The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Open source civilization (Interview)

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

This week we're talking about open source industrial machines. We're joined by Marcin Jakubowski from Open Source Ecology where they're developing open source industrial machines that can be made for a fraction of commercial costs, and they're sharing their designs online for free. The goal is to create an efficient open source economy that increases innovation through open collaboration. We talk about what it takes to build a civilization from scratch, the Open Building Institute and their Eco-Building Toolkit, the right to repair movement, DIY maker culture, and how Marcin plans to build 10,000 micro factories worldwide where anyone can come and make.

This week on The Change Law, we're talking about open source industrial machines. We're joined by Marcin Jakubowski from Open Source Ecology, where they're developing open source industrial machines that can be made for a fraction of commercial costs, and they're sharing the designs online for free. Their goal is to create an efficient open source economy that increases innovation through open collaboration. We talk about what it takes to build a civilization from scratch, their Open Building Institute and their Eco-Building Toolkit, the Right to Repair Movement, DIY Maker Culture, and how Marchin plans to build 10,000 micro factories worldwide

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They keep it simple. And the best part, you can get started on Linode today with $100 in free credit. Get all the details at linode.com slash changelog or text changelog to 474747 and get instant access to that $100 in free credit. Again, linode.com slash changelog. So we are slightly off the beaten path today, but not too far. We're talking open source ecology with Marcin Jakubowski, the executive director of open source ecology. Gotta give a thank to Josh Fong, listener back in July, asked us to have Marcin on the show. And I certainly would not have found this project

myself. So thank you, Josh. Hope you enjoyed this conversation. Marcin, thanks for coming on the changelog. Yeah.osh for recommending me that's great yeah he called you a pioneer in the open source world with your organization so that's a strong sale and i went and watched your ted talk and it's fascinating stuff why don't you just give us the story that you gave in that ted talk briefly how you came to do this global village construction set really fascinating i would have liked innovation stuntman better but okay innovation yes very good yeah okay so what's the story behind the global village construction set the work that we're doing it's about creating an open open collaborative paradigm for how we do product development in general so that's that's the current work we do. And the story started with On the Ground, where after a PhD program, I got PhD in fusion.

I was totally alienated from the work that I was doing because I felt I was getting more and farther removed from relevant pressing world issues. So I started a farm in Missouri, and then I started doing some farming. Basically, an experiment to see, okay, what would a community that actually does things right look like? So, started with some farming and things like that. Got a tractor. Then it broke. Paid to get it repaired. Then it broke again.

Pretty soon, I was broke, too. So, I learned that I had all my fancy degrees and all that. And I learned I had no practical skills. There is really no good equipment and tools and techniques that I needed to do this work just weren't around, either expensive or proprietary. So I started thinking a lot about open source. How do we create a, if somebody wants to do that, how do we do that? So let's do open source part comes from the PhD program, my school back in University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I wasn't even allowed to talk openly about my work to other groups because research groups are competing. And then when I thought about it, it's like, wow, this is pretty wasteful.

We cannot really learn, even in an institution that's supposed to be public for the public good. So I really looked into that issue of technology and what can we do better about it. And it's really about creating a collaborative way to develop things as opposed to proprietary. That's a big theme that we're working on. Was it that constraint that got you in open source, though, where you couldn't speak, sort of muzzled, so to speak? Was that what made you look at open source or this idea of freely sharing ideas? And in the case of open source software, actual code and actual software, but in the case of ideas, the idea of free and open source or free and available to other people where it's an ecosystem or a community, is that what got you into that, this muzzle? Or was it

sort of actual open source software and actual open source communities that sort of like got you excited? It's both. So actually it's a combination of a few factors. So first of all, I was completely alienated from the work that I was doing. Seconds, in my group, so we were using Macs, right? And then somebody one day said, hey, I got this Linux thing on my desktop. And they showed it to me. It's like, oh, wow, interesting.

It's something you can download. You can modify. It's's free people contribute to i was completely blown away because i thought there's only one way to do things like okay there's mac and windows so when somebody showed me that i was like wow there are different ways to do things i learned about the whole philosophy behind that project and i started thinking well how do you apply that to a more collaborative system like in the work that we were doing where I wasn't able to communicate openly? So that part of just thinking about really the terrible waste, the reinventing of the wheel that happens, I think that was the primary driver behind it. And there's also the concept of just there's Madison. It's a radical, it's a very progressive town.

So I kind of got radicalized there to much more than just my science, like social issues and environmental issues. And thinking about the world of technology, I was like, well, why can't we make a better life for everybody on this planet is just unacceptable that some people have and you know a lot of people are left out of the fun that we're having with our dslr cameras and podcasts here right there's a lot of deprivation happening at the same time that the technology of humankind is so powerful and amazing you can go to the moon but we can't kind of arrange our human business on this planet so that everybody benefits and that was that philosophical disconnect between okay me studying this fancy stuff and not being able to do really anything with it i felt powerless so started the project i said okay let's start an experiment a social basically a civilization startup experiment i mean i still kind of call it this it's basically how what does it take to to make a civilization from scratch

how do you go about that you need some technology you need some sociology so that's kind of origin yeah extracting these resources etc how did you jump from phd infusion buying a tractor farming to building your own tractor because that to me seems like there is a gap in skills there. And eventually you open sourced these plans for building 50 different machines. So not just tractors, but you went from like, my tractor's broken to I'm building my own tractor from first principles, so to speak. Where'd you acquire that knowledge? Was it just, you know, powered through

it like one step at a time or did you consult somebody? How do you learn how to build these things? Yeah. So definitely in a, you might think that, oh yeah, PhD in physics. It's like, you might have some practical skills. No, I mean, it wasn't prepared for any of this. This is about turning wrenches and designing things from scratch because typically you work with established things so it was the need the fire in the pants to to do something that the tractor that i bought it was 1970s tractor cost like five thousand bucks then just breaks the transmission goes out i got it repaired and one week from then it completely broke again and And I said, this is not sustainable. I can't do this.

I can't have a $2,000 bill one week, and then I don't know what's going to happen the next time. So I said, okay, I'm still committed to this amazing experiment of seeing how technology could be appropriate. And this is just the very opposite of appropriate technology. So I'm saying, okay, this is a fundamental flaw here, and I will not not be able to do this nor will anybody else be able to do this if we don't solve this question of appropriate technology i mean i studied a lot of this like during the phd program i did not study that in my formal work but but nights and weekends and a lot of time right i spent getting into all this stuff and almost getting kicked out of my PhD program because I was doing too much of it. But then I found no, there are, you know, in the theories in the books, it says,

yes, we need appropriate technology. But then I got my firsthand look at what that really means. And it's like, you need a machine that needs to work. And I want to be able to fix it. I want to be able to maintain it for a lifetime, not be subject to planned obsolescence. So I said, okay, I'm going to build this myself, design it so that anyone can have access to it. And then, okay, the good thing that I did get from the PhD was the first principles thinking that you mentioned. So I said, okay, well, what's a tractor? Okay, it's this box, this frame with wheels and drive and engine and some hydraulics and just start kind of reverse engineering from the ground up but the surprise was really good i mean these things work you get

yourself some engines some steel some hydraulics and the stuff just works with very basic design and then you want to strip it down to the most essential design that's as simple as possible but no simpler that still works does your thing and it's designed for you being the actual owner of it you own it and you control it so that was a definitely a breakthrough experience for me it started actually it did not start with the tractor it started with the brick press um both brick press on the tractor about the same time because the fire under the pants was okay here's a raw piece of land i ended up on I need a house I need to do some agriculture here too so those two tools were the first in line the first

very first one was the brick press which we used to build the first workshop bunch of houses that we have here but basically said yeah we gotta if we want to be in control of our destiny we have to have some control over the the equipment base not be completely subject to what what the industry is giving you explain that brick press what is that exactly since that's the first piece you started with yeah yeah so the brick press is it's an earth compact so it takes soil from beneath your feet and it compresses that into structural block and you can add some stabilizer some cement to it you can press without any cement but basically you get construction grade engineered material from the local material so if you have clay soil you can compress that and you

get bricks that are between like 300 and 1000 psi or so which is plenty for construction it's kind of like ad, but the technological version where you're compressing a regular shaped block from that. You can see plenty of videos of us pressing thousands of these and piles of these, but that's the first machine we did. Pretty cool. And the cool thing is, is you're probably standing on it, right? You got your materials right beneath your feet. Yeah. So that process is you build yourself a machine for a couple of thousand bucks, and then you can press material for your house. That's great. Low cost, but a lot of labor.

So that was the learning there. Yeah. Did you ever bump against the right to repair scenario in part of this? Is some of that in this story? Because it wasn't really mentioned in your TED Talk and in a lot of your story, but I'm assuming it's at least a part of the story to some degree. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's essentially in there. It's been there from the very beginning since the tractor broke.

But I didn't call it right to repair. That kind of came out maybe a decade after that or years after that. But definitely completely identify with the right to repair, for example, on your tractors, where now John Deere is putting proprietary equipment that you don't even own the software. And if it breaks, like you're completely dependent on the service from John Deere. Like there's a lot of pushback from that because people are saying, hey, I don't really own this thing. This thing is owning me. Yeah. Can you defend their side of it just by any example? Like I know you have your own side of it, but can you defend at least the commercial side of their thinking behind that? Oh yeah. I mean, it's, it's clear. It's, it's about control. So if you're

a business in the modern system of commerce, you're beholden to your stockholders to maximize profit. One way to do that is you concentrate information, you concentrate the services, you don't empower the customer to do all the things that would make the thing lower cost. So to give you some numbers, today, a farmer will go out and splurge with like half a million dollars worth of equipment that depreciates 10% per year, like $50,000 per year. Well, so you're talking about a 10-year lifetime before you got to snap up that half a million dollar deal again. Well, think about that.

It's like 10 years. That's, you know, you might say that that's pretty cool. You know, I grew all these beans and corn and made this money, which actually is marginal these days. So they're on this hamster wheel of keeping up with the system. But then the thing emerges, well, what if you had your right to repair? You'd absolutely drive your costs lower. It would be lower cost to repair things. Like, for example, to give you a great example.

So the tractor that I use right now, it's got modular parts. It's got a modular engine unit. If that thing breaks, I take a little hoist to that and take off the power. It's a modular hydraulic power unit with an engine. I take that off, and in an hour, I put in another one, and I'm off running again. This wasn't a week or two trip to the repairman or declining my productivity. It's something that I can control. Very low cost. Design it to be modular lifetime design

which you can if it's open source. If you're proprietary, you're not going to have that. You're going to make more money as the company because you're providing that service. The choice is yours, but which one will you take? Lower cost, of course.

You want that. You also have to kind of be willing to get your hands dirty and build the thing which nobody is there's reasons to do that like it's a compelling case with price and ownership and the ability to modularly repair it over the years let's take the tractor that you i don't know is the tractor that you built back when you first started this different than the tractor that you're running now? I assume you got. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. There's been six iterations so far. So each one is different and it improves. Yeah. It's, it's constantly, we're building the next iteration this year. Yeah. Okay. So let's take your current iteration tractor because I got a small piece of land out here and I've been looking at tractors

just because I got stuff that I like to do and I got a john deere nearby and i'm like man they're so stinking expensive i'm an amateur farm outdoorsy person but i wonder like starting from scratch if i started tomorrow and i took your global village construction set i'm sure the tractor is in there you got 50 different machines in there i just took your tractor plan what would it take for me to get that thing built cost time i have software skills i can turn a wrench but i don't have a lot of tools myself that you take to build things like oh right i can't weld so yeah what what would it take okay let's get a reality check here so first of all we don't have the 50 machines yet we've got about eight or so prototypes that's a plan or there's about 27 of these prototypes there's about seven or so prototypes. Oh, okay, so that's the plan. Or there's about 27 of these prototypes.

There's about seven or so that are at the product release stage. So for example, download our blueprints for the brick press, the tractor, the house, the 3D printer, the torch table, make a business out of it, go ahead. But there's only a handful of those right now. And the big thing right now is about the enterprise side

so that you right now have a choice not to go to John Deere, but to the open source ecology version tractor and get that as a turnkey service. So right now I would say you might say, OK, how do I build it? I don't know. Forget about it. No, I mean, only unless you're diehard and you're willing to go through a steep learning curve are you going to do this but that's the thing where the big surprise for me was that it's that side of the enterprise development is not taking off like the designs like here we're doing this the whole time people are not replicating it's hard altogether has been like a dozen or two replications of about a dozen of the brick press several of the tractor but it's a huge different story between the prototype that you can make work and you're you

know you're hacking it the whole time and a commercial product so this is where we're at right now we're at the stage of getting all this to the commercial traction stage and that's basically where we're we want to succeed because right now we haven't we this has not succeeded you have difficulties that are probably if i give you a number it's probably a thousand times harder than software like realistically speaking with the materials with the learning curves the the reality you're not moving electrons you're moving atoms and this is hard this is logistics this is this is parts that are completely, you got a thousand different parts you can choose from. You're working from a system that's got 200 years of industrial inertia of proprietary development. You're dealing with parts suppliers that you have a whole junkyard of cars, and you can't even make a single working car from all of that because all the parts are different. There's some challenges. So I think listener Josh really pegged you.

I mean, Pioneer is really what you are doing because you're having to really lay groundwork here in order to make this thing bootstrapped. Exactly. And we're talking about, I mean, initially I'm thinking, oh, yeah, you know, TED Talk time, all this amazing interest and all of that. But it's a hard management thing because to take it from a prototype to the product, it's like you got to do not like one or two prototypes. You got to do like 10 or 100. I mean, literally, it's kind of like software where you fix the bug, done. Okay, next bug, next bug. But how many bugs you have? Thousands, right? It's the same with hardware. You fix one thing, you learn a new thing, and then you can keep improving this and improving this.

And it takes a long time. Well, then how do the proprietary guys do that? Well, my answer to that is that their equipment is crap in general. I mean, it's it's pretty high performance, but it's nowhere near what it could be if you unleash a collaborative effort to do so. That's what we're going after. And it's not because the incentive structures don't actually align for that to be the case, right? Explain that question. The incentive structures of the business. So like light bulb manufacturer, like is it in his best interest that his light bulb lasts forever?

No, it's not because he wants you to buy the next light bulb. I'm saying like the way that it's the incentive structure of the economy doesn't make it so that John Deere wants to build the heart, the tractor that never breaks down. Right. It just doesn't make any sense. Yeah. I don't want to put bad intentions on John Deere people. It's just like that's the incentive structure of the business. Right.

It's a structural evil. Yes, it's an incentive structure. I use the word structural evil. We're within a paradigm that makes this happen. Now, that's very rational for John Deere to make that tractor and not collaborate, have the best one, get some boost up the sales and so forth. But the opposite of that is what if John Deere and Mahindra and Mahindra and biggest tractor company in the world from India, all the other ones, Case, Bobcat, what if they all collaborate to make the super machine? Well, we can make a case that it could be better. And you clearly can't say that.

Like, for example, to reify that a little bit, if you go out on the internet, if you know anything about diesel engines, people will say that there is no one perfect diesel engine. And I'm looking at that, it's like, huh, I thought about this issue. It's like, okay, is that because there's so many different options and this and that, and everyone complains about a diesel engine. Like there's whole religions. Like this is my favorite diesel engine.

This is my favorite diesel engine. And each one of them says that, okay, well, this is better because of this, but it doesn't have this, that, and the other. And I'm saying, like, why can't it not have all? Why can't it not be actually the best engine? And that's actually an issue we're struggling with right now because we don't really have a great engine to work from. And we're going to have to open source that in the future.

But that's an interesting story that the incentives there are to keep mediocrity as a status quo. We might think we have unleashed radical, crazy innovation, AI, and all of this, this and that. But I think we're still in a stone age until we learn to collaborate. I think that's a human flaw, though, to some degree, or maybe something that we can key off of, which is that it's very difficult for us to think about three generations from now and to sacrifice our lives to some degree of some financial upstream, upside, whatever it might be, to pay the sacrifice necessary or to create a system that is like you're trying to do or in this means and not have the incentive structures that Jared's talking about because we can't really see one or maybe two generations down the line of our humanity. We're sort of in the now, and we're sort of selfish as individuals. We say we're not, but we definitely are in our actions. And you see that by having sort of incentive structures that really

just focus on the quarter, the half year versus the 10 years down the line. Some of us think and transcend that thought pattern and are visionaries and innovators and pioneers like you might be, but not the collective at large. And that's where I think it's very difficult for us to – because we're sort of like slinky. Some of us go forward while the rest of us catch up, and it's sort of like this constant move and flow of like thinking about the long-term future and doing what's necessary to plan for that long-term future. We're not all in, literally all in on that idea. We're not all all in. Yeah, that's right, all in. That's right all in that's right well there's friction there's inertia there's other challenges in your life that just take priority

over you know certain ideals or or certain moves this is this is fascinating so you're not there yet and the ted talk is like decade ago 2011 ish time so you've yeah so you've been putting all i mean you've really been working on this. How do you sustain? How do you, what have you been doing in the meantime? Like I know, are you homesteading for the most part? I know you're building all your own stuff, but like financially, how are you making a living and all that? Our revenue model is actually workshops and selling some of the machines.

So for example, right now we sell the 3D printer kits. So you can go online and buy a kit from us. That's how we bootstrap. We also run workshops where, for example, we'll take a dozen or two dozen people over a weekend and we build a 3D printer that they take home. Or we do other things like where you go over a weekend and build a tractor. So crazy things like that. Up to five-day events where we build the seed eco home. Actually this house that I'm in right now has been built over five days with 50 people. So we do these

swarm based build, build events. So it's part of the experience economy, both products, education and experience economy, our, our revenue model. And that's, that's what we're doing. Initially, we had some, uh, started some true fans crowdfunding, did a couple of kickstarters. Um, but yeah, um, it's definitely, I mean, the next milestone is just get the revenue streams happening. We're planning to build and sell these houses. It's a model of a thousand square foot house that you can build with a friend in one week for $50,000. Or we can give you a turnkey version of that for $130,000, including land. That's our next major milestone milestone and we think we're going

to get some traction with this because a lot of everyone wants a home yeah i mean uh buy some acreage if you can scoop some of that up and plant that but who's coming to these workshops what kind of person comes there computer programmers who need practical skills survivalists uh okay there's people who aren't makers uh educators it's a very very broad crowd of freaks from society all over the place yeah both mainstream and progressive people it's a wild bunch basically want the common theme is there we you know we want to take charge of learning practical skills building things uh just getting away from that like just the same thing that i faced is that i got my phd and then i could not build a thing i had no practical skills there's that big gap it's also now a big political divide now the huge gap between the intellectual

world the world of finance capital and the productive people who are still in touch with producing things because i must say um a long time ago, we've been makers. We've lived in the jungle and slayed an animal. We built things. That kind of instinct is still quite deep within a lot of people. Everyone has that. You want to have your agency show, and the best way to show that is through manifestation of physical objects.

So that's the kind of drive that unifies a lot of people that come to our workshops. forward. Learn more and try it out for free today at retool.com slash changelog. Again, retool.com slash changelog. So we've been talking about bootstrapping, you're both bootstrapping this whole new thing what is and you wanted to start with the concept of like what do you need foundationally first principles to bootstrap a civilization this is the global village construction set is the goal 50 different industrial machines i think is eventually where it's headed. But like bootstrapping, you got to start somewhere, right? You got to tie the boots and then pull yourself up by the straps. I don't know. How do you bootstrap a civilization is the question. Yeah. One property of the system

is that it's a bootstrapping recursive kind of a thing where one machine builds the next one. So there's a logical sequence that we can propose right now, starting with the smaller, some of the smaller things and getting to the larger things. And that would be as a case example. And of course, the first example, like a 3D printer, relies on a bunch of technology. But take a look at this. So say you have a 3D printer. With the 3D printer, the way we design it, we can actually make parts to produce a CNC torch table,

which cuts steel, and then you can take that steel. And in an automated cutting process, you get all the steel for your tractor. Now then you take your tractor and you can build your house. So you can see that there's a logical progression there. But of course, like at the very base is, okay, well, where do I get all that steel and plastic and all of that too? And the answer is there's other machines that produce materials from raw feedstocks. The whole point is take rocks, sand, plants, soil, water, take those things and convert that to, that's where all the modern civilization comes from.

So what are the machines that produce that? So we have some of the things like an induction furnace that, for example, can melt steel to generate virgin steel from scrap. So for example, in our scenario right now, we can go take all the waste scrap metal or go to a junkyard and turn that into virgin steel from your tractor. You have things like plastic extrusion, so you can do 3D printing or make the plastic from waste plastic. That's kind of a low hanging fruit. Plastic recycling, so you're do 3D printing or make the plastic from waste plastic. That's kind of a low-hanging fruit. Plastic recycling, so you're shredding plastic, you're remelting it,

making it into 3D printing filament or rubber filament that you can print with. For each part of civilization, there's a machine that does the thing, like digging rocks. You dig rocks, you burn that rock, and you turn it into concrete. Now you've got your concrete foundation. You can go through that kind of a simple thinking process for every single thing. Rocks, that's like iron ore, right? Melt it, smelt it.

You got steel, steel concrete plants. You got plastics. All the present oil-based economy also can be gotten out of trees. It's carbon. So you got to know a little bit of chemistry for that. You got some industrial engineering there. But it's all so you got to know a little bit of chemistry for that you got some industrial engineering there but it's all a very rational like once you start wrapping your head around the whole process you say wow this is really cool and these all these resources are all around us

this is beautiful so that's the bottom line right now i'm i'm in a very optimistic standpoint i'm a techno utopian but not the diamantis style one of ai and computers and all of that but more like let's get to the bottom of the resources and the whole machinery set that is open source and reproducible over the world so other countries can leapfrog to the same state of excellence that we have attained here so forth because the path to build those kind of tooling isn't there in the proprietary world, or it is, and it's expensive and it probably is closed-doored. You know, you have to have a special key or a card or a title or a company style or something like that to get access to these brands that have these tooling.

So your path is accessible even if it takes motivation, whereas the other side, the fork in the road, may have many hurdles, if not straight up roadblocks. So let me address that. One point about this is how do you make this easier for people? So the idea is it's like, Jared, I said, forget about it. Well, not if you have the local open source microfactory in your town where instead of going to Walmart and buying a thing, you can go into a place where you can get a turnkey product or sign up for a manufacturing build where you actually build that yourself. And the thing is, when you build it yourself, now you own it.

You can repair it. I think tons of people do that. Yeah. This has been my desire for a very long time. A buddy of mine, I'm like, I'm not a woodsman. I don't, I'm not a very good woodworker. I don't have the tools. I don't want to set up a shop.

I don't have the space for a shop. I'd love it if there was something nearby that had all the necessary tooling so I can go when I wanted to. Maybe it's similar to a gym membership, you know, where I pay a monthly fee or some sort of membership fee or something like that. And I have access to this club or this place because it takes money to make these things go around. Right. But I have access to space and tooling that I may desire to have and own in my own home, but just don't have the space for it. And in this case, if you have these kind of things all over the place, then rather than Jared's question to you and you say, forget about it,

you know, it's more like just go down to your local open source. What did you call it? Open source manufacturing. Microfactory. Microfactory. Open source microfactory. Take a class and build the thing yourself with by renting two hours of time in the space and build a thing.

And when it breaks in the future, you know, as you said, with your machine or your engine, hoist it up take the part out go back to the open source micro factory rent the two hours of time on the machines and exactly remake the part yeah yeah and that's the theme behind the the maker spaces hacker space movement though those kinds of spaces currently they're not really set up for for real industrial productivity in a small scale. It's largely an education kind of tinkering kind of a space. But basically, think of the hacker space with a business model. Here's how we actually produce things. And the thing that's actually missing,

people think that there's all this open source hardware, there's open source this, open source that, instructables. Oh, yeah, you can find anything. No, it's actually not the the case for anything that's actually a very good product very little of that exists there are you know there are some stuff that's out there but the sad fact we run into right now is that anything that's actually really good it tends to still hide and become proprietary like there's a lot of cases of open source hardware projects that kind of hid and things like that but just to take the limit to what you have to be doing be doing is you have to be able to take metals for modern civilization you have to be able to take metals machine them and make ball bearings like ball bearings i would say is like the number one technology that allows the world to spin a spin around no intended. I mean, it's the core of industrial machines that spin that are, for example, like your

CNC mills and whatever your car's wheels. So if you can make the bearing, which is a relatively simple device, not too complex, a grinder that takes little balls and actually grinds them into perfect shape. That level of type of equipment, when you start thinking about, oh, okay, ball bearing machine, metal processing equipment that you can actually now start making steel. And the good thing is though, that none of this takes mega factories of yesterday. This is all doable in a very small scale facility. Like here, we have a 4,000 square foot workshop. You can do all of this in the workshop. our goal is to have that workshop you got an induction

furnace you've got some cnc machines you got a torch table got 3d printers and other hand tools you can build just about anything that's a business model to develop yeah these are big ideas but sometimes to get to the next phase you have to have focus and so you mentioned business model in terms of selling 3d printers, workshops, things like that. You know, when you take all this knowledge of making civilization, where are you placing that focus at now? Is it one part is obviously building homes, but is that where it begins? You mentioned ball bearings and, you know, different things. How do you focus what you're trying to do to sort of like get to that next stage to sort of rather than just somebody building tractors like what are you focusing on yeah the rollout right now is the

the project that we're doing right now is the seed eco home the house that i mentioned and because everyone needs a house we're thinking that's going to be a great way to generate revenue through a very efficient lean well-designed thing. We've made several prototypes. We think we know what we're doing. But at the same time, you also say, okay, so I'm going to start this house building enterprise, and we're going to produce, ideally, if everything works out, hundreds of these this year, or at least get hundreds of orders so we can execute, which means we're also training people to build.

But when I think about that enterprise, it's like, okay, well, what about a 3D printer or a tractor? Well, I need that tractor to do the foundation, to hoist the lumber, move things around, spread the gravel. So we're actually saying, okay, we're developing this house, but as side projects along with that, we are launching some other campaigns so that we get the tractor to the final workable version so we can lower the cost on the house business. So that's part of the house business. And the 3D printers that we've developed, we know we can make a lot of things that we use as materials for the house, like 3D printed plastic lumber, like foundation forms that

facilitate the foundation, like all this kind of stuff you can do if you have a larger printer and waste processing infrastructure for processing abundant plastic waste into filament. So actually as part of the house, which is our main campaign right now we're doing side the campaigns around the 3d printer and the tractor we're taking those also to the finish line so that we can reduce the cost of the housing that's our current one year two year yeah program to get these three the the 3d printer tractor house out the door so that we can have widespread access. Is there anyone out there in the commercial spaces, proprietary spaces that don't have your thinking that's threatened by what you're doing?

And if so, how are they reacting? I don't think so. Not yet because they don't understand it. Or even the maker spaces you mentioned, like making your own things. There's somebody out there that's like, like you're not buying their thing. You're not going to Lowe's and Home Depot

to buy the thing anymore. You're sort of like making it're not going to lozen home depot to no buy the thing anymore you're sort of like making on your own to some degree yeah that is if we had thousands or millions of replications which we don't so until the point where you have reached a billion dollar scale or so or at least like 10 million you're hardly going to be noticed right our budgets are we've only spent over the last decade or so it's about two million bucks it's shoestring so that's part of the learnings it's like no you put forth this design no people are not going to start going crazy and making all kinds of enterprises across the world like i thought would happen with the brick press or the tractor when i first

published the brick press i thought wow can i I first published the brick press, I thought, wow, can I publish this? People are going to steal it. The world's going to explode with this. What am I going to do? No, it's far from it. The thing is, it takes much more work together. And because society is missing what we call collaborative literacy is why this is not going forward we're too used to the idea that no it can't work you can't we get this collaborative effort like it's just so foreign i think there's 200 years of industrial inertia everything is proprietary right so when i first did that talk i was like yes beautiful and all these people coming at our door, but you find that at the end of the day, it's what can happen is limited. You need an infrastructure to harness

that entire effort. But first I think it's the real intent of people who are committed to make this happen. That is not there. It's a lot of, there's a lot of shallow effort, but not the consistent model where you're literally saying, Hey, we're going to reinvent the blueprints of civilization for how R&D goes. That's a bigger question. So we're just, I mean, I think this year is going to be a place where we'll get some serious cash flows happening and then we can bootstrap to further, further R&D that actually gets this thing done.

Because on the calendar, on our roadmap, 2028 is when we finish the entire global village construction set. So we've got a like six years seven years eight years maybe and you're what roughly eight you said six or eight in actual production readiness yeah there's like six that are productizable right now there's like 22 altogether 20 actually it's more like 27 since last year but you have to consider that each one of these items is at least a million dollar budget so we did just about right you know like two million bucks we got like one or two things out the door at the end of the day you have to take the due

diligence to to make it all happen corporate budgets are you you plop down a couple of million on a project or a startup budget plop down a couple of million you develop a first prototype go to market thingsop down a couple of million. You develop a first prototype, go to market, things like that. That's what it takes. But in open source, of course, the idea is that, oh, well, so many people contribute that it's actually all we share the burden. And it's all people pay with their sweat, equity, and time, just like Linux. And we get it all done to great benefit to everybody. Well, it just hasn't happened for hardware. It's a mental block. Collaborative literacy.

How do you get past that? What are you thinking so far to get past this collaborative literacy issue? We're optimistic and zealous. It's simply you've got to create a product. You've got to use the old revenue generation thing, the bootstrap thing.

The way we can scale this is by we're not taking any investment because I don't think that's right. It's like, we're generating this whole class of people who are third parties that gain a share in the enterprise. That would kind of defeat the purpose if we are to scale, because of course your investors, they're going to want to be proprietary. So there's a little block there, let's say. But how do you scale this to the world? Through open enterprise that anyone can replicate, but it has to rely on bootstrap business models. And that's what we're doing. So with a house, the idea is you've got a product, you sell it, and you reinvest.

And that's as simple as that. It's not too much magic. It's like everyone's got a job. We've got to start creating jobs where on your task queue, it's instead of working for a corporation, you have a viable option to work in distributed production as generated by this kind of movement in an open source microfactory. So it's about revenue models that are created that work and that kind of scale. That's where we're at. So it's the product, the house. I mean, everybody wants a house.

Let's talk about that then. Let's talk about the house itself.. So it's the product, the house. I mean, everybody wants a house. Let's talk about that then. Let's talk about the house itself. I know it's modular. There's a lot of systems to it. You mentioned actually pressing bricks. You've talked about printing, you know, using plastic filaments from recyclables, all these things like break down what a home you build consists of. Yeah. So the initial rollout is, so it's modular construction and

we're not doing the first one with the brick press because that's much harder. So we're using standard light framing, but it's modular so that the offer is a thousand square foot house. The initial model is two stories, but basically panel, panelized so that you can either build it yourself or have a large event like we typically do in order to build it. So it's not like you make the whole wall and you lift it up. You make four by eight modules, standard construction material like Legos. You build all the four by eight panels.

There are the walls, the windows, the doors, and then you put a roof. You got a foundation and a roof on that. And then everything is designed to be highly modular. And that way way i guess the unique thing is about the integration of the entire process to consider the most effective way to build and a way that an unskilled person i think the biggest thing is about allowing widespread access which means that any single person can be able to do this. So the way it could work is you have your weekends off your job. You can build all the panels that go up, go into this house. And then in one week with a friend, you can assemble it. So you got a complete house starting.

The foundation has to be there already, but in one week, so two people, so 80 hours build a whole thing from these pretty much pre-made modules that you can spend as much time as you need to get them done. That's the kind of model. So you can allow people to have a job to do this, or you can just hire contractors to do this, or hire us. So we're training people to be able to do this. It's a very romantic notion to build your own house.

I think it appeals, of course, the price advantages, modularity, the fact that you can start small and add later, especially if you have land or you have the space to do that in the suburbs. You can't really start small and build from there, but in certain contexts you can. But I think it's wise to say that's not like the only plan is like,

hey, come build your own house because that's not going to scale. That's not going to reach enough people you know you're going to have the you have to have the builders who are like we also do do you have a name for these kind of house open building institute i know it's an institute but like what's the name for that kind of a house like i'm looking for a you know there's tiny homes there's mobile homes there's other kinds of homes i need the right name yeah what's the what's the name of these things like i want to have a open house the brand name is called seed eco home see okay why is it called seed

because it's fully expandable so the way we designed it right now the initial design is thousand square feet but it's readily designed to add to it so you can build a 2000 square foot model on top of that. So we're even like pre-framing the places where you will add. So you have like placeholders for doors and stuff like that. But because the method is completely modular, you can do this and the system is designed so you can start with a little home and grows with your needs. So you don't get like one crappy home that you can afford. You get a small quality home. And then as time goes on, you build on because any structure out there is, I mean, the initial

build is just about, it's actually about 20% of the entire building. When you consider all the maintenance, the additions and so forth, most of it happens afterwards. You can invest in something small that you can actually live with for a long time. It's flexible. Is this idea to some degree focused on, let's say, Western civilization, say, U.S.-centric ideas, or is it in other areas of the world? Because I think, for example, here in Texas, barn dominiums are somewhat popular. People that want to workshop, they want a barn dominium because they're not really a barn, but they're sort of a home and a workshop space.

Or you've got – Jared mentioned tiny homes. I don't know if those are super popular in Texas. We've got lots of land, so tiny doesn't make any sense. But building something on your land, you might have a lot of land, and you may not want to build a home, you might want to build a second space or sort of an outpost or something like that that's in your space where the idea of home in these cases may not so much resonate, but it might in other areas of the world where say technological advancements aren't there, accessibility isn't there, or you have a culture that's totally focused on and already bought into this idea of building it your own tooling or this open source tooling idea like they may not call it that but

they're already doing it well for this the market here is we initially thought oh yeah we can this is the owner builder model where everyone's going to build their own house and and after thinking about it's like nah they ain't, they ain't going to scale. We need to provide a turnkey product that you can hire us and we give you a house. So that's here. And that will bootstrap the further developments where, like, for example, the brick press, just doing some of the final refinements, we found that the last thing we need on that is a soil mixer that allows you to mix cement and soil so it can stabilize block

to make it waterproof. That's like the last thing to make it fully industrial. And we want to actually start selling these bricks as a vehicle building material like you get at Menards. But the thing is, the initial level is, okay, let's get a house out there. We know that you can make money selling a house and we're going to invest that to refine the further developments. Now we're going to invest that to refine the further developments now we're doing using our own tractor to build it we're printing trim plastic lumber and foundation

forms and plumbing fittings and then we're going on to now here's your compressed earth block techniques here's the sawmill that if it's readily accessible and imagine a cnc sawmill you drop a log log to it and walk away, and then you've just got a pile of lumber. A techie person could do that. So mixing automation, the appropriate automation within all this process, and you can avail this unbridled productivity on a small scale. So that's the vision, to just create more options for people so you don't just have Menards or Lowe's Home Depot to go to. Because actually right now there's a real shortage of lumber that the price of lumber went up like three times.

Yeah, it's insane this year. It's a practical thing, too, if you can generate your local materials. We're finishing our basement right now, and I joke that it's like we're putting another house inside of our house because the prices are astronomical. And it takes a really long time because the builders are all just completely – they're all building stuff. No builder is dying for your business right now because they're so busy. So it's not a great time.

We really lucked out because we did an addition to our home earlier this year. And we beat the timing in terms of our, quote quote having to go up because of the cost of lumber but you know we were just by the nick of time to begin essentially to beat that time frame because it was going to go up like three times the cost for the lumber part of it alone so is there any real solution for that i actually think there is with 3D printing. So each person in the United States earns like 100 pounds of waste, plastic waste, that all goes to the trash. I mean, imagine taking the abundant plastic waste and distribute production of say, lumber, plastic lumber, you can get plastic lumber at the big box stores too. That's a technology that you take, you're

taking the entire waste plastic stream and with a basic shredder and a filament maker you can now start making filament to now start printing large things. Why can't you do that right now? Well, a spool of filament is 20 bucks. That would make for a very expensive 2x4.

Like a $40-$50 2x4 if you did that. But if you reduce that price of the plastic by 10 to 100x by going to waste plastic streams, then you're talking. So that's part of the initiative. We're going to do this as a very explicit part of the seed eco home. Here's now plastic lumber technology that we can now lower barriers to in this whole process. Let's talk about that because this is something I've become more and more aware of, I would say, over the last several years, but more so specifically very recently.

I had to almost double, I'm about to triple, the size of the containers I use to hold my recyclables to put out on Monday, essentially. And I've become more and more aware of what I would typically throw into the waste bin that goes into a landfill that could be in my son and my wife. And we all say we can make something out of that. So when we throw it away and we accidentally put it into the trash, which goes into the landfill and it's something we can make something out of, we say, oh, we can make something out of that. And we move it to the recycle section, which typically it's some variation of plastic.

In some cases, it's aluminum with tinfoil or whatever it might be. But in most cases, it's something we can use and make something from. And I've personally seen my recyclable areas from cardboard boxes from Amazon or whatever we're having shipped to our homes quadruple in the last several months. And then also just my awareness of what I would typically just throw into the trash that could be recycled. Is that what you're saying there? Like we could be more responsible as a society to, I suppose, be more aware of how we're funneling that to enable this lower cost, readily available product for us to use and reuse? The whole thing is about increasing our index of possibilities

on industrial productivity on a small scale. So I mentioned the open source microfactory, right? So it's a community center where you can build your car, build your telephone, build a cordless drill, things like that. You can do everything in a local microfactory, but take an even smaller scale at the scale of a house. You got your garage, you can start something. But with a very simple thing like the plastic recycling infrastructure combined with 3D printing,

imagine that. I could see that becoming an appliance just like you have a washer and a dryer today, where now you're just throwing your waste plastic and it's just simply a shredder. You pulverize it, you melt it down in just a little heat chamber and extrude it into a thin filament. That is not rocket science. And now you're printing. And a lot of that is just going into a landfill and just sitting there. Yeah. But let me tell you one thing, and this kind of goes back to our discussion about the lack of innovation today. The 3D printers have been the greatest example of an industry that's been transformed by open source. However, if you look closely, from my perspective, innovation there is actually slow. For example,

we have not, to this date, come up with a high temperature 3D printer. Everything is pretty much ambient temperature or not super high. There's a way to do it where you have a heated build chamber that is so high temperature that you can now print with any plastic because right now you can't print with a simple stuff like polyethylene polypropylene pvc is limited but because the things warp and you need an enclosed hot chamber that's very hot no single open source 3d printer in the world has that it's like guys came up with 3d printers like five to ten years ago as open source why aren't we going forward on it it's also an example where there's no clear mechanisms of how you collaborate because once they accompany like prusa printers gets success they continue and they now run a business

and maybe not worry so much about open source anymore. That's kind of typical. But okay, I'm kind of diverging here. The missing link on that home recycling infrastructure is larger and high temperature printers. Now we've got a design and we want to release that and I hope we can change the world with this. But that's one of the things that's missing. So you got your plastic recycling infrastructure and a more capable printer that prints more than literally with like a couple of materials like pla and abs where you can't hardly print with abs even because of the warping issues you need this high temperature chamber that does not yet exist so this is the call for innovation and a case for making a home recycling industry standard for every individual.

Is it because there's, we could recycle, but then it would just sort of be extra out there because there's nothing that can take the material that we would recycle and use it. Is that what you're saying? Is the pipeline is available there, but there's nothing there to actually use what would come out of the pipeline, which is homeowners or people, everyday folks like you and I, recycling. There are some open source variants of machines that can shred and make plastic with, but none that can do it very well. So there's a technology gap there, like none of that is reliable or cheap enough to do it. There's really good grinders, but as far as open-source filament maker that can make anything, you'd think there would be,

and you'd read tons about it. Oh, yeah, this one and that one. But actually, a lot of them, like the ones you can buy, they work with pellets, very highly controlled pellets that you buy off the shelf, which are still not recycled plastic, really.

To recycle plastic, you have to have much more tolerance. It takes more science because you're mixing all kinds of stuff in there and rat hairs and dust and everything else. You got to have a process that's designed to take everything. So it has to be a very robust, good system. That system does not exist yet. The filament maker that you can get, it will run typically from commercial pellets, not waste plastic, typically. What would that system cost if it did exist? Because it seems like it still might be too expensive for average homeowner to have one of those in their garage.

Yeah. We'd like to do one for about $2,000 as a price point for the shredding and filament making infrastructure altogether. It seems like a stepping stone to this in-home recycling thing where you can 3d print new things based on your you know empty pepsi bottles or whatever is like what you're talking about these open micro manufacturing plants what do you call it it seems like those are kind of like the linchpin for scaling this to different communities because I may not produce enough plastic in my house to have, I don't know what kind of margins or ratios you'd need in order to

output some 2x4s or whatever, but if we could all take our recycling to this little factory, then that provides the raw materials. They do the recycling there and the printing there. And then you have some sort of membership where you can just go get whatever free two by fours or cheap two by fours. Cause you've been participating. I can see that becoming like a thing that people did. And I just,

I'm not sure if like the in-home thing, it's just going to fit into too many people's lives, but like having a thing down the road where it's like, I, I like these people. They, they helped me to build stuff and I'll take my recycling down there and we can like build a community around it there. That's true. What are your thoughts on that? It seems like that thing really could be how you deploy this,

these concepts beyond the hub center, the center the real makers you know the real enthusiasts yeah yeah and that's why our vision is 10 000 micro factories worldwide just about in any city that you can do this at this episode of the changelog is brought to you by Render. Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks, and auto-deploys from Git. They handle everything from simple static sites to complex applications with dozens of microservices. If you're a developer or a founder that's frustrated with AWS's complexity or Heroku's high costs, Thank you. downtime deploys, built-in SSL, private networking, managed databases, secrets and configuration management, persistent block storage, and infrastructure as code. The Roku customers

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at render.com slash changelog. Get $100 in free credits to try the Render platform, plus a world-class engineer assigned to your account to guide you along the way. Just send an email to our special email, changelog at render.com to get access to those free credits. All that begins at render.com slash changelog. I don't know your full idea and I'd love to hear more of this, but I think hearing it now,

I almost think like if you could just prove the concept in one location very, very well. So you live in Missouri, right? Yeah. Prove it in one space and like the community thrives from it. And then one center at a time. That would be my assumption of how it could work. The dream may be 10,000, but I think for you to prove the concept, you know, get one area, especially where these kind of ideas are adopted very well. Colorado is a place where that kind of stuff happens.

In your areas, it's where that kind of stuff happens. Find a few places where there's a need, there's a vacuum, and provide the space, the center, and begin small. Provide this membership, this access, these courses, or these trainings, or these classes, and maybe even build some homes in the area as part of your rollout, but start someplace and just prove it in that one space and then roll that out. Absolutely. And then video that thing, document it, start sharing it, show the success stories. Right. Then you can start to get a groundswell. Absolutely. By no means are we saying it's easy. Isn't that what he's saying? That's how you do it. Are you doing that? Well, that's what we're doing in september 2021 that's this year nice there you go that's the idea and let me just introduce another thing so in august about the middle of the month we're going to do a weekend hackathon where we're inviting 2 000 people

to collaborate on publishing the blueprints for the house and some work on a printer and the tractor. So we're going to do a very crazy large-scale collaborative event that depends on still very simple tools. It's open source FreeCAD, it's Google Docs and collaborative editing, but we've got protocols where you can get masses of people where with module-based design, you can put a lot of people to collaborate together on unprecedented projects. Sounds cool, man. I love this idea because, you know, you were talking about housing and stuff like that.

But I'd love to like just build my own components to make an RC car or something like that, you know, or make my own skateboard, my own deck, you know, or something else. Like maybe I don't want it, but like the idea of doing something like that. Well, yeah, sure. My son skateboards. I used to skateboard. I was a skateboarder way back in the day. I can pass that on the torch to my son. That's right.

Yeah. Back in your offspring days. That's right. My offspring days when I was singing the songs. That was a pre-show thing. But, you know know it's housing but i think this maker culture this hacker culture of you know you said manifesting physical objects is that what you said earlier yes i did you know that idea is happening lots with you know it's it's happening in the

microcontroller space with arduino and raspberry pi and-V and all these fun things that are happening out there that are putting very high technology, small computer abilities into everyday people's hands. And you combine that with this space that you're creating, where literally whatever you want to make is possible. Maybe in this case, you're focusing on housing and the larger things that sort of like build civilization because you need somewhere to live to have a civilization. But eventually you just need a hammer or you just need a skateboard or an RC car. A 3D printer is a very good, diverse function tool that can get you there. Because if you think about any of these things that you mentioned, what are they made of?

They're made of plastic, a microcontrollercontroller an electric motor maybe some screws and bolts and with that you have just about anything so if you can make 3d print as far as the physical structure of it you can make your own circuits too you don't have to make your own circuits you got arduinos and plenty other microcontrollers electric motors yeah this is all feasible so that, as I say, the open source microfactory can be producing all these crazy things and like your custom skateboard that's souped up for just for your needs. You can make it custom exactly for what you need. So you learn how to do open source CAD

or you can download a bunch of designs from the internet and then manifest it in an open source microfactory where you have the appropriate tools. The one thing I would like to add to that is you need some kind of a standardization. We call it tool chain degeneracy. That means you don't have an infinite number of tools with infinite number of parameters that you can't control as a global network because there's too much variation.

You can never manage it properly. So reduce it to the single best, most powerful set that's easy to maintain. It's kind of like the standards in software or wherever. But don't go nuts into creating a thousand different versions of a screw. Just come up with the few of the most important ones or like one best engine i just want one best engine i don't want 3 000 different ones so agree to some standards collaborate but once again that's the collaborative part people kind of have are saying that wait wait where's my how am i going to make a living then uh so it's about collaborating with uh modern technology and others and computers to make life easy for everybody so we can do what we really want to do not be like working just so we can work what do

we really want to do is the real question and the answer is skateboard that's right and build rc cars yeah yeah i get some ball bearings in there right in there and it's the start of all civilization. There you go. Ball bearings. Ball bearings are really a useful thing. Oh, man. When you said that, I realized how useful ball bearings are.

Anything that has motion with heavy objects or metal between metal, you need a ball bearing in between the two to reduce the friction and make it last for however long. I noticed that whenever I built – I build mountain bikes for fun. And I just noticed like I never really built anything like that ever from scratch, from the frame up. And I realized like in a bike in general, in the head of the bike, you've got two different ball bearings on the top part of it and the bottom part of it. In the pedal, you got that. You got ball bearings in the pedal. You got ball bearings in the cranks. You got – bottom part of it. In the pedal, you got that. You got ball bearings in the pedal. You got ball bearings in the cranks. They're all over the place.

And it's just crazy. I never really considered how useful they are and how needed they are until I actually built something that required it. Yeah. Not to mention the machine tools. If you have a precision CNC mill to, say, mill a part, ball bearings are critical to that so you have a precision CNC mill to say mill apart, ball bearings are critical to that. So you get that precision.

And then if you talk about space age or computer age, that's where air ball bearings come in. So that is super precise structures where one fits in another, like just a cylinder inside a round thing that there is no friction because there's actually, there's nothing in there. It's not oil. It's just air. That's called air bearings. And that's what you have in turbines and high vacuum pumps that make semiconductors. That's true. Yeah.

There's nothing in there. Just air. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Air bearing. Yeah. Air bearing.

Air bearing. That was the big idea, too, behind Elon Musk's super fast. I forget what that thing was called. It's Hyper something or other. Hyperloop, yeah. Yeah, the Hyperloop. What's the name of that? It was like, you know, create a vacuum, large scale object, and you have no friction because you have no air.

It's essentially what you're talking about. It's this idea of like air as the bearing, the lubrication is the lack of friction. Something like that, a little bit. Well, you know, that's my... Coming from a fusion engineer, he's like... He's like, kind of not really.

Well, with the concept... More or less. Well, with the concept there is no friction, yes. But in the air bearing, there's actually air in there. You want air. So it's a little different,

but the concept... It's not a vacuum. There's actually air in there. Gotcha. I gotcha. Yeah, there's air versus vacuum. There's actually air in there. Gotcha. I gotcha. Yeah, there's air versus vacuum, and vacuum is what you're talking about for the Hyperloop. Leave it to me to get very particular and then be wrong too.

So there you go. That is kind of your trademarked move. Oh, it is. So one thing I've been wondering, and this is kind of there's no like easy way to segue to this but you know you spend a decade now doing these things and you've built probably machine after machine and you've had failures and successes you're building houses surely there's been some fun horror stories along the way things gone terribly wrong you know maybe like

lose a limb or a finger like i'm you're you're working with your hands and you have a team doing this so any cool stories that come out of the last decade of trying to bootstrap this idea? Yeah. I did lose some body parts. Like my fingers, a little chopped off in my brick press. I can see that. You can see that a little bit, but beyond that, nothing much outside of some psychological damage maybe. No. And that's why I actually meditate and I do that to kind of keep my mental hygiene. But I think the biggest thing,

one of the biggest things that we learn is a lot of, if you talk about horror stories, it's about the governance and personality kind of things. Because we basically opened up this place as a place where people can come. People come here for dedicated project visits. But, you know one thing we learned is that without really sound governance and clarity of what people are doing

it turns into a lord of the flies situation pretty quickly like this is a place where it's like we're completely open to to experimenting and doing different things but if you don't give people enough uh structure people go nuts so that's kind of like the biggest learning it's like you need governance like i guess i would say i was more anarchistic natured before i mean of course i came from higher education i was in a system but when i kind of dropped out of society in some way to live on a raw piece of land as an independent thinker i was like yeah you know we want to be responsible we don't want government telling us what to do and stuff like that adam you're from texas so you're in the texas republic there but i do appreciate much more about

governance and like when you try to run an enterprise there's got to be real clarity about operations and what the rules that we follow are so that So there's been a lot of learnings of how to do that because we've seen just personal conflict. I mean, I was personally, just to tell you, I was exiled. You can say exiled, voluntarily exiled. I mean, things got so crappy with some of the personalities that I just had to leave for like a month from my own house. I mean, that's crazy. That kind of tells you, especially with what's going on in politics, say about anarchy, it's like, no, we do need some governance.

We got to have sound governance. We got to constantly improve it. So definitely this experiment here, the big challenge is going to be governance. How do you get people to collaborate and work together on this piece of land? You know, how do you do it in a way that's better than that? It's the same struggle in open source software. You're just not, you know, living in the same piece of land, right? But we have these conversations around codes of conduct and how we're going to conduct ourselves. And do we need those? Do we not need those? Why do we have to have those? It's like, well, because some guardrails are nice to have because sometimes

necessary to set expectations of how people are going to interact with each other in this area. And that's actually a necessary thing. And it's interesting that, of course, we find that in the physical spaces as well. But we deal with it so much, even just in the digital spaces, that it's kind of there's nothing new under the sun kind of idea. Like, yeah, these are the same problems that you deal with with your neighbors and with your family and with people around you and then you go online and you deal with similar things and yeah we do need some structure for sure yeah so basically take what you know with the online communities but then the extra layer of challenges okay but you're actually physically with these people think about it's harder to ghost you know you can just peace out of an online community and be like

yeah i'm just not going to contribute to this project anymore but when you live there when you say these people do you mean people that come to visit for a bit for a class or for a project and they're there for many weeks or months potentially because it takes a long time is that or do you mean like immediate family it was more like in the early days when we started the project pretty soon as i said in my ted talk and people from all over the world began to show up so we accept them basically invite people yeah come on develop this thing with us build the tractor build the next brick press or whatever and that's what i'm talking about basically dedicated project visitors who were there for multiple like a month or more we kind of see that after three months that's kind of when they go nuts yeah it's like it doesn't go

work how's any serial killers or anything no not yet but the thing is that unless you have a rigorous structure for so-called hr you know, human research, managing people, setting expectations and so forth. People need that. And, and me, like, you know, we're a lean team. We're just a few of us here. It's like I never provided that rigorous kind of leadership or, I mean, I would call just constant feedback or like babysitting kind of thing. Like if you're trying to do a court coordinated effort where people working to get on a project, you definitely need some significant infrastructure for management,

unless you're assuming that everyone is very evolved and completely aligned and completely collaborative, which is kind of not yet. I mentioned that collaborative literacy, I think is very much undeveloped in today's society. So people don't know how to work together. So there's a real issue there. The interesting thing too, while the communities are separate, so in your case, it's real world, face-to-face, you get different problems when you are face-to-face.

Whereas when you're sort of digital communities, you're in your own island, so to speak. You don't have to see each are face-to-face whereas when you're sort of digital communities you know you're in your own island so to speak you don't have to see each other face-to-face you can I suppose commit to continuing to argue on the internet which people do but you do have the luxury of being able to walk away and have that separation whereas when you're face-to-face IRL you know like you are you may not have quite that same opportunity. And so you're eating breakfast with them and eating lunch with them and there is no break. And so, and then you have little weird cues or ticks that might get you, or just all these things that happen when you're in real space with people that doesn't happen in the digital spaces that can really drive you crazy, so to speak. Yeah, absolutely.

And we are setting this place up. We're going to basically run this as a school or between tech school and immersion education programs. So we definitely have to figure all this out. So we'll need a community manager. We'll need a cook. We'll probably have staff, like people who actually are taking care of the facility,

building things, growing food. Best example is like a university campus where you've got enough support staff that you can actually make it work. Do you have maybe like a town name? I know you have a business name in this idea, but did you name your place? This is like, you know, a place you go. What's the mecca name? What's the name of the place? Yeah, it's called Factory Farm.

It's not a factory farm. It's a factor E farm where E is the exponential number. It's about transcendence. It's a transcendental number. So you got the Open Building Institute. You got this place you're at. You got the seed eco buildings. You got the global village construction set, which you're still working on.

A lot of stuff happening. What's the next big horizon you're facing? I know you mentioned a couple of things, but what's the next big thing that you're doing? And maybe even an invitation to this, to this audience we have here to, you know, build their first home or, you know, give somehow what, how do you see a lot of the listenership of this show kind of playing a role? Yeah. Well, I mean, the next big thing is you might say it's the next big thing but it's all part of the global village construction set which the finish line is 2028 where we have essentially an appropriate technology infrastructure but actually bigger than that we're developing these these machines these artifacts but what we're

actually doing is developing collaborative design and development protocols that can shift the economy from proprietary to collaborative. That is a much bigger question. That means like you're AT&T or you're John Deere. You're not doing what you're doing with your proprietary research. You're part of an open source effort that makes everybody better. So a more distributed world. The next thing that we have is like, if you want to help us out, there's the big hackathon in August,

about middle of August. That's going to be a big thing. We need a lot of CAD people, designers, graphics people, publishing people, because we're going to basically write the big manual, the enterprise manual for how you build the seed eco homes. And then in September, we're going to do immersion where you actually learn to build the seed eco homes if you want to build them or we're doing

a longer program for three months where you're actually getting trained on how to be an entrepreneur or builder building these houses so that's there's a lot of activity there which includes the that does include the tractors and the 3D printers as part of that infrastructure. So if people want to help out, sign up online, there's a, we have an interest form for the seed eco home. We're going to basically launch that as a public announcement, probably by March 1st. So there's about six months before the actual hands-on training. So that's a big thing. Or otherwise, buy our 3D printers.

There you go. That's one product we offer online right now. And you can do that at opensourceecology.org. Of course, links in the show notes, the TED Talk that Martin has given there, the Open Source Maker Factory Build Camp that he's talking about later this year is there, and other things, of course. And the product tab is there to purchase a 3D printer if you so want to, the pro or universal.

Martin, thank you so much for sharing the story. It's very interesting to sort of cross that chasm of software into hardware. And I think you've helped us do that very well. And I like how it challenges people to think differently about, you know, recyclables and reuse and responsible future and proprietary versus collaborative. I think this is a really interesting concept you've helped us introduce here today. So thank you for sharing your time and your ideas. Thanks, Adam. Thanks, Jared. This was great. All right, that's it for this week. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you haven't heard yet, we have a membership. It's called ChangeLog++ because, hey, why not increment things?

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