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

Episode Date: April 18, 2026

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

I got for 500K. I think we need to hear this story about you getting shiv for half a mill. The scumbag who, J-Calb, thought he would get away with it. But I'm going to balance the ledger. From company. I'm going to unload. Okay.

Grace and Loven is the way, man. I know. I'm a flawed human. I will have grace for the people who stab me. I'm doing my best. Today's not going to be my best moment. This week in startups is brought to you. buy Northwest Registered Agent. Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks in 10

minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity. Learn more at Northwest Registeragent.com slash twist. Grasshopper Bank. Time is money. Don't waste either. Go to grasshopper. dot bank slash twist and get an exclusive $500 cash bonus just for opening an account. And IM8 Health. Start feeling like your best self every day. Go to IM8 Health. dot com slash twist and use the code twist to get a free welcome kit five free travel sachets and 10% off your order. Hey everybody. It's Friday, April 17th.

This is Twist. I am on fire today. Lon, we've got an amazing docket. We do. We do. Before we do anything, I just want to take a moment to applaud, Claude. I just hit it. I got the haptic.

I'm now recording the conversation and all my action items are on here. Action item number one. by the end of the show, explained the scumbag who effed J-Cow a year ago and thought he would get away with it. But J-Cow has a two-step process

in which, no revenge. I'm not a vengeful person, you know that long, but I'm going to balance the ledger. I got effed for 500K. Wow, that's a lot. And at the end of the show,

after we do off-duty, or maybe right before off-duty, remind me. I'm going to make a note right now. I'm going to balance the ledger. Let's get started. Who's our guest here? I'm so excited.

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

Howdy, everybody, and thanks for having me on. I'm also excited. Jason's one of my guys. He's in my squad, in my Austin squad. Jay Bell told me before the show that I've now. been in Austin long enough where I can get my own hat. I can start rocking the cowboy. 18 months. I've crossed the barrier. You know, I think it's faster than that, J. Cal, I think, like, the moment a person's residence is west of the Mississippi River, I think your rights

in privileges extend to new haberdashery. So I think, uh, okay, I was very excited to hear this. I've been waiting to cross the cowboy hat barrier. I think I have. I'm not sure what the length of the brim can be for a year one guy. You know, you, yeah, that's right. You have to find your way into it. But it's certainly a journey worth making and not to be too trepidious about for sure. Awesome. Yeah. I can't wait. Jason's a great entrepreneur.

Icon 3D homes. stunningly beautiful. I thought, I don't know about this model. And then I saw the homes. And once you see the homes, they're gorgeous. And there are three problems in society right now. And I did a little tweet about this earlier today. Just total serendipity, Jason.

and I was on fire this morning because there's all this bad news coming out about AI, right? And if you think about who our top two spokespersons are, Sam Altman, we just had a 270,000-word article in the New Yorker explaining he's a sociopath from every partner who he's ever had, apparently. I'll let people make their own decision there. He kind of admits he's had some challenges. And then you have Dario on the other side. And these are two hyper-competent people, but they are scaring the bejesus, speaking of Jesus, out of Americans.

And the dialogue continues to be jobs, economic uncertainty, and that this is going to get out of control, and we can't control the demon we're waking up. That's not who we need, in my estimation, Lon, leading the charge for. for technology today. We need to imagine as entrepreneurs, a single mom or dad with two kids, makes 60, 70, 80K a year, but, you know, an average American makes 67,000. So let's put it at 80K.

They're working a weekend job and a full-time job. And what do they want for their family? What do any of us want? A roof over our heads? A good education. Some healthy food. Right? Yeah, I mean, we often talk about it.

I mean, like, it's, like, very difficult to imagine that the future can be incredible. And I think the future should be incredible. But it's kind of hard to imagine it if you don't get these, like, very basic things correct. And I think food, water and shelter are certainly on that very short list of things. And it almost, like, getting those things correct, like enables all of the other exciting things that I think get talked about on this podcast and other places. It's foundation. Exactly. The ability to just to live relatively close to where you work.

Like, we don't think of that as being like a huge life-changing thing, but it really does matter. Like, that's like so core. And that, I think, is something that Americans just have not had a chance to experience at a long time. It's very difficult to live anywhere near where you work if you're around a major American city. Is it a great point if you think about the correlation between depression, substance abuse, alcohol abuse, obesity, domestic violence. violence, crime, all of these things. There's literally studies that have been made, I'll ask producer glad to pull it up. There have been countless studies made that show that have been done that once you get past

30 or 40 minutes in a commute, these things dramatically increase. And when you get to over an hour commute, it's like this couple is getting divorced. Because think about it, if mom or dad are taking this, you know, this hour and a half commute to get to work. They get home in an hour and 15 minutes. Now they've been in a car for two hours and 45 minutes after working for an eight, nine, ten hour shift. Man, what's left? What's left for the fam? Not much. Thanks to producer Claude. I've got a few studies here. The biggest one was from Sweden. They did a public health study in 2011. An analysis of public health surveys in southern Sweden found that car and public transport commutes exceeding 30 minutes are associated with increased

stress, lower vitality, and perceived poor sleep quality. So you hit it exactly. It's that 30-minute threshold. Also, all I do is read. The UK Office for National Statistics, the ONS found that commutes of more than 30 minutes by train lead to higher anxiety levels on average. So there you go. So Jason, you're here to talk a little bit about, I wouldn't call it a pivot. I think I'd call it a new product line. So tell us what you're working on. Yeah, it's not a bit. So I can, you know, for those who don't know or haven't heard, we're a construction. technology company sort of the charismatic megafauna of our company are like the large scale 3d printing robotics for printing buildings of all kinds um in the very earliest versions of my

our seed round in fact said like we think uh this technology is disruptively important we think the most impactful areas for this this to be deployed of course are in residence just like this sort of global housing crisis but even in the seed deck we were saying we think there's a profound opportunity here for the military and for military construction. And we think when it's time to build on other worlds, like this is going to be like the only game in town when it comes to building in space. That sort of seemed crazy eight years ago. But in fact, that is what has been happening all along. And so we've been working with the military, the intelligence communities in NASA for six or seven years now. And it has sort of finally come to a head where like

that business inside of icon will grow about 500% this year. And it's now worth like a dedicated focused effort. Because there's like interesting ways that you do business development with the government customer. There's interesting legal arrangements there's. And of course there's just like a sharp point on what the technology needs to do. Everybody wants faster and cheaper, but there are some things that are weighted more highly in a military and intelligence environment, you know, survivability. What are they? Because I mean, obviously building faster, cost for the military is not as important as for the single mom or dad we talked about earlier who was trying to make a living. But at speed, I would think, and quality. That's right. Speed is, speed is a big deal. And they have

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

the labor requirement by six-sevenths, right? And our supply chain are things that are like globally and ubiquitously available. In fact, some of the next generation work we'll be doing for the military is literally learning to use in situ resources, like the materials around you to build whatever you need in the moment. That's a big unlock in my mind because you use concrete. I like to stay active. You know, I'm getting a little older, but I've started drinking. I am a daily ultimate essentials.

and it is delicious. I'm starting to notice a real shift. I drink it every morning and I just feel less tired, right? Which allows me to really, you know, catch up and attack the day. IMA's daily ultimate essentials packs the benefits of 16 different supplements into one tasty drink. It's loaded with 92 nutrient-rich ingredients including vitamins, minerals, adaptogens, along with pre-pro and and postbiotics. It's giving me a great energy boost. It calms your digestion and it's an easy have to stick with because it tastes delicious. So start feeling like your best self every day with IM8. Go to IM8health.com slash twist and use the code Twist to get a free welcome kit, five free chival sachets, and 10% off your order. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA.

This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. We call it form. It's a concrete that needs to do some special things and take form. If you use, you know, standard concrete, it flows and then you end up with a puddle instead of a house. And if you use a lot of the traditional ways to like quick set concrete, you end up with a brick instead of a robot because it sets up in the machine. And so it's some pretty specialized concrete. But the base ingredients are ingredients that are like available everywhere in the world. All right. We'll get right back to what you're doing in terms of forward deployment, the use cases, and then we'll go to space.

First, I want to start, Lon, by a plotting plot. I just hit my plot. I'm recording. I've got all of my notes taken care of. take a memo. I'm going to unload on the one person who screwed me in the last five years. It's been a while since somebody got over on J-Cal and got over on me for about 500 times. 500 boxes Zizi. Not fun. But I'm going to balance the ledger at the end of the show. So I gave myself a note about that. If you want to keep track of your enemies of the people who screw you.

Or your friends. Or of what you got to do today. Use your plot. You get a applaud. And we applaud plod. You want to get applaud note pin S. And you can check it out for yourself at plod.aI slash twist. And just use the code twist for 10% off your plod note pit as. Keep track of all your enemies list easily with the plod note pin S.

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

And based on what I know about material science, which is very little, The bullets, bombs, and these new drones, when they hit a tent, a canvas based on my Boy Scout memories, is not going to help you when a drone comes in, correct? I mean, that's the laundry list of problems of military construction is quite long. But, yeah, to like simplify it, right now the two tools the military has to use when they want to build anything. You mentioned barracks and military housing, but whether it's a training center, whether it's like defensive structures, vehicle hides, all things we have built for the military. They either have these like high speed, low cost, but low survivability option, like tents, or they have this very slow, very expensive, very complicated way of doing traditional building. And what they're missing, which they like very sharply need, is a high, the high speed deployment

of survivable structures with a simple supply chain without needing a bunch of skilled labor hanging around. And that is the tool that robotic construction offers, that you have the automation of the labor through the robotics, and then you're building with a very simple supply chain and a material that is like inherently survivable. Yeah, so this concrete slurry that you use in the 3D printer, we saw it on the screen just a moment ago. It looks like you tend to do walls that are what, 12, 18 inches thick, and then what could they survive? If a drone hit it, I'm assuming the people inside survive or the tank inside survives because there's a foot or two of concrete, yeah? Yeah, we have done vehicle hides and we've done

sort of full or like an early round. There's more to come for sure of like blast and ballistics testing against facilities. I'm not allowed to disclose like the full performance characters, as you might imagine. But I think the email we got back from the testing officer was like, we subjected your structure to immense pressure and are confident that subjected to similar pressure in the field would pass muster, something, something like that. So yeah. And this is somebody who stayed at an icon, you had an Airbnb going for a while, but I think somebody bought it, right? Yeah, I mean, yeah, if that's the project, I think that was from, that project there is from like 2019. So that was like some of our early work. We have like 250 buildings that we have

delivered in the world to date, most of which are housing. A few dozen are those are like military structures. But it's been a fun journey of trying to like really like give humanity new tools with which to build. So how much faster can you build a survivable structure in the field versus the equivalent that the military would build? We're talking days, months, weeks, you tell us. The most recent project that we're doing is out at Fort Bliss in West Texas, and we just had a little ceremony out there, and the deputy secretary of the Army showed up and spoke about their experiences with the technology and said that typically it takes them one to two years to build a barracks, we are delivering 10 and six months for less than half the cost. And these are like

higher performance. Like if you saw the existing barracks on site, like it's actually like not apples. I'm giving you apples to apples time and cost comparisons, but these are like not apples to apples comparisons. So it could be 20, 30, 40 acts in terms of just the amount of square feet and the cost, you know, the somewhere in like half the price and 10 times the structure is like a 20, 30, 40 multiple. And talk to me about the, because what people typically get wrong here is aesthetics and climate. I first looked at it and I was like, I don't know if I want to be in a pizza oven. And I, you know, it's not going to look good or whatever. And then I saw the structure. And I was like, wait a second. This looks really beautiful. Lon. This looks like, you know,

Decker's apartment. It looks like the Innis House. This looks like something Frank Lloyd Wright built. Right? Yeah. It looks actually great and then talk about climate and temperature. Yeah, maybe I'll like go back because of course like housing was like the the big issue that I sort of provoked the existence of icon. And of course, everybody talks a lot about we need to build faster. We need to build more affordably. But you kind of do, it's an expensive problem to solve and you kind of need to step back and it's like, wait a minute. Are we sure like this is the world we want to build faster and cheaper? Like the sort of jet like these are not the houses you're looking for like. Like where is Wakanda?

Like where is Rivendell? Like are we sure like the delivery of this thing that we see? And I think the housing of the future should feel like if you let of course it should be faster and cheaper. But I think like beauty and dignity like have to be at the table of the requirements that you're solving for from day one. And of course that like happened in housing. And it was one of the attractive things about 3D printing was if you could imagine

automations do what automations do and they make things faster and cheaper. But because the architecture is digital and then very, very, very, you know, importantly because the building material is fluid all of your sort of aesthetic aspirations are still on the table right like if you want a house in the shape of a fibonacci spiral we can print a house in the shape of fivinati spiral and it's the same price as a square and so like what happens to the world like not only when things are cheaper but when when like beauty is back on the menu when like uh you know it's maybe in like the iPhone like the billionaire has the same iPhone as like the college student Like what happens when the same sort of high-end looking aesthetics are available?

And in fact, we're doing 110 more homes for the homeless at Community First Village. I should have maybe brought pictures. Like, these do not look like houses for the homeless. We're delivering them for between $99 and $120,000 a home, including our profit. Incredible. And like, they are incredible. That's awesome. I mean, so often when you're hearing about, you know, these well-intentioned programs to, like, help the homeless, it's like, well, we're going to build them like this little one-weighed.

room closet and we'll put it in a parking lot and you could have a thousand of them and it's so cheap and it's like yeah but it's depressing it's like living in a refugee it's a present and it's somehow funny it's strangely like connected to all this like regulatory runaway that has also happened in the housing space because you can you know in in some way you don't want a bunch of like ugly crappy houses like that's not like a wicked instinct um and so people have tried to sort of prevent this sort of ugliness uh from proliferating in the world and you you sort of get this pile up of, you get this pile up of regulations that like also add cost and expense in time. And somehow resetting with something that is faster and cheaper, but also more beautiful, perhaps also allows it to like untangle some of this like regulatory knot that we've gotten in.

That for sure is driving up housing costs. Here's a picture of, and listen, this is no dig to the people who made it. And this is certainly a lot better than living on the street. if I'm being honest, it looks like you're in barracks. And it looks, you know, it doesn't look modern. It doesn't look. It does not speak to the human heart. And again, it's like, where's what kind of?

Like, this is not the world that we want to build faster into it. It's not a leasing. This is not correct. Like, we want the same thing for our brothers and sisters who are at different parts of the socioeconomic ladder that we would want for our own family. I don't know if you can Google like I. Well, here's, like, look at this. Here's your 3D printed homes for the homeless.

Here's a startup truth bomb. A lot of founders have no idea what's actually going on with their money. If that's true of your company, hey, no judgments. I know you're busy. Hiring, building your product, go-to-market, all that important stuff. But your company needs a reliable financial partner, not a lifestyle brand, okay? Grasshopper is a real federally chartered digital bank. That's not trying to win you over with a rewards program.

Instead, they're building deep integrations, treasury products that are going to actually help you expand your runway and innovative tools like an MC-based AI connector. Oh man, that's awesome. We can connect it to all of our agents and do reporting. And that will put you in command of your money. As a twist listener, you're going to get $500 cash bonus just for opening an account. Think of that. You open an account? Boom, there's $500 in it. So leap on over to grasshopper. dot bank slash twist and use the promo code twist as a twist listener you're going to get a $500 cash bonus just for opening an account grasshopper dot bank slash twist again i'll be honest there's homes out here in hill country out in dripping springs uh out in wimbrily that are selling for 500 k that look

exactly like that and that are $400 a night Airbnb you looked at these lawn for your mom can you google i don't know if you can search um i 99 icon the the letters i 99 icon and see what images come up because I would like to show you some of the newer ones. There it is. We are building that house. That house is already done. We are building that house for between $99,000 and $120,000 delivered with our profit included. By the way, that house looks like a $4 million dollar L.A. mansion with a view. It looks like you'd go to Los Felis and tour that. Like, this was built in the 20s and it's been in a hundred films. You got it. You got it. You got it. And so we had like a global architecture design contest for

like we gave a million dollar prize to a million dollars in price of people designing homes that could be built for 99k was sort of the initiative we've also built that house out at at community first village this helps us get around this like nimbie problem like not in my backyard it's like you can sort of weave the the tapestry of society back together but beauty really is the key it's not just a spreadsheet exit the spreadsheet matters um but you but like these things have to be weighted sort of like in a more equal way than we're we've thought about them in the past of like solving the housing crisis. Taking an unhoused person and putting them in a real community that feels like a real

neighborhood, that's inherently stabilizing. If y'all go out to community first, you would say like, oh my God, a neighborhood of like homeless people. Like it must be like kind of crazy town. Right. Like it is completely chill and kind and like it is a miracle. and like the I don't want to keep repeating myself but like the restoration of dignity and community like these things are not just spreadsheet that when you're talking about fundamental human needs food

water shelter of course they're maybe but they like unlock the rest of the pyramid right of like self actualization and sure yeah and this is how you solve these seemingly intractable social issues is you you have to put the sort of whole human in the picture listen I'm going to invoke Jesus. Lon and I'm talking a lot about Jesus these days. Always, always. Always. I'm telling people the good news every day. How you treat the meekest amongst us is how you treat me. This is what Jesus said. This is the gospel. He said to us how you treat the weakest members of society is how you treat God. Let that sink in as a concept, folks. What you have done to the sake of the poor, the hungry, the prisoner is what you have done to me. Correct. And, and

And this is, I think, a great Nordstar for our society here in America. The reason it's important, and the reason I did my tweet this morning is I think it's very easy as technologists. It's very easy as capital allocators. You know, you hit some hits. They run away. Oh, my God, Uber, Robin Hood. You know, I'm a victim of it myself. But we have to ask ourselves, as society becomes so wealthy, where's the floor?

And has the floor moved up? Yeah, the whole the whole the whole the whole bracket has to move together. Correct. Yes. And if you were like thinking about structuring a society, which we should, the whole bracket has to move. And let me tell you something. When you are lucky enough to be in the top 1%, 0.1%, top 10%, top 10%, top 20%, wherever you find yourself in life. And in our industry, you very quickly find yourself in the top 10%, 5%, 1%. You know, it's, it's extraordinary how the upper middle class has grown. We've had the upper, middle class in the United States is the fastest growing. These are people who have networks of one to five million, which doesn't seem a lot if you live in New York City or Los Angeles, but it is a heck of a lot of money if you live in Nashville or Austin, right? You're doing really well. You have a lot of optionality. So what can we do to just move the floor up? And you had, yeah, go ahead. And I mean, like, I'm like icon as an icon of this. When you start thinking about technology, I don't think it's an accident, like the very same technology

that we're using to like reimagine the way we do social and affordable housing in America is like the very same technology that will also allow us to build the moon base somehow like when you like when you sort of frame these things as like bigger problems of like yes civilization just needs a better way to build as opposed to like what's a little widget that could save us a few dollars per square foot or something like it actually unlocks like tremendous potential for human flourishing sort of across the board both for solving intractable problems but also for like these like grand challenges that I think, like, also speak to the human heart or ennobling in their own way. Is that another way? This can be a win-win-win. Yes. The investors in these companies and the founders

and the team can win. Society can win, right? And all levels of society can win. It doesn't need to just be the top wins, the shareholders in the company. That's right. These things don't have to be incompetent. Like, we can show, with this technology and others, I think, We should be thinking like, we can shelter the homeless, we can revive the American dream, we can defend the West, and we can, by God, build the moon base. Like, that's the society that I want to be a part of. And that's the technology set that we need to be all working on collectively to, like, unlock the sort of next level of humanity.

You know what you just unlocked for me, this idea that when you make something that's truly got that craftsmanship that truly inspires the high end, it's not, it's not incongruous to have that hit everybody. And I'll give an example of it. You know, I'm sitting a couple of feet away from the 16th Tesla ever made, the Roadster that I paid $150,000 for it. And next to it is the Model S I paid also signature, signature, O-O-O-1, which I paid $150,000 for it.

Okay, it's $300,000 for up a car. I'm a very lucky guy. I get to have those two cars. What do I drive every day? I drive a model Y, cost 50K. I think you can get it used for 30K with 20,000 miles on it. The FSD I use, the FSD, Elon uses, the FSD everybody who has access to a used model Y or model 3, which you can get used ones right now with FSD is 15 to 20K. They're everywhere.

And then cyber care brings it everywhere. Every rich person you talk to, David Sack started driving again. He used to take Uber. He's in Austin now, right? He's in Austin, and he showed up for, we had a nice steak dinner the other week. He shows up. He's like, how do I park my car? I'm like, David, there's a valet.

He's like, okay, I give it to the valet. I'm like, yeah, you have to have your key, though, because, you know, text. I'm like, why are you driving yourself? He's like, oh, I have FSD and I have this model Y. I love it. Sacks doing pretty good, drives the model Y every day. Chimov, he's doing pretty good. He drives the model Y every day.

Yeah. Freeburg, he's doing very well. Oh, Hall is crashing it. He's got four model-wise, he's set on the program, four Tasselers, all of them with sub-traffic. We all drive the same car. It's all converged to one. Perfect cart.

This is what's going to happen with ICON. You'll be a rich person. You'll want to rebuild your Malibu 10,000 square foot beach home or in the hills, and you'll want it to be fire resistant. You'll build an icon. By the way, two to three-hour fire rating standard out of the box costs the same prices to build in a non-fireproof way. Like unpack that for us after we look at this incredible polymarket.

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

But people are betting here. Volume pretty low on this one. That means opportunity. There you go. But it's new. It's new. In fairness. So only 110,000 volume so far, but it's new.

Winning so far over 439K. That's what people are betting by the end of this month. The median Austin home value will be, then 435 to 439, then 431. Basically, as expensive as you can go is what people are leaning on. And as a person who has been home hunting in Austin recently, I don't disagree. If you find a decent house in Austin for under 400, you should buy it immediately. That's my take on it. It's easier than ever to build a great new product.

And launching a startup, even as a solopreneur, is getting easier and easier. But as my experience founders already know, there's a lot more to starting a company than just putting up a website or even building a product. If you're serious about going into business, you need a Delaware Sequark. That's going to give you a serious leg up on your competition. and you can be taken seriously by investors. That's where Northwest registered agent comes in. Just a few clicks. They're going to give you the perfect start to your new enterprise.

A real identity, a domain, a custom website, a business email, all the public filings done, and even a phone number. And you'll complete this process in under 10 minutes. Plus, you're going to get all sorts of free tools and resources from step-to-step guides, compliance reminders, and an online account that's going to keep everything organized. even as your business grows. So get all the advantages of a Delaware Sea Corp,

regardless of where in the U.S. you're operating out of. Northwest registered agent.com slash twist. And let that sink in. There are people right now in California, New York, Los Angeles, you know, other Boston, who are looking at this and their heads are exploding because they remodeled their kitchen for 800,000.

They could have bought two homes in Austin for what they're remodeled. I am not joking. And I'm not talking about remodeling your 2,000 square foot, you know, European kitchen that, you know, I had at my houses. I'm talking about a modest kitchen with, you know, GE appliances. It's $6,000, $800,000. It's $300,000 or $400,000 to remodel a bathroom in Los Angeles. You asked to have your bathroom remodeled in Brentwood minimum $300,000, the cost of a three-bedroom here.

in Austin. Get on it, folks. There's no comparison. I mean, if you were talking about $400,000 homes, you're going hours outside of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. If you're in San Bernardino, you're in the desert, you're going to, you're going to Richard Tree for that money. You're going to Sanfordu. You're going to Victorville. Like, there's just no way you're anywhere in Los Angeles for that price. It is the greatest city in the world, time, Jason. I certainly think so. There's something special happening here that I haven't experienced. And I like going to the Bay. I like going to Washington. See, I like New York City. Like I like the, I like those place.

Great place to visit. Something very special is happening here. And this is part of it's like there, there's an instinct to build instead of like hand ring and like sort of theorize about solutions. It's like just get out there and do something. Like figure it out. And I think that the city and the town are like reaping

the benefits of that. I mean, I don't know if you can pull up. We just built a hundred, a couple years ago now, 100 3D printed homes with Lenar, Lenar Wolf Ranch icon maybe would be like the thing to search. These are homes that we saw. sold in the 3 to 500K range with like the largest production. Lenar, this is the largest home builder in the country.

It was the first 3D printed neighborhood in the world. It was 100 homes that were 3D printed. Wow. Yeah, there you are. I mean, that's actually this is done now and sort of occupied. Fantastic. But it was like Lenar's number one selling community in Central Texas. It had like their lowest warranty claims.

Like this was the big sort of like does this work at the community scale. Amazing. And now you don't want to be it. It was possible to do something like that in Austin. It was like where I was getting. is like people were like ready to try and ready to innovate and like it like it was like surprisingly by the way this was what my experience when I grew up in the 80s and 90s in New York City this was my experience when I you know lived in California for 20 years there was a sense that anything was

possible and you could build stuff and then in both of those people both of those places the entire gestalt has changed the entire modus operandis has been how do I get mine there this is a shrinking pie, nothing can get done. All problems are intractable. The taxes only go up. The spending and the deficit only goes up. There is no way out. It's a death spiral. And the greatest pilots in the world, whether it's Sacks, Elon, you know, put myself down the list. But, you know, people who actually can solve the problems in those places are like, you know what? I'm tired of being hated for trying to solve problems and buildings. Peace out.

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

and they're going to put their hatred on you as the owner of the business because it's $6,000 to have a two-bedroom apartment. and it's $4 million to have a three-bedroom house. And it's $60,000 to $90,000 to put your kids in a decent school. And if you go to a public school, you're going to need to supplement it with $20,000 in tutoring. And you're going to have to hope your child is safe when they go to school. Your employees then start to figure out, well, who do I resent for this?

And they say, the rich VCs and the CEOs of these companies are the reason that my life sucks. And they're making $400,000 in RSUs and salary. Move your company to Austin. Lawn came from L.A., Jackie came from San Francisco. The reaction they had, Jason, when they came to this town, was this town's dope. Lon made an incredible observation. I can go get brunch and not wait online.

Oh, man. And the brunch doesn't cost $250,000. You could drive to any time. you'd be like, I like bagels from that one place. You could drive there. You could park right in front. You walk right inside. Maybe you wait five minutes.

I've waited in a seven minute line. You get your bagels. You walk right. It totally changes your entire lifestyle. In Los Angeles, that's a two-hour mission to go get bagels at a good place that people like because you're in line. It's where to park. It's chaos. And I'm worried about my guy, Lon.

Can't put a price. And he's moving here. I give him 10 dimes to move. I'm like, here's 10K, you know, whatever. You know, I'll pay for your movie. whatever. Whatever. I mean, so it's the minimum I can do to get that level of talent here.

I'm like, how's it going? What's it going? What's it going on with the apartment? I'm like, oh, I got a house. I'm like, oh, yeah, I got a house in this really nice neighborhood that I'm looking at living. And I'm like, how's long living in my neighborhood now? What the heck? For the same price I was playing for a studio apartment in Silver Lake.

I got a two-bedroom townhouse to rent in beautiful. Yeah, it's because all three times the space. Also, it's full of builders and it's full of people who support and applaud builders. Like, I suppose. in other places had I tried to start this company somewhere else, we would be very lucky to have built 10 or 20 homes by now, and the company would have gone extinct. I mean, like, we would certainly not be like hundreds of homes in

with like hundreds and hundreds of homes in the pipeline. You've got to be in a place that, like, supports the builders. From a super fan, Fat Don Capital, I thought this was an interesting guy. Oh, Fat Don. You know Fat Don. That's my me maker. So he says three-D printed houses, super interesting. He likes the cool designs. He says, I'm curious about longevity.

though, whether the concrete mixture cracks over time. And then what do you do about cracks if they do appear after the house has been printed? Yeah, so fortunately, one of the reasons we started with concrete is like there's a lot of innovative things we had to do with concrete. But the existence of concrete is not something we created. And so concrete has been around four thousands of years. Matter of fact, probably the only technology that civilization actually forgot how to do during the dark ages was make concrete. We didn't forget metalworking and all these other things. We forgot how to make concrete.

And so we know it's one of the most resilient materials on planet. I mean, we have bridges in Alaska standing in saltwater for decades that are still the, you know, the largest unreinforced dome in the world in Rome is made of concrete. And so we sort of have the empirical evidence to show that like this is like far better than the building materials we're using drywall. If we offered actually a million dollar prize on this show to come up with a lower quality building material that would pass building code than drop, no one would win the prize. Like it is literally the crappiest thing. we can imagine imagine using is what we're building with today so certainly like we we sort of win the awards on longevity there's two kinds of cracking and concrete one is structural cracking that never

happens to us anymore like like that as a result there is occasionally a thing called shrinkage cracking which is just like as the material dehydrates it leads a void it's only aesthetic that is very very minimal today sometimes people say it adds character but like if you want to paint over it seal at these kind of things. Like there's a whole, I won't get into it here, but like there, they did, like we've been building with concrete and masonry material so long, like, icon sort of didn't actually have to invent the playbook for like long-term care and maintenance. One hundred years is the lifespan of concrete at a minimum. At a minute. And by the way, termites, you may have heard of them when you have wood structures and you have to have somebody,

I mean, listen, I've owned a lot of homes at this point. I am my bane of my existence. Flooding. Yeah. Mold. Fire. Wind. And mold and fire. I cannot tell you, I have had mold in three of six homes I've owned. I have had flooding in two of six homes I've owned. I have had, thankfully, knock on wood, never had any smoke or fire. And termites in six of six homes I've had to deal with.

No, I'm not saying I've had a termite. only had a term I, like, problem in one of them, my L-1-1, my L-A-1. But all of them, I've had to pay 100, no, low thousands of dollars every two or three years to deal with this. To get them true. Concrete, none of it. And by the way, drywall is basically drywall in Spanish means mold collector. It literally is where mold, like, I have cut so much drywall.

You're at like this is there's like we're in a kind of like Stockholm syndrome about the way that we build it's like you know that mean where the dog is like drinking coffee in the house it's like this is fine like drywall's fine like this is not fine like this is not the way we should be sheltering ourselves. One more question also keeping it practical Jason from Nate Day IW8KM probably kilometers. How does electrical and plumbing work when the house is 3D printed? Great question. So one of the one of the. One of the. One of the. cool things about 3D printing is you actually control the internal structure of what you're building. And so plumbing, electrical, and usually the mechanical systems of the homes actually go in faster and cheaper with less error into a 3D printed wall. Installing, to be fair on the ledger though, like installing windows and doors is a bit different.

I won't say it's more expensive, but you do have to like learn something new. But plumbing electrical and the mechanical systems go in like very fast. Because the wall is not solid. It's sort of engineered to the loads you expect of it and you control the internal structure. of the wall. It's like you're not just automating framing. You're automating the whole wall system. So there's like multiple trades that are automated out.

Right. You can tell the printer here's what we want the inside to be. Yeah. Yes, correct. Awesome. We got our questions in. Great questions. Everybody, let's keep moving down the dock.

All right. So thanks to Jason for being here. Should we drop Jason off and bring on our next guest? Yeah, let's drop Jason off and I'll come see Jason. We'll have a little dinner. Yeah, you need to come to the new printer. We got the new multi-story printer. You need to come see it.

I will come see it. You know what we should do. We should do an onsite. We should bring a couple folks and do a little onsite. We'll have a little barbecue down there. Amen, and you should operate the printer. There you go. I cannot.

Wait, I'm going to build my own tower. I'm going to build my tower and I'm going to have a seat at the top, my little writer's cabin. How tall can you make these things? Looks like you get into two stories, yeah? Yeah, yeah, two to three stories with the new version of the printer, which is also the one we're starting to release to other builders. Like time to join the revolution. This is the equipment of the future. Oh, see, this is a key thing I didn't get into here, but I'll just give you a minute.

When you come out. No, no, no. I'll give you a minute here because this is. critical when you perfect the technology, you are partnering with the greatest home developers in the world. You started at the top, great way to do it. And then second, construction companies you're also partnering with because you can't possibly deploy every single channel. So tell me about your channel strategy. Yeah, yeah. We, you know, both the most effective way to solve the global housing crisis and at high speed it's also turns out to be like the best business is to like in the

long run be a technology company so really the the game all along has been to like arm the revolution so to speak we were like providing the tools by which humanity will build its future and the new generation of the printer titan is the multi-story railless more automated system that actually prints reinforced concrete not just concrete and we launched that business uh about a month ago this week in the uptake so if you're a builder you're a builder you're a builder You want to be a channel partner. Go to what's the URL? Iconbill.com.

Okay. And you can always guess sometimes the founder gets first name at the domain name. And you're also hiring who you hire for, Jason. Man, we're hiring material scientists, engineers, software engineers, architects, field operators, the whole staff. Jason, you can clip this. Yes. Okay. You can clip this for your hiring.

Okay. I am the ultimate judge of character. Okay. I am the bestie of all besties. people know like hey if you if you if you're having a tough time you call jason he's he's going to come and chop it up with you talk about your problems i i pride myself on trying to be a good friend to my friends and i immediately can tell when somebody is that person somebody is true honest a just person jason i knew jason ballard i knew from the moment i met you that you're a

quality guy and i collect quality guys you know why because some guys like to shivney me and I'm going to talk about the guy who shived me at the end of the show. Stick around. Yeah. Hey man. Okay. Grace and loving is the way, man. So like that. I know. I'm a flawed human. Yeah, yeah. And I will work on grace. I will have grace for the people who stabbed me, right? Like Jesus forgave people. He forgave them. It's a big thing with him. He was all about it. Yeah. And I'm doing my best. I'm doing my best. Today's not going to be my best moment. All right. Okay. I'm going to try to channel a little grace. But there's no better person you could go work for and there's no better mission than housing people.

Jason is an a plus character, individual. This is the person. If you're effective at what you do in your career, go work for Jason. Clip this. Put it on your hiring page, Jason. I give you permission to use this endorsement on your social media and on your website. Go work for Jason and do something good in the world. Stop working for Zuckerberg.

No offense. And trying to make people click on more ads and invade their private. privacy. Go work and build housing for the military, for space. Choose my French, for the homeless and for rich people. Go do it people. Where else do you get giant robots, homeless housing, and a moon base in one place? I mean, come on. Get some of those RSUs.

Come, it's going to be worth a freaking fortune. I'm going to, I can't wait till you IP. How come I'm not on the cat tip? We need to do a syndicate. All right. That's one of my favorite guys. Good guest. Good guy.

Right there. That's my guy. Always a good guy. I know quality guys. Now this next guy coming on the program, I don't know if this quality guy or not. We'll find out. So we're bringing up.

We'll find out. Seby Rubino. He's from Resi Labs, Jason. It's a bit tensor subnet. We've been talking to a lot of them. Subnet 46. And Rezzi stands for real estate super intelligence. So they are hosting a competition for AI models that can accurately price real estate.

It's a theme show today. We're talking housing. Sebi, thank you so much for being here. Hey, Seby. How you doing, brother? I'm doing good, brother. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

A big fan of the show. Yeah, I'm glad that we're... How long you've been listening to Twist? How long you've been listening to Twist? It's okay if it's a year. It's okay if it's 10. But I always like to ask people because I've been getting so many people DM you and it makes my day when somebody tweets at me or does a LinkedIn that they've been listening

to the show and it had some impact on their entrepreneurial journey. Almost two years. I worked at FonConfinance and one of the team members there was like sending me clips, not Clipsaw, sending me the videos and saying, you know, check this out. Awesome. And you can help the team out by just doing that. Tell a friend, if there's a quality episode, there's a moment in it. Just send the deep link, please, and say, hey, Jason's been doing this with Lon for 15 years.

We're in year 15, I think. Oh, more. Well, we got to have a, you know what? We have to start celebrating the community here. I want to do a yearly party on the anniversary of the show. I don't know when Brian Alvey came on for the first episode. That's a quality. That's my guy.

We'll have to go back and figure out when the, but it was early 2000. All right. What are you working on? Yeah. 2008. C-E-B-W-D. C-B. Are you working on?

Am I pronouncing across? S-E-B-Y-C-B? Sebi. Seby. Oh, my name is Sebastian. I work for TARRail Corporation. It's from Blade Runner, everybody. It's from a classic folkover.

All right. What are you working on Sebastian? Yeah, we are working on the real estate. It's actually portal. org. It's actually portal. .rezi Labs. Oh, okay.

I will. I will suggest. We are actually launching our new website and portal today, I will do a quick screen share, but we're building a real estate intelligence network. Our first competition, like Law & said, is an appraisal model. So right now we're doing property appraisals remotely without ever seeing the property in person, and our AI models can price homes in the USA at 98% accuracy. So that beats out Zestimate, that beats out even in-person appraisers. And now we are injecting our intelligence into the agents that real estate agents

or real estate investors are building. That's a good idea. Platforms, one of them is balcony technology will be using our pricing engine for. They have a trillion dollars in data from counties or housing data from counties, and they're bringing that data on chain. They're doing this avalanche.

And what they're doing with us is they're using our pricing engine to reassess property taxes. Sorry about that world. And also to, dissect fraud, right? So if someone quick claim deeds a house or transfers a house for 100K when it's worth a million, let's check that out. And yeah, so that's our intelligence track. We have some other tracks, but that has been where we've had the most progress so far. Incredible, incredible.

And so what's your background? And how did you come to this idea? I always like to know how the founder kind of found this. How did you find it? Yeah. So my whole family is real estate. based uncle is a huge developer in Brooklyn. My mom is even my hometown contractor. Oh, there you go. And Red Hook, right. He built up Red Hook, essentially. Red Hook, where we used to dump bodies.

Just so everybody knows, your family was working in one of the most dangerous places in the world. I was having dinner the other night with my new friend. This is my new friend, Jimmy Iovine. Yes. Jimmy Iovine. And I was lucky enough to sit at a table with him at an event. this is the guy who did my favorite album dire straits making movies this is the guy who did born to run bruce springsteen another favorite album one similar work and we sat there talking

i said let me ask a question this is like a quality guy i said where you from where you said i'm from brook i said that's where i'm from bay ridge where you from you from you from red hook i said you grew up in red hook that's like one of the four places when i was growing up in the 70s and 80s they told me lawn, fork green, bedstine, red hook. You don't need to get off at that train stop. The Westies, you're afraid the Westies are going to bother you. Just be careful. Just be careful. And I knew this is a legit guy. Okay. So that means, Sebastian, you're a legit guy. What's the business model here? How do you make money? I always want to know how the company makes money. Now we know what you're doing. We know how you came to the idea.

You had personal insights here. But how does it make money? How does Rezi Labs make money? We essentially sell our models. So right now we are live on shoots. So this is another BitTensor subnet. It's essentially the open or outer subnet. Right. So you can list your model.

They can allow you to list your model. And then from there, users can go and access that model. So with the portal that I'd love to take a second and show you guys. Yeah, show don't tell. Let's do a demo or die here. Remember, most people are listening. If you're not listening, go to YouTube. you can see it, but if you are listening, we'll explain it to you. And I think always good,

Sebastian, for people who don't know the magic of Tao, which I am obsessed with, I bought another $50,000 in Tao today. Wow. Explain what, I'm 750K into this, which is a small bet for me. That's not, I'm just giving that a context. And I made this as a, this is a personal bet. This is for my family office. But why are so many intelligent people building with Tao? Explain town in the subnets. Yeah, Tao has honestly been, I've been a builder for a while since I was 18. I was always building something.

And Tao has changed my life as a builder. One, it's giving me access to talent. Two, it's giving me access to resources. And three, it's giving me a community of people, these even 2,900 holders of a token. And it's giving me essentially this economic engine. What does tau do? Tau allows you, is a network of sub-networks. So I have a sub-network, as Lon mentioned, it's 46 out of these 128 networks in BitTensor.

And these networks are really just competitions. My competition is submit an AI model. There's other competitions that are provide compute, and we're just going to make sure you're ready and available or storage. So they're essentially like digital commodity. It's a digital commodity marketplace. And it's powered by these competitions. Now the bow on the BitTensor box is you can think about BitTensor the same way you think about, say, Google or Open AI or Claude, or sorry, Anthropic at the company level. Because those companies are building out their respective AI stack, right?

They're building out compute. They're building out multiple types of inference. on BitTensor, these 128 networks are hosting these competitions so that they can offer one piece of the AI stack. And where we fit in that AI stack and the reason why we're using BitTensor is because we have the thesis that narrow intelligence, faster, cheaper, better will win in this day and age and faster, cheaper, better commodities due to this economic engine, due to the competitive nature and not corporate structure. that allows us to be prepared for this next age of usage, which is going to be agent-centric instead of human-centric. So whereas the Zillow API is an API, we are a model, right? And as this change from APIs being used and humans being used for things transitions to digital commodities, these intelligence commodities, BitTensor will be the venue. you that is selected by most open router model routers and agentic model routers, right?

And in these meta agents, I have the open clause stuff, as I've seen you've been on as well. If my meta agent that I'm chatting to most of the time is selecting the intelligence, it's going to select every single time from bit tensor. And that is what we are, what we've plugged ourselves into and are involved in. And that's why we're able to see ourselves scaling out this, not just for appraisals, but for inspections with specialized hardware. Maybe we can do a competition for ICON and say, hey, instead of getting out a million bucks, we'll give you out $100K because we can really do this in a competitive manner. And now you can get your designs. We could be your design firm, right?

And they pay us and we redistribute that through our token. So that's a long-winded answer. No, it's a great one. Now do your demo. It's very important that we explain Tao and Bintetzer to folks here on this program. Why? Sometimes they get a tingle on. I hear a pitch.

I get a tingle. I get a spidey sense. I'm good at this. This is one of the things I found I'm good at in life. You know that means? The lean forward meme? Like here's the moment that I can see you physically do that when you hear a pitch that registers. You physically do the.

little lean forward like, okay, this is a brilliant idea. Here's what I need to know. I've seen you do. Well, I did it with BitTorrent, by, not Bitcoin, by the way. And I made a mistake. I had some Bitcoin on Mount Cox. It got hacked. I had it on another thing. I lost my Bitcoin. Okay, whatever. My wife bought it. We did great. Shout out to my wife. She's brilliant. And I should have done more. And like a crazy Musad, CIA agent, a famous one. with the dark past, like asked me to introduce him to the Bitcoin because he watched my podcast. And I was like, okay, here's the guys. I'll leave it at that.

I don't want to go down this rabbit hole here. He shall not be named who I barely knew. And I was like, hey, pal, sure, just so you know, this is like a nonprofit, essentially. These guys are monks. They're techno monks. They're not interested in money. But yeah, I'll introduce you to them, I guess, because my agent was like, can you introduce them to these guys?

I always like to help founders out. And then, of course, I get dragged for it. I'll put it all aside. I'm not making that mistake anymore. When I get the Spidey Sense, you know what I do? I share it and I place bets. I place a 750K bet on Tau. Yeah.

Co-founded Stillcore Capital at Mark Jeffrey. I leaned in and put some money of my own in. And I did the same thing with OpenClaw, right? These two things are my spidey senses in 2026. Those are my two Spidey Sense bets. This is not an investment advice, but I told Lon, if you have $500,000, and you ask me, should I buy some tau? I'd say, yeah, go for it, a woman. I feel comfortable giving you that advice, but I'm not giving anybody else advice. Okay. Yeah, Dem or a die.

Sebastian, go. Yeah, Dem or die. So this is our new website powered by the BitTensor subnet. I got, and as you're saying this, the lawn, you're explaining that. I mean, that was my exact thought. And it's what happened to me with BitTenso. So I've gotten to the point now where I've dedicated everything. I'm completely invested into either Tao or my own Alpha token, the subnet tokens are called Alpha tokens. And yeah, let me explain what we do and show you through this new website and portal environment. Simply put, we have an institutional grade, property pricing. You can use it here as an API.

It's very simple to use, but a model that powers that API. Right away, you can go and plug in an address, one, two, three, Main Street. And if I click this, it's going to bring me into the app. I don't want to do that quite yet. And what we are building is not just this intelligence track. Right now I'm showing on the screen for those listening. Analyze, tokenize, and capitalize the three things that users can do on our network. Remember, this is not a company.

This is a network. Right now that network is building the intelligence and offering it, but we're also building this infrastructure so that we can use this intelligence for something. But if we have intelligence to appraise property and we have essentially the intelligence needed to underwrite loans, property sales, we are building that infrastructure. Right now there's a project called Figure Helock and they have $17 billion in essentially assets under management. And that is like their loan book, right? The money that they have to issue loans and circulating in supply. So they are one mortgage company, one lending company. that uses the blockchain and no AI automation, no proprietary tech, just uses the blockchain

to run their book of business. It's allowed them to get better capital in their system and also streamline the financial systems to their business. That's what we are enabling with our intelligence, right, with the price of inspections in K.YC. That allows lenders to fundraise. Incredible. You built an oracle. You built a beautiful oracle. You built a beautiful And at scale, somebody could say, hey, I need, you know, we just had Jason Ballard on, he could do an analysis and say with Lanar, where should we build our next community? Right.

And where's the infill between Bastrop, Wimberley, and, you know, take the road south to San Antonio? Right. You go west, you go east, you go west to hill the country, go east to Bashrop, you go south to Singatoni. You could actually map this with the Oracle, get the data, look for trends, and this would save you, I kind of think, like hundreds of thousands of dollars in research. And you could get that same research for how much, Sebastian. What would I pay?

You would pay, it's 1% of a penny is the actual cost. Wow. Incredible. Are people doing it yet? Do you have customers yet? Yes. Yes. So we have, like I said, balcony. We have a few protocols like in the collaboration near estate protocol and there's another one, Commer Tys and Honey Shares. And what we do there is they essentially have tokenized properties for sale, but there's no third party price. It's like, why would I buy this thing? Why would I buy this house that I can't go and see it's halfway across the world? I don't have

an appraisal. I don't know when this is worth. So we are that third party appraisal and actually increases the volume on these platforms. Yes. So, yes, our product has been being, has been in use. We are now launching the portal so it can be used in an easier way and people can really start to understand our network's potential. But I will say this is the, this is one track. Intelligence is what you mentioned, that use case.

To double down on that, we actually have in our ecosystem, we're building the, and finalizing this, a macro prediction market trader. So the exact type of market that you were just. on on Polymarket, a partner, what we're able to do is say, hey, we're going to use this micro precision pricing engine that we have, this ability to price specific homes, single homes, and then we're going to extrapolate that, do that across the entire market. And you can essentially have an edge on those markets and front run those markets. And we actually are the data provider to help find equilibrium in those markets.

So investors were able to make better decisions. The world has access to more truth. Is this a company or is it just a subnet? Are you a Delaware C-Corp or a Texas corp, hopefully? What are you doing here in terms of the company versus the tokens? Because if we're investors in these things, this is one thing I bring up. You can buy tau and you get access to essentially all the subnets because the subnets use Tao to a certain extent. Then you have buying the subnet token.

and you're, I think, Subnet 46. Am I correct? Yes. Got it. And then you have investing in the corporation. So walk us through, are you a corporation, and then what's the opportunity here for investors who are listening? If there is one. Yeah.

So one, we're a Wyoming Seacore. Okay. Why Wyoming? Is that because they have good Dow and, you know, those kind of things? Yes. Yeah, definitely. Specifically like crypto-native companies, Wyoming

C-Corp's are normally the route to go. But how does that C-Corp, how does it gain value, right? How does it compound and grow upon itself? How does that entity go public?

Right. Right. And that question goes to, how does it gain value? We are essentially a debt. Our job is to monetize and build this technology, but every dollar of revenue

doesn't go to us. It goes back into buying back the token. and we as the owner of the subnet, we get tokens, right? So we are buying tokens and we are also receiving tokens. Our job is to increase the value of those tokens and increase the rate at which we're accumulating them. I don't want to die here. It's demo or die. I do want to show you guys the portal.

Okay. Let's wrap on the portal. Show us the portal real quick. Let's take a quick look. I looked up my own house, by the way, just to have curiosity. It works. Okay. It works.

Okay. Great. Beautiful. It's worth a little bit more than the. average home in Austin based on our previous. Is your rent 5%, 4%, 6% your yearly rent of the value of the home? Great question. I'm going to do some.

Times or monthly rent. I'm going to do. Don't tell anybody the address or the rent. No, I didn't tell. I'm not going to doxing you like Mondami doxed. I didn't tell any. I don't want anybody visiting Lons house. What percentage your yearly rent is to the value of the home?

It's about, oh, yearly, yearly. Let's see. Okay. This is a cap brain is the concept here. It should be 5%. So if you're paying... It is 5.4%.

Perfect. See, you got... That means you have a good deal and the person who owns the property got a good deal. I feel like we did. Bronda and I did well.

My land party. Go ahead. Special seems like your pricing engine is quite accurate. So that's it. That's it. Nailed it to the wall. Yeah.

Okay. So this is our portal So first thing you do is you see the dashboard. Here is where you can see every day we run this competition. We've given out $230,000 in rewards, analyzed the million properties, and we've hidden price on high of 98%. So 98% what? Sorry, accuracy on price. So if you plug in an address, we're going to be 98% accurate to the price that someone's willing to pay for it. So it's very actionable data. That's important. This dashboard gives you the insight of like, why can I trust this? How can I trust this? How can I

trust this. Boom. Beautiful. It's there. But this is what people are using the system for. And it's the plug-in addresses. I can plug in, right? When I got 1-18-Burch, I can find that property right here. As I plug that in, I'm getting outputs in one second. Let's just do an example test of this property here. Boom. It's going to show up and then formulate. And that's it. This is the portal. We have people negotiating with banks using these appraisal reports. We have people helping the county, and yet you're going to get that same output. People are helping counties fight fraud and assess taxes. And yeah, this intelligence track is quite exciting.

And this is a new chapter for us as people can start easily using tools. Hey, put it in an address for me. 108 South Woodburn Drive, 108 South Woodburn Drive, Los Angeles. Is that your old place? This was the first home I ever bought. They wanted 3.5, this is 20 years ago, I think. And I think I paid $2.4 million. I put a couple of hundred grand into it.

This was the Brentwood. The Brentwood place was the poolhouse. This is where I lived in Brentwood. This was the pool house. Where we started Mahalo.com. We started Mahalo in the pool house. Lon worked there. My friend Nick Jurecki, the famous director, lived there for a year when he moved there.

And my friend Josh Harris lived in the pool house from we live in public when he was. was down on his luck. I let him live in my pool house, and I gave him my corvette. And my incredible wife gave him a custom food order every week from Whole Foods. I mean, I'm not saying I'm a mensch, but when my friend was down on his luck, I always came through for him. It was a nice pool.

There it is. South Woodburn Drive. It's like 1.18. Okay, that's wrong. It needs to be done over again. It's wrong. We need the Oracle to go to work on. this. So how do you deal with an error in the system? Because this is taking a guess, I guess,

square footage, whatever right now, or is this the Oracle did it? Yeah. So this is the, not the Oracle, it's the model itself. Yes. Oracle's a bit more checked and what is it validated by real world professionals. But yeah, we have these bugs come in right out of four here. One of them is incorrect. Got it. Got it. And that's the opportunity is to do this. All right. Sebastian, great job. Let's stay in touch. And yeah, come back in a year and show us your progress. Yeah. I'm rooting for you. There it is, folks. Are we going off duty? Am I doing my... We've got so much to talk about. Let's go off duty. There's so much going on. Or should I do my little tyrant? That's what we should lead off off duty. You've teased it. I think we need to hear this story about you getting shiv for half a mill. That's what the people want to know.

Okay. Now you're stored. Now I'm my story. I'm going to tell the story without names. Okay. And then I'm going to allow a lawn to let me know if I should name names. Okay. I'll be the adjudicator here. I'm on the board of a company.

It's a founder who I love, pivots the company. They've got an extraordinary brand name. They've got a great vision to build a content management system, a CMS, right? And to build tools. It doesn't work out. I'm not stung by that. The fund puts in a couple of hundred thousand, and the syndicate puts a couple of hundred thousand in. We're okay with failure.

It's not a big deal. It has. But the company is looking to sell. They find a potential buyer who has a giant company worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The company is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. They've raised over a hundred million, I believe. They've got tens of millions of dollars. It's all public information for their content management.

system, which by all appearances is doing it extraordinarily well. They love the team, they want to buy it, yada, yada. So they, and one of the board members is already an investor in this company. So there's a bit of a conflict, but that's okay. There's conflicts, no conflict, no interest. So this is all going down, and they make an offer, and the offer is like, okay, the founders get taken care of. They get these great deals. Okay, it's not life-changing money, but it's a soft landing. And, And I said, okay, well, what do the investors get? And the guy says to me, well, you get nothing. And I said, okay, well, let's jump on a phone call.

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

And it was a space saving. everybody gets a soft landing. That happens all the time. And I'm totally okay with that. I am okay with losing my money on 90% of bets. I've done extraordinarily well being year zero, the first investor. Now, this company was going to go out of business. They pivoted.

I got them back in business. I worked for years on the company. Went to the board meetings. So I say to this incredibly successful founder, here's a proposition for you. I want to be a supporter of the transaction. and I'm going to support it either way because you don't want to be a scumbag

and be like, I'm going to block the thing. So I get on the phone with the founder. I said, here's an idea. Why don't you give the investors a token number of shares in your company? So you could get us to save, and then you, as the founder of this company, who wants to acquire companies and talent in the future,

can say, hey, you took care of the people in the investment community. I'm not asking for my cash back. I just want a token. So I can go back to my investors and say, hey, this wasn't a great acquisition, but we got, let's say, 500K on our $1.4 million invested. I think we're about $1.4 million invested in this company, which isn't a lot of money in the grant scheme. I just told you, I put $750K into a gesture. It's literally a gesture.

It's a goodwill gesture. Exactly. This founder says, I don't have. have to do that. Because I'm hiring the entire team and this company is out of money and there's nothing you can do about it. So I'm hiring the team because this company's going belly up, they can't make payroll. And you're SOL, J-Cal, so why would I do that?

And I say, okay, fair enough, blank from blank company. Fair enough. I understand. sure enough, he tells me that essentially in so many words to F off. Yeah. I don't have to, and there's nothing you could do about it, is the, that's F off in this sort of world, yeah. You know, listen, I'm not trying to throw my weight around. This happened over a year ago. Oh, okay. But I had a guess, but my guess was wrong because it's happened over a year ago.

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

Correct. That another board member is already an investor in. I don't have any shares in this company. And it's not for me. It's not going to change my life. It's for my LPs. It's for my syndicate members. I feel like that's the real lesson here is if this person had gone about this with a

different attitude. and approach, I feel like this might not have overflowed into a negative situation. This to me feels like, you know, an unforced error. Like, you could have probably not spent that much money, but not angered your investor to this point that it becomes about a personal grudge. He basically has the audacity to tell me that he's a huge fan of my work. And then he writes me essentially an apology letter. Okay.

The first interaction, I'll just quote, I have reflected on our conversation. Don't think it was a great first interaction between us and don't like that it ended that way, ended that way. So I wanted to share a couple of reflections. I'm sorry, this didn't turn out. Blah, blah, blah. That's very diplomatic. And then he's like, I'll let you invest in our next room.

He almost got there. He was so close. He almost got there. He was so close. So I talked to my friend who's on his board, chairman of this board, made a lot of money from this. I said, do me a favor. Just talk to this kid because he just literally, it's like you're in a basketball game and somebody throws an elbow at you on purpose. Yeah. And bust your nose. And then you say, hey, listen, that was not cool. You hit me in the nose with your elbow.

You know, it was a flagrant. Right. The flagrant found. Yeah. The guy said, and so my friend says, yeah, that was a flagrant. I apologize on his behalf. We'll take care of you. Jake Al. He's a fan of yours. And then he basically just tells me to F off. I've been sitting on this for a long time. Now I'm out of crossroads. Jason Ballard just told me, my brother in Christ told me, peace and love, I got to have peace and love and grace. Yeah. So the company has a spectacular domain name. And they're clearing out the assets. And this domain name I know is worth a bunch. So I say, hey, listen, just so we get some money back for the shareholders who lost, you know, three, four, five million bucks.

You know, and I was $1.4 million of it. How about just the domain? How much is the domain? Right. And they're like, well, we got $100K offer, $150,000. I said, listen, let me stop you right there. I think the domain's worth $500K a million. I'm going to put in a, I'll double whatever the last bid was.

I'll put in $250K. Now I'm dealing with the lawyer who's doing the liquidation. And I said, listen, I insist that we do this right because the shareholders are on the other side. And I'll just tell me what the bid is. I'll beat the bid. He's like, well, I can't in fairness. I'll do that. I said, great.

What was the last bid? Because we all need to know the less bid. It's X amount. I said, okay, I'll put it up. I can't remember. I think it was like $250K. Wow. I put up $250K.

I win the bid. $250K goes to the investors in the washout. So now I have that domain name. Yesterday, I realized that domain name would be the ultimate domain name for an AI-based. browser. Hmm. Okay. So I talked to an old collaborator of mine.

I said, listen, I want to build an AI-based browser with this domain name. He said, whoa, that's one of your best ideas ever. That's somebody I've worked with before. And I'm about to see this company and launch it there. Yeah. But while I was thinking about it, you know, I did a little study of, you know, these CMS systems, these headless CMS systems, et cetera. This is a huge, huge space.

What's the headless CMS? It's like you store the data. You can use any presentation level. I mean, it is like one of the great spaces. And my friend, you know, I've had friends who have built content management systems. I was just going to say movable type WordPress. Yeah. It's like a, it's tons of these things out there.

And I looked at the Tao thing and boom, it hit me. A headless CMS, a content management system powered by Tao would be incredibly disruptive. Okay. So I'm not naming this founder. I'm not naming the companies involved. Well, but you'll have to because the URL. We're going to figure it out eventually. At some point, you'll figure it out when I launch my AI browser.

It will come out in the wash. But now I need your counsel. Okay. I don't want to start another war. I've been involved in too many of these things. I'm like Obi-Wan Kenobi right now. I mean, I fought so many battles in the Clone Wars. I'm an old Jedi.

I mean, here's the only thing I would say is it's probably, as much as I would like to hear this person's name. I think it's probably not worth it. Just because you never know if I've learned anything about this world, it's that you never know where everybody's going to be in five years. The whole table gets shook up in five years. You never know who you're going to be sitting across from who you're going to want to make a deal with. Who's going to be in a position. So it's never really. So don't name names is your best advice.

Yeah, I don't think it's ever really. and honest, I don't think it's worth starting stuff with people. Thank you for talking me off a ledge. Thank you. Dead and God. Like if they're dead in the ground, they're never going to be an issue again. But I'm looking at the, you know what? I'm looking at the picture of the founder. And my Irish is up now.

I just said the temptation for sure, but you don't know. That guy and you might be in the same room in 10 years and you'll wish you hadn't picked a fight with them. You'll wish you could just have a drink. Even though I got jumped, even though I got shipped, even though he got the better of him. you got from one J.C., I think you've got to look to another, and you've got to turn the other cheek on this one.

You're saying J.C. has to ask J.C. with J.C. would do? You've got to ask yourself what the other, what would the thing I would do? I'm going to, I'm going to talk to Jesus right now. I think he'd forgive. I think he'd say, yay, my son. I've been wronged. What should I do? Yeah, the right, the righteous path is forgiveness. Jesus is coming in. Okay. He says I should. take the high road. I think so. I should do on to others as I would want to be done onto me, and I should turn the other cheek. That's, yes.

So I am turning the other cheek. There you go. Very close. However, however, there is a business opportunity. And this person decided that his business interest were, I mean, I literally was asking him to give me, I think, 500K in options. And I was willing on the options, by the way, to pay the current price, just have warrants,

which would have been 0.0. It would have been 10 basis points maybe in the values company. And if he had done it, I would have him on this podcast. I would be tweeting for him. I'd be helping him. Just what I did with Jason. I said, let me help you fill some things. He would have been on the podcast twice.

If that guy was here right now, I'd give him the same advice. say you shouldn't have approached it this way. You should have been without hostility. You should have been more gracious and like figure out a way to make this feel okay. So everybody feels like they got treated fairly. That's always how these situations should be. So I put into my agent, give me a business plan, an open source bit tensor business plan based on content CMSs. And I got back the most brilliant business plan.

Wow. I did last week two bounties, a $1,000 bounty I did on Twitter, somebody can pull it up, please, to make annotated.com, which is an annotation service I just need for myself where I want to like highlight five seconds from a video, 10 seconds from a video, and give my commentary on it. And I got all these people who built me like a way back machine style annotation device. I said, I'll give $1,000 to whoever makes the most interesting one in open sources it. and I did $5,000 to build the real-time commentary agents on the podcast,

and I think we got five people who built something. Yeah. Oh, more than five now. We're in business. It's going to take, so I now. It's going to take Jacob like a week to get through all of these different proposals that we've had.

Okay. So which one is this? Explain to people this. You need a genius technical co-founder to build you an annotation tool for the web that is like the way back machine, but with AI. That's this one. Yeah. So like way back machine plus delicious, if you remember that bookmarking service.

Oh, sure. Wow. It's been a long time since I thought about that. Right. So what I need is I need a Chrome browser extension. I'm on a YouTube video, you know, like this video. And somebody, anybody wants to either anonymously, pseudonymously, like Reddit or, you know, Twitter or whatever, they say, give me seconds 30 to 60, clip it, put a transcript, analyze it with AI. and I want to put some commentary on it.

I want to let my friends put some commentary. Completely fair use. Don't want to steal and rip other people's content. But if there's a story in the New York Times and you want to fisk it, if you remember fisking, F-I-S-K-I-N-G, pull up fisking from the Wikipedia. There was a dude on Usenet

who used to fisk people and it became fisking became the art of taking apart somebody's argument by line by line annotating it. So that's my concept here. Dude, it's named for, it's a Supreme Court.

I'm going to look up the actual origin of Fisking. Yeah, it was described the critical deconstruction of articles by British journalist Robert Fisk. That's what they were saying. Okay. Is he still alive? I want to have him on the program because Fisking to me was like one of the most interesting things in the early days of the internet. I think this is like 90s internet. Like I might have even been like pre web.

We lost Robert Fiske in October of 2020 sadly. Oh, no. Rest in peace. This guy was. this guy was a provocateur, but he also raised the intellectual level. And when we started the web, Blon, fisking was like a way to engage intelligently and move the ball forward. So anyway, I put a thousand dollar thing out and people started building already.

So now I'm bounty crazy. $1,000 bounty. Yes, we're checking out the live sidebars. I'll pull up the tweet now. We've gotten a lot. If you have submitted to us an AI sidebar based on this tweet, we are checking them all out. It's just going to take us a while because we're trying to do it live on the show. So Jacob is actually playing with our first submission today.

And this will be an enhanced show notes, right? We'll put all the links in the enhanced show notes. If you look at the show notes on your podcast player or on YouTube's description, we're doing enhanced show notes where we put like 20, 30, 40, 50, 50, I'll tell you, I designed a Claude skill to do this. It's working incredibly. So all I do is I take the transcript of the episode. I give it to Claude.

It goes through. It gets it perfectly organized and it finds great URLs for everything that we talk about. I have to correct it. I would say one out of every 15 times it gets the link wrong and I have to fix it. But it's amazing. Incredible. It's saving so much time. Right.

What it is got. So if you're the type of person who takes notes and wants to learn from podcasts like I do and Landa's. This is like our gift to you and OpenClaw's gift to you is that you get in there. So we have two of these. Not OpenClaw. My Open Claw, he's locked away. Great. Shout out Clough Co-Work. Shout out perplexity computer. Love the whole category. So we did $1,000. We did $5,000. Yeah. I'm going to announce another $5,000 next week. I'll do it a week from today. I have to have the time to write this. I got a big schedule. We'll be back. We'll be right here.

I'm going to write my headless CMS, BitTensor, open source, $5,000 prize to build this opportunity. And the prize, in this case, if it becomes a company, I'm going to ask for, I don't know, the ability to buy 5% of the company for, you know, whatever, 50K or something. Like, be the original seed investor. You know, it just want the option. Sure. If it works to have a little skin in the game. Why? Because if this works and I can get warrants or whatever,

I might be able to make some of my previous investors whole. I don't want revenge here, but I do have unfinished business. I want to fix the ledge. There's a ledger. We're going to fix the ledger. Now, what does this mean for the person who shived me? What is Tao good at, Lon? Tao?

What is Tao good at? At its core, when you put a service on Tao versus a commercial proprietary service, what happened? I think Tao you've got this huge, incentivizing it's incentives. It's that a regular company, you would have to hire people and pay them to do this work for you.

And then you're getting out of them, you know, whatever if they feel good about how they're being paid or whatever. It's like a normal employee. But in Tao, you're creating these communities that are financially incentivized to create or to validate the things that are being created. Correct.

So you create, it's sort of a- What happens to the product category, the customer, What did they experience then? What did they experience when they engage those products? What value does the customer get? Well, it's constantly being iterated and improved because you've got these huge

incentivized communities that are iterating constantly and creating the better, the better version. You nailed it. A better version. Then there's a second piece. Not only is it better, but it could be if it works better and... Faster? cheaper.

Oh, of course. cheaper, yes. Yes, because we are- It's deflationary. We're decentralizing everything. So if you think about it in terms of like a company, a hyperscaler having to buy room after room after room full of GPUs to produce their work, with Tyler, you're just sending that out to everybody who's got a GPU to spare.

Correct. So what's happened here? I'm just going to recap it. When somebody does this to you, you have to be forgiving. Okay. Namaste. I've talked myself up the ledge. Thank you, Jason Ballard.

Thank you, Lon, for your counsel. I'm taking the high road. But it also educated me on, hey, there's this really interesting company with a shark who elbowed me in the face. Like, this guy has, this guy broke my nose in a basketball game for no good reason. And when I said, hey, you broke my nose. He told me to F off. There's nothing you could do about it.

Nothing you could do about it. Hey, what are you going to do? Sue me? No, I'm not going to sue you. I'm going to sue the founders. I'm going to block the transaction. No, Mazeltov, go for it. I considered it.

Of course, I considered it. I have LPs. I considered, do I take legal action? The amount, it would cost $10 million to fire up a lawsuit for $1.4 million invested. It doesn't make any sense. Who's going to fund the lawsuit? It's going to be five years later. But I now have become tuned in to this incredible business opportunity.

And so that's what happens sometimes. Yeah. fairly, you might have also educated them and highlighted to them, there's a major opportunity here. And hey, we live in a free market where the best idea wins. I may want to have an entry in this market. I think you hear that narrative all the time from successful people is like, that, that lit a fire under me. That negativity is what spurred me on. It's that, it's that Michael Jordan quote from the last dance.

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

That's the productive thing to do. It's like, let this motivate you to do something great. Let this drive you to your next win. Rather than getting caught up in the back and forth with this person who wronged you. And to the person who broke my nose, I forgive you. It's not.

I'll take you at your word. It wasn't personal. I haven't spoken to the person since this is something happening he told me to F off. I'll take you at your word. It wasn't personal. And me launching a Tao

subnet in this vertical of content, headless content management system is also not personal. It's not personal. But I've got Mark Jeffrey. I've got all these developers in our community

who like to build stuff with me and they love a bounty and they love a conversation. They love a competition to show off their work. And now, perhaps, we'll be in another basketball game together. And I'm bringing a squad with me. And our goal is to take the price of a content, headless CMS. And we would like to take out 90% of the expense.

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

Well, we'll have round two. And this time, I'm not getting elbowed. And I'm not getting my nose broken. I mean, the cling on say, revenge is a dish best serve cold. So that's not even revenge. It's just, I just, you know what? I'm in the arena. you showed me this incredible game.

I'd like to try playing the game. Maybe it's only a 1% chance I make a business out of this, but maybe I could then go to my LPs who lost money in this and gift them some equity warrants that they didn't get. That's it. Enough already. I am at peace with this, but with peace and love,

I'm going to suit up. And I took that person. Yeah, that's what you know. All right, let's go off duty. Let's go off duty very quick. What do you got for me? So much stuff. Did you want to talk about these view buds?

This was the thing you sent me on Twitter the other day. There's a camera inside your earbuds that can show me that let's play the video and I'll give my feedback here. I will pull up the video as soon as I can get my mouse back over here. I saw this and I said this is like a school project. Jacob's got it already. There it is. So view.

All right. So hit play. So tiny cameras in each year. Yeah, we'll play the video. So these, yeah, they took regular Sony earbuds, opened them up, put these cameras and some batteries in them, and now they're connected to an on-device vision language model so that you could basically talk to your LLL or your vision language model, show it things around you, and it could just talk to you about whatever you're looking at, whatever you're seeing. So you'd say a phrase, hey, view is the sample one.

cameras activate. They stream images over Bluetooth to your phone or laptop. This is really clever. It's only going for a quick, like three seconds after you say, Hey, View. It's basically taking very quick photos so that it can see the thing you're looking at, but it's not, you know, it's not just filming all the time. That's what allows it to be quick and fast and not use up too much data because it's not a camera. It's not like a video camera. It's just taking quick images of what you see. And then they're tying it into the Quinn 2.5 VL 7B. vision language model, which can run on your device. So that's how you're sort of moving around the world and it could do this without you hauling a data center on your back. And it could process

the image, answer any spoken question. And it responds to you, Jason, right in your earbutt. So it's like you're having this conversation with your AI, but that has finally a visual element. There's one other thing I want to mention because I thought this was so smart. So if you think about what if you had cameras in your ears, the immediate issue is where your face is blocking a lot of their view, right? Like, that's why it's hard to have a camera back here. We always think of like you put the camera in the glasses so it's pointing directly out. Yeah, right in the middle, I'd point to where you put the tape on your nerd glass. But they get around it with binocular vision. So by combining the left and right cameras, like just like your eyeballs do, you don't see

your nose because your brain is interpreting both eyes together. So you don't see your face because they're interpreting both cameras together at once, that is really clever. And this will lead me to my off-duty. Okay, let me just say this. This idea is brilliant. So good. This is a founding team. If they have any entrepreneurial ability, I would love to invite them to my accelerator

and give them 125K or their first 25K to incorporate, whatever it is, if they're decent entrepreneurs, and they seem like they're pretty great. The team leader, he's Marucci Kim. He's a PhD in CompSye and Engineering from University of Washington, Seattle. He's now working at Google. He works on XR Audio at Google. We've got to get him out of Google and make this a startup if he wants to, or if anybody else wants to pursue something similar and they have hardware chops or they're just super motivated and have two friends. I'd love to incubate something similar because this could be incredibly accretive to blind people who are navigating the world.

this could be incredibly accretive to when you're in another country. We already have auto-translate, you know, in like pixel buds or whatever. But you're in Japan and you're looking at the sushi menu or you're looking at the eel menu. And it's in Japanese and it just starts reading to you what your options are and you're talking to it. Amazing in Japan. I would have used this constantly in Japan. Correct. And now you're skiing.

And I'm skiing and it's seeing what's in front of me and it says, hey, these are the conditions. This is the route you're going to go. This is, you know, how you get back to town to this lodge. Sometimes I'm in a new mountain. I ski when I was in Davos for one day. I don't know the terrain. I don't have the map. You got to take the map out in the cold. It's a blizzard. It's very inconvenient. But if it told you, hey, there's a quick way to the left. And that lift only has the three-minute weight. The one on the right has a 15-minute wait. There's all kinds of interesting things that developers will do when they get their hands on this. The more you start thinking about it, the more you're like, oh, I would use this like constantly.

I mean, they would just be like shopping. Imagine like if you're in a store and you go over like, like look at the product. How much is this on Amazon right now? Like you can only imagine all of the uses. Incredible. And when I saw this, I immediately thought I am a fan of Sony AirBuds. Everybody goes for the Apple ones. The Sony ones are so much better.

And these are expensive folks. These are $300. Yeah. And I've bought two different versions of these. the Sony WF 1000XM6. These are great noise canceling. The batteries last forever. They're extraordinary.

Now, they're expensive. Okay, fair enough. The last version is 50 bucks off. Sony WF 1000 XM5. And I actually prefer my XM5s better. They fit better. If anybody has any tips on how to get the foam things to fit, that's what I've been having a challenge with

that is making them so they fit. So they're not, they don't hurt from extended use and they don't fall out. You have like a real decision you have to make. Yeah. So anyway, this is my, that's my off duty for today is I really think this is just a great, great product. And then I have another amazing product. I just want to add to our off duty because, you know, I love gadgets.

I love a good charger. And, you know, I got the daughters. And I saw Anchor my favorite brand. And they made a beautiful charger. And what's really unique about this one, this is the Anchor Nano 45W Max charger. This is like a fast one. So it's really good, but it's so tiny. And what's really unique about this one is, you know, sometimes you're on a plane or you're in a hotel.

And you've got to plug your thing in. look at the 180 degree flexibility for your ideal view. It's like maybe the fifth image down on the Amazon. And what you'll see in the fifth image down is you can rotate the plug. There it is. See that one? Yes, yes. One more.

The plug will go different directions depending on what you need. And it has a display on it. I don't know how they do this, but the display knows what you plugged in. So it'll say charging at this watt, for this specific phone. It knows I have an iPhone Air, knows that you have iPhone 17. And then I have a bunch of different cables laying around.

Turns out some of the USBC cables I have are not charging as fast, and then other ones do. So knowing what your charge speed is is such an unlock with this screen, and it looks really cute. You press the button. You can turn the screen off and turn it on.

My daughters love it. It comes in orange, my favorite color. I just bought two of these. You throw two of these in your bag when you're going to Japan lawn, and they're dirt cheap, they're 30 bucks. It's so much better than anything Apple produces. You know, and they charge twice as much for half the product.

Anyway, I love these chargers. I love all Anchor products. Highly recommend you get this one. And then Anchor sells a two-headed USBC cable. So you got the daughters, you've got iPads, you got phones, you know, you're at the airport, you're on the road, you're in an Airbnb. The dual-sided cable that Anchor makes, there it is. There's a four-foot, two-in-one USB-C-to-USBC, 140-watt max.

18 bucks. Now, this isn't a data cable. I don't think this will do data. It might do data, but it doesn't do data to the best of my knowledge, but you can get, like, different length ones. Right. This thing's a godsend. You put these two things together.

They don't take up any space. You got your phone and your laptop charging. It's events. The clutch thing is when you're at an event, you're not always near a plug. You want to be on your phone all day. You're tweeting. You're checking updates. You're checking your email.

By halfway through the day, you're at 13% power. You just keep your anchor in your bag. It's the easiest solution in the world. I gave you the charger, right? Yeah. I gave you the cable. Now I will give you one more in my anchor trio of happiness. I buy these two or three at a time.

And then when I'm with a friend, I handed to them and I gifted to them. I did this with a member of my, I got a high profile, one of my high profile friends, their chief of staff, where we're at an event. I think we're at the All In Summit. I wouldn't say who it was, but you can look at the people on stage and get an idea. And I'm charging my phone with this. They said, what's that? I said, this is a giant 25,000 miller amp.

I don't know what these ratings are. And it's got two belting cables and it has passed through charging. So you plug those two USBCs, one of them into the wall, one of them into your phone. and I carry this thing with me. It doesn't weigh all that much, but you can charge your phone four times, five times. You can actually charge your laptop. M.A.m. hours.

That's what M-A-H is right there. 25,000 millie-am hours. It measures electrical charge and watt hours to measure energy and voltage. So you can plug four things into this. You can plug a cable into it. The holes and the cables and the outputs. It comes with two built-in cables,

so you're not searching for a cable. One of them is like a handle and cable. I put this in my back. pack. I put one in my luggage. You've been with me in Japan. I pull this thing out. I'm not looking for, even when I'm on a plane, you know, the plugs on the plane are like eight watts. They never charge your laptop. I just bring this thing with me. Charge it up in my hotel. It's fantastic game changer. There's your trio of off-duty from J-Cal for dealing with battery issues. And anchor is chef's kiss. You got your charger, you got your cable, you got your battery pack. I'm done.

Folks, that's my off-duty. AMC has a new Silicon Valley show, Jason. Did you hear about this? Oh, I heard about this. This has got Gallifanakis, my cousin. People don't know, but we're actually cousins. It's got Billy Magnuson. It's got Zach Alfenacus.

It's called The Audacity. The first two are on AMC now, and I gave it a watch. You know, it's interesting. It's funny. There are some good characters. I could see it developing into something. But it does have kind. It's a sameness.

It feels like the same kind of vibe as Silicon. Valley. It feels like the same kind of its derivative. It's a little about that mountain head. Remember we watched that Jesse Armstrong movie. It's all a little bit of the same joke that people in Silicon Valley, they think they're so great, they think they're so disruptive, they're changing the world, but it's really, you know,

they're kind of the same duffuses as everyone else, and they're sort of lying, and it's all this kind of BS thin veneer of technological supremacy, where really they're just recycling the same sort of old ideas. And I didn't hate it, but I was hoping it was going to be a little bit more of a different angle. Yeah, they've been, the person who's the writer is a Silicon, is a secession, I guess, writer, and they've been marketing it, not as the creative session, but somebody who was in the writer's

room, who knows what their providence is. But I knew that this was. Jonathan Glasser, they worked on Secession, but they also worked on Better Call Saul, which I love. Okay, so both of those I love, so it's super legit. The problem with all of these is, I think, and I haven't seen it, so I'll resolve it. of judgment. I'll watch it this weekend maybe with the wife. We've been looking for a new show. But when you watch these things,

like, um, it's becoming a bit on the nose in terms of outsiders trying to write about the inside space and this session kind of nailed it, but

I knew this one because I heard the writer on like a bunch of the woke anti-tech podcasts and they were over the moon. The hosts him of just how terrible everybody in Silicon Valley was, how, you know, oh my God, these are vapid people who don't care about society. It's just like, well, what if there's somebody in there who's like actually Jason Ballard, who actually is a good person? What if there's somebody like

me who actually is an empathetic, moderate person who doesn't care about politics, doesn't want to dominate the world, just wants to make cool shit. I feel like you're not really allowed to make that show right now. The public, I mean, we talk about it all the time. People are very down on AI. They're very down on the wealthy. We're having this big sort of populist moment. And so I think there's the timing just doesn't feel right. I think creatives know you couldn't come out with a show about rich people in Silicon Valley who are doing good things and trying to change the world right now. That's not where the culture is at. So if you want to do a Silicon Valley show, I guess it sort of has to be, oh, aren't these people all ridiculous and they're so

narcissistic and self-involved? And they're only, they're really just about the money and the prestige. and then they just pretend that it's about doing good for people. And I'm not saying there's nobody in Silicon Valley that's like that. Of course there are. But it just feels like it feels a little samey. And it feels like, well, what is this show's message specifically that we haven't already heard from Silicon Valley? Well, it's in the name, the audacity of these people. You know, oh, they're mendacious.

And even the premise, it's really, it's about the relationship between the CEO founder and his therapist. And they begin sort of colluding on financial fraud together. Like, that's the core premise of the show. So you kind of get... Let me tell you what would actually work. Let me tell you what would actually work. And maybe I should. Maybe you and I need to write out treatment.

I think so. I think we could have the inside. I think the treatment is really the industry. Like, industry is not like, hey, we have an axe to grind. It's just young people and it's money and its power. Yeah. And it's more... It's gray area.

Nobody on that show is all gray. on that show aren't evil or good. They're flawed. They're three-dimensional. They're people. Some of them you like. Some of them you don't. They're morally gray.

Just like reality. And I feel like all these Silicon Valley shows, everybody's always like dumb and evil. And that's kind of the premise. Gavin Balson, you know, the guy who runs the incubator in that show. In Silicon Valley. Yeah, I forgot his name and the actor's name,

who was in Deadpool. that's um called in yeah they claimed he called in a bomb front on a train you remember that fiasco i'm i'm i've met this guy and now i'm but t j miller right is that him t j miller who crushed it and then some people were like oh that's jay cal is like well but gabin belson in silicon valley that's a different character gavin belson's the guy who runs hooly the google yes the google owner was nothing like sergey or larry j miller was a different different guy and then this one anyway all it's all it's an alternate reality there's no real companies in the show The Audacity, but the big company that everybody

wants to be. Cooper Tino is the name of that company. So you could... Okay, so it's happening. It's obvious who it's supposed to be. You know, but it's, I don't know. I feel like it's not as realistic. Anyway, I'll watch it.

I'll give my judgment on off-duty next Friday when I release my headless CMS TOW project. And I release my bounty and my instructions on what the competition will be. All right, everybody. another great week of Twist. There's a secret twist group on... Oh, wow, the group chat.

Yeah. There's a secret group chat on X that's been brewing. It's got about 100 people in it. If you want to be in that group, DM, the TWA Startups account, and we'll add you if you're a true fan of the show. We'll think about it. We'll think about it. It's getting pretty active.

No, no, it's a fun group. It's a fun group of people who love the show. Like 100 of us. Let me just talk about the show every day and what we're going to have in the next episode. A lot of memes. Have a great weekend. Bye, bye, bye.