AudioDeep Dive
Building an AI Empire in 60 Days
Comprehensive deep dive covering all 46 vision documents, the builder chic philosophy, and the ecosystem valuation framework (V5: $523M-$783M Y1).
~30 min
Building an AI Empire in 60 Days
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Transcript: Building an AI Empire in 60 Days
I want you to picture something.
I've got a document open in front of me right now.
The title is Vision Document Version 3.
And it's dated today, Saturday, January 31st, 2026.
And to be honest, it looks a little bit like the manifesto
of a madman.
It certainly has that feel at first glance.
I mean, it is incredibly dense.
We are not talking about some three-page pitch
deck you'd see from a college kid.
No, not at all.
We are looking at a collection of 46 separate files.
I'm scrolling through them here.
We have architectural blueprints for a huge campus
renovation out in South Dakota.
We've got these incredibly complex profit and loss statements
for all things, a cannabis software company.
And then there are political lobbying strategies
mapping out a path to the governor's mansion.
It's a lot.
And the premise behind all of it is the most staggering part.
That one guy, a man named Luke Alvarez,
supposedly built the entire infrastructure
of this whole conglomerate in 60 days.
60 days.
And usually, when I see a business plan that was written
in two months by one person, it's a sketch on a napkin.
It's all fluff.
It's just, I'm going to change the world.
Please give me money.
Exactly.
But what's so unnerving about the stack of documents
is the fidelity, the level of detail.
These aren't just ideas.
The software code is ostensibly written.
The legal entities are filed and registered in Wyoming.
The real estate is actually under contract.
That's exactly the skepticism I want to start with.
Because, look, anyone can fire up chat GPT
and tell it to write a generic business plan.
You can turn out thousands of words of text in seconds.
So is this actually a business?
Or is it just a hallucination generated
by a large language model?
And that is the absolute core question
of our deep dive today.
Alvarez calls this the 60-day empire.
He claims he has used artificial intelligence
to compress literally 10 years of economic development
into just two months.
A decade into two months.
A decade.
But to answer your question, is it real?
We have to look at how he says he built it.
Because he isn't just asking chat GPT
to write me a business plan.
No.
He is running a very specific and very technical stack
of autonomous agents.
Welcome to the deep dive.
Today, we are going to be dissecting the Black Hills
Consortium.
We are going to try and figure out if artificial intelligence
can actually save dying small towns.
Or if this is all just a digital mirage
out in the South Dakota badlands.
It's a fascinating case study in what people are calling
the AI multiplier.
And whether this specific project the BHC succeeds or fails,
the fact that these documents even exist changes the rules.
That this much infrastructure could be planned
and built this fast, it changes everything about business.
So OK, let's start with the human element first, just briefly.
So we get a sense of who we're dealing with.
Luke Alvarez, what's his story?
Well, the bio and document 10 is interesting.
He's a legal immigrant from Paraguay.
That's the starting point.
He came to the US, he built a life.
For years, he was actually a van life influencer.
You know, one of his people on social media
traveling the country, he traveled something like 40,000 miles.
Huh, which usually implies a certain kind of bohemian care
free attitude, not exactly a building empire in 60 days kind
of person.
Usually, yes.
But here's the twist.
He's also a former employee of the tech unicorn canvas.
The company's also known as Instructure.
So he has this deep enterprise software DNA.
He understands that world.
OK, that's a different angle.
And maybe the most important piece of the puzzle
for this specific project is that he builds custom homes.
He has, personally, with his own hands, built three of them.
Wow.
OK, that is a weird Venn diagram.
Enterprise software, van life influencer, and general contractor.
It is, but it explains these documents perfectly.
He has put $1.8 million of his own money into this.
His own money?
That's the first thing that jumps out.
He is not looking for handout to get started.
He has already poured the concrete, both literally
and figuratively.
All right, let's get into the mechanics here.
Yeah.
This first part of our discussion, let's
call it the execution velocity.
Because this claim of 11 companies in 60 days is just
it's wild.
It is.
Document 45 is titled execution velocity.
And in it, he claims to have the equivalent of 500 employees
working for him for free.
Now, I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, come on.
That has to be a metaphor, right?
He doesn't actually have 500 AI agents running simultaneously.
It's a bit of both.
It's a metaphor, but it's also technically sort of true.
He is referring to a concept called asynchronous
agentic workflows.
OK, break that down.
Think about it like this.
When you are I use chat GPT, it's a linear conversation.
It's a chat.
You ask a question.
It gives an answer.
You stop.
It stops.
Right.
It's like a ping pong match back and forth.
Exactly.
But Alvarez is using more advanced tools like Cloud projects
and cursor.
And he's using them in a loop.
He's not just chatting.
He's assigning a role to the AI.
So what does that look like in practice?
For example, he'll upload the entire South Dakota state legal
cund regarding LLC formation into Claude's context window.
That's thousands of pages of dense legal text.
Right.
Then he prompts it.
You are the general counsel for my new venture.
Your entire knowledge base is the legal code I've just
provided.
Draft an operating agreement that maximizes asset protection
based only on these uploaded statutes.
So he is treating the AI's context window
as the lawyer's entire brain.
He's defining its world.
Precisely.
And he does this in parallel.
This is where the 500 employees thing comes from.
While he is sleeping, he has one instance of Claude acting
as a curriculum designer, drafting lesson plans for the school.
He has another instance acting as the CFO,
reconciling the budget against projected tax
revenues for a small town.
And what about the software?
He claims to have working code.
That's where cursor comes in.
And we should probably define that for anyone who
is in a developer.
Please do.
I keep hearing this name pop up more and more in tech circles.
It's really crucial to understanding
how this is possible.
Cursor is what's called a fork of VS code.
That's the standard coding environment.
The tech standarder that millions of developers use every day.
But cursor has AI baked into its core.
So you're not just asking an AI to write code in a chat window
and then copying and pasting it?
Not at all.
It's integrated.
Alvarez can highlight a block of his existing code
and just type a command in plain English.
Like, refactor this function to connect to the straight API
and handle payment processing.
And the AI doesn't just write new code.
It edits the existing code.
It checks for errors.
It understands the context of the entire project.
So Alvarez isn't acting as the coder, line by line.
He's acting as the product manager or the architect.
Exactly.
He's the conductor of an orchestra of AI's.
And that gets us to the 80% multiplier
he talks about in the manifesto.
Right, the core philosophy.
Yeah.
The idea is that AI cannot do 100% of the work.
It's not magic.
It can't shake a potential partner's hand.
It can't sign a physical lease on a building.
And it sometimes makes weird logic errors
that a human has to catch.
Famous hallucination.
Exactly.
But it can do 80% of the grunt work.
The boilerplate legal text, the basic code syntax,
the first drafts of marketing copy.
And if AI does 80% of the work for you,
then a single human can move five times faster.
So instead of hiring a general counsel
to draft operating agreements, which might cost what?
$50,000 and take three months of back and forth.
He does it in a single afternoon
with his cloud subscription for $20 a month.
And according to these documents, in 60 days,
he didn't just write pitch decks.
He created the legal entities.
He drafted all the operating agreements.
He build working software.
And he secured a 15 acre physical campus.
That is just wild.
Because if you lay that timeline
next to a traditional startup.
A traditional startup, especially one
trying to build a complex ecosystem like this
with hardware, software, and real estate,
you're talking four to eight years
to get to where BHC is on paper today.
Eight years.
You'd be lucky to have a minimum viable product
and MVP in 12 months.
Maybe you hit a million in annual return revenue
in three years if you're a breakout success.
But Alvarez claims that by using these AI agents,
which as he points out run 24, seven,
they don't need benefits, they don't sleep,
he has collapsed that entire timeline.
And this feeds directly into what the documents call
his no-permission philosophy.
I found this part really refreshing,
but also, yeah, a little bit aggressive.
It's very aggressive.
Usually when you hear about rural economic development,
the story is always about grants,
city council meetings, waiting for federal funding.
Which can take years.
And it implies that you need someone else's approval,
someone else's check before you can even start building.
Exactly.
But Alvarez's line, and I'm quoting from document 12 here,
is, I don't need your permission.
I'm asking how much you want to participate.
That is such a key distinction.
The pitch deck to the small towns explicitly says
they are not waiting for government grants.
Grants take three years.
BHC moves immediately.
And this is where his weird background
gives him a huge advantage.
The construction background.
It's a massive advantage.
Unlike your typical Silicon Valley founder
who, you know, might struggle to hang a picture frame,
Alvarez has personally built three custom homes.
He understands construction.
He understands local permitting,
or this is probably more important.
He understands where you don't need permits.
He knows the loop holes.
Can you give me an example of that from the documents?
Sure.
Take the campus renovation.
It's a 60 by 40-foot building that needs a major overhaul.
Because he knows the local codes in Custer, South Dakota,
he knows exactly what work he can do
himself under a certain dollar amount
versus what requires a licensed specialist, like an electrician.
So he avoids the biggest bottleneck in any construction
project, which is the general contractor.
He doesn't need to hire a GC to tell him the timeline
or the budget.
He is the general contractor.
He can manage the project himself,
saving months and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So you have the digital speed of AI combined
with the physical know-how of a builder.
That is, that's a dangerous combination in a good way.
It's a full-stack skill set.
He can operate in the world of bits and the world of atoms.
OK, so he's got the speed.
He can execute incredibly fast.
But speed doesn't matter if you're just driving full speed
into a brick wall.
Right.
Let's look at the actual plan.
Document 04 is titled The Flywheel.
Because this isn't just a random collection
of 11 businesses.
They're all designed to feed each other.
It is a closed loop ecosystem.
The guiding principle seems to be zero waste.
Every single asset has to generate revenue.
But you can't start with the mission-driven stuff.
You have to start with the cash engine.
You need money to fund the vision.
And that is Entity Hashtag 2 on the list.
Grow-wise.
Grow-wise.
It's a sauce platform software as a service built specifically
for cannabis compliance.
Now, that seems like a left turn.
Why cannabis?
And why a software company?
That feels a long way from saving rural America.
It does at first, but it's actually
a very shrewd strategic move to fill a gap in the market.
Document 23 is a deep competitive analysis.
And it focuses on a major competitor called Duchy.
I've heard of them.
They were a huge deal a few years ago.
They were the darling of the cannabis tech industry.
They raised nearly $700 million in venture capital.
But then the market turned.
And according to this analysis, Duchy lost 89% of its value.
A classic tech bubble burst.
A spectacular one.
And what happens when a company like that implodes?
The market is wounded.
Service levels drop.
Customers get angry.
But the need for the product doesn't go away.
Especially not with compliance software.
Exactly.
The demand for compliance software in the cannabis industry
is legally mandated.
You literally cannot run a dispensary
without tracking every single gram from seed to sale.
So Alvarez sees this huge wounded market
with a legally required product need.
It's a perfect opening.
And he didn't just guess that there were customers out there.
He brought the receipts so to speak.
This is another great example of the AI efficiency at work.
He used autonomous agents to scrape public government data
business licenses, state cannabis board records,
and he built his own CRM, a customer relationship manager.
How many leads did he get?
The document says 27,656 qualified cannabis business
leads across the country.
That is a massive pre-built sales database.
A huge one.
And the math in the financial projections
is really compelling.
He estimates that even at a very conservative 5% close rate.
Which is pretty low for a highly targeted list like that.
Very low.
But even at just 5%, this one entity
grow wise is projected to generate $10.4 million
in annual recurring revenue.
Wow.
OK.
So that one piece of software, if it works,
basically funds the entire rest of the ambitious world
saving project.
That's it exactly.
It fends on profits.
It funds the school.
It funds the real estate acquisitions.
Grow wise is the engine.
Without it, the rest is just a nice idea.
It's a charity with grow wise.
It's a self-sustaining empire.
But he isn't just building software in a silo.
He's building a story, a narrative around the whole thing.
Let's talk about the media arm.
This is where things get really meta and interesting for me.
This is Entity Hashtag 6, which is called the session,
an Entity Hashtag 11, which is called the cult.
OK, the cult.
That's a little ominous, isn't it?
It is.
Yeah.
The document clarifies that it's short for cultivation.
It's their planned annual convention.
But the branding is absolutely intentional.
He wants to build a cult-like following.
Tribe.
A tribe.
Yeah.
The session is the top of that funnel.
It's a podcast and media network
that is designed to document the entire build process
of the Black Hills Consortium in real time, which
is brilliant because by documenting
the building of the company, the company
becomes the content.
And that content does the marketing for you.
It attracts investors who want to be part of the story.
It attracts talent who want to move to South Dakota
and join the mission.
And it attracts customers for all the other businesses.
And then you funnel all of that attention into the big event.
Into the cult convention.
The business plan for it shows ticket tiers
ranging from $500 for a general pass up to $2,500
for a VIP experience.
It's a high ticket event designed
to be another major revenue stream
and bring capital directly into the ecosystem.
OK, so we've got the money maker, which is grow wise,
and the megaphone, which is the session.
But what's the actual mission?
What's the point of all this?
Why is he doing this in Custer, South Dakota?
And that brings us to the real heart of the project.
This is Entity Hashtag 3, the seed foundation,
and Entity Hashtag 4, the seed academy.
This is where the whole saving rural America promise
comes into play.
So what's the plan there?
What are these entities actually do?
The seed foundation is set up as a 501C3 non-profit.
Its primary goal is to provide starling internet
to every single home in their partner town.
Every home for free.
Yeah.
That is a massive undertaking for these rural areas
where internet can be terrible.
It's essential infrastructure.
You can't have a tech renaissance with dial-up speeds.
But they don't stop there.
They also provide what they call the student package.
The student package.
Every student in the local school system
gets a new laptop, a full business suit,
and access to a proprietary AI curriculum.
A lot of a suit.
Like a tailored business suit for a high school kid.
Yeah.
The document says it's about dignity, professionalism,
and preparing them for the pitch.
It signals to these kids that they aren't just students
in a forgotten small town.
They are future founders, future executives.
That's a powerful message.
And the curriculum isn't just a playlist
of random YouTube videos.
This is where his background at Canvas comes in.
He's an alumnus of the company
that built one of the world's biggest learning management
systems.
He is using their platform to deploy this curriculum.
He knows the ed tech space inside and out.
So the kids get the training, the internet,
and the gear to look the part.
What about the adults who are already in the workforce?
That's seed academy.
It's the for-profit side of the education wing.
It offers paid AI courses and corporate training
programs for adults.
The idea is to upskill the entire population,
not just the next generation.
And all of this is anchored to a physical place, right?
This isn't just happening in the cloud.
No, it's very tangible, very real world.
Entity hashtag 10 is the Grow Campus.
It's a 15-acre headquarters in Custer.
And on that campus, you have Entity hashtag 7, which
is the OP.
The OP, what's that?
It's a cafe and merchandise store.
But I saw you noticed a detail about it that you loved.
I did, the tourist revenue model.
It's so simple, but so smart.
It's brilliant, isn't it?
Custer is a huge tourist town.
People come from all over for the black hills,
for crazy horse, for Mount Rushmore.
Right, millions of people.
So the tourists come to the campus cafe.
They buy coffee.
They buy a hoodie with the BHC logo.
That external revenue then pays for all the employee perks.
So the staff gets free coffee and free food every day.
And it's all subsidized by the tourists.
If that zero waste philosophy again,
the tourists pay for the overheads.
Zero waste.
The cafe makes money.
The employees are happy and well fed.
And the campus stays vibrant and full of energy.
It's a perfect little loop.
It's an incredibly intricate machine,
especially for something that was supposedly designed
in two months.
But as I was reading through the source material,
one name kept popping up over and over again,
a company called Rooster Teeth.
Ah, yes.
Document 42 is dedicated entirely
to what he calls the Rooster Teeth parallel.
For those listening who might not know,
Rooster Teeth was a pioneering,
massive internet media production company.
They made the show Red vs Blue.
They had a huge podcast network.
But they just shut down recently.
Right.
So why on earth is Alvarez modeling his empire
after a failed company?
That was my exact first thought.
Hey, great idea.
Let's copy the guys who just went out of business.
But you have to read the post-mortem in the document.
Alvarez argues that Rooster Teeth
didn't fail because the product or the community was bad.
They failed because the math broke.
Explain what that means, the math broke.
So Alvarez apparently grew up watching Rooster Teeth
while he was living in his van.
It was a huge inspiration for him.
And he deeply analyzed their business model.
They had everything BHC is trying to build,
a podcast network, merchandise, huge live events,
subscriptions, all the pieces were there.
But at their peak, Rooster Teeth had over 400 full-time employees.
400, that is an absolutely massive payroll.
Think about it, HR departments, middle management,
janitors, dozens of expensive video editors,
all living in a high-cost city like Austin, Texas.
For a niche media brand, it's just unsustainable.
So what's Alvarez's insight?
His insight is that he can build the exact same structure,
multiple spin-off brands, merch, events, the whole thing.
But he can replace that 400-person headcount with AI.
So he wants the creative output of a 400-person media empire,
but with the overhead of what, 50 people, 10?
Initially one person, himself.
Eventually, yeah, maybe 50, but absolutely not 400.
He literally calls it building a media empire
with the overhead of a single person.
And he plans to spin off other brands, just like they did.
Exactly.
Just like Rooster Teeth spun off successful side brands
like Achievement Hunter, BHC plans to spin off independent
podcasts and brands, but they'll be run with AI agents
doing the video editing, the scheduling,
the social media clip creation, all the labor-intensive stuff
that required hundreds of humans at Rooster Teeth.
It's just ruthless efficiency, and it allows him
to operate in a place like Custer South Dakota,
where the talent pool for niche media editors
might be a little small.
But the cost of living is incredibly low.
Exactly, which is a perfect transition for us.
Let's talk about the broader economic model,
because the stated goal here
isn't just about making Luke Alvarez rich.
It's about saving these small towns.
Right, and let's get specific.
Let's talk about Keystone South Dakota.
This is segment four in our breakdown,
the Keystone Pitch from Document 34.
Keystone is such a fascinating case study.
Now, Keystone is tiny.
The year-round population is around 250 people.
250, so I mean, everyone knows everyone's business.
And it's the gateway town to Mount Rushmore.
So in the summer, it is absolutely packed with tourists.
But in the winter, it's a ghost town.
It's a completely seasonal tourist dependent economy,
very fragile.
So what is BHC offering a town like Keystone?
The promise, the core of the pitch
is that BHC will bring 100 new high-paying tech jobs
to Keystone over the next 10 years.
100 jobs in a town of 250 people.
Yeah, do the math on that.
That represents 40% of the town's entire current population.
That is, that's not economic development.
That is a complete and total transformation.
And frankly, I have to ask, does the town even want that?
That's the big question, isn't it?
I mean, if I'm a local in Keystone,
my families live there for three generations,
I run a small gift shop selling souvenirs.
Do I really want 100 tech bros moving in,
driving up housing prices and demanding oat milk lattes?
That's not revitalization.
That sounds like gentrification on hyperspeed.
And that is the unspoken risk here.
The documents use this very clinical term for it.
They call it DNA transformation.
Wow.
Alvers, of course, frames it positively.
You're turning a seasonal ghost town
into a vibrant year-round economy.
You have new families moving in, kids filling up the schools again,
grocery stores that can stay open all winter.
I see the appeal.
But you are absolutely right.
It changes the fundamental culture of a place almost overnight.
And the pitch to the mayors of these towns is almost,
it's almost a threat.
The pitch is it costs you $0.
I am always, always suspicious when a salesman says zero cost.
Well, it costs zero tax dollars directly.
He isn't asking for a bond measure or a tax break.
But the cost is compliance.
The cost is control.
What does that mean?
He wants them to adopt his AI curriculum in their schools.
He wants them to clear any regulatory hurdles
for his campus construction.
The real cost is that the town essentially
becomes a laboratory for the Black Hills consortium.
They have to say yes.
So it's a trade-off.
They give up a little bit of autonomy in exchange
for what they hope is prosperity.
That's the deal on the table.
And Keystone is just the test case.
The plan outlines a whole seven-town network.
Right.
No.
It's Custer, Hill City, Hot Springs, and Keystone
in South Dakota.
Then it crosses the border into Wyoming
with Newcastle and Sundance.
And it uses Rapid City as the larger regional hub.
And what's the total projected economic impact
of this whole network?
The projections in the documents, which, to be fair,
are based on modeling from the Tulsa remote program,
are projecting a $924 million economic impact over 10 years.
Almost a billion dollars from a guy who
started this with a laptop and some AI agents.
And the Settle the West grants.
This is a key part of their model.
They looked at Tulsa remote, which famously paid people $10,000
to relocate to Tulsa.
Right.
That got a lot of pressure.
BHC plans to offer similar $10,000 grants
to skilled workers.
But here's their key differentiator.
They are adding the job ecosystem on top of the grant.
You aren't just moving to South Dakota
to keep your remote job with Google in California.
You're moving there to build within the BHC ecosystem.
So it's stickier.
You're not just a remote worker.
You're part of a community.
That's the idea.
Now, speaking of timing, there is a very, very specific date
that's mentioned over and over again in these documents.
July 4, 2026.
The political masterstroke.
This is segment five.
This is where it goes from an interesting business
plan to a grand strategy.
Why is this one date so important?
July 4, 2026 is the semi-quincentennial.
Though what?
Say that again.
Is semi-quincentennial?
I had to practice it before the show.
It's America's 250th birthday.
OK, a huge national milestone.
A massive one.
And where is the focal point of that national celebration
likely to be?
Where is the most iconic patriotic landmark in the country?
Mount Rushmore.
Mount Rushmore, which happens to be a 15-minute drive
from the BHC campus in Custer.
That's a convenient.
It's more than convenient.
It's the entire strategy.
According to the political memels,
former President Trump has already
been invited to Mount Rushmore for the event
by South Dakota's governor, Larry Rodin.
Fireworks are set to return to the monument
for the first time in years, the eyes of the world,
and certainly the eyes of the entire American media
will be on South Dakota.
And BHC just plans to draft off
that massive wave of attention.
It is a brilliant leverage play.
They are positioning themselves to be
the economic success story that's
happening right next door to the big patriotic celebration.
While the politicians are at the monument
talking about America's past,
BHC wants to be 15 minutes down the road
showing off America's future.
Come for the fireworks, stay for the AI revolution.
That's basically the pitch.
And the political connections laid out
in the documents are surprisingly deep.
For instance, Luke Elvarez, apparently grew up
in McLean, Virginia.
His mother still owns a home there.
McLean, for anyone who doesn't know,
that's basically the bedroom community
for the entire US political and intelligence establishment.
Exactly.
And the documents casually mentioned
that BHC uses this house as a free DC HQ
for their lobbying efforts.
I'm not.
While other non-profits are burning through donor money
on $500 a night hotels in DC,
the BHC team just stays at mom's house for free.
That is incredibly resourceful.
It feels very van life meets case tree.
It is.
But they have specific targets.
They're targeting Dusty Johnson,
who's expected to run for governor,
a guy named Emmett Reichstroffer
for his alignment on cannabis and liberty issues.
And there's this weird, but fascinating little detail.
What's that?
Apparently created a series of South Dakota coloring books
at some point.
And through a connection,
they ended up in the White House.
Wait, coloring books in the White House.
The memo says that JD Dance's family visited South Dakota,
got the books and brought them back to DC.
It's a tiny detail,
but in the world of politics,
those weird loose connections can sometimes matter a lot.
So they have a location, they have the date,
and they have the connections.
But they also have a very clever strategy
for dealing with Big Tech.
This is segment six,
the Elon Musk and Big Tech strategy.
This is where the narrative really flips outward.
Because right now, let's be honest,
Big Tech companies like Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta
are under constant attack.
Oh, yeah.
The narrative is all AIs taking our jobs.
AIs dangerous.
AI creates deep fakes.
Right.
And BHC offers them the perfect counter narrative
on a silver platter.
AI creates jobs in rural America.
It's a PR shield.
It's a shield in a halo.
Document 09 is a pitch deck specifically designed
for these companies.
The ask isn't for an equity investment.
It's for donations to the nonprofit wing
in exchange for naming rights.
So you'd have like the Anthropic Auditorium
on the campus.
Anthropic Auditorium,
the cursor conference room,
the Meta Cafe.
It lets them say, look,
why aren't destroying the economy?
We are helping to build a new one in Custer, South Dakota.
Exactly.
And for a company like Meadow,
what does that cost?
A few hundred thousand dollars, a million,
a surrounding error for them.
But it's a massive win for BHC,
both in terms of capital and legitimacy.
And then, of course, there's the Elon factor.
Of course.
Document 39 is titled,
Musk Ecosystem Partnerships.
BHC is very consciously positioning itself
as the ultimate Elon Musk case study.
How so?
We'll think about it.
They rely on Starlink for high-speed internet,
which is essential in rural South Dakota.
They use X for all their communication and marketing.
They have a Tesla Cybertruck on order for the campus.
They're even modeling their AI work
on what they expect from XAI.
They are living entirely within the Musk Ecosystem.
And the goal is to leverage that customer status
into a full-blown partnership.
The narrative he can pitch to Elon is irresistible.
I built 11 companies in 60 days using AI
and Starlink in a town of 2,000 people.
It is the ultimate proof that Musk's entire suite of products
works in the extreme real world.
And the specific play for July 4th.
Invite Elon.
He's a patriot.
He loves big American events.
If he's already going to be at Rushmore
for the celebration with Trump,
invite him to drive his Cybertruck 15 minutes down the road
and be the guest of honor at the campus ribbon cutting.
Wow, if Elon Musk shows up, that's game over.
Yeah.
The publicity from that alone would be worth tens
of millions of dollars.
That is at the bat.
But let's step back from the hype
and the grand strategy for a minute.
Let's look at the cold, hard financials.
Segment seven.
Is this thing actually viable?
Or is it a beautiful house of cards?
Document 22 breaks down the budget in painful detail.
The year one revenue target is $3.35 million.
OK, that's a real number.
And what's the burn rate?
How much are they spending?
The projected burn rate is about $1.05 million a month.
A million a month.
That is a steep, steep burn.
Where's all that money going?
A lot of it is CapEx, upfront capital expenditures.
Buying the land, renovating the buildings,
buying all the computer equipment, the Starlink dishes,
it's very capital intensive at the start,
which is why they are seeking a $30 to $50 million investment.
And if they get, say, $40 million, how long does that last them?
What's the runway?
With a $40 million raise, their financial model
show a four to six-year runway.
That is a very significant amount of time
to get the flywheel spinning and figure things out.
And they do have revenue coming in from day one,
at least theoretically.
In theory, yes.
Between the Grow Ice Sauce product, the cafe, the merchandise,
and speaking of merchandise, even the business cards
are designed to generate revenue.
OK, let's allow whenever this part.
How does a business card make money?
Explain this.
It's in Document 29.
It's called Business Card Revenue.
The cards aren't just standard paper rectangles.
They're die-cut, collectible, sort of like mini billboards.
And they sell sponsorship space on the back.
You cannot be serious.
I am completely serious.
The philosophy is, if you're going to hand out 10,000
business cards at a conference, that's 10,000 impressions.
An advertiser should pay for that.
It's that zero waste mentality taken
to its most extreme conclusion.
So he is selling ad space on the back of his own employees
business cards.
Yes.
And he plans to rent out the on-campus employee housing
on Airbnb when the staff is away on business.
And the campus gym will sell memberships
to the local community.
It's a floor's not ceilings approach, as he calls it.
Exactly.
He assumes every single asset must, at a bare minimum,
cover its own cost.
He refuses to have cost centers in his budget, only profit
centers.
It's like survival as the economics
applied to a tech conglomerate, which
makes perfect sense for a guy who lived in a van for years.
You don't waste an inch of space in a van.
You don't waste a single resource.
He's just scaling that exact mindset up
to an 11 company ecosystem.
But what about the risks?
I mean, document 25 must be a pretty heavy read.
It is.
The risks are very real.
And they're laid out pretty, honestly.
First and foremost, is execution risk.
Can you actually hire 60 qualified people
to move to Custer, South Dakota and then manage them effectively?
It is one thing to design a company with AI.
It is a completely different challenge
to manage humans.
Humans are messy.
Very messy.
The second major risk is market risk.
Will cannabis companies actually pay $500 a month
for the grow-wise software?
The market is there, but are they willing to pay?
What does the break even analysis say?
It says they only need a 4% close rate on their lead list
to break even.
4% is low, but sales is a tough game,
especially if there's an economic downturn.
True.
And then there's the big one, political risk.
The entire July 4th grand strategy
depends on specific politicians winning
their elections or staying in power.
If the political wins shift in South Dakota,
that whole strategy could completely collapse.
But they do have a mitigation strategy for that, right?
That's the floor's not ceilings idea again.
Yes.
This is a really crucial concept to understanding the model.
They are not trying to build one single massive unicorn
that can fail.
They are building the floor, the minimum viable revenue
for all 11 entities separately.
What does that mean in practice?
It means that if the cafe just makes enough money
to keep its lights on, that's fine.
If the podcast just breaks even on its costs, that's fine.
They let each entity run as an independent business.
So if one of them fails completely,
the rest of the ecosystem survives.
But if one of them booms, if one of them booms,
like if GrowWise really takes off and captures the market,
it becomes the engine that funds and accelerates everything else.
It's a portfolio approach to building a single organization.
It's built in diversification from day one.
I see it exactly.
So as we're sort of coming to the end of this deep dive,
we've looked at the speed, the flywheel,
the politics, the money.
What's the end game?
Where does this all lead?
The conclusion of the vision document brings us
to document 37, the AI pioneer program.
This is the called action part.
Yeah, they call it the frontier.
It is a program designed to pay other AI founders and builders
to relocate to the black hills.
They offer office space, housing, and this is the key part,
a full-time documentary crew to film their build process.
So the pitch is, come to our ecosystem, build your company,
and we'll make you famous while you're doing it.
Right.
Which, again, reinforces the content flywheel
we talked about earlier.
But the final assessment in the documents
is that this isn't just about building software.
It's about building infrastructure.
It's about real estate.
It's about legacy.
And there's that tagline they use, the quote.
A society grows great when old men plant trees
in whose shade they shall never sit.
BHC claims to be planting those seeds.
And look, whether you think Luke Alvarez is a visionary
or a madman or somewhere in between,
these documents prove one thing absolutely undeniably.
What's that?
The barrier to entry for building
massive organizational complexity
has completely and totally collapsed.
It's gone.
One person with the right prompts and the right personal drive
can now design an entire empire in a matter of weeks.
That was physically and financially impossible five years ago.
It really makes you question the pace of everything else
in the world, doesn't it?
It really does.
And that actually leads me to my final provocative thought
for you, the listener.
If a single person using AI can plan a 10-year,
nearly billion dollar economic shift for seven towns
in just 60 days, what is the excuse
for our traditional government committees
taking three years to approve a new parking lot?
It's a question we're all going to be asking
a lot more in the coming years, I think.
And here's a more personal question for you to mull over.
Would you do it?
Would you move to a town of 250 people
if you had high-speed starlink, a $10,000 grant
to help you get there, and a built-in community
of AI builders waiting for you?
Is the Silicon prairie or the Silicon Hills
finally a real possibility?
It's the frontier, and the frontier is always risky,
but it is never ever boring.
Check out the show notes.
We'll link a full breakdown of the 11 entities
so you can see the madness or the genius for yourself.
Thanks for having me, Deepo.
See you next time.