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Engineer. I'm not a programmer by trade. I've taught myself enough to glue things together and make them work. But when I started my first company, Oculus, or actually when I started Mod Retro when I was 14 or 15, I knew just barely enough about software. If I would have been able to build crappy stuff by outsourcing it to a computer, I actually would have been able to accomplish things a lot faster than trying to do it myself. People might say, palmer, you should have just learned to code. You should have should have just learned to do it yourself. But I think it's pretty easy to look at my track record and realize. I started Oculus When I was 19, after building prototypes since I was 15, I was only able to accomplish what I accomplished because I focused on what I was good at, which was optomechanics, a little bit of electrical, and then the product integration of all of these different components. I didn't have time to learn to program. If I'd spent another year or two learning to program at even a reasonable level, I would have been two years behind on everything else. I am a big fan of vibe coding. Even if everything that comes out of it is slop, even if it is all shit, it's better than I was able to make.

So much value, but it isn't, doesn't inspire people. Here's something. Everyone's vying to be the Apple of AI, right? You see this in a lot of the, the marketing campaigns, advertising campaigns. A lot of it feels heavily Apple inspired. And Apple should be thinking, well, why not us? Why don't we be the Apple of AI? But instead, they're doing Gen Moji, right? Like they, they have an opportunity to have to lead with heavy, heavy campaigns around the magic of AI and they can say, we're not even building data centers. We're not, we're not, we're not, you know, we're not increasing your, your power bill. They have a really powerful position, but it feels like they've lost. It doesn't feel like anyone at Apple is in love with advertising anymore. Like, is really willing to meet the moment and deliver the kind of campaigns that I think they could. Or like the next demo day. I bet if you were to pull all the founders in the next demo day, like, what company inspires you the most? How many would say, Apple, we did this. We actually did this. And I was expecting it to be all like, Elon and Tim.

Protest. You won't. Team Cope is funny. Team Cope is funny. But, yeah, people took this all over the place. The people versus the wheel. Grunts from the silent majority. Dragging rocks and rolling is a drag. People are having a lot of fun about this. The horses versus the car. The horses versus the car. the same time, the backlash can have an actual impact. So you should not just write it off and be like, well, obviously AI is gonna happen, so this is. It's inevitable. It's like, no, these. These, like, we live in a democracy. Like, if they vote, no more data centers. Look at what happened in nuclear. People like, you keep comparing AI to splitting the atom. I was just watching some video, and the guy was saying, like, it's like, it's. The AI is the most incredible human invention. It's up there right with. With when we split the atom. And I'm like, well, I know how that ended. Like, we got a bunch of nuclear weapons that we didn't even fire at each other. It just became a cold war. So really zero economic value from that. Just a lot of people building and then putting them in silos and then a couple nuclear power plants that eventually got regulated out of existence. And we never got a nuclear future of energy. And so it is possible.

Mars is the goal and will be truly multi planetary. Moon base doesn't really count as multi planetary. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to see you. Will, congrats on all the progress. We're still waiting for our capsule here in the dome right now. Yeah, we've got, you know they're gonna have too many. They're gonna need a whole storage facility for them in a couple. We can be, we can be trusted. We can be trusted. The price is going to invert. I'm going to start paying you just. Yeah, yeah. You're going to be like I got to hold on to it for. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And I'm also going to tell you about Restream one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream go to restream.com up next, Sam Levenbeck from X Energy. He's the VP of Growth and strategy. Sam, good to meet you. How are you doing? What's happening? Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here. First time on the show. Please introduce yourself and tell us about the company a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. Name is Sam Levenbach. I work at a company called X Energy. X Energy is designing a reactor, high temperature gas reactor. And what's really exciting, there's a lot of exciting things about what we're doing. The technology is super compelling. We have some incredible investors. I think the thing that we're most cited for and known for is we're building our first project in South Texas with Dow Chemical in Calvin County, Texas and we're going to be building our second project in Washington state with Amazon for to support one of their largest data center clusters in the Pacific Northwest. So just super exciting times for nuclear and the next generation of firm power. Yeah, I mean Dylan and our team mentioned that you are a new Erebor customer and I'm wondering like this doesn't seem like something that's like, you know, unbankable or requires something new. But what is it about your business that drew you to Erebor? Is it just excitement or is there something that where your business looks a little bit different than a normal business? I think that there is a really amazing nuclear industry in the United States today. We have 94 operating nuclear reactors but not a lot of new reactors in construction. Right. And we have a moribund nuclear supply chain in, in this country. And that's, you know, it's, it's, it's a shame that we've lost a little bit of the shine and the pedigree of, of what we have historically done so well in the United States. And so getting that nuclear supply chain back up on its feet and up and running and to support the growth that's really demanded by AI digital infrastructure is a pretty heavy lift. And it's not something that's directly in the wheelhouse today frankly of a lot of existing pick your basket of capital allocators. I think what's been really impressive about the Erebor team about, you know, with Owen and you know, what they're building is a real excitement and willingness to roll up their sleeves and understand, understand our sector, understand what is risky, understand what is bankable and you know, get to work with us really with the same mission which is, you know, the next century of American leadership in global nuclear commerce. Yeah. How capital intensive is the business? Do you have to buy land to build a facility? To what level of the stack? Yeah. So our business is primarily around two things. Number one is designing a next generation high temperature gas cooled pebble bed reactor. So that's a heavy lift. Our company has over 900 employees today working on that. Wow. We are also then the secret sauce of our reactor is the fuel, so called Triso fuel. And this is really advanced stuff. And we're building a fuel factory today in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. We received last week from the NRC our permit to operate that facility. And so that's the, the two halves of our business. It's designing a reactor which our customers will license that technology for us and they'll, they'll build it on their balance sheet and we will sell them the fuel for the life of that reactor. So we are selling you the design to build the printer and then we will sell you the printer ink for the life of that reactor. So you know, there are different aspects of that business that are capital intensive. There are different aspects that are not. And getting into it with us and understanding those different aspects is a really something that airport's coming on that. When did you guys decide to get into the fuel business? Did that come after the reactor? That's a great question. You know, it was really a visionary decision by our founder back in 2015. If you're just, if you build the world's most advanced reactor and the fuel doesn't show up, you're kind of hosed. Right. And so a little Bit of vertical integration here, a little bit of getting into. If it's the secret sauce of your reactor, you better have your arms firmly around. It was really early insight that decision was made back in 2015. We spent a lot of time redeveloping how this fuel was made, the intellectual property around how you do it. That's been a really important part of our story and our journey. Last question for me. I want to know about timelines. We talk to a lot of folks in nuclear. I hear 2029. I've seen some reporting in the Wall Street Journal about even just bringing old nuclear power plants back online. But the dates are crazy to me. The 2030, 2032, 2035 gets thrown around. What are you estimating for when we might actually see the, you know, the famously flat curve of nuclear power generation in the United States start to tick upwards? It's going to, you're going to see it in the early 2030s. In the early 2030s is when we're going to see our first two projects coming online with many more thereafter. You know, the first pickles out of the jar are the hardest, but the demand is insane. New analogy. Because pickles are green like nuclear fuel. You know, it's, it's. But you're going to, I think that there's a reason that you're hearing, I mean that's, I think the kind of the consensus in the industry. You know, you got to. And so I think you see, look, turning on those reactors and upgrading existing reactors, that's the, that's the low hanging fruit. And we should get every electron we can out of the existing fleet. But that's not going to be enough. There's only so many of those projects to do the, really throughout the2030s. You're, I think you're going to see, I know you're going to see a steady and ever going growing clip of new nuclear reactors coming online and powering this kind of generational super cycle of AI digital infrastructure. Yeah. How are you thinking about the different scales of nuclear power generation? I was really excited about just replacing the 1 megawatt diesel reactor. Radiant's doing some cool stuff there. There's a couple other folks. Then there's been. As the AI boom has sort of taken off, everyone has been thinking about, well, what if we get 100 of those together? Well then we're doing something for a data center. Maybe we should upscale the whole project. Do a 10 megawatt, a 25, 100 megawatt and then we can get into like the really big Westinghouse projects that maybe can be unstuck by a startup. But what's the landscape like from your perspective? Where's the most value in, in new reactor designs? Love this question. I mean I think that it's all exciting and all have their puts and takes, right? So the big reactors, the conventional light water reactors, the Westinghouse 1000. Yeah, a lot of new excitement and focus on those. I'm sure nuance will get built. I mean just the amount of power demand that, that, that's out there. You know, Westinghouse is a great company, but Vodol, we all learned from Vodol that it can take, we did votable, but it took a long, long time. And I think the tech companies, that's the downside. Right. I think that even for a big hyperscaler, you know, even These companies spending $160 billion a year on CapEx, you know, a $15 billion bite on a single machine is a lot of risk to manage and it's a lot of risk for any individual investor owned utility to manage. You know, if you look at the market caps of the largest investor owned utilities in the United States, $15 billion, $10 billion, whatever the next AP1000 costs, these are big bites of the apple. So those are the puts and the takes with those. But you know what, they're going to be successful building more. I don't have any doubt about that. At the other end of the spectrum, the 1 mega 1 megawatt micros, look, if you can get those to scale, delivering tens and then hundreds at a time, it's an awesome opportunity. You know, the challenge there, and I think you alluded it, alluded to it in the question is, you know, for it to make a meaningful dent in a hyperscale data center, you're building hundreds and thousands, you know, in a single location and that's a lot of moving parts. That's a lot of. Yeah, but, but it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily. Grid capacity is grid capacity. So if you put one at every hospital and you replace a diesel generator on every, you know, oil field, like that does free up energy for other purposes and that has equivalent equilibrates at some point. So. Absolutely. And you know, so I mean they're super exciting. And you know, the theory of the case, getting to a factory kind of manufacturing, you know, through but, you know, to bring down the cost. Yeah, it totally makes sense, you know, but it's, it's, you know, it's, it's nonetheless challenged on the economics on the actual delivered cost of electricity. When you get that small, our main product is in that middle sweet spot. So our, a single one of our reactors is 80 megawatts electric. Oh, wow, that's building. Yeah. What Dow is building at our, at their first site is four reactors. So 320 megawatts. Wow. Okay, That's a lot. Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah. That's like a small coal plant. You know, that, that takes a real chunk out of, you know, what they're doing. And that, that more than takes care of the site that they are focused on. And I think that's, I think that's the same amount of energy that's generated in my entire city that I live in. I live in a small city. It's a meaning. Yeah, it's a meaningful bite. You know what? Amazon and energy northwest, their second project, you know, they're talking about anywhere between four and 12 reactors on a single site. So anywhere between 320 megawatts and a gigawatt. What's really exciting about that theory of the case, our theory of the case for these mission critical deployments, you know, a petrochemical facility, it can't go down. You need, you know, very high reliability. So if you have four reactors, you know, if, if, if you overbuild just a little bit, if you only need two or three reactors, you know, if one goes down, you're still golden. You know, if you build 12 reactors in Washington state, if you only need 10, one, even two go down, you're still completely utilizing that very expensive data center with those very expensive, you know, Nvidia chips, you know, running in it, you know, and getting the full use case out of it. So that kind of reliability of our form factor is something that's, you know, very exciting, you know, particularly to our customers. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Have a great rest of your day. Congrats. Have a great weekend. All the 900 or 1,000. A thousand people at the company. Seriously, on all the progress. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon, Sam, have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Applovin. Profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business. Before we bring in our next guest, we gotta check in with Tyler. Oh, yes. On his project. Let's go over to Tyler. What do we got? Okay, so I can read my little essay. And you swear, and you swear on your life that you did not use AI to generate this. Correct? Yeah, you can check my chat logs. I did not use any AI. Okay, anybody that's just tuning in. For anybody that's just tuning in, the challenge was write 500 words that Pangram will pick up as AI. Yes. At 90% or above. Okay. And if you win. Ready? Yes. You get a $50. This is, this is Tyler's impression steak sandwich. Okay. So I want you guys to also try to guess what, what the percentage is. Okay. This isn't just an essay that is trying to fool an AI system. It's an experience where words and phrases flow over the compute like a waterfall. This short speech marks a pivotal shift towards a style of writing where the audience doesn't just consist of real people, but machine learning algorithms too. It underscores the innovative change frequently cited in the New York Times and CNN, who along with many CEOs, industry professionals and growth hackers, have noticed the world changing pattern emerge. It's a testament to the emerging influence of the AI industry. Additionally, it demonstrates the way in which artificial intelligence systems may fall victim to possible bad actors, further enhancing the importance that some government institutions may play in the future. You are absolutely right. Ok, let him keep going. You are absolutely right that AI systems might not always accurately predict whether text is written by humans. And you're actually touching on something really important. It's a great insight in the future. It's like pretty long, but okay, I'm putting it at 96%. I think this is going to keep.

Yeah, very interesting. Well, it's, it's fantastic to see you. It's excited to come by the Ultra Dome soon. I want to. Well, that's what I was planning on doing. And then when I heard you guys were here and I was here, I was like, I was going to reach out to you guys next week about coming by, but. All right, well, I'm at this stock exchange, you know where we are. Since you were last on, I think John, like somebody's only offered your handle on Instagram to John Coogan like 10 times. They hit him up at me constantly. Do you want. At John? And I'm like, I know John Shahidi. I. I'm not like his. I'll give you on Snapchat because I have that, but I don't use it. So I got him on the Snapchat. That's yours. I like the consolidation of. You have the John Coogan. You got all the John Coogan. I'm happy to have the full name. The final John. The final John. Anyway, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real time experiences and new value. With Cisco software, multiples have been reset at a fair level given AI uncertainty, said Brad Gerstner. He says if you own a software stock, you must expect the CEO to say, quote, we crush numbers and expect that to continue because our business accelerates with AI. If you don't expect to hear it, don't own it. Too hard. Basket Dylan in the. Too hard. Dylan did that. Dylan did that. Dylan Field. Oh, yeah. Oh, exactly. Yes, yes, yes, for sure, for sure. Also, there was some funny stuff in the chat, but we can get to it later because we of course have Will Brewery from Bardas for a lightning round. The Restream waiting room. And it is time to kick off the Lambda lightning round. Let's fire up that cloud, fire up the graphics package and let's bring Will Brewie in to the TV in Altrim. Will, how are you doing? Check, check, check. Hey, Jordy and John, how are you? Can you hear me? Yeah. Good to see you. And clear. Excellent. It's been far too long. Obviously we're here excited about Erebor, but I'd love to start with just an update on. Are you. Are you running out of numbers for these capsules? How many are up there? How many have come back? You're gonna have to Switch to base 64 or something encoding them. Cause the numbers are getting so high. Yes, I love that, yeah, we are at Winnebago 5, just landed a couple of weeks ago. So we're very excited about that. Number four is in orbit. Number six gets shipped to launch late next week. Oh, thank you. Yes, yes, of course. The God love that. So, yeah. What are you actually learning in between these? Are they purely commercial? Like someone just asked you. So you're gonna put, I imagine that you're iterating on hardware, software, regulatory, everything that goes into it. What are you, what's the what, what, what changes in between one launch to the next. We have, but we've hit that zero to one moment. I mean we've hit the zero to five moment. So now we're moving from six and beyond. So yeah, yeah, very excited about that. So we are iterating on all the fronts you just mentioned, but luckily now that we, we have an assembly line going actually right behind me, there's two of them on the, on the floor. We, we put together and bulk all of our changes into what we call block upgrades. And so that about every year, just like a car comes off a line as an upgrade. Like an iPhone. Yes, it's a space iPhone. Exactly, exactly. It's lighter, thinner, faster, cheaper. It is. Okay, so you have a capsule, you can put stuff in that. Can I put a GPU in it yet? So technically we have a data center in orbit right now. You do. Okay. It doesn't do as much compute as you may want, but it, you know, so you're like d, shut up. This might be real. There's a chance. So actually I should point to you guys, we were featured in Morgan Stanley's market analysis that came out two days ago where they're looking at the micro grab, the manufacturer. Oh yeah, yeah. Round of applause for Morgan Stanley forward thinking futurist bankers. My favorite on Wall Street. So no, but they come in, out and take the microgravity manufacturing industry seriously in a very sophisticated report and kind of hit up the nail on the head. Okay. And a lot of that is still bio focused, I imagine. Yeah. So we're definitely focused on bio for at least the next five to ten years. Just because from first principles it's the most expensive dollar per kilogram. It has the biggest impact, it helps people, makes economic sense. And it's a large market that we can scale into. It's highly differentiated and the defense stuff is interesting and orthogonal, but that is sort of a separate part of the business. Is that correct? Separate part of the business, but same part of the product. I mean every single vehicle that Comes off the assembly line, can be either used for either use case and so that really helps with scaling and so we just have a diversified revenue stream now. What kind of AI native tools? And I mean truly AI native in that they were created after AI Transformer paper was released. What kind of categories are you getting pitched that you're excited about? Around potential speed ups or already getting benefit? You mean like to purchase? Yeah, yeah. Roll out like tools that you're buying? Oh sure. Planning to buy that you're excited about outside of code generation. Yes, outside of code generation. So cursor. Excited about that. Excited about the new model. It's just becoming so much easier to build the in house version of, of those sasses. That really isn't, you know, for us there's, it's. I'm laughing right now because the guy leading the effort here was up till 4am last night just because he was so excited about it. We were looking at it, but what we did was we, we what it, what it does is it looks at Confluence, which is kind of like our, our wiki at the, at the company. Based on the diff from Confluence over the past week, here is a report of everything that's happened at the company. It does time tracking, it does risk analysis. You know, it's so, it's like, it's awesome. It's awesome. We're really excited. Is it, is it getting to the point where it can make recommendations to you of like here, like here's, here's how you can speed up this part of the process or is that kind of the next step? Yeah, absolutely. We even ask it to give us a multiple choice, really nice walk through how launch costs are looking this year, next year. There was a lot of back and forth with Starship. Last year eventually did like massive progress in the back half of the year. And then the surprise for me was Blue Origin. And I think everyone was sort of like, oh, it's a space tourism company. And people were like no, no, no. It's like a very serious company and there's going to be a real race. That feels extremely good for you. But do you anticipate the curve of launch cost to continue or change in some way? What are you seeing? Yeah, so I'll tell you what I know, what I know is so we've right now we've already booked all of our launches out through 2029. Oh wow. And yeah, so we're, we're launching for this year 7, the year after that, 10 year after that, 12 year after that. They're booked. Flight hardware is purchased. The other thing I know is that, you know, when from a Barda business model perspective, we're one of the few space companies that treats launches shipping like, you know, and so we use SpaceX instead of FedEx. But from a business model perspective, shipping is shipping. And so, you know, we're excited about new shippers coming online and you know, that'll probably induce some margin compression which be nice for, for us payloads but at the same time, you know, we're not going to transfer transition overnight. You can imagine if you were using FedEx and they had, you know, a truck going 167 times to the route that you want and then all of a sudden UPS shows up with one truck. Hey, I'm excited. I can't wait for more. But I can't switch shipping quite yet at the current nascent aspect of technology. Last question, pick a side. Moon or Mars? Who you got? I'm on team Mars, man. Yeah, still I was. Oh yeah. So I was, you know, I was, I was cut my teeth when Mars was. I still think it is. Yeah, absolutely. Like I think the, you know what I want to be as my career ambition is Muddy the Mudskipper. You know the first fish that, it was an ugly scene but the first fish that started to crawl on to land his flippers were slightly more like legs. You know, it was not a glorious moment but if you zoom out it was an extremely glorious moment. So I'd like to be, you know, that ugly, you know, not quite, you know, ready for the next planet yet. But you know, we show up. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Moon important testing ground. But Mars is the goal and will be truly multi planetary. Moon doesn't. Moon base doesn't really count as multi planetary. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to see you. Well, congrats on all the progress. Still waiting for our capsule here in the dome right now. Yeah, we've got, you know, they're going to have too many. They're going to need a whole storage facility for them in a couple. We can be, we can be trusted. We can be tr. The price is going to invert. I'm going to start paying you just to get. Yeah, yeah. You're going to be like I got to hold onto it for regulation. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And I'm also going to tell you about Restream one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream go to restream.com up next, Sam Levenbeck from X Energy. He's the VP of Growth and strategy. Sam, good to meet you. How are you doing? What's happening? Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here. First time on the show. Please introduce yourself and tell us about the company a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. Name is Sam Levenbach. I work at a company called X Energy. X Energy is designing a nuclear reactor, high temperature gas reactor. And what's really exciting, there's a lot of exciting things about what we're doing. The technology, technology is super compelling. We have some incredible investors. I think the thing that we're most cited for and known for is we're building our first project in South Texas with Dow Chemical in Calvin County, Texas. And in we're.

That is fully fledged and is ready to go. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, breaking it down. Palmer, congratulations. Have fun. Enjoy the closing bell. Great to meet you. Come back on the show. Four minutes until the closing bell. Nice. We will talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And I believe we have Joe Lonsdale in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVPN ultram. Joe, how are you doing? Hey guys, how's it going? Good to see you. It's going fantastically. Is software dead? I want to software SaaS Apocalypse. I know, I know you have some good, some good takes on the SaaS apocalypse because someone vibe coded your former company, right? Oh, that's funny. You saw my comments today. I just, yeah, it's like being shared by all these people. Oh yeah, I vibe coded Palantir. Like, come on guys. It's like, it's annoying because I'm such a pro AI bullish person, but it drives you to apostasy from the whole movement. When they're like we're replacing everything. Palantir is going down. I'm like, no, I think low end SaaS is in trouble the next few years. Like that's the reality, right? Not the hard company. So that's narrow point solution. No system of record, no regulatory mode. Like no network effect. Is that what you're thinking when you Describe Low end SaaS? That's where I would start, is probably some of the stuff that Constellation software used to do. I don't know what they're doing now, but back in the day when I studied them, there's a lot of stuff like that. And listen, there's probably like, it probably climbs the stack over time, right? So there's probably some very simple systems of record that are very basic that you can kind of probably pull in. But listen, there's like, if you took more than $100 million to build your SaaS software with like good engineers, that's going to take a while to replace. And if you have a great SaaS company that spent hundreds of millions of billions of dollars and you still have a great tech culture and you're using AI, you're, you're fine, right? As long as you have a great tech culture because you're going to stay ahead, I think. But there's a lot of stuff. But PE Bot didn't take that Much to build, probably put more money into sales than tech. That stuff's in trouble. Yeah. What are you advise? How are the conversations going with existing portfolio companies that are now running the calculus on how long it'll take to build new products and thinking like, hey, we can go multi product faster than maybe we could before. Or maybe it's more tempting because this thing that was going to take us a year could now take, you know, two months or six weeks or something in that range to ship. Still feels like somewhat of a risk to just say, okay, we're going to do everything all at once, but how are you thinking about it? You know, my bias as an entrepreneur has always been to like, do too much at once and I need to hire people around me to hold me back because I'm like, let's do these 14 things. Then you're like, actually, guys, you know, actually we should ace this thing first, then this thing. So, you know, in general, this is probably dangerous for me because it empowers me to keep things doing everything at once. And it's like, I love Peter Thiel's like, argument on the board of Facebook 20 years ago where like the Warren Buffett, you know, person, Don Graham, who was tied to him is like, don't spend too much money. Get cash flow positive. And Peter's like, we should be like still burning money and like just growing faster and taking over the market. He's obviously was correct. Right? So, I mean, it's just like, there's a lot to do and our big companies are growing. You have no excuse to, to be making money right now. If there's things to build, right. You should, you should be spending it more to build within this environment. You know, it's, it's, you know, I think the best engineers really are 5 to 10x better with this. I think if your engineers are not using it, you should replace them. It's a great way to know how to replace, who to replace in your company right now. And, and, you know, I mean, yeah, a lot of our older SAS companies are still well run. They're building agents on top of it to perform the work for their customers. Does that make sense? Yeah. So, so it's like, if you're like Dominique, I shouldn't say it because he gets too many calls, but like One of our CEOs, he's like, dominates a big part of the financial industry in one particular niche area and now he's like rolled out agents and he's adding tens of millions of revenue with the agents to do to help the customers have to hire less and to be more efficient. So there's a lot of stuff like that we're seeing. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, let's flip it over to Erebor. You're not going to vibe code a bank charter. At least I don't think you will. But what are the keys to success going forward? You're obviously deeply involved with the company, very excited about it. What does the next couple of years look like? What do you want to see happen? So, you know, I think with a bank you got a barbell on one hand, there's like all this really exciting stuff you could do with AI and with hopefully like convincing the regulators to, to, to permit new idea, really great things and we could talk about that. On the other hand, this is, it's a goddamn bank, right? So you have to be traditional, you have to be safe, you have to be smart. I'm putting my own money in. I'm going putting some of my friends money in. I got to put. A lot of my friends are. A lot of my companies are too. I'm on the board of this thing. And your job and a bank board is to, is to be conservative as well. Right. And so the whole point is, you know, our reputations are all tied into this. Palmer's reputation, my reputation, a lot of other people's reputation. And you have to run this thing where you're serving customers better and learning from the best of that and where you're just. And we're going to be extra safe. I don't know what I'm supposed to talk about, but I think the whole point is that, you know, it's not a narrow bank in that, in the traditional sense that you did, but it's a. It is, it is much narrower than other banks. We're going to keep a lot of more in a very, very safe way because I think it's the right way to run these things. It just never not take any risk you don't need to take. What. What was the sort of 72 hours of the SVB crisis like for you personally? Oh, gosh. You know, that was actually interesting because I'd warned eight or nine of my companies about six months before actually that I was. I didn't know for sure, but I said this looks not, not, not quite right to me. My brother talked to me about it. He's a macro analyst and what's going on? I hadn't known for sure and I had a bunch of my family money in Frb. And it was really sad because I loved. I mean, FB guys were nice, too, but I loved frb. They were like our John and I, too. Yeah, yeah. And I was at the dinner with the governor here in Texas that night, and I had a bunch of other friends here. I won't mention their names, but like, you know, guys who'd moved here, very, you know, multibillionaires who themselves had a bunch of their own money in frb, actually. And we all felt terribly guilty because when SVB had started to go down, we actually had each withdrawn money from FRB as well, because you kind of had to in that situation. It was just too scary. And. And so it was like. It was like SBB was a little bit sad. FRB for me was just. I was never really worried for myself. I got my money out. My companies didn't have too much exposure, but I felt really sad because it was such a great bank. And I think for me, one of the goals of ARABOR would be to try to learn to do things as well as FRB did, to serve people. I think it was a really great bank. Yeah. You mentioned Texas. There's a lot of young people that are nervous about the job market in the age of AI. Give me the pitch for University of Austin right now. In the age of AI. University of Austin, the age of a. Well, I think in any age, but especially in an age where the world is changing quickly, you need to have a really strong foundation. You need leaders in your society to have a strong intellectual foundation. So what we're doing is we have, you know, it's one side, really deep intellectual foundations of the west, understanding our civilization, understanding how our world works, why it works the way it does. You want to talk, you know who my top people I work with in business, they all understand philosophy, they all understand history, whether it's Peter Thiel, Alice Karp, Charles Koch, Elon Musk, you have to give them that really strong base. On the other hand, you got to challenge them, push them really hard. On the STEM side, we're just finishing our STEM building right next to SpaceX and Boring Company. Have a. You know, one of my. I was just with my friend who built Palantir with me, was teaching the agents course next quarter. So we have a lot of our probably top 100 friends who built companies as advisors who are helping push the university forward, and we're going to train courageous young leaders, and a lot of them are going to work with us and build the future. So it's. It's a pretty exciting place to go. That's very exciting. You guys are setting up dorms for Mac Minis. A little space, set them up. You know, we got. There's all sorts of crazy AI stuff going on that we're having fun with. But I think the dorms a little bit too nice, frankly. I think the students, I don't know, maybe it's like too, too fancy. But it's good. They like it a lot. Are you secretly funding the California billionaire tax to punish all everyone that didn't leave like you? You know, it has, it has been something I've commented on that it's like probably really good for these people in California to wake the heck up and see what's going on. But no, I'm actually secretly funding a bunch of the things that now my friends are waking up to kind of reveal the fraud in California and reveal the nonsense in California and hopefully fight back against the real extremes. Because, you know, I used to argue with a lot of my friends in college. I'd be more on the moderate right. They'd be on the moderate left, I'd say, if you want to define it. And now most of those smart people who've been successful on the moderate left were like complete allies against the crazy far left. Because that is just so broken in California. And I'm excited to see a bunch of them courageously stepping up. Well, thank you for taking the time. We'll let you get back to your. Good to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Always a great time. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here. With a capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. You hear that? That's the sound of John, a happy dad barking. Should we bring them in? What's happening? Here we go. Cracking them open. It's five o' clock somewhere. It's four o' clock at the New York Stock Exchange. Cheers, John, good to see you again. Yeah, good to see you guys too. I'm good. Good. I know it's been a few weeks, but I just want to congratulate you guys again on the super bowl ad. Oh, thank you. That was a lot of fun. You know, I want to tell you guys, like, man, I actually got emotional because I remember a year ago when we spoke and when TVPN like was just taken off and you know, just watching your guys journey has been incredible. You know, I get. I get like once a week or so I get like someone calling me and like trying to pitch me on a show and they're like, we're the TVPN of sports. We're the TVPN of. I got some guy the other day, like, we're the TVPN of Europe. So it's kind of cool. It reminds me of. It reminds me of like 10 years ago when I was in music, people used to always pitch, I'm the Justin Bieber of Latin music. I'm the Justin Bieber of India. And like, that's what TVPNs become. Yeah, somehow. Yeah, it's a good sign. It rarely works. I mean, if someone's trying to do the happy dad for wine, it's like, that's probably not. Either you'll do it or whatever works in that category will just look completely different and have a different strategy because people want new things. Walk us through. What's the experience like at the New York Stock Exchange today? It's pretty cool. I mean, you know. Yeah, I came out here to support Erebor and what Palmer and Trevor and the team are doing. Really excited. You know, we're going to be switching all our companies over to Erebor in the next upcoming weeks. So it's very, it's very. You know, it's not just because they're good friends of mine, but it's really nice to see a bank doing something different and having that personal touch and their philosophy of just truly caring about companies and whether you're a startup or an established company. So it's just a good feeling to be a part of it. Yeah. How is business going? How did 2025 shake out? The economy was up, there were tariffs. There's lots going on. But what was it like in your world? Well, tariffs don't really affect.

Market, sports app space. Yeah. Talk to us about, like, the broader growth of alcohol consumption, particularly among young people. Obviously your business is growing, your category is growing. But beer, I believe, had a 4% decline. And alcohol, broadly, it feels like young people aren't drinking as sort of a meme. But how are you processing that? Yeah, so people are, you know, this new generation especially, but most people are just, they're drinking, they're just drinking differently. They're not, you know, they're not going heavy, they're not going, you know, spirits. They're not drinking beers. You know, if you look at most beer companies, if they haven't got into like the seltzers or the tea or no bubble space, they're struggling. So, you know, I think beer consumption is down. You know, I say this all the time. You know, people don't want to get, you know, they don't want to wake up hungover, so they're not drinking, you know, vodkas and whiskeys and, you know, some of these harder liquors because people want to get up and they want to feel good. People are more on their health kick more than ever these days. You know, that's why you're looking at, you know, all these supplement brands, these fitness brands, GLP1 peptide companies are all through the roof because people want to be healthy. They don't want to wake up. And also have this theory that people want to look good on social media too. So, you know, so there's only one two ways to look good on social media. Either be in shape or add 15 filters to your picture or grab a hammer. Grab a hammer. Stop with the hammer. We're not bone smashing. Bone smashing is now. It's over. That guy. Yeah. Anyway, that's a one. That guy's a one of one. He is a one of one, Jordan.

Bunch of text files. Surely we can do better than this. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about gaming and the concept of just raising the next generation kids? I have three kids and I think I could probably get an emulator and run it on an iPad and slam that over to my kid's face and he might not know the difference. But is there another angle to the M64 that is about like some of the things that you can't do with it are actually good for the world? Maybe. I mean, you have to remember that the gaming industry, like many industries, figured out what actually worked a long time ago. They figured out how to make fun games. They figured out how to make things that make people keep coming back. But it's moved from innovation to extraction. And I will note I stole that line from Nirav Patel, founder of Framework, because he put it so much better than I did. But there's these industries that have moved from innovation to extraction and they're now in the extraction phase where they try to make tons and tons and tons of money and actually pushing the limits is not the top priority for some huge majority of the dollars that are in industry. And so there's a lot of stuff that you can learn, especially when you're learning it from the ground up by going back to when people were just getting the basics right, when they were still innovating, building things that were really compelling to people. I recently had a kid. I might have a second on the way. I'm planning on starting them with. I wouldn't even if I'd say the classics, this isn't like a vintage play. It's starting them with a good foundation. That foundation happens to be largely old games. But I am not going to be throwing them into the slot machine microtransaction gamblerama that is dominating kids games today. It just seems like a crazy thing to do. So Skinner.

Or whatever works in that category will just look completely different and have a different strategy because people want new things. Walk us through what's the experience like at the New York Stock Exchange today? It's pretty cool. I mean you know yeah I came out here to support Erebor and what Palmer and Trevor and the team are doing. Really excited you know we're going to be switching all our companies over to Erebor in the next upcoming weeks so it's very, it's very you know it's not just because they're good friends of mine but it's you know it's really nice to see a bank doing something different and having that personal touch and you know, you know and have you know their philosophy of just truly caring about companies and you know whether you're a startup or an established company so it's just a good feeling to be a part of it. Yeah. How is business going? How did, how did you.

Thing when you go out on your own is you're like, oh, man, I gotta fight for distribution. I gotta fight for every eyeball. I gotta publish every day. Because when I'm not publishing, I'm not getting subscribers. That's why I went to four times a week. Because it's like when I don't, I don't get anything. So it's like putting it out everywhere. Is travel important to your work? Yeah, I gotta go out and touch the sources. I mean, not literally, but you know what I'm saying? Like, I gotta go out and grab them right when they walk out of the office, I gotta shoulder brush the sources. Last time, last time we were trying to meet up, you were like, I'm across town doing an interview in person. Yeah. That's always been a thing I've invested in. I've never understood reporters who just sit in their office and like, blog all day. It's like, you're never gonna get really differentiated stuff because the. Really. Especially in the age of AI where you can generate anything. Like, if I can just generate the copy, what matters is, like, what's feeding the copy. And that's me going out and like interviewing someone breaking a story. I went to some, like, political event in Las Vegas and Teddy Schleffer from the New York Times was just hanging out the bar. He didn't get invited. Yeah, that's. He just was literally gumtool man. Old school gumpture. And, and, and, and everyone, everyone there was adversarial to the New York Times, but everyone was talking to him. Everyone was like, you know, I gotta hear this guy. I gotta say my side of the story so good. You gotta do that. And you gotta love gossip. Oh, yeah. And you have to have like a level of just. You do. I mean, this is what this is. It's like gossip. People are always like, why do people tell you things? Why do people tell you things that violate an NDA? Oh, yeah, yeah. And they always think it's vindictive or they're pissed and they're trying to right a wrong. Or it's moralistic. A lot of people just like to gossip, man. Yeah. And I mean, maybe the more optimistic view is like, they like the world operating on the truth. And so leaking the truth out can be beneficial to update that. That's a little more altruistic. I mean, I think. Is not negative. I think it's just like. I mean, it's sort of neutral. It's neutral versus the vindictive. I'm leaking something because I want you to write about my enemy. That's different. That does happen. But there's also people that say, like, the story deserves to be told. Yeah. And you want to, like, give and take. So a thing I try to do also is, like, I share stuff I don't just, like, try to ask. So what do you think about the future of investors?

Who loves high interest rates. Very interesting. What hardware are you collecting? Recently we just learned you can buy a steam powered car and drive it around. Jay Leno has one that's 120 years old. What hardware am I buying? Am I buying collecting? Not just buying, collecting. Yeah, I know. What am I? Well, so there's a few things I could bring up. To be honest, I've been too busy to buy really good stuff. But I recently got delivered one of the first Jetson Jetson ones which is a small EVTOL aircraft. I was one of their first customers and their first delivery. I also have a collection of motorcycles. The theme of the collection is commercial failure. And so all of my motorcycles were huge commercial failures. The more of a failure the better. And so I've been buying some failed two wheel drive motorcycles, military motorcycles. How do they ride? Oh, incredible. Look, there's really bad failed motorcycles. There's those that failed because they're too good. One of the crown jewels in my collection is a Honda Roon. It was basically a personal project created by the CEO of Honda. The document that they used when they were creating it has actually been leaked now. And at the start of the document it says performance is the only object, price is of no importance. And so they wanted to build the ultimate cruising motorcycle. And the story goes that they lost over $100,000 per bike in the end. And so I've got one of the. One of the handful of Honda Runes that made it out of that program. A beautiful Honda Honda room with, with. With a couple thousand miles metallic purple and chrome. And it's, it's, it's one of my favorite motorcycles, if not the favorite. So commercial failure doesn't mean a product's bad. It just means they couldn't figure out how to make a business out of it.

I would have been two years behind on everything else. And so I am a big fan of vibe coding. Even if everything that comes out of it is slop, even if it is all shit, it's better than I was able to make. How are you thinking about VR these days? I recently watched the Matrix from start to finish in an Apple Vision Pro. I enjoyed it. It feels like the only real thing that you can do these days is just the home theater, if you don't have a home theater. But it doesn't feel like the industry's embraced that at all. And everyone's sort of writing down their investments and pulling back at a time when the display technology does seem to be good enough for that narrow use case, if you cut out the weight and move things around. But where do you see this? Where do you, where do you want consumer VR to go? And then where do you think it actually is going? So I will challenge your premise there, which is that people are pulling back. I think that's driven mostly by people sensationalizing meta, firing a bunch of people. But you have to remember they got rid of 10% of the Reality Labs team in one layoff. Right. Remember that they have something like 8 or 9% annual churn naturally and organically, not including firing. So sure. I mean, what you're really talking about is basically pulling six months of churn forward into a single month and they're still spending more on VR than anybody by an order of magnitude. They said they are not spending less on content, they're just not putting it into first party stuff like Facebook Meta Horizons. You might have seen they've announced Meta Horizons is no longer a VR app as of yesterday. It is now a mobile phone Focus app only. So what they've done is they basically killed a few of these failing efforts that didn't make sense. And they're now putting those resources into things that are working. And so I wrote a, I wrote a, I wrote a bit about this on Twitter where people need to understand this is not the end of VR. It's not, it's not collapsing. They are still spending an enormous amount of money. They're bigger than anybody else by an order of magnitude. And I think if you pay attention to what's going to be coming out from Metta and others over the next 12 months, you're going to see a lot of progress. Like Apple Vision Pro. Yes, they. So yes, Apple Vision Pro was ahead of everybody on visual quality, on display quality. But let me tell you a short story. Imagine that an American company Went to a Japanese display vendor and they said, we want you to sell us your new 4K micro OLED displays. The company gives them samples of those micro OLED displays. The samples cost about $1,000 each because the yield on that production line is only about 10%. In other words, 90% of the displays coming off the production line are not up to par. They're not working. And that's because these are engineering samples. They're not meant to actually be a working product. And they said, listen, here's our engineering samples. Just wait two years and the yield is going to be up to 90%. We'll be able to sell these to you for a couple hundred dollars. And then imagine that that American tech company had a guy named Tim Apple call them up and say, no, we're going to build a product with this right now, today, using your engineering samples. They said, but Tim Apple, that's crazy. That means that your headset was going to cost like $3,000. He said, I don't care. I'm going to sell a headset that should launch in 27, in 2024, 2025, and I'm going to do it for $3,500. That's what Apple Vision Pro is. It was never intended to be a product of the times. It's a product of the future, hauled into the present by spending enormous amounts of money. And so Meta and Sony and Apple and Google and all of these other companies, they are going to be hitting that level of visual fidelity. They're going to be doing it with headsets that are far smaller, far lighter than what you see from Vision Pro. And I actually remain very optimistic. That's great. I think things are going pretty well. I'm extremely optimistic. It's mostly just that when I try and pull stuff out of Meta, they're like, no, no, no, we're not ready to talk. And I think that they're just being cold shoulder to me because, like, they don't want to leak it yet. But I am very optimistic. Well, you know, the problem is they don't have a charming, charismatic pitch man who knows how to talk about this stuff with you. They got to solve that. They need to figure out what they're doing. You know, it reminds me of something. Being here. I'm on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange behind me. And back in the Oculus days, when we sold the company to Meta, one of the first things that happened was New York Stock Exchange emailed our contact email, and they asked if I would come and ring the bell of the New York Stock Exchange. Sounds pretty cool, right? Like, hey, like, you've been acquired by this major public corporation in the form of Facebook. Come and ring the bell.

We are going to have to take responsibility for that. And I think that actually leads to much better behavior. I would love to see that type of behavior across the industry. Physical branches, how are you thinking about that? I think we're going to start with Fort Knox and then we'll expand from there. I like it. Yeah. Maybe actually dive deeper there. Like, what is a bank these days? I think most people can conceptualize, like setting up a crypto wallet that holds coins, but when you want to hold real dollars, you don't actually have a physical bank vault, I imagine. So once you get the charter, does that just give you the ability to, like, maintain a database and a ledger? Like, what is a bank? What is a bank? I mean, there's lots of forms. It can be. I think if you want all the details, you can actually read through a lot of our applications. It's actually a matter of public record. And you can see that Anduril will, sorry, not Erebor, will have a physical vault and we will have a lot of treasure in it. So we are not trying to be a pure digital, pure, you know, pure ethereum company. And in fact, a lot of the companies that are very interested in working with us want us to have secure, actual vaulted storage. I'm not saying that that's going to be the first thing that we focus on. That's our key differentiator. But we are not a bank of the ether. We are of Terrafirma. Yeah.

A big fan of vibe coding. Even if everything that comes out of it is slop, even if it is all shit, it's better than I was able to make. How are you thinking about VR these days? I recently watched the Matrix from start to finish in an Apple Vision Pro. I enjoyed it. It feels like the only real thing that you can do these days is just the home theater, if you don't have a home theater. But it doesn't feel like the industry's embraced that at all. And everyone's sort of writing down their investments and pulling back at a time when the display technology does seem to be good enough for that narrow use case. If you cut out the weight and move things around. But where do you see this? Where do you, where do you want consumer VR to go? And then where do you think it actually is going? So I will challenge your premise there, which is that people are pulling back. I think that's driven mostly by people sensationalizing meta, firing a bunch of people. But you have to remember they got rid of 10% of the Reality Labs team in one layoff. Right. Remember that they have something like 8 or 9% annual churn naturally and organically, not including firing. So sure. I mean, what you're really talking about is basically pulling six months of churn forward into a single month and they're still spending more on VR than anybody by an order of magnitude. They said they are not spending less on content, they're just not putting it into first party stuff like Facebook Meta Horizons. You might have seen they've announced Meta Horizons is no longer a VR app as of yesterday. It is now a mobile focused app only. So what they've done is they basically killed a few of these failing efforts that didn't make sense and they're now putting those resources into things that are working. And so I wrote a, I wrote a, I wrote a bit about this on, on Twitter where people need to understand this is not the end of VR. It's not, it's not collapsing. They are still spending an enormous amount of money. They're bigger than anybody else by an order of magnitude. And I think if you pay attention to what's going to be coming out from Metta and others over the next 12 months, you're going to see a lot of progress. Like Apple Vis Pro. Yes, they. So yes, Apple Vision Pro was ahead of everybody on visual quality, on display quality. But let me tell you a short story. Imagine that an American company went to a Japanese display vendor and they said, we want you to sell us your new 4K micro OLED displays. The company gives them samples of those micro OLED displays. The samples cost about $1,000 each because the yield on that production line is only about 10%. In other words, 90% of the displays coming off the production line are not up to par. They're not working. And that's because these are engineering samples. They're not meant to actually be a working product. And they said, listen, here's our engineering samples. Just wait two years and the yield is going to be up to 90%. We'll be able to sell these to you for a couple hundred dollars. And then imagine that that American tech company had a guy named Tim Apple call them up and say, no, we're going to build a product with this right now, today, using your engineering samples. They said, but Tim Apple, that's crazy. That means that your headset was going to cost like $3,000. He said, I don't care. I'm going to sell a headset that should launch in 27, in 2024, 2025, and I'm going to do it for $3,500. That's what Apple Vision Pro is. It was never intended to be a product of the times. It's a product of the future hauled into the present by spending enormous amounts of money. And so Meta and Sony and Apple and Google and all of these other companies, they are going to be hitting that level of visual fidelity. They're going to be doing it with headsets that are far smaller, far lighter than what you see from Vision Pro. And I actually remain very optimistic. That's great. I think things are going pretty well. I'm extremely optimistic. It's mostly just that when I try and pull stuff out of Meta, they're like, no, no, no, we're not ready to talk. And I think that they're just being cold shouldered me because they don't want to leak it yet. But I am very optimistic. Well, you know what the problem is? They don't have a charming, charismatic pitch man who knows how to talk about this stuff with you. They got to solve that. They need to figure out what they're doing. It reminds of something, being here, I'm on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange behind me. And back in the Oculus days, when we sold the company to Meta, one of the first things that happened was New York Stock Exchange emailed our contact email and they asked if I would come and ring the bell.

Is software dead? I want to say SaaS apocalypse. I know you have some good takes on the SaaS apocalypse because someone vibe coded your former company, right? Oh, that's funny. You saw my comments online today. It's like being shared by all these people. Oh yeah, I vibe coded Palantir. Come on, guys. It's annoying because I'm such a pro AI bullish person, but it drives you to apostasy from the whole movement where they're like, we're replacing everything. Palantir is going down. I'm like, no, I think low end SaaS is in trouble the next few years. Like that's the reality. Right. Not, not the hard company. So that, so, so that's narrow point solution. No system of record, no regulatory mode. Like no network effect. Is that what you're thinking when you Describe Low end SaaS? That's where I would start, is probably some of the stuff that Constellation software used to do. I don't know what they're doing now, but back in the day when I studied them, there's a lot of stuff like that. Yep. And listen, there's probably like, it probably climbs the stack over time. Right. So there's probably some very simple systems of record that are very basic that you can kind of probably pull in. But listen, there's like if you took more than a hundred million dollars to build your SaaS software with like good engineers, but that's gonna be, that's gonna take a while to replace. And if you have a great SaaS company that spent hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and you still have a great tech culture and you're using AI, you're fine. Right? As long as you have a great tech culture because you're gonna stay ahead, I think. But there's a lot of stuff with Pebot, didn't take that much to build. Probably put more money into sales than tech, that stuff's in trouble. Yeah. What are you advised.

Look, there's a lot of things that I could point to, but it really boils down to I've been looking at starting a bank for a while, primarily for my own personal use because there weren't banks out there that really understood my business, my businesses, the things that I was doing. Silicon Valley bank was doing a reasonable job, but then they went out of business and took everybody's money with them and had to have the government bail everybody out. I think that was really kind of the thing that got me very serious about it. I realized that you didn't have banks that were aligned with the United States interests, that were aligned with deep tech, hard tech, energy, the things that are really complex and hard to understand but that do really matter, that could also serve them in a meaningful way. I mean, you have farmers, banks that serve communities that are doing agriculture. You have banks certainly that are doing oil and gas quite well. But when it comes to tech, it's a pretty sparse field. And so I started to think, well, how do you build a bank that could serve those things? How could you do it in a very conservative way, very, very low risk way where you can ensure you're not going to go out of business, you're not going to force everyone to rely on government bailouts. You may not be able to survive a total financial collapse, banks rarely can, but you can at least be the last man standing. And so thinking about that, and then also a lot of things that new technology enables, like using US dollar backed cryptocurrencies to have 365, 24. 7 settlement of payments, which is something that a lot of businesses need and very few get. You kind of tack all these things together and it becomes clear that there's, there's room for a company to be a real bank, for real companies doing real things. So is there a network effect there? Because if I'm on Erebor and Jordi's on Erebor and we can both have 24. 7 settlement but someone else is on a different bank and they don't have 24. 7 settlement, we're going to have a good experience and then maybe to get out of the network. How does that work? I think that there will be network effects, but to be honest, whatever network effects there are will probably be pretty short lived. I think that pretty quickly everyone is going to realize that they need to support these things. And I think that when like seeing this administration's support for using specifically dollar backed stablecoins, so not saying we're going to move everybody off of the dollar. We're going to move them off of the United States currency as the reserve currency for the world. But I think probably most banks are going to get drug into this. The difference is that we are trying to do it from the start. So is there a network effect? Probably. But I think most of the forward looking companies that would value that network effect, that one in particular see that in the next few years probably all banks are going to be forced to adopt this to be competitive. So what is.

It's good. They like it a lot. Are you secretly funding the California billionaire tax to punish all everyone that didn't leave like you? You know, it has. It has been something I've commented on that it's like, probably really good for these people in California to wake the heck up and see what's going on. But no, I'm actually secretly funding a bunch of the things that now my friends are waking up to kind of reveal the fraud in California and reveal the nonsense in California and hopefully fight back against the real extremes. Because, you know, I used to argue with a lot of my friends in college, I'd be more on the moderate right. They'd be on the moderate left, I'd say, if you want to define it. And now most of those smart people who've been successful on the moderate left were like complete allies against the crazy far left, because that is just so broken in California. And I'm excited to see a bunch of them courageously stepping up. Well, thank you for taking the time. We'll let you get back.

Going forward, you're obviously deeply involved with the company, very excited about it. What does the next couple of years look like? What do you want to see happen? So, you know, I think with a bank, you got a barbell on one hand, there's like all this really exciting stuff you could do with AI and with hopefully like convincing the regulators to, To. To permit new idea, really great things and we could talk about that. On the other hand, this is. It's a goddamn bank. Right? So you have to be traditional, you have to be safe. You have to be smart. I'm putting up, putting my own money in a complaint on my firm's money in. I got to. But a lot of my friends are. A lot of my companies are too. I'm on the board of this thing. And your job and a bank board is to. Is to be conservative as well. Right. And so the whole point is, you know, our reputations are all tied into this. Palmer's reputation, my reputation, a lot of other people's reputation. And you have to run this thing where you're serving customers better and learning from the best of that and where you're just. And we're going to be extra safe. I don't know what I'm supposed to talk about, but I think the whole point is that, you know, it's not a narrow bank in that. In the traditional sense that you did. But, but it's a. It is, it is much narrower than other banks. We're going to keep a lot more in a very, very safe way because I think it's the right way to run these things. It's just never, not take any risk you don't need to take. What, what was the sort of 72 hours of the SVB crisis like for you personally? Oh, gosh. You know, it was actually interesting because I'd warned eight or nine of my companies about six months before actually that I was. I didn't know for sure, but I said, this looks not, not, not quite right to me. My brother talked to me about it. He's a macro analyst. And what's going on? I hadn't known for sure. And I had a bunch of my family money in frb. And it was really sad because I loved. I mean, FB guys were nice too, but I loved frb. They were like our John. John and I too. Yeah, yeah. And I was at the dinner with the governor here in Texas that night and I had a bunch of other friends here. I won't mention their names, but like, you know, guys who'd moved here are very multibillionaires who themselves had a bunch of their own money in frb, actually. And we all felt terribly guilty because when SVB had started to go down, we actually had each withdrawn money from FB as well, because you kind of had to in that situation. It was just too scary. And. And so it was like, it was like,

Tell you guys like man I actually got emotional because I remember a year ago when we spoke and when TVPN like was just taking off and you know just watching your guys journey has been incredible. You know I get, I get like once a week or so I get like someone calling me and like trying to pitch me on a show and they're like we're the TVPN of sports, we're the TVPN of I got some guy the other day like we're the TVPN of Europe. So it's kind of cool. It reminds me of, it reminds me of like 10 years ago when I was in music people used to always pitch I'm the Justin Bieber of Latin music, I'm the Justin Bieber of India. And that's what TVPNs become. It's a good sign. It rarely works. I mean if someone's trying to do the happy dad for wine it's like that's probably not.

Talk about Vibe coding. What would your life be like if Vibe coding existed when you were 20? Advice for people who are 20 now. In the world of Vibe coding, you went into hardware very early. That feels like a great move. Is that still a great move? Walk us through all that. I mean, the biggest beneficiaries of Vibe coding are going to be the hardware nerds like me. It's going to be the. The shape rotators, not the word cells. Everyone's focused on how the word cells are going to be wiped out by AI, but for the shape rotators, it's going to be incredible. I was always a pretty terrible software engineer. I'm not a programmer by trade. I've taught myself enough to glue things together and make them work. But when I started my first company, Oculus, or actually when I started Mod Retro when I was 14 or 15, I knew just barely enough about software. If I would have been able to build crappy ST stuff by outsourcing it to a computer, I actually would have been able to accomplish things a lot faster than trying to do it myself. And people might say, palmer, you should have just learned to code. You know, you should have just learned to do it yourself. But I think it's pretty easy to look at my track record and realize I started Oculus when I was 19. After building prototypes since I was 15. I was only able to accomplish what I accomplished because I focused on what I was good at, which was optomechanics, a little bit of electrical, and then the product integration of all of these different components. I didn't have time to learn to program. If I'd spent another year or two learning to program at even a reasonable level, I would have been two years behind on everything else. And so I am a big fan of Vibe coding, even if everything that comes out of it is slop, even if it is all shit, it's better than I was able to make.

We can do better than this. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about gaming and the concept of just raising the next generation kids? I have three kids and I think I could probably get an emulator and run it on an iPad and slam that over to my kid's face and he might not know the difference. But is there another angle to the M64 that is about like some of the things that you can't do with it are actually good for the world? Maybe. I mean, you have to remember that the gaming industry, like many industries, figured out what actually worked a long time ago. They figured out how to make fun games. They figured out how to make things that people keep coming back. But it's moved from innovation to extraction. And I will note I stole that line from Nirav Patel, founder of Framework, because he put it so much better than I did. But there's these industries that have moved from innovation to extraction and they're now in the extraction phase where they try to make tons and tons and tons of money and actually pushing the limits is not the top priority for some huge majority of the dollars that are in industry. And so there's a lot of stuff that you can learn, especially when you're learning it from the ground up by going back to when people were just getting the basics right, when they were still innovating, building things that were really compelling to people. I recently had a kid. I might have a second on the way. I'm planning on starting them with. I wouldn't even if I'd say the classics. This isn't like a vintage play. It's starting them with a good foundation. That foundation happens to be largely old games. But I am not going to be throwing them into the slot machine microtransaction gamblerama that is dominating kids games today. It just seems like a crazy thing to do. It's a Skinner box. Yeah, don't go in the Skinner box.

Guys again on the super bowl ad. Oh, thank you. That was a lot of fun. You know I want to tell you guys like man, I actually got emotional because I remember a year ago when we spoke and when TVPN like was just taking off and you know just watching your guys journey has been incredible. You know I get, I get like once a week or so I get like someone calling me and like trying to pitch me on a show and they're like we're the TVPN of sports, we're the TVPN of I got some guy the other day like we're the TVPN of Europe. So it's kind of cool. Reminds me of, it reminds me of like 10 years ago when I was in music people used to always pitch I'm the Justin Bieber of Latin music. I'm the Justin Bieber of India. And that's what TVPNs become. It's a good sign. It rarely works.

I remember a year ago when we spoke and when TVPN like was just taking off and you know just watching your guys journey has been incredible. You know I get like once a week or so I get like someone calling me and like trying to pitch me on a show and they're like we're the TVPN of sports we're the TVPN of I got some guy the other day like we're the TVPN of Europe so it's kind of cool it reminds me of a. It reminds me of a like 10 years ago when I was in music people used to always pitch I'm the Justin Bieber of Latin music Dick I'm the Justin Bieber of India and that's what TVPNs become it's a good sign it rarely works I mean if someone's trying to do the happy dad for wine it's like that's probably not either you'll do it or whatever works in that category we'll just.

I mean, it's important. Remember, we just kicked this thing off. Look, I started Oculus when I was 19 years old. And I mean, you also got to remember the story of who is a founder, who is a co founder. It's fluid and dynamic and always changing with the ebb and flow of history. One of my ideas is to have a blockchain company where everyone agrees what the founding story is and who the co founders are, and then it goes into the blockchain so that nobody can come back and say that they're a co founder. There's a guy running around now who says that he's co founder of Oculus, who was very much so not a co founder. And in fact, I swear, I think I met this guy. I told you this story off air. A guy I was at. Tell me the story. I was at a dinner party at my friend's house, and my buddy was like, hey, this guy works at. I'm not gonna name the company, but you guys probably have some tech stuff in common. You guys should meet. And I go up to him, I said, hey, hi. I hear we should meet. And he's like, hey. I was like, what's your story? He's like, I started a company called Oculus now at Meta. And I was like, oh, interesting. Like, never heard of you before. And so maybe this guy, we won't put him on. Here's the crazy thing. I don't even know who you're talking about. And I told him, I was like, no, because there's multiple people who are saying this, including a guy who literally has a documentary being made about him, how he's the founder of Oculus. So it's all you'll appreciate. You'll appreciate. I was like, oh, that's. That's awesome. Like, Palmer comes on the show all the time, and then he completely backs. Backtracked. It was like, well, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I joined like, you know, you know, But I was on the founding team. Like, he backtracked to the point. You asked me, how do you select these people? Carefully. I was 19 years old when I selected the first people that I was working with. I've learned a lot. I've been stabbed in the back a lot, and I'd probably make very different decisions if I were doing it today. And it's worth noting, remember that I started Oculus on my own with no co founders, nobody involved in a lot of, like, I brought on people that I am happy to call co founders, even though they didn't join the company. Until months later who I had never met when I started the company. That said, I'm happy. There's some people I'm honored to share the title of co founder with, and there's other people that I'm not, which is why I really want this blockchain thing. Somebody needs to vibe code this slop and get it out there. Super important question. Have you played Federal Reserve Simulator yet? The new game? It's on Steam. On Steam? You got to try it out. You're a banker. I've not even heard of it. You're a banker now. You got to get the reps in. Enjoy this.

Experience for you, besides stability and low risk, is being able to talk to somebody. Is that a bug? Should we just. Is Erebor just going to be, you know, a chatbot that you say, talk to a human and it says, unfortunately, I cannot do that. I am an AI. I think it's going to be. I think it's going to be a long time before we hand things off to the chat pods, if only for regulatory reasons, like, you set aside the risk, which is a huge factor. You set aside the fact that we have our own banking rails, which are extremely efficient and that we can settle at any time. I mean, those are huge factors on their own. But even if you knock off kind of all, all of these obvious advantages, there's a lot of other things that you get from having a bank that is strongly aligned with the United States, strongly aligned with US Interests, strongly aligned with the US Department of War and also the intelligence community, and that there's a lot of ways that that manifests. For example, one of the things that we're doing is rather than working with the intelligence community only under court order to kind of go and respond when they think there's crime going on on the platform, or we're preemptively going out there and saying, no, we're going to work with them from the very, very beginning to help make fraud almost impossible on our platform. Which is great for me too, because it means that people who want to engage in fraud are going to go to other banks. It means that people who don't want to engage in fraud are going to be thrilled about being on a platform that doesn't have that type of activity on it. And to the extent that it exists inside of their own platform, against their will, they know that they have a willing partner that is willing to work with the government rather than hide these things. I would say maybe think of it as like the opposite of hsbc, where they were banking the cartels and desperately trying to, to avoid any sort of government intervention that would make that clear to the public markets. Put Erebor way at the other end of that spectrum. I think there's also a lot of other banks that whether they're good or bad people is irrelevant. You might have good people who nonetheless are very beholden to European markets, Chinese markets, other foreign markets that they need to keep happy, either because they want to keep them happy and make money, or because they don't want their executives in those jurisdictions to get arrested. Erebor is taking a very different approach. We're saying, you know what? We're an American company. We're an American bank that supports American companies. And we will comply with U.S. law, but we will not comply with spurious rulings from people who have no real jurisdiction or authority over us. And you'll find a very hard time finding a bank that takes that position. I'm not aware of any other than us.

Very early. That feels like a great move. Is that still a great move? Walk us through all that. I mean, the biggest beneficiaries of Vibe coding are going to be the hardware nerds like me. It's going to be the shape rotators, not the word cells. Everyone's focused on how the word cells are going to be wiped out by AI, but for the shape rotators, it's going to be incredible. I was always a pretty terrible software engineer. I'm not a programmer by trade. I've taught myself enough to glue things together them work. But when I started my first company, Oculus, or actually when I started Mod Retro when I was 14 or 15, I knew just barely enough about software. If I would have been able to build crappy stuff by outsourcing it to a computer, I actually would have been able to accomplish things a lot faster than trying to do it myself. People might say, palmer, you should have just learned to code. You should have just learned to do it yourself. But I think it's pretty easy to look at my track record and realize I started Oculus when I was 19. After building prototypes since I was 15, I was only able to accomplish what I accomplished because I focused on what I was good at, which was optomechanics, a little bit of electrical, and then the product integration of all of these different components. I didn't have time to learn to program. If I had spent another year or two learning to program at even a reasonable level, I would have been two years behind on everything else. I am a big fan of Vibe coding, even if everything that comes out of it is slop, Even if it is all shit and it's better than I was able to make. How are you thinking about VR these days? I recently watched the Matrix from start to finish in an Apple Vision Pro.

Even if there's the demand, right? So maybe we decided that. We decided that we needed to get our own charter because of the type of bank we were going to try to run and the ability to have the buck stop with us. The moment that you're dependent on somebody else for the key infrastructure, the key risk management, the key licensure questions, they can kick you off the platform, they can be forced to kick you off the platform. Maybe they're doing it for good reasons, maybe they're doing it for bad reasons. I mean, you've seen this play out, for example, with Steam and their payment processors and their banks and their payment processors banks, where they're basically censoring games because there's some circle of people who all claim it's not them pointing down the chain, it's that guy, it's that guy, it's that guy, it's that guy. But they all agree, even if they can't agree, who's causing the censorship, that if you don't censor, they're going to drop you, they're going to drop your account, they're going to debank you, they're going to depayment you. And so one of the things that you have to ask yourself when you're making yourself dependent on another bank or another payment company is, am I setting this up where they get to make my decisions for me? And are they making their decisions for me? Or is the Chinese Communist Party making those decisions? Is some political party that is extremely hostile to some business on our network, the one actually making that decision? So if you don't control your own charter, if you don't control your own destiny, the buck doesn't stop with you. And you're always going to have to keep other parties happy. And I think that was not something that we were interested in. We wanted to be able to run the bank the way that we think it needs to be run. And if we are debanking somebody, we are going to have to take responsibility for that. And I think that actually leads to much better behavior. I would love to see that type of behavior across the industry.

Tariffs. Iran is on the brink of war. And Erebor, the new bank for the tech community building things that actually matter, has officially received its charter and become operational. So it's a pretty good set of things that are going on. Big hit. Congratulations. Take us back in time. When did this project start? What was the inciting element? Why is this important? How did you pick this to work on? Look, there's a lot of things that I could point to, but it really boils down to I'd been looking at starting a bank for a while, primarily for my own personal use, because there weren't banks out there that really understood my business, my businesses, the things that I was doing. Silicon Valley bank was doing a reasonable job, but then they went out of business and took everybody's money with them and had to have the government bail everybody out. I think that was really kind of the thing that got me very serious about it. I realized that you didn't have banks that were aligned with the United States interests, that were aligned with deep tech, hard tech, energy. The things that are really complex and hard to understand, but that do really matter, that could also serve them in a meaningful way. I mean, you have farmers, banks that serve communities that are doing agriculture. You have banks certainly that are doing oil and gas quite well. But when it comes to tech, it's a pretty sparse field. And so I started to think, well, how do you build a bank that could serve those things? How could you do it a very conservative way, very, very low risk way where you can ensure you're not going to go out of business, you're not going to force everyone to rely on government bailouts, you may not be able to survive a total financial collapse, banks rarely can, but you can at least be the last man standing. And so thinking about that, and then also a lot of things that new technology enables, like using US dollar backed cryptocurrencies to have 365, 247 settlement of payments, which is something that a lot of businesses need and very few get. You kind of tack all these things together and it becomes clear that there's room for a company to be a real bank, for real companies doing real things.

Comb through. And there is, there is unlimited demand for Epstein related content. Totally, totally. Anyway, we have Palmer Lucky in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP ultra down. Palmer, how are you? You are doing live. You are live, sir. Can you hear us okay? Yep, I hear you loud and clear though, with a little bit of delay, so we'll try to keep it zippy. Well, we're going to say probably five words in total and you're just going to go crazy. Tell us what's happening. Tell us what's happening. So, I mean, Trump is complaining about tariffs, Iran is on the brink of war. And Erebor, the new bank for the tech community building things that actually matter has officially received its charter and become operational. So it's a pretty good set of things that are going on. Big hit. Congratulations. Big hit. Take us back in time. When did this project start? What was the inciting element? Why is this important? How'd you pick this to work on? Look, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things that I could point to, but it really boils down to I've been looking at starting a bank for a while, primarily for my own personal use, because there weren't banks out there that really understood my business, my businesses, the things that I was doing. Silicon Valley bank was doing a reasonable job, but then they went out of business and took everybody's money with them and had to have the government bail everybody out. I think that was really kind of the thing that got me very serious about it. I realized that you didn't have banks that were aligned with the United States interests, that were aligned with deep tech, hard tech, energy. The things that are really complex and hard to understand but that do really matter, that could also serve them in a meaningful way. I mean, you have farmers, banks that serve communities that are doing agriculture. You have banks certainly that are doing oil and gas quite well. But when it comes to tech, it's a pretty straight sparse field. And so I started to think, well, how do you build a bank that could serve those things? How could you do it in a very conservative way, Very, very low risk way where you can ensure you're not going to go out of business, you're not going to force everyone to rely on government bailouts. You may not be able to survive a total financial collapse, banks rarely can, but you can at least be the last man standing. And so thinking about that, and then also a lot of things that new technology enables, like using US dollar backed cryptocurrencies to have 365, 24. 7 settlement of payments, which is something that a lot of business and very few get. You kind of tack all these things together and it becomes clear that there's, there's room for a company to be a real bank for real companies doing real things. So is there a network effect there? Because if I'm on Erebor and Jordi's on Erebor and we can both have 24. 7 settlement but someone else is on a different bank and they don't have 24. 7 settlement, we're going to have a good experience and then maybe to get out of the network. How does that work? I think that there will be network effects, but to be honest, whatever network effects there are will probably be pretty short lived. I think that pretty quickly everyone is going to realize that they need to support these things. And I think that when like seeing this administration's support for using specifically dollar backed stablecoins. So not saying we're going to move everybody off of the dollar, we're going to move them off of the United States currency as the reserve currency for world. But I think probably most banks are going to get drug into this. The difference is that we are trying to do it from the start. So is there a network effect? Probably, but I think most of the forward looking companies that would value that network effect, that one in particular see that in the next few years probably all banks are going to be forced to adopt this to be competitive. So what is the ideal banking experience for you besides stability and low risk is being able to talk to somebody. Is that a bug? Should we just. Is Erebor just going to be, you know, a chat bot that you say talk to a human and it says unfortunately I cannot do that, I am an AI. I think it's going to be, I think it's be a long time before we hand things off to the chat pods, if only for regulatory reasons. Like you set aside the risk, which is a huge factor. You set aside the fact that we have our own banking rails which are extremely efficient and that we can settle at any time. I mean those are huge factors on their own. But even if you knock off kind of all of these, all of these obvious advantages, there's a lot of other things that you get from having a bank that is strongly aligned with the United States, strongly aligned with US interests, strongly aligned with the US Department of War and also the intelligence community. And there's a lot of ways that that manifests. For example, one of the Things that we're doing is rather than working with the intelligence community only under court order to kind of go and respond when they think there's crime going on on the platform, we're preemptively going out there and saying, no, we're going to work with them from the very, very beginning to help make fraud almost impossible on our platform. Which is great for me too, because it means that people who want to engage in fraud are going to go to other banks. It means that people who don't want to engage in fraud are going to be thrilled about being on a platform that doesn't have that type of activity on it. And to the extent that it exists inside of their own platform against their will, they know that they have a willing partner that is willing to work with the government rather than hide these, you know, hide these things. I would say maybe think of it as like the opposite of hsbc, where they were banking the cartels and desperately trying to avoid any sort of government intervention that would make that clear to the public markets. Put Erebor way at the other end of that spectrum. I think there's also a lot of other banks that whether whether they're good or bad people is irrelevant. You might have good people who nonetheless are very beholden to European markets, Chinese markets, other foreign markets that they need to keep happy, either because they want to keep them happy and make money, or because they don't want their executives in those jurisdictions to get arrested. Erebor is taking a very different approach. We're saying, you know what, we're an American company, we're an American bank that supports American companies, and we will comply with U.S. law, but we will not comply with spurious rulings from people who have no real jurisdiction or authority over us. And you'll find a very hard time finding a bank that takes that position. I'm not aware of any other than us. How do you think about rolling out products? A bank can do everything from mortgages to equipment financing to venture debt to capital raises. Take someone pockets. That's kind of what, you know, you go to a big bank, they're going to help you. Ipo, what do you want to do first? I think that right now, look, we've just barely opened, so give us a little bit of time. The products that we are prioritizing are based entirely on the customer feedback that we're getting. The things that they tell us they need, the things that they tell us that we can most help with. In a way, the existence of a bank to me is Almost this antiquated thing. Like you would hope that companies could really just do all of this stuff themselves, or at least most of it themselves. But the regulatory climate, the way that the banking system works requires that you have this intermediary in the form of a regulated bank to make these things happen. And so I kind of think of our business as part and parcel of these companies that need us. And we're going to work very, very closely with them and focus on the things that they care about. That's probably not going to be, for example, you know, residential mortgages, but things like equipment financing. Very conservative, very conservatively played. Where it's not going to turn into a risk management problem, allowing them to work with the legacy banking system and plugging into that in the least painful way. These are things that we have a lot of customers who are very interested. Oh, and we need to not lose their money. If we can do that, we'll be doing better than many other banks. Yes, yes. Talk about the trade offs of going the charter route. You know, the last 10 years, most of the banking products that founders have used were built on top of existing charters or spreading deposits across multiple people. Just avoid getting a charter at all. You know, they want to be a fintech company and they basically will dance around the fact that realistically what they're doing is basically being a bank. Look, there's a lot of things that you can do without having your own charter. There's things you can do partner with other companies. There's a lot of things you cannot do without having your sort of against. It's kind of anti, anti hyper growth. Like you can't just scale to 50 billion of deposits tomorrow even if there's the demand. Right? So maybe we decided that, we decided that we needed to get our own charter because of the type of bank we were going to try to run and the ability to have the buck stop with us the moment that you're dependent on somebody else for the key infrastructure, the key risk management, the key licensure questions. They can kick you off the platform. They can be forced to kick you off the platform. They might. Maybe they're doing it for good reasons, maybe they're doing it for bad reasons. I mean you've seen this play out for example, with Steam and their payment processors and their banks and their payment processors banks where they're basically censoring games because there's some circle of people who all claim it's not them pointing down the chain, it's that guy, it's that guy. It's that guy. It's that guy. But they all agree, even if they can't agree, who's causing the censorship, that if you don't censor, they're going to drop you, they're going to drop your account, they're going to debank you, they're going to depayment you. And so one of the things that you have to ask yourself when you're making yourself dependent on another bank or another payment company is, am I setting this up where they get to make my decisions for me? And are they making their decisions for me, or is the Chinese Communist Party making those decisions? Is some political party that is extremely hostile to some business on our network, the one actually making that decision? So if you don't control your own charter, if you don't control your own destiny, the buck doesn't stop with you. And you're always going to have to keep other parties happy. And I think that was not something that we were interested in. We wanted to be able to run the bank the way that we think it needs to be run. And if we are debanking somebody, we are going to have to take responsibility for that. And I think that actually leads to much better behavior. I would love to see that type of behavior across the industry. Physical branches. How are you thinking about that? I think we're going to start with Fort Knox and we'll expand from there. I like it. Yeah. Maybe actually dive deeper there. Like, what is a bank these days? I think most people can conceptualize like setting up a crypto wallet that holds coins, but when you want to hold real dollars, you don't actually have a physical bank vault. I imagine. So once you get the charter, does that just give you the ability to, like, maintain a database and a ledger? Like, what is a bank? What is a bank? I mean, there's lots of forms. It can be. I think if you want all the details, you can actually read through a lot of our applications. Some of it's actually a matter of public record. And you can see that Anduril will, sorry, not Andoril Erebor, will have a physical vault and we will have a lot of treasure in it. So we are not trying to be a pure digital, pure, you know, pure ether company. And in fact, a lot of the companies that are very interested in working with us want us to have secure, actual vaulted storage. I'm not saying that that's going to be the first thing that we focus on. That's our key differentiator. But we are not a We are not a bank of the ether. We are. We are. We are of terra firma. Yeah. Last time you came on we talked a lot about mod retro. I'd love an Update on the M64. What makes that product special? Where did you go further with this project than with the Chromatic and just general like how you're thinking about the M64? Well, for people who aren't familiar with that, the M64 is a tribute to the Nintendo 64 that I'm building one of the greatest multiplayer consoles of all time. We're building console that is compatible with all classic N64 games. We're re releasing a lot of classic N64 games so that you can buy them if you don't already have them. We're actually doing new releases of canceled N64 games that never even made it to market. Either because they were canceled and ported to GameCube or because they ran out of money or because the studios imploded for interpersonality reasons. There's a lot of cool stuff coming out the M64. I guess the main update is that it's in mass production right now. It is not eventually coming. It is in mass production right now. We've decided we're not going to launch it until we build up sufficient stock to meet the demand. One of the mistakes I think we made with the mod retrochromatic, which was a tribute to the Game Boy and Game Boy color, was that we started selling them and then all of a sudden we sold out. And then you have people who hear about it, they read about it, their friends are all talking about it, they go to try to buy one and they can't buy one because it's sold out. And there's a question, will they remember to come back and buy it some other time? Will they still feel like going and immediately buying it? Exactly. And so you kind of end up with this dead end called to action. And so we've decided this time, by the way, this is especially bad for the game publishers that we're working with. Let's say that it's someone who's re releasing a game or somebody who's doing a brand new game. Some of the indie developers we're working with on the Chromatic, they're out there promoting their game, they're trying to market their game, they're doing a whole marketing activation trying to convince people, hey, come and buy my new Game Boy game. Come and buy my new Nintendo 64 game. Well, what happens if you can't buy the Console. A lot of people are like, oh, I'll come back later and buy it, and then they don't. And so what we want to do is not let down our developer partners this time and make sure that we maintain stock. So the goal is that the M64, no matter how many people hit our website, is not going to sell out. And so we are mass producing. We're stockpiling, I think tens of thousands of them so far, more and more to come. What is the. What is the. What's the supply chain actually like right now? We've covered the. The gamer rebellion against AI memory. Gamers are rising up. You know, the supply chain is okay because of the type of hardware that we're building. There's a lot of consumer hardware right now where people are trying to buy memory, and it's a huge problem. But remember that the Nintendo 64 doesn't have exactly a lot of memory. You know, it had what, 16 megabytes by default, 32 megabytes with the expansion pack. And so it turns out that you don't need that much memory to perfectly replicate the Nintendo 64 original hardware. Maybe it might be actually the least. The least memory impacted consumer electronics product of the year. And so this was your plan then all along? Yeah. You saw this guy, the AI boom was coming, and you said, I'm going to make the final console. Yeah. Now we got to return to monkey. We got to go back to the beginning. I mean, really, what am I doing here with something with 32 megabytes of. I mean, you remember what, you remember what Bill Gates said, right? What was it? 64 kilobytes of ram ought to be enough for anyone. Let's figure out how to use AI to. Yeah, let's figure out how to use AI to build applications that fit within reasonable memory footprints. I'm only half kidding. I think you might have seen me going back and forth with Chamath on Twitter a couple weeks ago, talking about how this AI software platform for building, building software using AI should definitely support export to Windows XP Service Pack 3 compatible applications. And I really am only half kidding. There is actually a lot of government hardware that is still running those financial hardware that's still running these mostly offline stuff. And so having apps that can run on those is actually useful. But man, it feels crazy to need a few gigabytes of RAM to have a start menu. It feels pretty crazy that you need 16 gigabytes of RAM to take 30 minutes to search through a bunch of text files. Surely we can do better than this. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about gaming and the concept of just raising the next generation kids? I have three kids and I think I could probably get an emulator and run it on an iPad and slam that over to my kids face and he might not know the difference. But is there another angle to the M64 that is about like some of the things that you can't do with it are actually good for the world? Maybe. I mean, you have to remember that the gaming industry, like many industries, figured out what actually worked a long time ago. They figured out how to make fun games. They figured out how to make things that make people keep coming back. But it's moved from innovation to extraction. And I will note I stole that line from Nirav Patel, founder of Framework, because he put it so much better than I did. But there's these industries that have moved from innovation to extraction and they're now in the extraction phase where they try to make tons and tons and tons of money and actually pushing the limits is not the top priority for some huge majority of the dollars that are in industry. And so there's a lot of stuff that you can learn, especially when you're learning it from the ground, ground up, by going back to when people were just getting the basics right, when they were still innovating, building things that were really compelling to people. I recently had a kid. I might have a second on the way. I'm planning on starting them with. I don't even if I'd say the classics. This isn't like a vintage play. It's starting them with a good foundation. That foundation happens to be largely old games. But I'm not going to be throwing them into the slot machine microtransaction gamblerama that is dominating kids games today. It just seems like a crazy thing to do. It's a Skinner box. Yeah, don't go in the Skinner box. Talk about vibe coding. What would your life be like if Vibe coding existed when you were 20? Advice for people who are 20 now. In the world of Vibe coding, you went into hardware very early. That feels like a great move. Is that still a great move? Walk us through all. I mean, the biggest beneficiaries of Vibe coding are going to be the hardware nerds like me. It's going to be. It's going to be the Shape Rotators, not the word cells. Everyone's focused on how the words on the word cells are going to be wiped out by AI. But for the Shape Rotators, it's going to be incredible. You know, I was always a pretty terrible software engineer. I'm not a programmer by trade. I've taught myself enough program to glue things together and make them work. But when I started my first company, Oculus, or actually when I started Mod Retro when I was 14 or 15, I knew just barely enough about software. If I would have been able to build crappy stuff by outsourcing it to a computer, I actually would have been able to accomplish things a lot faster than trying to do it myself. People might say, palmer, you should have just learned to code. You should have just learned to do it yourself. But I think it's pretty easy to look at my track record and realize I started Oculus when I was 19, after building prototypes. Since I was 15, I was only able to accomplish what I accomplished because I focused on what I was good at, which was optomechanics, a little bit of electrical, and then the product integration of all of these different components. I didn't have time to learn to program. If I had spent another year or two learning to program at even a reasonable level, I would have been two years behind on everything else. And so I am a big fan of Vivek. Even if everything that comes out of it is slop, even if it is all shit, it's better than I was able to make. How are you thinking about VR these days? I recently watched the Matrix from start to finish in an Apple Vision Pro. I enjoyed it. It feels like the only real thing that you can do these days is just the home theater, if you don't have a home theater. But it doesn't feel like the industry's embraced that at all. And everyone's sort of writing down their investments and pulling back at a time when the display technology does seem to be good enough for that narrow use case, if you cut out the weight and move things around. But where do you see this? Where do you. Where do you want consumer VR to go? And then where do you think it actually is going? So I will challenge your premise there, which is that people are pulling back. I think that's driven mostly by people sensationalizing meta firing a bunch of people. But you have to remember they got rid of 10% of the Reality Labs team in one layoff. Remember that they have something like 8 or 9% annual churn naturally and organically, not including firing. So, sure. I mean, what you're really talking about is basically pulling six months of churn forward into a single month, and they're still spending more on VR than Anybody, by an order of magnitude. They've said they are not spending less on content, they're just not putting it into first party stuff like Facebook. Meta Horizons, you might have seen they've announced Meta Horizons is no longer a VR app as of yesterday. It is now a mobile focused app only. So what they've done is they basically killed a few of these failing efforts that didn't make sense and they're now putting those resources into things that are working. And so I wrote a, I wrote a, I wrote a bit about this on, on Twitter where people need to understand this is not the end of VR. It's not, it's not collapsing. They are still spending an enormous amount of money. They're bigger than anybody else by an order of magnitude. And I think if you pay attention to what's going to be coming out from Meta and others over the next 12 months, you're going to see a lot of progress. Like Apple Vision Pro. Yes, they. So yes, Apple Vision Pro was ahead of everybody on visual quality, on display quality. But let me tell you a short story. Imagine that an American company went to a Japanese display vendor and they said, we want you to sell us your new 4K micro OLED displays. The company gives them samples of those micro OLED displays. The samples cost about $1,000 each because the yield on that production line is only about 10%. In other words, 90% of the displays coming off the production line are not up to par. They're not working. And that's because these are engineering samples. They're not meant to actually be a working product. And they said, listen, here's our engineering samples. Just wait two years and the yield is going to be up to 90%. Let's be able to sell these to you for a couple hundred dollars. And then imagine that that American tech company had a guy named Tim Apple call them up and say, no, we're going to build a product with this right now, today, using your engineering samples. They said, but Tim, Apple, that's crazy. That means that your headset was going to cost like $3,000. He said, I don't care. I'm going to sell a headset that should launch in 27, in 2024, 2025, and I'm going to do it for $3,500. That's what Apple Vision Pro is. It was never intended to be a product of the times. It's a product of the future, hauled into the present by spending enormous amounts of money. Meta and Sony and Apple and Google and all of these Other companies, they are going to be hitting that level of visual fidelity. They're going to be doing it with headsets that are far smaller, far lighter than what you see from Vision Pro. And I actually remain very optimistic. That's great. I think things are going pretty well. I'm extremely optimistic. Is mostly just that when I try and pull stuff out of Meta, they're like, no, no, no, we're not ready to talk. And I think that they're just being cold shoulder to me because, like, they don't want to leak it yet, but I am very optimistic. Well, you know, the problem is they don't have a. They don't. They don't have a charming, charismatic pitch man who knows how to talk about this stuff with you. They got to solve that. They need to figure out what they're doing. You know, it reminds me of something, being here. I'm on the floor of the New York Hotel Stock Exchange behind me. And back in the Oculus days, when we sold the company to Meta, one of the first things that happened was New York Stock Exchange emailed our contact email, and they asked if I would come and ring the bell of the New York Stock Exchange. Sounds pretty cool, right? Like, hey, like, you've been acquired by this major public corporation in the form of Facebook. Come and ring the bell. Maybe, you know, maybe someday you will do something else with you. And unfortunately, unfortunately, I didn't see that email for about seven years because another Oculus executive intercepted the email, said, oh, no, Palmer can't make it, but I would love to come. And he came and he rang the bell without telling me about it. And so I found out about it later in unrelated litigation. That email came up in discovery. Anyway, I've not had a chance to ring the bell yet. Maybe when Anduril goes public, I'll finally be able to. I'll finally be able to ring that bell. But I got to admit, I have a long memory and a long memory grudges, and I won't say who it was, but there's probably a handful of people out there who can guess. You have a lot of co founders now, a lot of executives that you work with. How do you select for folks who won't do that to you? How do you select Extreme loyalty. Extreme loyalty, Trust. I don't know. I mean, it's important. Remember, we just kicked this thing off. Look, I started occupying when I was 19 years old. You also got to remember the story of who is a founder, who is a co founder. It's fluid and Dynamic and always changing with the ebb and flow of history. One of my ideas is to have a blockchain company where everyone agrees what the founding story is and who the co founders are, and then it goes into the blockchain so that nobody can come back and say that they're a co founder. There's a guy running around now who says that he's a co founder of Oculus, who was very much so not a co founder. And in fact, I swear, I think I met this guy. I told you this story off air. A guy I was at. Tell me the story. So I was at a dinner party at my friend's house, and my buddy was like, hey, this guy works at. I'm not gonna name the company, but you guys probably have some tech stuff in common. You guys should meet. And I go up to him, I said, hey, hi, I hear we should meet. And he's like, hey, I. I was like, what's your story? He's like, I started a company called Oculus now. Now at Meta. And I was like, oh, interesting. Like, never heard of you before. And so maybe this guy, we won't put him on blast. Here's the crazy thing. I don't even know who you're talking about. And I told him. I was like, oh, there's multiple people who are saying this, including a guy who literally has a documentary being made about him how he's the founder of Oculus. So it's all you'll appreciate. You'll appreciate. I was like, oh, that's. That's awesome. Like, Palmer comes on the show all the time and then he completely backs back, backtracked. It was like, well, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I joined like, you know, you know. But I was on the founding team. Like, he backtracked the point. You asked me, how do you select these people? Carefully. I was 19 years old when I selected the first people that I was working with. I've learned a lot. I've been stabbed in the back a lot. And I'd probably make very different decisions if I were doing it today. And it's worth noting, remember that I started Oculus on my own with no co founders, nobody involved in a lot of like, I brought on people that I am happy to call co founders, even though they didn't join the company until months later, who I had never met when I started the company. That said, I'm happy. There's some people I'm honored to share the the title of co founder with. And there's other people that I'M not. Which is why I really want this blockchain thing. Somebody needs to vibe code this slop and get it out there. Super important question. Have you played Federal Reserve Simulator yet? New game. It's on Steam. On Steam. You got to try it out. You're a banker. Not even heard of it. You're a banker now. You got to get the reps in. Enjoy this. You got to do it. Federal Reserve Simulator. I think I. It's right there on the screen. Screen it says, Trump says we have an incompetent Federal Reserve who loves high interest rates. Very, very, very interesting. What, what hardware are you collecting? Recently we just learned you can buy a steam powered car and drive it around. Jay Leno has one that's 120 years old. What hardware am I buying? Am I buying collecting? Not just buying, collecting. Yeah, I know. What am I? What am I? Well, so I have a. There's a few things I could bring up. To be honest, I've been too busy to buy really good stuff, but I recently got delivered one of the first Jetson ones, which is a small Evtol aircraft. I was one of their first customers and their first delivery. I also have a collection of motorcycles. The theme of the collection is commercial failure. All of my motorcycles were huge commercial failures. The more of a failure, the better. I've been buying some failed two wheel drive motorcycles. I've been buying military motorcycles. How do they ride? Oh, incredible. Look, there's really bad failed motorcycles. There's those that failed because they're too good. One of the crown jewels in my collection is a Honda Rune. It was basically a personal project created by the CEO of Honda. The document that they used when they were creating it has actually been leaked now. And at the start of the document it says performance is the only object. Price is of no importance. And so they wanted to build the ultimate cruising motorcycle. And the story goes that they lost over $100,000 per bike in the end. And so I've got one of the handful of Honda Runes that made it out of that program. A beautiful Honda Honda Room with a couple thousand miles metallic purple and chrome. And it's. It's one of my favorite motorcycles, if not the favorite. So commercial failure doesn't mean a product's bad. It just means they couldn't figure out how to make a business out of it. Sure, sure. Back to your Jetson one. Have you been flying it? Are you taking it like half a foot off the ground and then a foot off the ground? What is the path to Commuting to work in it. I think given the regulatory climate around Evtol aircraft, it's best that I not say one more word. Perfect. Perfect. Where do you, where do you get your shirts? Where do I got my shirts? Well it depends. I buy, I buy Tommy Bahamas. This one is a rain spooner and oral Hawaiian shirt. So I've got a sentry tower, I've got a ghost X on it and they're headquartered on, on Catalina Island, California in Avalon. So I buy a, I buy from a hold up a bunch of different places. I'm an equal opportunity Hawaiian shirt purchaser. I like it. Supporting the entire market map. Well, it sounds like we have Jonathan Gould, the Comptroller of the Currency next to you in the booth, is that correct? That's right. I'd like to introduce Jonathan Gould, Comptroller of the Currency here with me today on tvpn. Thank you so much for joining us. Jonathan, please introduce yourself. Since it's the first time I'm the show. And tell us a little bit about what happened today from your perspective and what's going on with Erebor from your perspective. Sure. So thank you so much for having me. I'm Jonathan Gould, Comptroller of the Currency. We charter, we regulate and we supervise national banks. And today we're here to celebrate what is the first full service charter of a national bank that's been issued since I took office about seven months ago. So we're very excited to, to have airborne into the national banking system after months of hard work on their part. So delighted to have them there. And we're here to celebrate that. Yeah. How much is changing around the way banks get chartered I'm interested to hear. Is this just the Herculean efforts on Palmer's side or is there going to be a flood of new bank charters issued? Like what does the view over the next decade look like for new banks? Broadly? Well, so I think over the last four years, but even beyond since the 2008 financial crisis, regulators have imposed a lot of hurdles procedurally and otherwise as a result of just having a much lower risk tolerance around bank chartering in the United States. That's not the result of any changes in statute or anything like that charter. Just simply a lot of regulators, not just the OCC but other regulators as well at the federal level and possibly the state level too. Just discouraging banks from, from, from, from forming. But of course it's absolutely critical that we have new banks forming in America on a regular basis. That's really part of how the banking system revitalizes and refreshes itself over time. And so again, we want to do everything we can, such that we are being transparent and holding all applicants to the same standard and faithfully applying the statutory factors that.

First thing that we focus on, that's our key differentiator. But we are not a. We are not a bank of the ether. We are of terra firma. Yeah. Last time you came on we talked a lot about mod retro. I'd love an Update on the M64. What makes that product special? Where did you go further with this project than with the Chromatic and just general like how you're thinking about the M64? Well, for people who aren't familiar with it, the M64 is tribute to the Nintendo 64 that I'm building one of the greatest multiplayer consoles of all time. We're building console that is compatible with all classic N64 games. We're re releasing a lot of classic N64 games so that you can buy them if you don't already have them. We're actually doing new releases of canceled N64 games that never even made it to market. Either because they were cancelled and ported to GameCube or because they ran out of money or because the studios imploded for interpersonality reasons. It's, there's a lot of cool stuff coming out the M64. I guess the main update is that it's in mass production right now. It is not eventually coming, it is in mass production right now. We've decided we're not going to launch it until we build up sufficient stock to meet the demand. One of the mistakes I think we made with the mod retrochromatic, which was a tribute to the Game Boy and Game Boy color, was that we started selling them and then all of a sudden we sold out. And then you have people who hear about it, they read about it, their friends are all talking about it. They go to try to buy one and they can't buy one because it's sold out. And there's a question, will remember to come back and buy it some other time. Will they still feel like going and immediately buying it? Exactly. And so you kind of end up with this, with this dead end call to action. And so we've decided this time, by the way, this is especially bad for the game publishers that we're working with. Let's say that it's someone who's re releasing a game or somebody who's doing a brand new game. Some of the indie developers we're working with on the Chromatic, they're out there promoting their game, they're trying to market their game, they're doing a whole marketing activation trying to convince people, hey, come and buy my new Game Boy game. Come and buy my new Nintendo 64 game. Well, what happens if you can't buy the console? A lot of you like, oh, I'll come back later and buy it. And then they don't. And so what we want to do is not let down our developer partners this time and make sure that we maintain stock. So the goal is that the M64, no matter how many people hit our website, is not going to sell out. And so we are mass producing. We're stockpiling, I think, tens of thousands of them so far. More and more to come. What is the. What is this going to be launching soon? What's the supply chain act?