this week elon musk wants to be known as techno king. 3d printing grows up with 3d printed housing. and gadget makers this week on "press: here." good morning, everyone. i'm scott mcgrew. i have a printer here in my home office. my first guest has a home office in his printer. oakland based mighty homes prints out buildings like home

offices using a giant 3d printer. it's sped up on video here. it usually takes 24 hours. by the time they're done and other materials are added like floors and lights, you get something that looks like this. they can be home offices or backyard yoga studios, small home for the mother-in-law, what the industry calls an adu, accessory dwelling unit. sam rubin is chief sustainability officer. thank you for joining us. what problem does this solve? wood and nails have put up houses for a couple of centuries. what problem are you solving? >> at mighty buildings, what we're doing is addressing the fact we don't have enough labor to build all of the housing we need. here in california we need 2.5 million new units to be on par with the rest of the country in terms of per capita housing.

we're looking at the missing middle, firefighters, teachers, more and more can't afford to live there. >> is that where the bottleneck is? mostly labor. california's biggest problem is not building houses fast enough. the way i hear it, it's government wanting to slow down sprawl or the amount of homes being built. >> i mean, obviously it's a very complicated issue. when you talk about governments and you have to talk about whether state government pushing to create more housing, removing local control in a lot of cases. that's one of the big points of tension where you have the local communities needing to meet their regional housing allocations which is right. >> you talked about adus. i want to circle back to that. you recently announced you're

building an entire community in the coachella valley. entire community of 3d houses? >> yes. it takes advantage of some of the big benefits of what we're doing. we're able to produce units for 40% less than comparable quality traditionally built units. we're able to do it with zero wait. practically zero waste. eliminating the 3 to 5 pounds that goes to land fills. we're increasing productivity to get housing out and doing it in a way that's sustainable. construction is 11% of all ght emissions. building energy use is another 3 to 8%. it's important as we solve the housing crisis, we're doing so in a way that doesn't further exacerbate the impact on climate. >> when you talk about printing, is this plastic material? how do you know that, you know,

we were talking about wood but brick or stone. we've established that houses made of those materials can last hundreds upon hundreds of years. you wouldn't have data on how long the stuff you're using lasts because it's new. >> what we've developed is a synthetic stone that doesn't have silica, so it doesn't have the same issues of other synthetic stone material. we do a lot of work with ul, underwriters lablaboratories. we've been doing a lot of work with them to ensure we're testing our material extensively to test full compliance with the building code and we show the material performs well out past 70 years. we're excited about the durability long term. that's one of the things we were continuing. we have units in the field. continuing to check in with customers there and see how it's doing. all of the testing we've done indicates it will perform quite well overtime. >> as far as the adus go, the

ones in place, i was looking at the prices. these are not necessarily inexpensive. i saw one that was 300 square feet more than $150,000. that's you already own the property. that doesn't include the property. there are a lot of homes in america that cost about $150,000. >> yes. one of the things you have to realize, california has high costs for construction, high material costs. that price you're talking about, 150 plus for 350 square foot studio, that is an all in price. that includes the site work, foundation, utility hookups, entitlement, permitting process and the unit comes fully finished. washer, dryer, cook top, microwave, all of that comes to that. it's move-in ready. >> communities have come around on the adu. a lot of cities have resisted it

and then all of a sudden realized this is something that needs to be done. >> a lot of communities would like to resist it. that's one of the changes happening at the state level since 2017 is that the state of california has passed a series of bills that required communities to allow adus as long as they meet minimum standards. >> 150k for what could be an adu or home office, i'm going to guess you're going to see an acceleration in demand even after people stay at home. not everyone is going to spend $150,000 on a home office. >> yeah. these are not necessarily targeted to be home offices. the real idea of adus is to be housing stock. they provide an income opportunity. that helps offset it. with the low mortgage rates, the costs of getting funding for that isn't as bad as it would normally be. we're seeing people using them for multi-generational living which is more and more prominent

particularly with covid as well as they need more space. full houses and a variety of uses. >> sam reuben is the chief of sustainability officer at mighty buildings. thank you for being with us this morning. we'll be right back.

welcome back to "press: here." a couple of days ago he notified u.s. government regulators that he wanted to be referred to as the techno king of tesla. they filed title changes with the securities and exchange commission. workers at a tesla plant contracted covid after he ordered them back to work. meantime's musk's company spacex is continuing to launch small satellites into orbit. it may some day take humans to mars. eric got to know musk and spacex as part of his research for a new book called "elon musk and the desperate early days that launched spacex." eric is a reporter from

ars technica. i was in caramel -- carmel and saw your book. what do you make of this techno king. >> musk is nothing if not a character, i think. he was probably having a lark. since he's filed paperwork, he's serious. he's interested in getting credit for being the chief engineer of the company. his title is not the founder of spacex, it's chief engineer of spacex. the guy did not study rocket science in college. he came into rockets not knowing a lot of rocket scientists. >> you're right. he had a physics degree and decided when he was going to get into rockets that he would read a lot of textbooks and everything he could basically find and, you know, over the years has had plenty of hard won knowledge working through

issues. >> i think one of the most asto heavy or the private astronauts going to the iss was the first time he sent a dragon cargo capsule up to iss. a lot of kids light up rockets for fun. here's a guy who says i want to be in the rocket business, teaches himself about rocket business and sends a capsule to the international space station. >> that was huge. here they were with a brand new rocket not only proving out the falcon 9 and putting dragon on it. >> your book title includes the words or phrase the desperate early days. explain to me why. >> there's two reasons. they faced both a cash crunch and a time crunch as they were going along. the company was founded in 2002.

they had failed they build the falcon 1. they failed in 2006 and 2007 and again in 2008. this was the summer of 2008, they had the hardware for one more rocket left. they were out of funding. this was at the great recession of 2008 which started to deepen so they couldn't raise private capital. so it was literally a couple of dozen engineers on a tropical island piecing together this last rocket. if they hadn't made it, the company wouldn't exist today. >> it is important to remember back as we look at all of the things that they're successful with with falcon heavy, with the star link, even putting the car into space, which i thought was a wonderful pr stunt, that it was extremely touch and go. >> oh, without a doubt, they could have failed thousands of times.

they ran into a bunch of red tape there. they had to find another launch site. they built this launch site in a few months from scratch on this deserted tropical island on the pacific. they went to all of these different failures. learning the process, yeah. they could have died on multiple occasions. >> i can recall getting -- he would get push back from congress as well. musk faced skeptical lawmakers. i can remember him testifying before congress. a lot of people felt leaving rockets to ula and boeing was the way to go. >> you can understand their skepticism to handing this over to the techno king. he's had that outsider personality. the fact of the matter was a lot of people in congress were trying to protect the vested interests of boeing and lockheed and spacex came along and was really trying to disrupt that and throw that, you know, toss

the apples off the cart, if you will. they were succeeding with the falcon 9. as they went along, you know, doing these things like trying to reuse rockets, congress was not supportive by and large. >> well, one of the reasons that they were able to succeed, spacex was, was because of the commercial orbital -- cots, to which president trump took a lot of credit during the launch of the first private astronauts. cots was long before president trump. >> yeah, there was no question spacex got a lot of help from nasa. they got the cots award in 2006. and in 2008 they delivered cargo to the space station. you can look back under cots and that started under the bush administration. the obama administration was enormously stu porttive and they spurred the development of the

commercial crew program which did launch humans and that mission which took place last year happened under president trump's watch. it's interesting. you've seen over the years the white house typically, were it's republican or democrat, has been pretty supportive of commercial space. >> nasa has caution built into its dna. it's obviously accomplished amazing things, even recently with mars, but it's often seen as plotting and slow and spacex is sort of cutting edge and scrappy. spacex hasn't killed anybody yet. it takes just one dead astronaut for nasa to say, hold on, we need to stop and make sure we know what we're doing. i'm not for a second saying spacex engineers aren't incredibly careful and incredibly professional. losing an astronaut is a way of sobering an administration. >> that's a risk going forward.

they're going to launch five human missions and that is taking out a lot of area. nasa's culture is risk averse, rather plotting. spacex is going as fast as they can moving forward and taking more risks. the two cultures, there's been some clash but it's been good. spacex has helped stodgy old nasa who have along and nasa has helped up start spacex find weaknesses and address those. >> i want to circle back to what we started with. that's the techno king. there is some concern musk would smoke pot in a video podcast. he made strange allegations on twitter and strange claims funding for tesla. at the same time he has made huge strides forward with electric cars and with private space travel.

can you reconcile those two narratives for me, the same person? >> you know, i think, you know, mussk is this titan of business that has founded two great companies. on the other hand, he's this awkward nerd who is finding himself in this world of congressional landscape competing with other industries and i think he uses twitter at times to blow off steam and to have fun and to sort of release some of the tension that involves running two large companies and being one of the richest people in the world and almost celebrity. he is a complicated person. you have to take the good with the bad. if you have to change the world, you have to break some heads. >> he's the author of the book about launching spacex. "press: here" will be right back.

welcome back to "press: here." i was counting the number of things in my home that used wi-fi. not just the computers, phones, tablets, xbox, security cameras, things that runs solar panels which i don't know quite what that does and the thermostat. some people have wi-fi enabled refrigerators and toasters. don't know exactly why. all of these gadgets and

interventions benefit from the fact that wi-fi is largely unregulated. 5g, you know it as a super fast cell phone service. you may have a 5g phone. part of the 5g spectrum is going to get the wi-fi treatment. it, too, will be open to inventors and gadget makers to do whatever. we have the ceo and founder of 5g chip company edge q. previously with qualcomm. thanks for joining us. i think most consumers are fairly unimpressed or confused by 5g because i can stream a netflix movie on my phone now. i don't need it to stream any faster, but it could be the things that are attached to 5g that are amazing, right? >> yeah. nice to be here. thank you for having me. yeah. so 5g is a lot more than just

connecting cell phones. 4g does a pretty good job of it actually. 5g, the evolutionary part is to connect phones. the revolutionary part is to connect things. like you said, connecting thing at the home. but more interestingly connecting things in like a factory or a campus environment. think of cameras, robots that are in a logistics factory like a fed ex or something, or building cars. robot arms do welding and things like that. so those things being connected they have interesting characteristics. that world is just starting to take off with automation those going on. i think that you'll find in the

next 5, 6 years there will be a massive amount of automation that will come to a lot of these indus zris sometimes called industry 4.0. 5g is more about that than just koekting cell phones. >> when we look behind the scenes, there are huge bundles of wires and cable running through the walls and ceiling, et cetera. so the factory of the future, obviously you have to power the robot or the whatnot, the assembly line with electricity. all of those wires and cables could be replaced by wireless signals. if you think back there are wires coming back into the docking station. they are pretty sophisticated and go on for a day. there is no internet wire or cable. very similar to that. a robot without batteries that

would last for a while and certainly that would take care of the power portion but when it comes to communications, there's no need to have these tethered cables anymore and 5g can take care of that. >> the inventor who's going to invent the next who knows what does not need permission from verizon or at&t. it uses a chip, maybe one made by you and then can access the unlicensed spectrum of 5g? >> yes. 5g has many aspects to it. one of them is the unlicensed aspect, called nru, a technical word. unlicensed portion of 5g where it would operate essentially. in which case you don't have to buy spectrum from the government like the fec. that is an aspect that is very exciting and interesting. some people think that would be the next big thing because as

you said, it opens up for a lot of people to innovate without actually purchasing this expensive spectrum. >> that's what we saw in wi-fi, right? there were -- i mean, the obvious use of wi-fi, which we now take for granted, is oh, look i can walk around the house with my laptop, as you mentioned. i'm not connected to the ethernet cable. all of a sudden the nests and arlo and whatnot said, oh, hold on. if we can send a wireless signal that fast we can do something amazing with something that has nothing to do with it. >> that's right. any time you make it easier for people to use and that's what mass adoption takes place and the price curves are brought down. so that happens in wi-fi. wi-fi is everywhere. everything is connected to wi-fi. i expect to see 5g do the same thing. right now still considered an

expensive technology. as this gets into the unlicensed arena, private factories, things like that, we will see the prices go down for it in which case anybody can afford it and lots of interesting obvious activities will take place and interesting good gets, too. >> what does 5g bring as far as these devices go? wi-fi seems to work just fine. let's use wi-fi. in the case of a robot i don't necessarily need high speed data. am i saving power? am i getting better range? what has 5g given? >> it's a little bit of everything. one main thing to think about when it comes to 5g that's different from wi-fi, it seems to have this characteristic, it's very reliable. reliable in terms of communications. if i'm talking on the phone, most likely that call will be just fine as long as i have a signal for it.

wi-fi, the signal is good but it never goes through. so it's a more reliable technology but there is another aspect to 5g that is very unique to 5g and 4g. it is designed for these applications. the way it was done, there is an aspect of security and there is an aspect of lay tense be si. particularly latency and reliability are two very, very important in manufacturing. for example, think of a drone or a robot, it has to make decisions and it has a controller or things it has to talk to. the communication has to be fast and sometimes within a millisecond. those kinds of decisions have to be made and have to be made reliably. it has to be super reliable. you can't have noise or if there is noise you can't have loss pacts, things like that. what 5g allows is a super low

latency. >> finally, let's talk about chips in general. you make chips. you're silicon valley based. i assume your fab is overseas. >> that's correct. we are based out of san it at that -- santa clara. we are overseas. >> we're seeing the shortages in chips. speaking generally about the industry and also specifically with you, first of all, are you seeing a shortage in chips? are you able to get chips when you need them? >> yeah. so given fab wear, the amount of chips we need are not massive. we're not seeing the same level of shortage. in general there is a supply chain constraint that has taken place and president biden was talking about that a few weeks ago. so we are seeing that but i believe this will get settled within 2021 itself and the world will go back to normal supply

chain again. >> let's hope the world goes back to normal in all different kinds of ways. >> in many ways. >> the ceo and founder. thank you for being with us. "press: here" will be back.

that's our show for this week. as we leave you, a reminder we have a sister podcast called sand hill road. you can find that wherever you get your podcasts. my thanks to my guests and thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.

o and welcoe to "comunidad del valle" i am damian trujillo. today, we're celebrating el dia de los muertos on your "comunidad del valle." ♪♪♪ damian: and we begin today with the oakland ballet company and their new production called "luna mexicana." with me is abel guillén, the chair of the board there of the luna mexicana committee. abel, welcome to the show. abel guillén: hey, thank you so much for having us today. i'm excited to be here and [speaking foreign language] damian: that's right. well, we have a theme going. that's why the altar--i have my [speaking foreign language] in the back, but we're talking about