Now, if you have your own tv show you can get away with certain things like inviting the ceo of the company that sent you the fake check to explain it and thats what ive done. Thomas sponholtz is the ceo of unison, a very unusual buss that offers to coinvest in houses alongside the homeowner, the same way parents might help their child buy a house. Unison helps with the down payment and, in exchange, owns a piece of that house with you. If the house goes up in value, unison shares in the profits when you sell it. Thomas has years of experience in finance. Before running unison he was at black rock. He has several degrees in economics and apparently he wants to help you buy a e. Joined by Erin Griffith of the new york times, joe menn of reuters. Is it really just that simple, we go in on a house together . Thomas sponholtz it really is. Its essentially investing together in a house. Scott right, like parents would. I mean, hopefully my parents wouldnt then want a cut of, you know, the profits at the end. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldnt. But it is that simple. Weyou are going to contribute to the down payment, i can hold the house for, what, however long i want to, i can live in my own house for as long as i want . Thomas up to 30 years. Scott up towell, thats plenty of time. I then sell it. We sell it for more, you get the percentage that you put in plus a certain profit . Thomas correct. And simultaneously, or likewise, if the house declines in value we participate in the loss alongside of you. Erin griffith how many times have you done that so far . Thomas participated in the loss . Erin mmhm. Thomas or have we realized a loss . We participate in the loss of all houses that we purchased. How many times have we realized a loss, i dont know that number off the top of my head but scott but its happened . Thomas oh, definitely. We were actually doing this during the financial crisis and a lot of houses declined in value. Joe menn how long have you been at this and in how many markets . Thomas about 12 years and today were in 30 states. Scott this seems like such an obvious thing. Im surprised i hadnt heard of it before. Thomas its very obvious and, really, at the end of the day, thisthe Housing Market and the financing of a house should have been this way from the beginning because when you buy your first house we all know the pain of buying the first house when were putting all our hardearned cash into one investment. It would be a lot better if we had some diversification and then you can actually get some help buying the house and maybe keep some cash for a rainy day on the side so, going back to coinvesting, i would say it really is the way housing should have been from the beginning and, as you pointed out, it has been like this for a long time but it was just done by your parents or your rich uncle. And our goal is really to democratize the rich uncle so that everybody can afford to buy a house but in balance with their income or their life goals, rather than having to able to afford and thenget intthe house owns you. Not be so again, it really is the way it should have been from the beginning. Joe i guess one of the drawbacks is that you cant pass your house on to yki sc. Ott cif you own it thomas correct, so you have toyou have to live in the house, correct. You canthe kids, on the other hand, can then reapply for the same arrangement. Scott refinance. Tell me, do you have any trouble and i was teasing you about the junk mail but this actually is from you. But do you have any trouble convincing homeowners that, no, it really is that simple, and ill give you an analogy and that is solar city. We had the solar city ceo on years ago and he said, were having trouble because we go up to the front door, we say, heres what wed like to do. We wanna put free solar panels on your home. You dont pay anything. Well pull all the permits, well do all the construction, doesnt cost you a cent. And then were gonna cut your power bill in half. and they got the door slammed in their face because that cant be right. Buy is solar citys model. It is that simple. Thomas you know, the Business Model is very different than what people know and, for ats new. But whats unique here is that its a partnership and a Partnership Means that we unusual in business. Herhe se tiy typically, thats a business and a client and they dont losethey dont win or lose together, but in this case, because it is a partnership, and we go in together at the same time, if the house appreciates, we both win. If the house depreciates, we both lose. So theres no catch or no mystery behind it. It is really just a partnership but it is new and you have to explain that. Erin but how do you convince people that youll be around for the long haul because you are, kind of, you know, a little bit of an upstart. You said youve been doing this for 12 years but still i think when people are thinking about their house, theyre thinking about longterm and if they wanna do business with a startup, what happens if you guys sell or if theres a housing crash. True, yeah, i mean, im just curious. Like, how do you convince people, like, this is gonna be around for a long time and were not gonna screw you sometime . Thomas we receive no payments, right . So were not a lender. So we provide you cash today and then we participate in the changing value of the house alongside with you. And we dont realize a gain or loss before you decide to sell the house. So you dont need us in between the beginning so this might actually be one of the cases where thats a good event for perhaps the client. Obviously, thats not gonna be the case but you dont have that risk as a homeowner. Its a True Partnership and that is really, as i said, unusual as a Business Model. Joe i just want one question on the details. Do you have a straight amount of equity typically and then that equity goes up over time or is it money in lieu of equity . How does that work . Thomas im actually not quite im not understanding your question. Joe oh, so well, do you own a percentage of the house after you help with the down payment or is it just them agreeing to pay you something at a future date . Thomas oh, good question. So the actual arrangement is that we have a right to own a piece of the house. We dont scott you have a lien on the house. Thomas yeah, webut its not a loan, right . Theres no note or loan attached to the house but theres a lien. So that means that in the beginning we provide you with a cash payment and then on a preagreed percentage ownership of the change in value of the house, 10, 20, 30 years passes scott thomas, are you repackaging this debt thomas we have a relationship with the homeowner, each homeowner partner, for the duration of the time. And selling it off or ar scott you n pools and we scott and wheres your initial funding coming from . Wheres the capital coming from . Thomas so thats capital for the company. We have shareholders like other people have shareholders, and then we have funds and in those funds are very longterm patient institutional capital. Scott and i wanna squeeze in one more question before we go to break and that is, would you helping me, i mean, outside of Silicon Valley maybe, put me in a house i couldnt afford . In other words, if i could double my down payment, i could buy a much bigger house, a house i shouldnt have been in in the first place. Thomas we are exactly the inverse of that example. Scott in what way . Thomas in what way. First of all, you have to still get a mortgage to buy a house. The lender will have to approve you on your debt to income ratio as that industry calls it. In other words, do you make enough money to pay for the mortgage . So even if some poor player wanted to do what you illustrate, they couldnt because you need a mortgage. Likewise, it would make no sense for us to help you buy us togher si only have your best interest in mind and you have my for me to veerest in mind. Sens you couldnt afford. Scott if you dont have a rich uncle, Thomas Sponholtz is your rich uncle. Thanks for being with us. Thomas thank you, i appreciate it. Scott up next, chinas got something we want, something apple and tessatesla, rather, are desperate for and they know it. When press here continues. Scott welcome back to press here. I want you to look at a photograph with me because theres a lot going on in the picture. This is chinese president xi touring a rare earths facility back in may. The photograph was released by the Chinese Government with little comment but the message is clear china can cut off access to their rare earths. Rare earth elements are the impossibletopronounce parts of the periodic table like praseodymium used in jet engines and ytterbium used in fiber optics. Tesla uses neodymium for their electric motors. Im sure those mispronounced all of those but you get my point. The worry is in the middle of this trade war, china will take its rare earths and go home, causing huge problems for american companies. Ann bridges is an expert on rare earths and the coauthor of a book about the subject that got glowing reviews in the canadian Mining Journal as well as more mainstream outlets Like National review. Shes here to educate us. All right, first of all, i did a terrible job with some of those, and neodymium you have in your hand. Sample and i brought itm, yes. Fa so you could see exactly what were talking about here. Pretty scott looks like, maybe, lead or some of the graphites, Something Like that. Ann thats correct, but if you pull out your smartphone youll see that thats used in there and so the question is how do you get from here to our smartphones and all the other magnets that are used and sensors that are used in our currentday technology. Scott why is it currentday technology . Have we used neodymium in the past or is this something new with iphones and spawned an entire new pursuitey of whats really going on in the periodic table of elements and so, for the last few decades, weve been pursuing more and more scientific applications, ways to make things smaller, faster, able to handle heat. And weve seen this in the Semiconductor Industry but now were doing the internet of things. We have more and more. We want mobility, we want everything, and we have all these emerging countries, china, india, and more, who have a growing middleclass population and now we have all these proclamations that we shall be running electric vehicles by a certain date across the world so theres just a growing demand for the finished product. The problem is that to get from here to there is a huge leap and its not just what we have in the ground, its the entire supply chain and manufacturing chain because we have to process these and filter these and purify them and make them into metals and alloys and get it finally into a useable form. Erin so why cant we recycle them . Kind of a dumb question, but ann well, eventually we can, some of them. But when you process and purify them and make em into new metals and alloys, youre actually changing the chemical basis of it. So sometimes you can split it apart. Many times you cant. The other thing, today recycling isnt a good solution because we dont have enough of em out there to have a Critical Mass to be able to create a nugget then to be able to go back from there. Joe if these are in the earth, all over the earth, why cant we just mimic what the chinese processing capability is . How hard could it be to just do the same processing that they did . Ann well, its probably not hard compared for americans who are pretty ingenious. We gave up this landscape about 20, 30 years ago, literally. I mean, we dont have many schools that offer degrees in this, and our patents filings on these is going like this, and chinas are like this. They literally have filed 10 to 20 times more patents over the years than we have on using these things. Re the geoloy thats reimporting them from greek, from turkey, owhow anymore because for the last 20 years Silicon Valley has been software and apps. Scott butgo ahead. Erin i mean, were here in Silicon Valley and we have a problem and that is, you know, what people here do is innovate their way out of problems so if werewhy cant wewhy isnt anyone trying to innovate their way out of this or are there startups or companies that are working on ways around it . Ann there are startups. Theyre not necessarily here. They tend to be more in the mining areas of the world. Whats going on in pittsburgh is truly amazing with carnegie mellon. Theyve decided that theyre staking their claim on the next generation of technology. Theyre near the auto industry. Infor apple, tesla, they are caught up in having their manufacturing in china and you dont wanna tick off yourvs for manufacturing and where youre trying to sell a product into the consumer class. The problem urisha and they care about having access to this. They dont care whether it costs 2 cents or 25 when youre putting millions of dollars into a submarine. They need to have something that works, and they need to have a reliable supply. Scott and the Trump Administration has noticed this. I mean, they have been pushing forward to get some sort of mining ability back into america but youre saying its a 20year lag. Ann its a manyyear lag. We started with the mining. Thats, you know, been an issue now since the executive order in december 2017 but it simply takes time. You cant just turn a mine overnight and you cant just build a manufacturing and processing facility overnight. You need to make sure you have all the pieces in place and that end customer so if apple or tesla said, we wanna buy american, okay, fine, we have a po now anbuu china has also demonstratd that theyre willing to tank the prices of the Global Market so all of a sudden with private ann it wouldnt be worth it, and investors go away. Scott to joes point about how this is actually all over. Its not like china has some vein of this that only they do, the way you might only findt hdiamonds in certain places. R. But is the mining process such that maybe we wouldntept the mining process, that we would be digging whole mountains apart to get those little nuggets that you have in front of us, in a way that other countries might be, like, its fine; do it . Ann in the past, i would say yes. Sadly, a lot of these kinds of rare earth elements have been considered waste for our core mining already, like, when we mine copper, you have rare earths as part of it. The problem is no one wanted to deal with it and there wasnt enough economic viability and scope and quantity to deal with it so they just covered it back up. So we have a lot of whats called mine tailings that we can go through and filter and process and do it fairly safely, environmentally well. China was willing to screw up their environment and a lot of yeah, there is a in one last question and that,e is that photograph that i showed off the top of president xi at a mining facility, rare earth facility. Is that the correct interpretation . I mean, that was an interesting photograph to be published and i think thats what the message was in the middle of this trade war, is, hey, dont forget, you cant make an iphone without us. Ann you cant make an iphone, we cant go to war in many respects because we need them to supply our military contractors. So yes, very much and just one quick one. If you look at the elements, you know, fire, air, water, earth, chinas culture has five and it includes metals. They appreciate the value that metals brings to their life and they are willing to support that and theyve been going after this for decades. Scott ann bridges has written several books about rare earth and i think were gonna have her back on cause i think this is gonna becontinue to be a major, major issue. Ann bridges, thanks for being with us. Ann thank you. Scott press here will be back in a moment. Scott welcome back to press here. Have you noticed there are a lot of words for dog online . People talk about their puppers and their doggos and their floofs and their good boys. This is more than just slang. It is a form of language. Gretchen mcculloch is a professional linguist who studies the Development Expertise on the internet. Her new book which i have been looking forward to is because internet understanding the new rules of language. Gretchen, good morning, and let me start out by pointing out there is no internet slang for cats and yet there are dozens orbecause dogs are better than cats and that is pure science right there. Gretchen mcculloch i think youre forgetting about the first animal meme of all which was the lolcat and therefore, you know, proves the superiority of the cat. Scott i had forgotten about lolcats. All right, explain the title to your book. I got it immediately but because internet. Explain that to me. Gretchen because internet is an example of one of these linguistic phenomena thats especially popular on the internet which is this stylized sort of incoherent language used to heighten an emotional effect. Ps so evident that you dont need the full sentence to explain it. Gretchen ha, ha, ha, ha. I think the first example that i came across in this phenomenon was, i cant do my homework because skyrim, so. Scott now, there is this temptation and im not going to do it to you, to interpret what youre doing as some sort of hey, listen up, parents, were gonna explain what teens are talking about on the internet when they say ffs or Something Like that. You are way above that. I mean, what youre talking about is linguistic science, right . Gretchen right, absolutely. So theres a whole area of linguistic called sociolinguistics which talks about how language and society are intertwined t oups in society use language differently. Scott let me read something out of your book to prove the point. Youre talking about the wordsthe letters repeating like the word so, but using a dozen os in so. You write i searched the corpus of rsaying, that this is a very serious science that you are engaged in. Gretchen its a very serious science but i really like the juxtaposition of applying serious science to topics that can seem a little bit amusing or frivolous and the connection between the two is really exciting for me. Scott oh, right, yeah, absolutely feel free to sell your book there. Im not for some reason saying, it is a very serious tome and treatise on the american english language. Gretchen its very boring. Scott yes, no, its got lolcats in it, for goodness sakes and emojis, i noticed, which was that a problem in printing a book to put, like, all the different emojis in it . Gretchen it was an interesting complication when it came to printing the book and, in fact, because of how, you know, the software tha