward to today, and the company has built dozens of these houses in Texas and in Mexico, with hundreds more in the planning stages. Now, before he launched Icon, Jason ran an eco-friendly building supply store called Treehouse with his college classmate Evan Loomis. But while Treehouse grew pretty quickly and has been largely successful, it wasn't long before Jason started to think about ways to make an even bigger impact.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  At the time, it was more like, could Treehouse be doing more? Like, because I was the CEO and founder of that company, and so that's where my focus was. And so I kind of made a list of things that I wanted to be true about the way that we build. I wanted it to be sustainable, I wanted it to be affordable, I wanted it to be deployable at scale and with some speed, I wanted it to be beautiful, sort of respecting human dignity. And eventually, it was only 3D printing that, like, actually, I believed had the possibility of checking all the boxes. And so the first thing I did is I brought the idea to the board of directors of Treehouse. And I sort of explained all the research I had done, and I wanted us to invest in like a small amount of research and development to see if there was something here.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  And they said, Jason, that's, you know, we love your heart, and we sort of respect what you're saying, but that is actually like not our business. Like, we're a retail and services company. And so I went away for a quarter, and I came back to the next board meeting and said, hey, I respect that, but I can't shake this idea, and I would really like to pursue it. Do you mind if I work on this on nights and weekends? And this is actually a tricky question for your CEO, because like, sort of almost legally, all of your creativity and work belong to the company you're working for. So we actually drafted up paperwork that said, you know, like, all of Jason's intellectual property and creativity belongs to trust, except when he's working on 3D printing. And so with the board's permission, I began, on my own dime and my own time, researching this, kind of nights and weekends.

• 7:52Guy Raz?

  Okay, you're researching this idea like, could we 3D print a house? Or could we 3D print homes that would tick all the boxes that need to tick? Environmentally sustainable, affordable, beautiful, et cetera. And of course, 3D printing technology was coming online and people were starting to even have little 3D printers at home. A lot of the material used at that time, and even now, was plastic-based, right? You are thinking about, okay, can this be environmentally sustainable? So initially, what materials were you thinking that would be used to build these homes?

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I definitely initially thought you would want to use more conventional residential building materials. So like, things related to the things I know that we can build houses out of. I had, as a person who'd been following and involved in like, technologies for a bit, I had long suspected, like, there's some misapplication of 3D printing technology, right? We were using it to make small things that were already mass-produced, very affordably. Like, a lot of times, people were 3D printing coffee mugs and spoons and stuff. It's like, we already have a lot of those, and they're made really cheaply. It's like, it occurred to me that 3D printing would actually be super valuable when something was large, bespoke, and made very slowly. Like, that would be an opportunity. And so, a house is a perfect use case, right?

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Houses are quite large, they're constructed rather slowly, over months and years, and they're very expensive. And so, that would be an opportunity for 3D printing to actually make an improvement on the way that we build. And so, I started working on that. And then, I sort of called my old partner in crime, Evan Loomis. And he and I started meeting with anyone we could, just to like, learn fast. We took little classes on 3D printing. We ordered every book on 3D printing off of Amazon, started meeting with other 3D printing companies, just to learn and soak up the knowledge really fast. And we were introduced to another gentleman here in Texas, that kept coming up, named Alex LaRue. People kept telling us, there's this other guy here in Texas, who is working on 3D printed houses, and you all have to meet.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Alex is like, a true mechanical engineer. And Evan was sort of this background in like, business and investing. And so, at some point, somebody said out loud at a lunch or something, "We should just all be working together." And then, we did.

• 10:14Guy Raz?

  Wow. All right. You joined forces. Let me, let me ask you about a huge part of how you were going to make this happen, and that was concrete. You essentially land on this idea that concrete could be, this is before you figured out how, but you thought concrete probably is going to be the best material to use to 3D print a house. Now, it's interesting because concrete production, we've done this on the show, we've talked to people working on green cement and things like that, but still, as you know, it accounts for between 4% and 8% of carbon emissions. It is a carbon-intensive material, right? And so you would think that like woods or wood polymers or things like that might be better for the environment.

• 10:57Guy Raz?

  Tell me about concrete. Why did you land on concrete?

• 11:00Speaker 01

  You know, luckily, kind of having spent at that point, I had spent like over a decade in like sustainability and sustainability innovation. And I knew that sort of like, the carbon that you're referring to is the carbon atmospherically released during the chemical reaction that produces Portland cement. That's the sort of, that 4% to 8% stature.

• 11:19Guy Raz?

  Yes, right.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  But I knew that's not the whole story, right? There's also like, the sort of operational carbon of like, how does the building perform? Because like, these are the issues we're fighting with stick-built homes, right? Is that they're very energy inefficient, like, you know, stick frame houses are, you have to insulate the heck out of them. So I knew enough about the situation to know like, the, the carbon related to Portland cement production is an ingredient in concrete.

• 11:43Guy Raz?

  And Portland cement, for people who, who haven't heard our interviews on cement, is the most common type of cement used around the world.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Correct. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so it's an ingredient in almost every concrete used in the world. And so I knew that was probably problematic. So that's in the negative column. But in the positive column, you have almost certainly a more energy-efficient house, almost certainly a more resilient house, almost certainly a, a more fireproof, mold-proof, waterproof house, which are all sort of positives in the sustainability column. And so when you sort of did the whole accounting, sort of the life cycle accounting, there was a good argument to be made then and now, that a house made of like more resilient, energy-efficient materials on the, on a life cycle actually would produce less carbon than one that was not.

• 12:26Guy Raz?

  I, I, yeah, I mean, I remember back in early 2000, 2000, maybe late 90s, I was

• 12:35Guy Raz?

  I was the Berlin correspondent for NPR at the time, and they had just built the new chancellor, German chancellor's residence, and it was entirely built out of concrete in Berlin. It was really controversial at the time, but the argument then was this is actually the most efficient building material. I remember going into that, and you know, it was very cool in the summer, and it was quite nice and warm in the winter. It was really interesting. And so it makes sense to me that when you account for the efficiency of concrete as a, you know, in, once you're actually using a home, then that carbon sort of footprint is reduced, essentially.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then if you replace, like, that number, that four to eight percent of global CO2 emissions being related to like cement production used in concrete, if you replace concrete with anything, that number goes up. If you try to replace it with plastic, if you try to replace it with steel, think about where you use concrete. Like, either we have to like go backwards as a civilization, which doesn't seem like the right recipe, or if you replace that with anything, we're going, we're going to get worse. And so the way forward, it felt like, was to innovate around concrete and cement production. That felt like the way forward, rather than going backwards or accepting an increase in carbon.

• 13:50Guy Raz?

  I want to just kind of ask you about materials in homes, because most of us listening have drywall in our homes. It's like you have a wood frame house, and you need to be insulated, and then the drywall is a form of insulation, but also it's, it's very useful because you can nail things into it, you can tear it out, you can put it back in, you can put holes in it. I owned a home a few years ago. We had flooding from one of these atmospheric rivers in California, and, you know, 14 inches of drywall had to be cut out of the entire bottom floor of my house. And, you know, it's, it's a pain. But But you also, from what I read, have had some experiences with hurricanes. I think your childhood home was damaged by hurricane and that was really devastating.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's true. I'm glad you picked up on that detail. So yeah, growing up on the Gulf Coast of Texas, my parents' home and my whole town, like 95% of the town was substantially damaged in that hurricane.

• 14:50Guy Raz?

  It's Hurricane Ike, I think, right?

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Correct. And we, you know, everyone in town had to tear out all of the interiors of their entire home, the floors, the drywall. It was very emotionally devastating and exhausting, disgusting work. And then I watched this, put it right back together with the same materials that we had just seen in a very painful way are not fit to purpose for this environment.

• 15:18Guy Raz?

  Drywall.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Right. All these sort of unresilient materials.

• 15:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Are materials that are not suitable for almost any climate. Like if I offered you a million dollar prize, or the whole audience listening to this show, a million dollar prize to come up with a building material that could actually pass building code, that was more cheaply and poorly made than drywall, nobody would win the contest. It's literally the worst building material we have been able to invent.

• 15:46Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, Jason makes his concrete printing idea a reality with the help of some sleepless nights and maxed out credit cards. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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• 19:17Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2017 and Jason, along with his wife and kids, are working on nights and weekends to build a 3D printer that can make homes out of concrete. And they're doing this as a side project while Jason is running his building supply company, Treehouse. And then, an opportunity comes along.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  And then eventually, a customer emerges who has seen what we've done at Treehouse and says, "If you guys could actually 3D print a house, we would have a project for you. But you have to prove that you could do it." And that customer is a really innovative housing nonprofit called New Story. They came out of San Francisco, they went through the famous Y Combinator program. And the two co-founders found out about what we were doing and said, "We agree that we need to innovate new ways to deliver affordable housing, and we're willing to take some risks." We were founded as a risk-taking nonprofit. And if you guys can actually print a house, then we have a project for you in Mexico." And so then the game is on, right?

• 20:24Speaker 01

  And now it's like, suddenly, I, myself, Evan, Alex, we then very quickly start spending a lot of money. I think I maxed out three credit cards.

• 20:35Guy Raz?

  Huh. Okay, so you're spending money like crazy, money you don't really have, to build this prototype of a 3D-printed home made almost entirely from concrete. And how big was this home going to be?

• 20:50Speaker 01

  In the neighborhood of 500 square feet was the initial target.

• 20:54Guy Raz?

  So like a large hotel room, basically?

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, like a studio home, or like an accessory dwelling unit sort of scale thing.

• 21:03Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  And we hired some engineering consultancies to like, help us like, fine tune a few things. We found a buddy who owned some land that would let us do the print and we self-funded the original printer called the Vulcan One and we self-funded the construction of this house.

• 21:24Guy Raz?

  All right. So you've got, you start to really work on this, on this printer and you, and you have this, all these friends and you call in a bunch of favors to design a house and you start working on this thing. But now, let's talk about concrete, right? I mean, everyone's seen a cement truck and, you know, and the concrete comes out and it's poured in, in foundation and there's people with, you know, these like, large tools that are smoothing it out and stuff. How do you make it so it's like soft serve ice cream and it's, you know, and it, and it works exactly as you need it to work? I mean, was it a matter of just changing the proportion of ingredients or adding additives to, to make it work? Like, because you're essentially creating a new kind of concrete is what you, what you had to do.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Correct. Um, yeah. So this, this, this exact problem, the sort of bundle of problems around the material science and of concrete and concrete behavior have been like the most bewitching and challenging because it's, it's what's called, what the fancy people call a non-Newtonian fluid, which means its properties change based on the kind of pressures it's under. So like a typical concrete, if you tried to 3D print with them, you'd have a puddle instead of a house because it would flow right out. But then they have these quick curing concretes that if you tried to print with those, your whole machine would turn into a brick. Like it wouldn't even-

• 22:43Guy Raz?

  Right. It would harden inside. Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Correct. And so getting material that will flow through your system and then harden rather quickly with enough precision that you can install doors and windows into it at the end. Was and is like a very challenging set of problems.

• 23:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah, cuz I'm thinking like, there's so many variables. The concrete can harden in the tubes of the printer.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Oh, and boy, and boy, has it.

• 23:10Guy Raz?

  That's it.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, been there, done that. Every problem you can have with concrete, we have had. And to this day, our highest concentration of PhDs at Icahn is in the material science department. I mean, it's like, like proper, like, engineering and scientific breakthroughs, right? To get concrete to behave this way.

• 23:28Guy Raz?

  So how did you come up with the material that could build this prototype house?

• 23:31Speaker 01

  We, we had some smart friends and advisors and like, we were just doing just good enough. Right? Like, material we used then passed every single test that the city of Austin and every permitting authority and the structural engineers threw at us. But it's not the material we use today, so we've continued to improve. So we got it good enough. But you wouldn't have known that for sure at the start of the project, right? I mean, it was, as a matter of fact, we got halfway through the house. And some, we were buying sort of the concrete as a dry mix, like a dry powder. And it was dewy in the mornings and the bags were sitting out there on the job site. And it ruined a bunch of the bags of the concrete. And then we, like, last minute, had to order more concrete. Because we had already announced that we were going to be unveiling something special at South by. So the clock is running.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  And so I, we were out of money, all my credit cards. So I called my wife and said, Jenny, I think we are going to finish this house. But I actually have to go get another credit card and I'm going to immediately max it out. And she did not bat an eye. She was like, this is so important, Jason, like, let's go, like, we're in this together. I mean, her, her whole energy and enthusiasm was like, uh, of course, dummy. Like, that's why we're married. And so we got one more credit card, immediately maxed it out on a, on a concrete order. And I finished printing the house like 48 hours before we unveiled it at South by Southwest.

• 24:53Guy Raz?

  Wow. All right, so you get this, you make it in time to unveil your, your company and your business at South by Southwest. And you've got this house. Now meantime, what happens to TreeHouse? Did you, what happens to the job there?

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so actually, the chairman of the board of TreeHouse came to the unveiling of the house. His name is Garrett Booty. He was one of the founders of the Container Store. And he was like very proud and happy. And it was clear that all of a sudden, like, I had a decision to make. Everything from let Icon go its happy way, let TreeHouse go its happy way, try to be the CEO and president of both. So had some long prayers and walks and talks with my wife. And we decided that we felt like with, with the lives we've been given, like, the most impactful thing we could do would be to pursue, continue to pursue this, like, construction automation, the sort of the path that Icon had laid out for us. And so I resigned at TreeHouse with gratefulness and thanks.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  And they brought on another CEO to run that company. And I went full time at Icon.

• 25:59Guy Raz?

  Full time. So now you've got this house, and it was a big splash. I think the, at the time, the, the, the coverage of it said it was built, it was printed in a day. It cost us $4,000. It wasn't entirely correct. I mean, it took a little bit longer than just a day to make, but.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly correct. Probably the accurate way to say, like, I had it printed perfectly. It could have printed in 24 hours. That, that got lost in all the headlines.

• 26:28Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  But it did not account for, like, the windows and the walls and.

• 26:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  But the, all that, you know, I learned, actually, I learned, that was a lesson that enforced its own penalty. For the next several years, I, we got, like, nonstop calls of people trying to order $4,000 houses.

• 26:43Guy Raz?

  $4,000 homes, yeah.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  And it was like, by God, I am going to speak much more clearly in the future. But at the time, we, you have to understand also, like, we hadn't slept in days. We didn't even know if it would work until 48 hours before. All of a sudden, we won the South by Southwest Startup Showcase. There were, like, press and people crawling all over and, like, sticking microphones in my face and asking questions. And they're like, how much did it cost to print? And I just, I didn't have the presence of mind or the thoughtfulness.

• 27:11Guy Raz?

  But still, it cost, I mean, even if it cost $10,000, it was a remarkable achievement.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. It was a remarkable achievement.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  And it became the basis that we were then able to raise money and start a real company.

• 27:27Guy Raz?

  So on the strength of that, you were able not only to raise money, but you had this promise from this nonprofit, this Y Combinator-backed nonprofit called New Story, to build, to work with them. I guess they wanted to build inexpensive, resilient homes in a poor part of Mexico. And this is going to be your first project, I should mention, right?

• 27:50Speaker 01

  That's right. It's going to be our first sort of scaled project. Now, what happened between them is New Story was very proud and excited, like, ready to, "Let's pack it up and let it go. Let's go to Mexico." And we said, "Actually, that was rather painful. There's a few changes we would like to make to the printer." For instance, the pumping system completely crapped out. It never worked. And so we were actually with buckets, hand-loading the printer. So our joke to this day is like, it was an artisan 3D-printed house. And so we sort of said, "Hey, if we could have a little bit more time, there's some real upgrades we would like to make before we head down to Mexico."

• 28:20Guy Raz?

  And you needed this constructed for you, like, custom-built for you, this printer?

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Oh, everything about this. Everything about this is custom. That's exactly right. We're making one printer at a time. You're not yet to like factory-scale production.

• 28:33Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  And so New Story says, "Yeah, of course. We have to make the upgrades." And so we raised money, a few million dollars, and used that money to hire other engineers, hire help, hire proper material scientists, lease some space. And we get to work, sort of doing like a version two. And so we partnered with a local nonprofit called Community First Village here in Austin, which does the most remarkable work I've ever seen with people experiencing chronic homelessness. And so we reach out to them and say, "Hey..." We need to validate this 3D printer works before we send it to this other project. And like, oh yeah, we heard about you guys and we'd be delighted. And so it was a cool opportunity to like, to do some real good in our hometown and to

• 29:17Speaker 01

  form what has turned into like a long-term partnership. And so the next print we did was a unit out there at Community First Village that is still there and used and occupied. That went really well. The house was like twice as big. We did it sort of twice as fast and like it, it was good enough to like, say, we're ready to go to Mexico.

• 29:36Guy Raz?

  I mean, let's talk about this project in Mexico, in Tabasco. How many houses were they, did the new story, was new story financing?

• 29:44Speaker 01

  It was, it was a pilot project of 10 homes.

• 29:47Guy Raz?

  Okay. And this was going to be your first large-scale project. How long did it take you to build those 10 homes?

• 29:54Speaker 01

  It took, sort of the whole project from like shipping down there, getting set up, finding local concrete providers, et cetera. It took about a year to do the whole project.

• 30:03Guy Raz?

  And now people live there?

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, now people live there and it feels like to so quickly go from like a dream to like real impact in the world is like, man, if this thing went bankrupt today, I'm already pretty proud of what we've done.

• 30:15Guy Raz?

  Wow. And by the way, a lot of people think that concrete isn't a good material in earthquake-prone areas, but actually that was tested in Mexico, I think, your homes.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, that's a very active seismic area and so we designed the houses to be seismic. I did go through a bunch of seismic testing, seismic evaluation, seismic, structural and civil engineering. And then not long after we finished the project, it received a magnitude 7.2 earthquake that actually caused like very extensive regional damage and no damage at all to the 3D printed houses. And how rarely that is the story for the very poor.

• 30:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Right? They're like, they are not usually the ones getting access to these like breakthrough materials and methods. And so again, it was just like very gratifying to like, to be kind of putting these kind of results out in the world so quickly in the life of the company.

• 31:06Guy Raz?

  All right. Let's describe for a moment how the houses are made. So you've got a giant. People shouldn't imagine like a laser printer, but more like a large, I don't know, you'd use something you would see in like a port, you know, with shipping containers, right?

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that architecture, that design, that structure you're referring to is called a gantry. It's two towers with a beam suspended between them. And the towers move back and forth on rails. And then the beam moves up and down on the towers. And that allows you to move with like, pretty remarkable precision, almost to any location you specify in three dimensional space, within the print area.

• 31:46Guy Raz?

  And so basically, like a 3D printer that, you know, uses plastic filament, you basically are using concrete. And this giant thing has the architecture fed into it, you know, via a computer. And then the printer basically prints a layer. It's like soft serve. It spouts, it pours out a layer of concrete. And then it stops. It lets it dry, right?

• 32:12Speaker 01

  No, it keeps moving.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  And by the time you're ready for the next layer, then the layer below it is ready to receive that layer.

• 32:21Guy Raz?

  Ah, okay. And so it's a layer at a time?

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you look at like the layers in the Grand Canyon, it's like it's depositing material in layers, which accounts for that, like, the appearance of 3D printing. Those lines and stripes come from that process.

• 32:35Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And so once that's built and it's got the holes in the, to sort of the, for plumbing and electric that humans will put in, you don't need any other insulation? The concrete alone does all that?

• 32:49Speaker 01

  The concrete alone in many climate zones does all that. And then if you wanted, you could just make the wall thicker. But often we do include insulation.

• 32:58Guy Raz?

  Got it, okay. All right, so it's 2019. And you guys have successfully built a community of these 3D printed studio homes in Mexico. And I guess now you're starting to sort of get flooded with requests from, you know, particularly American developers who want to partner with you. At that time, how did you decide which projects to say yes to?

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, so after we got back from Mexico, we did one quick little project with an innovative developer group called Three Strands. And the focus of, so every project in the early days had like a real purpose, like a box we wanted to check or something we wanted to prove to the world.

• 33:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  And what we wanted to prove with that project with Three Strands is that you could Because at that time, everybody's like, oh yeah, those are tiny homes for homeless people. It's not really going to help the global housing crisis, all these sorts of things. And so we felt like it was time to prove that we could build a house of sufficient quality and beauty, that a working class American would buy it, you could get a mortgage on it, sort of all those things. That was sort of the goal of that project. So we did four homes on 17th Street in East Austin.

• 34:00Guy Raz?

  And what was the cost of each finished home?

• 34:03Speaker 01

  So the, I think the, the, they're four, all four were different sizes. I think the cheapest of them was like in the $400,000 range and the most expensive was like in the seven or $800,000 range, if memory serves me correctly. It's sort of like plus or minus the median house price in Austin, right? And so that was a huge success for us, right? That, um, you know, you believe in what you're doing, of course, but will people actually put like several hundred thousand dollar commitment is real belief, right? People are making like decisions about their lives with real resources. And so that was sort of like another big moment for us, that the house could get appraised, that it would you know, like all the sort of things you had to do to, to build and sell houses on the open market.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  And one thing that was beginning to eat us at that moment was, you know, people were pointing to homes they knew and asking us to 3D print those homes.

• 34:51Guy Raz?

  Homes that, like what, like Frank Lloyd Wright's style homes?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  No, like just rather, rather than some of the homes you're used to, they're squares, like squares and rectangles, but it's like, there's all these opportunities to do like some really innovative things with 3D printing, things, opportunities around aesthetics, but also

• 35:08Guy Raz?

  Like curved walls and just like crazy funky.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  You've got things that look expensive, but are the same price to print as a straight line.

• 35:17Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  But also some of those things can add real strength and energy performance, right? If I have a straight piece of paper, if we had a video and I stood the paper up a follower, but if I bent the paper, it would stand up with no additional reinforcement or material changes. So that, that, that, that sense that like shape can create strength. There's all these opportunities that would add no cost to a building, but that 3D printing gives you for free, but people didn't really know how to imagine or think about it. So we realized we couldn't like wait on the world to innovate for us. We needed to do, we needed to show the world what 3D printing made, made possible. And so we did a sort of purposefully high end, experimental kind of avant garde house that we called House Zero, that we unveiled that following year. It was like a bomb going off between, because in the same year, we sold homes at market rate that were

• 36:03Speaker 01

  3D printed and showed that an entirely new architecture and design language is possible with 3D printing.

• 36:08Guy Raz?

  We're going to take another quick break, but when we come back, Jason's vision for the future of home construction and Icon's plans for 3D printing on the moon. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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• 37:37Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. Here's more from a conversation with Jason Ballard, co-founder and CEO of 3D Printing Construction Company Icon.

• 37:48Guy Raz?

  So you basically, you proved this out and I know you went on to attract a lot more interest from investors and I think to date you've raised over $450 million. Because this is a, this is a big ambitious project. Just as you were really kind of hitting your stride, you had a pretty big setback. A fire really damaged your, your main facility.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. The fire happened on Black Friday, like the morning after Thanksgiving, like at two or three in the morning, I get a call that like the HQ is on fire.

• 38:24Guy Raz?

  In, in 2022?

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Correct. And

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Had it happened at any other moment, it would have wiped out the entire company. For a long time, that was our only building. And all of our printers, everything we had was in that building. But we had just opened a second building that we were using as like a factory to make the printers. So almost the entire fleet, except for one test printer, was out of the building. Because it was a holiday, no humans were in the building. And so we ended up, the losses were largely sentimental. Like I had, like the very first printer that printed that Chacon houses in that building and melted into a pile of aluminum slag. And it was sort of like the Wright Brothers airplane getting burned up. I had a lot of like notes from customers and pictures like from the early days of News Stories, like some of those like early, like very sentimental, like things that are like kind of priceless and irreplaceable.

• 39:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  And so I still treasured those things in my heart. But the things that we needed to keep, keep moving. We still had, we still had the fleet, we still had the people.

• 39:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  All the software was in the cloud and we really, we were like back to work on Monday morning.

• 39:31Guy Raz?

  Wow, okay. So, so shortly after that, you were awarded a contract from NASA. And this is, this is a completely different part of your business that you're now focused on. They essentially want you to one day 3D print structures on the moon. So, and this is, this is real, like there's a timeline, there's an expectation that you're going to do this maybe with even within 10 years.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Oh, that would be way too long. It better be sooner than that. Yeah, we got a contract to develop a construction system as part of the Moon to Mars program. So it's a construction system that's supposed to be for the moon, but it should also be easily repurposed for Mars. That's, that's the sort of the actual contract. You know, the new Artemis program, which is kind of like the successor, at least the spiritual successor to the Apollo program from the, from the 60s, wants to return to the moon. But this time it's like, we want to return to the moon to stay. And when you want to go and stay, you need things like power and life support system. But you also need like lots of infrastructure, landing pads, roads, habitats, shelters. So we've actually got to be able to build on other worlds.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  And this has actually been on ICOM's radar from the very beginning, but it was always a belief. This is like a tool that needs to be in humanities toolkit of the way that we build and construct things. And these advanced tools make all kinds of things possible. They will help us solve big problems on Earth. They will help us pursue really cool opportunities on Earth, like domes and arches and vaults and all these kind of incredible ways of building and designing that like we don't think are on the menu right now. But one of the cool things it makes possible is building in space and on other worlds. And my belief is that these things all go together. We've been stick framing homes for hundreds or even a thousand years. And it's not like we're going to discover some

• 41:25Speaker 01

  secret breakthrough in stick framing homes. It's going to allow us to solve homelessness. If we keep doing what we've been doing, then we're going to get what we've got. And what we got ain't working. And so I think it will be the tools of an advanced civilization that let us solve some of these like very difficult and thorny problems. And so I think it may just turn out that the answers to some of our problems on Earth are going to be found on the moon.

• 41:50Guy Raz?

  You're in Texas, which is a tends to be a pretty friendly environment to business and a less regulated environment than California where I am. California, as you know, very challenging place to build anything. But still, I imagine there's still quite a few obstacles, even in Texas, to building. Just the regulatory environment about home building is challenging. You know, how big can it be? Where can it be? What materials, you know? So what are the hurdles you have to get through, aside from money, but just the regulatory hurdles, to make this something that you could do everywhere quickly? Because like if you could build a community in a couple of months, building each house in two

• 42:33Guy Raz?

  weeks, that, I mean, you know, we're talking about a revolution in home building.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're definitely after a revolution. And so in the early days, the first time we went into a permitting office in Austin and said, we'd like a permit to 3D print a house. And he saw that they stared at me like a cow staring at a shut gate. And you know, they didn't know what I was talking about, or if they were being pranked. And so we began, you know, a long series of like tests and verifications and second tests and second verifications. At this point, the actual performance of 3D printed buildings is like rather well understood. And qualify at least the way Icahn builds them. There are now, you know, the International Building Council, the International Code Council now actually has regulations on the books for how to permit and regulate and judge 3D printed homes.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  So a lot of that, I hope, is now behind us. It's about, you know, each new municipality, like agreeing with those things. So I don't think we have to like go back to square one on those things. The biggest regulatory hurdle in front of us right now, in terms of like proceeding with the revolution, is the, the building codes around how long you can do construction. The printers are actually like very quiet, right? There's no, there's no nail guns, there's no circular saws, there's no hammering. But the building code says you have to stop at 7pm, but these machines are designed to just turn them on and print. And so, right now, like, I could print homes in one week, for sure. But it's taking, it's taking us two weeks, which means even with robotic construction, the cost is still materials and labor.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  And so the, the humans that do operate those machines, I now, we have two weeks of labor cost, instead of one week of labor cost.

• 44:13Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  And so like, these kinds of regulations are actually preventing costs from coming down even further. And so like, I think we're going to realize, we've been building the same way for so long, people are beginning to see that like, oh, these regulations were written for a very specific paradigm that may not apply when we're building in new ways.

• 44:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah. They're just, it's, there's so much red tape. It's challenging.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  It's a, we have to legalize construction.

• 44:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So, I mean, you know, as you know, I mean, there's an affordability crisis in, in many cities. You're in Austin, that's a place where that crisis exists. I'm in north of San Francisco. You know, massive, massive problems here with, with homelessness and unhoused folks. I mean, you are talking about something that can really be stood up quickly and can be done affordably. And so let's, let's just talk about homelessness for a moment. I mean, I imagine that there are lots of organizations and groups like the one, like the one you worked with in Mexico, that have approached you and have said, look, can we do this?

• 45:25Guy Raz?

  Can we build like villages for people to house them? What, tell me about those conversations or that interest that you've had, if at all.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, we definitely have them. And in fact, like, we'll have hundreds of more homes for the very poor and the homeless coming online in the near term future with some partners you've heard of and some you haven't heard of yet. But again, that's sort of like their news to share. So that continues to be like a very important part of the work of Icon and like a big reason why the company exists. One thing we have done that we have talked about is, again, this idea of architecture and like the 3D printing makes some new kinds of architecture possible even for, or maybe especially for, the very poor who typically get sort of like no architectural attention whatsoever. We launched a year

• 46:17Speaker 01

  ago, a global design contest called Initiative 99 with a million dollar prize to design homes that could be built for $99,000 or less. And people are like, why not, why such a big prize or whatever? It's like, because I wanted the very best of their attention and their work. Typically, when architects do work for these kind of projects, like pro bono, it's on the sign, they use the interns or the junior partners, like, I want your very best work, creativity and possibility. And to get that, you need to feel like you could earn the same kind of money that if you, you would earn if you won a major commission.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  And we have gotten responses from hundreds of countries, dozens and dozens and dozens of submissions that I think that will then catalyze a lot more. It's like, hey, we've got the machines, we've got the materials, we've got the technology, and we've got these like incredible designs now that are sort of all ready to go on these like social housing projects. So, and I don't want to downplay like homelessness is a complex issue, having worked at a homeless shelter.

• 47:21Guy Raz?

  Yes, it is, it is, yeah. It's not just about putting people in homes, that's right.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  But, but it will never be less than putting people in homes. It will at least be putting people in homes, and there's probably more that we need beside that. And it seems like we have evaded, you know, housing is a necessary but often insufficient resolution to homelessness.

• 47:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  But it will never, it will always be necessary, and it will never be less, less than housing. And it has been amazing how much like the obvious thing of like, Innovate around building and then build your brains out as like an important first step. Whatever services have to be layered on top of that, it will always have to at least be shelter.

• 48:03Guy Raz?

  Yes. I mean, so right now, we're talking about what we've been talking about are these like sort of, you know, structures in which, you know, sort of, you know, for habitation, right? But, but really, I mean, if you're looking 10, 15 years down the line, I mean, in theory, or maybe not even in theory, you could be building, you know, apartment buildings or even, you know, different kinds of buildings that that we don't use to house humans, but maybe structures to house, you know, aircraft warehouses. I don't know. I mean, what, what do you, how do you imagine Ikon kind of becoming? What, what's it going to be making in 10 years from now, besides homes?

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the, the big thesis is all construction should be done with robots. That's the big thesis. And we started with housing. In fact, we started with single story housing. In fact, we started with just the walls in single story houses. But our ambition is to give humanity a way to build anything it wants. So like our capabilities on earth will expand and our capabilities of what we can build in space will expand. What I hope to see in my own lifetime with my own eyes is the end of the global housing crisis, defined as a crisis of housing availability, housing affordability and housing sustainability.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Because like right now, there's like a billion unsheltered people or undersheltered people in the world. That's, that's like people like, my God, that's like, that's one out of seven, seven or eight people.

• 49:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  Lennar's is the most capable builder I know of. And I think they've built a million homes in the whole time their company's existed. If you could get to where you're building a million homes a year. It would still take you 1,000 years to build a billion shelters. And that's like 950 years too long. And so we've really got to change the paradigm here. We've got to like curve jump to a different way of doing things. And you know what can work round the clock tirelessly and is like very, very scalable? It's robots. And concrete is basically ground up geology. It's like one of the most available materials on the planet. And so like it has all the signals of like, this could be the thing that let us solve it. And I would like to see it solved with my own eyes.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  The joke at Icon is like, we're going to solve the global housing crisis and then Jason can die.

• 50:32Guy Raz?

  Jason, thanks so much. Great having you.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  It's been great to be here and thanks for letting me tell a little bit of the story.

• 50:37Guy Raz?

  That's Jason Ballard, co-founder and CEO of Icon. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. This episode was produced by Carla Esteves with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Chris Messini, J.C. Howard, Kerry Thompson, Catherine Seifer, Malia Agudelo, Niva Grant, and Sam Paulson. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This Lab.