Palmer Luckey on ModRetro's roadmap, Erebor bank, and Anduril's Eagle Eye AR headset winning the $22B Army contract

first guest of the show. We have Palmer Lucky in the reream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP Ultradome. Palmer, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

I'm here.

He's here with the power of technology, the magic.

How are you doing?

What's going on?

Doing really well. Although the thing I've been complaining about lately is I was recently on Joe Rogan.

Yes.

And what you don't understand when you go on Joe Rogan is that it's like calling in a distributed denial of service attack on all your communications because your email, your voicemail, your text messages, your Facebook Messenger, your XDMs, everything becomes useless because you have so much incoming that even the important things like Homer, you need to go to your dentist appointment right now. Boom. Flooded by bro. How many so sick on

how many float tank operators have reached out and said, "We got to get used. Let me think about this for a second.

I haven't even caught up with everything, but at least three."

Okay. Have you actually gone in a float tank? I mean that that hearing that hearing that at the beginning of the interview and and and realizing that that uh this guy you're listening to wants to do a float tank but hasn't yet and you're like I've been waiting for this moment my entire life.

It's it's it's funny too because in in talking about float tanks, we we Joe and I took a we took a break during the show and when we took that break, we actually went to go look at his float tank.

Okay.

And it was so funny because Yeah, you're you're you're right. I'm like one of the only people who uh has gone on the show knowing all about float tanks and the principle and the mechanism and the theory and the history yet I've never actually managed to to get into one. So, um it's it's it's a it's a it's a it's a rare combination. I think most people who haven't used float tanks don't really know much about them.

Yeah.

Or care. Yeah.

I've actually looked a lot into float tanks even beyond what we talked about on Rogan. going back to like my my initial kind of uh push into this was in VR where I got into thinking about you know how do you how do you do like sensory um management how do you make how do you forget the senses that are at conflict with the virtual reality you want to present a float tank's interesting but then also you that's a sci-fi staple is to fill your lungs up with some kind of oxygen bearing fluid and then go in your you know full fluid immersion pod so that you can achieve extremely high G forces during rapid acceleration. And what I've always wanted to do is build a dragster like like build a car that can accelerate so fast that it would kill somebody if they weren't in a full fluid immersion G-pod. And I think that if you could do that, it would be like it'd be some kind of truly novel motorsports achievement where for the first time in any motorsport, the limit would truly be the ability of the person to survive it rather than the power of the machine that is involved. Like wouldn't that be so cool? Like, oh, don't floor it unless you've got your lungs full or it will kill you.

Yeah. They talk about instantly be

supercars that don't have traction control being, you know, death machines, right? But even but you know supercars that are accelerating over 1g like that's crazy. I want to do an inverted fan car basically a vacuum car that is accelerating at 80 or 90 gs.

Would you have to put like rockets on the back too or explosives or something like how do you actually what how do you max it out?

So my general opinion on these things is that there's an I'll know it when I see it element. If you're using rockets you're not really a car. Like look look I'm a huge fan like the NHR was the NH right the

I forget whatever the sanctioning body was in the United States for for for drag races they allowed rocket dragsters up until I think the late late 1980s. There's a great video of a dragster called Vanishing Point. Uh and it was a rocket powered dragster that was the last one before they banned them. It was doing like 400 m hour in the trap and its final run. There's a video on YouTube. I'll have to send it to you guys. Although if you look up Vanishing Point Rocket Dragster on YouTube, you'll find it. Maybe you guys can cut it into the video later for people watching this not live. But uh it final run, they ran it at true full throttle, went faster than ever, and the camera pans up and it blew out every single window in the control tower when it went.

And the rumor is that it went so fast and so hard that the pilot passed out during the acceleration and the parachute was actually pulled by a timer. I don't know if that's true, but it's a great story. So, anyway, the point is rocket dragsters don't count. You have to do it with wheels. I'll know it when I see it. If it's rockets, it's not a car. And the the the there was a guy in the I think the Air Force who set the record for most G's sustained by a person. And he used a rocket sled to do that. Basically, it was a rocket sled that accelerated and then very rapidly decelerated.

And they couldn't,

he thought it would be unethical to have anybody else volunteer. So, it was a pretty senior Air Force researcher who did the test himself. And I think he like blew out all of his the all the veins in his eyes and his sinuses and he was bleeding from every hole on his head. But he survived and recovered and he proved that a human can survive over 50 gs of relatively sustained

50gs.

50 gs. Over 50 G's.

Wow.

But you have a very

That's leadership. That's That's leadership. That's true leadership. If if if the flow tank's going to get added potentially to your uh routine, what other biohacks are you using or or a fan of or what else have you tried

in in in sort of like the performance optimization?

Being on a being on a mission I I feel like being on the mission being on a mission is the ultimate biohack.

Yeah,

I Yeah, I mean it really is. Um I mean I've always been very straight edge, right? So no alcohol, no caffeine, no nicotine, no drugs, nothing. I've recently started drinking since having a child and you know if we can get into that or not but um I I

I'm very much high on life. I don't really want

Doesn't Mountain Dew have c uh caffeine in it?

So it does and I will but like I generally will avoid Mountain Dew for that reason at least as a dependency. Now I go to Taco Bell I'm getting that Baja blast

of course. Uh and now that I've had a kid and I drink I can go to the Taco Bell cantina of which there's only a hand. Are you familiar with the Taco Bell canteen?

I'm not. No, I've I've I've never been.

It's It's in New York. Is there one in SF, too?

I think there's one in New York City. I don't think SF SF Nobody builds anything in SF.

Um,

but there's that Taco Bell right on the beach in uh Pacifica. You know what I'm talking about?

Yeah. The Taco Bell cantina is this concept where it's like Taco Bell, but also they serve alcohol. So, it's like a bar and a Taco Bell. And there's one less than five minutes from my house in Newport Beach. And so I can now go get get Baja blasted on my on my Baja Blast. Uh uh you know.

Wait, but I have to ask what about fatherhood made you start

drink.

Do you have kids?

Yeah. So we both have kids.

We actually passed the Palmer test. We have five between us.

Well, then you should understand.

Yes,

I do.

You should understand.

Yeah. No, I I understand it a little bit. But but part of it is like like uh alcohol for me. I sleep terribly. Kids are also, you know, they make they they very

Oh, I see. No, alcohol knocks helps. You know, it's different for everybody. It knocks me It knocks me out. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

Maybe because I don't have a tolerance to it. But, uh, so you asked about hacks. I've got one that I've been pondering that maybe we could talk about.

Yeah, please.

Um,

I'm I'm really afraid that nicotine might be really really good. Um, you know that you've probably seen this theory, right? like like basically uh America smokes smoked its way to being the dominant hyperpower. It kept people focused. It kept people fit. It's an appetite suppressant. There's this really interesting health trade-off theory that I'm not saying I buy into it fully yet. So for people who are watching and and and shouting and screaming, I don't buy into it fully yet, but I'm becoming more and more convinced that the health benefits of not smoking were have not been properly traded against the health problems caused by the resulting uh uh eating. Not just in terms of appetite suppressant, but also just people filling cravings and filling the need for ritual, you know, ritual.

I would tell you out of experience

with other with other things that are worse for you. I think the crazy version of this is we'd all be better off with lung cancer eventually,

but fit until then. And it could be that smoking gets you there. So,

I don't I'm trying to figure this one out, but nicotine is is near the top of my list of potential biohacks.

The other the other thing that it feels real is nicotine makes boring things pretty enjoyable. And it turns out that to do anything significant in life, like it's often times very exciting early. Like let's say you're working on a new product at Anderol. It's very exciting.

You can make a 3D render, you know, internally, not for marketing materials. I know you guys don't do that.

No render policy.

No renders. But let's say you make a render internally. You're like, "This is really exciting." And then and then it gets into the mud and you're like, "Okay, now we have to build this thing and you're you're in the in the trenches of product development and you get through many many many boring hours of struggle and

I'll tell you a lot of the people in the trenches, they are smoking."

Yeah. the literal the literal trenches also going back through war like they were that was how people used to be in rations of course

that I was I was going to bring that up. Yeah. I mean they didn't they didn't get rid of the they didn't get rid of the cigarettes in MREs until

pretty recently. I don't know what date it was but it was not that long ago.

Uh

so that's the and of course there's other ways to have nicotine without having to have the health impact of actually smoking a tar substance. So that's where it becomes interesting. Like you probably couldn't convince me that smoking is literally better than, you know, the food,

but it's like, you know, is is is vaping worse than being fat?

I don't know. I struggle. I I struggle based on the evidence I've seen.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's wild. Um, do you play video games before bed? You said that the alcohol helps you fall asleep, but uh do you ever get locked in and you like are playing video games can't fall asleep because of that? Um, you know, I used to play games all night long. I mean, I there was a time where I was spending maybe 14 hours a day on the computer if I could.

Um, you know, like that's it's you. That's you.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

Wonderful.

The best times.

I love them.

Gaming was was a good chunk of that, but also, you know, running online communities and other things. Um the the problem that I have now is I'm the types of games I really like. Uh

especially multiplayer games, you kind of have to be on your game. And if you play late at night when you're all wrecked, you're not even competitive enough for it to be fun. And I'm not saying I need to win or I or I hate it. You know, I'm not I don't hate skill-based matchmaking that much, but you want to know that you're playing to at least the upper limit of your own potential. And I find so that that's been the struggle as I've gotten older. And I know I know 33 doesn't sound that old,

but there's a lot there's a lot of things that are easier when you're 23 than when you are 33. And like you're not supposed to talk about that, particularly as an executive of a company in California. Hi, Department of Justice. You're not supposed to acknowledge that perhaps it's possible. I'm not saying there are. It's possible that different age ranges have different strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps, possibly, but certainly nobody should ever make a hiring decision on that basis. That' be a crime.

That's right. Yes.

That's right.

Well, yeah. I I the imagine in some ways being uh probably easier parenting could be easier for for people in their early 20s, right, than their early 30s. Just just by

Oh, forget what what are you talking about 20s? Look at this. Look at this mainstream NPC. No, no, no. Kids kids should kids should be having should be having kids when they're when they're in their teens. That's when they're that's when they're supposed to have them. Now, you could argue that maybe there's a reason to stretch it out a little bit, but if we're just talking about physical ability and and depth of well of energy, you know, let's let's not be politically correct. Let's just admit you're supposed to be having kids you're 16, 17, 18, and be done by the time in your 20s so that you can uh so you can have your kids working on the farm by the time you're in your 40s. Yeah,

I mean it's a I I mean I I I regret not having kids even at the age of 33. I regret not having them earlier because I I'm like, jeez, this would have been so much easier when I was younger. I've been with my wife since we were 15, though. So, it's a lot easier for me. You know, when people like, oh, but Palmer, how do you know it's the right person? Like, geez, we should have just obviously had kids when we were 16. It would have worked out just fine.

Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah. The whole world, you feel like when you're younger, everything's as complicated as it'll ever be, and it just gets more complicated every year and more busy every year. Um, take us through take us through mod.

Well, this gets also to like the startup thing I say all the time and I'll take this this this moment to to push it,

especially for anyone young who's listening.

People think that starting a company or taking a break from school is this very high-risk move when you're young. They say, "Oh, how do you find the bravery to do that?" What I need to what I try to push on people is it will never get better. the the like when when you are 18 or 19, you have no family, you have no real job, you don't have a career yet, per se. Uh that's the best time to start a company. You're not giving anything up. All you have to lose is a bit of time. And all you need to do is better than you would have done otherwise on your resume. Like running a startup and failing it is probably going to look better on your resume than whatever you were going to be doing part-time in school as a as a as a late teenager or or early early 20s. Yeah. And so, uh, yeah, I the the best time to start a company is when you're young because you don't need any bravery to do it. The the people who start it later where they have a family and a mortgage and

yeah, once once these people have acclimated to like a 250k base, it's like good luck rate, you know, building a

100% and and and also once you have a family, you have a sort of fiduciary duty to your family to maximize their quality of life. There's no life hack that says that you're allowed to degrade the quality of your child's

uh childhood because daddy wanted to have that grind set mindset, right? Like it's irresponsible at that point. So totally. Uh yeah, I I couldn't imagine starting Oculus where I am today. Like it would it would just be it would just be irresponsible.

Yeah. Take us through Mod Retro. How much of everyone's familiar with the Chromatic. We've talked a lot about a lot on the show. We unboxed one. We've had a lot of fun with them. uh how much of the road map is public now? Where's the company going? Where's the company now? Just kind of give us the general update and then we'll dive into some

Well, before I tell you where it's going, I'll go back to where it came from in the first place. A lot of people

think that Mod Retro is this very recent thing for me. You know, the first product we launched, the Mod Retro Chromatic, which was kind of the ultimate Game Boy, this this kind of heirloom grade tribute to the Nintendo Game Boy and Game Boy Color. Um, very high-end hardware, magnesium aluminum alloy shell, a lab grown sapphire crystal screen lens rather than plastic or even even glass. Yeah.

Um,

and the thing is Mod Retro was actually the first company that I ever started even before Oculus. So, I started Mod Retro when I was about 15 years old. It was an online forum for

we have a

it was an online forum for people uh modifying game consoles, handhelds, portables um also also um also uh uh you know home television consoles. The main kind of thrust of the community was this hobby called portabilizing, which is taking home consoles and turning them into handhelds by combining them with modern technology like LCDs and you know modern modern high energy density batteries and um I mean that that actually was a pretty big deal for a while. I know in the modern day this doesn't mean much but we were getting millions of unique viewers every single month because we were getting covered of of the projects on this site. We had thousands of active members. We're getting covered by Ing Gadget and Gizmodo and Kotaku and you know kind of the the whole group of of outlets that back then liked technology. They're now anti-tech uh anti- tech uh

coverage. But back when back when tech news was about tech and not anti-tech, they were covering all of these things. And uh again, you know, these days millions of uniques, I mean, you can get that on TikTok with with a good dance, but but that really meant something in the mid 2000s on the internet. And um we we actually started working on projects like what the ultimate game boy would be back then. There was a project that I did in 2008 called the PGB, the Power Game Boy. Power Game Boy was the ultimate Game Boy. It was a Game Boy Advance. It was Game Boy Advance SP hardware transplanted into an original Game Boy shell, but with an upgraded screen, upgraded controls, motion controls, an FM radio transmitter, so you could broadcast the sound to your car, so you could be playing and didn't have to tether in and could have all that sound if you're doing LSDJ, Dell's DJ or some other chip tune software. And that actually won the the 2008 portable pulooa. So, I'm very proud of the Power Game Boy. Um, I was also the first person to ever backlight a Game Boy Pocket. The first person to ever uh LED backlight an original Game Boy. So, I mean, I am an OG to the max when it comes to this.

That was the original like parental control was I just remember being a kid and being like, if I turn the lights on to play Game Boy, my parents are going to see the light under the door. They're going to come take my Game Boy. So, I was like trying to It was probably training my eyesight to try to

Yeah. Uh,

no. No. You're just maybe hurting your eyesight, but training your brain. Now you can see signal from the noise. Maybe you hold him at night vision. You're you're Batman himself by the Game Boy, molded by it, raised by it.

But um,

so what what happened is I started on this project all the way back then of what the ultimate Game Boy would look like. I kept working on it at Oculus.

Yeah.

I kept working on it post Oculus. And then after about eight or nine years of not making any progress because I was just like I I I made some progress. We had some prototypes and stuff, I finally said, you know what, I need to get more serious about paying someone else to do my hobby uh because I'm not going to be able to get this done on my own. And so uh I ended up hiring a few people uh from my past life and uh getting getting together with a bunch of people who believed in this kind of vision of building these tributes to what technology used to be the best parts of what gaming used to be and building a company around that and we ended up pulling together the chromatic all the pieces and loose ends from 10 years of of of of hacking and modding and turned it into a real product. Um, walk me through the the the road map. The M64 is coming out. Uh, that's right. Do you have other ideas or or ways you define like what sticks out? Obviously, the Game Boy is iconic. The N64 is iconic. Um, but uh how broad are you thinking like h like what reaches? Is it just games? Is it just games from the 90s, 2000s? We're We're We did the Game Boy because it's the most important handheld console ever. Yeah.

I mean, it redefined the idea of gaming, what it was, how you did it, how it fit into your life, how you could build games that you didn't sit down and be tethered to something, but instead could be a thing that you would share with friends, bring to places, meet new people playing them. I mean, that that was really, really a wild idea at the time. Yeah.

And um there's a lot of good in that. But I think that as the games industry has financialized and gotten much bigger, uh there's a lot of things that have gotten lost. I think that you know the need to make more and more money has taken things away from I think what were actually great product decisions in the 80s and 90s when people were just trying to make great games and great consoles. They weren't trying to figure out how to you know bump up their daily active users. They weren't trying to build live services. They weren't trying to build, you know, passive recurring revenue models that they they relied on a variety of modern marketing concepts to juice people and get them get them locked in.

Yeah. What do you like in the modern

That's why I say just generally hardware wise I I want to go into hardware. There was like similar turning points, right? So the M64 is an obvious one. You that was the beginning of 3D gaming basically for everybody. You could say but Palmer there were people who were playing you 3D games on their PCs. Yes. But in terms of mainstream access, totally. I mean, that changed everything. Totally. I'm interested in going to all these points where there's things that we can learn and releasing basically the best version of that combined with modern technology that makes it more useful. So things like

what would a modern Sony Walkman look like? Like what was good about the Walkman experience versus modern streaming and kind of the digital morass that we've gotten into the algorithmic feed? Like nobody's doing mixtapz anymore. Listening to music is not a conscious activity. It's not a curated recept for a machine. People talk about just having AI sloped to them without realizing that, you know, the modern music industry has kind of been pioneering this for a long time. It's just the AI is behind the curtain, the computers are behind the curtain, and the algorithmic recommendation engine is behind the curtain.

Do you feel like there's some green shoots in the modern gaming economy? I'm thinking like yes there's a lot of uh you know mobile games that are hyper optimized and there's a lot of games that have gone freeto play with all the micro payments and stuff but then you do have folks like the you know the team behind Last of Us where it's just a story and you don't really get sucked into any crazy micro payments and it feels like there's an artist behind it but are there are there other areas of the modern game industry that are sticking out to you as like positives

there there certainly are and there's lots of modern indie games that are I think doing a lot of like you look at like you look at like Silkong a lot of like

but where you're not seeing this I think is on the hardware side

like you're still living in an ecosystem. So like let's say that you want to play a game that was built with these values. All right. So you're going to turn on your console.

You're going to try to play it. Oh, there's a critical security update. Time for you to do your critical security update. Y

okay, now you need to also update your console. All right, you're updating your console. Nope. Now that wiped out all of the cookies. It's time for you to log in again. You're going to log in. It wants you to do two-factor authentication because fraud has become such a problem that you now do. Oh [ __ ] where's my phone? Let me see. I don't have my authent.

It's one of those terrible things where it adds so much friction. And that's before you then get railroaded into a big giant UI of advertisements

that are autoplaying the moment. Like

the idea of like

that's just to get permission to upgrade your skins. Basically, the idea just be like I'm going to take this

Yeah. and just turn it on

and that's it. And it's great.

That is that Yeah. That is

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I modern games can't do that because of the platforms that they're on.

Yeah. Yeah. I was comping like what it takes to play. Uh actually on the one of the one of the newer quests I had I realized I had seven different passwords, Instagram, Facebook, Meta. I had all these different passwords. I had codes to different pieces to buy games and stuff versus I went and pulled up an old N64 where you turn the button and it just says Golden Eye and it's just like amazing. And I was saying that like that that seems like it own goal. It seems like modern video game designers should at least know that you will see lower churn if you pre-install one great game and when the first time they unbox it on Christmas, you turn it on and it's Beataber or whatever the whatever the piece of software or hardware that you're selling like have it come with something great. Like why don't people do that? Are they just stupid or is it like something more complex?

This is it is complex. I mean, so you got to remember like, so first of all, there's a lot of people in the games industry who didn't necessarily get into it purely because they want to build great games or

nec Starbucks and not Mountain Dew.

Yep, you've heard my quote, right? And you have a lot of these people who it's it's a lily pad. It's a way to make a check or it's a way to affect affect social change in the world through some larger company's budget.

Um,

and so that's that that that that is part of the problem, but you're also at odds often enough. So, like you just talked about this specific idea of having a bundle title. So, I've been on the other side of the negotiating table inside of, you know, inside of Meta, formerly Facebook and, you know, formerly Oculus.

Um,

what's going to happen is you're going to say, "Hey, this is going to be a great experience." And then you have someone who says, "Ah, but if we have a bundled title, then that gets rid of the revenue opportunity to have another company pay us to be the bundled title." And also, they're our developers are going to be really upset because we're going to be competing with them. And so, for example, your holiday day one installs, they're mostly going to be of this new game. People are going to be less likely to do day one buys of all of these other games. If there's a game that you can already play, you say, "Well, well, what should we we have to have something pre-installed?" And then you have these conversations. Well, it can't be a full game. It be a thing that shows off the hardware. It be like a fun little bite experience, but we then need to have people go into it. And here's another thing. They say, if you have literally nothing, that means they have to download something. And the the time where there's going to be the most impetus for them to put in their payment details is going to be that day one. So you don't want to do anything that degrades your get the payment details because the moment you get their payment details, every purchase after that is an easy click. It's an easy dopamine hit. You don't have to go through all of the pain.

And so it's one of those things where you have all of these intervate money driven things and you have the platform holders so tightly intertwined with much of the content. This is the problem when the hardware owners end up owning all of these studios. Uh, and

yeah,

I mean, this is probably me getting a little too business political, but in the early days of Oculus, we were very clear with developers to our business relations. We are not Nintendo. We are not going to compete with you and basically destroy your sales by pref preferentially treating our own developers better, our own studios. So, we made things, but we really said we our goal is to enable second and third party titles to fund lots of other people and we funded dozens of developers. As you become Nintendo, you make it harder for those third parties to exist. And the first party has their own goals that are not necessarily aligned with what you're talking about, which is turn on the game and play it and have a good time. They have they have they have other plans for you.

Is the answer just out compete them? I imagine that the libertarian in you is not saying we need to regulate this. So what's the answer?

Of course not. No. Um I I think it's a combination of reminding people what they've lost, like what they had and how good it was.

Yeah.

It's about reminding and showing off for the first time to a new generation how things used to be. I mean, one one of the things I love about Chromatic and M64 is people, you know, show like we were just at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo,

and a lot of the people coming by and having the most funs were kids whose parents brought them over like, "Oh, check out this game." Like, "This is the Mario Kart I used to play."

And you can you can you can show these people, I think, a lot about how things used to be, how it used to work, and I think you can prove that people still want that. There's people who don't believe any of this. Like you'll talk people say, "Well, that's not what people want from games anymore. They want live service games. They want games that are continuously updating with fresh new content." And like they say this, I think because their internal people have to convince themselves that it's true because otherwise their business model of being a 100 billion dollar company doesn't pan out. And you contrast that with like the number, you know how many people made the Game Boy?

There's 12 people. I mean it's just it's you contrast that with like the 60,000 people you have in some of these large. So I I look I don't think it's regulation. I think it's reminding people showing people and then at some point someone needs to take the best of modern technology

and they need to take these lessons from the past when people were trying to make things great without necessarily being concerned about the micro financials. and they need to build probably a new platform that that learns for that you combines the best of all of these things which is kind of the idea behind Mod Retro. You want to combine the best of the modern and the best of the retro. And I think at some point somebody's somebody's going to do that. You know, who knows? Maybe you'll see something like Sega re-enters the console war and and kicks everybody's ass. But u maybe it'll maybe it'll maybe it'll be Intellivision. Maybe KCO Vision is going to come back.

Uh but at some point it'll happen. Yeah.

Do you expect Mod Retro to continuously make decisions that sort of limit the TAM and that's you know not going down the path of hyper financialization and and you know trying to create this open ecosystem. I just I I doubt you guys had any investors that that passed on Mod Retro, but I imagine some of them would say, you know, the NPC VC that thinks it's contrarian to have kids in your 20s would say like, okay, I want to invest, but like how do you think about the TAM, right? Like how do how do you address that? because I I can see the obvious path of just selling a lot of really great hardware and building out, you know, millions of people in the world that just love the hardware, buy the hardware, and you have a fantastic business, but maybe it's not an anderal scale opportunity, and you're probably totally okay with that.

I think the opportunity actually is huge. I think that the entire modern electronics industry is in a sort of prisoners dilemma where nobody can stop doing these things that nobody wants to be doing because the first person to do it can't really do it alone. I mean like like that's why your phone is full of crapware. That's why you buy a laptop and it's pre-loaded with all of this stuff. like the the companies know just how much consumers hate it, but they're all in this competing for each penny, competing for each dollar race against each other with largely undifferentiated offerings. And so they have to play that game. If you can hugely differentiate and if you can convince a consumer that it really is a differentiated thing, I actually think that you can end up where the TAM is look what here's what'll actually happen. I think the TAM for doing things right is bigger than the TAM for things that do things wrong.

The only problem is that the moment you prove that that's true, everyone is going to follow in your footsteps and become your competitors in this new post prisoners dilemma world.

Uh that's probably the form of success that I would be happy with. It's not let's do everything ourselves and and and and nobody's going to follow us. Realistically, the moment you see success, everybody copies what you're doing. Yep.

Changing the world is a outcome people need to be okay with even if they don't own the whole market.

Would Mod Retro ever make an M1 Grand?

M1 Grand?

I don't think so. I think it's going to stick to consumer electronics um like technology product.

Would you ever make a consumer electronics product that was uh created before you were born?

Oh yeah, for sure.

For sure. Um, I mean, we're working on a cassette tape player right now. Okay. Yeah. Um, so like that's that that's one example. Like what what would what would

what would the ultimate Sony Walkman look like? Like if you were making something today with those principles in mind, what would it look like today? How would it work? And there's a lot of things. And I'm not even talking about the complicated things like algorithmic music feeds, just basic things. It is. It was so easy to stop and start music or adjust the volume or know that it was playing in the first place. You know, like you have that haptic mechanical like you can literally feel the you feel the wheels turning.

Um, a Walkman on your should, you know, on an armband is a much better experience than using your phone to play music.

And I understand why we're using one and not the other. And I'm not saying that the cassette tape part is the part that made it good, but there's a lot of other parts that were good that that I that I think are worth learning from. Um, another one is like an example would be modern televisions.

Um, I know I'm a libertarian and I'm not supposed to like regulation, but I sometimes flirt with the idea that smart TVs should be illegal.

I I hate smart TVs so much.

They're so bad.

You're clapping because everyone agrees.

Everyone agrees.

This is the danger of being a libertarian. You realize you can just adopt populist pro-state dispositions and you can get voters. It's like, "Oh, we're libertarian except for this thing that you hate. We're going to regulate that."

You can be you can be trusted with soal control. I

I would trust you.

Exactly. But

you're not like the other ones.

But like smart TVs create a lot of these same bad incentives where you have the hardware manufacturer not just trying to build a good TV, a good screen, good visual technology. They're now dipping their toe into, well, I actually need to be a services company. I need to be a software platform company. They need to run an app store.

Y

and it's a and it's a prisoner's dilemma. If you don't do those things and if you don't introduce advertising into your TV feeds and if you don't have, you know, a lock screen that's showing ads on your TV, how could you compete with the people who are who charge, you know, just a few a few dollars less?

Um, but I think that there's I I think that there's value in saying like, hey, like one of the things Mod Retro is looking at doing is doing a modern CRT display. And part of the value there is building something that is actually has all those cool attributes of a CRT, especially when you're working with retro computer systems and retro consoles that we're designing the art around the particular technicalities of how a CRT works in terms of having very high motion clarity, very very good color gamut, relying on the persistence of the phosphor to enable certain visual effects, um assert certain blending that happens on certain things, doing display interlacing techniques, but but ignoring all that there's also just the fact that a TV that you can plug something into and it just shows what you plugged into it is an incredibly novel idea. And I think bringing it back, reminding people of that. Like I I would be I wouldn't be surprised to see Mod Retro make a totally modern technology display that is just a TV that doesn't [ __ ] you. Like that's it. I think I

I mean just just think just the the the the my biggest critique of all these smart TVs is how quickly the software degrades. Like it wasn't good in the beginning and then quickly there's like a a small lag every time you push a button. And imagine a TV that was just super snappy and just had the three apps that you actually want to use. And I'm sure you go back and use go back and use like a even like a flip phone from the early 2000s. The UIs were literally orders of magnitude faster and snappier than the UIs of these modern smart TVs. Like you could buy a TV with 8 gigabytes of RAM and a 3 GHz processor

and somehow you're right, it still manages to have that.

You know what? We're at a stage in the technology cycle where people make things that are different but not necessarily better. There's this pressure to do things that are new and movement.

Yeah. Yeah. And I and and my biggest critique is the new uh iOS liquid glass. It's like congratulations, you made it different. I don't believe you made it better.

Yeah. Uh what do you think? Do you think there's a world where the next turn of VR kind of displaces TVs? Uh we talked to James Cameron about this and it seemed like he'd kind of seen the next iteration maybe and was kind of excited about the idea of being able to watch a 3D IMAX movie at home. And from my experience with the Apple Vision Pro, the screen's getting better and better. Meta's working on this stuff. Like we've talked to the big screen team. It feels like we might finally be at a point where we're thinking about replacing the home theater.

The way to think about VR headsets is not as a replacement for a TV,

but as a replacement for a home theater.

So, and the reason that's important is it's not just a TV, a screen, it's a controlled environment optimized for watching that content. The thing I've always liked about VR is you can have all this cool new VR content, but it can potentially also simulate any previous form of any previous media experience before. So like an example I've given when people said, well, you know, what about like an ebook, you know, an ebook reader on VR? Uh, you know, are we are we really going to use that? And the point I make is, well, look, if you make this good enough, it's not just the book, right? The experience of reading a book is also your environment, your surroundings. People will go places just to sit down and read a book in the right environment. Simulating that is interesting. So, and the same thing goes for music, right? It's not that that you're not trying to simulate a speaker. You're trying to simulate, you know, a listening room.

And I feel like that that's where things are going. I think that's why James Cameron is excited because you spend a lot of money to control a viewing experience when you're doing it physically, right? Like I'm building walls. I'm soundproofing a room. I'm painting the whole thing matte black so there's no reflections on my screen. By the way, I've done that. I have a basement home theater that I made myself and uh it's the the walls are painted matte black and the ceiling is painted matte black and I have custom matte black carpet that's mostly black except for a few of my favorite galaxies printed on it from NASA imagery because I wanted to have some space carpet. Nothing's cooler than space carpet.

Um but like that was really expensive to do all that and I think VR is going to actually surpass that experience in short order. that the technological path to VR displays being better than 99% of people's home viewing environments is a singledigit year problem. It's not decades. It's it it's it's within 10 years certainly.

Yeah. What's the what's in the critical path? Is it you've said that you liked pulling the battery out? Is are there other things that you're pulling out if you're building the next version of consumer like VR as home theater? What are the design considerations you're pulling out? I mean I mean I mean where where do I even where do I even begin

the second screen on the outside you'd have you'd definitely have that if you want to be in the home theater right?

No no um I hear that was a Tim Cook special. Um but I can't I can't confirm it. I don't I don't work at Apple.

Um but I mean you need to relentlessly focus on the experience of the user of the device and you can't have features that are not adding to that. like you don't if you're if your job is to try and make VR cool, which is largely what Apple was trying to do with the first generation Vision Pro, you might do things like have a screen on the outside and like if you're trying to make it cool and acceptable,

but at some point you need to optimize towards the experience of it all. And luckily, in the long run, maybe even the medium run, these things are going to look like sunglasses, not like ski goggles. And so that that that that's really where this is all going. I don't I I think if you if you and me were had James Cameron right here to grill, I don't think you would say I think the future looks like a bunch of people wearing ski goggles. I think you'd say the glasses you wear to already like navigate and communicate that you're wearing all day will also simultaneously be the best home theater device you've ever seen. We're going to get there sooner rather than later.

Yeah. Let's talk about Arabore. There's been some press hits lately. the press seems entirely fixated on Palmer Ly's crypto bank. And obviously that uh is not the the

but any the full story nor is it the most I think exciting uh thing about it from anybody that's been in the tech industry that lived through the SVB collapse. And so I wanted

I wanted to hear it directly from you.

Well, you know, it's a little early to start talking about you. We just got our conditional approval which is fantastic. We're still waiting on FDIC. Yep. We're still waiting on full approval. So, it's a little early for me to really get into into, you know, going out and and marketing the bank.

Yeah. But why? But but but yeah,

but but what you're getting into Yeah. No, I I get it. Like the I think there's this natural inclination for people to look at this and say, "Oh, it's like what SVB was. It's catering to the same customers. That must mean that they're going to be this really high-risk bank that does all these high risk things." In reality, it's literally reaction to that. It is an opposite. The reason that we got this approval is because we went in saying we are going to have the most conservative loan to deposit ratios of any bank in history. We are going to do this extremely novel service of taking money from people, holding it for them, and then allowing them to have it back. Like like we're going to be offering these services that banks used to offer. You can't get the service I just described in any bank. If you go and you say, "I want you to just like hold on to my assets, but I don't want you to loan against them." Yeah.

Like that's that's not what a bank is.

What are you talking about? And of course, like I'm not saying that all assets should be held that way, but when you're a business in the business of making your business grow, you don't care nearly as much about getting an extra half a percent on your deposits as you might about truly minimizing the risk that you're not going to have access to any of your capital. I mean, if if SVB would not have been bailed out by the government in in in a like it wasn't just like the government's obligations, they were bailing out they were bailing out well beyond FDIC limits. If they wouldn't have done that, it probably would have wiped out half the tech industry in one fell swoop. That's crazy. How can the tech industry have become so subservient to the banking industry, to the finance bros that not only can we not survive without them, but in working with them, we sign our own death warrants, right? Like like we can't see what the risk is, we can't control what is and there's literally no other option. So that it is. I agree. It's it's annoying to see everyone talk about how Arabore is this new bank in the vein of SVB that's going to be taking on higher risk, you know, higher risk bets. It's literally the opposite. It's it's do what SVB didn't for the people that SVB was otherwise successful in working with. So think like national security companies, hard tech, deep tech, biotech, these companies that just need to make sure they have someone who understands how their business works. And SV did do a good job at that. but then also is going to make sure their money is actually there when they go to get it. That was the part that SVB screwed up.

Yeah.

How how uh

I guess I'll end with one bit here which is maybe worth noting. You know, I'm not I'm not even I'm not working on Arabore in an operational day-to-day capacity.

Um like I'm I'm a board member. I I founded it because I wanted this to exist. You got to remember that the tech sorry, the finance industry is full of people who love finance for the sake of finance, right? They're truly they're truly in love with with all the levers and and and the machines and how it works and what

That's right. And in addition, they probably like what it enables. They like free flow of capital. They love the ability to to leverage things like I I I get that.

Similarly, I'm a VR guy. I love VR for the sake of VR. I love what VR can do. I love that it can be a home theater. I love that it can be a classroom. I love that it can be a time machine. But I also strictly love it for the sake of the technology itself. that you're that you're presenting an artificial view to your peripheral nervous system that is sufficiently advanced as to convince a body that has developed for millions of years to discern what is and isn't real. Like that's that's incredible. I love it. I would love it from a tech perspective, even if it were useless from an everyday perspective. And I would say that is not how I am with finance. I don't love finance for the sake of finance. I'm not a finance bro. I want something like Arabore to exist because of and for the sake of my love for all of these other technologies. If something doesn't exist, a safe, reliable banking partner for people like me who care about tech for the sake of tech and what tech can do, uh if something like that doesn't exist, people are going to have a hard time. So, it's a little weird. It's one of the few finance companies that's started by somebody who wants it to be in service of all the other true interests they have rather than the culmination of their own personal interest. Like I guarantee JP Morgan, uh, Goldman Sachs, these firms were not started by people who said, you know, I don't really care about baking, but but but I I do I do want to make this technology work.

Yeah. Yeah, I know. That makes a lot of sense. Uh, speaking of other uh articles, there's this interesting article in Business Insider from six years ago. The US Army wants mixed reality headsets that detect enemy fire, translate language, and see in the dark. And the startup founded by Oculus Palmer Lucky. Oculus is Palmer Lucky is on it. Uh this was a six-year project. What What is the full story here? What was the genesis of this article and then uh how did the Yeah. How did the product come together?

Well, the thing that that's so interesting and I I think there's a quote you should dig in there for like a quote from Brian Shimp. He says it's uh the real moonshot for us is this idea. Uh you want to have every soldier, every operator be able to have total awareness of what's going on. They know everything they need to know to do their job and all of this is available to them in a millisecond and the most crit and just the most critical information that they need.

I mean you could take that quote and it's practically word for word what the army is saying about soldier mission command. I mean it could be the press release for eagle eye which we just which we just started showing off publicly at a USA. I mean, uh, I I'm I'm it's interesting because a lot of people think that this move into announcing our augmented reality efforts is this new thing that we pivoted into rather than the culmination of 8 years of platform building, building the software that you need, building the data integration techniques you need, the uh the the the the radio relay and meshing systems that you need. There's so much you have to do to accomplish this dream of a soldier-born heads-up display that shows you where the baddies are, where your buddies are, does your ballistics compensation and calculations. I mean, like it it is it is it takes so much work and we've been working on this since the beginning of the company. And so I think that article is interesting because uh it it's this was, you know, six, seven years ago and people are asking what are you guys going to We said, "Oh, we're going to build combat heads of displays that integrate data from all these sources and put it right in the solders's field of view so it's available in a millisecond." And when people when we said that back then, people were kind of giving us side eye and they were like,

"Okay, one, that sounds crazy. Two, the army just gave like put to put this in context, that was like 6 months after Microsoft had won the IVAS contract." They're like, "Well, that's what Microsoft's doing. Why why why would you be working on that?" And even then, it's because we had a vision for what it needed to be that was somewhat divergent from what the army or Microsoft was doing. And so, we kept investing. We kept building. And I mean, who would have bet that eight years later that Microsoft contract, that $22 billion contract vehicle for the architecture of the Army's AR future would move over to Anderil that we would be launching something like Eagle-Eye and that it would be an extremely you you know that when we took over SBMC from Microsoft that we integrated our UI and features that we've been building on Lattis in less than two weeks like we literally like we we we did in two weeks what the army had been working on for years because we've been building this backend for it and kind of preparing for the day where this might happen. So, it it feels very much like a culmination of destiny, a bet that paid off. I've been definitely talking to my investors and reminding them that they told told us that this was a moonshot that probably was not going to pan out. Like, you know, I mean, try try telling someone, I think Microsoft is going to transfer their $22 billion contract to us at some point. It's just like they're just like Palmer. Like that's magical thinking. Like it's not like it's a type literally I've been told Palmer that's the type of thing you think when you just miss the boat and you just can't bear to like you're just you're just coping. You're just coping.

It's cope. It's pure cope. I said

well let's let's give it up for a culmination of destiny.

Yeah. Culmination of destiny.

I'm always a fan of people achieving achieving their destiny. I I haven't gotten to mine yet. Although, you know, um I won't I won't I won't do this. You know, I think I think you guys might have even asked me about this at one point. I I I So, you know, I have this I have this uh I have this this goatee that I've been growing ever since I was fired.

And um you know, that was like I'm coming up on nine years ago now.

And uh I I've told people who asked about it that I I can't I can't shave it until certain conditions are met, until I achieve certain goals in my life. Okay.

And uh I I've I've just been cryptic about it and never said why. I don't plan on changing that. But I will let you know I have achieved those life goals. I have achieved the the the the my destiny to end that I that I set set for myself eight years ago. So

wait, so does that mean you're just you're just keeping the goatee because you like it? Is that what you mean?

So well I I I said I'm not going to shave it until these conditions occur. And uh there were people who believed that those conditions will never occur. We'll have to talk about it another time. Uh but but uh it's not that I must shave it. It's that I now can shave it. That's right. I I I tweeted about it a few years ago and I said, "Uh, look, I I I'm not going to tell you what's going on in my in my personal life yet here. But but suffice to say,

when the beard comes off, shit's about to go down.

We need a We need a We need a beard. We'll get a beard tracker on the website for sure that people get.

Well, we have uh Brian Armstrong uh joining the show. Thank you so much, Palmer, for joining. That was a