The First Thing Built on the Moon Will Come from Austin | Jason Ballard & Will Hurd, ICON

About this episode

Jason Ballard and Will Hurd discuss ICON's innovative approach to solving the construction crisis and the implications for future technologies, including building on the moon.

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…

People in this episode

Host: Jason Scharf

Guests: Jason Ballard, Will Hurd

Topics covered

• construction
• technology
• housing crisis
• AI
• space exploration
• regulations
• innovation

Keywords

• construction problem
• supply-demand
• breakthrough technologies
• moon base
• housing
• AI
• robotics
• military construction

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: ICON, OpenAI

Places: Austin, Afghanistan, moon

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