>> we are finding it, we are testing it, we are there as they build it. we are on a quest to show you the most cutting-edge companies on the brink of the future. >> tonight, i will step into a tinkerer's paradise. techshop is democratizing invention. >> techshop changes the nature of the innovation process. >> i will get a taste of the miracle berry with an all-star chef who is taking on obesity. what you are basically describing is eliminating sugar. >> and i will take local motor'' crowd-source rally fighter off-roading in the desert. announcer: "bloomberg brink." ♪ announcer: companies that break the mold, convention, boundaries. ♪

announcer: and the future of technology, design, and industry. ♪ sam: i have had dozens of invention ideas. the problem for me has always been, besides being lazy, i never knew where to go to get them off the ground. rachel: well, i will tell you where to go. techshop. for a monthly fee, you have access to more than a million dollars worth of equipment. sam: ok, but is it basically a glorified afterschool program? or is it a place where real businesses can get their start? rachel: no, real businesses are coming out of techshop. i don't know if you heard of a little company called square, which is changing the way that we pay for things, but they prototyped at tech shop. so a lot is going on there. announcer: techshop, on the brink of democratizing invention. >> on a friday and saturday

night, this floor literally becomes the most creative place in san francisco. >> it is a lamp that i designed, and it basically unfolds from a book. >> we are working on an origami kayak. >> it is a phone charger designed for golfers. >> i was just actuallly hanging up these lamps, and they are actually touch sensitive. rachel: these are great. mark, tell me a little bit about the vision of techshop. mark: techshop is a membership-based fabrication studio. fundamentally, the idea is cheap access to really powerful tools. this platform really does change the entire paradigm around what it takes to launch a hardware company. and changes the nature of the innovation process itself. rachel: so you make all of these pieces with this piece of machinery right here? >> i do. rachel: how much does this machine cost? do you have any idea? >> i think they are about $40,000. obviously it is not what i have at home. rachel: of course. >> this is the fun part. you can grab this end and this end. and pull on it.

>> perfect. rachel: oh, wow. >> once i joined techshop, i was able to do things a lot faster and better than previously. just the access to tools was amazing. mark: literally by the end of the week, you will be producing things out of steel that only a millwright was able to produce 15 or 20 years ago. that is truly revolutionary. rachel: i have never welded before. hopefully i will emerge unscathed. what is the worst thing that could happen right now? >> you just get a bad weld. there is one thing we do before we pull the red button, we say welding. rachel: wait, first you have to pull this down. >> ok. rachel: welding! >> you can see i am holding it tight with my right hand, bracing it. rachel: ok. it is my turn now. >> so you are going to hold it just like that and pull the trigger. go for it -- slowly. there you go. look at you. rachel: that is a beauty. yeah! i should end on a high note, what do you think? >> yeah.

rachel: jim, some may say your chief innovation is creating a space for other people to invent. jim: i think that is my best invention yet. rachel: yeah? jim: yeah. rachel: can you show me some of the things you have built in here? jim: i built an electric cargo bike for burning man. rachel: you are a burning man man? jim: i have been one time. it was fun. rachel: when one goes to burning man, you build a bike. jim: i built this in about four days. it is fully electric, it has got two car batteries inside. i could have almost lived out of this. rachel: can i get on it? >> sure. let's take it out front. rachel: here goes nothing. it is a little wobbly. you have always been a tinkerer -- did that inspire you to open up techshop? >> it absolutely did. i did software for a long time, but you don't get to hold the stuff in your hand. it always bothered me. when i closed that company down, i decided to work with my hands more. i started techshop just so i could get access to the tools and make stuff. i think unlocking the new

technologies that people have in their heads is really important to big companies. i am really proud of a lot of the products that our members are coming up with, too. rachel: what is one that has struck you that you are really floored by? >> that is like saying which of your kids is your favorite kid. [laughter] rachel: how integral was techshop to the beginning of dodocase? >> techshop was key for us to scale as quickly as we did as a business. the ipad was coming out, and we wanted to have a device and a product ready when the ipad went on sale. and really the only way we were able to do that is because we had access to the techshop. you know, there was someone there to teach me the equipment, and then i could spend time on the equipment and tweak and tune. so i was able to learn exactly what kind of equipment i needed before i ever invested in buying a piece of equipment. rachel: tell me about type a machine. andrew: we are a 3d-printing company that makes this, the series one. we started about a year ago.

we built these guys right here in san francisco, inside techshop. rachel: do you think type a machine would have ever come to fruition had it not been for techshop? andrew: no. that simple. access to the tools here is so critical because it is a simple equation of you can either make the thing, or you can't. rachel: well, show me some other things you can do with the machine. andrew: have you got an iphone? because that is all you need. if you take roughly 30 to 40 photographs -- rachel: do i stand still? >> yep. you just take a whole bunch of photos, then this fantastic app takes all your photos and turns them into a solid model that you can print. rachel: so this is the 40 photos that you just took, they come together to make this. wow. bryan: so right now we are cutting your model into .2 millimeter-thick slices. rachel: ok. bryan: and they stack up. then we will send that code to the machine. the machine will build it up out of plastic, layer by layer.

rachel: how long will it take for the machine to build it? bryan: this will take probably about three hours. >> this isn't just for people -- this is for anything. rachel: there are practical applications, too. it is not just a party trick. tell me about the future of techshop. >> we believe that every community eventually needs one of these. >> in the next 15 or 20 years, i would love to see thousands of techshops across the united states. if you open access to the tools of innovation up to everyone, just as a recreational basis, you're going to see some amazing things come out. >> we are getting it to profitability. it takes us about two years to get a site in the black. but the way we have been growing, we have been working with partners. ford helped us open up and stand up the location outside of detroit. you know what? when a fortune seven company calls and says they want to drive innovation in their community, you say absolutely. let's go. rachel: what are your next steps? >> i have to scale up very quickly. rachel: are you still going to

be working everyday at techshop, or are you going to cancel your membership? >> we will still keep using it, for prototyping at least. >> everyone is doing something pretty amazing here. it always inspiring to come in. rachel: i think everybody would want one of these. i want one of these. nice ride. >> we actually have more stuff that needs welding if you want to stick around -- rachel: all right, yeah. are you going to pay me? >> making things, tinkering, and innovating should not be an odd thing that some people do but most people don't do. i want innovation to be something that everyone does, and they don't think about it. it is just part of their life. sam: what you are basically describing now with the miracle berry is eliminating sugar from food. whoa. it tastes like sprite. >> completely healthy for you. ♪

rachel: so you have been eating some really fancy foods recently. sam: i am always eating fancy foods. in fact, this time i was in chicago, spending time with homaro cantu, who runs a bunch of restaurants there. and what he is trying to do is tackle issues of obesity and malnutrition by basically eliminating sugar from our diet, and he is doing that using something called the miracle berry. rachel: but how can you take on these global problems from a michelin-starred restaurant? sam: well, you can if you sort of think of yourself like a robin hood. cantu charges his patrons a lot of money, but he pours that money back into research, which he then hopes will filter out into the greater food industry and change the way we all eat.

♪ announcer: chef homaro cantu -- on the brink of conquering sugar. homaro: food has been largely the same for the last 40 or 50 years. and it is time now to change the way we eat and think about food. i don't look at food problems as problems. i look at them as untapped resources. there is this whole other world of food that we have just scratched the surface of. the first time i tasted a miracle berry, i went into work thinking, everything that we know is useless. our mission now has to be to get rid of sugar. a friend of mine was undergoing chemo and radiation therapy, and when you undergo this, your taste buds become twisted. and so this friend said hey, can you help me eliminate this taste effect? so we ordered thousands of food ingredients from around the world. we got this berry in from some probably african warlord from west africa. you have these twisted tastebuds when you're undergoing chemo,

and it would actually latch onto one and split it apart so you could taste food as normal people do. sam: so, chef, what you are doing right now with the miracle berry is a two-step process. you have to actually consume the berry first, and then that changes what you eat. homaro: yep -- let's do a quick demonstration. >> hello. homaro: take the powder and we are going to put it on our tongues. you have two taste receptors on your tongue -- one tastes sour and bitter and the other one tastes everything else. and there is a protein in that berry that is latching onto your sour receptor. basically when you eat sour foods, it will bounce off of the sour receptor and go down this other one and tell your brain that it is actually really sweet. now, take your lemon and squeeze a little bit on your sour cream. sam: like that? homaro: just give that a taste. sam: whoa! homaro: cheesecake. sam: totally. that is really good. homaro: cheers.

sam: whoa -- it tastes like sprite. homaro: completely healthy for you -- there's zero calories from refined sugar, so we could argue that this is healthy junk food. but what we are creating is a new product that will go into your food, then companies can then just start integrating this into their product and you will just see obesity rates fall through the floor. sam: that basically removes the two-step process. now it is in your twinkie, it is in your sprite. homaro: it is really an exciting opportunity to create healthy junk food. >> ready? >> completely different. >> flavor. sam: what you are basically describing now with the miracle berry is eliminating sugar from food. tell me a little bit more about why you are doing this. one could be happy running two successful restaurants and doing really interesting things. homaro: i grew up very poor. my mother, sister, and i, we

were homeless for about three years. we went from homeless shelter to homeless shelter, and everything that we saw was junk food. as i started working in nice restaurants, i realized, wow, the biggest difference between poverty and the upper-middle class is diet. there is a huge opportunity out there to take all of those problems in food that i grew up with and really flip them upside down. when we built our lab for moto restaurant, that is when our innovation really started taking off. i have a fascination with efficiency, because if you have more efficiency in a business, you can take more money from that business and then do whatever you want with it. some people like to drive fancy cars, i like to build a lab and then work on more efficient ways to work. the big push over the last five years has been, like, farm to table. but -- very sick of that term, by the way. it is used and abused. and we are dead set on replacing all of our farm products with indoor farm products. sam: because you have one.

homaro: exactly, we have one of the world's most advanced indoor farms. and i want to show you that. so this is our farm. sam: this is your farm -- in a closet. yeah, it looks like a farm. yeah, sure. homaro: logically, the best-tasting fruits and vegetables grow really close to you. sam: right. homaro: we have decided to just grow them right next to the kitchen. sam: what is growing here? homaro: so we have soybeans and sunflowers -- sam: oh, look at that. homaro: legumes. sam: they are, like, little edamames. homaro: it is all organic -- there are no chemicals. we are eliminating the need for packing, shipping, refrigeration, and handling. it cost me about $12,000 to build this room, so it has already paid for itself. sam: how did you get the idea to develop an indoor farm here? homaro: we started developing the software program to run our business. we realized that we did not need on a full-blown office here at moto. so this was our office space.

>> two onions. homaro: here it is a financial spreadsheet. even further than that, let's say that we have 16 chefs in the kitchen -- it will calculate how much they are costing us up to the second. sam: you are basically bringing sort of big data into the kitchen. homaro: we have real-time profit and loss reports, which enables us to not waste money on an office but saving money and applying all of that residual capital to innovation. sam: maple-y, kind of granola. it tastes good. almost like a snickers bar. homaro: what you are actually in eating here, the chocolate sauce, that consists of balsamic vinegar, orange juice, and cocoa powder. you're actually eating vegetables and fruits, and it tastes like a dessert that would really be bad for your body. i actually worked with an ice cream company, and they were actually voted one of the worst unhealthy products in america. when i explained to them, your ice cream has 37 ingredients in right ice cream has 37

ingredients in it, but i can actually replicate that using nothing but yogurt, lemon juice, and cocoa powder, that is really an opportunity for me and them. maybe ben & jerry's will be the first company on the planet to ever make an ice cream that is actually good for people. sam: what is the step to go from here to a much larger scale, where you're really going to have national and global impact across the industry? homaro: right now i am kind of like the prototype guy. let's make it work on a small-scale and then license it out to other food companies. they really want this. they don't want to keep going down the same path. we are taxing sugar, people are banning it in certain cases. and it is only going to get worse. everything becomes obsolete at some point. every technology, every food product. the trick is staying ahead of the curve. nobody in those industries is going to turn down an innovative product that can do exactly what their product does, except better. rachel: what is the hardest thing about driving off road?

>> long pedal on the right, that on is all you got to remember. rachel: i am holding on for dear life. ♪

sam: you just got back from arizona. tell me what you saw down there. rachel: i went to local motors in chandler, arizona, and they are trying to revolutionize the way cars are manufactured. sam: do these guys really stand any chance of taking on a toyota or a gm? rachel: well, they are not trying to take them on gm or toyota. they are trying to out-innovate them. they're introducing crowd sourcing into car design, which is reducing r&d costs from billions of dollars to just a few million, and they can get a car to market five times faster. announcer: local motors, on the brink of reshaping the automobile industry. >> ford brought about the first industrial revolution in cars. it was mass production. gm brought around the second industrial revolution for cars, segmenting the market. ours is the third industrial revolution. the truth is that the world does not need more cars. the world needs better cars.

rachel: let's go. yeah. >> if you ask for people's input, and you build at a smaller scale, you can answer customers more quickly, and you can bring technology along faster. rachel: what is this? tell me in your opinion, what is the chief innovation behind local motors? jay: the chief innovation behind local motors really comes in two parts. we co-create the vehicles together with our community. co-creation is really the advanced form of crowd sourcing. give me your idea, i will give you my idea, we will see how it works, and together we will come to a solution. the rally fighter came to be because it was the first vehicle that our community designed.

and then the other part is that we make them in small volume. micro manufacturing. this is the beginning of the rally fighter. when we talk about the local part of local motors, instead of doing a mass product, the assembly of these vehicles is local, put together right here only when you buy a vehicle. what it means is you have to make somebody want this vehicle. rachel: right, because they have to purchase it before you start building it. jay: as we do micro manufacturing and co-creation, we thought that it would be really valuable to get engaged to people by allowing them to come in and build the vehicle that they would be buying on the floor with us. rachel: this is your first day building your car? >> yes. rachel: how does that feel? are you excited about that? >> yeah, it is very exciting. rachel: can i do it with you? >> sure, jump in. >> pull these spark plugs out. >> ok. >> yay.

rachel: i am going to work up a sweat. >> so there are a lot of reasons why we created local motors. in the simple answer, we wanted to move vehicle technology forward the fastest. but the real answer behind it is i was deployed to iraq and this was my second deployment. two of my friends were killed in 2004, that really got me taking thinking about what could i do in their honor to make a difference? we would not have a lot of conflict in areas of the world that have very little other than oil if it were not there or if it were not as valuable. today's off-road vehicles get between six and eight miles per gallon. these vehicles get about 22 miles per gallon. that is better than what is out there already. this is what i would call midway through the project in a project that has been completely decided by the community. and it is called the tandem.

the tandem was conceived by a community member that came along and said, i would like a car that cost $10,000. i would like it to seat two people, and i would like to be able to commute in it, but i would also to be able to have fun in it. we open up our shop for volunteers to be able come in and work with the online process of designing something and make something real. the only thing we do is we help pay for the steel and the parts that come in. >> i am a community member. i have been coming here for a little over a year now. i am usually here two days a week to actually have a voice in it, and to be able to -- to influence the awesomeness that comes out all on its own. it is really satisfying to have a chance to be part of that. rachel: all this intellectual property is online. it is all open. what motivates somebody to come in and pay you guys for the $100,000 car that they could theoretically make in their garage? jay: great question. nothing. we are a complete open-source car company. when you think about the notion of the quality it takes to put something together, and the

speed it takes to put something together, that is why people come to us and say, you know what, i could do this on my own, but i have chosen to come and do this at your factory. rachel: what about the big three coming and stealing your designs? how would you feel about that? jay: i would be so honored if they came and stole our design. because we build vehicles for the niche local market. if they came and said i am going to steal this idea for a desert-racing vehicle in the southwest that is also road legal, the market is like this big for that. so local motors is simply sized to the market to be able to go one place to the next place to the next, always taking on individual innovations that are in the area where people need to have a response to what they need in that place. rachel: hi, guys. so here's a race car coming. >> he is coming. rachel: this guy is not street legal, right? >> actually, that race car is titled, but we don't drive it on the street.

rachel: oh, my god. what is the hardest thing about driving off road? what do i need to be careful of? >> long pedal on the right -- that is all you got to remember. rachel: how am i doing? >> you are doing good. you just want to maintain speed. jay: we are looking to share information, the good and the bad, and bring it out as quickly as possible. in the next 10 years, you are going to see 100 micro-factories from local motors all around the world. you will see the ability for us to be able to make upwards of 100,000 cars in a year, and you will see one million people or more engaged in our community. rachel: i am holding on for dear life. jay: the model that we built in the last 100 years will only be part of the solution going forward, and we will become a very significant actor in the market. rachel: i think i'll buy it. ♪

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sam grobart: we are finding it, we are testing it, we are there as they build it. we are on a quest to show you the most cutting-edge companies on the brink of the future. tonight, i try on electronics that measure concussion. ow, i feel bad for the dummy. rachel crane: i will meet a paralyzed man who is walking again thanks to ekso-bionics. how does it feel to be taking steps right now? jason gieser: oh, it is amazing. sam: and we will check out a house that will cut your power bill to zero. david goswick: this home comes with a guarantee of 10 years of zero electricity and zero gas payments. >> "bloomberg brink." ♪ companies that break the mold, conv,