I think that we have to, like a global government. Like, it's who you answer to at the highest level, potentially. I mean, obviously the US is like, much, much bigger than the UN and so we have this kind of flipped model. But anyway, we have our first guest of the show. We have Palmer Luckey in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVPN ultradome. Palmer, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. I'm here. He's here with the power of technology, the magic. How are you doing? What's going on? Doing really well. Although the thing I've been complaining about lately is I was recently on Joe Rogan. Yes. And what you don't understand when you go on Joe Rogan is that it's like calling in a distributed denial of service attack on all your communications because your email, your voicemail, text messages, your Facebook messenger, your x DM'd, everything becomes useless because you have so much incoming that even the important things, like, Homer, you need to go to your dentist appointment right now. Boom. Flooded by bro so sick on Rogan. How many float tank operators have reached out and said, we gotta get here? Have you used. Hang on, let me think about this for a second. I haven't even caught up with everything, but at least three. Okay. Have you actually gone in a float tank? I mean, hearing that the beginning of the interview and realizing that this guy you're listening to wants to do a float tank. It hasn't yet. And you're like, I've been waiting for this moment my entire life. It's funny too, because in talking about float tanks, Joe and I, we took a break during the show, and when we took that break, we actually went to go look at his float tank. And it was so funny, because you're right, I'm like one of the only people who has gone on the show knowing all about float tanks and the principle and the mechanism and the theory and the history, yet I've never actually managed to get into one. So it's a rare combination. I think most people who haven't used float tanks don't really know much about them or care. Yeah, I've actually looked a lot into float tanks, even beyond what we talked about on Rogan. Going back to my initial kind of push into this was in VR, where I got into thinking about, how do you do sensory management? How do you forget the senses that are at conflict with the virtual reality you want to present? Float tank is interesting, but then also, it's a sci fi staple, is to Fill your lungs up with some kind of oxygen bearing fluid and then go in your full fluid immersion pod so that you can achieve extremely high G forces during rapid acceleration. And what I've always wanted to do is build a dragster, build a car that can accelerate so fast that it would kill somebody if they weren't in a full fluid immersion G pod. And I think that if you could do that, it'd be some kind of truly novel motorsports achievement where for the first time in any motorsport, the limit would truly be the ability of the person to survive it, rather than the power of the machine that is involved. Wouldn't it be so cool? Like, oh, don't floor it unless you've got your lungs full or it will kill you. Yeah. They talk about instantly be dead supercars that don't have traction control being death machines, right? But supercars that are accelerating over 1G, like, that's crazy. I want to do an inverted fan car, basically a vacuum car that is accelerating at 80 or 90 GS. Would you have to put rockets on the back too, or explosives or something? How do you actually. How do you max it out? So my general opinion on these things is that there's an I'll know it when I see it element. If you're using rockets, you're not really a car. Like, look, I'm a huge fan. The NHRA was the nhra, right? I forget whatever the sanctioning body was in the United States for drag races, they allowed rocket dragsters up until I think the late 1980s. There's a great video of a dragster called Vanishing Point. And it was a rocket powered dragster that was the last one before they banned them. It was doing like 400 miles per hour in the trap. And its final run. There's a video on YouTube. I'll have to send it to you guys. Although if you look up Vanishing Point rocket dragster on YouTube, you'll find it. Maybe you guys can cut it into the video later for people watching this not live, but its final run. They ran it at true full throttle, went faster than ever one. And the camera pans up and it blew out every single window in the control tower when it went. And the rumor is that it went so fast and so hard that the pilot passed out during the acceleration. And the parachute was actually pulled by a timer. I don't know if that's true, but it's a great story. So anyway, the point is rocket dragsters don't count. You have to do it with wheels. I'll Know it when I see it. If it's rockets, it's not a car. And there was a guy in the, I think, the Air Force who set the record for most GS sustained by a person. And he used a rocket sled to do that. Basically, it was a rocket sled that accelerated and then very rapidly decelerated. And they couldn't. He thought it would be unethical to have anybody else volunteer. So it was a pretty senior Air Force researcher who did the test himself. And I think he, like, blew out all of his. The. All the veins in his eyes and his sinuses and he was bleeding from every hole on his head. But he survived and recovered. And he proved that a human can survive over 50 GS of relatively sustained force. 50 GS? Over 50 GS. Brutal. Wow. But you have a very bad. That's leadership. That's leadership. If the float tank is going to get added potentially to your routine, what other biohacks are you using or a fan of or what else have you tried in sort of like the performance optimization? Being on a mission, I feel like being on a mission is the ultimate biohack. Yeah, I mean, it really is. I mean, I've always been very straight edge. Right. So no alcohol, no caffeine, no nicotine, no drugs, nothing. I've recently started drinking since having a child and, you know, we can get into that or not. Yeah. But I. I'm very much high on life. I don't really want to. Doesn't Mountain Dew have caffeine in it? So it does, and I will. But I generally will avoid Mountain Dew for that reason, at least as a dependency. Yeah, sure. I go Taco Bell. I'm getting that Baja Blast, of course. And now that I've had a kid and I drink, I can go to the Taco Bell Cantina, of which there's only a hand. Are you familiar with the Taco Bell Cantina? I'm not, no. I've never been. It's in New York. Is there one in SF, too? I think there's one in New York City. I don't think sf. Sf. Nobody builds anything in sf, but there's. That Taco Bell right on the beach in Pacifica. You know what I'm talking about? The Taco Cantina is this concept where it's like Taco Bell, but also they serve alcohol. So it's like a bar and a Taco Bell, and there's one less than five minutes from my house in Newport Beach. And so I can now go Get Baja blasted on my. On my Baja blast. But I have to ask, what about fatherhood made you start drinking? You have kids? Yes, we both have kids. We actually passed the Palmer test. We have five between us. Well, then you should understand. Yes, I do understand. Yeah, no, I understand a little bit. But. But part of it's like, like alcohol for me. I sleep terribly. Kids are also, you know, they make they very. Oh, I see. No, alcohol knocks helps. It's different for everybody. It knocks me. It knocks me out. Yeah, yeah. Maybe because I don't have a tolerance to it, but. So you asked about hacks. I've got one that I've been pondering that maybe we could talk about. Yeah, please. I'm really afraid that nicotine might be really, really good. You've probably seen this theory, right? Basically, America smoked its way to being the dominant hyperpower. It kept people focused, it kept people fit. It's an appetite suppressant. There's this really interesting health trade off theory that I'm not saying I buy into it fully yet. So for people who are watching and shouting and screaming, I don't buy into it full fully yet, but I'm becoming more and more convinced that the health benefits of not smoking have not been properly traded against the health problems caused by the resulting eating. Not just in terms of appetite suppressant, but also just people filling cravings and filling the need for ritual rituals. Well, I would tell you out of. Experience with other things that are worse for you, I think the crazy version of this is we'd all be better off with lung cancer eventually, but fit until then. And it could be that smoking gets you there. So I don't know. I'm trying to figure this one out, but nicotine is near the top of my list of potential biohacks. Sure. The other thing that it feels real is nicotine makes boring things pretty enjoyable. And it turns out that to do anything significant in life, like, it's oftentimes very exciting early. Like you're working on a new product at Anduroll. It's very exciting. You can make a 3D render internally, not for marketing materials. I know you guys don't do that. No render policy, no renders. But let's say you make a render internally. You're like, this is really exciting. And then it gets into the mud and you're like, okay, now we have to build this thing and you're in the trenches of product development and you get through many, many, many boring hours of struggle. Well, I'll tell you a lot of the people in the trenches, they are smoking. Yeah, the literal trenches also going back through war. Like they were in rations. Of course. Well, I was going to, I was going to bring that up. Yeah, they, they didn't get rid of the, they didn't get rid of the cigarettes in MREs until pretty recently. I don't know what date it was, but it was not that long ago. Yeah, so that's the. Of course there's other ways to have nicotine without having to have the health impact of actually, you know, smoking. Atari substance. So that's where it becomes interesting. Like you probably couldn't convince me that smoking is literally better than, you know, the food, but it's like, you know, is vaping worse than being fat? I don't know. I struggle. I struggle. Based on the evidence I've seen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's wild. Do you play video games before bed? You said that the alcohol helps you fall asleep, but do you ever get locked in and you like or playing video games? Can't fall asleep because of that? You know, I used to play games all night long. I mean there was a time where I was spending maybe 14 hours a day on the computer. If I could say. That's you. Yeah, it's wonderful. The best times, I love them. I want to go back. Was a good chunk of that. But also running online communities and other things. But the problem that I have now is the types of games I really like, especially multiplayer games. You kind of have to be on your game and if you play late at night when you're all wrecked, you're not even competitive enough for it to be fun. And I'm not saying I need to win or I, or I hate it. You know, I'm not, I don't hate skill based matchmaking that much. Yeah, but you want to know that you're playing to at least the upper limit of your own potential. And I find so that that's been the struggle as I've gotten older. And I know, I know 33 doesn't sound that old, but there's a lot, there's a lot of things that are easier when you're 23 than when you are 33. And like, you're not supposed to talk about that. Particularly as an executive of a company in California High Department of Justice, you're not supposed to acknowledge that perhaps it's possible. I'm not saying there are. It's possible that different age ranges have different strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps, possibly. But certainly nobody should ever make a hiring decision on that basis. That'd be a crime. That's right. Yes, that's right. But yeah, imagine in some ways being probably easier parenting could be easier for people in their early twenties. Right. Than their early thirties. Just, just by. Forget. What are you talking about twenties? Look at this, look at this. Mainstream npc. No, no, no. Kids should be having, should be having kids when they're, when they're in their teens. That's, when they're, that's when they're supposed to have them. Now, you could argue that maybe there's a reason to stretch it out a little bit, but if we're just talking about physical ability and depth of, well, of energy, let's not be politically correct. Let's just admit you're supposed to be having kids. You're 16, 17, 18, and be done by the time in your 20s so that you can, so that you can have your kids working on the farm by the time you're in your 40s. Yeah, I mean, it's a. I mean, I regret not having kids even at the age of 33. I regret not having them earlier because I'm like, geez, this would have been so much easier when I was younger. I've been with my wife since we were 15, though, so it's a lot easier for me when people like, oh, but Palmer, how do you know it's the right person? I'm like, geez, we should have just obviously had kids when we were 16. It would have worked out just fine. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. The whole world. You feel like when you're younger, everything's as complicated as it will be, and it just gets more complicated every year and more busy every year. Take us through, take us through. My. Well, this gets also to like the startup thing. I say all the time, and I'll take this moment to push it, especially for anyone young who's listening. People think that starting a company or taking a break from school is this very high risk move. When you're young, they say, oh, how do you find the bravery to do that? What I try to push on people is it will never get better. When you are 18 or 19, you have no family, you have no real job, you don't have a career yet, per se. That's the best time to start a company. You're not giving anything up. All you have to lose is a bit of time. And all you need to do is better than you would have done otherwise on your resume. Running a startup and failing it is probably gonna look better on your resume than whatever you were Gonna be doing part time in school, school as a, as a, as a late teenager or early, early 20s. Yeah. And so yeah, the, the best time to start a company is when you're young because you don't need any bravery to do it. The people who start it later, where they have a family and a mortgage and yeah, once, once these people have. Acclimated to like a 250k base, it's like good luck rate, you know, building a hundred percent. Yep. And also once you have a family, you have a sort of fiduciary duty to your family to maximize their quality of life. There's no limit life hack that says that you're allowed to degrade the quality of your child's childhood because daddy wanted to have that grindset mindset. Right. It's irresponsible at that point. Yeah, totally. I couldn't imagine starting Oculus where I am today. Like it would just be irresponsible. Yeah. Take us through Mod Retro. How much of everyone's familiar with the Chromatic? We've talked about it a lot on the show. We unboxed one, we've had a lot of fun with them. How much of the roadmap is public now? Where's the company going? Where's the company now? Just kind of give us the general update and then we'll dive into some stuff. Before I tell you where it's going, I'll go back to where it came from in the first place. A lot of people think that Mod Retro is this very recent thing for me. You know, the first product we launched, the Mod Retro Chromatic, which was kind of the ultimate Game Boy. This kind of heirloom grade tribute to the Nintendo Game Boy and Game Boy color. Very high end hardware, magnesium aluminum alloy shell, a lab grown sapphire crystal screen lens rather than plastic or even, even glass. And the thing is, Mod Retro was actually the first company that I ever started, even before Oculus. So I started Mod Retro when I was about 15 years old. It was an online forum for. It was an online forum for people modifying game consoles, handhelds, portables, also home television consoles. The main kind of thrust of the community was this hobby called portableizing, which is taking home consoles and turning them into handhelds by combining them with modern technology like LCDs and modern high energy density batteries. I mean that actually was a pretty big deal for a while. I know in the modern day this doesn't mean much, but we were getting millions of unique viewers every single month because we were getting covered of the projects on this site. We had thousands of active members. We were getting covered by Engadget and Gizmodo and Kotaku and, you know, kind of the whole group of outlets that back then liked technology. They're now anti tech. Anti tech. Tate coverage. But back when tech news was about tech and not anti tech, they were covering all of these things. And again these days, millions of uniques. I mean, you can get that on TikTok with a good dance. But that really meant something in the mid-2000s on the Internet. And we actually started working on projects like what the ultimate Game Boy would be back then. There was a project that I did in 2008 called the PGB. The power game Boy. Power Game Boy was the ultimate Game Boy. It was a Game Boy Advance. It was Game Boy Advance SP hardware transplanted into an original Game Boy shell, but with an upgraded screen, upgraded controls, motion controls, an FM radio transmitter so you could broadcast the sound to your car so you could be playing and didn't have to tether in and could have all that sound if you're doing lsdj, Dells, DJ or some other chiptune software. And that actually won the 2008 portable Palooza. So very proud of the Power Game Boy. I was also the first person to ever backlight a Game Boy Pocket, the first person to ever led backlight an original Game Boy. So, I mean, I am an og, OG to the max when it comes to this. That was the original, like, parental control was. I just remember being a kid and being like, if I turn the lights on to play Game Boy, my parents are gonna see the light under the door. They're gonna come take my Game Boy. So I was like, trying to. It was probably training my eyesight to try to. Yeah, yeah, no, no. You're just maybe hurting your eyesight, but training your brain. Now you can see signal from the noise. You have ultimate night vision. You're. You're. You're Batman, you're Superman. Game Boy molded by it, raised by it. Yeah. But so what happened is I started on this project all the way back then of what the ultimate Game Boy would look like. I kept working on it at Oculus. Yeah, I kept working on it post Oculus. And then after about eight or nine years of not making any progress, because I was just like, I made some progress. We had some prototypes and stuff. I finally said, you know what? I need to get more serious about paying someone else to do my hobby, because I'm not going to be able to get this done on my own. And so I ended up hiring a few people from my past life and getting together with a bunch of people who believed in this kind of vision of building these tributes to what technology used to be the best parts of what gaming used to be, and building a company around that. And we ended up pulling together the Chromatic, all the pieces and loose ends from 10 years of hacking and modding, and turned it into a real product. Walk me through the roadmap. The M64 is coming out. That's right. Do you have other ideas or ways you define what sticks out? Obviously, the Game Boy is iconic, the N64 is iconic. But how broad are you thinking? What reaches? Is it just games? Is it just games from the 90s, 2000s? We did the Game Boy because it's the most important handheld console ever. Yeah. It redefined the idea of gaming what it was, how you did it, how it fit into your life, how you could build games that you didn't sit down and be tethered to something, but instead could be a thing that you would share with friends, bring to places, meet new people playing them. That was really, really a wild idea at the time, and there's a lot of good in that. But I think that as the games industry has financialized and gotten much bigger, there's a lot of things that have gotten lost. I think that the need to make more and more money has taken things away from, I think what were actually great product decisions in the 80s and 90s when people were just trying to make great games and great consoles. They weren't trying to figure out how to bump up their daily active users, they weren't trying to build live services, they weren't trying to build passive recurring revenue models that they relied on a variety of modern marketing concepts to juice people and get them locked in. Yeah. What do you like in the modern. That's why I say generally, hardware wise. I want to go into hardware. There was like similar turning points. So M64 is an obvious one. That was the beginning of 3D gaming, basically for everybody. You can say, but Palmer, there were people who are playing 3D games on their PCs. Yes, but in terms of mainstream access, totally. I mean, that changed everything. Totally. I'm interested in going to all these points where there's things that we can learn and releasing basically the best version of that, combined with modern technology makes it more useful. So things like what would a modern Sony Walkman look like? Like, what was good about the Walkman experience versus modern streaming and kind of the digital morass that we've gotten into the algorithmic feed like nobody's doing mixtapes anymore. Listening to music is not a conscious activity. It's not a curated activity. It's a. It's being a receptacle for. For a machine. People talk about just, you know, having AI slop fed to them without realizing that, you know, the modern music industry has kind of been pioneering this for a long time. It's just the AI is behind the curtain, the computers are behind the curtain, and the algorithmic recommendation engine is behind the curtain. You feel like there's some green shoots in the modern gaming economy. I'm thinking like, yes, there's a lot of, you know, mobile games that are hyper optimized and there's a lot of games that have gone free to play with all the micropayments and stuff. But then you do have folks like the team behind Last of Us, where it's just a story and you don't really get sucked into any crazy micropayments and it feels like there's an artist behind it. But are there other areas of the modern game industry that are sticking out to you as positives? There certainly are. And there's lots of modern indie games that are, I think, doing a lot of, you look at Silksong and a lot of the Balatron. But where you're not seeing this, I think is on the hardware side. Sure. You're still living in an ecosystem. So let's say that you want to play a game that was built with these values. All right? So you're going to turn on your console. You're going to try to play it. Oh, there's a critical security update. Time for you to do your critical security update. Okay, now you need to also update your console. All right. You're updating your console. Nope, that wiped out all the cookies. It's time for you to log in again. You're going to log in. It wants you to do two factor authentication because fraud and has become such a problem that you now need to be like, oh shit, where's my phone? Let me see. I don't have my authentic. It's one of those terrible things where it adds so much friction. And that's before you then get railroaded into a big giant UI of advertisements that are autoplaying the moment. The idea of that's just to get. Permission to upgrade your skins. Basically. The idea to just be like, I'm going to take this. Yeah. And just turn it on and that's it. And it's great. That is, yeah, that Is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Modern games can't do that because of the platforms that they're on. Yeah, yeah. I was comping like what it takes to play. Actually on the. One of the, one of the newer quests I had, I realized I had seven different passwords. Instagram, Facebook, Meta. I had all these different passwords, I had codes to different pieces to buy games and stuff. Versus I went and pulled up an old N64 where you turn the button and it just says Goldeneye. And it's just like amazing. And I was saying that like that that seems like an own goal. It seems like modern video game designers should at least know that you will see Lower Churn if you pre install one great game. And when the first time they unbox it on Christmas, you turn it on and it's Beat Saber or whatever the, whatever the piece of software or hardware that you're selling, like have it come with something great. Like why don't people do that? Are they just stupid or is it like something more complex? This is, it is complex. I mean, so you got to remember. So first of all, there's a lot of people in the games industry who didn't necessarily get into it purely because they want to build great games or. Necessarily drink Starbucks and not Mountain Dew. Yep. You've heard my quote, right? And you have a lot of these people who, it's a lily pad. It's a way to make a check or it's a way to affect social change in the world through some larger company's budget. And so that is part of the problem. But you're also at odds often. So you just talked about this specific idea of having a bundle title. So I've been on the other side of the negotiating table inside of, you know, inside of Meta, formerly Facebook and you know, formerly Oculus. What's going to happen is you're going to say, hey, this is going to be a great experience. And then you have someone who says, ah, but if we have a bundled title, then that gets rid of the revenue opportunity to have another company pay us to be the bundled title. And also they're going to. Our developers are going to be really upset because we're going to be competing with them. And so for example, your holiday day one installs, they're mostly going to be of this new game. People are going to be less likely to do day one buys of all of these other games. If there is a game that you can already play, you say, well, we have to have something pre installed and then you have These conversations. Well, it can't be a full game. It needs to be a thing that shows off the hardware. It can be like a fun little bite experience. But we then need to have people go into it. And here's another thing they say if you have literally nothing, that means they have to download something. And the time where there's going to be the most impetus for them to put in their payment details is going to be that day one. So you don't want to do anything that degrades. You get the payment details. Because the moment you get their payment details, every purchase after that is an easy click. It's an easy dopamine hit. You don't have to go through all of the pain. And so it's one of those things where you have all of these intervariate money driven things and you have the platform holders so tightly intertwined with much of the content. This is the problem when the hardware owners end up owning all of these studios. This is probably me getting a little too business political. But in the early days of Oculus we were very clear with developers through our business relations. We are not Nintendo, we are not going to compete with you and basically destroy your sales by preferentially treating our own developers better, our own studios. We made things, but we really said our goal is to enable second and third party titles to fund lots of other people and we funded dozens of developers. As you become Nintendo, you make it harder for those third parties to exist. And the first party has their own goals that are not necessarily aligned with what you're talking about, which is turn on the game and play it and have a good time. They have, they have, they have other plans for you. Is the answer just out compete them? I imagine that the libertarian in you is not saying we need to regulate this. So what's the answer? Of course not. I think it's a combination of reminding people what they've lost, like what they had and how good it was. It's about reminding and showing off for the first time to a new generation how things used to be. I mean, one of the things I love about chromatic and M64 is people. We were just at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo and a lot of the people coming by and having the most funds were kids whose parents brought them over, like, oh, check out this game. Like this is the Mario Kart I used to play. And you can show these people, I think a lot about how things used to be, how it used to work. And I think you can prove that people still want that there's people who don't believe any of this. You'll talk to people say, well that's not what people want from games anymore. They want live service games. They want games that are continuously updating with fresh new content. And they say this I think because their internal people have to convince themselves that it's true because otherwise their business model of being a $100 billion company doesn't pan out. And you contrast that with like the number, you know, many people made the game boy, it was 12 people. 12. I mean it's just, it's, you contrast that with like the 60,000 people you have in some of these larger games. So I look, I don't think it's regulation. I think it's reminding people, showing people. And then at some point someone needs to take the best of modern technology and they need to take these lessons from the past when people were trying to make things great without necessarily being concerned about the micro financials. And they need to build probably a new platform that learns combines the best of all of these things. Which is kind of the idea behind Mod Retro. You want to combine the best of the modern and the best of the retro. And I think at some point somebody's going to do that. Who knows, maybe you'll see something like Sega reenters the console war and kicks everybody's ass. But maybe it'll be in television, maybe ColecoVision is going to come back, but at some point it'll happen. Yeah. Do you expect Mod Retro to continuously make decisions that sort of limit the tam and that's, you know, not going down the path of hyper financialization and you know, trying to create this open ecosystem. I just, I doubt you guys had any investors that, that passed on Mod Retro. But I imagine some of them would say, you know, the NPC VC that thinks it's contrarian to have kids in your 20s would say like okay, I want to invest but like how do you think about the tam, right? Like how do you, how do you address that? Because I can see the obvious path of just selling a lot of really great hardware and building out, you know, millions of people in the world that just love the hardware, buy the hardware and you have a fantastic business. But maybe it's not an and scale opportunity and you're probably totally okay with that. I think the opportunity actually is huge. I think that the entire modern electronics industry is in a sort of prisoner's dilemma where nobody can stop doing these things that nobody wants to be doing because the first person to do it can't really do it alone. I mean that's why your phone is full of crapware. That's why you buy a laptop and it's preloaded with all of this stuff. The companies know just how much consumers hate it, but they're all in this competing for each penny, competing for each dollar, race against each other with largely undifferentiated offerings. And, and so they have to play that game. If you can hugely differentiate and if you can convince a consumer that it really is a differentiated thing, I actually think that you can end up where the TAM is. Look, here's what will actually happen. I think the TAM for doing things right is bigger than the TAM for things that do things wrong. The only problem is that the moment you prove that that's true, everyone is going to follow in your footsteps and become your competitors in this new post prisoners dilemma world. That's probably the form of success that I would be happy with. It's not let's do everything ourselves and, and, and, and, and nobody's going to follow us. Realistically, the moment you see success, everybody copies what you're doing. Changing the world is outcome people need to be okay with even if they don't own the whole market. Would Mod Retro ever make a M1 Garand M1 grand? I don't think so. I think it's going to stick to consumer electronics, like technology products. We are working electronics product that was created before you were born. Oh yeah, for sure, for sure. I mean we're working on a cassette tape player right now. Okay, yeah. So like that's one example. Like what would the ultimate Sony Walkman look like? Like if you were making something today with those principles in mind, what would it look like today? Today, how would it work? And there's a lot of things, and I'm not even talking about the complicated things like algorithmic music feeds, just basic things. It was so easy to stop and start music or adjust the volume or know that it was playing in the first place. You have that haptic mechanical like you can literally feel the wheels turning. A Walkman on an armband is a much better experience than using your phone to play music. And I understand why we're using one and not the other. And I'm not saying that the cassette tape part is the part that made it good, but there's a lot of other parts that were good that I think are worth learning from. Another one is like an example would be modern televisions. I know I'm a libertarian and I'm not supposed to like Regulation. But I sometimes flirt with the idea that smart TVs should be illegal. I hate smart TVs so much. They're so bad. See, you're clapping because everyone agrees. Everyone agrees. This is the danger of being a libertarian. You realize you can just adopt populist, pro state dispositions and you can get voters like, oh, we're libertarian, except for this thing you hate. We're going to regulate that. You can be, you can be trusted with total control. I would trust you. Exactly. But you're not like the other ones. Like, smart TVs create a lot of these same bad incentives where you have the hardware manufacturer not just trying to build a good tv, a good screen, good visual technology they're now dipping their toe into. Well, I actually need to be a services company, I need to be a software platform company, I need to run an app store. And it's a, it's a prisoner's dilemma. If you don't do those things and if you don't introduce advertising into your TV feeds and if you don't have, you know, a lock screen that's showing ads on your tv, how could you compete with the people who are, who charge, you know, just a few, a few dollars less. But I think that there's, I think that there's value in saying like, hey, like one of the things mod Retro is looking at doing is doing a modern CRT display. And part of the value there is building something that actually has all those cool attributes of a crt, especially when you're working with retro computer systems and retro consoles. That we're designing the art around the particular technicalities of how a CRT works in terms of having very high motion clarity, very, very good color gamut, relying on the persistence of the phosphors to enable certain visual effects, a certain blending that happens on certain things, doing display interlacing techniques, but ignoring all that. There's also just the fact that a TV that you can plug something into and it just shows what you plugged into it is an incredibly novel idea. And I think bringing it back, reminding people of that, I wouldn't be surprised to see Mod Retro make a totally modern technology display that is just a TV that doesn't fuck you. Like, that's it. I think I, I mean, just, just. Think just the, the, the, the. My biggest critique of all these smart TVs is how quickly the software degrades. Like it wasn't good in the beginning and then quickly there's like a, a small lag every time you push a button and imagine a TV that was just super snappy and just had the three apps that you actually want to use. And I'm sure you go back and use. Go back and use like a. Even like a flip phone. Yeah. From the early 2000s, the UIs were literally orders of magnitude faster and snappier than the UIs of these modern smart TVs. Like, you could buy a TV with 8 gigabytes of RAM and a 3 GHz processor, and somehow you're right, it still manages to have that lag. You know what, we're at a stage in the technology cycle where people make things that are different but not necessarily better. There's this pressure to do things that are new and different. Horizontal movement. Yeah, yeah. And my biggest critique is the new iOS liquid glass. It's like, congratulations, you made it different. I don't believe you made it better. Yeah. What do you think? Do you think there's a world where the next turn of VR kind of displaces TVs? We talked to James Cameron about this and it seemed like he'd kind of seen the next iteration maybe, and was kind of excited about the idea of being able to watch a 3D IMAX movie at home. And. And from my experience with the Apple Vision Pro, the screen's getting better and better. Meta's working on this stuff. Like, we've talked to the big screen team. It feels like we might finally be at a point where we're thinking about replacing the home theater. The way to think about VR headsets is not as a replacement for a tv, but as a replacement for a home theater. So, and the reason that's important is it's not just a tv, a screen, it's a controlled environment optimized for watching that content. The thing I've always liked about VR is you can have all this cool new VR content, but it can potentially also simulate any previous form of any previous media experience before. So, like an example I've given when people said, well, what about like an ebook? You know, an ebook reader on VR, you know, are we, are we really going to use that? And the point I make is, well, look, if you make this good enough, it's not just the book, Right? The experience of reading a book is also your environment, your surroundings. People will go places just to sit down and read a book in the right environment. Simulating that is interesting. So the same thing goes for music, right. It's not that you're not trying to simulate a speaker, you're trying to simulate A listening room. And I feel like that's where things are going. I think that's why James Cameron is excited, because you spend a lot of money to control a viewing experience when you're doing it physically. I'm building walls, I'm soundproofing a room, I'm painting the whole thing matte black so there's no reflections on my screen, by the way. I've done that. I have a basement home theater that I made myself and the walls are painted matte black and the ceiling is painted matte black. And I have custom matte black carpet that's mostly black except for a few of my favorite galaxies printed on it from NASA imagery because I wanted to have some space carpet. Nothing's cooler than space carpet, but that was really expensive to do all that. And I think VR is going to actually surpass that experience in short order. The technological path to VR displays being better than 99% of people's home viewing environments is a single digit year problem. It's not decades, it's within 10 years, certainly. Yeah. What's in the critical path? You've said that you liked pulling the battery out. Are there other things that you're pulling out? If you're building the next version of consumer like BRS home theater, what are. The design considerations you're pulling out? I mean, where do I even begin? A second screen on the outside, you'd definitely have that if you want to be in the home theater, right? No, no. I hear that was a Tim Cook special, but I can't confirm it. I don't work at Apple. But you need to relentlessly focus on the experience of the user of the device and you can't have features that are not adding to that. If your job is to try and make VR cool, which is largely what Apple was trying to do with the first generation Vision Pro, you might do things like have a screen on the outside and like if you're trying to make it cool and acceptable, but at some point you need to optimize towards the experience of it all. And luckily in the long run, maybe even the medium run, these things are going to look like sunglasses, not like ski goggles. And so that's really where this is all going. I think if you and me were had James Cameron right here to grill, I don't think you would say, I think the future looks like a bunch of people wearing ski goggles. I think you'd say the glasses you wear to already like navigate and communicate that you're wearing all day when you will Also simultaneously be the best home theater device you've ever seen. We're going to get there sooner rather than later. Yeah. Let's talk about Erebor. There's been some press hits lately. The press seems entirely fixated on Palmer Luckey's crypto bank. And obviously that is not the full story. The full story, nor is it the most, I think, exciting thing about it from anybody that's been in the tech industry that lived through the SVB collapse. And so I wanted to, I wanted to hear it directly from you. Well, you know, it's a little early to start talking about you. We just got our conditional approval, which is fantastic. We're still waiting on fdic. Yep. We're still waiting on full approval. So it's a little early for me to really get into, into, you know, going out and marketing the bank. Yeah, but why, but, but, yeah, but. We are getting into. Yeah, no, I get it. Like the, I think there's this natural inclination for people to look at this and say, oh, it's like what SVB was. It's catering to the same customers. That must mean that they're going to be this really high risk bank that does all these high risk things. In reality, it's literally reaction to that. It is an opposite. The reason that we got this approval is because we went in saying we are going to have the most conservative loan to deposit ratios of any bank in history. We are going to do this extremely novel service of taking money from people, holding it for them and then allowing them to have it back. Like we're going to be offering these services that banks used to offer. You can't get the service I just described in any bank. If you go and you say, I want you to just like hold on to my assets, but I don't want you to loan against them. Like that's, that's not what a bank is. What are you talking about? And of course, like, I'm not saying that all assets should be held that way, but when you're a business in the business of making your business grow, you don't care nearly as much about getting an extra half a percent on your deposits as you might about truly minimizing the risk that you're not going to have access to any of your capital. I mean, if SVB would not have been bailed out by the government, it wasn't just the government's obligations. They were bailing out well beyond FDIC limits. If they wouldn't have done that, it probably would have wiped out half the Tech industry in one fell swoop. That's crazy. How can the tech industry have become so subservient to to the banking industry, to the finance bros. That not only can we not survive without them, but in working with them we sign our own death warrants. Right? Like we can't see what the risk is. We can't control it. And there's literally no other option. So that it is. I agree. It's annoying to see everyone talk about how Erebor is this new bank in the vein of SVB that's going to be taking on higher risk. Higher risk bets. It's literally the opposite. It's do what SVB does. Didn't for the people that SVB was otherwise successful in working with. So think like national security companies, hard tech, deep tech, biotech. These companies that just need to make sure they have someone who understands how their business works. And SVB did do a good job at that. But then also is going to make sure their money is actually there when they go to get it. That was the part that SVB screwed up. Yeah. How? How? I guess I'll end it with one bit here which is maybe worth noting. I'm not working on Erebor in an operational day to day capacity. I'm a board member. I founded it because I wanted this to exist. You got to remember that the finance industry is full of people who love finance for the sake of finance. They're truly in love with all the levers and the machines. They're in love with leverage and what. That's right. And in addition they probably like what it enables. They like free flow of capital. They love the ability to leverage things. I get that. Similarly, I'm a VR guy. I love VR for the sake of VR. I love what VR can do. I love that it can be a home theater. I love that it can be a classroom. I love that it can be a time machine. But I also strictly love it for the sake of the technology itself. That you're presenting an artificial view to your peripheral nervous system that is sufficiently advanced as to convince a body that has developed for millions of years to discern what is and isn't real. That's incredible. I would love it from a tech perspective, even if it were useless from an everyday perspective. And I would say that is not how I am with finance. I don't love finance for the sake of finance. I'm not a finance bro. I want something like Erebor to exist because of and for the sake of my love for all of these Other technologies. If something doesn't exist, a safe, reliable banking partner for people like me who care about tech for the sake of tech and what tech can do. If something like that doesn't exist, people are going to have a hard time. So it's a little weird. It's one of the few finance companies that started by somebody who wants it to be in service of all the other true interests they have, rather than the culmination of their own personal interests. I guarantee J.P. morgan, Goldman Sachs. These firms were not started by people who said, you know, I don't really care about baking, but I do want to make this technology work. Yeah, yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. Speaking of other articles, there's this interesting article in Business Insider from six years ago. The US army wants mixed reality headsets that detect enemy fire, translate language and see in the dark. Anduril, the startup founded by Oculus Palmer Luckey. Oculus Palmer Luckey is on it. This was a six year project. What is the full story here? What was the genesis of this article? And then how did the. Yeah, how did the product come together? Well, the thing that, that's so interesting and I think there's a quote you should dig in there for. Like it's a quote from Brian Chimp. Yeah, that's right. He says it's the real moonshot for us is this idea you want to have every soldier, every operator be able to have total awareness of what's going on. They know everything they need to know to do their job and, and all of this is available to them in a millisecond and just the most critical information that they need. I mean, you could take that quote and it's practically word for word what the army is saying about soldier borne mission command. I mean, it could be the press release for Eagle Eye, which we just started showing off publicly at ausa. I mean, it's interesting because a lot of people think that this move into announcing our augmented reality efforts and is this new thing that we pivoted into rather than the culmination of eight years of platform building, building the software that you need, building the data integration techniques you need, the radio relay and meshing systems that you need. There's so much you have to do to accomplish this dream of a soldier born heads up display that shows you where the baddies are, where your buddies are, does your ballistics compensation and calculations. I mean like, it is, it is, it takes so much work. And we've been working on this since the beginning of the company and so I think that article is interesting because it's. This was, you know, six, seven years ago and people are asking, what are you guys going to do? We said, oh, we're going to build combat heads up displays that integrate data from all these sources and put it right in the soldiers field of view so it's available in a millisecond. And when people, when we said that back then, people were kind of giving us side eye and they were like, okay, one, that sounds crazy. Two, the army just gave like put, to put this in context, that was like six months after Microsoft had won the IBAS contract. They're like, well that's what Microsoft's doing. Why, why would you be working on that? And even then it's because we had a vision for what it needed to be that was somewhat divergent from what the army or Microsoft was doing. And so we kept investing, we kept building. And I mean, who would have bet that eight years later that Microsoft contract, that $22 billion contract vehicle for the architecture of the Army's AR future was, would move over to Anduril, that we would be launching something like Eagle Eye and that it would be an extremely, you know, that when we took over SBMC from Microsoft, that we integrated our UI and features that we've been building on Lattice in less than two weeks. Like we literally, like we did in two weeks what the army had been working on for years because we'd been building this backend for it and kind of preparing for the day where this might happen. So it feels very much like a culmination of destiny, a bet that paid off. I've been definitely talking to my investors and reminding them that they told and told told us that this was a moonshot that probably was not going to pan out. Like, you know, I mean try, try telling someone I think Microsoft is going to transfer their $22 billion contract to us at some point. It's just like, they're just like Palmer, like that's magical thinking. Like, it's not like it's a. Literally, I've been told, Palmer, that's the type of thing you think when you just miss the boat and you just can't bear to. Yeah, they're like, you're just, you're just coping. You're just coping. It's cope, it's your cope. I say, well let's, let's give it up for a culmination of destiny. Culmination of destiny. I'm always a fan of people achieving, achieving their destiny. I haven't gotten to Mine yet. Although, you know, I won't. I won't. I won't do this. You know, I think. I think you guys might have even asked me about this at one point. So I have this goatee that I've been growing ever since I was fired, and that was, like, coming up on nine years ago now. And I've told people who asked about it that I can't shave it until certain conditions are met, until I achieve certain goals in my life. And I've just been cryptic about it and never said why. I don't plan on changing that. But I will let you know, I have achieved those life goals. I have achieved my destiny to end that I set for myself eight years ago. Wait, so does that mean you're just keeping the goatee because you like it? Is that what you mean? So, well, I said I'm not going to shave it until these conditions occur. And there were people who believed that those conditions will never occur. We'll have to talk about it another time. But it's not that I must shave it, it's that I now can shave it. That's right. That's right. I tweeted about it a few years ago and I said, look, I'm not gonna tell you what's going on in my personal life yet here, but suffice to say, when the beard comes off, shit's about to go down. We need a beard. We'll get a beard tracker on the website. Beard tracker. For sure that people get. Well, we have Brian Armstrong joining the show. Thank you so much, Palmer, for joining. That was a fantastic conversation. We'd love to. We'll talk to you soon. How you guys doing? Good to see you, Palmer. Yep. We'll see you later, Palmer. Have a good one. Awesome. Thanks for coming on. Cheers. Live long and prosper. Live long and prosper. That is correct. Brian, welcome to the show. Double Brian. As you can see, I've already.

The Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVPN ultradome. Palmer, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. I'm here. He's here with the power of technology, the magic. How are you doing? What's going on? Doing really well. Although the thing I've been complaining about lately is I was recently on Joe Rogan. Yes. And what you don't understand when you go on Joe Rogan is that it's like calling in a distributed denial of service attack on all your communications because your email, your voicemail, text messages, your Facebook messenger, your X damned, everything becomes useless because you have so much incoming that even the important things like Palmer, you need to go to your dentist appointment right now. Flooded by bro. How many. How many float tank operators have reached out? Said we got to get. Let me think about this for a second. I haven't even caught up with everything, but at least three. Okay. Have you actually gone in a float tank? I mean, that, that hearing that, hearing that, the beginning of the interview and realizing that this guy you're listening to wants to do a float tank, but hasn't yet. And you're like, I've been waiting for this moment my entire life. It's funny too, because in talking about float tanks, Joe and I took a. We took a break during the show and when we took that break, we actually went to go look at his float tank. And it was so funny because you're right, I'm like one of the only people who has gone on the show knowing all about float tanks and the principle and the mechanism and the theory and the history, yet I've never actually managed to get into one. So it's a rare combination. I think most people who haven't used float tanks don't really know much about them or care. Yeah, I've actually looked a lot into float tanks, even beyond what we talked about on Rogan. Going back to my initial kind of push into this was in VR where I got into thinking about how do you do sensory management? How do you forget the senses that are at conflict with the virtual reality you want to present? Float tank is interesting, but then also it's a sci fi staple, is to fill your lungs up with some kind of oxygen bearing fluid and then go in your full fluid immersion pod so that you can achieve extremely high G forces during rapid acceleration. And what I've always wanted to do is build a dragster. Like build a car that can accelerate so fast that it would kill somebody if they weren't in a full Fluid immersion G pod. And I think that if you could do that, it would be like it'd be some kind of truly novel motorsports achievement where for the first time in any motorsport, the limit would truly be the ability of the person to survive it rather than the power of the machine that is involved. Wouldn't it be so cool? Like, oh, don't floor it unless you've got your lungs full or it will kill you. Yeah, they talk about instantly be dead. Supercars that don't have traction control being death machines, right? But supercars that are accelerating over 1G, like, that's crazy. I want to do an inverted fan car, basically a vacuum car that is accelerating at 80 or 90 GS. Would you have to put rockets on the back too, or explosives or something? How do you actually. How do you max it out? So my general opinion on these things is that there's an I'll know it when I see it element. If you're using rockets, you're not really a car. Like, look, I'm a huge fan. The NHRA was the nhra, right? I forget whatever the sanctioning body was in the United States for drag races, they allowed rocket dragsters up until I think the late 1980s. There's a great video of a dragster called Vanishing Point. And it was a rocket powered dragster. That was the last one before they banned them. It was doing like 400 miles per hour in the trap. And its final run. There's a video on YouTube. I'll have to send it to you guys. Although if you look up Vanishing Point rocket dragster on YouTube, you'll find it. Maybe you guys can cut it into the video later for people watching this not live, but its final run, they ran it at true full throttle, went faster than ever one, and the camera pans up and it blew out every single window in the control tower when it went. And the rumor is that it went so fast and so hard that the pilot passed out during the acceleration. And the parachute was actually pulled by a timer. I don't know if that's true, but it's a great story. So anyway, the point is rocket dragsters don't count. You have to do it with wheels. I'll know it when I see it. If it's rockets, it's not a car. And there was a guy in the, I think the Air Force who set the record for most GS sustained by a person. And he used a rocket sled to do that. Basically it was a rocket sled that accelerated and then Very rapidly decelerated and they couldn't. He thought it would be unethical to have anybody else volunteer. So it was a pretty senior Air Force researcher who did the test himself. And I think he, like, blew out all of his. The. All the veins in his eyes and his sinuses, and he was bleeding from every hole on his head. But he survived and recovered. And he proved that a human can survive over 50 GS of relatively sustained. 50 GS. Over 50 GS. Wow. But you have a very bad. That's leadership. That's leadership. That's true leadership. If the float tank is going to get added potentially to your routine, what other biohacks are you using or a fan of, or what else have you tried in sort of like the performance optimization? Being on a mission, I feel like being on a mission is the ultimate biohack. Yeah, I mean, it really is. I mean, I've always been very straight edge. Right. So no alcohol, no caffeine, no nicotine, no drugs, nothing. I've recently started drinking since having a child. And, you know, we can get into that or not. Yeah. But I. I'm very much high on life. I don't really want to. Doesn't Mountain Dew have caffeine in it? So it does, and I will. But, like, I generally will avoid Mountain Dew for that reason, at least as a dependency. Yeah, sure. I go to Taco Bell. I'm getting that Baja Blast, of course. And now that I've had a kid and I drink, I can go to the Taco Bell can, of which there's only a hand. Are you familiar with the Taco Bell Cantina? I'm not, no. I've never been. It's in New York. Is there one in sf, too? I think there's one in New York City. I don't think sf. Sf. Nobody builds anything in sf. But there's that Taco Bell right on the beach in Pacifica. You know what I'm talking about? The Taco Cantina is this concept where it's like Taco Bell, but also they serve alcohol. So it's like a bar and a Taco Bell, and there's one less than five minutes from my house in Newport Beach. And so I can now go get Baja blasted on my Baja Blast. Wait, but I have to ask. What about fatherhood made you start drinking? Do you have kids? Yes, we both have kids. We actually passed the Palmer test. We have five between us. Well, then you should understand. Yes, I do. You should understand. Yeah, no, I understand it a little Bit, but, but part of it's like, like alcohol for me. I sleep terribly. Kids are also, you know, they make they very. Oh, I see. No, alcohol knocks helps. It's different for everybody. It knocks me. It knocks me out. Yeah, yeah. Maybe because I don't have a tolerance to it, but. So you asked about hacks. I've got one that I've been pondering that maybe we could talk about. Yeah, please. I'm. I'm really afraid that nicotine might be really, really good. You've probably seen this theory, right? Basically, America smoked its way to being the dominant hyperpower. It kept people focused, it kept people fit. It's an appetite suppressant. There's this really interesting health trade off theory that I'm not saying I buy into it fully yet. So for people who are watching and shouting and screaming, I don't buy into it fully yet, but I'm becoming more and more convinced that the health benefits of not smoking have not been properly traded against the health problems caused by the resulting eating. Not just in terms of appetite suppressant, but also just people filling cravings and filling the need for ritual rituals. Well, I would tell you out of. Experience with other things that are worse for you, I think the crazy version of this is we'd all be better off with lung cancer eventually, but fit until then. And it could be that smoking gets you there. So I don't know. I'm trying to figure this one out. But nicotine is near the top of my list of potential biohacks. Sure. The other thing that it feels real is nicotine makes boring things pretty enjoyable. And it turns out that to do anything significant in life, it's oftentimes very exciting. Early. Let's say you're working on a new product at Anduroll. It's very exciting. You can make a 3D render internally, not for marketing materials. I know you guys don't do that. No render policy, no renders. But let's say you make a render internally, you're like, this is really exciting. And then it gets into the mud like, okay, now we have to build this thing. And you're in the, in the trenches of product development and you get through many, many, many boring hours of struggle in a. Well, I'll tell you, a lot of the people in the trenches, they are smoking. Yeah. The literal trenches also going back through war like they were. That was how people used to be in rations. Of course I was going to, I was going to bring that up. Yeah. I mean, they didn't get rid of The. They didn't get rid of the cigarettes in MREs until pretty recently. I don't know what date it was, but it was not that long ago. Yeah, so that's the. And of course there's other ways to have nicotine without having to have the health impact of actually, you know, smoking. Atari, substance. And so that's where it becomes interesting. Like you probably couldn't convince me that smoking is literally better than, you know, the food, but it's like, you know, is, is, is vaping worse than being fat? I don't know. I struggle. Based on the evidence I've seen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's wild. Do you play video games before bed? You said that the alcohol helps you fall asleep, but do you ever get locked in and you like or playing video games? Can't fall asleep because of that? You know, I used to play games all night long. I mean there was a time where I was spending maybe 14 hours a day on the computer if I could. Same. Yeah, like that's. That's you. Yeah. Wonderful. The best times. I love them. I want to go back. It was a good chunk of that. But also running online communities and other things. But the problem that I have now is the types of games I really like, especially multiplayer games. You kind of have to be on your game and if you play late at night when you're all wrecked, you're not even competitive enough for it to be fun. And I'm not saying I need to win or I hate it. I don't hate skill based matchmaking that much. But you want to know that you're playing, playing to at least the upper limit of your own potential. And I find so that that's been the struggle as I've gotten older. And I know, I know 33 doesn't sound that old, but there's a lot, there's a lot of things that are easier when you're 23 than when you are 33. And like, you're not supposed to talk about that. Particularly as an executive of a company in California High Department of Justice, you're not supposed to acknowledge that. Perhaps it's possible. I'm not saying there are. It's possible that different age ranges have different strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps, possibly. But certainly nobody should ever make a hiring decision on that basis. That's right. Yes, that's right. Yeah. I imagine in some ways being probably easier parenting could be easier for people in their early 20s. Right. Than their early 30s just by. Oh, forget. What are you talking about 20s, look at this. Mainstream NPC. No, no, no. Kids should be having, should be having kids when they're, when they're in their teens. That's when they're, that's when they're supposed to have them. Now you could argue that maybe there's a reason to stretch it out a little bit, but if we're just talking about physical ability and depth of, well, of energy, you know, let's, let's not be politically correct. Let's just admit you're supposed to be having kids, you're 16, 17, 18 and be done by the time in your 20s so that you can, so you can have your kids working on the farm by the time you're in your 40s. Yeah, I mean it's a, I mean I regret not having kids even at the age of 33. I regret not having them earlier because I'm like, geez, this would have been so much easier when I was younger. I've been with my wife since we were 15 though, so it's a lot easier for me would be like, oh, but Palmer, how do you know it's the right person? I'm like, geez, we should have just obviously had kids when we were 16. It would have worked out just fine. Yeah, yeah, totally, yeah. The whole world, you feel like when you're younger everything's as complicated as it'll be and it just gets more complicated every year and more busy every year. Take us through mod recognition. Well, this gets also to like the startup thing. I say all the time and I'll take this moment to push it, especially for anyone young who's listening. People think that starting a company or taking a break from school is this very high risk move when you're young, they say, oh, how do you find the bravery to do that? What I try to push on people is it will never get better. When you are 18 or 19, you have no family, you have no real job, you don't have a career yet per se. That's the best time to start a company. You're not giving anything up. All you have to lose is a bit of time and all you need to do is better than you would have done otherwise on your resume. Like running a startup and failing it is probably going to look better on your resume than whatever you were going to be doing part time in school as a late teenager or early 20s. And so yeah, the best time to start a company is when you're young because you don't need any bravery to do it. The people who start it later, where they have a Family and a mortgage. And yeah, once these people have acclimated to like a 250k base, it's like good luck building a hundred percent. And also once you have a family, you have a sort of fiduciary duty to your family to maximize their quality of life. There's no life hack that says that you're allowed to degrade the quality of your child's childhood because daddy wanted to have that grindset mindset. Right. It's irresponsible at that point. I couldn't imagine starting Oculus where I am today. Like it would just be irresponsible. Yeah. Take us through Mod Retro. How much of everyone's familiar with the Chromatic? We've talked a lot about it, a lot on the show. We unboxed one, we've had a lot of fun with them. How much of the roadmap is public now? We. Where's the company going? Where's the company now? Just kind of give us the general update and then we'll dive into some stuff. Before I tell you where it's going, I'll go back to where it came from in the first place. A lot of people think that Mod Retro is this very recent thing. For me, the first product we launched, the Mod Retro Chromatic, which was kind of the ultimate Game Boy. This kind of heirloom grade tribute to the Nintendo Game Boy and Game Boy color. Very high end hardware, magnesium aluminum alloy shell, a lab grown sapphire crystal screen lens rather than plastic or even glass. And the thing is, Mod Retro was actually the first company that I ever started, even before Oculus. So I started Mod Retro when I was about 15 years old. It was an online forum for. It was an online forum for people modifying game consoles, handhelds, portables, also home television consoles. The main kind of thrust of the community was this hobby called portableizing, which is taking home consoles and turning them into handhelds by combining them with modern technology like LCDs and modern high energy density batteries. I mean that actually was a pretty big deal for a while. I know in the modern day this doesn't mean much, but we were getting millions of unique viewers every single month because we were getting covered the projects on this site. We had thousands of active members. We were getting covered by Engadget and Gizmodo and Kotaku and you know, kind of the, the, the whole group of outlets that back then liked technology, they're now anti tech. Anti tech Tate coverage. But back when, back when tech news was about tech and not anti tech, they were covering all of these things. And again, these days, millions of uniques. I mean, you can get that on TikTok with a good dance. But that really meant something in the mid-2000s on the Internet, and we actually started working on projects like what the ultimate Game Boy would be back then. There was a project that I did in 2008 called the PGB, the power game Boy. Power Game Boy was the ultimate Game Boy. It was a Game Boy Advance. It was Game Boy Advance SP hardware transplanted into an original Game Boy shell, but with an upgraded screen, upgraded controls, motion controls, an FM radio transmitter so you could broadcast the sound to your car so you could be playing and didn't have to tether in and could have all that sound if you're doing lsdj, Dells, DJ or some other chiptune software. And that actually won the 2008 portable Palooza. So I'm very proud of the Power Game Boy. I was also the first person to ever backlight a Game Boy Pocket, the first person to ever led backlight an original Game Boy. So, I mean, I am an OG OG to the max when it comes to this. That was the original, like, parental control was. I just remember being a kid and being like, if I turn the lights on to play Game Boy, my parents are going to see the light under the door. They're going to come take my Game Boy. So I was like, trying to. It was probably training my eyesight to try to. Yeah, no, no. You're just maybe hurting your eyesight, but training your brain. Now you can see signal from the noise. You have ultimate night vision. Your Batman yourself. Game Boy molded by it, raised by it. So what happened is I started on this project all the way back then of what the ultimate Game Boy would look like. I kept working on it at Oculus, I kept working on it post Oculus. And then after about eight or nine years of not making any progress, because I was just like, I made some progress. We had some prototypes and stuff. I finally said, you know what? I need to get more serious about paying someone else to do my hobby, because I'm not going to be able to get this done on my own. And so I ended up hiring a few people from my past life and getting together with a bunch of people who believed in this kind of vision of building these tributes to what technology used to be the best parts of what gaming used to be and building a company around that. And we ended up pulling together the chromatic, all the pieces and loose ends from 10 years of hacking and modding and turned it into a real product. Walk me through the roadmap. The M64 is coming out. That's right. Do you have other ideas or ways you define what sticks out? Obviously, the Game Boy is iconic, the N64 is iconic. But how broad are you thinking? What reaches? Is it just games? Is it just games from the 90s, 2000s? We did the Game Boy because it's the most important handheld console ever. I mean, it redefined the idea of gaming what it was, how you did it, how it fit into your life, how you could build games that you didn't sit down and be tethered to something, but instead could be a thing that you would share with friends, bring to places, meet new people playing them. That was really, really a wild idea at the time and there's a lot of good in that. But I think that as the games industry has financialized and gotten much bigger, there's a lot of things that have gotten lost. I think that the need to make more and more money has taken things away from, I think, what were actually great product decisions in the 80s and 90s when people were just trying to make great games and great consoles. They weren't trying to figure out how to bump up their daily active users, they weren't trying to build live services, they weren't trying to. To build passive recurring revenue models that relied on a variety of modern marketing concepts to juice people and get them locked in. Yeah, what do you like in the modern. That's why I'd say generally, hardware wise, I want to go into hardware that was similar turning points. So the M64 is an obvious one. That was the beginning of 3D gaming basically for everybody. You can say, but Palmer, there were people who are playing 3D games on their PCs. Yes, but in terms of mainstream access, I mean, that changed everything totally. I'm interested in going to all these points where there's things that we can learn and releasing basically the best version of that combined with modern technology makes it more useful. So things like what would a modern Sony Walkman look like? Like what was good about the Walkman experience versus modern streaming and kind of the digital morass that we've gotten into the algorithmic feed, like, nobody's doing mixtapes anymore. Listening to music is not a conscious activity. It's not a curated activity. It's a. It's being a receptacle for, for a machine. People talk about just, you know, having a slop fed to them without realizing that, you know, the modern music industry has kind of Been pioneering this for a long time. It's just the AI is behind the curtain, the computers are behind the curtain, and the algorithmic recommendation engine is behind the curtain. Do you feel like there's some green shoots in the modern gaming economy? I'm thinking like, yes, there's a lot of, you know, mobile games that are hyper optimized and there's a lot of games that have gone free to play with all the micropayments and stuff. But then you do have folks like the team behind Last of Us, where it's just a story and you don't really get sucked into any crazy micropayments and it feels like there's an artist behind it. But are there other areas of the modern game industry that are sticking out to you as positives? There certainly are. And there's lots of modern indie games that are, I think, doing a lot of, like, you look at, like Silksong and a lot of Balatro. But where you're not seeing this, I think is on the hardware side. Sure. You're still living in an ecosystem. So let's say that you want to play a game that was built with these values. All right, so you're going to turn on your console, you're going to try to play it. Oh, there's a critical security update. Time for you to do your critical security update. Okay. Now you need to also update your console. All right, you're updating your console. Nope, that wiped out all the cookies. It's time for you to log in again. You're going to log in. It wants you to do two factor authentication because fraud has become such a problem that you now need to do that. Oh, shit, where's my phone? Let me see. I don't have my authentic. It's one of those terrible things where it adds so much friction. And that's before you then get railroaded into a big giant UI of advertisements that are autoplaying the moment. The idea of that's just to get. Permission to upgrade your skins, basically. The idea to just be like, I'm going to take this. Yeah. And just turn it on and it plays and it's great. That is. Yeah, that is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Modern games can't do that because of the platforms that they're on. Yeah, yeah. I was comping like what it takes to play actually on the. One of the. One of the newer quests I had, I realized I had seven different passwords. Instagram, Facebook, Meta. I had all these different passwords, I had codes to different pieces to Buy games and stuff versus I went and pulled up an old N64 where you turn the button and it just says Goldeneye. And it's just like amazing. And I was saying that like that that seems like an own goal. It seems like modern video game designers should at least know that you will see Lower Churn if you pre install one great game. And when the first time they unbox it on Christmas, you turn it on and it's Beat Saber or whatever the, whatever the piece of software or hardware that you're selling, like, have it come with something great. Like why don't people do that? Are they just stupid? Or is it like something more complex? This is. It is complex. I mean, so you got to remember. So first of all, there's a lot of people in the games industry who didn't necessarily get into it purely because they want to build great games or. Necessarily drink Starbucks and not Mountain Dew. Yep, you've heard my quote, right? And you have a lot of these people who, it's a lily pad. It's a way to make a check or it's a way to affect social change in the world through some larger company's budget. And so that is part of the problem. But you're also at odds often. So like, you just talked about this specific idea of having a bundled title. So I've been on the other side of the negotiating table inside of, you know, inside of Meta, formerly Facebook, and you know, formerly Oculus. What's going to happen is you're going to say, hey, this is going to be a great experience. And then you have someone who says, ah, but if we have a bundled title, then that gets rid of the revenue opportunity to have another company pay us to be the bundled title. And also our developers are going to be really upset because we're going to be competing with them. And so, for example, your holiday day one installs, they're mostly going to be of this new game. People are going to be less likely to do day one buys of all of these other games. If there is a game that you can already play, you say, well, which should we. We have to have something pre installed. And then you have these conversations. Well, it can't be a full game. It needs to be a thing that shows off the hardware. It can be like a fun little bite experience. But we then need to have people go into it. And here's another thing they say if you have literally nothing, that means they have to download something. And the time where there's going to be the most impetus for them to put in their payment details is going to be that day one. So you don't want to do anything that degrades. You get the payment details because the moment you get their payment details, every purchase after that is an easy click. It's an easy dopamine hit. You don't have to go through all of the pain. And so it's one of those things where you have all of these intervariate money driven things and you have the platform holders so tightly intertwined with much of the content. This is the problem when the hardware owners end up owning all of these studios. This is probably me getting a little too business political. But in the early days of Oculus we were very clear with developers through our business relations. We are not Nintendo, we are not going to compete with you and basically destroy your sales by preferentially treating our own developers better, our own studios. We made things, but we really said our goal is to enable second and third party titles to fund lots of other people and we funded dozens of developers. As you become Nintendo, you make it harder for those third parties to exist. And the first party has their own goals that are not necessarily aligned with what you're talking about, which is turn on the game and play it and have a good time. They have, they have, they have other plans for you. Is the answer just out compete them? I imagine that the libertarian in you is not saying we need to regulate this. So what's the answer? Of course not. I think it's a combination of reminding people what they've lost, like what they had and how good it was. It's about reminding and showing off for the first time to a new generation how things used to be. I mean, one of the things I love about chromatic and M64 is people. We were just at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo and a lot of the people coming by and having the most funds were kids whose parents brought them over, like, oh, check out this game. Like this is the Mario Kart I used to play. And you can show these people, I think a lot about how things used to be, how it used to work. And I think you can prove that people still want that. There's people who don't believe any of this. You'll talk to people say, well that's not what people want from games anymore. They want live service games. They want games that are continuously updating with fresh new content. And they say this I think because their internal people have to convince themselves that it's true. Because otherwise their business model of being a $100 billion company doesn't pan out and you contrast that with like the number, you know, many people made the game boy, there's 12 people. 12. I mean it's just, it's. You contrast that with like the 60,000 people you have in some of these larger games. So I look, I don't think it's regulation, I think it's reminding people, showing people. And then at some point someone needs to take the best of modern technology and they need to take these lessons from the past when people were trying to make things great without necessarily being concerned about the micro financials and they need to build probably a new platform that learns combines the best of all of these things, which is kind of the idea behind Mod Retro. You want to combine the best of the modern and the best of the retro. And I think at some point somebody's going to do that. Who knows, maybe you'll see something like Sega reenters the console war and kicks everybody's ass. But maybe it'll be in television. Maybe ColecoVision is going to come back, but at some point it'll happen. Yeah. Do you expect Mod Retro to continuously make decisions that sort of limit the TAM and that's, you know, not going down the path of hyper financialization and you know, trying to create this open ecosystem. I just, I doubt you guys had any investors that, that passed on Mod Retro but I imagine some of them would say, you know, the NPC VC that thinks it's contrarian to have kids in your 20s would say like okay, I want to invest but like how do you think about the tam? Right? Like how do you, how do you address that? Because I can see the obvious path of just selling a lot of really great hardware and building out, you know, millions of people in the world that just love the hardware, buy the hardware and you have a fantastic business. But maybe it's not an Andrew Scale opportunity and you're probably totally okay with that. I think the opportunity actually is huge. I think that the entire modern electronics industry is in a sort of prisoner's dilemma where nobody can stop doing these things that nobody wants to be doing because the first person to do it can't really do it alone. I mean that's why your phone is full of crapware, that's why you buy a laptop and it's preloaded with all of this stuff. The companies know just how much consumers hate it, but they're all in this competing for each penny, competing for each dollar race against each other with largely undifferentiated offerings. And so they have to play that game. If you can hugely differentiate and if you can convince a consumer that it really is a differentiated thing, I actually think that you could end up where the TAM is. Look, here's what will actually happen. I think the TAM for doing things right is bigger than the TAM for things that do things wrong. The only problem is that the moment you prove that that's true, everyone is going to follow in your footsteps and become your competitors in this new post prisoners dilemma world. That's probably the form of success that I would be happy with. It's not let's do everything ourselves and nobody's going to follow us. Realistically, the moment you see success, everybody copies what you're doing. Changing the world is outcome people need to be okay with even if they don't own the whole market. Would Mod Retro ever make a M1 Garand M1 grand? I don't think so. I think it's going to stick to consumer electronics, like technology products. Did you ever make a consumer electronics product that was created before you were born? Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure. I mean, we're working on a cassette tape player right now. Okay, yeah. So like that's one example. Like, what would the ultimate Sony Walkman look like? Like, if you were making something today with those principles in mind, what would it look like today? How would it work? And there's a lot of things, and I'm not even talking about the complicated things like algorithmic music feeds, just basic things. It was so easy to stop and start music or adjust the volume or know that it was playing in the first place. You have that haptic mechanical, like you can literally feel the wheels turning. A Walkman on an armband is a much better experience than using your phone to play music. And I understand why we're using one and not the other. And I'm not saying that the cassette tape part is the part that made it good, but there's a lot of other parts that were good that I think are worth learning from. Another one is like an example would be modern televisions. I know. I'm a libertarian and I'm not supposed to like regulation, but I sometimes flirt with the idea that smart TVs should be illegal. I hate smart TVs so much. They're so bad. So you're clapping because everyone agrees, Everyone agrees. This is the danger of being a libertarian. You realize you can just adopt populist pro state dispositions and you can get voters like, oh, we're libertarian, except for this thing. You Hate we're going to regulate that. You can be, you can be trusted with total control. I would trust you. Exactly. But you're not like the other ones. Like, smart TVs create a lot of these same bad incentives where you have the hardware manufacturer not just trying to build a good tv, a good screen, good visual technology they're now dipping their toe into. Well, I actually need to be a services company. I need to be a software platform company. I need to run an app store. And it's a, it's a prisoner's dilemma. If you don't do those things and if you don't introduce advertising into your TV feeds and if you don't have, you know, a lock screen that's showing ads on your tv, how could you compete with the people who are, who charge, you know, just a few, a few dollars less. But I think that there's, I think that there's value in saying, like, hey, like one of the things Mod Retro is looking at doing is doing a modern CRT display. And part of the value there is building something that actually has all those cool attributes of a crt, especially when you're working with retro computer systems and retro consoles that we're designing the art around the particular technicalities of how a CRT works in terms of having very high motion clarity, very, very good color gamut, relying on the persistence of the phosphors to enable certain visual effects, a certain blending that happens on certain things, doing display interlacing techniques, but ignoring all that, there's also just the fact that a TV that you can plug something into and it just shows what you plugged into it is an incredibly novel idea. And I think bringing it back, reminding people of that, I wouldn't be surprised to see Mod Retro make a totally modern technology display that is just a TV that doesn't fuck you. Like, that's it. I think, I mean, just, just think. Just my biggest critique of all these smart TVs is how quickly the software degrades. Like it wasn't good in the beginning, and then quickly there's like a small lag every time you push a button. And imagine a TV that was just super snappy and just had the three apps that you actually want to use. And I'm sure you got to go. Back and use, go back and use like a, even like a flip phone. From the early 2000, the UIs were literally orders of magnitude faster and snappier than the UIs of these modern smart TVs. Like, you could buy a TV with eight gigabytes of RAM and a 3 GHz processor. And somehow you're right, it still manages to have that lag. You know what, we're at a stage in the technology cycle where people make things that are different but not necessarily better. There's this pressure to do things that are new and different. Horizontal movement. Yeah. Yeah. And my biggest critique is the new iOS liquid glass. It's like, congratulations, you made it different. I don't believe you made it better. Yeah. What do you think? Do you think there's a world where the next turn of VR kind of displaces TVs? We talked to James Cameron about this, and it seemed like he'd kind of seen the next iteration, maybe, and was kind of excited about the idea of being able to watch a 3D IMAX movie at home. And from my experience with the Apple Vision Pro, the screen's getting better and better. Meta's working on this stuff. Like, we've talked to the big screen team. It feels like we might finally be at a point where we're thinking about replacing the home theater. The way to think about VR headsets is not as a replacement for a tv, but as a replacement for a home theater. The reason that's important is it's not just a tv, a screen. It's a controlled environment optimized for watching that content. The thing I've always liked about VR is you can have all this cool new VR content, but it can potentially also simulate any previous form of any previous media experience before. So, like an example I've given when people said, well, what about, like an ebook? You know, an ebook reader on VR, you know, are we. Are we really going to use that? And the point I make is, well, look, if you make this good enough, it's not just the book, right? The experience of reading a book is also your environment, your surroundings. People will go places just to sit down and read a book in the right environment. Simulating that is interesting. So the same thing goes for music, right? It's not that you're not trying to simulate a speaker, you're trying to simulate a listening room. And I feel like that's where things are going. I think that's why James Cameron is excited, because you spend a lot of money to control a viewing experience when you're doing it physically. I'm building walls, I'm soundproofing a room, I'm painting the whole thing matte black so there's no reflections on my screen. By the way, I've done that. I Have a basement home theater that I made myself and the walls are painted matte black and the ceiling is painted matte black. And I have custom matte black carpet that's mostly black except for a few of my favorite galaxies printed on it from NASA imagery because I wanted to have some space carpet. Nothing's cooler than space carpet. But like that was really expensive to do all that and I think VR is going to actually surpass that experience in short order. The technological path to VR displays being better than 99% of people's home viewing environments is a single digit year problem. It's not decades, it's it, it's, it's within 10 years certainly. Yeah. What's the, what's in the critical path? Is it. You've said that you liked pulling the battery out. Is, are there other things that you're pulling out? If you're building the next version of consumer like BRS home theater, what are the designers? I mean, I mean, I mean, where do I even, where do I even begin? A second screen on the outside you'd have, you definitely have that if you want to be in the home theater, right? No, no, I hear that was a Tim Cook special, but I can't confirm it. I don't work at Apple. But you need to relentlessly focus on the experience of the user of the device and you can't have features that are not adding to that. If your job is to try and make VR cool, which is largely what Apple was trying to do with the first generation Vision Pro, you might do things like have a screen on the outside and like if you're trying to make it cool and acceptable. But at some point you need to optimize towards the experience of it all. And luckily in the long run, maybe even the medium run, these things are going to look like sunglasses, not like ski goggles. And so that, that, that, that's really where this is all going. I don't, I think if you, if you and me were had James Cameron right here to grill, I don't think you would say, I think the future looks like a bunch of people wearing ski goggles. I think you'd say the glasses you wear to already like navigate and communicate that you're wearing all day will also simultaneously be the best home theater device you've ever seen. We're going to get there sooner rather than later. Yeah. Let's talk about Erebor. There's been some press hits lately. The press seems entirely fixated on Palmer Luckey's crypto bank and obviously that is not the full story, nor is it the most, I think, exciting thing about it from anybody that's been in the tech industry that lived through the SVB collapse. And so I wanted, I wanted to hear it directly from you. Well, you know, it's a little early to start talking about you. We just got our conditional approval, which is fantastic. We're still waiting on fdic. Yep. We're still waiting on full approval. So it's a little early for me to really get into, into, you know, going out and marketing the bank. Yeah, but why, but, but yeah, you're getting into. Yeah, no, I get it. Like the, I think there's this natural inclination for people to look at this and say, oh, it's like what SVB was. It's catering to the same customers. That must mean that they're going to be this really high risk bank that does all these high risk things. In reality, it's literally reaction to that. It is an opposite. The reason that we got this approval is because we went in saying we are going to have the most conservative loan to deposit ratios of any bank in history. We are going to do this extremely novel service of taking money from people, holding it for them and then allowing them to have it back. Like we're going to be offering these services that banks used to offer. You can't get the service I just described in any bank. If you go and you say I want you to just like hold on to my assets, but I don't want you to loan against them. Like that's, that's not what a bank is. What are you talking about? And of course, like, I'm not saying that all assets should be held that way, but when you're a business in the business of making your business grow, you don't care nearly as much about getting an extra half a percent on your deposits as you might about truly minimizing the risk that you're not going to have access to any of your capital. I mean if SVB would not have been bailed out by the government, it wasn't just like the government's obligations. They were bailing out well beyond FDIC limits. If they wouldn't have done that, it probably would have wiped out half the tech industry in one fell swoop. That's crazy. How can the tech industry have become so subservient to the banking industry, to the finance bros, that not only can we not survive without them, but in working with them we sign our own death warrants. Right? Like we can't see what the Risk is we can't control what is. And there's literally no other option. So that it is. I agree. It's annoying to see everyone talk about how Erebor is this new bank in the vein of SVB that's going to be taking on higher risk, you know, high risk bets. It's literally the opposite. It's do what SVB didn't for the people that SVB was otherwise successful in working with. So think like national security companies, hard tech, deep tech, biotech, these companies that just need to make sure they have someone who understands how their business works. And SVB did do a good job at that, but then also is going to make sure their money is actually there when they go to get it. That was the part that SVB screwed up. Yeah. How? How? I guess I'll end with one bit here, which is maybe worth noting. You know, I'm not, I'm not even. I'm not working on Erebor in an operational day to day capacity. Like I'm a board member. I, I founded it because I wanted this to exist. You got to remember that the tech. Sorry, the finance industry is full of people who love finance for the sake of finance. Right there. They're truly, they're truly in love with, with all the levers and the machines. And they're in love with lever. That's right. And in addition, they probably like what it enables. They like free flow of capital. They love the ability to leverage things. I get that. Similarly, I'm a VR guy. I love VR for the sake of VR. I love what VR can do. I love that it can be a home theater. I love that it can be a classroom. I love that it can be a time machine. But I also strictly love it for the sake of the technology itself that you're presenting an artificial view to your peripheral nervous system that is sufficiently advanced as to convince a body that has developed for millions of years to discern and what is and isn't real. Like, that's incredible. I love it. I would love it from a tech perspective, even if it were useless from an everyday perspective. And I would say that is not how I am with finance. I don't love finance for the sake of finance. I'm not a finance bro. I want something like Erebor to exist because of and for the sake of my love for all of these other technologies if something doesn't exist, a safe, reliable banking partner for people like me who care about tech for the sake of tech and what tech can do if something like that doesn't exist. People are going to have a hard time. So it's a little weird. It's one of the few finance companies that started by somebody who wants it to be in service of all the other true interests they have, rather than the culmination of their own personal interests. I guarantee J.P. morgan, Goldman Sachs. These firms were not started by people who said, you know, I don't really care about baking, but, but, but I do, I do want to make does technology work? Yeah, yeah, I know that makes a lot of sense. Speaking of other articles, there's this interesting article in Business Insider from six years ago. The US army wants mixed reality headsets that detect enemy fire, translate language, and see in the dark. And the startup founded by Oculus Palmer Lucky. Oculus's Palmer Lucky is on it. This was a six year project. What is the full story here? What was the genesis of this article? And then how did the product come together? Well, the thing that's so interesting, and I think there's a quote you should dig in there for. Like there's a quote from Brian Schimp. Yeah, that's right. He says the real moonshot for us is this idea. You want to have every soldier, every operator, be able to have total awareness of what's going on. They know everything they need to know to do their job. And all of this is available to them in a millisecond and just the most critical information that they need. I mean, you could take that quote and it's practically word for word what the army is saying about soldier borne mission command. I mean, you could be the press release for Eagle Eye, which we just, which we just started showing off publicly. Ausa. I mean, I'm, I'm. It's interesting because a lot of people think that this move into announcing our augmented reality efforts is this new thing that we pivoted into rather than the culmination of eight years of platform building, building the software that you need, building the data integration techniques you need, the radio relay and meshing systems that you need. There's so much you have to do to accomplish this dream of a soldier born heads up display that shows you where the baddies are, where your buddies are, does your ballistics compensation and calculations. I mean, it takes so much work. And we've been working on this since the beginning of the company. And so I think that article is interesting because this was six, seven years ago and people are asking, what are you guys going to do? We said, oh, we're going to build combat heads up displays to integrate data from all these sources and put it right in the soldiers field of view so it's available in a millisecond. And when we said that back then, people were kind of giving us side eye and they were like, okay, one, that sounds crazy. Two, the army just gave, like, to put this in context, that was like six months after Microsoft had won the IVAs contract. They're like, well, that's what Microsoft's doing. Why? Why would you be working on that? And even then, it's because we had a vision for what it needed to be that was somewhat divergent from what the army or Microsoft was doing. And so we kept investing, we kept building. And I mean, who would have bet that eight years later, that Microsoft contract, that $22 billion contract vehicle for the architecture of the Army's AR future would move over to Anduril, that we would be launching something like Eagle Eye, and that it would be an extremely. You know, that when we took over SBMC from Microsoft, that we integrated our UI and features that we've been building on Lattice in less than two weeks. Like we literally, like we did in two weeks what the army had been working on for years because we'd been building this backend for it and kind of preparing for the day where this might happen. So it feels very much like a culmination of destiny, a bet that paid off. And I've been definitely talking to my investors and reminding them that they told us that this was a moonshot that probably was not going to pan out. I mean, try telling someone, I think Microsoft is going to transfer their $22 billion contract to us at some point. It's just like, they're just like, palmer, that's magical thinking. Literally, I've been told, Palmer, that's the type of thing you think when you just miss the boat and you just can't bear to. Yeah, they're like, you're just coping. You're just coping. You're just coping. It's cope. It's pure cope. I say, well, let's, let's give it up for a culmination of destiny. Yeah, a culmination of destiny. I'm always a fan of people achieving, Achieving their destiny. I haven't gotten to mine yet. Although, you know, I won't, I won't. I won't do this. You know, I think. I think you guys might have even asked me about this at one point. So, you know, I have this. I have this. I have this. This goatee that I've been growing ever since I was fired. And that was like, coming up on nine years ago now. And I've told people who asked about it that I can't shave it until certain conditions are met, until I achieve certain goals in my life. And I've just been cryptic about it and never said why. I don't plan on changing that. But I will let you know, I have achieved those life goals. I have achieved the. My destiny to end that I set for myself eight years ago. Wait, so does that mean you're just keeping the goatee because you like it? Is that what you mean? So, well, I said I'm not going to shave it until these conditions occur. And there were people who believed that those conditions will never occur. We'll have to talk about it another time. Sure. But it's not that I must shave it. It's now. I now can shave it. That's right. That's right. I tweeted about it a few years ago and I said, look, I'm not going to tell you what's going on in my. In my personal life yet here, but. But suffice to say, when the beard comes off, shit's about to go down. We need it. We need a. We need a beard. We'll get a beard tracker on the website that people get. Well, we have Brian Armstrong joining the show. Thank you so much, Palmer, for joining. That was a fantastic conversation. We'd love to have you back. We'll talk to you soon. How you guys doing? Good to see you, Palmer. Yep, we'll see you later, Palmer. Have a good one. Awesome. Thanks for coming on. Cheers. Live long and prosper. Live long and prosper. That is correct, Brian.

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