our goal is to build big family domes right like two three domes that connect together that are anywhere from 1,500 to 3,000 square feet and also the smaller you know spaces a lot of people want 400 square feet or 800 square feet and all that can be kind of done efficiently with this domes of um two and then three different sizes that can [Music] interconnect is a carbon neutral ceramic geodesic dome with a 500-year lifespan the future of housing in America welcome to Tech first my name is John CER 3 years ago I wrote about this funky crowdfunding project to create a new kind of home one year ago sort of in the tail end or middle of covid still I wrote about the progress in some early prototypes and lots of people on YouTube said where's the beef show us is this real or is this vaporware well today I'm with the founder of GEOS ship Morgan beers shank and as understand it he's going to show us the beef welcome Morgan hey John yeah so good to talk to you again good to see you again I see you're in a place it doesn't look like a virtual representation where are you yeah we're in our first engineering prototype here on in Nevada City California the ceramic geodesic dome it looks impressive it looks different from some of your earlier prototypes I don't know if you've painted it or what you've done um can you give us I I know you're sort of tethered it's not a mobile device you're sharing right now but can give us a bit of a tour as much as you're able of of what you're inside sure yeah so this is a 18 foot diameter uh ceramic geodesic dome so the frame the exterior the interior all ceramic composits there's no paint anywhere um and I'll do a little bit of a swing around here try to got some lights here to try to reduce the Shadows but uh kind of get us it's not a huge space the main intention here is really to uh you know Prototype all of the engineering and design challenges and Material Science challenges there's a lot this is a pretty major innovation in terms of we're not using any metal wood concrete or petrochemicals it's just all a new Material Science it's a chemically bonded ceramic that we're basically in rection molding and press molding in a factory you said no metal no wood no paint and there was another no in there if I'm not mistaken uh petrochemicals yeah okay looks incredible I want to talk about that in a bit I want to talk about the windows and the natural light and all that stuff for those who are seen this for the first time didn't watch the first video didn't watch the second video didn't read the story on Forbes tell us the the story of geoship uh you talked a about a little bit in terms of the new Material Science but what are you trying to achieve here yeah we're really trying to introduce a new archetype of home um with the climate crisis combined with the housing affordability crisis and kind of the you know crisis of disconnection for a lack of a better way to describe that just Community Building uh needing more Community this uh technology we think we're really starting from a physics first principle so what is the in home building it really comes down to Material Science geometry and method of manufacturing and so we chose the most uh efficient in all of those areas right the geodesic dome chemically bonded Ceramics or otherwise known as geopolymers and uh injection molding and you combine those three together and I think this is a has huge potential for being just a transformative Home Building Technology for the future we talked about last time uh that you wanted to build something with a potentially a 500-year lifespan talk about the material you're using here people think ceramic I don't know what they think do they think you know teacup or something like that what is this material here and and what makes it so durable yeah so it's a a chemically bonded ceramic it's a new Material Science it was really developed at US National Labs through the early 2000s um by the nuclear industry and now it's been commercialized over the last 20 years in quite a few different industries from it's actually a bioceramic used in the human body for bone repair uh it's also used for infrastructure repair like concrete and Bridge repair Highway uh Department of Transportation is using it quite often and also for steel Coatings so you can spray it on steel and it actually is like a paint it bonds to the steel and Alloys it and so that's that kind of hints towards how it's really different in terms of uh it kind of sits in the middle of a ceramic a cement and an epoxy and that it's it has all the properties of a ceramic but it doesn't require high heat it is like a flash cure at room temperature like a really fast acting cement and it has the properties of a is it technically an inorganic polymer so like an epoxy forms molecular bonds with metal wood and and itself pretty amazing stuff it's used actually inside the human body which makes you think okay it's pretty healthy stuff it's not going to poison you or other do other bad things to you I see obviously the Triangular shapes are is that your injection mold molded shape and is it kind of like Lego blocks can somebody get them and put it together themselves yeah that's our goal is to really provide a a a kit of components that people can um either you know an in a trained crew could install it really quickly or kind of an owner Builder could do it on site with there's no cutting there's no measuring the parts only fit together kind of one way can also be kind of uh assisted with like augmented reality glasses to have a little helper there or the parts kind of light up and show you where they go and that's where we see just the I think this generally most of there's some big you know major um momentum happening I think in the home building industry in general and this is the direction is pretty consistently like assem parts are manufactured in a factory and assembled on site talk about the windows one of the things um I love natural light um I where I live I live on a mountain side I see trees out uh when I look out we have large Windows one of the things that struck me as you sort of did your little twirl there um was natural light and windows all throughout it's amazing but you said there's no steel there's no wood or anything like that how are those window components created are do they have the the the ceramic around the the actual glass uh there's a little bit of a steel spacer in between like you know from a window manufacturing company that makes the little spacer in between the glass but the glass is set into a ceramic frame and yeah the whole you know our one of our key kind of design goals here and it's really exciting to experience it actually for the first time we've been working on this project for a long time and it's just in the last few days that we got it complete enough where I could just be able to sit in here and really experience the space and it's it's phenomenal you know it really feels like you're uh being held by the Earth in a sense that earthing is a combination of earthing floors High dialectric ceramic materials and these kind of great circle skylights that kind of make you feel connected to the outside you really held interesting uh so just for background people may not know you're from the tech industry I believe I I should have double checked this before believe it was Microsoft or was it Intel that you worked for that was Intel it was Intel excellent so you're you're you're you've got a hardcore Science and Technology background uh and you you talked about it a little bit there but expand on that you're in this space and try and imagine you know you didn't have the three years of trying to make this moment happen try and imagine you come in for the first time and you lay down in the space what do you feel how does it feel uh there's something comforting about that that circular that Dome space isn't there yeah I mean it feels um the two words are really centered and balanced right energy it feels really centered it almost like you can if you dance or do yoga or something you just it's just the nature of the space the energy is focused into the center it's a and then the Earth and Floors kind of make this connection feel like a connection to the Earth and just eliminating all of the there's no obviously no mold and toxic uh building materials and a lot of freshh air because you get vents at the top and vents at the bottom so you have this natural convection process and that's really our overall design goal is how do we you know restore the natural conditions that humans would have evolved with for thousands of years right you modern Ultra modern architecture you mentioned twice now Earth and Floors what does that mean bare earth does that mean stamped earth does that mean uh some sort of ceramic on the floor what do you mean by that it's um basically a cob floor and then we can put a layer of ceramic like a ceramic veneer over it potentially but this is just a pure cop floor and there's a lot of uh science that's come out in the last couple of years especially maybe five 10 years here now of just the benefits of earthing I mean you can connect when you put your feet in the mud there's actually a you know a red reduction in inflammation basically in body talk to people about your vision uh perhaps for a family or a community a small community um you can join these domes you can have one as like the communal kitchen Dome you can have others as bedroom domes uh talk about how that works yeah totally you know that's one of the big kind of um I think just misunderstandings that people have at some level now because we're sitting in a small Dome and you know we enter the market with the small Dome because that's the wisest way to enter the uh Market but our goal is to build big family domes right like two three domes that connect together that are anywhere from, 1500 to 3,000 square ft and also the smallest you know spaces a lot of people want 400 square feet or 800 square feet and all that can be kind of done efficiently with this domes of U two and then three different sizes that can interconnect it is interesting because I continually hear about it not just through news sources but also people that I know people are looking for different ways to live right we've we've kind of come from this reality that maybe for maybe for thousands of years you had multiple Generations in the same dwelling whatever that looked like whatever that felt like to in the past let's say 100 years certainly 50 you know you move out you might be alone in your space you might be with one other person in your space you might have a nuclear family in your space and there's a lot of disconnection so you see things in Berlin they're doing cool things with uh former Office Buildings that you know building a variety of homes and then small bedrooms big communal space in in in other places I believe it was in um Kentucky there's a family that built six tiny homes for them their kids and their adult children it's all sort of congregated around a space of five acres that they put together right and so people are looking for a different way to live how does this fit into that yeah you know I think a nice way to think about it is a new and Ancient Future so in a lot of ways the the new technology that's coming out with web 3 you know being able to have a little more um close interactive experiences also opens up the potential to go back in some ways to like a village building model where you can uh connect with the people that you want to um build a a community with on in the cloud and participate with one another in a digital space to kind of build the relationships and also to design the the village that you want to um build and then go through the design build process and form potentially form a dow and local currencies so you can really kind of uh we see you know what one of the I think great companies are often built on kind of general and surprising insights and GEOS ship were really built on two general and surprising insights one is that like in the future not everybody will live in boxes like round homes will just be a more a new choice that people will have that doesn't really isn't really a viable option today uh and also communities will populate the land from the cloud right so Millennials are sort of the first generation of digital Natives and we think the way the development process will work in the future is that uh people will you know have more participation in it today it's like developers and Banks get together and buy land and build homes and then sell them to people and in the future it's just natural that the communities will participate in that process and have more um say in the design so that that Village is kind of an expression of what is important to them right cool talk to The Listener or viewer who isn't into web 3 doesn't care about the cloud doesn't want his or her feet in the mud so the the the fuzzier stuff that you're talking about and the feeling that you're talking about doesn't matter to them they're looking to build a place they want it to be something that is eco-friendly they want it to be something that's comfortable they want it to be something maybe Innovative but they're looking hardcore at the atoms right um talk to them about this space and if this works for them yeah totally so at a sustainability level um by using using this Material Science and geometry we reduce the carbon footprint of housing by about 90% that's the embodied energy the energy of takes it constru to the home and also these this Dome has about a 10inch thick insulation cavity so it's kind of super insulated even Beyond kind of passive house standards because it's a lot of big insulation cavity combined with the reduced surface area of a dome uh and combined with kind of the the ceramic has a special kind of heat reflective property that gives it really Next Level uh Energy Efficiency and then also the the geodesic shape I mean as uh climate becomes a little more uncertain in the future uh in terms of fires and floods and hurricanes and earthquakes this structure is like there's nothing to burn um hurricane it's the most hurricane resistant structure you can build in terms of just its aerodynamic and is also very high strength ceramic composits so the Ceramics are basically have carbon fiber or natural fibers embedded in them depending on which which component it is and what kind of strength we need and also um earthquake resistance so there's no what fails in an earthquake you know I I think an it's important like earthquakes don't kill people as much as buildings kill people right buildings the collapse and the earthquake that cause the the catastrophe uh and what fail in an earthquake is these moment connections where columns and beams meet in a geodesic dome you have this kind of tensegrity princial going on where there is no columns and beams it's a integrated hole almost yeah interesting interesting Okay cool so one of the things that I know that you've been working on is cost uh that's obviously a concern for a lot of people in the world right now um uh especially in the western world uh real estate prices may have come down slightly after the co surge right but it's it's crazy expensive for a lot of people that's driving a lot of the tiny home stuff as well where you can build a tiny home for you know as I've seen people build it as little for $10,000 $25,000 Scavenging materials other things like that where are you on the cost I know it's early because this is your first like fully functioning actual Dome so you probably haven't gotten into economies of scale or efficiencies of production but where are you thinking right now on ter in terms of cost uh the base price for this 18t Dome would be about 33,000 and the base price for a bigger kind of 1100 foot Dome would be about 110,000 and this is that's not uh as the manufacturing scales our goal is to reduce those prices by at least 50% and that's really the ultimate goal for geoship is to be able to build homes that are 2. . 5x mediate income in every every location and we think ultimately because of this kind of first principles approach that I mentioned earlier Material Science geometry method of manufacturing at scale we believe this form factor and material this structure will be the most affordable and sustainable home at scale on the planet so it terms of like of course building with local materials like you cut down the trees on sides or you use the dirt from the site and you put in a lot of manual labor of course that'll Al always be a little less expensive but in terms of like at scale producing millions of homes uh this technology should be the most affordable and sustainable homes on Earth at some point as we scale as you scale that is of course the challenge uh building something that is excellent is the first Challenge and then making it producible at scale as the next challenge talk about where you are in that Evolution yeah most of our um you know our our first shot is to make the best home on Earth the most affordable one so that's there's a sequence there the right now we're focused on making the best home on Earth and that means for us there's a lot of different I know that's a subjective thing to say best but there's a lot of objective ways we can measure that in terms of health and cost and sustainability and speed of construction and how long it lasts and all these kind of measurements to Define best so we're really focused first on building the best home over the next couple of years here uh it's we're really designing for manufacturing and then the challenge after we have the best home is to be able to produce it to make it the most affordable home and you know that of course it took Tesla to give you I think Tesla Motors is a kind of a good Benchmark for this kind of thing because this is a really deep innovation in terms of new Material Science new product design new Factory design there aren't injection molded ceramic factories out there today so we're developing that technology and I think it took Tesla Motors six years to deliver the 100th car and then 14 years to get to a million cars a year and I I think we're somewhere around that same uh trajectory and of course it's taking a lot longer to get to hear because I'm not you know Elon Musk with a lot of um money and connection there's no Emerald mine in your background um no PayPal Millions uh shoot if I did I put you know we joke that uh we burned the boats you know as far as my co-founder and I we literally did I sold my wood saleboat that I lived on to start bootstrapping geoship and we started in a barn on an island and we're just have been full in you know because we just know in our our hearts and that kind of logically the physics that we described there it goes pretty deep we have gone deep into that just understanding is this really the technology of the future and we just really really believe it is so we're just incompletely and uh we'll we'll make it bring it you know to the world and you've adopted sort of a community funding structure right um talk about that and if somebody wants to participate what do they do yeah yeah I think that's the other thing that um uh you know we haven't gone we most entrepreneurs go to venture capitalists and raise you know a lot of money early on and instead of going that route we really saw we we want to you know it's kind of crazy it's a little bit of a unlevel playing field when it comes to like investing in private tech companies and private tech companies pretty much generate like most of the wealth on in the world financially you know an early stage private Tech investing was limited to accredited investors until 2016 so now that's opened up and uh so now everyday investors can invest a minimum of like 400 bucks in a company like geoship and potentially see these big returns or potentially lose all your money but we've been going down that route of like Community First financing so we're we've raised a precede round through Equity based crowdfunding and now we're raising a seed round and we're now we're also going to go out to more like family offices and uh Angel Investors and maybe a few really purpose aligned VCS and there's also a lot of government funding that we're pursuing at this point uh the kind of inflation reduction act and whatnot that's you know 10 times more funding available now for uh CL you know climate Tech and affordable housing than there was in 2008 when Tesla got 400 something million dollars to set up the first manufacturing plan cool before we finish this um talk a little bit about how this connects to the rest of the world in a very physical sense um water electricity other things like that it seems like it would work well sort of an Off the Grid scenario maybe with some solar and stuff like that but in most cases it'll be on the grid um is that part of what you're working on now how it connects with those systems how you build a kitchen in one of these maybe in the larger ones all that stuff yeah yeah you know there's been some just beautiful Innovations in that space from uh movements like that kind of Earth Ship uh autonomous home design and we're bringing in a lot of those principles in terms of like passive solar heating and cooling and um uh let's see passive solar heating and cooling and just other technology to basically create tools for people that are kind of plug and play that generate power recycle water uh reuse waste that kind of thing and but of course fundamentally you're just if most most build sites it's pretty much the same you've got sewer and water you know plumed to the pad and this goes on and the running the plumbing and electrical is pretty similar to Conventional build and you first you have a ceramic frame and then you have the exterior um panels that go on and then you can run all your electrical and plumbing and then you put the interior panels on and fill the insulation cavity nice nice and obviously you've got electrical up top I see a lamp behind you um so you got ways of routing power and other things like that through the panels themselves which as you said are pretty thick it looks amazing um I I I maybe this summer I'll have to take a road trip and see one in person um but um uh thanks for sharing anything else to leave us with at the end um you know I I think U main thing is go check out what we're doing you know we're really have a big Vision here for uh transforming kind of creating an alternative home building and Village building industry uh and we the experience is really is about the experience I can't wait to bring more people in here where you can just like sit and take it in because when you're in the space it's pretty clear how this ceramic Dome technology is really fundamental right you can see how how this would Advance um incredibly over the in the future and the experience of just being in the space it's an Ultra Modern natural home and I think that's it's Unique in that's in that way it's really interesting because in the same interview you've said Ultra Modern and ancient and both those are true from different perspective Ives um I can't wait to see uh the village build um and and grow and thank you for taking this time yeah thank you so much John