SPEAKER_01: I got f***ed for 500k.

SPEAKER_00: I think we need to hear this story about you getting shiv for half a mil.

SPEAKER_03: The scumbag who f***ed J-Cow, wow, thought he would get away with it. But I'm going to balance the ledger f***ed from f***ing company. I'm going to unload you.

SPEAKER_06: Okay, grace and loving is the way, man.

David Friedberg: I know, I'm a flawed human. I will have grace for the people who stabbed me. I'm doing my best. Today's not going to be my best moment.

SPEAKER_09: Hey, everybody. It's Friday, April 17th. This is Twist. I am on fire today. Lon, we've got an amazing docket. We do. You look great. Before we do anything, I just want to take a moment to applaud Claude. I just hit it.

SPEAKER_10: I got the haptic. I'm now recording the conversation, and all my action items are on here.

SPEAKER_03: Action item number one. By the end of the show, explain the scumbag who f***ed J-Cow. A year ago, I thought he would get away with it. But J-Cow has a two-step process in which, no revenge. I'm not a vengeful person. You know that, Lon. But I'm going to balance the ledger. I got f***ed for 500k.

SPEAKER_13: Wow, that's a lot.

SPEAKER_03: 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. On how I'm going to balance the ledger. Let's get started. Who's our guest here?

SPEAKER_17: I'm so excited.

SPEAKER_18: 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.

SPEAKER_21: I'm really excited to be here. Howdy, everybody. And thanks for having me on.

SPEAKER_23: I'm also excited. Jason's one of my guys. He's in my squad. In my Austin squad.

SPEAKER_18: J-Bow told me before the show that I've now been in Austin long enough where I can get my own hat, I can start rocking the cowboy hat. 18 months. I've crossed the barrier.

SPEAKER_28: You know, I think it's faster than that, J-Cal. I think the moment a person's residence is west of the Mississippi River, I think your

SPEAKER_31: rights and privileges extend to new haberdashery. So I think more people should be doing this. Okay. I was very excited to hear this.

SPEAKER_32: I've been waiting to cross the cowboy hat barrier. I think I have.

SPEAKER_34: I'm not sure what the length of the brim can be for a year one guy.

SPEAKER_31: You know, you, yeah, that's right. You, you have to find your way into it. Yeah. But, but, but it's certainly a journey worth making and not to be too trepidatious about for sure.

SPEAKER_38: Awesome. Yeah. I can't wait.

SPEAKER_39: Jason's a great entrepreneur.

David Friedberg: Icon 3D homes. Stunningly beautiful. I thought, I don't know about this model. And then I saw the homes and, you know, once you see the homes, they're gorgeous. And there are three problems in society right now. And I did a little tweet about this earlier today. Just total serendipity, Jason. I was, um, on fire this morning because there's all this bad news coming out about AI, right? Uh, and if you think about who our top two spokespersons are, Sam Altman, who just had

SPEAKER_45: a, uh, 270,000 word article in the New Yorker explaining he's a sociopath, uh, from every

David Friedberg: partner who he's ever had. Apparently I'll let people make their own decision there.

SPEAKER_45: Um, he kind of admits he's had some challenges and then you have Dari. And these are two hyper competent people, but they are scaring the bejesus, speaking of Jesus out of Americans.

SPEAKER_03: And the dialogue continues to be jobs, uh, economic uncertainty, and that this is going to get

SPEAKER_48: out of control and we can't control the demon. And we're waking up. That's not who we need in my estimation, Lon, leading the charge for technology today. We need to imagine as entrepreneurs, a single mom or dad with two kids makes 60, 70, 80 K a year,

SPEAKER_03: but you know, an average American makes 67,000. So let's put it at, uh, 80 K 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?

SPEAKER_52: A roof over our heads, a good education, uh, some healthy food, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_28: I mean, we, we, we, 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

SPEAKER_31: don't get these like very basic things, correct. Uh, and I think food, water, and shelter are certainly on that very short list of things. And, um, it almost like getting those things correct, like enables all of the other exciting things that I think get talked about on this podcast and other places.

SPEAKER_18: So yeah, it's foundation to live relatively close to where you work. Like, we don't think of that as being like a huge life-changing thing, but it really does matter. Like that's like so core. And that I think is something that Americans just have not had a chance to experience in a long time. It's very difficult to live anywhere near where you work.

SPEAKER_61: If you're around a major American city.

SPEAKER_60: It's a great point. If you think about, um, the correlation between depression, uh, substance abuse, alcohol

David Friedberg: abuse, uh, obesity, uh, domestic violence, uh, crime, uh, all of these things, there is literally studies that have been made. I'll ask producer glad to pull it up. There have been countless studies made that show, uh, 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

SPEAKER_62: you 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, 15 minutes, now they've been in a car for two hours and 45 minutes after working for an eight, nine, 10 hour shift, man, what's

SPEAKER_65: left, what's left for the fam? Uh, not much.

SPEAKER_18: Thanks to producer Claude. Uh, I've got a few studies here. Well, the, the biggest one was from Sweden. They did a public health study in 2011, uh, and 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, you hit it exactly. It's that 30 minute threshold. Also, all I do is read the UK 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.

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

SPEAKER_28: Yeah, it's not a good, so Icon, you know, for those who don't know or haven't heard, we're a construction technology company, a sort of the charismatic megafauna of our company

SPEAKER_31: or like the large scale, uh, 3d printing robotics for, uh, 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. Uh, 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. Uh, that sort of seemed crazy eight years ago, but in fact, uh, 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, it's now worth like a dedicated focused effort.

SPEAKER_27: Um, because there's like interesting ways that you do business development with the government customer. There's interesting legal arrangements there's, um, and of course there's just like, um, a sharp point on what the technology needs to do. Everybody wants faster and cheaper, but there, there are some things that are weighted more highly, uh, in a military and intelligence environment, you know, survivability.

SPEAKER_39: What are they? Cause I mean, obviously building faster cost for the military is not as important as for the single mom or dad we've talked about earlier, who's trying to make a living, but speed, I would think. Yeah. Speed quality.

SPEAKER_28: That's right. Speed is speed is a big deal. And they have a special word for quality called survivability.

SPEAKER_31: I mean, these have to be like quite safe depending on sort of the situations, uh, soldiers and people in the military are in.

SPEAKER_27: And so they have this like extreme sensitivity to survivability and durability, uh, of the things that they build. They also are very sensitive to, they often operate in places where they don't have easy access to a complicated supply chain or a lot of skilled labor and, you know, a wall system, which is primarily the thing we automate with the technology today, you know, a typical wall system is going to take, you know, 15 to 20 people to build in about 60 days. And our system builds that same wall system in the residential space, um, uh, with about two people in a week. Um, and so like, you know, you shrink, uh, the, the labor requirement, uh, 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.

SPEAKER_62: That's a big unlock in my mind because you use concrete.

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SPEAKER_27: We call it form create. 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, it's some pretty specialized concrete, but the base ingredients are ingredients that are like available everywhere in the world.

SPEAKER_39: All right. We'll get right back to what you're doing in terms of forward deployment, the use cases,

SPEAKER_84: and then we'll, we'll go to space. First, I want to start lawn by applauding plot.

SPEAKER_45: 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 dimes, 500 boxes of Ziti. Not fun. But I'm going to balance the ledger at the end of the show. So I just gave myself a note about that.

SPEAKER_03: If you want to keep track of your enemies, of the people who screw you, or of what you got to do today, use your plot and be a plot plot.

SPEAKER_18: You want to get a plot note pin S and you can check it out for yourself at plot.ai slash twist and just use the code twist for 10% off your plot note pin S. Keep track of all your enemies list easily with the plot note pin S. There you go.

SPEAKER_84: We have some discount codes and the best live question I am going to pay for, applaud for free.

SPEAKER_60: But you got to ask a great question either on X or on YouTube or the LinkedIn account.

SPEAKER_84: So we'll check all of those. All right, Jason, let's talk about that forward deployment. It looked like you were building barracks or storage there. So my understanding is when we are in a conflict or we need to have a presence, they pop up tents and these kind of semi-permanent structures.

SPEAKER_45: They're a little more than a tent, but obviously a lot less in the building. And based on what I know about material science, which is very little, the bullets, bombs, and these new drones, when they hit a tent, a canvas based on my Boy Scout memories, is not going to

SPEAKER_99: help you when a drone comes in, correct?

SPEAKER_31: I mean, the laundry list of problems in military construction is quite long. But yeah, to simplify it, right now, the two tools the military has to use when they want to build anything, you mentioned barracks and military housing, but whether it's a training center, whether it's like defensive structures, vehicle hides, all things we have built for the military, they either have these like high speed, low cost, but low survivability option

SPEAKER_27: 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

SPEAKER_31: labor through the robotics, and then you're building with a very simple supply chain and a material that is like inherently survivable. Yeah.

David Friedberg: So this concrete slurry that you use in the 3D printer, we saw it on the screen just a moment ago. It looks like we tend to do walls that are what 12 18 inches thick. And then what

SPEAKER_62: could they survive if a drone hit it? I'm assuming the people inside survive or the tank inside

SPEAKER_103: survives because there's a foot or two of concrete. Yeah, yeah, we have done vehicle hides

SPEAKER_28: and we've done sort of full or like an early round. There's more to come for sure of like

SPEAKER_31: blast and ballistics testing against facilities. I'm not allowed to disclose like the full performance

SPEAKER_27: character, as you might imagine. But I think the email we got back from the testing officer was like, we subject, we subjected your structure to immense pressure and are confident that subjected to similar pressure in the field would pass muster or something, something like

SPEAKER_105: that. So yeah. And this is somebody who stayed at an icon. You had an Airbnb going for a while,

SPEAKER_106: but I think somebody bought it, right?

SPEAKER_27: 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 has been a fun journey of trying to like, really like give humanity new tools with which to build.

SPEAKER_105: So how much faster can you build a survivable structure in the field versus the equivalent that the military will build? We're talking days, months, weeks, you tell us.

SPEAKER_31: The most recent project that we're doing is out at Fort Bliss in West Texas. And we just had a little

SPEAKER_27: 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're

SPEAKER_31: delivering 10 and six months from 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.

David Friedberg: 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, uh, talk to me about the, cause what people typically get wrong here is

SPEAKER_105: aesthetics and, um, climate. Yeah. 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

SPEAKER_62: and I was like, wait a second, this looks really beautiful. Uh, Lon, this looks like, uh, you know, Deckard's apartment. It looks like the Innisfouse. This looks like something Frank Lloyd Wright built, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It looks actually great. And then talk about climate and temperature.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah. Maybe I'll like go back. Cause of course, like housing was like the, the, the big issue that sort of provokes the existence of icon. Um, and of course everybody talks a lot about, we need to build faster. We need to build more affordably, but you, you kind of do, it's an expensive problem to solve and you kind of need to step back and be like, wait a minute. Are we sure? Like,

SPEAKER_31: this is the world we want to build faster and cheaper. Like, uh, the sort of jet, like these

SPEAKER_27: are not the houses you're looking for. Like, right. Like where is Wakanda? Like, where is Rivendell? Like, are we sure? Like the delivery of this thing that we see? And I think the housing of the future should feel like, 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 you could imagine. Automations do what automations do and they make things faster and cheaper, but because the architecture is digital and then very importantly, because the building material is fluid, all of your sort of aesthetic aspirations are still on the table, right? Like if you want a house in the shape of a Fibonacci spiral, we can print a house in the shape of Fibonacci spiral. And it's the same price as a square. And so like, what happens to the world? Like not only when things are cheaper, but when, 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

SPEAKER_31: aesthetics are available. And in fact, we're doing 110 more homes for the homeless at community first village. Um, I should have maybe brought pictures. Like these do not look like houses for the

SPEAKER_27: homeless. We're delivering them for between 99 and $120,000 a home, including our profit.

SPEAKER_18: Um, incredible. And like, they are incredible. That's awesome. Cause I mean, so often when you're hearing about, you know, these well-intentioned programs to like help the homeless, it's like, well, we're going to build them like this little one room closet and we'll put it in a parking lot

SPEAKER_127: and you could have a thousand of them. And it's so cheap and it's like, yeah, but it's depressing. It's like living in a refugee camp. It's depressing and it's somehow funny. It's strangely like

SPEAKER_27: connected to all this like regulatory runaway that has also happened in the housing space, because you could, 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, uh, uh, ugliness, uh, from proliferating in the world. And you sort of get this pileup of, you get this pileup of regulations that like also add cost and expense and time and somehow resetting with something that is faster and cheaper, but also more beautiful, perhaps also allows it to like untangle some of this like regulatory knot that we've gotten in

SPEAKER_132: that for sure is driving up housing costs. Here's a picture of, um, and listen,

SPEAKER_48: this is no dig to the people who made it. Um, and, and this is certainly a lot better than, um, living on the street. But, um, if I'm being honest, it looks like you're in barracks. Um,

SPEAKER_135: and it looks, you know, it doesn't look modern. It doesn't look, uh, it does not speak to the

SPEAKER_129: human heart. And again, it's like, where's, like, this is not the world that we want to build faster into. 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.

SPEAKER_74: I don't know if you can Google, like I, here's like, look at this,

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SPEAKER_80: just for opening an account. Grasshopper.bank slash twist. Again, I'll be honest,

SPEAKER_45: there's homes out here in Hill Country, out in Dripping Springs, uh, out in Wimberley that are

SPEAKER_146: selling for 500 K that look exactly like that. And that are $400 a night Airbnb. You looked at these

SPEAKER_28: lawn for your mom. Can you Google, I don't know if you can search, um, I 99 icon to the letters, I 99 icon and see what images come up. Cause I would like to show you some of the newer ones.

SPEAKER_27: There it is. We are building that house. That house is already done. Uh, we are building that house for between 99, $120,000 delivered, uh, with our profit included. By the way, that house

SPEAKER_150: looks like a $4 million LA mansion with a view. It looks like you'd go to Los Feliz and tour that,

SPEAKER_153: like this was built in the twenties and it's been in a hundred films. You got it. You got it. You got it.

SPEAKER_28: And so we had like a global architecture design contest for like, we gave a million dollar prize

SPEAKER_31: to a million dollars in price of people designing homes that could be built for 99 K was sort of

SPEAKER_27: the initiative. We've also built that house out at, at community first village. This helps us get around this like NIMBY problem, like not in my backyard. It's like, you can sort of weave the, the tapestry of society back together, but beauty really is the key. It's not just a spreadsheet, extra, the spreadsheet matters. Um, but you, but, but like the, these things have to be weighted

SPEAKER_28: sort of like in a more equal way than we've thought about them in the past of like solving the housing

SPEAKER_18: crisis, taking a, an unhoused person and putting them in a, in a real community that feels like a real neighborhood. That's inherently stabilizing. I'm putting you would not, if y'all go out to

SPEAKER_27: community first, but you would say like, oh my God, a neighborhood of like, uh, homeless people. Like it must be like kind of crazy town, right? Like it is completely chill and kind and like, like it is a miracle. And like the, the, uh, I don't, I don't want to keep repeating myself, but like the restoration of dignity and community, like these things are not just spreadsheet 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, um, and this, and this is how you solve these seemingly intractable social issues is you, you have to put the sort of whole human in the picture. Listen, I'm going to invoke Jesus.

SPEAKER_141: Lon and I have been talking a lot about Jesus these days. Um, always, always, always.

SPEAKER_133: I'm telling people how you treat, how you treat the meekest amongst us is how you treat me. This is what Jesus said. This is the gospel. He said to us, how you treat the weakest members of society is how you treat God. Let that sink in as a concept folks. What you have done to the sick,

SPEAKER_31: the poor, the hungry, the prisoner is what you have done to me. Correct. And, and this is,

David Friedberg: I think a great North star for our society here in America. The reason it's important. And the reason I did my tweet this morning is I think it's very easy as technologists, it's very easy as capital allocators, you know, you, you, you hit some hits, they run away and oh my God, Uber, Robinhood, you know,

SPEAKER_84: I'm a victim of it myself, but we have to ask ourselves as society becomes so wealthy, where's the

SPEAKER_27: floor and has the floor moved up? Yeah. The whole, the whole, the whole bracket has to move together.

SPEAKER_31: Correct. Yes. I really. And if you were like thinking about structuring a society, which we should, um, the whole bracket has to move. And let me tell you something, when you are lucky enough

SPEAKER_48: to be in the top 1%, 0.1%, top 10%, top 20%, wherever you find yourself in life. And in our industry, you very quickly find yourself in the top 10%, 5%, 1%. You know, it's, uh, it's, it's extraordinary

SPEAKER_45: how the upper middle class has grown. We've had the upper middle class in the United States is the fastest growing. These are people who have net worths of one to 5 million, which doesn't seem

SPEAKER_176: a lot if you live in New York city or Los Angeles, but it is a heck of a lot of money if you live in Nashville or Austin, right? You're doing really well. Uh, you have a lot of optionality.

SPEAKER_51: So what can we do to just move the floor up? And we've had, yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_27: And I mean, like, I like icon as an icon of this, um, when you're sort of start thinking about

SPEAKER_31: 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

SPEAKER_27: frame these things as like bigger problems of like civilization just needs a better way to build as opposed to like, well, what's a little widget that could save us a few dollars per square foot

SPEAKER_31: or something like it actually unlocks like tremendous potential for human flourishing sort of across the board, both for solving intractable problems, but also for like these like grand challenges that I think like also speak to the human heart and are ennobling in their own way.

SPEAKER_179: And said another way, this can be a win, win, win.

David Friedberg: Yes. The investors in these companies and the founders and the team can win. Society can win, right? And, uh, all levels of society can win.

SPEAKER_182: It doesn't need to just be the top wins, the shareholders in the company.

SPEAKER_31: Yeah, that's right. These things don't have to be incompetent. Like we can show with this technology and others. I think we should be thinking like we can shelter the homeless, we can revive the American dream. We can defend the West and we can by God, build the moon base. Like that, that's, that's the society like that I want to be a part of. And that's the technology set that we need to be all working on collectively to like unlock the sort of next level of humanity.

SPEAKER_45: You know what you just unlocked for me, this idea that when you make something that's truly got that craftsmanship that truly, uh, inspires, uh, the, the high end, it's not incongruous to,

SPEAKER_176: uh, have that hit everybody. And I'll, I'll give an example of it. You know, I'm sitting a couple

SPEAKER_175: of feet away from the 16th Tesla ever made the roadster, uh, that I paid $150,000 for it.

SPEAKER_45: Yeah. And, uh, next to it is the model S I paid also signature signature. Oh, one,

SPEAKER_175: which I paid $150,000 for it is $300,000 for up the cars. I'm a very lucky guy. I get to have

SPEAKER_48: those two cars. What do I drive every day? I drive a model Y cost 50 K. I think you can get it used for 30 K 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 three, which you can get used ones right now with FSD is 15 to 20 K. They're everywhere. And then cyber care brings it everywhere. He, every rich person you talk to,

SPEAKER_176: David Sacks started driving again. He used to take Uber. He's in Austin. He's in Austin now,

SPEAKER_03: right? He's in Austin. And he showed up for, uh, we had a nice steak dinner the other week. He shows up and he's like, how do I park my car? I'm like, David, there's a valet. He's like, okay, I give it to the valet. I'm like, yeah, you have to have your key though, because you know, I'm like, why are you driving yourself? He's like, oh, I have FSD and I have this model. Why? I love it. Sacks doing pretty good. Drives the model Y every day. Chamath, he's doing pretty good. He drives the model Y every day. Yeah. Freeberg, he's doing very well. Ohalo's crashing it. He's got four model Ys. He said on the program or four Teslas, all of them with self-driving. We all drive the same car. It's all converged to one. Yeah. Perfect. This is what's going to happen with

SPEAKER_84: 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,

SPEAKER_31: two to three hour fire rating standard out of the box costs the same prices to build in a non-fireproof

SPEAKER_62: way. Unpack that for us after we look at this incredible Polymarket. Here it is, folks. Sure. I am very excited to be a shareholder in, a fan of, and partners with Polymarket. What will the median home value in Austin, Texas, metro area be on April 30th? And here it is. What do we have

SPEAKER_45: here? 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.

SPEAKER_18: 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

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SPEAKER_198: slash twist and let that sink in. There are people right now in California, New York, Los Angeles,

SPEAKER_176: you know, other Boston who are looking at this and their heads are exploding because they remodeled

SPEAKER_45: their kitchen for 800,000. They could have bought two homes in Austin for what their remote. I am not

SPEAKER_03: joking. And I'm not talking about remodeling your 2000 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.

SPEAKER_45: It's six, seven, $800,000. It's three or 400,000 to remodel a bathroom in Los Angeles.

SPEAKER_03: 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. Yeah, there's no comparison. I mean,

SPEAKER_200: 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 Riverview. You're going to San Purdue. You're going to Victorville. Like, there's just no way you're anywhere near Los Angeles for

SPEAKER_166: that price. It is the greatest city in the world, huh, Jason? I certainly think so. There's something

SPEAKER_31: special happening here that I haven't experienced. And I like going to the Bay. I like going to Washington DC. I like New York City. Like, I like those places. Great place to visit. Something very special is happening here. And this is part of it's like there's an instinct to build instead

SPEAKER_27: of like hand wring and like sort of theorize about solutions. It's like, just get out there and do

SPEAKER_31: 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, a hundred 3D printed homes with Lennar. Lennar Wolf Ranch icon maybe would be like the thing to search. These are homes that we sold in the three to 500k range with like the largest production. Lennar, this is the largest home builder in the country. It was the first 3D printed neighborhood in the world. It was a hundred homes that were 3D printed. Wow. Yeah, there you are. I mean, this is done now and sort of occupied. Fantastic. But it was like Lennar's number one selling community in Central Texas. It's had like their lowest warranty claims. Like this was the big sort of like, does this work at the community scale? Amazing. Now, you don't want to be the developer. 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.

SPEAKER_150: Uh, by the way, this was what my experience when I grew up in the eighties and nineties

David Friedberg: 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

SPEAKER_45: people, both of those places, the entire, uh, gestalt has changed. The entire modus operandus has been,

SPEAKER_48: how do I get mine there? This is a shrinking pie. Nothing can get done. All problems are intractable.

SPEAKER_45: 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 Saks, Elon, uh, 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

SPEAKER_48: where the other builders are. That's why if you're listening to my voice right now and you're starting a company, I have no problem with you moving to the Bay area for the first year or two, when you get to 10 employees, let me tell you what's going to happen. Everybody who works for you is going to

SPEAKER_45: 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

SPEAKER_84: 60 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, 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

SPEAKER_48: Austin lawn came from LA. Jackie came from San Francisco, but the reaction they had Jason,

SPEAKER_62: when they came to this town was this town's dope. I can lawn made an incredible, uh, observation. I can go get brunch and not wait online. Oh man. Uh, and the brunch doesn't cost

SPEAKER_18: 250,000. So you could drive to any, 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. It's like, you get your bagels, you walk around.

SPEAKER_200: It, it, it, it totally changes your entire lifestyle in Los Angeles. That's a two hour mission to go get bagels at a good place that people like, cause you're in line. It's where to

SPEAKER_62: park. It's, it's chaos. And I'm worried about my guy lawn and he's moving here. I give him 10 dimes to move. I'm like, here's 10 K, you know, whatever, you know, I'll pay for your movie, whatever,

SPEAKER_223: 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 going on with the apartments? And I got a house. I'm like,

SPEAKER_225: what for this? 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?

SPEAKER_227: Uh, for the same price, I was playing for a studio apartment in Silver Lake. I got a two bedroom townhouse to rent in, in beautiful. Yeah. Three times the space. Also it's full of, of builders and

SPEAKER_28: it's full of people who support and applaud builders. Like, like I suspect in other places,

SPEAKER_31: had I tried to start this company somewhere else, we would be very lucky to have built 10 or 20 homes by now. And, and the company would have gone extinct. I mean, like, like we, we, we would have, we would certainly not be like hundreds of homes in with like hundreds and hundreds of homes in the pipeline. Uh, you, you've gotta be in a place that like supports the builders from a super fan,

SPEAKER_231: fat Don capital. I thought this was an interesting, you know, fat Don, that's my meme maker. Uh, so

SPEAKER_18: he says 3d pros 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

SPEAKER_200: do about cracks if they do appear after the house has been printed? Yeah. So, so fortunately, one of

SPEAKER_27: the reasons we started with concrete is like, there's a lot of innovative things we had to do with

SPEAKER_31: concrete formulation, but the, the existence of concrete is not something we created. And so concrete has been around for thousands of years. Matter of fact, probably the only technology that civilization actually forget, forgot how to do during the dark ages was make concrete. We didn't forget metalworking and all these other things. We forgot how to make concrete. Um, and so we know it's one of the most resilient materials on planet Earth. And we have bridges in Alaska standing in salt water for decades that are still at 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,

SPEAKER_27: 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, then no one would win the prize. Like it is literally the crappiest thing we can imagine, imagine using, uh, 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 it, these kinds 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.

SPEAKER_181: 100 years is the lifespan of concrete at a minimum. And by the way, termites, you may

SPEAKER_84: have heard of them when you have wood structures and you have to have somebody, I mean, listen,

SPEAKER_45: I've owned a lot of homes at this point. I am my bane of my existence. Flooding. Yeah. Mold, fire. Termites and mold and fire. I cannot tell you, I have had mold, uh, in three of six homes I've owned. I have had flooding in two of six homes I've owned. I have had, uh, thankfully,

SPEAKER_62: knock on wood, never had any smoke or fire, um, and termites in six of six homes I've had to deal

David Friedberg: with. No, I'm not saying I've had a term, I only had a termite, um, like problem in one of them. Uh, my, my L one, one, my, my, my LA one. Um, but all of them I've had to pay a hundred, no,

SPEAKER_45: low thousands of dollars every two or three years to deal with this concrete, none of it. And by the way, drywall is basically drywall in Spanish means mold collector. It literally is where mold,

SPEAKER_27: like I have cut so much drywall. You're like, this is, there's like, we're in a kind of like Stockholm syndrome about the way that we build. It's like, you know, that mean where the dog is like drinking coffee in the house. It's like, this, this is fine. Like drywall is fine. Like, this is all fine. It's like, uh, this is not fine. Like, this is not the way we should be sheltering

SPEAKER_18: ourselves. Uh, one more question. Uh, also keeping it practical, Jason from Nate day, I w eight K M probably kilometers. How does electrical and plumbing work when the house is

SPEAKER_31: 3d printed? Great question. So one of the, one of the cool things about 3d printing is you actually

SPEAKER_27: control the internal structure of, 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. Uh, I won't say it's more expensive, but like you have, you do have to like learn something new. Uh, but plumbing, electrical, and the mechanical systems go in like very fast because the wall is not solid. It's sort of engineered to the loads you expect of it. And you control the internal structure of the wall. So it's like, you're not just automating

SPEAKER_28: framing. You're automating the whole wall system. So there's like multiple trades that are automated

SPEAKER_252: out. Right. You can tell the printer. Here's what we want the inside to be. Yeah.

SPEAKER_84: Yes. Correct. Awesome. Uh, we got our questions in great questions, everybody. Let's keep moving

SPEAKER_18: down the dock. All right. So thanks to Jason for being here. Should we drop Jason off and bring

SPEAKER_09: on our next guest? Yeah, let's drop Jason off and I'll come see Jason. Um, we'll have a little

SPEAKER_74: Yeah, you need to come see the new printer. We got the new multi-story printer. You need to come see it.

SPEAKER_256: I will come see it. Well, you know what we should do? We should do an on-site. We should bring a couple of folks and do a little on-site, a little barbecue down there. Hey man, you should operate

SPEAKER_45: 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 of my little writer's cabin. How tall can you make these things?

SPEAKER_31: To two stories. Yeah. Yeah. To two to three stories with the new version of the printer, which is also the one we're starting to release to other builders. Like, like, like time to join the revolution. This is the, the equipment of the future. Oh, see, this is a key thing I didn't

SPEAKER_132: get into here, but I'll just next time when you come out. No, no, no. I'll give you a minute here

SPEAKER_84: 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,

David Friedberg: construction companies, uh, you're also partnering with because you, you can't possibly deploy every single, um, channel. So tell me about your channel strategy. Yeah. Yeah. We, we, we, you know,

SPEAKER_27: both the most effective way to solve, uh, the global housing crisis and, uh, at, at high speed, it's also, it 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

SPEAKER_31: providing the tools by which humanity will build its future. And the, the, the new generation of the printer Titan is the multi-story rail-less, uh, more automated system that actually prints reinforced concrete, not just concrete. And we launched that business, uh, about a month ago this

SPEAKER_265: week, uh, in the uptake. So if you're a builder, you're a builder, you want to be a channel partner,

SPEAKER_09: go to what's the URL icon build.com. Okay. And you can always guess sometimes the founder, it gets first name at the domain name. Yeah. And you're also a hiring who you're hiring for,

SPEAKER_31: Jason. Man, we are hiring material scientists, engineers, software engineers, architects, field operators, the whole stack. Jason, you can clip this.

SPEAKER_45: 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 and talk about your problems. I, I pride myself on trying to be a

SPEAKER_48: good friend to my friends. And I immediately can tell when somebody is that person, somebody is true,

SPEAKER_45: honest, a just person. Jason. I knew Jason Ballard. I knew from the moment I met you that you're a quality guy and I collect quality guys. You know why? Because some guys like to shiv me and

SPEAKER_269: I'm going to talk about the guy who shiv me at the end of the show. Stick around. Yeah. Hey man.

SPEAKER_06: I'm going to unload today. Okay. Grace and loving is the way, man.

David Friedberg: I know. I'm a flawed human. 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.

SPEAKER_225: It's a big thing with him. He was all about it. Yeah. I'm doing my best. All right. Yeah. I'm doing my best. Today's not going to be my best moment. All right. Okay.

SPEAKER_133: I'm going to try to channel a little grace, but there's no better person you could go work for.

SPEAKER_84: 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. Okay.

SPEAKER_48: And on your website, go work for Jason and do something good in the world. Stop working for Zuckerberg and no offense and trying to make people click on more ads and invade their privacy. Go work and build housing for the military, for space. Excuse my French, uh, for the homeless

SPEAKER_133: and for rich people. That's right with people.

SPEAKER_53: Where else do you get giant robots, homeless housing, and a moon base in one place?

SPEAKER_84: I mean, come on and get some of those RSUs. It's going to be worth a fricking fortune,

SPEAKER_258: man. I'm going to, I can't wait till you IPO. I'm going to, how come I'm not on the cat tip?

SPEAKER_280: 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.

SPEAKER_283: Always a good guy. I know quality guys. Now this next guy coming on the program, I don't know if it's a quality guy or not. We'll find out.

SPEAKER_18: Quality guy. So we're bringing up Sebi Rubino. He's from Resi Labs, Jason. There it's a, it's a BitTensor subnet. We've been talking to a lot of them. Subnet 46, uh, and Resi 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.

SPEAKER_72: Hey, Sebi, how you doing, brother?

SPEAKER_287: I'm doing good, brother. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. A big fan of the show. And yeah, I'm glad that we're here.

SPEAKER_45: How long you been listening to Twist? How long you been listening to Twist? I always, it's okay if it's a year, it's okay if it's 10, but I always like to ask people

SPEAKER_290: because I've been getting so many people DM me and it makes my day when somebody tweets at me or there's a LinkedIn that they've been listening to the show and it had some impact on their entrepreneurial journey.

SPEAKER_293: Almost two years. I worked on finance and one of the team members there was like sending me clips, not clips, sending me the videos and saying, yeah, check this out.

SPEAKER_45: Awesome. And you can help the team out by just doing that. Tell a friend if you get,

SPEAKER_48: 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 2000.

SPEAKER_62: 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.

SPEAKER_301: I don't know when Brian Elvey came on for the first episode. That's a quality. That's my guy. We'll have to go back and figure out when, but it was early. All right. What are you working on? Yeah. 2008 CB, what are you working on?

SPEAKER_45: Am I pronouncing it correct? S E B Y CB?

SPEAKER_103: Sebi. Sebi. Oh, my name is Sebastian. I work for Tyrell Corporation.

SPEAKER_310: It's from Blade Runner, everybody. It's from a classic film company. All right. What are you working on, Sebastian?

SPEAKER_293: Yeah, we are working on the real estate. It's actually portal.resilabs.ai. Okay. I will suggest. We are actually launching our new website and portal today. I will do a

SPEAKER_315: quick screen share, but we're building a real estate intelligence network. Our first competition, like Lon said, is an appraisal model. So right now we're doing property appraisals remotely without ever seeing the property in person. And our AI models can price homes in the USA at 98% accuracy. So that beats out Zestimate. That beats out even in-person appraisers. And now we are injecting our intelligence into the agents that real estate agents or real estate investors are building. Ooh, that's a good idea. These platforms, one of them is Balcony Technology. We'll be using our pricing engine for, they have a trillion dollars in data from counties or housing data from counties. And they're 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 detect fraud, right? So if someone quick claim deeds a house or transfers a house for a hundred K when it's worth

SPEAKER_293: a million, let's check that out. And yeah, so that's, that's our intelligence track. We have some

SPEAKER_318: other tracks, but that has been where we've had the most progress so far.

SPEAKER_150: Incredible. Incredible. And so what's your background and how did you come to this idea? I always like to

SPEAKER_258: know where, how the founder kind of found this. How did you find it?

SPEAKER_293: Yeah. So I've, my whole family is real estate, uh, based uncle is a huge developer in Brooklyn. My mom is my hometown contractor. Oh, there you go. In red hook. Right. He built up red hook,

SPEAKER_45: essentially red hook where we used to dump bodies. Just so everybody knows, uh, your family was working

SPEAKER_48: in one of the most dangerous places in the world. I was having dinner the other night

SPEAKER_269: 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

SPEAKER_331: movies. This is the guy who did born to run Bruce Springsteen, another favorite album. Seminar work.

SPEAKER_260: And we sat there talking. I said, let me ask a question. This is like a quality guy. I said, where are you from? Where are you? He said, I'm from Brooklyn. I said, that's where I'm from. I'm

SPEAKER_133: from Bay Ridge. Where are you from? He said, red hook. I said, you grew up in red hook. That's like one of the four places when I was growing up in the seventies and eighties, they told me the lawn

SPEAKER_301: for green bed, red hook. You don't need to get off at that train stop. The Westies you're for the Westies. We're going to, we're going to bother you. Just be careful, be careful. And I knew this is a

SPEAKER_335: legit guy. Okay. So that means, Sebastian, you're a legit guy. What's the business model here? How

David Friedberg: 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

SPEAKER_315: does Resilabs 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 opener and outer subnet, right? So you can list your model that they can allow you to list your model. Um, and then from there users can go and access that model. Right. So with the portal that I'd love to take a second and show you guys.

SPEAKER_338: Yeah. Show, don't tell let's do a demo or die here. Remember most people are listening.

SPEAKER_335: If you're not listening, go to YouTube. You can see it, but if you are listening, we'll, we'll explain it,

SPEAKER_45: explain it to you. And, um, I think always good, uh, Sebastian, for people who don't know the magic of Tau, which I am obsessed with. I bought another $50,000 in Tau today. Wow. Uh, explain what I'm, I'm 750 K into this, which, which is a small bet for me.

SPEAKER_132: That's not, I'm just giving that a context. And I made this as a, this is a personal bet.

SPEAKER_45: This is for my family office. Um, but why are so many intelligent people building with Tau explain

SPEAKER_342: town in the subnets. Yeah. Tau has honestly been, uh, I've been a builder for a while since I was 18.

SPEAKER_315: I was always building something. Uh, and Tau has changed my life as a builder. One, it's given me access to talent. Two, it's given me access to resources. And three, it's given me a community of people, these even 2,900 holders of a token. And like, it's given me essentially this economic engine. What does Tau do? Tau allows you as a network of sub networks. So I have a sub network as, uh, Lon mentioned, it's 46, uh, out of these 128 networks in BitTensor. And these networks are really just, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, competitions. My competition is submit an AI model. There's other competitions that are, uh, provide compute. And we're just going to make sure you can, you're, you're ready and available or storage. So they're essentially, uh, like digital commodity. It's a digital commodity marketplace. And it's powered by these competitions. Now the, the, the bow on the, the BitTensor box is, uh, you can think about BitTensor the same way you think about, uh, say Google or, uh, OpenAI or Claude, or sorry, Anthropic at the company level, because those companies are building out their respective AI stack, right? They're building out compute. They're building out multiple, multiple types of inference on BitTensor. These 128 networks are running and 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 comp competitive nature and not corporate structure. Um, that allows us to, uh, be prepared for this, this next age of usage, which is going to be agent centric instead of human centric. So whereas the Zillow API is an API, we are a model, right? And as this, this change from APIs being used, uh, and humans being used for things, transitions to digital and, uh, digital commodities, these intelligence commodities, BitTensor will be, uh, the venue that is selected by most, uh, open router model routers and, uh, agentic model routers, right? And in these meta agents, I have the open clause stuff as I seen you've been, uh, on as well. If my meta agent that I'm chatting to most of the time is selecting the intelligence, it's going to select every single time from BitTensor. And that is what we are, what we've plugged ourself into and are involved in. And, uh, that's why we're able to see ourselves, uh, scaling out this, not just for appraisals, but for inspections with specialized hardware. Maybe we can do a competition for icon and say, Hey, instead of giving out a million bucks, we'll give you out a hundred K cause 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,

SPEAKER_293: and we, we, uh, redistribute that through our token. So that's a long-winded answer, but no,

David Friedberg: it's a great one. Now do your demo. It's very important that we explain Tau and BitTensor to folks here on this program. Why? Sometimes they get a tingle on, I hear a pitch, I get a tingle.

SPEAKER_181: Yeah. I get a spidey sense. I'm good at this. This is one of the things I found I'm good at in life,

SPEAKER_18: you know, that is finding the energy, 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.

SPEAKER_132: Okay. Well, I did it with BitTorrent, not BitTorrent, um, uh, Bitcoin, by the way. And I made a

SPEAKER_62: mistake. I had some Bitcoin on Mt. Gox. It got hacked. I had it on another thing. I lost my Bitcoin. Okay. Whatever. My wife bought it. We did great. Shout out to my wife. She's brilliant. Um, and

SPEAKER_45: I, I should have done more. And like a crazy, um, Musad, uh, CIA agent, a famous one with the dark

SPEAKER_105: past, like asked me to introduce him to the Bitcoin because he watched my podcast. And I was like, okay, here's, here's the guys. I'll leave it at that. I don't want to go down this rabbit hole

SPEAKER_354: here. He shall not be named who I barely knew. And I was like, Hey pal, sure. Just so you know,

SPEAKER_225: this is like a nonprofit. Essentially. These guys are monks. They're techno monks. They're not

SPEAKER_45: interested in money, but yeah, I'll introduce you to them, I guess. Cause 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.

SPEAKER_84: When I get the Spidey sense, you know what I do? I share it and I place bets. I placed a 750 K bet

David Friedberg: on Tao co-founded still core capital with Mark Jeffrey. I've leaned in and put some money of my own in. And, uh, I did the same thing with open claw, right? These two things are my Spidey senses in 2026. Those are my two Spidey sense bets. This is not investment advice, but I told Lon, if you have

SPEAKER_62: $500, $1,000 and you to ask me, should I buy some Tao? I'd say, yeah, go for it. I feel comfortable giving you that advice, but I'm not giving anybody else advice. Okay. Yeah. Dem or die. Sebastian go.

SPEAKER_287: Yeah. Dem or die. So this is our new website, uh, powered by the BitTensor subnet. I got, and as you're saying this stuff, Lon, you're, you're explaining that. I mean, that was my exact thought and it's what happened to me with BitTensor. So I've gotten to the point now where

SPEAKER_315: I've dedicated everything. I'm completely invested into either Tao or my own alpha token. The subnet tokens are called alpha tokens. Um, and yeah, let me explain what, uh, what we do and show you through this new website and portal environment. Um, simply put, we have an institutional grade property pricing. You can use it here as an API. It's very simple to use. Um, but a model that powers that API, uh, right away, you can go and plug in is, uh, an address, uh, 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. Um, and what we are building is not just this intelligence track. Um, right now I'm showing on the screen for those listening, analyze, tokenize and capitalize the three things that, uh, users can do on our network. Remember, this is not a company. This is a network. Right now that network is building the intelligence, uh, and, 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 he lock and they have $17 billion in, uh, essentially assets under management. And it's, that is like their, their loan book, right? The, the money that they have to issue loans, um, and it's circulating in supply. So they are one mortgage company, one lending company that uses the blockchain and no AI automation, no proprietary tech, just uses the blockchain to run their book of business. It's allowed them to get better capital in their system and also streamline their, their, the financial, uh, systems to their business. That's what we are enabling

SPEAKER_346: with our intelligence, right? With appraisal inspections and KYC that allows, uh, lenders to act,

SPEAKER_342: uh, uh, uh, incredible fundraise. You built an Oracle, you built a beautiful Oracle and at scale,

SPEAKER_114: somebody could say, Hey, I need, you know, we just, we, we, we just had Jason Ballard on,

SPEAKER_45: um, he could do an analysis and say with Lenar, where, where, where should we build our next community? Right. And where's the infill between, uh, Bastrop, Wimberley and, you know, uh, take the road south to,

SPEAKER_132: um, San Antonio, right? You go west, you go east, you go west to hill country, go east,

SPEAKER_51: to Bastrop, you go south to San Antonio. Right. You could actually map this with the Oracle, get the data, look for trends, and this would save you. I, I, I, I kind of think like hundreds

SPEAKER_176: of thousands of dollars in research and you could get that same research for how much Sebastian,

SPEAKER_339: what would I pay? Uh, you would pay, uh, it's 1% of a penny, uh, is the actual cost. Wow.

SPEAKER_268: Incredible. Are people doing it yet? Do you have customers yet? Yes. Yes. So we have, uh, like I

SPEAKER_315: said, balcony, we have a few protocols, like in the collaboration or estate protocol. And, uh, there's another one, Commer ties and honey shares. And what we do there, um, 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 a halfway across the world. I don't have an appraisal. I don't know what this is worth. So we are that third party appraisal and actually increases the volume on these platforms. Yes. Um, so yes, our product has been being, has been, uh, 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. Um, but I will say this is the, this is one track intelligence is what you mentioned that use case to double down on that. We actually have in our ecosystem, we're building the, and finalizing this, a macro prediction market trader. So the exact type of market that you were just on, on poly market, a partner, um, what, what we're able to do is say, Hey, we're going to use this micro precision pricing engine that we have this ability to price specific homes, single homes. And then we're going to extrapolate that, 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, uh, investors are able to make better decisions. The world has access to more

SPEAKER_48: truth. Um, is this a company or is it just a subnet? Are you a Delaware C corp or Texas corp?

SPEAKER_45: Hopefully what, what, what are you doing here in terms of the company versus the tokens? Uh, because like if we're investors in these things, this is one thing I bring up. You have, you can buy

SPEAKER_114: Tao and you get access to essentially all the subnets because the subnets use town to a certain

SPEAKER_62: extent that you have buying the subnet token, uh, 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, what's the opportunity here for, for investors who are

SPEAKER_363: listening? If there is one. Yeah. So, uh, one, we're a Wyoming C corp. Okay. Why Wyoming? Is

SPEAKER_51: that because they have good, uh, Dow and, uh, you know, those kinds of things? Yes. Uh, yeah,

SPEAKER_315: definitely. Uh, specifically like crypto, uh, crypto native companies, Wyoming, uh, Wyoming C corps are normally the, the route to go, but how does that, that C corp, how does it gain value, right? How does it compound and grow upon itself? How does it, how does that entity go public? Right. Right. And that, that question goes to, how does it gain value? We are essentially a 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. Um, 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.

SPEAKER_380: I do want to show you guys the portal. Um, okay. Let's wrap on the portal. Show us the portal real

SPEAKER_72: quick. Let's take a quick look. Yeah. I looked up my own house, by the way, just out of curiosity.

SPEAKER_61: Oh, okay. It works. Okay. Great. Beautiful. It's worth a little bit more than the average home in

SPEAKER_182: Austin based on our previous. Is your rent 5%, 4%, 6%, your yearly rent. Great question.

SPEAKER_384: Of the value of the home. Great question. I'm going to do the do some times or monthly rent.

SPEAKER_223: I'm going to don't tell anybody the address or the rent. I don't know. I'm not doxing you like

SPEAKER_198: Mondami doc. I didn't tell Griffin. I don't want anybody visiting lawns house.

SPEAKER_34: What percentage or yearly rent is to the value of the home? It's about, uh, oh, yearly,

SPEAKER_63: yearly. Let's see. Uh, okay. This is a cap rate is the concept here. It should be 5%. So

SPEAKER_132: it is 5.4%. Perfect. So you got your, that means you have a good deal. And did the person who owns the property got a good deal. I feel, I feel like we did. Rhonda, Rhonda and I did well. My land.

SPEAKER_393: Okay. Go ahead. It seems like your pricing engine is quite accurate. So nailed it.

SPEAKER_315: That's it. Nailed it to the wall. Yeah. Okay. So this is our portal. First thing you do is you see the dashboard. Here's where you can see every day we run this competition. We've, uh, given out $230,000

SPEAKER_346: in rewards, analyze 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

SPEAKER_315: to the price that someone's willing to pay for it. So it's very actionable data. That's important. This dashboard gives you the insight of like, why can I trust this? How can I trust this? Boom. Beautiful. It's there. But this is what people are using the system for. And it's the plugin addresses. I can plug in, right? When I done one eight Birch, I can, uh, 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.

SPEAKER_346: It's going to show up and then formulate and that's it. Uh, this is the portal. We have people

SPEAKER_315: negotiating with banks using these appraisal reports. We have people helping the county and yeah, you're going to get that same output. People are helping counties fight fraud and assess taxes.

SPEAKER_346: And, uh, yeah, this intelligence track is, is quite exciting. And this is a new chapter for us

SPEAKER_407: as people can start easily using, uh, tools. Yeah. Hey, put it in an address for me. 108 South

SPEAKER_62: Woodburn drive. 108 South Woodburn drive, Los Angeles. Is that your old place? Uh, this was the

SPEAKER_409: first home I ever bought. I bought it. They wanted 3.5. This is 20 years ago, I think. And I think I

SPEAKER_411: paid 2.4 million. I put a couple of hundred grand into it. This was the Brentwood, the Brentwood place. This was my, this is where I lived in Brentwood. This was the pool house where we started pool house.

SPEAKER_62: We started Mahalo in the pool house, uh, lawn work there. My friend, Nick Jarecki, the famous director lived there for a year when he moved there. And my friend, Josh Harris lived in the pool

SPEAKER_175: house from we live in public when he was, um, down on his luck. I let him live in my pool house and

SPEAKER_415: I gave him my Corvette and I get, and my, my incredible wife gave him, uh, a custom food order every week from, uh, whole foods. I mean, I'm not saying I'm a mensch, but, uh, when my friend was down on his luck, I, I, uh, you know, I always came through for him. It was a nice pool. There it is. South Woodburn drive.

SPEAKER_03: And, um, 1.18. Okay. That's wrong. It needs to be done over again. It's wrong. We need the oracle to go

SPEAKER_10: to work on this. So how do you deal with, um, an error in the system? Uh, cause this is taking a guess, I guess, square footage, whatever right now, or is this the oracle did it? Yeah. So, um,

SPEAKER_288: this is the, not the oracle. It's the model itself. Yes. It's a bit more, uh, checked and,

SPEAKER_346: uh, uh, what is it validated by real world professionals, but yeah, we have, we have these bugs come in right out of four here. Uh, one of them is incorrect, right? These are all within that.

David Friedberg: No problem. And that's the opportunity is to do this. All right. Uh, Sebastian, great job. Uh, let's stay in touch and, uh, yeah, come back in a year and show us your progress. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm rooting for you. All right. There it is folks. Are we going off duty? Uh, am I doing my,

SPEAKER_18: um, we can, we've got so much to talk about. Let's go off duty. There's so much going on. I know. Or should I do my little, uh, 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 shipped for half a mil. That's what the people want to know. Oh, okay. Now you're stored. Now I'm sorry. I'm going to

SPEAKER_09: tell the story without names. Okay. And then I'm going to allow lawn to let me know if I should

SPEAKER_384: name names. Okay. Um, I'll be the adjudicator here. I'm on the board of a company. It's a founder

SPEAKER_150: who I love pivots the company. They've got an extraordinary brand name. They've got a great

SPEAKER_335: vision to build a content management system, uh, a CMS, right. And to build tools, it doesn't work out. I'm not stung by that. The fund puts in a couple of hundred thousand and the, uh, syndicate puts a couple of hundred thousand in we're okay with, with failure. It's not a big deal, but 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, uh, over a hundred million. I believe they've got tens of millions of dollars

SPEAKER_48: is all public information, uh, for their content management system, which by all, uh, appearances is doing extraordinarily well. They love the team. They want to buy it, yada, yada. So they,

SPEAKER_45: and one of the board members is already an investor in this company. So there's a, there's a bit of a conflict, but that's okay. There's 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, they get these great deals. Okay. It's, it's not life changing money, but it's a, it's a soft landing. And, uh, I said, okay, well, what do the investors get? And the, the guy says to me, well, you get

SPEAKER_114: 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. Uh,

SPEAKER_48: 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 tech crunch and it turns out nobody made any money. Right. And,

SPEAKER_127: but it was a space saving. Everybody gets a soft landing that happens all the time.

SPEAKER_48: And I'm totally okay with that. I am okay with losing my money on 90% of bets. I've done extraordinarily,

SPEAKER_45: 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

David Friedberg: for you. I want to be a supporter of the transaction and I'm going to support it either way, because you don't want to be a scumbag and be like, I'm going to block the thing. But you know,

SPEAKER_335: so I get on the phone with the founder. I said, here's an idea. Why don't you give the investors

SPEAKER_84: a token number of shares in your company? So you could get us a save. And then you as the

SPEAKER_335: founder of this company who wants to acquire companies and talent in the future can say,

SPEAKER_48: hey, you took care of the people in the investment community. I'm not asking for my cash back. Right. 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

SPEAKER_114: about 1.4 million invested in this company, which isn't a lot of money in the grant scheme and things. I just told you, I put 750K into the gesture. It's literally a gesture. It's a goodwill

SPEAKER_45: gesture. Exactly. This founder says, I don't 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.

SPEAKER_132: So I'm hiring the team when this, because this company is going belly up, they can't make payroll. Right. And you're SOL, J Cal. So why would I do that? And I say, okay, fair enough.

SPEAKER_51: Blank from blank company. Fair enough. I understand. And sure enough,

SPEAKER_10: he tells me that essentially in so many words to F off.

SPEAKER_158: Yeah. I don't have to, and there's nothing you could do about it. That's F off in this sort of world. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10: You know, listen, I'm not trying to throw my weight around. This happened over a year ago.

SPEAKER_63: Oh, okay. But I had a guess, but my guess was wrong because it's happened over a year ago.

SPEAKER_62: Well over a year ago now. Okay. So I say to the guy, listen, I understand. I talked to the other board members of his company,

SPEAKER_48: 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. And 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

SPEAKER_442: members. I feel like that's the real lesson here is if this person had gone about this with a

SPEAKER_18: different attitude and approach, I feel like this might not have overflowed into a negative situation. This to me feels like a, you know, an unforced error. Like you could have probably not spent that

SPEAKER_72: much money, but not angered your investor to this point that it becomes about a personal grudge.

SPEAKER_454: He basically has the audacity, um, to tell me that he's a huge fan of my work.

SPEAKER_335: And then he writes me essentially an apology letter. Okay. Uh, the first interaction, I'll just quote, I have reflected on our conversation. Don't think it was a great first interaction between us and don't like that it ended the way, ended

SPEAKER_44: that way. So I wanted to share a couple of reflections. I'm sorry, this didn't turn out. Okay. Uh, blah, blah, blah. That's very diplomatic. Uh, this is, and then he's like,

SPEAKER_462: I'll let you invest in our next room. He almost got there. So close. He almost got there. He was so close and he so close. Yeah.

SPEAKER_44: So I talked to his, my friend who's on his board, chairman of this board made a lot of money from

SPEAKER_114: this. And I said, do me a favor, just, just talk to this kid because he, he just literally, it's like you're in a basketball game and somebody throws an elbow at you on purpose. Yeah. And bust your nose. And then you say, Hey, listen, that was not cool. You, you, you hit me in the nose with your elbow. Uh, you know, it's, it was a flagrant, right? The flagrant foul. 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. Yeah. Now I'm at a crossroads. Right.

SPEAKER_471: Jason Ballard just told me my, my, my brother in Christ told me peace and love.

SPEAKER_114: I got to have peace and love and grace. Yeah. So the company has a spectacular domain name

SPEAKER_48: and they're clearing out the assets and like the, and this domain name I know is worth a bunch. So I say, Hey, listen, just, so we get some money back for the, the shareholders who lost,

SPEAKER_114: you know, three, four or 5 million bucks, you know, and I was 1.4 million of it. How about just the domain? We, how much is the domain? Right. And they're like, well, we got a hundred K off for 150 K offers. And listen, let me stop you right there. I think the domain's worth 500 K a million.

SPEAKER_175: I'm going to put in a, I'll double whatever the last bid was. I'll put in 250 K. Now I'm dealing

SPEAKER_51: with the lawyer who's doing the liquidation. And I said, listen, I insist that we do this right because the shareholders on the other side and I'll just tell me what the bid is. I'll beat the

SPEAKER_114: bid. He's like, well, I can't in fairness. I'll be doing that. I said, great. What was the last bid? Because we all need to know the last bid. It's X amount. I said, okay, I'll put it up. I can't remember. I think it was like 250 K. Wow. I put up 250 K. I win the bid. 250 K goes to the investors

SPEAKER_51: in the, in the washout. So now I have that domain name yesterday. I realized that domain name would be the ultimate domain name for an AI based browser. Hmm. Okay. So I talked to an old collaborator of mine and I said, listen, I want to build an AI based browser with this domain name. He said, well, that's the, that's one of your best ideas ever. That's

SPEAKER_480: somebody I've worked with before. And I'm about to seed this company and launch it there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_335: 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, uh, you know, I, I've had friends who have built content management systems, immovable type WordPress. Yeah. It's like, uh, it's tons of these things out there. And I looked at the towel thing and boom, it hit me a headless CMS, a content management system powered by towel would be incredibly disruptive. Okay. So I'm not naming this founder.

SPEAKER_255: I'm not naming, um, the companies involved.

SPEAKER_87: Well, but you'll have to, because the URL, we're going to figure it out eventually.

SPEAKER_150: Cause at some point you'll figure it out when I launch my AI browser, it will come out in the wash,

SPEAKER_489: but now I need your counsel. Okay.

SPEAKER_45: I don't want to start another war. I've been involved in too many of these things. I'm like, I'm like Obi Wan Kenobi right now. I mean, I fought so many battles in the clone wars.

SPEAKER_18: I'm an old Jedi. I mean, here's, here's the only thing I would say is I it's probably as much as I would like to hear this person's name. I think, I think it's probably not worth it just

SPEAKER_493: 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, if I'm being honest, I don't think it's worth starting stuff with people. Thank you for talking me off a ledge. Thank you dead and gone. Like if they're

SPEAKER_496: dead in the ground, they're never going to be, but I'm looking at the, you know what my,

SPEAKER_335: I just, I'm looking at the picture of the founder and my Irish is up now because the temptation

SPEAKER_496: 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

SPEAKER_158: hadn't picked a fight with them. You'll wish you could just have a drink. Even though I got jumped,

SPEAKER_63: even though I got shipped, even though he got the better of me. I mean, you got, you know,

SPEAKER_18: from one JC, I think you got to look to another and you got to, you got to turn the other cheek

SPEAKER_503: on this one. You're saying JC has to ask JC with JC. I think WWJD, you got to ask yourself what the other,

SPEAKER_506: what would Chris do? I'm going to, I'm going to talk to Jesus right now. I think he'd forgive. I think he, Jesus, I think he'd say, yay. I've been wronged. What should I do?

SPEAKER_18: Yeah. The right, the righteous path is forgiveness. Jesus is coming in.

SPEAKER_338: Okay. He says, I should take the high road. I think I should do on to others as I would want

SPEAKER_335: to be done on to me. And I should turn the other cheek. That's yes. So I am turning the other cheek.

SPEAKER_198: There you go. Very close. However, however, there is a business opportunity.

SPEAKER_45: And this person decided that his business interests were,

SPEAKER_48: I mean, I literally was asking him to give me, I think 500 K in options. I would, and I was willing

SPEAKER_45: on the options, by the way, to pay the current price, just have warrants, which would have been point O point. It would've been 10 basis points, maybe in the value of his

SPEAKER_48: 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. You see what I did with Jason. I said, Hey, let me help you fill some things. He would

SPEAKER_516: have been on the podcast twice. If that guy was here right now, I give him the same advice. I say, you shouldn't have approached it this way. You should have been without hostility. You should have been,

SPEAKER_18: you know, like you should have been more gracious and like make, figure out a way to make this feel okay. So everybody feels like they got treated fairly. That's always how, how these situations

SPEAKER_93: should be. So I put into my agent, give me a business plan, an open source BitTensor business

SPEAKER_335: plan based on content CMSs. And I got back the most brilliant business plan. Wow, I am. I did last week, two bounties, $1,000 bounty I did on Twitter, so we can pull it up, please, to make annotated.com, which is an annotation service I just need for myself where I want to like highlight, you know, five seconds from a video, 10 seconds from a video and give my commentary on it. And I got all these people who built me like a way back machine style annotation device. I said, I'll give $1,000 to whoever makes the most interesting one and open sources it. And I did $5,000 to build the real-time commentary agents on the podcast. And I think we got five

SPEAKER_18: people who built something. Yeah. Oh, more, more than five. Now we're, we're, 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

SPEAKER_522: different proposals that we've had. Okay. So this is, which one is this?

SPEAKER_18: This is, you need a genius technical co-founder to build you an annotation tool for the web that is

SPEAKER_158: like the way back machine, but with AI. That's this one. Yeah. So like way back machine plus

SPEAKER_335: delicious. If you remember that bookmarking service or wow, it's been a long time since I thought about that. Right. So what I need is I need a, um, a Chrome browser extension. I'm on a YouTube video at, you know, like this video and somebody, anybody wants to either anonymously, pseudonymously like Reddit or, you know, Twitter or whatever. They say, give me seconds, 30 to 60, clip it, put a transcript, analyze it with AI. And I want to put some commentary on it. I want to let

SPEAKER_48: my friends put some commentary on it. Completely fair use. Don't want to steal and rip other people's content. But if there's a story in the New York times and you want to fisk it, if you remember fisking F I S K I N G pull up fisking from the Wikipedia, there was a dude on usenet who used to fisk

SPEAKER_45: 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, it's named for, uh,

SPEAKER_18: it's a Supreme court. I'm going to look up the, the, the actual origin of fisking. Yeah. It was,

SPEAKER_459: uh, described the critical deconstruction of articles by British journalist, Robert Fisk.

SPEAKER_338: 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, uh, in the early days of the

SPEAKER_258: internet. I think this is like nineties internet. Like I might've even been like three web.

SPEAKER_18: We lost Robert Fisk in October of 2020 sadly. Oh man. Rest in peace. This guy was,

SPEAKER_335: this guy was a provocateur, uh, but he also raised the intellectual level. And when we started the web blonde, fisking was like a way to engage intelligently and move forward, uh, the ball forward. So anyway, I put a thousand dollar thing out and people started building already. So now I'm bounty crazy.

SPEAKER_531: A thousand dollar bounty. Yes. We're, we're, we're checking out the live sidebars here. I'll,

SPEAKER_18: I'll, I'll pull up the tweet now. Uh, we do, we've gotten a lot. If you have submitted to us an AI sidebar based on this tweet, we are checking them all out. It's just going to take us a while. Cause we're trying to do it live on the show. So Jacob is actually playing with our first, uh, submission

SPEAKER_335: today. Uh, and we, and this will be an enhanced show notes, right? We'll put the, all the links in the enhanced show notes. If you look at the show notes on your, um, uh, podcast player or on YouTube's, uh, you know, description, we're doing enhanced show notes where we put like 20, 30, 40, 50 links in it.

SPEAKER_18: Can I, I designed a Claude skill to do this. It's working incredibly. So I, all I do is I take the transcript of the episode. I give it to Claude. It goes through, it gets it perfectly organized and it finds great URLs for everything that we talk about. I have to correct it. I would say one out of every 15 times it gets the link wrong and I have to fix it, but it's amazing. Incredible. It's saving so

SPEAKER_84: much time, right? What it, what it is. So if you're the type of person who takes notes and wants to

SPEAKER_175: learn from podcasts, like I do. And Lon does, this is like our gift to you and open clause gift to you is that you get in there. So we have two of these, not open club, my open clause. Okay.

SPEAKER_62: He's locked away. Great. Shout out Claude co-work, shout out perplexity computer. Love the whole

SPEAKER_132: category. So we did a thousand dollars. We did $5,000. Yeah. I'm going to announce another $5,000

SPEAKER_114: next week. I'll do it a week from today. I have to have the time to write this. We'll be back. We'll

SPEAKER_45: be right here. I'm going to write my headless CMS, BitTensor, open source $5,000 prize to build this

SPEAKER_48: opportunity. And the prize in this case, if it becomes a company I'm going to ask for, I don't

SPEAKER_335: know, the ability to buy 5% of the company for, you know, whatever, 50K or something, like be the

David Friedberg: original seed investor. You know, I just want the option. Sure. If it works to have a little skin

SPEAKER_335: 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 hole. I don't want revenge here, but I do have unfinished business. I want to fix the ledge. Right. There's a ledger. We're going to fix the ledger. Now, what does this mean for the person who shivved 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 happens? I think Tao,

SPEAKER_158: you've got this huge incentivizing platform. 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 what you got, it's like

SPEAKER_18: 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. So you create, it's sort of a-

SPEAKER_335: What happens to the product category, the customer, what did they experience then?

SPEAKER_338: What did they experience when they engage those products? What value does the customer get?

SPEAKER_551: Well, it's constantly being iterated and improved because you've got these huge incentivized

SPEAKER_158: communities that are- A better product. ...iterating constantly and creating the better, the better-

SPEAKER_489: You nailed it. A better version. Then there's a second piece. Not only is it better,

SPEAKER_335: but it could be if it works better and-

SPEAKER_301: Faster? Cheaper. Cheaper. Oh, of course. Cheaper, yes. Cheaper.

SPEAKER_408: Right, because we are-

SPEAKER_63: It's deflationary. ...we're decentralizing everything. So if you think about it in terms of like

SPEAKER_18: a company, a hyperscaler having to buy room after room after room full of GPUs to produce their work, with Talia, you're just sending that out to everybody who's got a GPU to spare.

SPEAKER_132: Correct. Yeah. So what's happened here, I'm just going to recap it. Sure. When somebody does this to you, you have to be forgiving. Okay. Namaste. I've talked myself

SPEAKER_45: up the ledge. Thank you, Jason Ballard. Thank you, Lon, for your counsel. I'm taking the high road.

SPEAKER_132: But it also educated me on, hey, there's this really interesting company with a shark like who elbowed me in the face. Like this guy has, this guy broke my nose in a basketball game for no good reason. And when I said, hey, you broke my nose, he told me to F off. 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. Mazel Tov, go for it. I

SPEAKER_45: considered it. Of course I considered it. I have LPs. I considered, do I take legal action? The amount,

SPEAKER_48: 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. When you treat somebody incredibly unfairly, you might have also educated them and highlighted to them, there's a major opportunity here. And hey, we live in a free market where the best idea wins. I might want to have an entry in this market. I think you hear that narrative all the time

SPEAKER_18: from successful people. It's like, that lit a fire under me. That negativity is what spurred me on. It's that Michael Jordan quote from The Last Dance. And I took that personally.

SPEAKER_335: 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. Yeah. And then I will release the 5k bounty next week with

SPEAKER_301: the conditions. You know, that's the productive thing to do is like, let this motivate you to do

SPEAKER_61: something great. Let this drive you to your next win rather than getting caught up in the, the back and forth with this person who wronged you. And to the person who broke my nose,

David Friedberg: I forgive you. It's not, I'll take you at your word. It wasn't personal.

SPEAKER_335: I haven't spoken to the person since the selling habit. He told me to F off. I'll take you at your word. It wasn't personal. And me launching a Tau subnet in this vertical of content, headless content management systems is also not personal. It's not personal, but I've got Mark Jeffrey. I've got all these developers in our community who like to build stuff with me and they love a bounty and they love a competition to show off

SPEAKER_45: 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

SPEAKER_48: 90% of the expense. That's the goal. Sure. Remove 90% of the expense and make it available to everybody

SPEAKER_441: in the world essentially for free. Because when you take 90% of the cost out, you're essentially saying,

SPEAKER_48: I'm going to make this free for the good of humanity. And we'll play another basketball game.

SPEAKER_476: Yeah. Well, we'll have round two. And this time I'm not getting elbowed and I'm not getting my nose

SPEAKER_63: broken. I mean, the Klingon say revenge is the dish best served cold. So that's not even revenge.

SPEAKER_48: 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,

SPEAKER_114: I'm going to suit up. And I took that person. Yeah. That's what it is.

SPEAKER_525: All right. Let's go off duty. Let's go off duty very quick. What do you got for me?

SPEAKER_18: So much stuff. Did you want to talk about these view buds? This was the thing you sent me on

SPEAKER_493: Twitter the other day there. There's a camera inside your earbuds that can show me that let's

SPEAKER_227: play the video and I'll give my feedback. I will pull up the video as soon as I can get my mouse

Chamath Palihapitiya: back over here. I saw this and I said, this is like a school project. Jacob's got it already.

SPEAKER_18: There it is. So tiny cameras in each ear. We'll play the video. 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 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 QUEN 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 earbuds. So it's like you're having this conversation with your AI, but that has finally a visual element. There's one other thing I want to mention because I thought this was so smart. So if you think about what if you had cameras in your ears, the immediate issue is, well, your face is blocking a lot of their view, right? Like,

SPEAKER_493: 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, like Poindexter,

SPEAKER_18: 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 it's your brain is interpreting both eyes together. So you don't see your face because they're interpreting both cameras together at once. That is really clever. And this will lead me to my off

SPEAKER_525: duty. Okay, let me just say this. This idea is brilliant. So good. This is a founding team. If they

SPEAKER_62: 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,

SPEAKER_18: and they seem like they're pretty great team leader, he's Marucci Kim. He's a PhD in comp sci and engineering from University of Washington, Seattle. He's now working at Google. He works on

SPEAKER_223: XR audio at Google. We got to get him out of Google and make this a startup if he wants to,

SPEAKER_62: or if anybody else wants to pursue something similar, and they have hardware chops, or they're just

SPEAKER_45: 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,

SPEAKER_441: or you're looking at the eel menu and it's in Japanese and it just starts reading to you what

SPEAKER_589: your options are, and you're talking to it. This would have been so amazing in Japan. I would have used this constantly in Japan. Yeah, correct. And now you're skiing and I'm skiing and it's seeing

SPEAKER_45: 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 how you get back down to this lodge. Sometimes I'm in a new mountain. I skied when I was in Davos for one day. I don't know the terrain. I don't have the map. You 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 wait. The one on the right has a 15 minute wait. There's all kinds of interesting things that developers will do when they get their hands on

SPEAKER_18: 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, you go over and like, look at the product. How much is this on Amazon right now? You can only imagine

David Friedberg: all of the uses. Incredible. And when I saw this, I immediately thought, I am a fan of Sony earbuds. Everybody goes for the Apple ones. The Sony ones are so much better. And these are

SPEAKER_335: expensive folks. These are $300. Yeah. And I've bought two different versions of these, the Sony WF 1000X M6. 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 1000X M5.

SPEAKER_45: And I actually prefer my, my, my X M5s better. They fit better. Um, if anybody has any tips on how to get the phone things to fit, that's what I've been having a challenge with is making them so they fit. So they're not, um, they don't hurt from extended use and they, and they don't fall out. You have a, like a real, um, decision you have to make. Yeah. So anyway, this is my, uh, that's my off duty for today is I really think this is just a great, great product. Uh, and then I have another amazing product. I just want to add to our off duty because, you know, I love gadgets. I love a good charger and, uh, you know, I got the daughters and, um, I saw anchor my favorite brand and they made a a beautiful charger. Uh, and what's really unique about this one, this is the anchor, um, uh, nano 45 W max charger. Okay. It's like a fast one. So it's really good. Um, but it's so tiny. And what's really unique about this one is, you know, sometimes you're on a plane or you're in a hotel

David Friedberg: and, uh, you got to plug your thing in, look at the 180 degree flexibility for your ideal view. It's like maybe the fifth image down in on the Amazon. And what you'll see in the fifth image down is you can rotate the plug. There it is. See that one. Yes. Yes. One more. The, the plug will go

SPEAKER_335: 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. It turns out some of the USB C cables I have are not charging as fast. And then other ones do. Oh, 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. Uh, you know, and they charge twice as much for half the product. Anyway, I love these chargers. I love all anchor products. Highly recommend

SPEAKER_45: you get this one. And then anchor says, sells a two headed USB C cable. So you, you got the daughters, you're, you've got iPads, you got phones, you know, you're at the airport, you're on the road, you're in an Airbnb. Uh, the dual sided cable that anchor makes there it is. Yeah. There's a four foot

SPEAKER_114: two in one USB C to USB C, 140 watt max, 18 bucks. Now this isn't a data cable. I don't think this

SPEAKER_48: will do data. Um, it might do data, but it doesn't do data to the best of my knowledge, but you can get like different length ones. Right. This thing's a godsend. You put these two things together. They

SPEAKER_290: don't take up any space. You got your phone and your laptop charging. It's events. The clutch thing

SPEAKER_18: is when you're at an event, you can't, you're not always near a plug. You want to be on your phone all day. You're tweeting, you're checking updates, you're checking your email by halfway through the day. You're at 13% power. You just keep your anchor in your bag. It's the easiest solution in the world.

SPEAKER_302: I gave you the charger, right? I gave you the cable. Now I will give you one more in my anchor trio of

David Friedberg: happiness. I buy these two or three at a time. And then when I'm with a friend, I hand it to them

SPEAKER_45: and I gift it to them. I did this, uh, with a member of my, I got a high profile, uh, frat, one of my high profile friends, their chief of staff were, were 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. They said, what's that? I said, this is a giant 25,000, uh, milliamp. I don't know what these ratings are. Um, and it's got two belting cables and it has pass through charging. So you plug those two USBCs, one of them into the wall, one of them into your phone. 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 plug, you can actually charge your laptop.

SPEAKER_604: Milli amp hours. That's what MAH is right there. 25,000 milliamp hours. It measures electrical

SPEAKER_18: charge and wad watt hours to measure energy and voltage.

SPEAKER_52: So you can plug four things into this. You can plug a cable into it, the holes and the cables and the

SPEAKER_45: outputs. It comes with two built-in cables. So you're not searching for a cable. One of them is like a handle and cable. I put this in my backpack. I put one in my luggage. You've been with me in Japan. I pull this thing out. I'm not looking for what, 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 kits. You got your charger. You got your cable. You got your battery pack. I'm done, folks. That's my off duty.

SPEAKER_551: AMC has a new Silicon Valley show, Jason. Did you hear about that?

SPEAKER_301: Oh, I heard about this. This has got Galifianakis, my cousin. People don't know, but we're actually cousins.

SPEAKER_18: It's got Billy Magnuson. It's got Zach Galifianakis. It's called the Audacity. The first two are on AMC now, and I gave it a watch. You know, it's interesting. It's funny. There are some good characters. I could see it developing into something, but it does have kind of, it's a sameness. It feels like the same kind of vibe as Silicon Valley. It feels like the

SPEAKER_493: same kind of vibe. It's derivative. It's a little bit of that mountain head. Remember, we watched that, that Jesse Armstrong movie. It's all a little bit of the same joke that people in Silicon Valley, they think they're so great. They think they're so disruptive. They're changing the world, but it's really, you know, they're kind of the same doofuses as everyone else. And they're sort of lying. And it's all this kind of BS, thin veneer of technological supremacy, where really they're just recycling the same sort of old ideas. And I didn't

SPEAKER_604: hate it, but I was hoping it was going to be a little bit more of a different angle.

SPEAKER_60: Yeah. They've been, the person who's the writer is a Silicon, is a secession, I guess,

SPEAKER_62: 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...

SPEAKER_18: Jonathan Glatzer. They worked on secession, but they also worked on Better Call Saul, which I love.

David Friedberg: Okay. So both of those I love. So it's super legit. The problem with all of these is,

SPEAKER_62: I think, and I haven't seen it, so I'll reserve judgment. I'll watch it this weekend, maybe with the wife. I've been looking for a new show. But when you watch these things,

SPEAKER_45: like, 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 host, 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

SPEAKER_18: 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,

SPEAKER_496: they're really just about the money and the prestige. And then they just pretend that it's

SPEAKER_558: about doing good for people. And I'm, and I'm not saying there's nobody in Silicon Valley that's like that, but of course there are, of course there are, but it just feels like it feels a little

SPEAKER_18: samey and it feels like, well, what, what is this show's message specifically that we haven't

SPEAKER_620: already heard from Silicon Valley? Well, it's in the name, the audacity of these people,

SPEAKER_127: you know, Oh, they're mendacious. It's really, it's about the relationship between the CEO founder

SPEAKER_18: 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

SPEAKER_255: what would actually work. And maybe I should, maybe you and I need to write a treat. I think so. I think

David Friedberg: we could have the, I think the treatment is really the industry. Like industry is not like, um, Hey, we have an ax to grind. It's just young people and it's money and it's power. Yeah. And

SPEAKER_158: it's more, it's gray area. Nobody on that show is all gray. People on that show aren't evil or good.

SPEAKER_18: They're flawed. They're, they're three-dimensional and, and they're people. Some of them you like, some of them you don't, they're morally gray, just like reality. And I feel like all these

SPEAKER_158: Silicon Valley shows, everybody's always like dumb and evil. And that's kind of the premise.

SPEAKER_35: Gavin Belson, you know, um, the guy who runs the incubator, um, in the show, Silicon Valley.

SPEAKER_223: Yeah. I forgot his name and the actor's name who was in Deadpool. That's um, called him. Yeah. Oh,

SPEAKER_627: they claimed he called in a bomb front on a train. Remember that? Yeah. Fiasco. I'm glad I've met

SPEAKER_493: this guy and now I'm like TJ Miller, right? Is that him? TJ Miller who crushed it. And then some

SPEAKER_48: people were like, Oh, that's Jake Allen. Okay. In Silicon Valley, that's a different character.

SPEAKER_18: Gavin Belson is the guy who runs Hooli, the Google. Yes. The Google owner was nothing like

SPEAKER_72: Sergey or Larry. TJ Miller was a different, different guy. And then this one,

SPEAKER_18: anyway, all the, it's all, it's an alternate reality. There's no real companies in this show, the audacity, but the big company that everybody is sort of wants to be. Cupertino is the name of that company. So you could. Okay. So it's app. It's obvious who it's supposed to be,

SPEAKER_493: you know, but it's like, I don't know. I feel like it's not as, anyway, I'll watch it. I'll give

SPEAKER_283: my judgment on a off duty next Friday when I release my headless CMS towel project.

SPEAKER_335: Exciting. And I released my bounty and my, uh, and my, uh, instructions on, uh, what the competition will be. All right, everybody, it's been another great week of twist. Uh, there's a

SPEAKER_131: secret twist, um, uh, group on the group chat. Yeah. There's a secret group chat on X that's been

SPEAKER_335: brewing. It's got about a hundred people in it. If you want to be in that group, DM the TWI 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, we'll think about it. No, no, it's a fun group. It's a fun group of people who love the show. There's like a hundred of us. Let me just talk about the show every day and what we're going to have in the next episode. It means have a great weekend. Bye-bye.