Jacob Goldstein
Jacob Goldstein spent more than a decade as co-host of the Planet Money podcast. He's also the author of the book Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing, which the New…
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Jason Ballard is the co-founder and CEO of ICON. Jason’s problem is this: Can you use 3-D printing to build houses that are cheaper, better and more interesting than the houses we build now?
In this episode, Jason explains:
- Why construction methods are so slow to change
- How 3D printing opens up new designs for houses
- How building on the Moon shaped the way Icon builds on Earth
- The challenge of scaling to printing thousands of houses
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Pushkin. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is What's Your Problem? My guest today is Jason Ballard. Jason is the co-founder and CEO of a company called Icon, and his problem is this. can you use 3D printing to build houses that are cheaper and better and maybe more interesting than the houses that we build now? As you'll hear, ICON has 3D printed a few hundred houses, and they're currently trying to scale up so that thousands of houses can be built using their system. Before he started ICON, Jason was a seminary student at one point. He got a master's in lunar construction, as in building on the moon. And he also started a company that he describes as a combination between Whole Foods and Home Depot. In our conversation, we talked about all of those things. But to start, I asked Jason why he eventually set out to build houses in a new way.
01:18
Speaker 2
The whole purpose of technology is to sort of bend the world toward the things that we want. And so there was this like idea of like imagining a way of building that was faster, that was lower cost, but actually improved quality instead of decreased quality and left tremendous design opportunity still on the table. I don't know if you've ever talked to a builder, but there's this like terrible saying among builders, like you can either have it fast, cheap or high quality. You can only pick two of the three. And that seemed completely unacceptable to me as like a default setting for something so basic. I mean, we're talking about food, water, shelter are the basic things we need.
01:56
Speaker 1
And yeah, we've gotten much more efficient at food and water, right? Like, Clean, cheap water is an underappreciated miracle that we have, at least in this country, in the developed world. Food has gotten profoundly cheaper, but building a house has not gotten much cheaper. There have been strangely few productivity gains. It looks the same as it did to a large extent, whatever, 50 years ago, 70 years ago.
02:20
Speaker 2
I mean, my office is probably slightly hyperbolic, but we have been building with plain lumber and bricks and mortar for something rounding to a thousand years. You know, we invented like nail guns and power saws and things like that, but the sort of fundamental principles in approaches to building haven't changed in an awfully long time. And look, we built a civilization or a few on these paradigms, but it's clear that we're like reaching the limits of what they can do for us. And, you know, then it was 2018, now it's 2026, but sort of the same idea, like where's Wakanda? Like where's Rivendell? Where's this like world of the future we're supposed to have by now. Like houses are getting more expensive and we don't even like really like these things. Like it's like rather soul crushing when you look at most new neighborhoods getting built in the world today. And it just felt like both a cool problem, an important problem to solve. But then also you could imagine all these like very cool things that could happen as well if you figured out how to build with robots. And so all of that was the setup for 2018, which is like we have got to show the world that something new is possible so that these conversations about construction aren't always so like damn depressing.
03:31
Speaker 1
When do you discover 3D printing? When do you think, oh, maybe 3D printing will solve this problem?
03:36
Speaker 2
Yeah, so at the time when I first had the idea, I was working at a sustainable building and remodeling company called Treehouse.
03:44
Speaker 1
The company you had started.
03:46
Speaker 2
Correct. Imagine Whole Foods took over Home Depot and that'll kind of get you in the ballpark of kind of what the company was like.
03:51
Speaker 1
Yeah.
03:53
Speaker 2
Clientele at the time, even though we're trying to drive down costs the best we could, was like a rather high in clientele. And so we're going into some of the nicest homes in Austin and ultimately Dallas as well. And they have like all these problems with air quality, with like basic building material quality, beauty. And it's like, something is wrong with the way we're building. If like the nicest houses in town have all these problems, it wasn't, you would expect sort of the rich people to have all this sorted out. But even with the nicest homes in town, there were these like real problems. And it was like, you know, we don't just need to like improve like what we're doing. We don't need to like automate drywall hanging or whatever, like something's really wrong here. And so again, I kind of made this spreadsheet of like, got to be faster, got to be lower cost, got to leave aesthetics and beauty on the table, needs to be sustainable, needs to be resilient. And I kind of looked at everything. I looked at SIP panels and ZIP panels and prefab and modular and shipping container housing. Probably the weirdest thing I looked into was growing houses out of fungus, but really just like a full, no stone left unturned kind of approach to like, what could we possibly do? And it was only with 3D printing, even though at the time no one had ever done it. Nobody had ever printed an occupiable building. There were some like research efforts at universities But it was like you could believe with 3D printing that like, oh, that could be cool and beautiful. And that material is very simple. And a robot should be faster and lower cost than a bunch of human laborers. And it is stronger and all these kinds of things. So it wasn't clear that it would work at the time. But it just felt so like compelling to try. It was the only thing I could find for which you could even imagine working. all those things being true. It's just like, well, we got to try.
05:41
Speaker 1
All those things being, it could be fast, cheap and beautiful and good.
05:44
Speaker 2
And strong and safe. And like, yeah, you didn't have to make these trade-offs, right? They're sort of, you're forced into with conventional approaches to buildings.
05:54
Speaker 1
So you have this dream. And as I understand it, South by Southwest in 2018 was kind of a key early moment, right? Tell me what happened there.
06:02
Speaker 2
Yeah, so we kind of had to bootstrap the company. There was two other co-founders, myself, a gentleman named Alex LaRue, who was like the founding CTO and engineer. And then my other co-founder was Evan Loomis, the three of us. we were kind of it and we kind of had to bootstrap. And so we found a buddy and we said, Hey, we need to 3d print a house in the backyard of a property you own. And if it, if it doesn't work, we'll tear it down. And if it works, you'll have a free house, but we need to, uh, show that this can be done. And so we worked with a friend who is an architect to design it. Cause we wanted to show off, begin showing off the possibilities of 3d printing. Uh, his name is Andrew Logan. So really kind of friends and family bootstrap. And, uh, started figuring it out. And so we built a prototype, uh, gantry style 3d printer. We did not have enough money at the time to develop a material delivery system. So we're using just kind of off the shelf concrete mixing and pumps, uh, and doing our best effort at like engineering a material that will work and started trying, just like showed up and started trying to print and failed and failed and failed and kind of improved day after day. And eventually everything was working well enough. It's like, I think we have enough time to have this house done by South by Southwest when the whole world comes to Austin. Like that will be the moment. So we sort of marked that on the calendar and just started printing. There were, of course, lots of hilarious failures. We were kind of hand mixing the concrete and pouring it into the printer. So we say that that first house was artisan 3D printed. And by the skin of our teeth, got it done literally with like not an hour to spare. And then announced to the world that you're like, hey, there's a permitted 3D printed house in Austin that you can come see while you're here at South Byte. And it kind of went viral and everybody took notice. We ended up winning like the startup contest at South by this year. And then that sort of proof point, like here is a very compelling looking house that was 3D printed in a real city, got real permits, a real certificate of occupancy. And that allowed us to raise our first investment round and build a team and continue the journey.
08:02
Speaker 1
So when you talk about, you know, a gantry style 3D printer and concrete, like Just give me the basics, because this is still the basics of how it works, right? I'm sure you've innovated a lot and changed a lot, but what is happening? When you say print a house, what do you actually mean? How does it work?
08:18
Speaker 2
Yeah, so if you sort of accept the premise that what we want to do is 3D print a house using a concrete material, and I can explain why we think all that's right later, but you basically need to put the concrete where it goes. That's what the printer itself does. It's just like depositing material in three-dimensional space. And then you have to make that concrete behave along the way and once it gets there. It has to flow and pump to the nozzle, the printhead. If it keeps flowing, you get a puddle instead of a house. But if it starts setting up too fast, you end up getting a brick instead of a printer. So you need to put the concrete where it needs to go, and then you have to get the concrete to behave. Those are the two fundamental principles. engineering, scientific problems that you need to solve in order to 3D print a house.
09:01
Speaker 1
I'm just going to say what it looks like. I've watched videos of this, and if I was listening to a podcast, I wouldn't quite understand. So let me just say what I've seen. If you imagine... kind of like a giant tube of toothpaste. And the machine, the printer is sort of squeezing the toothpaste and moving in whatever shape the house is going to be. You can imagine a rectangle just for something simple. And so it does a rectangle in the size of the house. And then it kind of puts another rectangle of toothpaste on top of the first rectangle of toothpaste. And it goes around and around and it stacks up those rows of toothpaste until it's as tall as the walls of the house are going to be.
09:37
Speaker 2
That's correct. It prints layer by layer according to the architectural designs that you have. Although you said rectangle. This is like an important point about 3D printing that was so exciting.
09:45
Speaker 1
Yes, they're round. It's rounded. It can be anything you want.
09:48
Speaker 2
And it doesn't change the color. If I printed you a house in the shape of a Fibonacci spiral, assuming it's the same square footage, it's the same price as the rectangle. And that's not true. So some of the things you can do with 3D printing look very... elevated and beautiful and even high and inexpensive, but they are sort of not. This is this design aesthetic point.
10:08
Speaker 1
Yes.
10:09
Speaker 2
It's possible.
10:10
Speaker 1
And they do, the ones you have been building, and we'll get to this, but they do have a lot of rounded, right? Instead of a corner, there will be a little kind of a rounded edge rather than 90 degree angles. It seems like a common kind of design motif.
10:24
Speaker 2
That's right. And that's rather intentional. You can, of course, rather obediently print a rectangle if you want to. But of course, we're often trying to say like, hey, this house is 3D printed. It should like lean into its own possibilities. And so you see that show up a lot.
10:36
Speaker 1
To your point of like, let's design Wakanda. Why do we still have houses that look like houses a.
10:41
Speaker 2
Thousand years ago? The thing I often say is like, once upon a time, we built bridges out of wood and then we invented steel. And steel bridges aren't just carbon copies of wooden bridges. Like, steel enabled entirely new ways to build bridges. And something like that is happening with 3D printing. And there's a whole architectural vernacular and design language that becomes possible because of this technology.
11:05
Speaker 1
So just to get back to the narrative, you're at 2018 and you're, like, hand-pouring the concrete into the machine and, like— blowing on it to make it dry or whatever. You're just barely getting it to work. I know there have been various steps. Like, were there a few key things you had to figure out to get from there to like, you know, building houses for real that people are actually going to live in and that are going to cost a reasonable amount? Yep.
11:29
Speaker 2
That's a few things along the way. The next thing to do after that first South by Southwest was to like automate the material delivery system, right? Instead of hand mixing and hand pouring into the machine. Yeah. And again, you're asking concrete to do something that is typically not asked to do. You either have like normal concrete that will flow and fill up a form, or you have this fast curing concrete. And neither of those will quite work. You need it to be flowable and pumpable. And then you need it to set up with like a high amount of accuracy very quickly. And so what we ended up having to do, and by the way, with the cost thing, we restricted ourselves to a list of globally and ubiquitously available materials, right? We don't want to have any expensive fairy dust or carbon nanotubes or graphene or anything like this. In a sense, that makes the problem harder because we're keeping cost in mind the whole time. And so we developed an approach to material delivery that is actually remaking the formula about every 15 minutes. So it takes temperature... humidity, irradiance, readings, and is reformulating based on the actual conditions about every 15 minutes. There's like a continuous batch mixing is what we call it.
12:38
Speaker 1
And the reformulation is basically changing the ratio of whatever aggregate, water, just the basic inputs. That's right.
12:45
Speaker 2
And that, of course, allows you to operate at a much longer timescale because traditionally in the concrete industry, like if you use ready mix, it is set to the parameters of a small few hour window on the day. It's like, hey, if you don't use all this concrete before it gets too hot, you've wasted it. You'd have to change the formula. And so even if it on paper looked like.
13:03
Speaker 1
And it's basically just weather, like what the hotter it is, the faster it sets.
13:07
Speaker 2
Everything, the colder, the hotter, the more and less humid, right? And so the concrete industry sort of designs mixes for a very narrow set of environmental conditions. And we needed to be able to operate continuously almost in any kind of weather conditions. And so designing that system and all the data and formulation that goes into that was probably the most important breakthrough of the early years.
13:32
Speaker 1
So you mentioned sustainability being a long-time interest of yours and something you studied. I mean, I know that cement... is very carbon intensive, right? Like by its nature, it's actually quite a hard problem to solve. Like, how does that fit? How does building houses out of cement like fit with sustainability? Yeah, cement is an ingredient, but it's not the whole house isn't cement. Cement is just a small percentage of the actual ingredients in concrete. And so when you think about housing sustainability, there's maybe a few things to think about. One is like, the materials that it's getting about, what's the environmental impact of the materials that you're actually building with?
14:15
Speaker 2
How long will that building last? So if something is, you know, 20% more carbon, but you have to like tear it down every 50 years and rebuild it. So like the lifespan, like, and then the environmental impacts of operating a building built with those materials, the energy efficiency, the fire rating, wind rating, these kinds of things. So we have worked very hard on our mix itself to reduce the carbon emissions in our formulation of the concrete that we use. Of course, concrete is much longer lasting than a stick frame house in a drywall. Matter of fact, if I offered your listeners a million dollar prize to invent a building material lower quality than drywall that would still pass building code, no one would win the prize. It is literally the crappiest thing we can imagine to build with. So you're already at a low carbon basis relative to conventional construction methods. It's going to last much longer and it is much more energy efficient. That's partly material. It's partly the wall system that we've engineered that there's no thermal bridging inside the wall system. We have a You have like an exterior bead, an interior bead, and then we're careful to make sure that those who never touch and communicate heat and energy flows back and forth to each other. And so input materials, environmental impact, operational environmental impact spread over what time period. We sort of win on all three fronts. And that took a lot of work and thought and testing to get there.
15:39
Speaker 1
How many houses have you built? Where are you in the world now?
15:43
Speaker 2
We are, let's see, sneaking up on 260 somewhere this week. We're always out in the field. We're over 250. We'll be sneaking up on 300 or so by the end of the year and growing very rapidly.
15:57
Speaker 1
So 300 isn't scale yet, right? I mean, I know it's a lot, and not to belittle the work that you have done. No. But it's 300 more houses than I have built. But it's not like a meaningful number in the context of even Texas, right? Much less the United States.
16:13
Speaker 2
Yeah, correct. The year that we did the largest single project we've done to date, although we have some bigger ones coming up that we'll be announcing soon, was this 100-home 3D-printed community just north of Austin in Georgetown, Texas. And that neighborhood was like a double-digit percentage of the homes built in that community that year or whatever. But you're right.
16:35
Speaker 1
And are those just normal houses now? I mean, I'm sure more efficient, good-looking, whatever. But do people just live there now?
16:41
Speaker 2
It's amazing. If you walk out into that neighborhood, we built it in partnership with Lenar, who's like the second largest publicly traded builder in America. And for me, like, to this day, I take people on tours out there and to go into the middle of the neighborhood and turn, like, everything you can see is 3D printed. And you're like, oh, this does feel better. Like, there's a vibe. Like, of course, the console.
17:02
Speaker 1
Yeah, it looks a little different, right? You can see the sort of the lines of the layers.
17:07
Speaker 2
Yes.
17:08
Speaker 1
And they're more rounded. Those are the two just superficially having looked, you know, on my laptop. Right. Those are the two things you notice. They're more round and the lines are a certain aesthetic.
17:18
Speaker 2
Yep, that's right. It's kind of like brick has a different aesthetic than wood has a different aesthetic. It definitely has its own aesthetic.
17:24
Speaker 1
And it looks like, is it right? Did those houses sell for about what other houses in that area? Correct.
17:31
Speaker 2
Lennar priced them at the same sort of entry-level to mid-market pricing that they use on all of their— that' s sort of all of Lennar's housing product.
17:39
Speaker 1
Okay. Were they cheaper to build? Did Lennar have a bigger margin on those houses.
17:43
Speaker 2
Than on the stick-built houses in the neighborhood? the efficiencies that were gained on that project, we actually used to create a better house. So like they have a total budget they're going for. It's kind of like, hey, what's the best house we can build at this price point with our budget? And so they use a lot of the efficiencies to put a metal roof, All of the houses are solar panels. So they sort of used it that way. So like get more house at that price point that you would typically get.
18:07
Speaker 1
I mean, you could imagine people being a little skittish. Like some people would be like excited to be kind of early adopters, right? But being an early adopter on a house is... is riskier than being an early adopter on a phone, right? Like there's A, what if it leaks or whatever? And then there's B, what if nobody wants to buy it in 10 years when I want to move, right? I could imagine those being reasonable concerns that a homeowner might have.
18:34
Speaker 2
Which is why it was like so important for us to just to do a scaled up project because you can do all the research that you're coming up with is like, let's build a hundred houses and sell them and see what's happening.
18:44
Speaker 1
So what happened? Like, did people have those concerns?
18:47
Speaker 2
They did. But of course, at that point, we had like half a decade of like testing and test results that we could show people.
18:52
Speaker 1
Yeah.
18:52
Speaker 2
It ended up being Lenar's number one selling community in Texas that year. And again, and if you go out, there's like all kinds of people. There's young people that work at SpaceX. There's retired people. There's young families. So it wasn't like this sort of early tech bro, whatever you're thinking of early adopter looks like ended up being there. number one selling community in Texas that year. It's had their lowest warranty claims of any community so far. And now the houses, you know, after three to five years, some of them are beginning to, people are taking new jobs, moving, whatever. Some of the houses have been resold since, and they have appreciated like quite meaningfully, like $ 200, 000 plus in many cases in just like a few years.
19:32
Speaker 1
And how does that appreciation, how does that appreciation compare to the appreciation of Traditionally built homes in the neighborhood.
19:39
Speaker 2
Above market rate appreciation.
19:41
Speaker 1
Oh, great.
19:42
Speaker 2
Yes. Congratulations. And there's no way you could know ahead of time, right? You just have to start building. But again. I think the bar is so low in housing. I don't want to throw any of my partners or whatever under the bus. Housing might be one of the only things. If you moved to Austin and you had your choice between a brand spanking new house and a hundred-year-old house, there is a very good chance that you would prefer the 100-year-old house.
20:14
Speaker 1
I have a 100-year-old house. I am actually not interested in a brand new house.
20:19
Speaker 2
What other product on earth is that?
20:22
Speaker 1
I don't want a 100-year-old phone.
20:25
Speaker 2
Or a 100-year-old airplane or car. It's kind of insane that we've just accepted this.
20:31
Speaker 1
It reveals how housing has failed to innovate.
20:35
Speaker 2
Yes, yes. A lot more work to do, but we do believe you brought up scale earlier. I mean, there's a lot we've had to prove. You had to make the materials work. You had to make the robots work. You had to make the architecture and the actually engineering of the wall system work.
20:48
Speaker 1
You had to get all these- Well, let me ask you about other things you had to make work. Permits. Tell me about permits. When I've talked to other people about innovating in home construction, one of the constraints is all these permits are just built around stick-built houses. And they're like, you have to build a house like this. And so everybody keeps building the same house. Is that a problem for you?
21:08
Speaker 2
Problem is probably too strong a word at this point. Again, one of the reasons we used concrete in the beginning, rather than an exotic foam or some kind of wood polymer- is we have been building with concrete for a couple thousand years. We forgot for a little while how to do it when the Roman Empire fell and then remembered again later. That's a side question.
21:25
Speaker 1
The Romans were amazing at concrete. People are still studying why Roman concrete is still so good.
21:31
Speaker 2
The only material humans forgot how to make during what we call the Dark Ages is concrete. We didn't lose woodworking. We didn't lose metal. We didn't lose— we forgot how to make concrete during the Dark Ages, and then we figured it out again later. So it's a remarkable— It's hard to imagine the modern world without it. It would actually be more carbon intensive if you had to build everything out of like wood and plastic and metal. Anyway, I digress.
21:56
Speaker 1
There's more concrete than biomass in the world, right?
21:59
Speaker 2
Yeah. The testing, but because concrete had been around so long, there was this established precedence of building CMU block walls, tilt wall concrete. And so in the early days, we just kind of went into the slipstream of established precedence of, of building with concrete. So we tried not to defy gravity, just like show that we could pass all the certifications you would otherwise require of a concrete wall while in the background and in parallel working to establish specific guidelines for 3D printed wall systems. And so we have successfully done both. So we went to a new area and before there was like building code on the books specifically for 3D printing, we would just say, show us your building code for CMU block walls or tilt wall concrete, things like this, masonry style constructions. And we will show you that we are as good or better, almost always better.
22:48
Speaker 1
On whatever dimensions the code prescribes.
22:53
Speaker 2
Exactly. We have now made a lot of progress, fast forward eight years, both in the International Construction Code, the International Residential Code, the American Concrete Institute, and others, establishing good precedence for what a good safe 3d printed house would be. Cause there was also a defensive part of the, the offensive, like we want to build, but there was also the defensive maneuver of if anybody else ever 3d prints a house that falls over or hurts anyone in any way that will blow back on us. Like we have a real interest in like making sure even our competitors are building very safely and very effectively, uh, if that makes sense. And so, All of that is now, there is established building code for 3D printing. There's established guidance for all the mortgage makers in America. There's established guidelines for insurance underwriters. And so any of our competitors now benefit from all the work that we do on that front. But it was a lot of work to do.
23:51
Speaker 1
So you've done all that. And I mean, certainly compared to that, 300 houses sounds like not that many. Like, is there some... scale moment? What is the binding constraint at this point? What is the rate limiting step?
24:07
Speaker 2
This was the first year we ever turned down business in the history of the company. There was more people wanting us. First of all, the binding constraint was we were not cheap enough. That first 3D printed house I told you about in 2018, the printing was like over $ 300 a square foot and it needed to be cheaper than $ 30.
24:23
Speaker 1
You got to have dudes standing there. Yeah, that's right.
24:26
Speaker 2
So first binding was like, it actually has to be cheaper. Once, and we sort of finally crossed under that, you know, about 18 months ago or so. And then it was like, and so this was the first year we had to turn away business from some pretty great partners because we just did not have enough printers to But we didn't want to make more of the first generation printer, knowing that the new printer is on the way. We'll still grow like 300% this year, over 4X from last year. And we'll more than double that again next year. So it's still like very healthy growth. I think we will very soon be graduating from like hundreds of homes a year to thousands. But it really now is the binding constraint is scaling up our production growth. Of the Titan printer, the sort of multi-story robotic arm system.
25:08
Speaker 1
Basically building the robot that builds the homes. That's what's happening now. Correct.
25:12
Speaker 2
That's it. That's it.
25:16
Speaker 1
We'll be back in just a minute. What's the business model?
25:31
Speaker 2
So the long-term business model since the beginning and remains, we are developing technologies and tools, and we want to put these tools into the hands of builders and developers all over the world. And that kind of is like this printers and ink model, right? We like sell you the printer and then we sell you the ink. There's also the software and the services and everything.
25:49
Speaker 1
I don't say the printer, the ink model, though. Everybody hates printers and ink, right?
25:54
Speaker 2
But in this case.
25:56
Speaker 1
So what like like what exactly is that going to mean? Like you're going to sell the robots, you're going to license like how is it going to work? You can either buy it outright, you can finance it or you can lease it. That is the program. And in this case, the ink.
26:10
Speaker 2
Is like having to buy the ink, so to speak, is a great peace of mind to the reservation holders we have so far because they don't have to do eight years of testing. We spent over $ 30 million on third party fire testing, wind testing, seismic testing, energy of performance testing. You are getting a material that that you know is backed by like now rounding up to a decade of testing and research. And we're about one third the cost of any other sort of 3D printing concrete that's currently on the market. So it is cheaper and just been through a lot more robust, rigorous testing. So you can have the peace of mind that the things you are building, in fact, will be safe, will be comfortable, will be beautiful. If you look at the print quality of some of our competitors, hard to believe you would want to take a 30-year mortgage on some of it. In fact, they have to cover it up often enough because it's just like not looking good enough.
26:56
Speaker 1
So just to be clear, the builder can basically buy or lease the robot and then you sell them the special concrete?
27:04
Speaker 2
That's the essential nature. We also have a lot of field support. Like we are like not going to let our customers fail, right? We have a team of people we call field engineers. who are like F1 repairs, like get the car back on the track if anything goes wrong. A software suite, like project management for robotic construction projects. So we have a software system we call BuildOS. It's a whole program, right? Because this is a whole new way to build. It's not just a painting robot. Everything's roughly the same, and this robot just shows up and paints. This is a whole new way to build, design, permit, and you kind of have to deliver the system fully formed. And so that is the most important long-term business model. In the background, most of our revenue to date has come by us actually acting as the customer. We have been designing and building buildings using our own technologies. That was important because it was both like a finishing school for the technology. Like, does it actually work? Like we need to feel the pain of any problems that exist. And it was a proof point to customers that you can run a very powerful, very profitable construction business using these technologies. And so- Now that we have that proof, it has helped it again. Because, you know, we talked about the homeowners earlier. They're betting their 30-year mortgage or whatever that this is going to be a good house. A builder or developer who buys into this system That's the way they pay their mortgage. That's the way they send their kids to college. I mean, that's a big amount of belief to change from the way that they are building to this entirely new way of building. And so it felt like we had to sort of prove it before we could ask people to take that bet. And so that's the reason both to mature the product and to show that, in fact, you can run a very high performance construction company using these tools.
28:45
Speaker 1
Tell me more about getting from hundreds of houses to thousands of houses. Like how many houses do you think you'll build next year and where?
28:52
Speaker 2
I bet we will. So we will probably build as many houses next year as we have built in the whole history of the company to put together so far. One of the big ways we're going to start scaling up from there to thousands of houses is number one, we've got to start manufacturing more of the robots. And the number two is just start working in more markets. We've essentially only been working in Texas so far, a little bit in Mexico, some interesting far field projects with the Department of Defense, now the Department of War. But we're about to begin a rather aggressive expansion into multiple U.S. markets and probably trailing that by about 18 months is multiple global markets. And so simply increasing the surface area of our work, very naturally, we'll scale it up, right? If you can do several thousand houses in Texas, if you're in 10 markets, you should certainly be moving from the hundreds of the thousands, ultimately to the tens of thousands of homes per year. And I think that's the kind of scale you got to be working at to start making a dent in the problems that we care about.
29:47
Speaker 1
There are lots of different ways, theoretically, to build houses. I know you said, you know, you looked at the long list and decided that 3D printing was the best based on the constraints or variables you were trying to optimize for. But I'm curious, like, if you imagine a kind of dream world, like, is everybody living in 3D printed houses? Are there other underused construction methods that are good in certain settings? Like, what's, you know, dream big. What does the world look like? What do houses look like?
30:20
Speaker 2
Maybe it's my old conservation biology roots from my university days, but I'm, like, rather allergic to, like, monoculture in agriculture, in ecology, and even in building. Like, part of what gives me an allergic reaction to the way that builders are often building today is like the lack of diversity, the lack of aesthetic diversity, architectural diversity. And so I would say my romantic dream is for 3D printing to take its place alongside the other primary ways of building that humanity currently has. And then my goal would be among those ways of building that 3D printing would be the fastest, most beautiful, most affordable, most resilient way of building that And that the only reason you would go for any other direction is just like a simple aesthetic preference. Like I just liked the way a log cabin looks, you know, like would be a fine reason. Um, but really to be like the best way of building, uh, by all of the major criterion, uh, is my goal for this company. And I do hope to see a world in which, uh, first like a lot, and then maybe even eventually the majority of new construction happening, uh, is with 3d printers. And I hope that happens in my lifetime.
31:32
Speaker 1
Let's talk about modular housing for just a sec, like building houses in factories, basically, and assembling them on site. Like, that goes back, you know, at least to Buckminster Fuller, and you had Sears selling kit houses, what, about 100 years ago now? And... That one, at a certain level, makes sense to me. Obviously, it has not taken off, and there is a kind of stigma attached to modular houses in some context. But factories are good at making things at scale and cheaply. Like, is there a place in the world for beautiful modular houses, or do you think there's, like, a fatal flaw there?
32:06
Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, first of all, there's enough innovation that needs to happen in housing and construction that, like, I'm happy to see people try all kinds of experiments like may a thousand flowers bloom kind of opportunity. But you're right. We have tried this a number of times and I examined it when we were starting Icon. Like I thought very seriously about like, should this be what we do here? If you sort of look at the long arc of people trying to factory or build homes inside of a factory here ends up being the problem. Number one, uh, to really get the efficiencies of factory production. It's about repeated tasks of the same part or system. And so you actually have this aesthetic problem. Like it looks good at like, hey, we could make five houses, 10 houses, 20 houses, and these like look really cool, but you need like a million people to want the exact same house. And so it sort of runs into this, everybody doesn't want the exact same house.
33:00
Speaker 1
I mean, is there not some kind of Lego version of that?
33:03
Speaker 2
You still are sort of limited to your modules and they all end up rhyming with each other enough aesthetically that it just, I don't think I'm like conjecturing here. Like it has not, like humans haven't wanted it. And aesthetics has been like one of the reasons. The second one is.
33:17
Speaker 1
Wait, let me just say one more thing there, if I might. I mean, I grew up in Southern California, and, you know, it was like a small town when I was born, and then now it's full of subdivisions. All those subdivisions look the same to me. Like, they weren't built in factories, but I feel like people do often want a million of the same house.
33:34
Speaker 2
Well, so that was first. Reason number one is they didn't have a differentiated approach to aesthetics.
33:40
Speaker 1
Okay.
33:40
Speaker 2
Reason number two is this sort of capital expense problem. because you're going to be shipping a house. It's expensive to ship a refrigerator. It's very expensive to ship a house. And so often all the savings you got from the automation, you surrendered back in shipping cost, or you needed to build a factory every 500 miles. And so there was like an economic problem with shipping versus the expense of building new factories closer to market, things like that. And then the third problem is a product problem is like, because you have to ship these houses, you end up at some level having to optimize the house for a truck. And houses aren't for trucks, they're for people. The product should be optimized for people, not a road. And so those three things put together, I think, are the three things you would have to solve if you really wanted a modular construction company to work. But 3D printing, in a sense, we just kind of inverted the problem. We said, hey, instead of shipping the house, ship the factory. Like a 3D printer, another funny way to think about a 3D printer is it's a bespoke housing factory. The factory shows up on the job site because it's a lot easier to ship a robot. And then you leave all this design freedom, but it's automated in every way that a factory is automated. And so maybe it's easier to ship factories and then leave a lot of design freedom than it is to like fix the factory and ship a house. And so we kind of just inverted the problem because it's, but it's sort of coming at the same thing. It's like, we need automation here to drive down cross and increase quality.
35:09
Speaker 1
So you're at this moment when it seems like you've proven that the thing you're building works and that people want to buy it, importantly, and that banks will lend against it. What do you worry about? Like, if something's going to go wrong for you in the next few years, what do you think it'll be?
35:27
Speaker 2
So far, we've been so close to everything we've done, right? Like, we were there— Uh, we were just like close to our problems, both literally in terms of our business model, and then literally in terms of geographically, the market we were working in.
35:39
Speaker 1
Like you could just drive out there every day. Yeah.
35:42
Speaker 2
The engineers could be there. I could be there. I'm often on every single project, uh, that we have going at any given time. And so we're going to have to learn these new things. Number one of just like the manufacturing side of manufacturing robots, but all of that in service of like spreading this out, putting these things into the hands of other builders, other developers, other markets. And I'm sure we're going to have to learn some lessons about how to support this new way of building as it spreads out, or we can't just be at every single project every day, or I certainly can't be at every project. And so that's going to be like a new thing for us. Like, There hasn't been a single thing we've printed in the history of the company that I haven't been there. But of course, this business is going to have to outscale my capabilities as a human. And so that will be a new thing that feels like we've got some lessons to learn.
36:27
Speaker 1
Speaking of a construction site you can't be on, when are you going to build something on the moon?
36:34
Speaker 2
Very funny.
36:35
Speaker 1
Yeah.
36:35
Speaker 2
So we hold currently the contract with NASA to develop the lunar construction system. because we made in 2018 a very similar pitch to NASA, but re sort of purpose for the moon. It's like, Hey, you know, in my master's degree, it was in space resources, specifically lunar construction. And it was like, Hey, here's our ideas about building on the moon. Number one, it has to be robot. So all these ideas of like humans up there with hammers and special space tools, like I just don't believe it. Human space flight is four times more expensive than a robotic mission. Like we're never going to, it's too expensive and too dangerous. We'll never have a moon base. Number two, You have to learn to live off the land. All of the ideas that I could see involved bringing everything from earth, bringing this habitat, bringing this landing pad, bringing this reactor shield from earth. It is like $ 100, 000 a pound to land something on the lunar surface. And if you have to spend a billion dollars every time you want to build a tiny house, again, we're never going to have a moon base that way. We have to learn to use the local things that are already there, just like all of the other explorers from history, right? When the Europeans first landed on this continent, the ones that tried to bring Europe with them, they died during the first winter. It was the ones who learned to live off the local resources that truly flourish. And I think that will apply to the moon as well, especially... financially. And then number three, in the early days, versatility beat specialization. So at the time, there were all these like, here's a habitat system, here's a road paving system, here's a landing pad system. Any space system you're going to develop is going to cost between several hundred million and several billion dollars. It's like, what we need is one multi-purpose system that you can send up multiple units of it that can build all major elements of lunar construction, landing pads, roadways, habitats, reactor shields, foundations, you name it. And so robots that are multipurpose that are designed to use local resources. So they funded us. And that's what we've been researching and developing. And we've passed all of our testing with flying colors. And the next step for us is to send something up to the lunar service and prove it on the moon because we've done basically everything you can do to prove it on Earth.
38:45
Speaker 1
So is the basic idea you have some version of your robot and then you send it to the moon and then it uses the regolith, the right word, the dust that's on the surface of the moon as like the fundamental input for the building material and you 3D print a moon base out of that?
39:03
Speaker 2
That's exactly correct. You want to use the, good job knowing the word regolith, but moon dust to the layperson. Yeah. And that's it. You want to use that as your only input. So it's not going to be a concrete. So we use a laser-based system.
39:18
Speaker 1
Because it's too expensive to bring water.
39:20
Speaker 2
To the moon. And if you had a water-based concrete, you would tear the wall apart to get the water out. Water is so precious in space. It would be like building out a platinum on Earth. It's like the most precious thing you can imagine. And so you melt it with a laser and then you cool it down so that the molecules have time to form like a crystal structure that is like a ceramic and much stronger.
39:41
Speaker 1
Almost like the way you'd work with metal or something. You turn it into sort of molten dust or something.
39:46
Speaker 2
Yeah, so you melt it and then control the rate of cooling.
39:49
Speaker 1
Just glass, yeah. Have you tried that, like, in a lab? Is that obviously going to work?
39:56
Speaker 2
Yeah, we have our own dirty thermal vacuum chamber here at the lab. We have done it multiple times in vacuum at, like, every temperature range we would expect to find on the moon. Then NASA put us through the test in their large dirty thermal vacuum chamber called V20. And we had a threshold goal and a stretch goal. We exceeded our stretch goal for compressive strength and tensile strength by 2x. And so, again, we've sort of done everything we can do on Earth. The next step for us is to go prove it on the moon.
40:26
Speaker 1
I love the phrase dirty thermal vacuum chamber. I feel like some Austin band should call themselves dirty thermal vacuum chamber.
40:33
Speaker 2
Somebody should start a metal band called Dirty Thermal Vacuum Chamber for sure. Yeah.
40:37
Speaker 1
Is there any time frame for you actually, you know, doing some kind of preliminary building on the moon or is that still too far out?
40:44
Speaker 2
No, we have NASA's stated goal is to begin early demonstration construction between 2028 and 2032. So we will be ready as early as 2028. There's a lot of other things that have to happen for us to go like that. Right now, we don't have a lunar lander that works. There's no there's no transportation to the lunar surface right now. So that has to come true. We need power communication on the moon, etc. But we're going to be ready as soon as 2028, and hopefully the rest of the timelines hold.
41:11
Speaker 1
So I just want to go back to Earth for a minute. Like, the moon is cool, but Earth is cooler to me. Like, if you could build lots of houses that are beautiful and cheap on Earth, I would take that over a moon base if I had to choose. Is there, like, how are you doing on cost?
41:31
Speaker 2
Yeah, so with our first-generation system, we are... Uh, 10 to 15% cheaper than conventional construction with our second generation system. We are 40% cheaper and seven times faster than conventional construction. And I'm glad you pose a like moon versus earth is these things are often posited as like a one or the other. But we're in a situation with construction where we like have to push the frontier of what's possible. And the moon in outer space is the double black diamond for material efficiency, energy efficiency, autonomy, all the things we need to do. And in fact, if you look at our lunar printer and our second generation Titan printer, they look a lot closer. They're the same sort of architecture. And that's not by accident. It was because of figuring out how to build on the moon informed the way we build on earth. Our control software was first written by for our lunar printer. Our mission control software that we now use to operate all of our printer fleet was first written for a NASA contract. And so, in fact, there are more homeless people in housing in Austin at lower cost because we have a space program than there would be had we sort of kept our aperture really narrow. Because what you really just need to do is mature this technology as fast as possible and upgrade human capability. And that's what space and a frontier condition have always been good for in terms of human progress and human innovation. And so I don't think these things are a dilemma. I think it's a false dilemma. It's like.
43:03
Speaker 1
Yeah, so like the analogy that comes to mind there is chips in the 60s, right? Like Silicon Valley was funded by NASA at the beginning, and they learned to build chips to go on rocket ships at the beginning, right? Like, that's the analogy that comes through.
43:21
Speaker 2
Or you could just do a thousand of these, like sailing, and you're like, we wouldn't, like, the reason we have clocks is It was because sailors needed to know where they were on.
43:29
Speaker 1
Earth, right? Clocks without pendulums, right? Clocks that work on a ship. That's right.
43:32
Speaker 2
And so, like, how many human benefits have come from being able to keep accurate time? Like, for example, and there could have been an argument like, well, we should just sort of stay here. Like, this is all scary and too expensive and too many lives lost or whatever. Maybe we should just stay on the shore. But it's by always sort of pushing into Frontier's That these like innovations and like step function changes have come in human capabilities that have raised the waterline for everyone. And I think space exploration is the same thing.
44:04
Speaker 1
You mentioned a minute ago that there are homeless people who have houses because of your work like. What specifically were you referring to? Tell me about that.
44:12
Speaker 2
So, yeah. So when I talk about homeless people in housing in Austin, there's an organization here in town that has repeatedly invited us back to build for them called Community First Village. And I encourage all your listeners to go look up Community First Village in Austin, one of the most amazing homelessness reduction programs in all of America in terms of rate of recidivism, lifespan after housing, the quality and dignity of life that these people have. And so we have built over 110 homes for them so far. First, it was one, then it was seven, then it was a hundred more, then it was 10 more after that. Um, and so I expect we will continue building for them, but our ability to manage those projects, drive costs down on those projects, increase the quality of those projects, uh, was accelerated because of our space program. And in fact, the first homes that Titan, our second generation printer, will ever build are homes for the homeless in Austin. And again, Titan's architecture is a lot more like our space architecture than our gantry style system. And so these things are all connected somehow. And it's really gratifying to see, you know, often the very poor are the last people to get access to innovations and breakthrough technologies. But we have kept it front and center for us that we want the people who are suffering most from a lack of good construction to be some of the first to receive its benefits.
45:36
Speaker 1
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. We're going to finish with a lightning round.
45:54
Speaker 2
Yes.
45:55
Speaker 1
Is it true that you got into the housing business because a bishop told you that you should?
46:00
Speaker 2
The short version is I was almost a priest, had already sort of been accepted to go to seminary, and had this opportunity to go work and to start a business definitively doing sustainable construction, sustainable housing, and went to the bishop and was like, what should I do? Should I go to seminary? Should I pursue this sustainable housing opportunity? So we went and prayed in the cathedral. We went to lunch, went back to his office, talked more. And after he had kind of heard me out, he said, I think you should pursue this housing thing. Like, when I hear you talk about it, I can just tell there's like a fire in your belly. So, like, go for it. And if it doesn't work out, the church hopefully will still be here. But pursue this. Like, this is your vocation.
46:41
Speaker 1
And what did you think when he said that?
46:44
Speaker 2
It felt correct. It felt correct. Like, I left happy and felt a sense of, like, purpose. you know, a thing that was like rumbling around in like my heart and soul had been validated. And now I sort of felt completely free to go pursue it.
46:57
Speaker 1
What's your favorite Bible verse?
47:00
Speaker 2
Psalm 126 in the Orthodox Bible, the opening verse of that is like, unless the Lord builds the house, those who labor, labor in vain. And given my vocation to build, specifically to build houses, a reminder of that Unless we are cooperating with the work of God, that our work is likely to be serving ego or dark forces or these kind of things. And to remember to do our work in service first to God, but then in service to the world around us. So that would be the one.
47:31
Speaker 1
Say it again.
47:32
Speaker 2
Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.
47:38
Speaker 1
Very good. What other domains would benefit from 3D printing besides housing?
47:43
Speaker 2
So 3D printing as a technology, I think got off on the wrong foot. 3D printing is going to be best when things are slow, expensive, and bespoke. When two or all three of those things are true, that's where 3D printing is going to be very good. In the early days, they were using it to do things that were already cheap, already mass produced, and all the same. So people were like 3D printing coffee cups and 3D printing spoons and these kinds of like, that's already cheap and fine. But things like aerospace parts, Dental implants, sort of like medical grade, kind of very custom medical prosthetics, things like that. Housing would be another example. It is slow and expensive, and it wants to be bespoke. And so anything that is slow, expensive, and bespoke is going to be the right kind of use case for 3D printing.
48:28
Speaker 1
If you could 3D print any building, what would it be?
48:32
Speaker 2
I want to 3D print my own house is the next. My kids have been asking me, Dad, when are we going to live in a 3D printed house? And I think this is the year. So that's what I'm really excited about right now is printing my own house.
48:42
Speaker 1
Why don't you live in a 3D printed house? Like, I feel like you got to live in a 3D printed house.
48:46
Speaker 2
Yeah, I do have to live in a 3D printed house. So far, it's just been like all the, as soon as, you know, all the printers were just as busy as we could keep them. And it felt selfish to pull a printer off of a project for a customer to build my own house. But it is definitely time and I'm pretty excited about it.
48:58
Speaker 1
You have any particular dreams for your own 3D printed house? You could have like a little round room or something?
49:03
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think what I will be able to do that others would not is like really push the boundaries of what's possible in 3D printing and really show out at the limit in a really, hopefully a rather radical way what a 3D printed building can be.
49:17
Speaker 1
What is an example of a thing you're going to do to that end?
49:19
Speaker 2
Well, maybe what I'll say is like, I do have some sketches and mood boards and things like this for the home design. And like, I don't think anyone will have ever seen a house like this. And so it's like very difficult, but you should be imagining full enclosures, right? Arches, domes, vaults. So now you're not just printing the walls, you're printing the foundation, the wall system, the full roof enclosure. And it's going to be a profoundly new approach to architecture and housing design. And I think people will find it incredibly beautiful, but unlike anything they've ever seen.
49:49
Speaker 1
I hope your kids like it.
49:50
Speaker 2
Yeah, no, my daughter is actually very leaned in on the design. So she's like kind of my co-designer.
50:02
Speaker 1
Jason Ballard is the co-founder and CEO of iConn. Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was engineered by Sarah Bruguere. And our showrunner and editor is Jake Harper. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem?
The Host
