BHC Deep Dive

Okay, let's unpack this because today we are looking at something that honestly feels a little bit like a heist movie. A heist movie for economic development. That's a good way to put it. Right. I mean, imagine this scenario. You have small town in South Dakota. Population is what? Roughly 2,000 people. It's custer. It's a beautiful place. It's for a near-mount rush more at the monuments. But it is not exactly Silicon Valley. Far from it. It's the kind of place people drive through. Maybe they stop for gas or a burger. They don't usually stop to launch a tech empire. Exactly. But then you have this one guy who decides he is going to prove that artificial intelligence can save rural America. A pretty bold mission statement. Incredibly bold. And he doesn't do it by writing a white paper. He doesn't do it by lobbying Congress or starting something tank. Yeah. He does it by building the infrastructure for 11 functional companies in just 60 days. 60 days. That is the number that just jumped out at me immediately in the world of economic development. And you know, I've spent a lot of time looking at municipal growth plans. 60 days is usually how long it takes to schedule the first meeting. The first meeting to discuss the agenda. To discuss the agenda for the next meeting. It's it is a blink of an eye. It's ludicrous speed. Yeah. And we have to be really clear here. We aren't talking about like some pretty pitch decks. No, this isn't just an idea on a napkin. We are talking about actual legal entities, full compliance frameworks, functional software that's already been coded. Yeah. A 15 acre campus that's been secured. And a political strategy that targets a very specific, very high stakes date in American history. Yeah. We are looking at the black hills consortium. And the source material we have today is fascinating. It ranges from, you know, executive summaries and detailed revenue models to actual construction plans and political playbooks. It's a huge stack of documents. It's a blueprint for what they're calling. And I love this phrase, a society restart button. A society restart button. Yes. It's a huge claim. It is. And what's so compelling, I think, is that mission statement right at the very top of the executive summary. It just says, prove that AI can save small town America. That's it. And to really get this, we have to look at the protagonist because this isn't some faceless corporation or a government program. No, not at all. This is very much the vision of a man named Luke Alvarez. And you really have to understand his background because he is not your typical tech bro wearing a Patagonia vest in San Francisco. No, he's kind of the opposite of that in a lot of ways. He really is. So let's introduce Luke. He's a former employee of canvas in structure. Which if you have kids in school, you know canvas. It is the massive learning management system that is used pretty much everywhere. So he gets tech at scale. He understands software. He understands ed tech, which becomes really important later. But he's not just a software guy. That's the thing. Right. And that's the key differentiator here. He's also, well, he's a builder, like a literal hands-on builder. And his personal history is just it's wild. He was orphaned in Paraguay. He was raised in Virginia McLean actually, so right in the heart of the political machine, he has these deep connections there. Which is a huge strategic advantage we'll get into. Absolutely. But then he goes through this van life phase. He lived in a van with his family, drove something like 40,000 miles across the country. Which I mean, that just speaks to a massive amount of resourcefulness, right? Oh, totally. When you live in a van, you learn to fix things yourself because you have to. You learn how to optimize every single square inch of space. You learn to live with an efficiency that most people never have to think about. He's built tiny homes. The documents say he's built three custom homes himself, like literally swinging the hammer. Yeah. Not just hiring a contractor. He's the architect, the GC, and the labor. Exactly. And he's putting $1.8 million of his own capital into this. He calls it skin in the game. And that capital is so crucial because it allows him to just bypass all the traditional gatekeepers. He doesn't need a loan officer's permission to start. He doesn't need to beg a VC for a seed round. He just starts. He just goes. But before we get into the how and all the different companies, we really have to set the stakes here. Why is he doing this? Why now? The source material outlines these two competing narratives that are really battling for the soul of the economy right now. Yeah. And they're both very powerful stories. Let's start with the one we all hear every day. The doom narrative. The doom narrative. Exactly. It's in the headlines constantly. It says college is over. It's too expensive. The ROI isn't there anymore for a lot of kids. It says mass layoffs are coming because automation and AI are going to replace huge swabs of white color work. Right. The call center jobs, the data entry, and even more complex stuff now. And it points out that the median age of a new hire in the trades like plumbers and electricians is pushing 40. The young people aren't filling those roles. So you have this hollowing out. A total hollowing out. Basically, it says that rural America is getting left behind. The future is bleak. And these towns are in a death spiral. It's the story that says the robots are coming to take your job and leave your town to rot. It's a very pervasive, very depressing narrative. It is. But then Luke presents the hope narrative. And this, this is the core thesis of this entire deep dive. This is the big idea. This is the flip. This is the flip. The idea is what if AI doesn't take jobs? What if AI creates jobs by compressing the time it takes to build the very companies that hire people? That's the hook. What if the tool of destruction is actually the tool of creation? Precisely. It's a pivotal question. If you can compress say 10 years of corporate building of bureaucracy and fundraising and legal work into two months, do you suddenly run out of excuses for poverty in these small towns? If the barrier to entry at the cost, the time, the expertise drops that low. Does it unlock a golden age of entrepreneurship in places that have been forgotten? That's a huge question. So, all right, buckle up. We're going to unpack this whole thing. We're going to cover the 60-day build. This concept, he calls the AI 80 percent multiplier, the incredible flywheel economy he's designed with these 11 companies. And a political strategy centered on July 4, 2026 that is frankly audacious. Let's do it. Okay, let's start with section one, the thesis. Why small towns? Why Custer, South Dakota? And why this obsession was speed? Well, the data in the executive summary is just it's stark. It says 82 percent of rural counties in the US are losing population. 82 percent. That's a staggering number. It's a demographic death spiral. The young people leave for the cities to find work, which means the tax-based shrinks, which means the schools get worse and the infrastructure starts to crumble. And that just makes even more people leave. It's a vicious cycle. And the traditional solution has always been your economic development. Go get a grant. Which is broken. I mean, it's completely broken. You apply for a federal grant. You fill out 100 pages of paperwork. You wait two years to maybe get a sliver of what you ask for. Yeah. Or you try for a tip financing. Right. Tax increment financing. Which for anyone who doesn't know is just a bureaucratic maze. It requires public hearings, city council votes, environmental impact studies. It's designed to be slow. It creates this weight and sea culture where nothing ever actually gets done. And Luke's argument is that government moves at the pace of committees, but AI moves at the speed of light. You can't fight an exponential technology with a bureaucratic timeline. You can't. He offers a benchmark comparison in the notes that is really, really telling. He points to a company called PropertyMild. Okay. Great company. A huge success story in the property tech space. But it took them eight years and 28 million dollars to scale to a certain point eight years, 28 million. Okay. Luke's Black Hills Consortium by contrast built the infrastructure for 11 entities and 60 days with 1.8 million. The comparison is just it's not even in the same league. It's a different sport altogether. And again, I want to clarify for you listening what built means here because in Silicon Valley built often means I made a slide deck and I have a dream. Right. Or we have a landing page and we're collecting emails. Exactly. In this context, the sources are very, very specific. Built means the articles of incorporation are filed and legal. Compliance frameworks for things like HR and finance are done. Working software has actually been coded. A vehicle fleet has been purchased and a 15 acre campus has been secured. This isn't a plan. It's a deployed reality waiting for the on switch. And the reason he started in Custer, South Dakota is so strategic. He talks about this idea of baselines. Yes. This is a brilliant observation on his part. If you start a tech company in San Francisco or Austin, you are nobody. You are just another startup in a sea of thousands of startups all screaming for attention and talent. You are dropping the ocean. Exactly. But if you start a tech company in Custer population 2000, you are instantly the fastest growing software company in town. Why? Because the baseline is zero. There is no other software company. There isn't one. You're the fastest growing media company. You're the most innovative real estate developer. You control the narrative immediately because there is no competition for that narrative. You become the big fish and a small pond instantly. And that gives you leverage. It gives you attention from the mayor, from the governor. Tremendous leverage. Everyone wants to be associated with the one big success story. Okay. So he's moving its incredible speed. But how? I mean, how does one person do the work of 100? This brings us to section two of our outline. The AI 80 percent multiplier. This is the secret sauce of the whole operation. This is the engine under the hood. This part is fascinating because it totally refrains how we think about using AI in the workplace. The core philosophy Luke operates on is that AI cannot do 100 percent of the work. Okay. That's an important caveat. It's critical. He's not an AI utopian who thinks it's magic. He's very clear in the docs. It hallucinates. It makes things up. It misses nuance. It doesn't understand the specific emotional context of a tough negotiation. It can't look a city council member in the eye. But and this is the big but. But it can do 80 percent. It can do the grunt work. It can do the research. The first draft, the data analysis, the code boilerplate. And the math he uses here is simple but powerful. If AI does 80 percent of the heavy lifting for you, the human is now five times faster. Exactly. You're not managing a project anymore. You're just editing and directing the final 20 percent. And he treats different AI models like their his corporate departments. This was a real aha moment for me reading through this. He doesn't just use AI broadly. He assigns specific roles. Break that down for us. What does that look like in practice? Okay. So take Claude the model for manthropic. In Luke's structure, Claude is a general council and his chief strategy officer. His lawyer and his strategist. Yeah. He uses it for drafting legal documents, analyzing contracts, and for long form strategic planning. Because Claude is exceptionally good at reasoning through large amounts of text and maintaining context. Work that would usually cost 1000 maybe tens of thousands in legal fees. Tens of thousands. And it would take weeks of waiting for a law firm to get back to you. He gets a first draft in minutes. Then he uses a tool called cursor, which is an AI native code editor as his entire engineering department. So that's what's building the software products. That's what builds the sauce platform, the websites, everything. And then he uses chat GPT for the quicker stuff. Yeah. Research and drafting, brainstorming. Yeah. It's essentially his admin staff and his research interns. So he is one man, but he has a C suite of AI is working for him 24, 7. That's the model. But the vision isn't just for him to do this. He's not trying to be a solo Superman. He wants to clone himself essentially. Right. He calls it scaling the human. It's not about replacing humans is about making them more powerful. And the goal is to train every single employee from day one to use AI in exactly this way. Whether you are in marketing sales or facilities management, you are trained to offload 80% of your job to an AI assistant. Everyone gets a C suite of AI's everyone. And the math he lays out is just staggering. If you have a 60% team and they're all trained to let AI handle that 80% of the groundwork, that team has the output of a 300 person organization. That explains it. That's how they plan to operate 11 different entities with a target head count of only 60 to 70 people. Yes. It sounds completely impossible until you understand the 5x multiplier. And there are specific examples of this in the documents. The campus design one really stood out to me as a concrete, easy to understand example of this speed. Oh, the architecture example. Yes, that's a perfect one. Yeah. So typically if you want to design a 15 acre campus, what do you do? You go out, you hire a big architecture firm. You pay them 50 grand, maybe a hundred grand, just as a retainer to get started. Right. And then you wait six months for the first set of plans. And then you argue about the revisions for another three months. Then you wait for the engineering specs. It's a very long, very expensive process. Right. Luke's method. He used AI to draft the layouts to engineer the material specs and to prepare the bid documents that he can send out to contractors. How long did it take him? Days. And the cost was zero dollars. He is effectively acting as the architect and he's using the AI as his drafting team. And that speed, that's the whole game. It allows him to be ready to take biggs the very day that his funding arrives. He isn't waiting for permission to build. He's ready to break ground. He completely removes the waiting for experts bottleneck from the process. It's incredibly empowering, but you can also see how it's it's deeply disruptive to a lot of traditional industries. Highly disruptive architects, lawyers, consultants. But for a town like Custer, it's a lifeline. They can't afford the big firms in the long waits. Okay, so that's the how. That's the engine. Now let's talk about the what? Because he didn't just build one company. He built this flywheel of 11 entities and the guiding principle here. It's written everywhere in the docs is zero waste. This is where you see the van life efficiency mindset applied to an entire economy. It's an ecosystem where every single dollar is designed to stay inside the system. It's vertical integration on steroids. Yeah, usually a startup is told to focus, right? Do one thing and do it well. The lean startup model. Exactly. Lucas saying no to save the town. We have to own the whole stack. We have to own the problem from end to end. Let's walk through the key entities because they all feed each other in this really elegant way. It all starts with the cash engine. This is the one that makes the money to fuel everything else. It's entity number two. Grow wise. Grow wise. So this is a sauce product software as a service. Correct. Specifically, it's a compliance and operations platform for the cannabis industry. Think of it like a Salesforce or project management tool, but built specifically for the unique needs of dispensaries. Why cannabis? That seems like a random left turn. It's purely data driven. It's not about passion for the industry. The source material shows they scraped government databases and built a CRM, a customer relationship management list of 27,656 licensed cannabis businesses in the US. 27,000 leads from day one. From day zero, it's a massive underserved market with incredibly heavy compliance needs and it's a messy market. Government regulations are a patchwork. They change constantly. That is a perfect problem for software to solve. So what's a business model? Very simple. A $1,500 one-time onboarding fee, and then $500 a month per location. And the numbers they project are pretty wild. If they get just a 5% market share of those leads, they've already identified. That's over $10 million in annual recurring revenue. Yeah. ARR and a time margin revenue. But here's the flywheel part. Grow wise is a for-profit company, but it's not just about making money for shareholders. No. This is where it gets interesting. Grow wise is structured to donate 7% of its equity directly to the seed lags accelerator, which is another entity we'll get to. And the profits, the actual cash flow from the software, are used to fund the real estate acquisitions for the campus. Wait, so the cannabis software literally pays for the physical buildings? The high marketer and scalable software business subsidizes the capital intensive infrastructure business. Exactly. That's genius. Which brings us to the moat. How do you defend this? That's entity number six. The session media. This is just brilliant strategic thinking. If you're going to build this thing in public, which he is, you absolutely have to control the story. Or someone else will. Someone else will. And they'll get it wrong. So the session media is a podcast, a YouTube channel, and a documentary crew that is filming everything from day one. The working title of the documentary is can AI save America? That's great title. And the strategy is detailed right there in the docs. It says control the narrative so competitors can copy the structure, but not the story. Exactly. Anyone with money can try to copy this. You can build a campus. You can hire developers. But you can't be the orphan from Paraguay who used AI to save a dying town. If Luke has already claimed that narrative lane, the story is the defensive moat. And it generates revenue too. Oh yeah. They project about $700,000 in revenue just from sponsorships, speaking a derences, and content licensing. It's another profit center. Okay. So we have software making money. We have media making fame. Now let's talk about the culture. Entity number seven, the OP. The OP, which is short for the operation, is the on-campus cafe and merch hub. Again, the economics are fascinating. It operates on that no waste principle. So how does that work for a coffee shop? Well, tourists come to custer all the time to see the black hills. They're going to be curious about this new high-tech campus. They'll stop by the OP. They buy a hoodie. They buy a coffee. I'm margin items. Very high margin. The profit from that tourist spending pays for the employees uniforms, which is the same merch the tourists are buying. And it pays for their daily meals from the cafe. So the employee culture, the cool swag, the free lunch every day, it's completely subsidized by tourism. Correct. The company isn't paying for swag or perks. The tourists are. It turns what is normally a cost center for a tech company, employee perks, into a profit center. That is just incredibly clever. It's finding value where no one else is even looking. It's the van life mindset. Use everything, waste nothing. And then there's the venue itself, the physical space. Entity number 10, the grow campus. 15 acres. And it's designed to be more than just offices. It has a professional podcast studio, a sports complex with a basketball court in a skate park, a full theater. And again, efficiency is key. Absolute efficiency. When the employees aren't using the basketball court in the evening, it's rented out to local leagues. When the podcast studio is empty, it's rented to other startups or content creators. Every single asset generates revenue when it's not being used internally. There's no dead space. No downtime on the asset. And finally, there's the entity that really ties all the branding together. It's got a provocative name. Entity number 11, the cult E. I saw that and I thought, okay, that's edgy. It is, but it stands for cultivation. Right. It's a genius double entendre. It references cannabis cultivation from grow wise, talent cultivation from their education mission, and obviously the edgy join the cult branding that they're going to put on the hoodies. And what is it exactly? It's an annual convention, a big event. And the economics here are the absolute best example of the flywheel in action. Because the black hills consortium owns the venue, which is the grow campus. And they own the catering, which is the OP. And they own all the media and promotion, which is the session. So the hard costs to host a major convention are almost zero. They own the whole supply chain for the event. The entire thing. So the ticket sales and sponsorships are almost pure profit. Wow. What are they projecting for that? They project $350,000 in revenue for the very first year with $250,000 of that being pure profit. That's an insane margin for a first year event. It is because there are no vendors to pay. It's a self-contained economy, a perfect loop. But, you know, none of this matters if you can't physically build the place. And this is where Luke's unique background gets really, really interesting. We talked about him being a builder, but section four of our outline really highlights this as the construction advantage. This is where the whole van life and tiny home thing stops being a quirky biographical detail and starts being a massive competitive advantage. Luke isn't just a tech CEO who sits in an office and looks at spreadsheets. As we said, he's personally built three custom homes. He understands non-uniform architecture. What does that mean exactly? Non-uniform architecture. It means he avoids the standard, expensive cookie cutter methods that require big, expensive architecture farms. He designs unique but cost-effective structures using materials he can source himself. He's a practitioner. He understands how things are actually put together, so he can design for efficiency and speed, not just for aesthetics. He bypasses the middleman. And there's a very specific asset mentioned the docs that's key to their speed, the 60 by 40 building. This is a critical detail. This is how he gets around the biggest bottleneck in any construction project. Which is the government permitting. There is already a 60 foot by 40 foot metal building on the campus property, a simple structure. And the crucial detail in the legal notes is that in that county remodeling the interior of an existing structure like that requires no building permits. That is huge. It's everything. In the world of construction, permitting is the death of speed. It can take six months, a year, just to get permission from the county to start hammering nails. And he just gets to skip that whole step. He creates a situation where he is ready to take bids from contractors the very day the funds arrive. And he can have that building occupied and filled with employees in months, not years. He effectively removes the local government from the critical path of his timeline. He controls his own destiny. That's a recurring theme here. It is. And he's also partnered with an influencer builder, a group called Aria Tech Create 208. I've seen their stuff on YouTube. They do these amazing custom barned aminiums. Right. So instead of hiring a traditional slow government contractor who might take two years just for a feasibility study, he's working with a nimble media savvy custom builder who moves fast and creates a product that looks incredible on social media. It's a construction plan and a PR plan all in one. Okay, so we have the buildings, we have the software, we have the money engine. But what about the people? You can't save a town without the people. Section five covers what they call the human element. And this is where the mission really shifts from just business to something more like social engineering. And it all centers on entity number three, the seed foundation. Their tagline is plant the future very appropriate. The seed foundations core mission is to provide a free K through 12 AI curriculum and financial literacy training to schools in their partner towns. But it's not just about giving them software, they are tackling the infrastructure problem head on in what way? They are providing Starlink internet to every single home in their partner towns for free. Wow, they're just becoming the ISP. Because the government has failed to provide reliable broadband in these areas for decades. Exactly. Decades of promises and the problem never gets solved. BHC just steps in and says fine, we'll just buy everyone's Starlink problem solved next week. But the part of this that really blew my mind was the student package. Oh yeah, tell us about that. So just imagine you are a 15-year-old kid in rural South Dakota. Your town is shrinking. The opportunities feel limited. You join this program through your school and you get the exact same onboarding package as a brand new BHC employee. The same as a software engineer they had hired from out of state. The exact same. You get a custom fitted suit. They have a partnership with the income color brand. You get a new laptop. You get a power bank all the gear. And you get the same AI training that the executives get. They are treating 10th graders like new hires at a top tier tech firm. The message that sends to a kid in a rural town. It's so powerful. It says you are a professional. You are valuable. You are part of the future right here right now. It changes their entire identity and their perception of what's possible for them. And the hiring philosophy matches that completely. Luke's notes say explicitly. We don't hire for degrees. We hire for imagination. Which is easy to say but he has this other concept that proves he means it. He calls it the poach me goal. The poach me goal. That sounds counterproductive. It sounds insane right. He wants venture capitalists and big tech recruiters to visit the campus and steal his employees and interns. Wait, why on earth would he want to lose his best staff? Because it proves the model works. It's the ultimate validation. If a VC from Silicon Valley comes to Custer South Dakota meets a 19 year old kid who is trained by the seed foundation and says, oh my god, I need to hire you right now for $150,000 that validates the entire educational pipeline. It becomes a mark of prestige to have been trained there. Exactly. It builds an alumni network that spreads the BHC DNA across the entire tech world. It's incredibly confident. He's not trying a hard talent. He's trying to create so much of it that it overflows. Speaking of VC's and investors, the way they handle fundraising is just as aggressive and unconventional. They call it the reverse shark tank. I love this. This just flips the entire power dynamic of fundraising on its head. Usually founders go to Sandhill Road, had in hand and they beg for money. Right. You have 10 minutes to prove you're worthy. Luke flips it completely. Investors have to apply to visit the campus. You have to apply to give them money. You have to apply for the privilege of visiting. And if you're accepted, you get flown out for this curated three day tour. You get picked up in a fleet of new Broncos. You stay on the campus. The docs mentioned waking up to deer outside your window and eating James Beard level food. It's a full on hospitality experience. But there's a catch. There has to be. Oh, there's a huge catch. Before you are allowed to invest a single dollar of equity into the four profit side, you must do two things. First, you must appear on their podcast. The session. So they get free content and promotion from you. And second, you must make a significant personal donation to the seed foundation. So you have to pay to play. You have to donate to the nonprofit before you can invest in the four profit. You have to prove you're aligned with mission. It's a filter. It weeds out the sharks who are just looking for a quick 10x return. If you aren't willing to donate to help the kids, you aren't getting a piece of the deal. That is a serious power move. But this whole project seems to be a series of power moves. It really is, which leads us to the biggest one of all. This is the grand finale of the strategy. Section six, the political moment. This is where the strategy goes from being about local economic development to playing on the national stage. They have identified a very specific date on the calendar. July 4, 2026. That is America's 250th birthday, the semi-quence or once in a lifetime national event. And where is a huge focus of that event going to be Mount Rushmore, which is just 60 miles down the road from Custer. And the governor of South Dakota, Larry Rodin, has already publicly invited Donald Trump to Mount Rushmore for a massive fireworks celebration that day. And regardless of your politics, whether you love Trump or hate him, the reality is that the eyes of the world and the entire national and international media apparatus will be laser-focused on South Dakota that week. And BHC positions itself as the, what else is happening story? The other story. Exactly. Every politician, every journalist is going to be there. They want a good story to tell. BHC becomes the feel-good economic miracle happening right next door. The strategy document explicitly says their approaches, addition to multiplication, not division and subtraction. They want to be the economic success story that politicians from both sides of the aisle want to take a photo with. They have specific political targets listed right there in the docks. Dusty Johnson, who's running for governor. Dusty needs a high-tech jobs and rural SD win for his campaign. It's a perfect fit. Emmett Ray Straffer, who's running for the house. Restroffer is a big cannabis advocate, which connects to Growwise, and he's got a strong anti-subcity free market stance, which fits BHC's no-government handouts perfectly. Even Kristi Noem is mentioned as a potential target if she returns to the state and needs a big reputation rebuilding win. And Luke has a Washington advantage too from his childhood. He grew up in McLean, Virginia. He's not a complete outsider to that world. He understands how DC works. His mother still has a home and falls church, Virginia, and the docks list this as a strategic asset. A free headquarters in DC. A free headquarters exactly. His team can go to DC to lobby, to meet with people with zero lodging costs. It's another one of those small, efficient advantages that add up. And there's this great little detail on the notes about coloring books. Yes, this is fantastic. Apparently a few years ago, Luke created these South Dakota coloring books for kids. And during a visit by JD Vance's family to the state, those coloring books made it into the hands of the second family's kids. So his work is literally already in the White House. It's these little connections, these little bits of strategic planning that make you realize, this isn't just a guy with a good idea in a garage. He's thinking 10 steps ahead. It's all strategic layering. He's layering the tech, the media, the construction, and the politics, all to peak and converge on that one specific date, July 4, 2026. Now speaking of big players, section seven covers the pitch to big tech. Because companies like Ampropic, OpenAI, and Meta, they are facing a bit of a PR backlash right now. They have a massive public relations problem. The dominant narrative right now is AI takes jobs. AI is coming for your livelihood. There's a lot of fear. And Luke offers them the perfect counter narrative. He offers them a shoolde. It's the ultimate case study for them. He can go to Sam Altman at OpenAI or Dario Emma Day at Ampropic and say, look, everyone in the New York Times says your product destroys jobs. I use your product to create 60 brand new, high-paying jobs in a town that had zero tech presence. AI saved America. It's the headline they are absolutely desperate for. They need that story more than he needs their money and he knows it. The ask in the documents is really for them to become partners in that story. He wants them to buy naming rights for the campus buildings. The Ampropic auditorium, the OpenAI conference center. Exactly. And you have to remember, these companies have marketing budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Combined, it's over $700 million. They are constantly looking for positive stories to tell. So Luke is asking for what is to them a tiny fraction of that budget. A tiny fraction in the form of a tax deductible donation or sponsorship. And in return, it buys them the good guy badge. It's a brilliant leverage of the current cultural anxiety around AI. So we have the plan, the tech, the politics, the funding strategy. But the ultimate question, the one that really matters in the long run is in section 8, the replication question. Is this just a one-off, a cool story about one guy in one town? Or can this actually save Appalachia? Can it save the rust belt? This is the big picture question. And they have an answer for it. They have a program called Settle the West, which is entity number nine. It offers $10,000 relocation grants to remote workers to move to these small towns. It's modeled after the hugely successful Tulsa remote program. Right. Which brought thousands of new, high-income people and a huge economic impact to Tulsa. A massive impact. But BHC wants to go even further than that. The goal isn't just custard. The documents take clearly. We are not just looking at a business plan. We are looking at a society restart button. They want to open source the consortium structure. So a town in West Virginia, Ohio could just copy this playbook. They could copy the 501c6 non-profit structure, the training curriculum, the media strategy, the whole flywheel concept. Luke keeps the sauce software proprietary. That's his revenue. But the how-to guide for saving your town is free for anyone to use. This leads to the real debate. Because the skeptical argument, the pushback will be, well, Luke is special. He's a unicorn. He has $1.8 million. He's a builder. He's an AI genius. You can't replicate him. And that's a fair criticism. He does have a unique skill set. But the counter argument, and I think this is the most profound point in this entire deep dive, is that the bottleneck is no longer money or unique expertise. What's the bottleneck now? There isn't one, besides will. If AI can do 80% of the administrative work, if it can write the grants for you, draw the architectural plans, file the legal documents, then the bottleneck is simply will. Do you have the will to start? It's about speed. It's about removing the excuses. The evidence is right there in the timeline. 60 days versus 10 years, $1.8 million versus tens of millions and consulting fees and government waste. The debate isn't, can we replicate Luke? The real debate is can AI move faster than local government? And the answer seems to be an overwhelming yes. It effectively removes the excuse of we don't have the expertise or we don't have the resources. Because the AI provides a huge chunk of both. Precisely. It democratizes the ability to build. This is, it's a lot to process. It's so ambitious. We have a founder who has verticalized an entire local economy education, housing, employment, media technology into a single self-sustaining flywheel. He's powered it by AI, allowing him and his team to operate at 5x normal human speed. And he's aiming for a national spotlight in 2026 to showcase it to the world. It is without a doubt the most ambitious and holistic rural development project I have ever seen. And the crazy thing is the foundational infrastructure is already built. This isn't a dream. It's done. It brings us back to that final thought. We started with the doom narrative. The idea that these places are doomed to fail. But after looking at this stack of papers, at this blueprint, it's hard not to feel a little bit of that hope narrative. It forces you to ask a different and maybe more uncomfortable question. And that question is, in a world where AI can build empires and weeks. Are we running out of excuses for leaving these towns behind? That's the question we have to answer. Thanks for listening to The Deep Dive. We'll see in the next one.