Investing Like A Mystic: How Cyan Banister Finds Outliers (Co-Founder of Long Journey Ventures)

You've been one of the best investors, I would say, of the past 15, 20 years. Your track record is truly astonishing. You know, SpaceX, Uber, Pokemon Go. But what I'm doing is taking in all the sensory input around me and watching everyone's behaviors. The companies that have had the largest returns in my portfolio came from the most unusual places. Uber came from thinking about the taxi medallion system. I didn't come up with the idea of Uber, but I knew there was a problem. I knew there was a racket and there was a bottleneck, which was only a certain number of drivers can exist because it's throttle. And that's a problem. Whenever you notice humans' obsession, pay attention. You know, Pokemon Go, that happened because I noticed my friends playing this game called Ingress and they were obsessed with it. And I thought to myself immediately, this is my one and only chance to invest in something I think is going to change the world. Eventually you'll be able to vibe products like... physical object like vibe manufacturing is going to be a thing million dollar idea you've been sitting on for years you can now take it on sharp tank and i think we're going to have so many newly minted millionaires across the world might not be venture scalable companies but they're going to be life-changing for those families and create wealth that has been unprecedented in those communities Cyan Bannister has written that she is never playing the game that she appears to be playing. At 15, that meant sitting on the curb reading Kurt Vonnegut to capture an older crush's attention. Today, it's an apt description of how she's built one of the most successful investing track records of her generation, with early checks into Uber, SpaceX, DeepMind, Niantic, Postmates, and Andro, to name just a few. Cyan now co-leads Long Journey Ventures, a fund dedicated to backing tech's magical weirdos. In our conversation, Cyan shares her evolution from lifelong atheist into a believer in non-local consciousness, her job as a professional daydreamer, as she describes it, and why brain-computer interfaces are primed to break out over just the next two years, in her view. We also cover why she's building a drive-in movie theater for golf carts and the Somerset Maugham novel,

She thinks everyone on Earth should read. I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist. This episode is brought to you by .tech domains. I spend a lot of time speaking with founders and builders who are building the next generation of technology companies. For all of them, finding a compelling and distinctive company identity is essential to breaking through the noise. That starts with a great name and a great domain. That's exactly the thinking behind .tech domains. For companies building in tech, a .tech domain gives your project a clean, confident identity from day one, instantly communicating what you're building. Nothing.tech, 1x.tech, Aurora.tech, CES.tech, the list of companies choosing .tech is growing quickly. It's not surprising that many venture-backed startups secure their .tech domain early. If you're building a technology company, it's worth thinking about how you want to show up from the start. Secure your .tech domain today. from any registrar of your choice. They take care of things like expenses, all according to your rules, so you can move faster while staying in full control. One in three startups in the U.S. already runs on Brex. You can too at brex.com slash Mario. Well, Cyan, I've been looking forward to this for an extremely long time. I remember you being sort of one of the first people who I thought seemed... extraordinarily interesting when I first got interested in tech and venture capital many, many years ago. And you've managed to remain equally, if not more interesting as the years have gone by. So yeah, when I think about people who seem to occupy different pockets of the future, you are certainly one of them. So thank you so much for being with us. Yeah, thank you for having me. The honor is mine. Thank you. Yeah, there's so many things I'm excited to chat about today. Your past as an investor and present as an investor, some of your...

thoughts about the future, and also your writing. You are a wonderful writer and you've been working on a memoir that you've been sort of publishing bit by bit. And it's actually there that I wanted to start because there were so many interesting lines in some of your pieces that seemed like they revealed part of your personality. And yeah, there's one in particular that I have been mulling over. It's in a piece where you're talking about being 15 and sitting on a... I think a curb reading Vonnegut books and waiting for an older crush to notice you. And you have this line, which is that you're never playing the game you seem to be playing. Yes. I wondered what it was that made you someone who always is in some sense obfuscating what you're after or the game that you're playing. Well, let's run a thought experiment. If life is a game. And again, this is a thought experiment. All games have rules, right? And so if you wanted to figure out if this reality that we live in is operating in some unusual way, the best way to figure that out is to run experiments and to do everything you're not supposed to do. So if you think about human beings, they're mechanical by nature. And so we get into our routines. We wake up in the morning. We walk the same way. We drive the same way. We find these things that are comfortable and we define them as our personality. We say that that's just how it is. But what happens if you start rolling the dice? What happens if you start, you know, instead of going left, you go right. Instead of wearing pants, you wear something ridiculous. You know, what happens when you really shake up life? And for me, that... has always been a guiding light for me. And I keep a lot of these thoughts secret because I want to see if I do something, what's the outcome of it? What happens? And if I reveal it to everybody all the time, then that kind of defies the purpose.

Tilt the experiment if you share too much. And in that particular experiment, I got the guy, right? Yeah, it worked out. And you read a lot of Vonnegut, which, you know, win-win. Exactly, exactly. So I sat there and read a lot of Vonnegut. And it helped that I kind of had an inkling that he liked Vonnegut. But, you know, eventually he did notice me. And then it all worked out. You know, I think that idea of almost remaining, you could call it. playful or childlike or open-minded, you know, it's one of those things that I think adults struggle to maintain. You know, we, our brains sort of lose their plasticity over time in some sense if you're not careful. Like, I don't know, have you had to make a really conscious decision to keep pushing those boundaries for yourself or keep running these experiments so that it doesn't calcify? Yeah, I mean, it's a daily practice. You have to weave it into your life. You have to really not take yourself too seriously. We tend to do that. We tend to cosplay as adults. And I think if you add a little bit of play and wonder, if you look at children, especially in early childhood, they're limitless. They don't understand a lot of boundaries of thinking, of their environment, and they're just in explorer mode. and everything is a new sensory experiment, like experiment, right? And so I look at the world that way. For example, today and yesterday, I've been running the thought experiment of if I'm in an avatar, it always starts with if, you know, if I'm in an avatar and I get to have this one human body for a period of time, and let's just say I'm a limitless energy being inside of it. There's only so many breaths. There's only so many leaves. There's only so many tears. There's only so many frustrations I'm going to experience. And so when I think about that and I close my eyes, I'm so grateful. And I'm filled with so much joy. I recommend that everybody try it. Go outside and be like, wow, I may not feel arrogant. It's pretty great.

You know, and that will lift your spirit immediately and invite that childlike wonder in. If you just stop and pause for a moment every day. So for me, it's a practice when I wake up. The first thing I do is wiggle my toes. You know, it's kind of like a boot sequence. You've got to be like, OK, I've got this hardware. My toes are going to wiggle my fingers. I write things on walls. I write things around my house. that help remind me. Because I am mechanical just like everyone else. Yeah. I fall into my routines. I start thinking too much about the future or I live too much in the past. And I need something to just kind of shake me awake. And so I recommend if people want to start doing this, you know, the shower is a great place. You can write something on the glass. When it fogs up, you can remember to be more full of wonder every day. Hmm. How did that sort of spiritual, philosophical posture come to you? Was that something you were, I don't know, raised in in some capacity, even if it's been transmuted? Is that, you know, I know you've spoken before about having, you know, a sort of profound awakening after a stroke. Like, was it, you know, more tied to that? Where does that come from? All of the above. So I was raised exposed to just about every religion you can imagine. So my mother was deeply trying to find herself and her purpose and why we're here. And so and then there was also free child care. So we got dropped off that, you know, I was a Mormon. I was baptized Mormon. I went to catechism. I've been a Baptist and baptized Baptist. I had a Muslim stepfather. My mother was also part of the Native American church. And so I ended up out of all of that experience becoming an atheist. However, the childlike wonder was not, I didn't think of it as spirituality. I just thought about it as a way of living and a way of surviving, which is if you've got to get up every day and you've got to go out that door.

And you've got to make something of yourself. You may as well have fun. You may as well figure out some way to spark joy in yours and other people's lives. So for me, it was fundamental to just my being. And if you talk to anybody who's known me for a long time, I've always, I had very little, I was very poor. And so the other thing is like, how do you maximize fun and happiness with very little money? So I was always the friend. And there's a couple of us, but who would try to come up with something really fun and inventive to do on a Friday night that costs very little, you know, and maybe it's playing a prank on a friend or maybe it's calling two people together and having them talk to one another in a three way call in the middle of the night. Or maybe it's, you know, it's it's endless. But, you know, that was part of my personality. But spirituality really opened it up. And. I had a very profound experience. It wasn't exactly related to my stroke. The stroke started it. The stroke started the question, which is, what is all this about? Where does suffering come from? What is the purpose of suffering if there is one? And that thought experiment lasted several years. And I asked myself, have I been really, really honest about spirituality or if I just dismissed it because of my childhood and have I ever believed any of it and the answer was no I never believed any of it so how does one believe how does someone get there like how how do you trick your mind or convince yourself an invisible world you know that no one and you can't see but I can tell you that Once I got there for a series of experiments, I started seeing things, experiencing things that are just bizarre. You became more of a magnet for weird things after being sort of, as you say, tricking yourself into becoming a believer. Yeah, my life was already bizarre and weird and magical. It became more so, right? Let me give you some examples.

This one is probably the most profound. Can I tell you the most profound one? Please, yeah. I was listening to something called the telepathy tapes. And if you haven't listened to it, I highly recommend it. For folks that don't know what that is, would you mind giving a pricey? Oh, absolutely, yeah. The podcast is about parents who have children, both adult and underage, who have autism and are nonverbal. In many cases, also have no ability to move. um their bodies and so or it's very limited what they discovered was that these children were able to find things that the parents hid over and over and over again and so at first they thought well they have super hearing you know the ones that can move around and seek and look for things and then they realized no it's not that it's it's because they would they would do it outside of the house they would conspire the parents together to hide the candy and the kids would still find it. And so they developed this hypothesis that perhaps the children were psychic. So what was interesting was that they started displaying characteristics that were off the charts, like math that they shouldn't know that they never went to school for, languages that they never went to school or studied for. In one particular case, there's a gentleman who could recite novels. but had never read. Wow. How do you do that? So I started thinking about that and I wrote down every episode and I started writing down the commonalities between each of the people. What were the stories that were the same over and over again? The number one thing was they all claim that they have sat or met God, sat with God or met God. Oh, wow. So they all claim that there's a metaphysical school that they all go to. So a university that's metaphysical. They all claim that it's individualized to each person. And so, for example, there's one kid who said that if he wanted to learn anything about anyone like Aldous Huxley, he just pulls Aldous's hat off of a wall and puts it on. And he knows everything about what Aldous thinks or did or wrote. And that's how he experiences reading a book.

I was like, wow. And what blew me away more than anything was that 100% all of them meet in this place called The Hill. It's a place that has green grass that thousands of them congregate at. At one point, the host asked how many people are on The Hill right now, and they just spat out a number, 2,173. I was like, what? And you can't get into this space unless they allow you into it. moderator of some sort or they're all moderators you have to show up there with the right intentions now there's a lot of things if you want to think about this as a scientist obviously social contagion is a thing yes you know they're all on facebook all the parents could conspire they could share stories there's a quality to it that just feels there's something there and so i started running my own experiments And I started targeting people in my life. And I just went to Spotify and just typed in, send a telepathic message to a friend. To Spotify. Like, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm going to try this. And so I found this thing called intuitive hour. And I tried to send a message to someone I have not talked to in a few years. And I thought, well, if this person responds to me, that's just a bona fide miracle. I did it. And within 15 minutes, I got a text message from that person. And what was really interesting was that he responded to something three months prior that was completely non sequitur. So it was not like the last message we had. It was something from three months ago. I fell on the ground and started crying because one, I missed this person dearly and I wanted them back in my life. Also, it may have worked. And I say may have because I'm not a scientist, but I am a scientist. Yes. A scientist. A scientist. And so I was like, well, you got to try it again and again and again and again. So I tried different experiments. I tried sending a message to someone that I don't get along with too well. Now, here's the weird one. So I did that one and I got a call from my best friend in New York, not the person I sent it to, who said they were sitting in their living room. They said, what were you doing last night at 10 o'clock Pacific, one o'clock my time in New York?

And I was like, oh, why? Because I never say. I'm like, what? And they were like, well, I heard your voice outside of my head, which normally you hear things inside your head. But the voice said, are you all right? Are you OK? That is exactly what I sent to the woman who didn't get it. So I thought, hmm, if you are emotionally blocked or you have negative energy towards someone, maybe it goes to the nearest node. of someone who loves you. I see. That's an interesting theory. Right. So that's hurting all these things out. And I was like, OK. And I was like, well, what happens if you send a picture to someone? What happens if you get a group of people to do it? I got a group of people to do. I started getting witnesses for everything. I got a group of people to do it. And we sent the image of a bird to a friend. And the next day I got a message from that friend that said that they were. getting on a plane in Miami or Key West or something and suddenly saw a hummingbird in their mind and they thought of me and so they're going to go get a tattoo of a hummingbird. And I was like, wow. So what does this imply? Right? I was like, this is insane that I, with these limited skills, are able to continuously do this. Now here's where it's really going to blow your mind. So I'm down at a farm in Temecula in a grapefruit grove. And I'm watching a movie with a friend. So my friend was like, let's watch something. And I said, let's watch Spellers, which is what the telepathy tapes is based off of. I highly recommend everyone also watch the movie Spellers. Halfway through the movie, my friend Chris pauses the movie and he says, Cyan, do you think that animals are telepathic? And I said, well, here's the thing. I don't know. I don't know any of this, by the way. I'm not claiming that this is real. I'm just saying, try it for yourself. And I said, you know, the telepathy tapes, there is one episode where there's an African gray and a human. It's human. And they separate them into different rooms. They show the human a picture, like, say, of a red ball. And African gray goes red ball. Oh, cute. A picture of a yellow car and it goes yellow car. You know, so whatever she sees, the bird spits out. Yeah. Just as I'm telling this story, all of a sudden we hear help me.

Help me. And I look at Chris and I said, what is that? And he's like, I don't know. My daughter and my wife have gone to bed. Maybe it's a toy that got left out. So we started looking around for a toy. You know, we don't find a toy. And I'm like, we have squirrels out there. We have, you know, coyotes. We have owls. We have snakes. We have nothing that makes that noise. And so he comes running to me. He's like, saying, saying, saying, you need to come here right now. And I'm like, OK. So we go to the front of the house. On the outside of the house on the screen window is a pink cockatoo. Wow. Saying, help me. Oh, my gosh. I can send you a video of this. It's insane. And I was like, what are the chances? What are the odds? Wow. This is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. Gosh. Now, it took us three days to find the owner of that bird. You know, we named it Telly for telepathy because we thought. It's a telepathic bird. And we found its owner, which was two farms down. So it's not a short distance. They came and claimed it and they said that normally this bird doesn't fly and they have it in the garage and have it in the house and the windows are open and it never escapes. Like it's never done this. But one day they were in the garage and it just took off. And they thought it was dead. They were like, this is such a domesticated bird. There is no way we thought it survived. So this is a miracle that you saved it. And the other thing was that we asked, what is the name of the bird? Because we call it Telly. And they said it's Mumbles. And I said, why is its name Mumbles? And they said, because it doesn't say as many words as a cockatoo should. It has a very limited vocabulary. And I said, well, is help me part of the vocabulary? And they said, no. That kind of stuff keeps happening. So that to me implies that human beings have capabilities that this may not even be supernatural. It may not need to be spiritual. Yes. May just be natural. We might have the ability to communicate with one another or glean things from the environment and nature that we're just completely unaware of or detached from or don't understand how it works anymore.

And that's because we're so distracted. It could be because of our ego. So the ego plays a huge part of it. You got to think of the ego as software on top of the hardware. And the ego interprets everything that comes to it as I. This is mine. It originates from within. What if it doesn't originate from within? What if it's outside of us? The thing I'm most obsessed with right now is non-local consciousness. What does non-local consciousness mean? Many people have studied this and they said, well, it is kind of interesting that this happens, but it's not always repeatable. It's not, you know, you can't get empirical evidence on this ever. It's slippery. It always gets away from you. I suspect, I feel because I've played with this enough and poked at it enough that there is a collective sort of cloud of consciousness. That maybe I'm going to use some layman terminology here. Sorry for all the scientists listening. The universe is conscious. I have no other word for it. But that we're all connected to this cloud of sorts. And that you are a receiver. You're basically an antenna that waits to get information. So if you talk to a lot of artists, like let's look at the woman who wrote Harry Potter. She says that she was on a train. And the entire story of Harry Potter was just downloaded to her in a flash in an instant. If you talk to a lot of musicians, they say the same thing. They say, I don't know where this song came from. I don't feel like I wrote it. Yes. Same thing with novelists. You name it. There's people who said like, I have no idea where this came from. It just struck me in the shower. It struck me while I was driving. It struck me while I was walking. I've also been looking at BCIs, which is brain control interfaces. And a lot of these startups and these entrepreneurs are starting to discover that there's this really interesting stuff happening in the background in your subconscious that you are completely not privy to. So there's some startups that I've seen that are starting to spit out information that is two weeks old, like you thought about two weeks ago. That is still visible in a BCI. Yeah, but not in your active thinking, not in your what we would call consciousness.

be subconscious right and not only that but some of it is picking up on other people's thoughts around you how's that work yeah i think in the next two to three years we're going to figure it out and when we do you've got to think about there's a dystopian view of it and a utopian view of it which is that means it can be manipulated that means that it can be used for dangerous and terrible things But it can also be used for things that can uplift humanity and bring us to our truly, truly creative selves that we're meant to be. You know, I think the sign of a good conversation that there's a lot of things that you said that I feel so skeptical about that now I have to go back to and a lot of things where I'm nodding vociferously along with you. You should be skeptical. Anyone listening should be very skeptical. OK, I started out as a skeptic, as an atheist. I got here through experimentation, through mysticism. I treat it like science. Yes. I poke at reality. I ask a question and I go out and do things and then I get these weird results. And so I recommend don't listen to me and trust me. Like, go read this stuff yourself. Listen to this. Run your experiments. Run your own experiments. Yes, I totally I like that idea a lot. And I think I'm going to try. It's interesting. I never. listened to the telepathy tapes, I read about them, and I think I reached the stage at which I read about the sort of like Ouija board effect and was like, ah, okay, I've understood this. And clearly there's like three or four levels deeper that one can go to think about it. And so I'm excited to do that piece. And then you're, I think the, have you ever read the book Impro? No. It strikes me that you might really like the discussion of creativity in that. It's from one of the guys who basically created the philosophy of improvisational comedy and theater. And he talks about how like Western ideas of creativity have become so ego focused. And so as a result, we become super blocked because we become so attached to like, what does it say about me that I did this thing? Like, does that mean I'm bad or dark or strange? And actually,

you know, so much of creativity in many other cultures have a very different view, which is more of this like I am a channel for something. And that's much more freeing. And I totally think that's true. Well, not only that, but we're always playing for an audience, right? Like if you're creating for TikTok and it's not coming from an authentic center of who you truly are and you can feel it, you can see it. Even when I watch Instagram, I can tell if someone's putting on a show and it's a video or if it's really who they are. Yes. And so I think Art used to be very different, you know, even in the era of Saturday Night Live, early television. I think we were seeing some of that creativity, that rawness, you know, coming through. But now I feel like a lot of it is manufactured for a certain kind of viral outcome. You know, I can't say if it's good or bad. I have no idea in the long run how this all plays out. But I do think there's something to just letting go of the attachment. to the outcome and allowing yourself to be a vessel for whatever comes through you. You know, you've been one of the best investors, I would say, of the past 15, 20 years. Your track record is truly astonishing. You know, SpaceX, Uber, many others. How much of that do you attribute to what I would classify in this conversation as like an extreme high openness? Like you seem very open to any signal the world might give you and then a desire to like verify it for yourself. But to me, that's almost one of the most underrated parts of a venture investor's job and kind of under filtered for when people look to, I don't know, hire people to an investing team. There's some version of a VC that people think, ah, you know, we want someone who did two years at McKinsey, two years at Google, and then maybe a startup stint. And that really doesn't capture. the level of imagination that's required. So I like to tell people I'm a professional daydreamer. So one of the things I like to do is carve out a significant portion of my week to sit and ask these questions and run these thought experiments and then visualize what that future could look like in reality. You know, are there market conditions that could make that possible?

One of my favorite science fiction authors, Neil Stevenson, told me I got a chance to meet him, which I was really excited about. He told me, I said, how did you get so much of our future right? Yeah. And he said, well, one is I'm a historian, so you have to understand the past. And two, you have to understand how the money is made. You can look to the future and you can come up with a utopian paradise. But if there's no way to make money in that utopia, it just won't happen because markets will drive things forward. Right. And so that's how he figured out the diamond age and how he figured out snow crashes. He figured out the financial incentives, which is beautiful. I can't say that I've always thought that way and I've made some mistakes because of it. However, you know, timing is everything. I've been too early. If I told you all the times I was too early, you know, it'll make me cry. Is there one that's really painful? Like what was the one that you were too early that really should have worked or maybe were just getting... close to it which uh basically um invented crowdfunding and and patronage from for art ended up becoming you know i would argue that only fans is probably the largest outcome of that that economy but here's another example of something that was too early that you can invest in later which is i was in love with this company called cosmo that did um delivery of like cough syrup, candy bars, video games under an hour, but it was based in a warehouse. And this was around year 2000, 2001. Oh, wow. And they went belly up because they couldn't figure out how to make the margins work. Yeah. Along comes Postmates and they figured it out, right? Because you needed the iPhone. You needed the ability to give them provision credit cards. You needed the ability to that whole. system had to exist in order for that idea to exist. So that's one of the things to look at every time you get pitched on something is now the time, what are all the things that are going to need to be in place for this to exist? And when do you think they're going to exist? The companies that have had the largest returns in my portfolio came from the most unusual places. They did not come from grinding and taking meetings back to back. Uber came from thinking about the taxi medallion system.

I didn't come up with the idea of Uber, but I knew there was a problem. I knew there was a racket and there was a bottleneck, which was only a certain number of drivers can exist because it's throttled. And that's a problem. How do you disrupt that problem? I didn't have the answer to that. But, you know, I met Travis at a boondoggle thing in Hawaii and he wasn't pitching me Uber. I just happened to notice he was interesting, you know, and observed him. What was interesting about him? Gravitas. He had this natural born ability to lead. And no matter what you put him in, whether it be a hot tub or a conference room or at a dining table, he just took charge. He was clearly the leader of everything. And he was on the bench. At the time, he said, I just sold my company. I'm looking for my next thing to do. And if you're an investor, that should ignite part of your mind and be like, someone to watch right yeah so i just put a pin in it and then a few months later i saw him pitching at uh open angel forum uber cab now keep in mind also i had an uber driver my my personal driver was right was driver number one for uber another weird oh wow yeah gosh um and he kept handing me ryan graves business card If anything, the universe, if it was conspiring in my favor, was basically hitting me over the head. Yes, not subtle. It was not subtle. And so is that incredible luck? Sure. If that was the only thing I ever did, then I would say, yeah, that was just luck. But then if you look at flock security, you know, one day I was at the Four Seasons before the pandemic and people used to have lots of meetings there. And I went there. And again, like if you were to ask a lot of people about me, I tend to be very quiet and observant. And you would probably describe me as a wallflower. But what I'm doing is taking in all the sensory input around me and watching everyone's behaviors and listening, deeply listening, not just the words, but all kinds of things. And so I went into the cafe and I looked around and I noticed everybody's busy wheeling and dealing and having their meetings.

And so I order my coffee and I get on the Wi-Fi and I noticed that on the Wi-Fi, everyone's tethered their phone in a public manner. So there's K Pixel. And I was like, K's Pixel. I look around and I see Keith Raboy. And I'm like, oh, OK, he has a Pixel phone, maybe. So then I see Travis K iPhone. And I look over in the corner and lo and behold, there's Travis Kalanick meeting with someone. I'm like, this is a great way to get Intel. This is crazy. Then I see Garrett Langley's iPhone. And I'm like, I don't know who that is. So I Google search him. And he is the founder of a company called Flock Security, which was in Y Combinator at the time. And I did not go to the demo day. So I didn't know it was coming up. I don't know if he had pitched or what. And I remember a conversation. This is where observation comes into play here, right? A conversation at Founders Fund where we were wondering. Is there a camera solution that's crowdsourced of some sort that could eliminate or reduce crime? Should we look for a company like that? And we all agreed we should. So I messaged my intern at the time, John Ludig, who's now a partner there. And I said, John, what do you think of Flock Security? And goes, well, it's on my list of people of YC I want to meet. And I was like, well, he's just right across from me. And he's like, well, walk over there. Say hi. Perfect. So I walk over and I'm like Garrett Langley. And he looks up at me and he's like, huh? He's like looking around. And I'm like, and I just, it was a bit of a magic trick. I said, I'm Cyan from Founders Fund and we would love to meet you. And he's like, are you part of YC? Are you doing the demo day? Like, how do you know who I am? And I was like, well, do you really want to know? And I told him and he blushed. And we were going to save this story for when the company went public. But I think it's safe to share it now. You know, John ended up coming and meeting with him, too. And we ended up doing the investment and co-leading the Series A down the road. But that company is what valued at $7 billion, $8 billion or something at this point. And solves a huge percentage of the country's petty crime, like bicycles and lawnmowers. And it also solves amber alerts and things like that.

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you know eight or so months but it really felt like for a moment this was like one of the more wholesome uses of uh of technology and like yeah a really beautiful way of people finding these new connections why do you think that didn't stick as a as a form factor yeah human nature so it's still quite large they make billions of dollars it's uh still played worldwide um it was acquired uh recently And the company that acquired it also made Monopoly go, which is not geolocation, but it's I think Monopoly would be a natural extension of the of the technology. I would actually talk about why didn't Harry Potter work? Because Harry Potter should be that should be, you know. Yeah, even bigger, right? And I think part of it was because the lore started when Harry Potter was an adult and it should have started when he was a child. And there should have been a sorting hat. There should have been this magical experience of going back to Hogwarts for the first time. And instead, you know, for whatever reason, J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers wanted it to start later in the canon. And I think that was a big mistake. And so if anything, I think allowing IP makers or holders too much control over the IP could be catastrophic. If you have an insight where you know that that's not how it should go. But that's probably why I posit. I don't know for sure that, you know, that didn't work out. But Pickman Bloom is still doing incredibly well. Anything that's like rooted in Japan, really, like has a global application. Like there's something about Japanese culture that translates really well in this regard. The question I have is why hasn't there been another one? And I think human beings are, we love novelty and we love to try new things, but to make something stick for a long, long time, it's just very difficult for us because of dopamine, because our bodies are wired and trained. But there's some people who still use Pokemon to get out and walk, to get out and meet friends. They still go to the festivals. They go to the meetups. They go out on special Pokemon days and catch special Pokemon. It's still happening. It just looks a little different.

And it's not as prolific as it was in the first year. And so I think that's why people think it vanished, but it didn't vanish. I suppose the part that's interesting to me is that like that hasn't been more of a launch pad for like a whole new range of experiences beyond even Niantic, right? Like the more people haven't sort of taken the Pokemon Go. Hard problem. I think people didn't realize how hard it is. They thought it was super easy. But I'll tell you what the hard part is, is understanding. where a human can walk and not walk. I don't know if you remember, but there were people catching Pokemon in police stations. Yeah. And the police were like, no, no, you need to geofence this. And on baseball fields and all these sorts of, you know, professional stadiums. Exactly. So running into stores that they are even people's yards, you know, figuring out. That piece was probably one of the hardest parts. And nobody owns a better map of that than Niantic. So my insight to Niantic was not that it was a game. You know, the founder of Niantic, John Hanke, also built Keyhole and worked on Google Earth and Maps. And so the way that I thought of Niantic is it's a mapping company at the end of the day. And so Niantic Spatial, I think, is going to... prove that out in the end. So it's now a separate company and they don't do games anymore, but they're continuing on the mapping. And I think that's wise. I think it was a very good strategic move on their part. Well, speaking of a different kind of mapping, I'm curious to go back to the brain-computer interface thread. You mentioned, I think, you expect us to have a lot more answers even in two to three years. What do you expect to help us get there? Have you just seen... Yeah. The fact that we can take large amounts of data now and find interesting things in it that we couldn't do before without great expense, I think is really breaking things open. So all these entrepreneurs wandering around with spaghetti helmets is what they look like. These little things and collecting data 24-7. And then, you know, there's thousands of people running these studies now.

And so you're going to get information that was previously unavailable. And so that will enable a breakthrough of some kind. Every week I read about some new, like I just read about a hat that allows you to type. I just saw the same thing. I bet the beanie, right? The beanie. You'll be able to type without using a keyboard. I remember I invested in Control Labs, which ended up becoming part of the Meta Ray-Bans, the gesture. Yes, yes. And when they first showed that to me, it was so amazing because I was able to play Space Invaders just by thinking about it and the micro movements in my arms. Incredible. So, you know, AI is going to, it's going to be the age of the polymath. If you have the ability to think about different systems and how they might work together. Like you're starting to see agents where there's like 20 different types of agents that work together to try to come up with something. You're going to be able to come up with outcomes that were previously those disciplines didn't work well together, are going to discover things. A great example of this that I always love to give is Paul Stamets, who's a mycology expert, was walking through a forest one day and he saw some bees on some fungus on a tree. And he thought to himself, well, that's unusual behavior. I thought, you know, I've never seen a bee on some fungus before. I wonder what that's all about. And that little rabbit hole led him to creating kind of like an antibiotic of sorts for bees for groves. So I don't know if you remember, but Bee Die Off was the number one headline for many years. Like humanity is doomed. The bees are dying. We're going to have to create little robot bees. Yes. Some mycologists solved it. That's what we're going to start seeing is somebody that you don't. expect, you know, who studied fluid dynamics suddenly has a physics breakthrough or, you know, things like that are going to be really, really interesting with because they're going to become AI enabled or AI enhanced. That's a really interesting framework that I don't think I've heard someone articulate quite before. To make sure I'm following, you're basically saying that because AI sort of can help you.

close the knowledge gap on the areas you don't really understand, you can then apply a different lens from your area of expertise and sort of make these sort of different juxtapositions and connections together. Yes. Yeah, that's really interesting. That's a really good point. I hadn't really put that together. The level of creativity that's going to come just out of that will reshape humanity alone. I really like that. I mean, it's interesting. That definitely corresponds to my experience with the technology so far, which is that You know, you can I mean, I'm sure you're doing this, too, but like building a million things with cloud code and all these sorts of things that are crossing the chasm of things I could have done. I couldn't I could never have done these things before, but still are somehow an extension of like your own perspective and point of view into these new areas. Yeah, I think our EAs are making dashboards. Our meetings here at our office have completely changed because people who couldn't code are suddenly able to dream up a way of. you know, sorting data that they never had before, because before they had to use an Excel spreadsheet or a notion or whatever. Now they can actually say, what would it be like to know this information? These are people that never had access to that skill or didn't have the time or the confidence that they could understand engineering on that level. And so if you think about engineering being available to everyone, there's creativity in every human being. That's one of the things that's special about humans that makes us so wonderful and beautiful. And AI doesn't sit on its own and just, you can say, come up with 20 ideas, but it's based off of its training data. But it's not going to think about a lot of things that only humans are uniquely capable of thinking about. And so I think what's interesting is we need to start thinking about how human work is going to change. To where we become professional, we all become professional daydreamers. We all become, or artisans, like I think some more people are going to start using their hands. I think there's going to be beauty and imperfection, which goes back to the Diamond Age and Neal Stephenson's predictions about the future. There was this society called the Victorians who sourced all of their...

furniture and all of their clothes and everything from another society that was a group of makers that was what they loved doing they wanted to be part of that community they wanted to make things by hand and those things ended up being like books ended up being the most valuable things in the world and so it could be that etsy and companies like that just soar Because we don't want things that are just 3D printed. We don't want things that look like everything else. Because we are novelty seekers, the novelty might be in the imperfection in the future, not the perfection. But a human being now can sit and think, gosh, I've always wanted this service to exist. And now it can. And eventually you'll be able to vibe products like physical objects. Like vibe manufacturing is going to be a thing. A million dollar idea you've been sitting on for years, you know, you can now take it on Shark Tank. I think we're going to have so many newly minted millionaires across the world. It might not be venture scalable companies, but they're going to be life changing for those families and create wealth that has been unprecedented in those communities. And so I am so excited and optimistic about what all of this unlocks. And at the same time, every tool has a utopia and a dystopia, right? It can be used for horrible, horrific things. And it can be used for incredibly uplifting, amazing things. So I try to stay in the land of utopia and try to stay away from dystopia as much as I can. And so that's where I tend to have all my dreaming is I think about what could unlock human potential. Yeah, I really agree with that idea that there will be value in these imperfections. I've been starting to wonder about that with regard to writing. Like at what point does having a typo in something make it feel more authentic and more real? Yeah, you're going to want 100% organic human things. I'm seeing a lot of Gen Alpha care deeply about this. You know, they only want to play indie games even if the quality of the game or the graphics.

are more rudimentary and less like a triple a game they would much rather support a human being in in that endeavor than to something that was vibe coded and they're starting to care about you know thoughts being organically human originating from you and there could be a spiritual component to that if you think about going back to what we were talking about which is if you are a vessel and things are supposed to speak through you You know, just publishing something that just came out as slop from an AI is maybe not the best thing. However, I have used AI to co-create content. And I'm going to say co-create, not create. As the seed and the spark of the idea, it's like molding clay. If you think about words as clay, you can take or leave parts of it. You can say that expression is something I would use or it's even better than what I would use. And you can sort of like mold it. to where it's something that truly expresses what you wanted to say. And so maybe you didn't have the words or the vernacular of sorts to express an idea that's been inside of you or you've been afraid to do it and AI takes that out of you. In that sense, it's zero to one, right? Like you had no ability to do something and now you have more confidence to do something. And in that sense, I think AI is very helpful. I think when you just sort of... sit back on autopilot and you're like, yeah, that sounds good enough. We all know what those look like. If you go on X or you go any place and you read a substack that's written by AI that their creativity is not in it, you can feel it. You know that it's not 100% authentic and not 100% human. Yeah, 100% agree. Well, you know, I'd love to actually talk a little bit about long journey ventures. And in particular, I really love the way that you define what you're looking for, which is magical weirdos. I really obsess about trying to think about the traits that make for great founders. And that's a nice configuration, I think. But I also wonder, what does a magical weirdo look like to you? I imagine there are lots of different archetypes, lots of different sort of clusters of traits, but perhaps a few that seem to pop up more than others. Yeah, I mean, just like human beings.

And thumbprints, you know, they come in a wide variety of feathers. I don't know how else to describe it, but really what it comes down to is there's a unique experience that's happened in their life, whether it be trauma or some hurdle they had to overcome or something that they've noticed that's deeply wrong about the world that they want to correct or insight that they have that no one believes and they've got to bring it. to reality they've got to bring it into our world and they are driven by this maniacally so and then their way of being um how they navigate is usually very interesting and bizarre too so i'm going to take a company called bus right for example that we invested in which does bus logistics for schools now that sounds like a boring problem right it's like hmm but have you met keith corso the founder he is The most delightful, inquisitive, curious person you could ever meet who is uniquely the moat of that business. Because it takes someone who wakes up in the morning, which he does, and immediately says, you know what? We need to solve today. Buses. You know, and he gets all of his team fired up about it. And, you know, he convinces people kind of like a Pied Piper to get people to follow him into this. seemingly boring space magically weird by itself right yes and so that's what we call magical founders running boring businesses and we invest in a lot of those but we also like magical founders doing magical things which is the frontier and that you have to be a little careful because you have to make sure they're paired with someone who's operational who has we call it the biz tis and riz uh so if you've got someone who's really high tis What's tis? Autistic. I view it as a superpower. Yeah, absolutely. I'm on the spectrum. You know, there's certain things I don't understand and get in certain social cues that escape me. But it's my deficits are also my superpowers. Yes. So when you see somebody who doesn't make eye contact and looks down, you know, sometimes in the past that didn't pattern match.

what you know a good founder was supposed to be like and instead you could ask yourself how do they lead and you might discover that they're really amazing writers and they lead through slack a great example of this is brendan ike from brave a lot of people are like wow he doesn't make eye contact or he doesn't you know he he's very quiet or he sits in the background you know how can he lead a team and i'm like well he leads open source projects and he developers really regard him highly and look up to him. And he's kind of a legend. And so I have no issues with his leadership style, which, you know, gave me an unfair advantage because I could just dismiss that part. Some people will say no, because it doesn't just, you know, somebody doesn't go straight down the fairway. You know, they're not like, you know, this person looks like they have an MBA and, you know, they did these things or they know these people or they have this pedigree. If you look at Crusoe, the founder had this crazy idea and he did not come from the oil fields. Yes. No, but he had this crazy idea of like, we're going to have a power shortage and we're going to have a compute problem for crypto and then later AI, right? This insight that he had led him to build one of the most amazing data center companies that is enabling a lot of what we're even talking about right now. again i i love human beings and so when i sit with someone and i collect people i always like to say i collect personalities and people like pokemon and you know when you found a legendary pokemon you know when you found something so special and unique and rare a mind like no other and then it's just like okay well do they have are they paired with the biz or are do they have business capabilities Because you can have an academic who's brilliant, who has a groundbreaking idea or technology, but if they can't bring it to market, if they can't hire people, if they can't people, then that's not going to go anywhere, which unfortunately a lot of things die there. And so it was biz, tism, what was the third one? Riz. Charisma. Riz. Interesting. The charisma matters, huh? It really matters. You know, I think...

Charisma is your ability to sell, your ability to create a culture, your ability to be that pied piper that gets people behind you. And if you're not that person, someone in your company needs to be. So we think that the perfect trifecta and my partner, Ariel Zuckerberg, came up with this framework. It's a good one. It's really great. So we always, every time we evaluate a company, we're like, what's the biz-tiz-riz dynamic going on here? How often do you see that in one person? Almost never? A lot of the time? Sometimes you get it. And it's kind of a miracle. It's like a genie in a bottle. You're like, wow, that person has all three. A great example would be Josh Browder. He has so much charisma. He led a game of Mafia with us one time. And you got to really see his personality just really come out. You know, because someone who's on the Tiz spectrum. who has charisma, usually will talk about their special interests and go very, very deep. And then if you have the business skills on top of that, then it's probably like, you know, back the truck up, give them resources and get out of their way. You know, in researching you and your story, you seem to live a very unusual life in other ways, like you live in a retirement community. Part-time. Part-time, okay. Why was that a choice you made? And I wonder how it sort of... forms your perspective i went to this retirement community that a friend brought me to to play golf and i was not into golf actually and but i looked around at the infrastructure and i was like wow there's this community center and there's this big swath of land and there's all these people living around it what if you could sort of slowly Keep in mind that everybody that's living in these places, this is their dream right now. This is what they looked forward to in their 30s or 40s. And they're living their dream. So you don't want to come in and destroy the dream. But what you want to do is start thinking about what your dream is. And when I'm 80 years old, I have a very specific dream, which is I want to live in a community that has amazing things going on every night of the week, but driven by the community.

My house, we're building, we're almost done with it, an outdoor movie theater that's a drive-in that golf carts can pull into. Oh, awesome. And then you have little speakers or you bring your own speaker and you tune in to the movie just like the old days, but you're in your little golf cart. Oh, that's awesome. And so I'm going to be responsible for a movie a week maybe, right? And then there's a guy down the street who built a tiki lounge in a tree that's only open on Thursdays. There's also, you know, we have a wood fired pizza oven. And, you know, now you can just vine code an app and create a local pizza delivery for your neighbors. You can create an underground jazz club and, you know, retired musicians or musicians passing through can perform on Fridays. You know, you could. there's so there's also it's one of the only golf courses there's only seven I think golf courses in America that have an airstrip so this one has an airstrip and so like if you're into piloting and you're into airplanes you could get into aviation and there's a workshop there a wood shop and so you can build things and so that's what I dream about my future and so what I've been doing is recruiting my friends to live there and buy houses I love it with the idea that we're all going to kind of spend either full-time or part-time there and uh that's the dream you know and then the golf club is there if you like to golf but who knows if it stays a golf club you know 50 you gotta have a 50 100 year view right and 50 to 100 years maybe it's an esports arena i don't know golf might not exist then i don't know yeah but but regardless it's a huge piece of land that could be utilized for a lot of different things and right now it's golf And so that's why I started doing it. And the other thing is I love being around older people. There's so much wisdom that you can learn from an 80 or 90 year old, especially at the end of their life or their last days. And so I've sat by the bedside of people there who are dying, who have told me things like they know that someone's coming over and there's no way that they could know that that person's coming over.

Or they see their family around the bed. You can't see them, but they're there for them. And they're talking to them. And then the wisdom they give you in those last moments is priceless. And they live these happy lives. There's this woman who lived to be 93. And she died at home with a window looking at the golf course. Everybody came by and waved at her and put it in front of her window. And she died very happy. And I thought to myself, that's what I want for me and my friends and loved ones. And I want everybody to start thinking about this because the alternative is you end up in one of those homes alone with strangers. Yeah. And that's sad. Yeah. You have to be that way. Like we could come together as a community and support one another. And there's a much more beautiful alternative. Yes. It involves volunteering. You know, you have to volunteer, you have to participate. Think of it as a Burning Man that doesn't go away. You know, it's a way of living. Yeah. Another eclectic thing that I came across was you seem to be one of the more adventurous readers I have come across. Like, I don't think I mean, Vonnegut, great love, you know, everyone should read him. But I don't know if I know many people who have read Aleister Crowley. What are your reading habits? How do you decide where your curiosity takes you? What do you take from people like a Crowley? So my favorite thing to do in the world, and I recommend everybody go to their local bookstore, used bookstore, ideally, and walk around the store with your hands on the books. And one of them is going to jump out at you, either the color of the spine, the picture on the book, or just something about it is going to be like, Buy me. Read me. Or it'll be something you've always wanted to read and haven't taken the time to read. And my favorite bookstore, it's called B Street Books in Burlingame, has a bookshelf of books that can't be categorized or put away. So they don't know where they go. So I go there and I'll buy like four or five books off those shelves. And some of my favorite books and the things rabbit holes I've gone down have been because of those books.

Things I would have never picked. So that's, again, breaking mechanical behavior. Like don't don't just read what everybody else is reading. Read something that calls to you, that speaks to you. I've read a book about automats. I've read, you know, it gets you thinking about like, I don't know if you know this, but in the 20s, New York had all these automats everywhere. And so what is an automat? Sorry. It's basically a place where you would go and get food. And there were home cooked meals inside these little windows and you would go put a quarter in or get a ticket and then you would take food out of the window. Oh, interesting. People were able to because they could make these things in such large batches, they could drive the prices down and you could have mashed potatoes, meatloaf, you know, green beans. And if you read about the quality of food, it was incredibly high and incredibly nutritious and not deep fried and not like what fast food is today. And so, you know, David Friedberg created an automat. that was ahead of its time, which was based on quinoa. And it was downtown in San Francisco before the pandemic and the food was incredible. It was magical, but it was ahead of its time. And so I think automats are going to come back. Japan is obviously the leader in this space. They have machines and they have, you know, tickets where you can go get ramen and get them out of things. And so I think that eventually, in order to drive costs down and have nutritious food, you know, you either have to have robots or you have to have something like this. And so I this is how I think about the world is like I just go and grab a random book. The other thing is I'll open it to a random page and you'll be surprised that sometimes that random page is exactly what you need to be reading. It'll see you in a way that's unique to you. I mean, honestly, I roll the dice when it comes to books a lot of the time. Sometimes I find them in the little free libraries. Sometimes people will just hand me a book or I'll find it on the ground. And the Aleister Crowley stuff came because I found this like printed paper from the early 1900s. And I found this little story by Frank Harris in there called The Magic Glasses, which changed my life.

And it wasn't even by Aleister Crowley. It was by this guy, Frank Harris. That led me down a Frank Harris rabbit hole. And I discovered that he wrote a book that was banned called My Life and Loves, which is basically all of his sex campaigns with every woman he'd ever been with in one book. Oh, wow. You can imagine that was pretty controversial back then. Yes, yes. And I went and read it. And then I discovered that he was a cowboy outlaw. and that he left England when he was 14 and came to America and it was just this really interesting human that I never heard of that hung out with all the greatest writers of the time and then I just looked at I was like well this Crowley character is odd you know so I went down that rabbit hole and I'm like what a weird guy very controversial with very controversial ideas but it led me into there was a whole movement around that time of people who were experimenting with reality and That resonated with me more than anything, which was, you know, these mystics. I also led me to Sufi thinking, Kabbalists. All of them are kind of birds of a feather. And then Gurdjieff, which is one of my favorite mystic philosophers. I highly recommend reading Gurdjieff and now Spinsky. And so these things kind of build on each other, right? Like you read something and it inspires you to read another thing, inspires you to read another thing. And that's kind of how it all works for me. I love that. Well, maybe that's on as we're on the topic. I always like to end these conversations with a bit of a thought experiment, half thought experiment, half book recommendation. If you had the chance to give a book to everyone on Earth to read and understand, what would you want to give to people or recommend to people? OK, there's the the answer I want to give. And then there's an answer that's probably the right answer. We'll take both. Both are great. Mandatory reading for everyone should be books on economics. I think there's just a deep understanding about how the world works and a distrust of capitalism without a fundamental understanding of what it is. And so that would probably be number one. And I can't rattle off, you know, maybe Milton Friedman or something like that. But the book I would want everyone to read is The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham. Wow. Why that book? That's such a...

That's a great choice. It's such a beautiful book. Somerset Maugham is just in study his life and study like where he lived and why he wrote what he wrote when he wrote it and the period and set and setting of, you know, the war and everything. I think it's such a beautiful display of human nature, you know, of the archetypes that exist in this world around suffering. and how to escape it and it actually was the story that led to my spiritual awakening there's a character in there who faced with profound sadness could wallow in that sadness but he chooses not to instead he chooses a stoic exit and decides that it just doesn't matter because he has to go live in the now and living in the now can sometimes be lonely. It can be, like they say, the razor's edge is often walked alone and it can even cut the walker. And so there's a lot of people that will not go on that journey with you. And this story is about that. It's about the awakening of a person who went to war, saw some brutally horrible things, decided to leave the script of the life that he was supposed to lead and find his own true identity and finds it in the end. For me, it's my story as well. And so I deeply resonate with it. I recommend reading the book first. Then there's a movie that was filmed, I think, in the 40s, 30s or 40s. And then there's a movie that Bill Murray made with his brother. And so what's interesting about that movie is in order to film Ghostbusters 2, this is what the lore is. He said, I'll only do it if you allow me to produce. this movie and you pay for it it came out and was not didn't receive no critical like no acclaim it was kind of like a blip wow um in all of his movies if you were to ask people what their favorite movie is of his that is never hardly ever mentioned but i would argue is one of the most profound roles that he's ever been in and stories he's ever told it's the one that impacted me the most and so um but start with the book

so that you understand the archetypes because his movie is different than the book and you can understand what Somerset Maugham was trying to do to convey to you. Cyan, this was as freewheeling and deep and interesting as I had hoped it would be. Thank you so much. This was really a pleasure. Thank you. I'm a huge fan of your work and your writing and of Hummingbird. Yeah, I'm really excited where you've landed because they're remarkable people and truly, truly independent thinkers. Yes. And so it's a great place to land. So congratulations. Thank you so much. I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one. For all past episodes and more, visit us at thegeneralist.substack.com See you next time as we continue to explore the future.