Entrepreneur and Startup Advisor Andrew Weinreich Focuses on 3D Printing in Future Homebuilding for Podcast Episode

It took me an embarrassingly long time to finally try listening to a podcast: I’m a fairly visual person, and I didn’t think I would enjoy just sitting and listening to something that didn’t have any video to go along with it. My husband, who knows my deep and (possibly?) unsettling love for true crime stories, convinced me to listen to a few episodes of Criminal with him, and while I’m certainly not a podcast fanatic now, I do enjoy it more than I thought I would. I’ve even made peace with the “no video” aspect and have taken to folding laundry, dusting the family room, or completing other tasks that don’t require me to watch something on TV.

Andrew Weinreich

It seems like there’s a podcast for just about every imaginable topic: the history of the British museum, dating advice, reading the Harry Potter series as instructive, sacred texts, and of course, 3D printing. The ZBrush Podcast was introduced earlier this year, not long after bioink company CELLINK launched its Biotech Buzz podcast. Social networking pioneer and serial entrepreneur Andrew Weinreich, the chairman of data analytics startup Indicative, recently started his own tech/business podcast, called Predicting Our Future, about the coming revolutions in the technology sector.

In addition to starting the podcast and founding seven of his own startups, including SixDegrees, the world’s first social network, Weinreich is the advisor to several other startups, and also founded educational startup launchpad Andrew’s Roadmaps, which provides expert startup coaching that includes weekly best practices and tutorial videos, live Q&A sessions, and even startup boot camps.

Jessica Thoubboron, Content & Event Producer for Andrew’s Roadmaps, told 3DPrint.com, “The story behind the podcast is that Andrew Weinreich…set out to predict huge opportunities for tech entrepreneurs in various industries. The first industry we chose was homebuilding, so we did a 6-part series where he interviewed 29 experts and CEOs about the state of the homebuilding industry and how tech entrepreneurs can disrupt the space.”

The six-part series, titled “The Future of Homebuilding,” asks why, in a time where nearly every imaginable product is manufactured in a factory, new American homes are still being built by local contractors.

The series description reads, “Will all homes eventually be built inside of factories at a fraction of the current cost? Can we construct beautiful homes in factories that are more energy-efficient than ever before?”

With episode titles like “The Tesla of Homebuilding,” “Home-In-A-Box,” and “Half-Priced Hamptons,” Weinreich explores multiple building concepts and questions in the series, including:

• how factory-built construction can address explosive global population growth
• how people can save 50% of the cost of building a new home
• the journey from designing to financing a modern homebuilding factory
• the lessons homebuilders can learn from automotive companies

The fifth episode is titled “Cars, Mars, and 3D Printing,” and focuses on the future of homebuilding, and how homebuilding entrepreneurs are able to transform the way they build homes by watching and learning from the auto industry, the 3D printing industry, and shipbuilding.

“Cars, Mars, and 3D Printing”

“In 2012, six single-family homes were made by a 3D printer in China. The inventor of that technology is now working on a 3D printer designed to construct buildings on Mars. Does this technology have a future on Earth? Or does the future of homebuilding involve modern factories that leverage robots to build wood or steel framing similar to the types of machines you might find in modern automotive plants?”

Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis

The episode, which is less than 30 minutes, features interviews with auto manufacturing expert Jeffrey Liker; Michele Francovigh, Lead Project Engineer of Fincantieri, and Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, who invented the computerized construction Contour Crafting technology; Contour Crafting relies on mobile, large-scale but lightweight 3D printers, which are able to be easily moved directly to a job site. We’ve written about Dr. Khoshnevis’s innovative work before: in addition to inventing and founding Contour Crafting, he won first place in the 2014 Create the Future competition, and last year won the top prize in NASA’s In-Situ Materials Challenge with his new Selective Separation Sintering (SSS) 3D printing technology.

“When I got my first grant from NASA and I made the first demonstrations, the first people that came to see me were people from SpaceX, actually,” Dr. Khoshnevis explains in the podcast episode. “They were especially interested in Martian applications. Later on, as I made more progress, I’ve been contacted by a number of other commercial space entities. Right now we have a few of them, actually, that are interested in mining in space, or interested in fabricating in space, interested in space tourism…I believe probably the biggest part of space resources that we will get in the coming years and decades, starting from maybe 20 years from now, is fabrication in space. Probably in 50 years, our capability to manufacture in space will be millions of times bigger than what it is on Earth. You can imagine what humanity can do with that capability. Why? Because space offers free resources.”

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