Creativity and Innovation in Business and Design: Lance Cayko on (re)Inventing Architecture

Living a life in full is a conversation you always wanted to have with that person who gave an amazing TED Talk or the author of one of your favorite books, or that inspirational Olympian you always wanted to know more about. It's graduate level conversations with those making a difference in the world and in the lives of others. This show brings you new ideas and approaches so that you can live a life in full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout and I hope you enjoy this episode. This episode is brought to you by the nonprofit I founded, the center for Global Initiatives. The center is an all volunteer organization so there are no salaries and thus all tax deductible donations can go to the work. While our key country partner is in Tanzania, our work is global and generally focused in the areas of education and healthcare. We also help others to get their nonprofits started or augment others project based initiatives. It's our goal to open source humanitarian intervention and to help make it easier for others to do more good in the world. We are proud to have been ranked a great nonprofit every year since 2011 and to have achieved a Platinum level rating by Guidestar Links. In this episode's show, notes will take you to published articles on our outcomes, a number of helpful tools, and downloadable resources which are all free always. Please Visit us at CenterForGlobalInitiatives.org and be sure to watch our video at Patreon.com DrChrisStout to learn more. Thanks. Welcome to another episode of Living a Life in Full. I hello, I'm your host Dr. Chris Stout at the intersection of architecture is art, creativity, design, engineering, sociology, psychology, and inspiration. Not to mention survival, sustainability and comfort. It's been said that architecture is the art that we live in. We're all impacted by the communities in which we live, the spaces in which we work, along with the places we visit and experience throughout our lives. So what is it that makes for good architectural design? How does a space become iconic? How does an architect go from project to design to engineering to completion? Well, Lance Saiko knows a lot about the answers to those questions and more. Lance is a serial entrepreneur and co founder of the architecture firm F9 Productions with Alex Gore. His career in architecture, engineering and construction spans over two decades and includes numerous design awards including the International Architect Architeizer a award for Architecture plus Living Small. They operate out of the office site that they designed, developed and built in Longmont, Colorado. Their firm earned the number one spot in tier three of Biz West's Mercury 100 fastest growing private Firms with an unheard of growth rate of 386%, which we'll do a deep dive on in today's episode as well. Lance holds undergraduate degrees in building construction technology and in environmental design, and a master's in architecture from North Dakota State University, where he was an award winner in a sustainable skyscraper competition, and he also won The Peter F. McKinsey Award for Outstanding architectural thesis project. Lance routinely lectures at the University of Colorado Boulder and co hosts one of the top five ranked architecture and business podcasts, Inside the Firm, which just before this off Mike, he told me they have over 600 episodes, which I was just so impressed with. He's also involved in philanthropic work and is the founder and leader of the Longmont Community Gardens, a non profit that promotes urban, sustainable gardening education and community involvement. And he serves as Regional Editor for the Indian Peaks Wilderness, James Peak Wilderness and Rocky Mountain National Park. Welcome to the show, Lance. It's great to have you on.

Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

You know, while my doctorate's in clinical psychology and most of my professional and academic career has been in health, healthcare, and medicine, I also actually have an undergrad degree in architecture from Purdue, but I never formally practiced. I was a member of the American Institute of Architects until we moved from Chicago a few years ago. So I've got a real deep interest in your work and architecture. So perhaps we could start with your origin story and you could tell us a bit about your journey into the world of design as well as entrepreneurship.

Yeah, I'd be happy to. I am the ripe old age of 40 years old, just about to be 41, and my journey starts back when I was 13 years old growing up in north northwest North Dakota. In between a one side of the family was a group of sugar beet farmers and the other with Durham and the other was a cattle ranch where they did longhorn cattle. And I tried irrigating these sugar beets with my dad one summer, who was basically the manager of the farm. He kept it all running and everything. And if anybody's ever spent any time in Northwest North Dakota, it is very cold. In the winter, sure, that's obvious. But in the summer I think one of the things that gets overlooked is that the humidity rate is usually 90% and the temperatures can soar above 90. And what you're doing when you're irrigating these sugar beets is you're picking up a lot of these tubes and they're basically siphoning tubes and so you set them and you Set them in each row. You make them, you make them siphon water and all that. And it wasn't so much that I was adverse to hard work. I like hard work. I'm an, I'm an athlete. I've tried to always push myself to the limits in that way, but I didn't get along with my dad too well at that point in my life. And in addition, in addition to that, what 13 year old, now that I have children, what 13 year old is really prepared to get up every two or three hours for a 24 hour period and then for seven days a week, a couple weeks on end to do this kind of work. And the biggest problem was though, is we just didn't get along. And frankly, it was like very unfulfilling work for me.

Yeah.

So I lasted about a week and my dad said, well, you know, I turned to him one day and I go, hey, this, this, this type of work really isn't for me. We're not getting along. You know, I don't really like it. And I, I have a reply. I already have a replacement for you. I was, even at that age a very proactive, good, you know, if I leave, can I replace myself sort of mentality. Said, my best friend Chris would love to do this. You know, he's looking for a job, the pay is fine for him, etc. And he said, well, you got to do something. And I, you know, I'm here to, you know, the typical, I'm here to raise children with a strong Protestant work ethic and all that kind of stuff. And I go, you know, no problem, trust me, I like money. You know, we grew up very lower middle class, you know, to the point where you'd get one pair of shoes per year. It was, there was always anxiety around asking for money from mom and dad, stuff like that. So I called up his best friend Bruce. Bruce was a general contractor. And I said, hey, I think you, you got a big contract, I think this summer where you guys are doing like a bunch of roofs and stuff like that. And I said, I've always been interested in construction. Do you have any, do you have any openings? Like, I'll do anything. He goes, sure, you can be my gopher. And I go, and I'll pay $7.25 an hour. And I just jumped out of my seat. I was so excited. And I said, cool, what's a gopher? And he goes, well, you can, you'll go for this, you'll go for that. When you're done going for the things. Then you can get up on the roof, Lance, and learn how to roof with us. I was the best gopher he'd ever had. Oh, awesome. He will unequivocally say that, you know, I was up on the roof as much as physically possible. And by the end of the summer, I had really learned how to, you know, tear off a roof, put on a roof, do all the detailing and all of that good stuff. About halfway through the summer, Bruce saw that I was one of the more capable young guys and energetic and eager young men that he had ever hired. And I think he saw something in me that he hadn't seen in the other folks that he hired previously. And he pulls me aside and he says, how much, you know, I'm paying you? $7.25 an hour. What do you think I'm paying? What do you think I'm charging the owners for your. For your labor? 7.25 an hour. And he laughed. And I go, why are you laughing? And he says, that's. That's not what I charge them. I charge them, you know, three or four times what I'm paying you per hour. And I go, whoa, why would you do that? First explained to me, profit. He explained to me risk. He explained insurance, all the overhead that goes into it. And why he was, why, why? That's how it works in that service based industry. And at the same time, I recognized after working with Bruce for that, for that long over the summer, that he didn't have the same kind of anxiety about money. He didn't think about money in the same way that my family did and I did. And that it was a. It's no matter what, it's this. It's the source of all evil, you know, no matter what. And that it also was scarce. And therefore, you know, one of my favorite quotes that is actually from Kanye west, having money isn't everything. Not having it is. And I really felt that inside of me, I was like, oh, yeah, if you don't have money, it's like everything. Because that's all you're trying to do. It's just like if you don't have food, food is everything. Then all of a sudden, right?

Yeah.

And so I saw that contrast between. It was kind of like rich dad, poor dad for me, right? Robert Kiyosaki's book. My dad was the poor dad who just worked in the family farm, never had any aspirations of his own to start his own business, zero entrepreneurial effort and skill and that sort of thing. And Bruce was the Opposite. And I saw it wasn't that Bruce was living this huge lavish lifestyle. Not, not by all, by any means. He was definitely in that area middle to upper class. And so there was a good contrast there. And so I thought it just clicked for me and I said, okay, I'm gonna learn a different trade in construction every single summer now up until I am a young, you know, ready to start my own business. And the goal was always to start my own general contracting business. So I, I did that up until I was 18. Then I went to even. I went to North Dakota State School of Science in Waherton for two years after I graduated high school for building construction technology, which they basically teach you how to be a Bruce Class B general contractor, where you do small commercial buildings, residential, all that kind of stuff. And that was also the first time that I really excelled at school. I mean, I was a bright student, a bright individual, but growing up in a town of 500 people and a class of 20, you have zero choices. And I really, I'm the type of person that struggles if I don't have choices and can't pick my path. So you couldn't. There wasn't even electives to pick. Right. Wow. So I graduated with like a low 3.0. Barely had honors, that sort of thing, but had a very high IQ and through some various tests and everything. And then when I got to North Dakota State School of Science, though, it was like, oh, I'm picking my own path. I started, I was on the dean's list every semester. I started winning scholarships, really accelerated and just actually finally loved school. And by the end of it, our capstone project was we are supposed to build a house. And I started. We got. So we were looking at blueprints and for me the curiosity was peak deep. That's where it was peaked even further. And it was, why did the architect draw it like this? And huh. So the architecture comes first and then the building. That's obvious. Wow. I would really be in. Put myself in a quite the position as a business person if I was the architect first. And then I decided and then I, I got to pick the clients I want to build for. In the end, like I'm getting. I get paid two times at that point. Right. And at that point I've also earned their trust and all of these sort of things. So I applied to North Dakota State, 70 miles north of Wahpeton, to get into their architecture program. It's the freshman class when it goes, when they, when people, when people go there to get the architecture program, it's 350 to 400 people. It gets whittled down to 50 people through a selective process with GPA and portfolio down to 50 your sophomore year, and then by the end time you graduated, it gets whittled down to about 40 people because people just end up dropping out. It's a. It's a very rigorous program. When I graduated, it was number 17 in the nation. I mean, we were up there with the I schools.

Yeah. Wow.

2008. So that's what led me to be an architect. And again, the same trajectory happened when I went to North Dakota State. It was. Oh, my God, I love. I mean, I was just so personally fulfilled with the rigor of learning. Architecture, design, academics. I mean, I really. I ended up being a McNair Scholar two times, won the Peter F. McKinsey Award, like you said, graduated top class. And as a matter of fact, Chris, I'm actually teaching at North Dakota State now as well. In addition to state, Colorado, Boulder. So I need to update my bio, but, yeah, that's sort of as quick as a story as I could make it of what led me to be an architect today.

That's great. Oh, my gosh, I love that. I want to unpack a lot of that. So when it was sort of like this inspiration of Bruce being able to get, you know, see the business side of it and then, you know, opening up those blueprints. So you. You guys actually physically built a house based on the. The plans that you had. That was one of the projects earlier on in your education.

Yeah, yeah. And they were old school blueprints. Right? I mean, they weren't literally blueprints. Literally blueprints. Right now they're mostly, you know, most people, I think, know, they still call them blueprints. I mean, I think it's like a leftover term that's gonna happen.

Right.

But, yeah, that was my first, first experience. And I just, I, you know, most recently in the last couple years, I did. I have taken a test to see if I even register on the autism spectrum. And I do it at a lower level, like a high functioning level. Right. You can still function well. But one of the things that folks like I, I sort of suffer from when you're on that spectrum is like, you. You really care about the truth. Like the truth and the why behind things. So I'm now looking back at it, it's like, oh, that's why I was so intrigued by looking at these drawings and going, well, why? Yeah, why did they make those decisions?

That's great. So like in your back in the day, a million years ago, when I was in architecture school, sort of the career trajectory was either go like you did get your master's degree in architecture or you could actually get licensed in Indiana. I went to Purdue that if you apprenticed for someone for 10 years. And just where my head was at back then, it was sort of like I really kind of didn't want to do either one of those things, so I didn't. But how did like, did you go from getting your master's degree into, you know, putting out your architect's shingle, so to speak, or what was the foray from going from school into entrepreneur and startup and founder?

Yeah. So I love that you cited some time with, you know, a timeframe with that. So where it is now today is if you graduate architecture school, it's not like a lawyer, where you, if you graduate as a lawyer, you could go take the bar and you could potent and pass and potentially start your own firm right away. Architecture school went from 10 years of apprenticeship, like you said, down to now three to five years of apprenticeship. And you have to log all these hours and it's very rigorous and you have to take between five and seven tests. When I took the test, it was seven tests. The I my trajectory towards becoming a business owner in and the co founder of F9 Productions here in Colorado is, is not a traditional one. A lot of architecture folks, a lot of people that own their own firms, they take a traditional path and that path would be something to and of they graduate, they do the apprenticeship, they work with, then they get licensed under an architect, then they, then they work for maybe five to 10 years under that architect or jumping maybe from job to job. They get enough connections to where then they feel like they can safely jump ship and start and hang their own shingle. Right. Well, Alex and I graduated in 2008, and if there's any folks that are listening that understand just the history of economics and the economy, they will know that those 2008, 2010, very significant years. Right?

Yeah, I remember great recession. Yeah, Great perfect time.

How can one forget, right?

Yeah. Mercy.

Hey, great time to graduate.

Yeah.

So we graduated and we actually ended up landing each individually some of the very last internships, I think, that were even available on the free market. And so I came to Boulder, Colorado and worked for studio ht, who is now defunct. They split up and broke up and all that, all that stuff. I lasted about nine months. My business partner, Alex Gore, he went out and Worked in New York City. He actually watched Wall street melt down from skyscraper in the office during the Great Recession. It was. It was. I mean, watching the stockbrokers, like, come out of the buildings with. With their briefcases, and they're, you know, basically clearing out their desks. Right.

Wow. What a time to be there. Good Lord. Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. And so I could see the writing on the wall coming from Studio ht, you know. You know, if you're just kind of scrolling around in the design software and not really doing anything because there's nothing to do, that something. Something is wrong. I started paying attention to what was going on in the stock market and reading about it a lot more, and I was like, okay, I'm pretty sure the layoff is coming. And it. Sure enough, it came. It was one of the most devastating days of my life. I remember driving home, like, calling my granny, calling my. Calling my mom, my wife crying, super upset, Right? Just devastated. You work so hard to graduate, like, at the top of the class, and then that happens, and it's no fault of your own.

Exactly. Exactly.

Yep. So, no, but again, I knew it was coming. And so what I was doing was. I did a couple different things. I started putting out these. These Craigslist ads for side work, relying back on my. All my carpentry experience, painting experience, construction experience. And I've always tried to contrast what others are doing to exploit a niche that I think is there. Right. And I guess it relates to the law of polarity, which is sort of my. One of my guiding north stars in life now, of thinking about life in terms of the law of polarity. And so when I would look at these other competing handyman and their ads on Craigslist, they. They weren't really compelling ads. They were, like, older, you could tell grumpy guys and stuff like that. And so I was like, what's the opposite of that? Oh, I'm gonna. I'm gonna tout myself as, like, a highly educated, easy to work with, handsome, sober. I'm not joking that I put, like, that kind of stuff in there. And then I. And then at that point, even Craigslist would allow you to add some images to the. To the ads. And so I would. I added some images of, like, myself and stuff like that. And the response I got from Boulder county in particular was amazing. Like, I had all of these wonderful housewives that wanted. That wanted to hire me and have me around and, like, painting and cleaning and having lunch with them. It was. It was. It was pretty fun.

That's Brilliant.

So, so I, yeah, so I was doing. So I had that pipeline kind of ready to go, knowing the layoff was coming. And the other thing I was doing is I would wake up very, very early, like 4 or 5 in the morning, and I would work two or three hours at my home office and I would build these CAD models. Because at that point the architecture community was from AutoCAD, like drawing in 2D over to building animation, modeling with platforms like Revit Architecture. And I could see that all of these CAD details needed to get translated over to 3D models. So I would model them and I would upload them to this website called Turbo Squid. And I started to get noticed by the cfo. And she goes, she emailed me one day and she goes, hey, you are uploading more models than anybody in regard to this software, like in the world. She's like, what's your goal here? And I go to continue to do that. Like that's the idea. Because it was mailbox money. Like they would buy the models and then you would just get mailbox money, huh? Yeah. And so through that noticing though, then she, she goes, well, we've got one of the biggest architectural catalogs interested in teaming up, who then has access to the biggest building product manufacturers in the world. And they know that they need to transition and you'd be perfect for this. So I kept in touch with her and that after a couple months and then the layoff happened and I had this pipeline of work I never had to take, I never had to take unemployment. And I'm proud of that just because I'm a very much a self starter and like try to be as self made as I can in that kind of regard. And so by the time I got laid off, all of those things were in play. And that laid the groundwork, especially that CAD work, for us to be able to start the architecture firm. We started it on license. We had to be very careful about what we even called ourselves. So at that point we were just designers who do buildings and you know, the language had to be really careful, right? And then what was really crazy was we started to get. We started, we use Craigslist again to advertise and we started to get clients. We focused on single family, residential, custom stuff. We would get commercial clients every once in a while. And the most hilarious part about the commercial clients was that's where the licensure comes into play. It's like, well, we're not licensed. So we had to start teaming up with other architects and that's where we finished out the rest of our apprenticeship, you know, so it was very peaceful.

That's. That's awesome. Because you then brought business to those firms and you could, you know.

Yeah.

Be able to be under their license as an umbrella and everything's all, you know, hunky dory for everybody. That's brilliant. Wow.

Thank you. And one of the sweetest ones was I brought a clinic back to the firm that laid me off. It was hilarious. It was like, why? It's like, why is this 20. Where would I bet 24. Why is this 24. 24 year old guy unlicensed out, like getting. Be able to. He's getting work and you guys can't. Like, what is the problem here? Right. So, again, so, so that's. So we starved for about three or four years. You know, in 2009-2013, economies finally started to pick up again. It started to pick up so much that Alex and I were, you know, we were the true garage story like his. Where we operated our business out of was his dining room in the apart one bedroom apartment, kitty corner to mine. When he. Because he ended up moving down to Colorado. Because what he did is he. He did help me with some of that CAD work. And we were talking about a business. He got laid off a little bit after he got laid off actually before me in New York. Because everything, you know, went from New York west.

Trickled. Yeah, yeah.

Yep. And then he, he was like, well, you know, we're young and naive. And he says, oh yeah, well, I'm going to go back to grad school for my construction, my master's in construction management. And by the time I get out, this recession will be over. Like we didn't know.

Sure. Yeah.

Obviously didn't work. So he ended up having to move back in with his mom and dad. And as a young American male that. Who's highly independent like Alex is, has worked really hard, is. I think that's hard. That's hard on anybody, you know. So he was very dejected by the whole situation, for sure.

Yeah. Well, coming from the high life of New York and you know, probably what the trajectory he viewed himself on that, you know, what a 180 degree turnaround for that that would be tough to do.

Yeah. So he ended up, you know, staying at mom and dad's for like a couple months and then eventually moved down to Colorado. Because I said, hey, I got a house, I got a clinic, I got all this CAD work. How much money you got? I got three months. I got three Months of living expenses saved as I go, hey, the apartment open up just right above me. Let's. Let's try it. Like, I know we're a decade early, but let's try it. And we tried it. So we started for those three or four years. Finally everything started to pick up. And then we needed to hire somebody, and we tried to. We were looking local, so we tried to hire out of the University of Colorado Boulder. And the first candidates that we got, we were really not happy with at all. And they just weren't what I would call, like, turnkey. And so we were like, no problem. We reached out to the CU Boulder, to, I think the dean, the chair of the department, Environmental Design, and said, hey, we're local. We want to hire local. We can't. Here's why, but we think we can help. And here's what we could do. You know, we both have master's degrees. We're qualified to teach. Do you have any. Do you have any openings for people for us to teach this piece of software called Revit Architecture? And she said, you know, we don't have any openings in our department, but we do in the engineering department department. And so that's. So we ended up started teaching that. That software to the engineering students in university at the University of Colorado Boulder. Alex still teaches that class today. We used to teach it tandem together, and now I teach in the environmental design department. I teach the. The Adobe Creative Suite and stuff like that.

Wow.

And then. And then from the. From 2010 or 2013 to now, it's been just a. It beautiful trajectory of growth that we. And multiple companies have been started as offshoots. From F9, we have F12 productions, which is actually, I'll start back. F10 Productions was. We designed and built these two tiny houses for Subaru. After. After our first tiny house was seen on hgtv, it was seen about every two weeks because we monitored an episode with them. That's where the archetizer award comes into play. And then we started after. After we built those two tiny houses, we. We earned enough money to finally be able to buy a piece of land, which has always been. Our dream is to be kind of wear all three hats. Architect, builder, real estate developer. And it's. It's sort of an alliteration on, you know, me thinking, oh, if I was an architect first, then I could build it.

Yeah.

And it was like, I get paid two times. Well, now if I do the real estate developer, I can get paid three times and actually maybe indefinitely if I. If I hold onto the real estate, and that sort of thing is investment. So we started F12 Productions, F14. We skipped F13. We're a little superstitious. F14 is our general contracting company, and that's still going very strong today, and we're looking to grow that as well. And that's kind of. That's, you know, brings us up to sort of present day with the inclusion of teaching at North Dakota state.

So. So F12 was. Is the development arm of it.

Yep. Okay.

And then you said with the F10 with tiny house and Subaru.

Did I hear you right? Yes.

What. How do they have super tiny garages? What. How does Subaru care about. Why do they care about tiny houses?

How the heck does Subaru.

Yeah, right.

So Subaru funded the project, and they worked with a company called Powder. And it's like, pwdr. They took out the vowels. And what they. What these two. What Powder ends up doing is they end up creating experiences. That's sort of their tagline.

Okay.

And basically what it means is that we made these two tiny houses, that the first tiny house that we made is called Atlas Tiny House. If people are Googling this right now, it's very searchable. It's a couple pages deep. It's so popular because it was the first of its kind. We looked at, again, sort of this. Looking at what exists. What is the opposite is. The opposite is the opposite of niche we can exploit in a positive way. And the existing tiny houses at that time, first of all, they were a reaction to the Great Recession. So you had all these millennial, Gen Z. Sorry. Yet all these millennials and Gen X folks looking at the housing bubble and going, do we actually need, like, I want to live in the opposite. I want to live with no debt. Right. They were looking at these huge mortgages that failed, these huge houses that were on the market, and they were like, what is the opposite of that? The opposite of that is a tiny house with no mortgage. And so all of the people who were building those at the beginning were. They were building, like, cabins on wheels, which are cool, but it's not. It's definitely not architecty. It's not out of the box. It doesn't grab attention. I think the arc. I think this experience could be better. So Atlas is what was, at that time, one of a kind. It had a foldable deck and a foldable awning. So, like, that would. That would cover this glass door. Sorry, this glass wall, and protected while I was rolling down the road. And it was completely Self sustainable. It would collect its own water, solar, all that stuff. Excuse me. And so when we built that, when we were leading up to building that, we. The origin story is actually that we were. Alex and I had started the firm. We earned our first big commercial commission. For us, it was just a duplex in Golden, Colorado. So we were excited. We were like, we got it. We got to make sure we celebrate these victories. Like, like, life is short and go, okay, let's go to Boulder and have some burgers. So we did. We were driving back and we were all, we're still very Cloud nine for us. And we called one of our friends we went to school with. His name was Blake Dinkins. And he was, he was the, he was down. He's sort of like an Eeyore character. Just never satisfied, you know, that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

And it was like, okay, Blake, you know, he was still one of the lucky ones to be employed too. And that's what was so frustrating to me is like, you still have a job, bro. You didn't have to. You don't have kids.

What are you so down about?

Yeah, yeah. And I said, I said, well, Blake. And I was just, I'm a very solution oriented guy. And I was like, Blake, what do you, you know, what do you have to, what do you have to worry about? You don't have any kids to support. I was like, how much. I was like, how much money do you got, Blake? And he goes, he told me. And I, you know, I think it was, it was a substantial amount to where, you know, it prompted the question back to him of, well, if you're so unhappy and life is so short, why don't you. And you like these tiny houses? Like, why don't you design and build a tiny house and then just travel around the United States and take photographs that'll make you happy. And he laughed and, you know, he thought we were joking and we kind of were, but not. And so we went home. We got home and bought a domain name. The way bought was Blake's tiny house. And we made a website, emailed him the next day that I guess you're doing it. And he went along with it for like a year.

Huh.

So he and I, he and I, one of our other colleagues, we went to school with, her name is Sarah Schultz. We designed and worked on this tiny house together for, for about a year. He got so much organic traffic on the Internet that we. That's how the HGTV and like all these TV networks who were trying to start These tiny house shows.

Wow.

And get them launched. And we contact us and they would. Sometimes they'd fly out producers and they'd interview us and we'd do like, what's called a Sizzler. Well, eventually, finally, gg. Yeah, it was. It was. Especially as a young guy, I mean, and Alex and I are pretty outgoing. We created our own press. It was really interesting. So we. Eventually HGTV got funded to do one of these. It was called Big House, Tiny Living. And Alex goes down with his then fiance to the Denver Home and Garden Show. They had a booth up. They were looking for people who wanted to design and build a tiny house and were ready to go in Colorado. And Alex goes, oh, we are. Alex signs us up, comes back to the office on Monday and says, oh, hey, by the way, I signed us up. We're going to be on hgtv. We're going to build the tiny house.

Oh, by the way.

Yeah. Casually I go, okay, I'll do it. How are we going to pay for it? I don't know. We got to figure that out.

Yeah, that's why I told you.

Yeah, exactly. That's why I told you. So we figured it out. We actually took out a business loan for it. It's one of the only business loans we've ever taken out.

W. Wow.

And so we ended up. We designed it, we built it, we were on tv. That's how. That's how Subaru sauce, Subaru came to us. When Subaru came to us, they go, we love the concept, this foldability. It's so cool. Here's what we want to use it for. Basically what they were going to use it for was they were going to haul around these tiny houses that we're going to build for them to all these ski resorts. And they would have the big Subaru logo and they would have like, swag in there. Subaru swag. And it was branding for them. Hot cocoa in there. They were like portable warm up shelters. But they said instead of one deck and one awning, we want two on each one, both sides. We want them to be like 50% bigger. We want the overall tiny house to be 50% bigger. And by the way, we also want a foldable deck with foldable railings and a foldable staircase on the roof so we can. So we can then host rock bands.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah. And I said, yeah. So I was like, when. When they said all that stuff, I said to Alex, I go, you know, the first one was really hard to build. I don't think my wife is gonna put up with how much it's gonna like the effort it's gonna take to build this one. I just. Because we were inventing architecture. I mean, really, especially in that tiny house area. And so he said, well, what if I tell him this number? I go, if they go for that number, I. She could, she won't even be part of the argument. And they didn't blanket Subaru. And so we built them and that's. We've got enough profit and then we bought the piece of land and then we, then we went down the development path.

Wow. And you're able to meet Subaru specs with this, this crazy place.

Oh, yeah. I mean, it was very difficult. Sure. And part of the problem too is like the project manager who was involved. So again, Subaru provided the seed funding and then there was this project manager at Powder. And the problem with the problem with the project manager Powder is I, you know, it's like anybody who builds for the very first time in their life and overthinks too many things and I'm guilty of it myself because, you know, I've designed to build two of my own houses. And I know on the, on the one big house that my wife and four kids lived in that we designed for ourselves and everything, like, there's obvious things where I'd be like, nope, I would never put that door in that kind of situation again. That stuff. That was actually the most difficult part. And then their time frame, I mean, their time frame was just out of control.

I bet.

I bet. Yeah. Yeah.

Did they sort of like keep coming back and going, hey, and can you put a window here? And hey, can you make this, you know, 4 inches longer and stuff like

that, or did they kind of worse than that? I wouldn't know. It was worse than that.

Oh, no.

I'm going to give you an example. Yeah, they, they insisted on us installing this barnwood. And Barnwood was. It's still a little chic, but it was definitely super chic when we built this in 20. 2015. Super chic, right. Everybody was putting it on everything. And I tried to explain to them, you guys, this is going to be driving down the road, it's going to get all muddy and just disgusting and like, then you guys are going to have to power wash it. You know what that's going to do. They didn't, they weren't thinking about that. They actually were more capital a architects about the project than we were. You know, more capital to be designer than we were. But that's not actually the kicker. The part was we put on, like, the first couple rows of it, which was essentially. It was the siding for the tiny houses. Cladding on the outside. Put it. We put up the first couple rows of it, and we're installing it as if it was just like any other kind of siding. Lap siding is installed where if we have studs at 16 inches on center, then we're going to put two fasteners in each stud. You know, where the studs are behind this piece of siding. So then you end up with this nice row going up and down. Right. They hated it. And I was like. I was like, are you kidding me? I was like, we're trying to build this thing. You're gonna be. You're taking a static. What. When it's at rest. The static piece of architecture, and then you're gonna make it dynamic by going down the road.

Down the road.

Oh, my gosh. And you guys are gonna go all over the United States. And I go, how am I supposed to give. Have confidence and give you confidence that you can roll around with this thing if we're not allowed to fasten like we normally would? They. They literally made us come up with a randomized pattern and then get back with their engineer and charge them additional services to have a randomized pattern of screws that would work for them. One of the. They came back to us actually, like, four or five years after we completed this project, and they wanted to do another one. And with a lot more experience and under our belts, obviously.

Yeah.

You know, builders wise and just business and just having more confidence and saying, I don't know or I know or whatever? I. I had to bring it up to that. To that project manager, you know, I go, hey, are we going to encounter any more of this craziness about, like, randomized patterns? He's like, no. He admitted all of his rookie mistakes sort of satisfying, but at the same time, like, oh, man, it still sticks in my craw. We had to do something.

So how did that turn out? Did they. Did you wind up doing that one, too, or just. It was too crazy to take, or you're too busy, or did you.

No, they ended up. What's really super flattering about the whole. The architecture that we. That we ended up inventing with that. With those tiny houses that we built was that we had a lot of copycats that ended up coming along, which is really, I think, super flattering.

That is. It really is. Yeah. Wow.

Yeah. So they. So we. They found a competitor to Us that could do what nobody could formally do until we did it. And that's who they ended up going with.

Gotcha. All right, well, that's just as well. Just as well. Well, let me, let me circle back. So we've got the F10, we got the F12. We've. We've superstitiously gotten. Avoided the 13. So did it, did things start with F9? I mean, that's kind of when I was doing my background on you. That's what I, that's what I found. So what's, what does that reference. Is that just because it sounds cool or does it have some, some secret meaning?

It does have a secret meaning.

No.

Can you share 100 for the first.

For the first time.

So, you know, as I talked about earlier, we had. When we started our, we started our firm in the Great Recession and the thing I want to add, the couple things I want to emphasize with that is that, you know, we were both, we were both respectively laid off from award winning firms. I mean, the firm Alex is working for was Studio Daniel Lipskin. He was the, he was the architect who was commissioned to create and design the World Trade center after they, after 9, 11. He was that guy. Yeah, yeah. Super, super famous.

Yeah, yeah.

And then the folks I worked for, Brad Thomas at Christopher Hare, they were AIA Young architects of the year. Very, very, very good architects to begin working for an apprenticing under. But they were terrible business people, obviously. Right, right. And so our stints at both firms were so short, you know, it takes. But by the time we were laid off, you know, in between nine and 12 months of being there independently, each was. That's not enough time to get any kind of built work that you can even take credit for. You're designing stuff at that point. Right. And then it's gonna take another year to get it built. And then photograph. And it's a long process build a portfolio. We didn't. We. So we had no built work when we started the firm. We also had no contacts hardly. And I mean it really was. And then the economy sucked. Right.

Honestly, a triple crown of.

Oh, man. But I tell people all the time, Chris, there is no better time to start a business than an example like we did. Because you will. You are. It's like putting a piece of coal in the hottest fire. What's going to happen if you can withstand that fire and come out the other side? You become a diamond. Like all of that pressure and heat.

Mm.

Makes it. It forces you to be super lean, super creative, super Hungry. You're gonna go out there and you're gonna out compete everybody. If you have a very competitive attitude like Alex and I do, and your discipline and all that, all that good stuff. So F9, what does it mean? F9, how that comes into play is with the. With no built work. All we had at that point, at that time were renderings. These photorealistic renderings of our projects from school. That's all we had. Right. And the hotkey on the keyboard for the rendering software that we used to produce those was F9. It was. Yeah. So that's all we had was F9 productions at the beginning. Start. And we can. We. The renderings were good enough, the models were good enough. They convinced people to trust us at a very young age. And we made it happen.

That. I love that. That is so cool. That is so cool.

Wow.

So you had this like just really incredible opportunity with having good work be out there that people start to recognize and then that creates a little bit of a buzz and then that gets more recognition and more visibility and HGTV, etc. So like, do you have a sweet spot now these days? Do you have like a specific type of building or specific type of project that's really kind of like you probably. Because you probably. I think you could do kind of full spectrum things. But do you have something in particular is like, oh yes, this is the kind of thing that we really enjoy doing. Or. Or is everything kind of fun for you guys these days?

Our. Our portfolio on average annually has evolved to 50% of our work is custom single family residential projects which. Which ranges from. We actually try to serve the lower middle class when possible by. And we do that by the systems we've put in place, which kind of goes all the way back to that software and really becoming experts at that design software honing in our design process, streamlining it, being effective communicators, just defining. Defining how we operate. Much better. So we'll do very small projects like an interior kitchen remodel or just we're adding a bedroom and swapping out a mudroom for a bathroom or something like that all the way up to. I think our biggest and most prominent project right now is in single family just custom houses in Boulder. It's a. Has like a five million dollar budget. It's all glass. You can imagine it sits on the hill. It's just amazing. The remaining 25%, two levels of that, you know, is we do multifamily. So we'll do apartments these big townhome kind of projects, that sort of thing, podium style stuff where it's like the first levels commercial and then on top is all apartments and mixed use building. And then, then the last remaining 25% is small commercial and industrial projects. So we like to have a big, we like diversity.

Mm.

Like there's that big, there's that buzzword in that phrase that goes around and I think it's, I think it's, I think it's misused. I think we give the best definition of it, actually. You know, they say diversity is your strength. I think in business that works in your service based business like us, where you have a diverse set of clientele. Because that's why Alex was laid off, that's why I was laid off was the architects that we were working with, they specialize in like one kind of architecture, you know, one type of clientele. So if that, if we're sitting on like a metaphorical stool and the stool has three legs, right, the kind of, the legs that I just described, 50% this, 25 that, 25 that. But if you only have one stool, one leg in that stool and it falls, first of all, you're balancing the whole time. I mean, honestly, like, like, like we're thinking about this as a real metaphor. Difficult, right? Then that one leg falls out, boom, you're done.

Yep.

Well, with us, we try to have as many legs on the stool as possible in that way. And while at the same time trying to niche into tiny, tiny houses. Right? Very, there's a, there's a, this style of house and custom houses that we've developed down here. It's called the East Watch series. The East Watch house was the very first one of that. We made the COVID of builder magazine in 2020 January issue for that project. And since then, people come to us just specifically for that style. So, you know, for anybody out there who's listening, and they go, okay, you guys are super diverse with your workload, the type of clientele you're bringing in. That is the opposite of what I've been hearing in terms of you need to niche, niche, niche. You can still niche. You can still niche. It's just your challenge is bigger to niche. It's just a bigger problem to solve.

Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I think about it too in terms of some of the other guests I've had and some of the writing I've been doing for LinkedIn. Kind of another buzzword that maybe can be applicable to what you're describing too is like what people talk vis a vis Careers of a portfolio career, you know, that there might be things that you really lean heavy in on, that, you know, that there's, you know, specific training or expertise that you've had, but then also you bring a diverse set of other kinds of skills and experiences. Just like you guys with, you know, design. You know, design, be architects, be developers, be, you know, general contractors and all that. You know, I think all of those things inform one another, you know, because I think there's a lot of general contractors I've known that just, you know, curse the architect, like, why would he or she do that? You know, blah, blah, blah. This is so dumb. And vice versa, you know, to say, well, this is just a box with a roof on it, you know, and just all those kinds of things where you, you know, you and your team, you know, are able to bring all those things together in whatever kind of project, be it a, you know, commercial or be it a, you know, multifamily or podium, mixed use and that. All that kind of informing how you even think to approach a project, I think, is really, really clever way to do it, I think. I don't know if you're familiar with Talib's book Antifragile, but that's one of the other things that's coming up in my head as you're talking about this, that, you know, to start a company during, you know, really difficult economic times, but then also to have this flexibility to say, you know, right now it's 50 this, 25 this, 25 this. But we could make it, you know, 35, 35, 35. If we had to, we could make it 75, 25. You know, we could. We have the adaptability depending upon what the market is, depending upon what the economy is, depending upon what customer demand is, and I think that's brilliant. Is that part of the secret sauce? I wanted to circle back to that amazing number that you guys won this award. 386% growth rate. Is this the secret sauce? Into what yields a number? Okay, awesome.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. It's 100%. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's risk versus reward in the context of taking on more responsibility and thus reaping the rewards of taking on more responsibility.

Nice. It's nice to see that that actually happens. It's good to see you guys as a model of that, because conceptually that's like, yeah, that should be the case. And I know it's not all the time, but it's wonderful to see you guys doing this and also to do it in the field of architecture is great, but. Sorry, I interrupted your thought. What were you gonna say?

Yeah, yeah, no, I. Yeah. Thank you for adding that. 100%. Yeah, it is, it is. It's like, because you don't always see that. I mean, you hear there's a lot that's like a statistic that really always will always stick with me. And I cite it on almost every public interview I give or when I'm talking, when I'm trying to. I'm coaching other people in business because now all of our colleagues are starting businesses. They're 10 years behind us. Right. Because we took the risk right away. We're crazy. We hadn't, we honestly had no choice but to do it.

Yeah.

And they'll call me and ask for advice and stuff like that. And so what I say is, I go, look, this is a, this is an empirical fact. Most businesses fail within seven years.

Yeah, yeah.

So. So, you know, to have that kind of success, like, we feel very blessed. I'm, I'm very much a man of faith. I thank God a lot. I try to wake up with gratitude every day. Like when we were doing the, the development and we were wearing all three hats, there was a period where it was 80. I worked 80 days in a row, no days off, that type of thing. And I really had. I was walking around pretty much praying in real time, you know, that this would all work out. So there's definitely some, some hand to God and Providence in all of that. And the seven year, the seven year thing for us too is like really coincidental with the. It's intentional. It's coincidental, but it's intentional with the podcast. So, you know, we started in, I want about 2010, 2009. Right, right in there. Right at the end of 2009, beginning 2010. So our anniversary would have been in 2017 of the seven years. It was like when that happened, you know, I turned to Al one day and I go, you know, it's been seven years since we started the business. He goes, yeah, as goes pretty fast. And I go, we haven't failed.

Yeah.

And he's like, yep, yep, we have. And I go, we should, we should tell people our story. Yeah, I think, I think we should give. We should give. It would be immoral. It just, you could just feel that urge, like wanting to burst out and tell people, especially with some of this negative attitude I just see in the media about Gen Z and the millennials. We're a millennial led firm and we have mostly Gen Z and Millennials working at the firm and this idea that, like, the American dream is dead, that capitalism is all bad. And I have plenty critiques of capitalism. I am not just this vehement, like, it's all or nothing, yes, money, money, money, money. But it was like, we should tell our story and maybe it will positively affect people's psyche and give them, especially in our generation, it will give them hope and show them that they're still away and you can still make it and you can still eventually buy your own house, you know, do all of these wonderful things. So that's. That's why we started the podcast.

I love that. And that's. That's why I think you're so top ranked with that as well, too, because there is an audience that, that really pines for that, you know, to hear that this is. This is a possibility, this is real. I mean, I remember again, going back into the caveman era of my getting started in things that a similar kind of story and trajectory of you go through all this training for you and me to a degree, but you much more so with design and construction and architecture. But when I was in undergrad, architecture, I never had a class on how to be a business person. And when I was in an undergrad or a graduate student in psychology, there was no class on how to open a project private practice. And everybody just kind of either worked for somebody and like you with Bruce, kind of paid attention to how they did it, or someone has an architecture and apprenticeship and they kind of see how it's done, or you get hired by somebody and try and look over the transom to see how does a contract work or how do I bid or how do I present to somebody or whatever. And all those things get kind of not necessarily talked about in a public or a educational setting. And then when you make things public, you know, through podcasts and through, you know, like this interviews, when people hear you talk about this, you know, then they can go check out your. Your. Your podcast, which I'll put links to in the show notes. And I'm gonna. I've been making notes too, about, you know, does Blake's tiny house URL still exist? Is that still out there?

The. Yeah, so it's actually a. You know what? I want to know where it is now. I'll speak to where I know where it left off.

Okay, yeah, let me know. And then I'll hunt it down and put it in the show notes and things, too. Because I think even that those kinds of things, I think are super helpful to People to, you know, and your bootstrap, like, you're honest. I gotta get a clap for you, Lance, with how clever you were of. With starting off with Craigslist and say, hey, I'm not an alcoholic. I show up a ton. I'm not on probation, you know, et cetera, et cetera. All these things when people. Because you said, you know, in your head, probably, what are the things that inhibit people from, you know, getting someone. What are the. All the bad experiences that people have had? You grew up doing that and finding ways to be able to, you know, counter that and be, you know, the. The anti stereotype in a. In a successful way of what customers wanted. And now you've. You've rinsed and repeated at a much grander scale now with F9 and 2, F10, et cetera, et cetera, all the iterations of that. So just, again, bravo. But I do want to. For everybody in here, there's a lot. I had another designer on my show, and I just loaded up on the links because it's wonderful to have these conversations, but it's also so cool also to see the stuff that you guys have designed and to see historically as well as kind of current portfolio kinds of things, too. But again, here I go, interrupting you. You had a train of thought that I derailed. Sorry about that.

That's all right. Here we go. Yeah. Yeah. So Blake's tiny house. So we designed it, we built it, we finished it, and then it was like, what do we do with it? Al was originally going to go on his honeymoon with it, and that didn't happen. And so. Because I don't think it was finished, I don't think it was truly, truly, truly finished. Like, TV production is. It puts on a facade.

Right. Sure.

So, like, it mostly was done. Right. Was it completely functional? Not yet. So we had to finish it over the summer, and then Al got married at the end of that summer, and anyway, he. So what. End up. We did end up finishing it, and what we ended up doing with it was we. We. There's a. The world's first tiny house hotel was born in Lyons, Colorado, which would be 10 miles west of Longmont, which is where our office is, which is where the tiny house was at that time.

Mm.

And they had openings. And so what you could do is if you were. If you built a tiny. If you owned a tiny house, you could put it there, and then they would rent it out, and then you would get a. You would get a fee. You know, you'd earn money every Month. So we did that for about two years until they said, we're. We want. We want that. We want to switch inventory. And so we put it on the market, and we actually sold it to this couple from New York City.

Wow.

Manhattan. Deep in Manhattan. And they drove out. They. They bought it from us, and then they drove it around the country for a year. And then I believe they sold it to another couple. And I haven't heard about it since.

That's what a history.

What I'm hoping happens is I am one of these summers on a summer road trip, and I see it, and I can go talk about it.

Wouldn't that be cool?

It would be so cool. I just think somehow that's gonna happen. So that's. I know. And then the other ones, the other tiny houses that we built for Subaru, those. Those ended up traveling for a couple years. And then I believe they're. They revamped them a little bit and made some modifications and that they're still in use.

That is so neat. Wow. Wow. Well, I know we're on a little bit of a tight timeline. There's a couple of other areas of questions I want to kind of pick your brain on. Circling back to my history, back when I was an undergrad and kind of making this transition from architecture to psychology. I had an independent study course that was actually in psychology. And my professor encouraged me to correspond with Buckminster Fuller because I had some of these ideas for an undergraduate thesis and whatnot for that paper. And I'd read a number of his books, and I'm sure you know who Buckminster Fuller is. And I had an extremely difficult time. I understood a little bit of what I read. But anyway, you know, so I was like an I'm not worthy moment. It's like, oh, my gosh. I can't. I can't really write this guy. So I wrote him, and I was just dumbfounded. He wrote me back, and I still. I've kept. Kept that letter to this day. It was so, so cool. He had a. Like, you know, like, on a postage meter. His postage meter, I remember, on the envelope had a geodesic dome on it and stuff. Just really, really neat. So, years later, I was given a talk at Stanford. And while I was there, I requested to get access to Bucky's archive, which is kept at Stanford and part of their collection. And then I was invited to do an entry in the encyclopedia on Buckminster Fuller, which was really difficult to do. Like a. I forget how many words it was, but it's like, describe Buckminster Fuller. You know, like in five paragraphs, it's like, well, that's pretty much impossible. But anyway, having said all that, are there certain books or authors or architects or designers that have an impact on your thinking or your work or who might be role models or inspirations for you in the. The design and architectural world?

The number one architect who's influenced me is actually a contemporary meaning. Like, he's still practicing. His name is Jonathan Segal. He is not the actor, but he practices out of San Diego and he has developed this course and practice that is basically titled Architect as Developer.

Perfect.

And so he is one of the. He was on the vanguard for sure, starting this movement of architects. Because the thing about being an architect is the title. The title in itself, right. Was originally Master Builder. So, you know, you think about Michelangelo, Michael. Michelangelo. Michelangelo was the Renaissance man, right? I mean, he did, he did everything. Painter, a sculptor, an architect, a builder. It's Michelangelo. So that's, that's, that's the idea of. With Jonathan Seagal and what, what he's doing and what we've, we've tried to do. So we took his course, Architect as Developer. And he walks architects through about, like, here's how you can, you know, his goal, his. His number one goal was and still is, and he lives. It is. I don't want any more clients. Like, I'm the client. I. You know, he has very much an ego about him in that kind of way. Like, I know what's best. Much like Frank Lloyd Wright, when he would have his clients.

Right.

Frank Lloyd Wright would, like, dictate their, Their furniture.

Yeah.

To them. Yeah.

Yep.

Or you couldn't and you had to sign, like a legal document or he wouldn't be your architect. It was very extensive. So that's the number one architect that I have followed that I have. We have modeled what we do on him. And I. That's what I encourage people is like, architects complain so much and they go, you know, one of their big complaints is they complain that they're. They don't make enough money. And I go, because you're not taking on responsibility. Become a builder. Become a builder like me and charge 20 to 30% on 2 million. That's a lot of money. Yeah, Right. Whereas architects are charging between 5 and 10% and that their struggle is much harder and they want to spend so much more time on design. Whereas builders are like, get it done, get it done, get it done, get it done. Well, you know, to code and all that other good Stuff. Some other. Some other. Some other books, though, that have really changed my life in the last couple years is Marcus Aurelius's meditation.

Oh, yeah, Yeah.

I just can't recommend it enough to.

Hear, hear. Yep.

It's so important. And I think for me, like, a lot of the books I read, they end up dispelling myths. So for that one, it was, oh, being a stoic is talking less, you know, like, it's me and Chris getting a Skype call and just looking at each other. Nope, that's not it. Being a stoic is recognizing where you're at in the chess game of life.

Yeah.

And the metaphor, I just. I explained to people all the time, especially people that suffer from this victimhood culture that's so permeable all throughout society right now is, look, I'm. I'm with you, Gen Z. I'm with you, millennial. We weren't dealt a royal flush like the boomers. We didn't have the economy. We weren't riding this amazing wave after World War II of prosperity. But guess what? You're still playing the game. You're still on the chessboard. Let's say you're a pawn. The stoic approach to thinking about this is, I'm a pawn, but if I get. If I play my moves correctly and I get all the way to the other side of the board, I become a queen. Now I'm the most powerful piece on the chess board. Nice. Nice. Then there's two other books I that have really been influential lately. One is called Drive. And if you're a business owner and you have. If you're anybody who manages people, it will help you understand how to make those people the happiest you can by putting them in a flow state. And so where it's the kind of flows, you know, it's the kind of state where it's like whatever task I'm doing for that day, if I love doing that task, let's say I'm designing a house. I get there at work at 8am, I look up at 5pm and I go, where did the day go? That's the flow state. That's the dream.

Yeah.

And the last one is train your empathy. I think for me, it just dispelled the myth of. My first wife would tell me all the time, I have no. I have no empathy. What she was confusing empathy with was sympathy. It's that I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who don't want to help themselves. Like, I get the complaining. I will Empathize with you about the circumstances you're in. I can relate to you. That's empathy. But the sympathy part is the part I struggle with. But knowing so that I just think language gets misused so much that those, those are the reasons I recommend those kind of books and people. People to look up to.

That's great. That's good. Yeah, I've got. I just literally yesterday got Daniel Goleman's new book on like, optimization. And I know that he talks a lot about that, like, you know, flow state and those kinds of things. The late Macaulay Csikszentmihalyi who was at University of Chicago with his kind of conceptualization of that, of flow in the first place. And yeah, I think you kind of nailed that. I remember way back again that when I would be in kind of that zone of just freehanding a design of something, of a project, when I was just in that very nascent first couple of days, here's what the specs and requirements are for, for a course or something of, you know, a design course or whatever. And just really enjoyed that and could just, you know, spend all day there, you know, be like, I wouldn't eat, you know, it's just like everything else kind of shut down except my head and my hand and just really enjoyed that. So. So again, the, the other thing I want to just ask about before we wrap up. What are your opinions about how AI may be transforming architecture? Have you seen any glimmers of that in your work? Or do you have any thoughts or opinions about AI since it seems to be so prevalent in the news these days in a variety of other kinds of industries and domains. But how about for you with design and architecture?

Yeah, AI is inevitable. The analogy I try to make as I go. So there's a lot of panic going on from architects in the architecture everywhere.

You don't have to be an architect to be panicked about AI. Yeah, everybody's in a tizzy.

It's true. I mean, it's going to transform every, almost every industry, every profession. Anything, anything that has that is digital, like it's gonna happen. I mean, it just already is there like the predictive text already that was in Gmail is like a. Is a dumbed down version of that, right? Or the predictive text on your, on your phone. Siri is a dumbed down version. Like it's been here actually for about decade, right? And it's just going to keep accelerating and growing and all that good stuff. But the analogy I make is I go, hey, Architects. Remember when, Remember when we were just hand drafting in the blueprints, right? And you were so important as you were so important, weren't you, architect? Because you were the. You were the instrument. And then you panicked when AutoCAD came out and you thought, I'm not useful anymore. It's just going to do it from. And it's not the case. Right? What ended up happening? It ended up. So it's like this law of polarity again. So you thought, Mr. Architect, that you were going to become made much more obsolete with the ad, with the invention of AutoCAD, just from going from blueprints to hand drafting to AutoCAD. And what it ended up doing is it ended up freeing you up. The positive part about it was it ended up making it so you could spend more time iterating and designing. Okay. Then we, then we were with AutoCAD for like 20 years. Then we switched from AutoCAD to the software I mentioned earlier, where now, no, now we're modeling in three dimensions. So if I'm drawing a wall in a plan view and now it's extruding it in the z axis, the third dimension, and it's already creating other drawings for me without me even having to even do anything besides just draw my walls. You panicked again, didn't you? You thought, oh my gosh, I'm going to become obsolete again. Right. And all it did is it allowed you to do more of the stuff you want to do, which is the actual design work, and less drafting. I think the next evolution for AI in architecture is going to be that same sequence. We're going to see all this panic and what is. What my prediction is, what is going to end up happening is it's going to free us from that menial work that we don't want to do at the end. The very important work, right? Like code research, checking about, checking clearances for eight for accessibility standards, detailing, formatting, stuff like that. Can it take that stuff and do it very quickly and will allow us to do better architecture? Because we can spend more time on architecture. That's where I see it going.

Yeah, I remember I had the Wiley, I think was the publisher Architectural Graphic Standards, you know, just a very heavy book. It was, it was fairly sizable, but it also just. The pages were so dense and stuff. And I just. My fantasy would be if I was still in architecture, it'd be like, I design whatever it was, however it was, however I want to do it. And then I could just like, you know, tell some app to say okay. Make this fit all the standards for ADA and, you know, like, you know, just electrical or the code for this county or whatever. So that's great. Well, hey, listen, I know we're bumping up against time. You've got a busy day going on. What are some of the best ways for listeners to learn more about you, your work, to see your portfolio, to get on your listen to your podcast, things like that? Lance?

Yeah, if they want to keep up with the architecture work, the building work, the development work, they can go to f9productions.com Sign up for our newsletter. We put out a newsletter every month. If they want to follow up on and catch up on the show, I always recommend. And the show will work for anybody who wants to start any kind of business, honestly, because we show there's so many just fundamental business ideas and tips and tricks and things that we talk about. I recommend starting at episode zero. You can go to insidethefirmpodcast.com for that. If you want to get in touch with me personally, I actually welcome anybody to link in with me. If they go to LinkedIn.com and they type in Lance, L A, N, C E, last name Cyco, C A, Y, K, O, I will link in with you.

All right, good. And I'll make sure folks are listening to this in their car or on a run or whatever, that we'll get all those in the show notes as well, too, so. Well, Lance, I want to. I want to thank you for taking the time to be on. I know that you are just Mr. Busy with so many things. We could probably do a round two and we could catch up with some of the other stuff that you're up to. And it's. It's been great to get to know you better and talk things, design and architecture and kind of nerd out in that area. I'm really a big fan of your designs and your work in terms of, you know, like the stuff I've seen with doing background on you is just really impressive. And I'll put some of the links that I have found that in as well, too. So thank you so much, Lance. This has just been a treat and I look forward to keeping in touch.

Thank you so much for having me on the show. It was a pleasure,

Lynn. Living a Life in Full is a production of Stout Media, a subsidiary of Gordian Knot, LLC. Assistant producer Gracie Wong Music Dan O' Brien executive producer and host Dr. Chris Stout to learn more, stop by our website at lifeinfull for show notes and please recommend us to your friends and subscribe on your favorite platform. And as for the obligatory disclaimer, this podcast is for general information uses only and does not constitute the practice of psychology, medicine, nutrition or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical or psychological advice. No doctor patient relationship is formed. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I take conflicts of interest seriously. For all of my disclosures as well as show notes, please see livingalifeinfull.org podcast and my LinkedIn profile profile. Thanks and until next time.