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

26:59You know what you just unlocked for me, this idea that when you make something that's truly got that craftsmanship, that truly inspires the high end, it's not incongruous to have that hit everybody. And I'll give an example of it. I'm sitting a couple of feet away from the 16th Tesla ever made, the Roadster, that I paid$150 ,000 for. And next to it is the Model S I paid, also signature 0001, which I paid$150 ,000 for. Okay, it's$300 ,000 for up the cars. I'm a very lucky guy. I get to have those two cars. What do I drive every day? I drive a Model Y, costs 50K. I think you can get it used for 30K with 20 ,000 models on it.

27:45The FSD I use, the FSD Elon uses, the FSD everybody who has access to a used Model Y or Model 3, which you can get used ones right now, with FSD is 15 to 20K. They're everywhere. And then Cybercare brings it everywhere. Every rich person you talk to, David Sachs started driving again. He used to take Uber. He's in Austin now, right? He's in Austin. And he showed up for, we had a nice steak dinner the other week. He shows up. He's like, how do I park my car? I'm like, David, there's a valet. He's like, okay, I give it to the valet. I'm like, yeah, you have to have your key though, because, you know, I'm like, why are you driving your stuff?

28:24He's like, oh, I have FSD and I have this Model Y. I love it. Sachs doing pretty good. Drives the Model Y every day. Chamath, he's doing pretty good. He drives the Model Y every day. Freberg, he's doing very well. O 'Hallo's crashing it. He's got four Model Ys, he said, on the program. Four Teslas. All of them in self-driving. We all drive the same car. It's all converged to one. This is what's going to happen with Icon. You'll be a rich person. You'll want to rebuild your Malibu 10 ,000 square foot beach home or in the hills, and you'll want it to be fire resistant. You'll build an Icon. By the way, two to three hour fire rating, standard out of the box.

28:59cost the same prices to build in a non-fireproof way? Unpack that for us after we look at this incredible Polymarket. Here it is, folks. Oh, 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 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, the volume people are betting here. Volume pretty low on this one. I'm looking. That means opportunity.

29:34There you go. But it's new. It's new in fairness. So only 110 ,000 volume so far, but it's new. Winning so far over 439K. That's what people are betting by the end of this month. The median Austin home value will be then 435 to 439, then 431. Basically as expensive as you can go is what people are leaning on. And as a person who has been home hunting in Austin recently, I don't disagree. If you find a decent house in Austin for under$400, you should buy it immediately. That's my take on it. It's easier than ever to build a great new product. And launching a startup, even as a solopreneur, is getting easier and easier.

30:19But as my experienced founders already know, there's a lot more to starting a company than just putting up a website or even building a product. If you're serious about going into business, you need a Delaware C-Corp. That's going to give you a serious leg up on your competition. And you can be taken seriously by investors. That's where Northwest Registered Agent comes in. Just a few clicks, they're going to give you the perfect start to your new enterprise. A real identity, a domain, a custom website, a business email, all the public filings done, and even a phone number. And you'll complete this process in under 10 minutes.

30:52Plus, you're going to get all sorts of free tools and resources from step-to-step guides, compliance reminders, and an online account that's going to keep everything organized, even as your business grows. So get all the advantages of a Delaware C-Corp, regardless of where in the U.S. you're operating out of. NorthwestRegisteredAgent.com slash twist. And let that sink in. There are people right now in California, New York, Los Angeles, you know other boston who are looking at this and their heads are exploding because they remodeled their kitchen for 800 000 they could have bought two homes in austin for what their remodel i am not joking and i'm not talking about remodeling your 2 000 square foot you know european uh kitchen that you know i had at my houses i'm talking about a modest kitchen yeah with you GE appliances, it's$600 ,000,$700 ,000,$800 ,000.

31:50It's$300 ,000 or$400 ,000 to remodel a bathroom in Los Angeles. You asked to have your bathroom remodeled in Brentwood, minimum$300 ,000. The cost of a three-bedroom here in Austin. Get on it, folks. Yeah, there's no comparison. I mean, if you were talking about$400 ,000 homes, you're going hours outside of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. If you're in San Bernardino. You're in the desert. You're going to River. You're going to Sanfordu. You're going to Victorville. There's just no way you're anywhere near Los Angeles for that price. It is the greatest city in the world, huh, Jason? I certainly think so.

32:24There's something special happening here that I haven't experienced. And I like going to the Bay. I like going to Washington, D.C. I like New York City. I like those places. Great place to visit. Something very special is happening here. And this is part of it. There's an instinct to build instead of hand-wring and sort of theorize about solutions. It's like, just get out there and do something. like figure it out um and i i think that the city and the town are like reaping the the benefits of that i mean the uh i don't know if you can pull up we just built a hundred a couple years ago now 100 3d printed homes with lenar lenar wolf ranch icon maybe would be like the thing to search these are homes that we sold in the three to 500k range with like the largest uh production lenar this is the largest home builder in the first 3d printed neighborhood in the world it 100 homes that were 3d printed wow um yeah there you are i mean that's actually the image this is done now and sort of occupied plastic but it was like lenaar's number one selling community in central texas it had like their lowest warranty claims like this was the big sort of like does this work at the community scale um and now you don't want to like it was possible to do something like that in austin 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 uh by the way this was what my experience when I grew up in the 80s and 90s in New York City.

33:42This was my experience when I, you know, lived in California for 20 years. There was a sense that anything was possible and you could build stuff. And then in both of those people, both of those places, the entire gestalt has changed. The entire modus operandus has been, how do I get mine? This is a shrinking pie. Nothing can get done. All problems are intractable. The taxes only go up. The spending in 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, 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?

34:26I'm tired of being hated for trying to solve problems and build things. Peace out. I'm going to go where the other builders are. That's why if you're listening to my voice right now and you're starting a company, I have no problem with you moving to the Bay Area for the first year or two. When you get to 10 employees, let me tell you what's going to happen. Everybody who works for you is going to hate you. And they're going to put their hatred on you as the owner of the business because it's$6 ,000 to have a two-bedroom apartment. And it's$4 million to have a three-bedroom house. And it's$60 ,000 to$90 ,000 to put your kids in a decent school.

35:04If you go to a public school, you're going to need to supplement it with$20 ,000 in tutoring, and you're going to have to hope your child is safe when they go to school. Your employees then start to figure out, well, who do I resent for this? And they say, the rich VCs and the CEOs of these companies are the reason that my life sucks. And they're making$400 ,000 in RSUs and salary. move your company to Austin. Lon came from LA. Jackie came from San Francisco. The reaction they had, Jason, when they came to this town was, this town's dope. Lon made an incredible observation. I can go get brunch and not wait online.

35:48And the brunch doesn't cost $250 ,000. You could drive to any time. You'd be like, I like bagels from that one place. You could drive there. You could park right in front. You walk right inside. Maybe you wait five minutes. I've waited in a seven-minute line. You get your bagels. You walk right in. It totally changes your entire lifestyle. In Los Angeles, that's a two-hour mission to go get bagels at a good place that people like because you're in line. It's where to park. It's chaos. I'm worried about my guy Lon. And he's moving here. I give him ten dimes to move. I'm like, here's 10K. I'll pay for your moving.

36:26It'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? I'm like, oh, I got a house. I'm like, what? Oh, yeah, I got a house in this really nice neighborhood that I'm looking at living in. I'm like, how's Long living in my neighborhood now? What the heck? For the same price I was playing for a studio apartment in Silver Lake, I got a two-bedroom townhouse to rent in beautiful. Three times the space. Also, it's full of builders, and it's full of people who support and applaud builders. Like, I suspect in other places, had I tried to start at this company somewhere else, we would be very lucky to have built 10 or 20 homes by now.

37:00And the company would have gone extinct. I mean, like we would have. We would certainly not be like hundreds of homes in with like hundreds and hundreds of homes in the pipeline. You've got to be in a place that like supports the builders. From a super fan, Fat Don Capital. I thought this was an interesting thing. You know, Fat Don. That's my meme maker. So he says 3D printed houses. Super interesting. He likes the cool designs. He says, I'm curious about longevity, though. whether the concrete mixture cracks over time and then what do you do about cracks if they do appear after the house has been printed yeah so so fortunately one of the reasons we started with concrete is like there's a lot of innovative things we had to do with concrete formulation but the the existence of concrete is not something we created and so concrete has been around for thousands of years matter of fact probably the only technology that civilization actually forget forgot how to do during the dark ages was make concrete we didn't forget metal working and all these other things, we forgot how to make concrete.

37:55And so we know it's one of the most resilient materials on planet Earth. We have ridges in Alaska standing in salt water for decades that are still the largest unreinforced dome in the world, and Rome is made of concrete. And so we sort of have the empirical evidence to show that this is 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, no one would win the prize like it is literally the crappiest thing we can imagine imagine using right 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 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 kind of things like there's a whole i won't get into it here but like that 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 100 years is the lifespan of concrete at a minimum and by the way termites you may have heard of them when you have wood structures and you have to have somebody i mean listen i've owned a lot of homes at this point.

39:14I am my bane of my existence. Flooding. Yeah. Mold, fire, wind, 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 knock on wood, never had any smoke or fire and termites in six of six homes I've had to deal with. No, I'm not saying I've had a termite. I only had a termite problem in one of them, my L1 one, my LA one. But all of them I've had to pay low thousands of dollars every two or three years to deal with this. Concrete, none of it. And by the way, drywall is basically, drywall in Spanish means mold collector.

40:13It literally is where mold, like, I have cut so much drywall. You're right. Like, this is, there's like, we're in a kind of like Stockholm syndrome about the way that we build. It's like, you know that meme where the dog is like drinking coffee in the house? It's like, this is fine. Like, drywall is fine. Like, this is all fine. It's like, this is not fine. Like, this is not the way we should be sheltering ourselves. One more question, also keeping it practical, Jason, from NateDayIW8KM, probably kilometers. How does electrical and plumbing work when the house is 3D printed? Great question. So one of the cool things about 3D printing is you actually control the internal structure of what you're building.

40:53And 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. Now, installing, to be fair on the ledger though, like installing windows and doors is a bit different. I won't say it's more expensive, but like you do have to like learn something new. But plumbing, electrical, and the mechanical systems go in like very fast. Because the wall is not solid. It's sort of engineered to the loads you expect of it. And you control the internal structure of the wall. So it's like, you're not just automating framing.

41:21You're automating the whole wall system. So there's like multiple trades that are automated out. Right. You can tell the printer, here's what we want the inside to be. Yeah. Yes, correct. Awesome. We got our questions in. Great questions. Everybody, let's keep moving down the dock. All right. So thanks to Jason for being here. Should we drop Jason off and bring on our next guest? Yeah, let's drop Jason off and I'll come see Jason. We'll have a little dinner. Yeah, you need to come see the new printer. We got the new multi-story printer. You need to come see it. I will come see it. You know what we should do?

41:47We should do an onsite. We should bring a couple folks and do a little onsite, a little barbecue down there. Hey, man, you should operate the printer. There you go. I cannot wait. I'm going to build my own tower. I'm going to build my tower, and I'm going to have a seat at the top of my little writer's cabin. How tall can you make these things? It looks like you get into two stories, yeah? Yeah, yeah, two to three stories with the new version of the printer, which is also the one we're starting to release to other builders. Like, time to join the revolution. This is the equipment of the future.

42:12Oh, see, this is a key thing I didn't get into here, but I'll just give you a minute. Next time, when you come out. No, no, no, I'll give you a minute here, because this is critical. When you perfect the technology, you are partnering with the greatest home developers in the world. You started at the top. Great way to do it. And then second, construction companies you're also partnering with because you can't possibly deploy every single channel. So tell me about your channel strategy. Yeah, yeah. We, you know, both the most effective way to solve the global housing crisis and at high speed, it's also turned out to be like the best business is to like in the long run be a technology company.

42:52So really the game all along has been to like arm the revolution, so to speak. We were like providing the tools by which humanity will build its future. And the new generation of the printer Titan is the multi-story, rail-less, more automated system that actually prints reinforced concrete, not just concrete. And we launched that business about a month ago this week. And the uptake is very fast. So if you're a builder, you want to be a channel partner, go to what's the URL? IconBuild.com. Okay. And you can always guess, sometimes the founder gets first name at the domain name. And you're also hiring.

43:27Who are you hiring for, Jason? We are hiring material scientists, engineers, software engineers, architects, field operators, the whole staff. Jason, you can clip this. Yes. Okay. You can clip this for your hiring. Okay. I am the ultimate judge of character. Okay. I am the bestie of all besties. People know. Like, hey, if you're having a tough time, you call Jason. and he's going to come and chop it up with you, talk about your problems. I pride myself on trying to be a good friend to my friends. And I immediately can tell when somebody is that person. Somebody is true, honest, a just person. Jason, I knew from the moment I met you that you're a quality guy.

44:09And I collect quality guys. You know why? Because some guys like to shiv me. And I'm going to talk about the guy who shiv me at the end of the show. Stick around. I'm going to unload today. Okay. Grace and loving is the way, man. I know. I'm a flawed human. Yeah, yeah. And I will work on grace. I will have grace for the people who stabbed me, right? Like Jesus forgave people. He forgave them. It's a big thing with him. He was all about it. And I'm doing my best. All right. I'm doing my best. Today's not going to be my best moment. All right. Okay. I'm going to try to channel a little grace. But there's no better person you could go work for, and there's no better mission than housing people.

44:48Jason is an A-plus character, individual. This is the person. If you're effective at what you do in your career, go work for Jason. Clip this. Put it on your hiring page, Jason. I give you permission to use this endorsement on your social media and on your website. Go work for Jason and do something good in the world. Stop working for Zuckerberg, no offense, and trying to make people click on more ads and invade their privacy. Go work and build housing for the military, for space. Choose my French. For the homeless and for rich people. Go do it, people. Where else do you get giant robots, homeless housing, and a moon base in one place?

45:26I mean, come on. Get some of those RSUs. Come, it's going to be worth a freaking fortune, man. I'm going to do... I can't wait until you IPO. How come I'm not on the cap tip? We need to do a syndicate. All right. That's one of my favorite guys. Good guest. Good guest. Right there. That's my guy. Always a good guest. 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. So we're bringing up Sebi Rubino. He's from Resi Labs, Jason. It's a BitTensor subnet. We've been talking to a lot of them. Subnet 46. And Resi stands for Real Estate Super Intelligence.

46:00So they are hosting a competition for AI models that can accurately price real estate. It's a theme show today. We're talking housing. Sebi, thank you so much for being here. Hey, Sebi. How you doing, brother? I'm doing good, brother. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. A big fan of the show. And yeah, I'm glad that we're here. How long have you been listening to Twist? How long have you been listening to Twist? It's okay if it's a year. It's okay if it's 10. But I always like to ask people because I've been getting so many people DM me. And it makes my day when somebody tweets at me or does a LinkedIn that they've been listening to the show.

46:32And it had some impact on their entrepreneurial journey. Almost two years. I worked at Fountain Finance. And one of the team members there was like sending me clips. Not clips. Sending me the videos and saying, check this out. Awesome. And you can help the team out by just doing that. Tell a friend if there's a quality episode, there's a moment in it, just send the deep link, please, and say, hey, Jason's been doing this with Lon for 15 years. We're in year 15, I think. Oh, more. You know what? We have to start celebrating the community here. I want to do a yearly party on the anniversary of the show.

47:04I don't know when Brian Alvey came on for the first episode. That's a quality. That's my guy. We'll have to go back and figure out when. But it was early. All right, what are you working on? Yeah. 2008. CB, what do you work on? Am I pronouncing it correct? S-E-B-Y-C-B? Sebi. Sebi. Oh, my name is Sebastian. I work for Tyrell Corporation. It's from Blade Runner, everybody. It's from a classic film company. All right. What are you working on, Sebastian? 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.

47:41I will do a 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 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.

48:26They're bringing that data on chain. They're doing this avalanche. What they're doing with us is they're using our pricing engine to reassess property taxes. sorry about that world um and also um to uh detect fraud right so if someone quick claim deeds a house or transfers a house for 100k when it's worth a million let's check that out and um yeah so that's that's our intelligence track we have some other tracks but that has been where we've had the most progress so far incredible incredible and so what's your background and how did you come to this idea i always like to know where how the founder kind of found this how did you find it yeah so i have my whole family is real estate uh based uncle is a huge developer in brooklyn my mom is oh my hometown contractor oh there you go in red hook right he built up red hook essentially red hook where we used to dump bodies just so everybody knows uh your family was working in one of the most dangerous places in the world i was having dinner the other night with my new friend this is my new friend jimmy iovine yes jimmy iovine and I was lucky enough to sit at a table with him at an event.

49:38This is the guy who did my favorite album, Dire Straits Making Movies. This is the guy who did Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen, another favorite album on, seminal work. And we sat there talking. I said, let me ask a question. This is like a quality guy. I said, where are you from? He said, I'm from Brooklyn. I said, that's where I'm from. I'm from Bay Ridge. Where are you from? He said, Red Hook. I said, you grew up in Red Hook? That's like one of the four places when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, they told me, Elon, Fort Green, Bed-Stuy, Red Hook. You don't need to get off at that train stop.

50:12The Westies, you were afraid the Westies were going to bother you? Just be careful. Just be careful. And I knew this is a legit guy. Okay, so that means, Sebastian, you're a legit guy. What's the business model here? How do you make money? I always want to know how the company makes money. Now we know what you're doing. We know how you came to the idea. You had personal insights here. but how does it make money? How does 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 open and outer subnet, right?

50:46So you can list your model. They can allow you to list your model. And then from there, users can go and access that model, right? So with the portal that I'd love to take a second and show you guys. Yeah, show, don't tell. Let's do a demo or die here. Remember, most people are listening. if you're not listening go to youtube you can see it but if you are listening we'll explain it 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 fifty thousand dollars in tau today wow explain what i'm 750k into this which which is a small bet for me that's not i'm just giving that a context and I made this as a, this is a personal bet.

51:29This is for my family office. Um, but why are so many intelligent people building with Tao? Explain Tao in the subnets. Yeah. Tao has honestly been, uh, I've been a builder for a while since I was 18. I was always building something. Uh, and Tao has changed my life as a builder. One, it's given me access to talent. Two, it's given me access to resources and three, it's given me a community of people, these even 2 ,900 holders of a token. And it's giving me essentially this economic engine. What does Tau do? Tau allows you as a network of subnetworks. So I have a subnetwork, as Lon mentioned, it's 46 out of these 128 networks in BitTensor.

52:12And these networks are really just competitions. My competition is submit an AI model. There's other competitions that provide compute and we're just going to make sure you're ready and available or storage. So they're essentially like digital commodity. It's a digital commodity marketplace and it's powered by these competitions. Now the bow on the BitTensor box is you can think about BitTensor the same way you think about say Google or OpenAI or Claude or sorry, Anthropic at the company level because those companies are building out their respective AI stack, right? They're building out compute, they're building out multiple types of inference.

52:56On BitTensor, these 128 networks are hosting these competitions so that they can offer one piece of the AI stack. And where we fit in that AI stack and the reason why we're using BitTensor is because we have the thesis that narrow intelligence, faster, cheaper, better, will win in this day and age. And faster, cheaper, better commodities due to this economic engine, due to the competitive nature and not corporate structure, that allows us to be prepared for this next age of usage, which is going to be agent-centric instead of human-centric. So whereas the Zillow API is an API, we are a model, right?

53:38And as this change from APIs being used and humans being used for things transitions to digital and digital commodities, these intelligence commodities, BitTensor will be the venue that is selected by most open router model routers and agentic model routers. These meta agents, I have the open clause stuff, as I've seen you've been on as well. If my meta agent that I'm chatting to most of the time is selecting the intelligence, it's going to select every single time from BitTensor. And that is what we've plugged ourselves into and are involved in. And that's why we're able to see ourselves scaling out this, not just for appraisals, but for inspections with specialized hardware.

54:31Maybe we can do a competition for Icon and say, hey, instead of giving out a million bucks, we'll give you out$100K because we can really do this in a competitive manner. And now you can get your designs. we could be your design firm, right? And they pay us and we redistribute that through our token. So that's a long-winded answer, but - No, it's a great one. Now do your demo. It's very important that we explain Tao and BidTetzer to folks here on this program. Why? Sometimes they get a tingle on, I hear a pitch, I get a tingle. I get a spidey sense. I'm good at this. This is one One of the things I found I'm good at in life is finding the energy.

55:11The 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 it. Well, I did it with BitTorrent, not BitTorrent, Bitcoin, by the way. And I made a mistake. I had some Bitcoin on Mt. Gox. It got hacked. I had it on another thing. I lost my Bitcoin. Okay, whatever. My wife bought it. We did great. Shout out to my wife. She's brilliant. And I should have done more. And like a crazy Musad CIA agent, a famous one with the dark past, like asked me to introduce him to the Bitcoin because he watched my podcast.

55:55And I was like, okay, here's the guys. I'll leave it at that. I don't want to go down this rabbit hole here. He shall not be named. Yeah. He shall not be named, who I barely knew. And I was like, hey, pal, sure. Just so you know, this is like a nonprofit, essentially. These guys are monks. They're techno monks. They're not interested in money. But yeah, I'll introduce you to them, I guess, because my agent was like, can you introduce them to these guys? I always like to help founders out. And then, of course, I get dragged for it. I'll put it all aside. I'm not making that mistake anymore. When I get the Spidey sense, you know what I do?

56:26I share it. And I place bets. I placed a$750K bet on Tau, co-founded Stillcore Capital with Mark Jeffrey. I leaned in and put some money of my own in. And I did the same thing with OpenClaw, right? These two things are my spidey senses in 2026. Those are my two spidey sense bets. This is not investment advice. But I told Lon, if you have$500,$1 ,000, and you asked me, should I buy some Tau? I'd say, yeah, go for it, Lon. I feel comfortable giving you that advice. but I'm not giving anybody else advice. Okay. Yeah. Dem or die. Sebastian, go. Yeah. Dem or die. So this is our new website powered by the BitTensor subnet.

57:07And as you're saying this stuff, Lon, you're explaining that meme. That was my exact thought. And it's what happened to me with BitTensor. So I've gotten to the point now where I've dedicated everything. I'm completely invested into either Tau or my own alpha token. The subnet tokens are called alpha tokens. And yeah, let me explain what we do and show you through this new website and portal environment. Simply put, we have an institutional grade, property pricing. You can use it here as an API. It's very simple to use, but a model that powers that API. Right away, you can go and plug in an address, 123 Main Street.

57:47And if I click this, it's going to bring me into the app. I don't want to do that quite yet. And what we are building is not just this intelligence track. Right now, I'm showing on the screen for those listening, analyze, tokenize, and capitalize the three things that users can do on our network. Remember, this is not a company. This is a network. Right now, that network is building the intelligence and offering it, but we're also building this infrastructure so that we can use this intelligence for something. But if we have intelligence to appraise property and we have essentially the intelligence needed to underwrite loans, property sales.

58:26We are building that infrastructure. Right now, there's a project called Figure Heloc and they have$17 billion in essentially assets under management. And that is like their loan book, the money that they have to issue loans and circulating in supply. So they are one mortgage company, one lending company that uses the blockchain and no AI automation, no proprietary tech, just uses the blockchain to run their book of business. It's allowed them to get better capital in their system and also streamline the financial systems to their business. That's what we are enabling with our intelligence, with appraisal inspections in KYC, that allows lenders to fundraise.

59:15You built an oracle. You built a beautiful oracle. And at scale, somebody could say, hey, I need – we just had Jason Ballard on. He could do an analysis and say, with Lenar, 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 um san antonio right you go west you go east you go west to hill country go east to bastrop you go south to san antonio you could actually map this with the oracle get the data look for trends and this would save you, I kind of think like hundreds of thousands of dollars in research. And you could get that same research for how much, Sebastian?

1:00:08What would I pay? You would pay, it's 1 % of a penny is the actual cost. Wow. Incredible. Are people doing it yet? Do you have customers yet? Yes. Yes. So we have, like I said, Balcony. We have a few protocols like in the collaboration your estate protocol. And there's another one, Commertize and HoneyShares. And what we do there is they essentially have tokenized properties for sale, but there's no third-party price. It's like, why would I buy this thing? Why would I buy this house that I can't go and see? It's halfway across the world. I don't have an appraisal. I don't know what this is worth.

1:00:45So we are that third-party appraisal and actually increases the volume on these platforms. Yes. So yes, our product has been in use. We are now launching the portal so it can be used in an easier way and people can really start to understand our network's potential. But I will say this is one track. Intelligence is what you mentioned, that use case. To double down on that, we actually have in our ecosystem, we're building and finalizing this, a macro prediction market trader. So the exact type of market that you were just on, on Polymarket, it a partner, what we're able to do is say, hey, we're going to use this micro precision pricing engine that we have, this ability to price specific homes, single homes.

1:01:30And then we're going to extrapolate that, do that across the entire market. And you can essentially have an edge on those markets and front run those markets. And we actually are the data provider to help find equilibrium in those markets. So investors are able to make better decisions. The world has access to more truth. Is this a company or is it just a subnet? Are you a Delaware C Corp or Texas Corp, hopefully? What are you doing here in terms of the company versus the tokens? Because if we're investors in these things, this is one thing I bring up. You can buy Tau and you get access to essentially all the subnets because the subnets use Tau to a certain extent.

1:02:10Then you have buying the subnet token. And you're, I think, subnet 46. Am I correct? Yes. Got it. And then you have investing in the corporation. So walk us through, are you a corporation? And then what's the opportunity here for investors who are listening, if there is one? Yeah. So one, we're a Wyoming C-Corp. Okay. Why Wyoming? Is that because they have good DAO and those kind of things? Yes. Yeah, definitely. Specifically like crypto native companies, Wyoming C-Corps are normally the route to go. But how does that C-Corp, how does it gain value? How does it compound and grow upon itself? How does that entity go public?

1:02:55And that question goes to how does it gain value? we are essentially a dat our job is to monetize and build this technology but every dollar of revenue doesn't go to us it goes back into buying back the token 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. I do want to show you guys the portal. Okay. Let's wrap on the portal. Show us the portal real quick. Let's take a quick look. Yeah.

1:03:32I looked up my own house, by the way, just out of curiosity. It works. It works. Okay. Great. Beautiful. It's worth a little bit more than the average home in Austin based on our previous - Is your rent 5%, 4%, 6 % your yearly rent of the value of the home? Great question. I'm going to do some - Times or monthly rent. Don't tell anybody the address or the rent. No, I didn't tell. Not doxing you like Mondami doxed Ken Griffin. I don't want anybody visiting Lon's house. What percentage your yearly rent is to the value of the home? It's about, oh, yearly, yearly. Let's see. This is a cap rate is the concept here.

1:04:11Should be 5%. So if you were paying. It is 5.4%. Perfect. So you got, that means you have a good deal. And the person who owns the property got a good deal. I feel like we did. I did well, my landlord. Go ahead, Special. It seems like your pricing engine is quite accurate. Nailed it. 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 is where you can see every day we run this competition. We've given out$230 ,000 in rewards, analyzed the million properties, and we've hidden I have 98%. 98%. 98 % what? Sorry, accuracy on price.

1:04:56So if you plug in an address, we're going to be 98 % accurate to the price that someone's willing to pay for it. So it's very actionable data that's important. This dashboard gives you the insight of like, why can I trust this? How can I trust this? Boom. Beautiful. It's there. But this is what people are using the system for. And it's the plug-in addresses. I can plug in, right? When I've done 1-8-BIRCH, I can find that property. right here. As I plug that in, I'm getting outputs in one second. Let's just do an example test of this property here. Boom. It's going to show up and then formulate.

1:05:33And that's it. This is the portal. We have people 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. And yeah, this intelligence track is quite exciting. And this is a new chapter for us as people can start easily using tools. Hey, put in an address for me. 108 South Woodburn Drive. 108 South Woodburn Drive, Los Angeles. Is that your old place? This was the first home I ever bought. They wanted 3.5, this 20 years ago i think and i think i paid 2.4 million i put a couple hundred grand into it 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 we started mahalo in the pool house uh lon worked there my friend nick jurecki the famous director lived there for a year when he moved there and my friend josh harris lived in the pool house from we live in public when he was um down on his luck i let him living in my pool house and 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.

1:06:47I mean, I'm not saying I'm a mensch, but, uh, when my friend was down on his luck, I, you know, I always came through for him. It was a nice pool. There it is. South Woodburn drive. And, um, 1.18. Okay. That's wrong. It needs to be done over again. It's wrong. We need the Oracle to go to work on this. So how do you deal with an error in the system? Because this is taking a guess, I guess, square footage, whatever right now, or is this the Oracle did it? Yeah. So this is not the Oracle, it's the model itself. Yes. Oracle's a bit more checked and what is it, validated by real world professionals.

1:07:23But yeah, we have these bugs come in right out of four here. One of them is incorrect. These are all within that 2%. And that's the opportunity is to do this. All right. Sebastian, great job. Let's stay in touch and yeah, come back in a year and show us your progress. Yeah. I'm rooting for you. All right. There it is, folks. Are we going off duty? Am I doing my - We've got so much to talk about. Let's go off duty. There's so much going on. And I know - Or should I do my little tyrant? That's what we should lead off off duty. You've teased it. I think we need to hear this story about you getting shibbed for half a mil.

1:07:58So that's what the people want to know. Okay. Now you're stored. Now I'm sorry. I'm going to tell the story without names. Okay. And then I'm going to allow Lon to let me know if I should name names. Okay. I'll be the adjudicator here. I'm on the board of a company. It's a founder who I love. Pivots the company. They've got an extraordinary brand name. They've got a great vision to build a content management system, a CMS, right? and to build tools. It doesn't work out. I'm not stung by that. The fund puts in a couple of hundred thousand and the syndicate puts a couple of hundred thousand in. We're okay with failure.

1:08:39It'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 over 100 million, I believe. They've got tens of millions of dollars. It's all public information for their content management system, which by all appearances is doing extraordinarily well. They love the team. They want to buy it, yada, yada. So they, and one of the board members is already an investor in this company. So there's a bit of a conflict, but that's okay. There's conflict, no conflict, no interest.

1:09:19So this is all going down and they make an offer. And the offer is like, okay, the founders get taken care of. They get these great deals. Okay. It's not life-changing money, but it's a soft landing. And I said, okay, well, what do the investors get? And the guy says to me, well, you get nothing. And I said, okay, well, let's jump on a phone call. Listen, here's what I propose. I'll be super supportive of the transition. I want to see the founders have a great exit, even if it's just landing the plane. And sometimes you just land the plane in this game. And you see, oh, a company was acquired on TechCrunch.

1:09:55And it turns out nobody made any money. Right. And, but. It was a space saving. Everybody gets a soft landing. That happens all the time. And I'm totally okay with that. I am okay with losing my money on 90 % of bets. I've done extraordinarily well being year zero, the first investor. Now this company was going to go out of business. They pivoted. I got them back in business. I worked for years on the company, went to the board meetings. So I say to this incredibly successful founder, here's a proposition for you. I want to be a supporter of the transaction, and I'm going to support it either way, because you don't want to be a scumbag and be like, I'm going to block the thing.

1:10:36But, you know, so I get on the phone with the founder. I said, here's an idea. Why don't you give the investors a token number of shares in your company? So you could get us a save. And then you, as the founder of this company, who wants to acquire companies and talent in the future, can say, hey, you took care of the people in the investment community. I'm not asking for my cash back. 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 about 1.4 million invested in this company, which isn't a lot of money in the grant scheme.

1:11:15I just told you I put 750K into BitTensor. But it's the gesture. It's literally a gesture. It's a goodwill 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. So I'm hiring the team because this company is going belly up. They can't make payroll. Right. And you're SOL, J-Cow. So why would I do that? And I say, okay, fair enough. Blank from blank company. Fair enough. I understand. And sure enough, he tells me that essentially in so many words to F off. Yeah. I don't have to and there's nothing you could do about it.

1:12:08is the, that's F off in this sort of world. Yeah. You know, listen, I'm not trying to throw my weight around. This happened over a year ago. Oh, okay. But. I had a guess, but my guess was wrong because this happened over a year ago. It's 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 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 that another board member is already an investor in.

1:12:47I don't have any shares in this company. And it's not for me. It's not going to change my life. It's for my LPs. It's for my syndicate members. I feel like that's the real lesson here is if this person had gone about this with a different attitude and approach, I feel like this might not have overflowed into a negative situation. This to me feels like an unforced error. Like you could have probably not spent that much money, but not angered your investor to this point that it becomes about a personal grudge. He basically has the audacity to tell me that he's a huge fan of my work. And then he writes me essentially an apology letter.

1:13:27Okay. The first interaction, I'll just quote, I have reflected on our conversation. Don't think it was a great first interaction between us and don't like that it ended that way. So I wanted to share a couple of reflections. I'm sorry this didn't turn out. Blah, blah, blah. That's very diplomatic. And then he's like, I'll let you invest in our next round. He almost got there. So close. He almost got there. He was so close. And he's so close. So I talked to my friend who's on his board, chairman of his board, made a lot of money from this. And I said, do me a favor. Just talk to this kid. Because he just literally, it's like you're in a basketball game and somebody throws an elbow at you on purpose.

1:14:08Yeah. And bust your nose. And then you say, hey, listen, that was not cool. You hit me in the nose with your elbow. You know, it was a flagrant. Right. The flagrant foul. Yeah. And so my friend says, yeah, that was a flagrant. I apologize on his behalf. We'll take care of you, J-Cow. 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. Jason Ballard just told me, my brother in Christ told me, I got to have peace and love and grace. So the company has a spectacular domain name. And they're clearing out the assets.

1:14:50And this domain name I know is worth a bunch. So I say, hey, listen, so we get some money back for the shareholders who lost three, four, five million bucks. 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 100k off for 150k i said listen let me stop you right there i think the domain's worth 500k a million i'm gonna put in a i'll double whatever the last bid was i'll put in 250k now i'm dealing with the lawyer who's doing the liquidation and i said listen i insist that we do this right because the shareholders on the other side and i'll just tell me what the bid is i'll beat the bid he's like, well, I can, in fairness, have you do that?

1:15:33I 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 250K. I put up 250K. I win the bid. 250K goes to the investors in the washout. So now I have that domain name. Yesterday, I realized that domain name would be the ultimate domain name for an AI-based browser. 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, whoa, that's one of your best ideas ever. This is somebody I've worked with before. And I'm about to seed this company and launch it there.

1:16:12But while I was thinking about it, I did a little study of these CMS systems, these headless CMS systems, et cetera. This is a huge, huge space. What's a headless CMS? It's like you store the data. You can use any presentation level. I mean, it is like one of the great spaces. And my friend, you know, I've had friends who have built content management systems. I was just going to say, Movable Type, WordPress. Yeah, it's like a. It's tons of these things out there. And I looked at the Tao thing and boom, it hit me. A headless CMS, a content management system powered by Tao would be incredibly disruptive.

1:16:52Okay. So I'm not naming this founder. I'm not naming the companies involved. Well, but you'll have to because the URL, we're going to figure it out eventually. At some point you'll figure it out when I launch my AI browser. It'll all come out in the wash. But now I need your counsel. Okay. I don't want to start another war. I've been involved in too many of these things. I'm like Obi-Wan Kenobi right now. I mean, I fought so many battles in the Clone Wars. I'm an old Jedi. I mean, here's the only thing I would say is it's probably as much as I would like to hear this person's name. I think I think it's probably not worth it just because you never know if I've learned anything about this world.

1:17:36It'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. Unless they're dead and gone. If they're dead in the ground, they're never going to be an issue again. No, but I'm looking at the, you know what?

1:18:02I'm looking at the picture of the founder. Mm-hmm. And my Irish is up now. I said the temptation for sure, but you don't know. That guy and you might be in the same room in 10 years, and you'll wish you hadn't picked a fight with them. You'll wish you could just have a drink. Even though I got jumped. Even though I got shibbed. Even though he got the better of me. I mean, you got, you know, from one JC, I think you got to look to another and you got to, you got to turn the other cheek on this one. You're saying JC has to ask JC what JC would do? I think WWJD, you got to ask yourself what the other, what the big guy would do.

1:18:34All right, what would Crest do? I'm going to, I'm going to talk to Jesus right now. I think he'd forgive. I think he'd, Jesus. I think he'd say, yay, my son. I've been wronged. What should I do? Yeah, the righteous path is forgiveness. Jesus is coming in.

1:18:51Okay. He says I should take the high road. I think so. I should do on to others as I would want to be done on to me, and I should turn the other cheek. That's, yes. So I am turning the other cheek. There you go. Very close. However, however, there is a business opportunity, and this person decided that his business interests

1:19:21were, I mean, I literally was asking him to give me, I think, 500K in options. I would, and I was willing on the options, by the way, to pay the current price, just have warrants, which would have been point, oh, point, it would have been 10 basis points maybe in the value of his company. And if he had done it, I would have him on this podcast. I would be tweeting for him. I'd be helping him. Just so what I did with Jason, I said, hey, let me help you fill some things. He would have been on the podcast twice. If that guy was here right now, I'd give him the same advice. I'd say, you shouldn't have approached it this way.

1:19:51You should have been without hostility. You should have been more gracious and figure out a way to make this feel okay so everybody feels like they got treated fairly. That's always how these situations should be. So I put into my agent, give me a business plan, an open source BitTensor business plan based on content CMSs. and I got back the most brilliant business plan. I did last week two bounties, a$1 ,000 bounty I did on Twitter. Somebody can pull it up, please, to make annotated.com, which is an annotation service I just need for myself where I want to highlight five seconds from a video, 10 seconds from a video, and give my commentary on it.

1:20:36And I got all these people who built me like a Wayback Machine-style annotation device. And I said, I'll give$1 ,000 to whoever makes the most interesting one in open sources. And I did$5 ,000 to build the real-time commentary agents on the podcast. And I think we got five people who built something. Yeah. Oh, more than five now. We're in business. It's going to take Jacob like a week to get through all of these different proposals that we've had. Okay. So this is, which one is this? Explain to people this. You need a genius technical co-founder to build you an annotation tool for the web that is like the Wayback Machine, but with AI.

1:21:15That's this one. Yeah. So like Wayback Machine plus Delicious, if you remember that bookmarking service. Oh, sure. Wow. It's been a long time since I thought about that one. So what I need is I need a Chrome browser extension. I'm on a YouTube video, you know, like this video. And somebody, anybody wants to either anonymously, pseudonymously, like Reddit or, you know, Twitter or whatever. They say, give me seconds 30 to 60. Clip it. Put a transcript. Analyze it with AI. And I want to put some commentary on it. I want to let my friends put some commentary on it. Completely fair use. Don't want to steal and rip other people's content.

1:21:51But if there's a story in the New York Times and you want to fisk it, if you remember fisking, F-I-S-K-I-N-G, pull up fisking from the Wikipedia. There was a dude on Usenet who used to fisk people. And it became, fisking became the art of taking apart somebody's argument by line by line annotating it. So that's my concept here. Dude, it's named for, it's a Supreme Court. I'm going to look up the actual origin of Fisking. Yeah, it was described the critical deconstruction of articles by British journalist Robert Fiske. That's what they were saying. Okay. Is he still alive? I want to have him on the program because Fisking to me was like one of the most interesting things in the early days of the internet.

1:22:31I think this is like 90s internet. Like, it might have even been like pre-web. We lost Robert Fiske in October of 2020, sadly. Oh, man. Rest in peace. This guy was a provocateur, but he also raised the intellectual level. And when we started the web, Lon, fisking was like a way to engage intelligently and move the ball forward. So anyway, I put a$1 ,000 thing out, and people started building already. So now I'm bounty crazy. $1 ,000 bounty. Yes, we've got another one. We're checking out the live sidebars. I'll pull up the tweet now. We've gotten a lot. If you have submitted to us an AI sidebar based on this tweet, we are checking them all out.

1:23:15It's just going to take us a while because we're trying to do it live on the show. So Jacob is actually playing with our first submission today. And this will be an enhanced show notes, right? We'll put all the links in the enhanced show notes. If you look at the show notes on your podcast player or on YouTube's description, we're doing enhanced show notes where we put like 20, 30, 40, 50 things. Can I tell you, I designed a Claude skill to do this. It's working incredibly. So all I do is I take the transcript of the episode. I give it to Claude. It goes through. It gets it perfectly organized, and it finds great URLs for everything that we talk about.

1:23:55I have to correct it. I would say one out of every 15 times it gets the link wrong, and I have to fix it. But it's incredible. It's saving so much time. What a discussion. So if you're the type of person who takes notes and wants to learn from podcasts like I do and Lon does, This is like our gift to you and OpenClaw's gift to you is that you get in there. So we have two of these. Not OpenClaw. My OpenClaw, he's locked away. Great. Shout out Claw Cowork. Shout out Perplexity Computer. Love the whole category. So we did$1 ,000. We did$5 ,000. Yeah. I'm going to announce another$5 ,000 next week.

1:24:32I'll do it a week from today. I have to have the time to write this. I got a big speech. We'll be back. We'll be right here. I'm going to write my headless CMS, BitTensor, open source,$5 ,000 prize to build this opportunity. And the prize, in this case, if it becomes a company, I'm going to ask for, I don't know, the ability to buy 5 % of the company for, you know, whatever, 50K or something. Be the original seed investor. You know, just want the option. Sure. if it works to have a little skin in the game. Why? Because if this works and I can get warrants or whatever, I might be able to make some of my previous investors hole.

1:25:15I don't want revenge here, but I do have unfinished business. I want to fix the ledge. There's a ledger, we're going to fix the ledger. Now, what does this mean for the person who shivved me? What is Tau good at, Lon? Tau? What is Tau good at? At its core, when you put a service on Tau versus a commercial proprietary service, what happens? I think, Tal, 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 whatever.

1:25:51It's like a normal employee. But in Tal, you're creating these communities that are financially incentivized to create or to validate the things that are being created. Correct. So you create. It's sort of a. What happens to the product category, the customer? What did they experience then? What did they experience when they engage those products? What value does the customer get? Well, it's constantly being iterated and improved because you've got these huge incentivized communities that are iterating constantly and creating the better, the better. You nailed it. A better version. Then there's a second piece.

1:26:28Not only is it better, but it could be if it works, better and faster cheaper oh of course cheaper yes because cheap right because because we are it's deflationary we're decentralizing everything so if you think about it in terms of like a company a hyperscaler having to buy room after room after room full of gpus to produce their work with talia you're just sending that out to everybody who's got a gpu to spare 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 up the ledge thank you jason ballard thank you lon for your counsel i'm taking the high road but it also educated me on hey there's this really interesting company with a shark like who elbowed me in the face like this guy has this guy broke my nose in a basketball game for no good reason and when i said hey you broke my nose he told me to f off there's nothing you could do about it nothing you could do about it hey what are you gonna do sue me no i'm not gonna sue you i'm gonna sue the founders i'm gonna block the transaction no mazel tov go for it i considered it of course i considered it i have lps i considered do i take legal action the amount it would cost 10 million dollars to fire up a lawsuit for 1.4 million invested.

1:27:52It 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 that narrative all the time from successful people it's like that that lit a fire under me that negativity is what spurred me on it's that it's that that that michael jordan quote from the last dance like and i took that personally like you know i think somebody make make a video i'll try of me somebody make me looking at the ipad and saying i took that personally and then i will release the 5k bounty next week with the conditions uh you know of what that's the productive thing to do it's like let this motivate you to do something great let this drive you to your next win rather than getting caught up in the the back and forth with this person who wronged you.

1:29:05And to the person who broke my nose, I forgive you. It's not, I'll take you at your word. It wasn't personal. I haven't spoken to the person since this whole thing happened. 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 their work. And now, perhaps, we'll be in another basketball game together.

1:29:49together. And I'm bringing a squad with me. And our goal is to take the price of a content headless CMS. And we would like to take out 90 % of the expense. That's the goal. Remove 90 % of the expense and make it available to everybody in the world, essentially for free. Because when you take 90 % of the cost out, you're essentially saying, I'm going to make this free for the good of humanity. And we'll play another basketball game. We'll have round two. And this time, I'm not getting elbowed and I'm not getting my nose broken. I mean, the Klingons say, revenge is the dish best served cold. So that's - It's not even revenge.

1:30:38I just, you know what? I'm in the arena. You showed me this incredible game. I'd like to try playing the game. Maybe it's only a 1 % chance I make a business out of this, But maybe I could then go to my LPs who lost money in this and gift them some equity warrants that they didn't get. That's it. Enough already. I am at peace with this. But with peace and love, I'm going to suit up. And I took that person. Yeah, that's what it is. All right, let's go off duty. Let's go off duty very quick. What do you got for me? So much stuff. Did you want to talk about these view buds? This was a thing you sent me on Twitter the other day.

1:31:16There's a camera inside your earbuds that can - Show me that. Let's play the video and I'll give my feedback. I will pull up the video as soon as I can get my mouse back over here. I saw this and I said, this is like a school project. Jacob's got it already. There it is. So view button. All right. So hit play. So tiny cameras in each ear. Yeah, we'll play the video. So these, yeah, they took regular Sony earbuds, opened them up, put these cameras and some batteries in them, and now they're connected to an on-device vision language model so that you could basically talk to your LLA or your vision language model, show it things around you, and it could just talk to you about whatever you're looking at, whatever you're seeing.

1:32:01So 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 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.

1:32:38So 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, that's why it's hard to have a camera back here.

1:33:09We always think of, like, you put the camera in the glasses so it's pointing directly out. Yeah, right in the middle, like Poindexter, where you put the tape on your nerd glass. But they get around it with binocular vision. So by combining the left and right cameras, like, just like your eyeballs do, you don't see your nose because your brain is interpreting both eyes together. So you don't see your face because they're interpreting both cameras together at once. That is really clever. And this will lead me to my off-duty. Okay, let me just say this. This idea is brilliant. So good. This is a founding team.

1:33:45If they have any entrepreneurial ability, I would love to invite them to my accelerator and give them 125K or their first 25K to incorporate, whatever it is, if they're decent entrepreneurs and they seem like they're pretty great. The team leader, he's Maruchi Kim. He's a PhD in comp sci and engineering from University of Washington, Seattle. He's now working at Google. He works on XR Audio at Google. We got to get him out of Google and make this a startup if he wants to, or if anybody else wants to pursue something similar and they have hardware chops or they're just super motivated and have two friends.

1:34:16I'd love to incubate something similar because this could be incredibly accretive to blind people who are navigating the world. This could be incredibly accretive to when you're in another country. We already have auto translate, you know, in like pixel buds or whatever, but you're in Japan and you're looking at the sushi menu or you're looking at the eel menu and it's in Japanese and it just starts reading to you what your options are. And you're talking to it. Amazing in Japan. I would have used this constantly in Japan. Yeah, correct. And now you're skiing. And I'm skiing and it's seeing what's in front of me.

1:34:54And it says, hey, these are the conditions. This is the route you're going to go. oh, 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 this. The more you start thinking about it, the more you're like, oh, I would use this constantly.

1:35:26I mean, they would just be like shopping. Imagine like if you're in a store, you go over like how like look at the product. How much is this on Amazon right now? Like you can only imagine all of the uses. Incredible. And when I saw this, I immediately thought I am a fan of Sony Air Buds. Everybody goes for the Apple ones. The Sony ones are so much better. And these are expensive, folks. These are$300. Yeah. And I bought two different versions of these. The Sony WF-1000XM6. These are great noise canceling. The batteries last forever. They're extraordinary. Now, they're expensive. Okay, fair enough.

1:36:04The last version is 50 bucks off, Sony WF-1000XM5. And I actually prefer my XM5s better. They fit better. If anybody has any tips on how to get the foam things to fit, that's what I've been having a challenge with is making them so they fit. So they're not, um, they don't hurt from extended use and they don't fall out. You have like a real, um, decision you have to make. 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 beautiful charger.

1:36:53Uh, and what's really unique about this one, this is the anchor, um, uh, nano 45 W max charger. Okay. This is like a fast one. So really good. Um, but it's so tiny. And what's really unique about this one is, you know, sometimes you're on a plane or you're in a hotel and 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 on the Amazon. And what you'll see in the fifth image down is you can rotate the plug. There it is. See that one? Yes, yes. One more. The plug will go different directions depending on what you need. And it has a display on it.

1:37:39I 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. It knows that you have an 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. So knowing what your charge speed is, is such an unlock with the screen. And it looks really cute. You press the button, and 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.

1:38:13You throw two of these in your bag when you're going to Japan, Lon. And they're dirt cheap. They're 30 bucks. It's so much better than anything Apple produces. You know, and they charge twice as much for half the product. Anyway, I love these chargers. I love all Anker products. Highly recommend you get this one. And then Anker sells a two-headed USB-C cable. so you got the daughters you're you 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 this is a four foot 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 will do data um it might do data but it doesn't do data to the best of my knowledge, but you can get different length ones.

1:39:05This thing's a godsend. You put these two things together. They don't take up any space. You got your phone and your laptop charging. It's events. The clutch thing is when you're at an event, you're not always near a plug. You want to be on your phone all day. You're tweeting. You're checking updates. You're checking your email. By halfway through the day, you're at 13 % power. You just keep your anchor in your bag. It's the easiest solution in the world. Now, I gave you the charger, right yeah i gave you the cable now i will give you one more in my anchor trio of happiness i buy these two or three at a time and then when i'm with a friend i hand it to them and i gift it to them i did this uh with a member of my i got a high profile uh frat one of my high profile friends their chief of staff were we're at an event i think we're at the all-in summit i won't say who it was but you can look at the people on stage and get an idea and i'm charging my phone with They said, what's that?

1:39:57I said, this is a giant 25 ,000 milliamp. I don't know what these ratings are. 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. Doesn't weigh all that much, but you can charge your phone four times, five times. You can actually charge your laptop. Milliamp hours. That's what MAH is right there. 25 ,000 milliamp hours. It measures electrical charge and watt hours to measure energy and voltage. So you can plug four things into this. You can plug a cable into it, the holes and the cables and the outputs.

1:40:36It 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, 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 JCal for dealing with battery issues. And anchor is chef's kiss. You got your charger, you got your cable, you got your battery pack.

1:41:10I'm done, folks. That's my off-duty. AMC has a new Silicon Valley show, Jason. Did you hear about that? Oh, I heard about this. This has got Galifianakis, my cousin. People don't know, but we're actually cousins. 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 same kind of vibe. It's derivative.

1:41:43It's a little bit of that mountain head. Remember, we watched that Jesse Armstrong movie. It's all a little bit of the same joke that people in Silicon Valley, they think they're so great. They think they're so disruptive. They're changing the world. But it's really, you know, they're kind of the same 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 hate it, but I was hoping it was going to be a little bit more of a different angle. Yeah, they've been, the person who's the writer is a Silicon, is a Secession, I guess, writer.

1:42:20And they've been marketing it, not as the creative Secession, but somebody who was in the writer's room. Who knows what their providence is? But I knew that this was. Jonathan Glatzer. They worked on Secession, but they also worked on Better Call Saul, which I love. Okay. So both of those I love. So it's super legit. The problem with all of these is, I think, and I haven't seen it, so I'll reserve judgment. I'll watch it this weekend, maybe, with the live. I've been looking for a new show, but when you watch these things, like, um, it's becoming a bit on the nose in terms of outsiders trying to write about the inside space.

1:42:56And yeah, this session kind of nailed it, but I knew this one because I heard the writer on like a bunch of the woke anti-tech podcasts and they were over the moon, the hosts him of just how terrible everybody in silicon valley was how you know uh oh my god these are vapid people who don't care about society it's just like well what if there what if there's somebody in there who's like actually jason ballard who actually is a good person what if there's somebody like me who actually is an empathetic right moderate person who doesn't care about politics doesn't want to dominate the world just wants to make cool shit i feel like you're not really allowed to make that show right now.

1:43:37The 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 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 really just about the money and the prestige, and then they just pretend that it's about doing good for people.

1:44:11And I'm not saying there's nobody in Silicon Valley that's like that. Of course there are. Of course there are. But it just feels a little samey, and it feels like, well, what is this show's message specifically that we haven't already heard from Silicon Valley? Well, it's in the name, the audacity of these people. You know? Oh, they're mendacious ass. And even the premise, it's about the relationship between the CEO, founder, and his therapist, and they begin sort of colluding on financial fraud together. Like, that's the core premise of the show. So you kind of get - Let me tell you what would actually work.

1:44:43Let me tell you what would actually work. And maybe I should. Maybe you and I need to write a treatment. I think so. I think we could have the inside. I think the treatment is really the industry. Like, industry is not like, hey, we have an axe to grind. It's just young people and it's money and it's power. Yeah. And it's more, it's gray area. Nobody on that show is all gray. People on that show aren't evil or good. 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 Silicon Valley shows, everybody's always like dumb and evil.

1:45:23And that's kind of the premise. Gavin Belson, you know. the guy who runs the incubator in that show. In Silicon Valley. Yeah, I forgot his name and the actor's name who was in Deadpool. That's, um... Called him. Yeah, oh. They claimed he called in a bomb front on a train. Yeah. Remember that? Yeah. Fiasco. I'm glad. I've met this guy and now I'm like, T.J. Miller, right? Is that him? T.J. Miller, who crushed it. And then some people are like, oh, that's J. Cal. It's like, it's not J. Cal. Okay. In Silicon Valley, that's a different character. Gavin Belson's the guy who runs Hooli, The Google. Yes, the Google owner was nothing like Sergei or Larry.

1:46:02Miller was a different, different guy. And then this one. Anyway, all the it's all. It's an alternate reality. There's no real companies in the 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. OK, so it's app. It's obvious who it's supposed to be. You know, but it's I don't know. I feel like it's not as. Anyway, I'll watch it. I'll give my judgment on Off Duty next Friday when I release my headless CMS towel project. Exciting. And I release my bounty and my instructions on what the competition will be. All right, everybody.

1:46:36It's been another great week of Twist. There's a secret Twist group. Oh, wow. The group chat. Yeah. There's a secret group chat on X that's been brewing. It's got about 100 people in it. If you want to be in that group, DM the 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 pretty active. No, no, it's a fun group. It's a fun group of people who love the show. There's like 100 of us. Let me just talk about the show every day and what we're going to have in the next episode. A lot of memes. Have a great weekend. Bye-bye.

1:47:04Bye, buddy.