{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Austin Next","title":"The First Thing Built on the Moon Will Come from Austin | Jason Ballard & Will Hurd, ICON","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":4325,"description":"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. Agenda0:00 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 LoomisGuest Links & BioJason Ballard: X/TwitterWill Hurd: LinkedInICON: Website, ICON Prime, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTubeJason BallardJason 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...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/4HrZGXEGyTZvMSwVdOhUF-5lWCTZZWxkKyPeZJOEQTE/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8wODE0/YzJjMTNjM2YzZTM3/MzZmNmVhOTRkNjNl/MTQ5OC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}