Episode Details

ICON has been telling the same story since 2018. Humanity has a construction problem that solving for regulations and supply-demand incentives alone won't fix. We need fundamentally new ways to build.

Jason Ballard, ICON's founder and CEO, and Will Hurd, the former CIA officer, congressman, and OpenAI board member who just joined as President of ICON Prime, came on to lay out what happens when a non-consensus thesis held for eight years starts to materialize in the real world. The conversation cuts across the full stack, housing, AI, robotics, labor, reindustrialization, and space. The through-line is Ballard's argument that breakthrough technologies are never narrow, that building the technology for a moon base solves the housing and building crisis on Earth.

Agenda

• 0:00 What ICON is building and why shelter is broken 
• 6:40 The regulation stack and ICON as a technology company 
• 11:40 Customer shapes, business model, and the innovation stack 
• 17:10 AI, ChatGPT from the inside, and the case for optimism 
• 23:40 The spoons-and-ditches fallacy and Hurd's regulation inversion 
• 30:30 What is ICON Prime and the barracks crisis 
• 36:40 Military construction, Afghanistan, and expeditionary printing 
• 42:40 The moon base, Olympus, and in-situ resource utilization 
• 49:40 Eight years of the same thesis and software's limit 
• 56:40 Austin's talent gravity and the ICON diaspora 
• 1:00:40 The moon in our lifetime 
• 1:04:40  National security, espionage, and Austin as a target 
• 1:08:40 Laser on the moon, 2028 

Previous ICON Episode with Evan Loomis

Guest Links & Bio
Jason Ballard: X/Twitter
Will Hurd: LinkedIn
ICON: Website, ICON Prime, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube

Jason Ballard
Jason Ballard has dedicated his life to working on big problems in service to humanity, most recently and notably as the co-founder and CEO of ICON, the construction technologies company using construction-scale 3D printing to tackle the global housing crisis and prepare to build on other worlds. ICON has been named one of the "Most Innovative Companies in the World" by Fast Company and recently profiled on CBS’s 60 MINUTES.  Raising $451 million to date in funding, ICON has delivered communities of resilient 3D-printed homes at high-speed and lower cost in the U.S. and internationally and forged partnerships with world-renowned architects, builders and housing organizations missionally aligned to shift the paradigm of homebuilding. In fall 2022, ICON was awarded $57.2 million from NASA to develop a lunar surface construction system that will target humanity’s first-ever construction on another planetary body. In 2019, Ballard was awarded the Austin Under 40 Award in the Technology category. In 2021, Ballard was named to TIME100 Next as one of the emerging leaders shaping the future as well as Newsweek’s America's Greatest Disruptors: Visionaries and Innovators Who Are Changing the World.

Prior to co-founding ICON, Ballard served as CEO of an eco-friendly home upgrade company that normalized sustainable and healthy approaches to home improvement. B