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

18:08Cyan Banister:Yes, a scientist.

18:10The Generalist Host:Yes, 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.

18:48The Generalist Host:But the voice said, are you all right? Are you okay? 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.

19:08Cyan Banister:I see. That's an interesting theory.

19:10The Generalist Host:Right? So I started charting all these things out. And I was like, okay. 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? So I got a group of people to do it. 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 and 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 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 is these 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 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.

20:56Cyan Banister:Yeah.

20:57The Generalist Host: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 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 you need to come here right now and i'm like okay so we 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 i can send you a video of this it's insane and i was like what

21:46Cyan Banister: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

22:00The Generalist Host:thought it's a telepathic bird yeah and we found its owner which was two farms down so it's not 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 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.

23:39The Generalist Host:This is mine. It originates from within. What if it doesn't originate from within? What if it's outside of us? So the thing I'm most obsessed with right now is non-local consciousness.

23:51Cyan Banister:What does non-local consciousness mean?

23:53The Generalist Host: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 look 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.

24:56The Generalist Host:They say, I don't know where this song came from. I don't feel like I wrote it.

25:00Cyan Banister:Yes.

25:01The Generalist Host: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.

25:35Cyan Banister:That is still visible in a BCI.

25:38The Generalist Host: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 does 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.

26:19Cyan Banister:I think it's a 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.

26:32The Generalist Host:Anyone listening should be very skeptical. I started out as a skeptic, as an atheist. I got here through experimentation, through mysticism. I treat it like science. I, 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.

26:57Cyan Banister:Listen to these, run your experiments, run your own

26:59The Generalist Host:experiments.

27:00Cyan Banister:Yes. I totally, I like, 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, OK, 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.

27:41Cyan Banister: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

28:11The Generalist Host:we're always playing for an audience right like if you're creating for TikTok and it's not coming from an authentic center yeah 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. And so I think art used to be very different. Even in the era of Saturday Night Live, early television, I think we were seeing some of that creativity, that rawness 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.

28:49The Generalist Host: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.

29:06Cyan Banister: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 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 like 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.

29:58The Generalist Host: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? And he said, well, one is I'm a historian, so you have to understand the past.

30:34The Generalist Host:And two, you have to understand how the money's 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. 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. There's I if I told you all the times I was too early, you know, it'll make is there one that's really painful?

31:11Cyan Banister:Like what was the one that you were too early that really should should have worked or maybe we're just getting close to my own part of Zivity. Zivity, yeah.

31:19The Generalist Host:Which basically invented crowdfunding and patronage for art ended up becoming, I would argue that OnlyFans is probably the largest outcome of 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 delivery of like cough syrup, candy bars, video games in under an hour, but it was based in a warehouse. And this was around year 2000, 2001.

31:53Cyan Banister:Oh, wow. And they went belly up

31:56The Generalist Host:because they couldn't figure out how to make the margins work.

31:59Cyan Banister:Yeah.

31:59The Generalist Host:But along comes Postmates and they figured it out, right? Because you needed the iPhone. You needed the ability to give them provisioned 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.

32:38Yeah.

32:38The Generalist Host:Like 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.

33:11Cyan Banister:What was interesting about him?

33:13The Generalist Host:Gravitas. He had this like 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, I'm one to watch, right? So I just put a pin in it. And then a few months later, I saw him pitching at Open Angel Forum, Uber Cab. Now, keep in mind, also, I had an Uber driver. My personal driver was driver number one for Uber.

33:59The Generalist Host:another weird oh wow yeah gosh um and he kept handing me ryan graves business card if anything the universe if if it was conspiring in my favor was basically hitting me over the head it was just like 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.

34:37The Generalist Host: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 okay 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 this is a great way to get intel.

35:27The Generalist Host:This is crazy. Well, 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, 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?

36:06The Generalist Host: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 he 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 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 um co-leading the series a down the road but that company what is what valued at seven billion eight billion or something at this point and solves a huge percentage of the country's petty crime, like bicycles and lawnmowers.

37:18The Generalist Host:And it also solves Amber Alerts and things like that.

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38:24The Generalist Host:And so I think, you know, you have to be open to an opportunity presenting itself in the most unusual of places. you know pokemon go that happened because i noticed my friends playing this game called ingress and they were obsessed with it and whenever you notice humans obsession you know pay attention like why are this this early group of people these early adopters

38:51Cyan Banister:chartering helicopters like what for this geo game yeah it looks like geocaching yes um and so

39:01The Generalist Host:I started playing it and I realized like wow this is amazing if I could invest in this I would but Google owns it lo and behold they spin out Alphabet 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 and then when I found out that Pokemon was going to be involved I was like I went around to everyone saying you don't understand everyone's going to be catching invisible Pokemon and they're like you're insane no one's going to be looking at their phone nobody yes if you remember everybody's doing this yeah yeah totally and i would argue it was the closest we ever came to world peace

39:36Cyan Banister:it was a beautiful moment i remember that summer very well i mean maybe it was longer than a summer maybe it was 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 form factor?

40:00The Generalist Host:Human nature.

40:02Cyan Banister:So, Pokemon Go is still quite large.

40:04The Generalist Host:They make billions of dollars. It's still played worldwide. It was acquired recently. And the company that acquired it also made Monopoly Go, which is not geolocation, but I think Monopoly would be a natural extension of the technology. I would actually talk about why didn't Harry Potter work? Because Harry Potter should be, that should be, you know.

40:32Cyan Banister:Yeah, even bigger, right?

40:33The Generalist Host: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 it should have, 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 jk rowling and warner brothers wanted it to 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 But, you know, that didn't work out.

41:20The Generalist Host:But Pikmin 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.

42:01The Generalist Host: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.

42:16Cyan Banister: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 of experiences beyond even Niantic. Right. Like the more people haven't sort of taken the Pokemon Go.

42:31The Generalist Host: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 are like no no you need to geofence this and on baseball fields and all these sorts of you know on professional stadiums exactly so running into stores that they are even people's yards you know yes yeah figuring out that piece was probably one of the hardest parts and nobody owns a better map of that than niantic so my insight niantic was not that it was a game you know the the founder of niantic john hankey also built keyhole and worked on google earth and maps.

43:14The Generalist Host: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.

43:35Cyan Banister: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 know, you expect us to have a lot more answers even in two to three years. What what do you expect to help us get there? Like, have you just seen? Yeah.

43:52The Generalist Host: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 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 so you'll be able to type without using a keyboard and um i remember i invested in control labs which ended up becoming part of the the meta ray bands the 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.

45:01Cyan Banister:Incredible.

45:02The Generalist Host: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'd i thought you know i didn't 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.

45:54The Generalist Host:I don't know if you remember, but bee die-off was the number one headline for many years. Humanity is doomed. The bees are dying. We're going to have to create little robot bees. Some mycologists solved it. That's what we're going to start seeing is somebody that you don't expect who studied fluid dynamics suddenly has a physics breakthrough or things like that are going to be really, really interesting because they're going to become AI-enabled or AI-enhanced.

46:24Cyan Banister: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.

46:53The Generalist Host:The level of creativity that's going to come just out of that will reshape humanity alone.

46:57Cyan Banister: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. uncertain. 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.

47:21The Generalist Host: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.

48:00The Generalist Host: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 like 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 more 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 uh 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 want 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.

49:28The Generalist Host: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. 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. These 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.

50:11The Generalist Host: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.

50:39Cyan Banister: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?

50:55The Generalist Host: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 AAA game. They would much rather support a human being 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 is 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.

51:59The Generalist Host: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.

52:38The Generalist Host: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.

52:46Cyan Banister:Yeah, 100%.

52:48The Generalist Host:You know that it's not 100 % authentic and not 100 % human.

52:53Cyan Banister: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.

53:26The Generalist Host: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 yeah, 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 some thing 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 if 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?

54:44The Generalist Host:We need to solve today. Buses. And he gets all of his team fired up about it. And he convinces people kind of like a Pied Piper to get people to follow him into this seemingly boring space. It's 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 you got it's autistic i view it as a superpower yeah absolutely

55:35Cyan Banister:Absolutely.

55:35The Generalist Host: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.

55:45Cyan Banister:Yes.

55:46The Generalist Host: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 gave me an unfair advantage because I could just dismiss that part.

56:37The Generalist Host:Some people will say no, because somebody doesn't go straight down the fairway. They're not like, this person looks like they have an MBA and 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.

56:56Cyan Banister:Yes.

56:57The Generalist Host: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 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?

57:41The Generalist Host:Or do they have business capabilities? Because you can have an academic who's brilliant, who has a groundbreaking, you know, 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.

58:01Cyan Banister:And so it was biz, tism, what was the third one? Riz, charisma. Riz, interesting. The charisma matters, huh?

58:09The Generalist Host: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.

58:30Cyan Banister:It's a good one.

58:31The Generalist Host: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?

58:39Cyan Banister:How often do you see that in one person? Almost never? A lot of the time?

58:44The Generalist Host: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.

59:20Cyan Banister:You know, in researching you and your your story, you seem to live a very unusual life in other ways, like you live in a retirement community. Part time. Part time. OK. Why was that a choice you made? And I wonder how it sort of forms your perspective.

59:37The Generalist Host:I went to this retirement community that a friend brought me to to play golf. And I was not into golf, actually. 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 um we're almost done with it an outdoor movie theater that's a drive-in that um golf carts can pull into 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 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 and there's also um 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.

1:01:20The Generalist Host: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 woodshop. 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.

1:01:46Cyan Banister:I love it.

1:01:47The Generalist Host:With the idea that we're all going to kind of spend either full time or part time there. And 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 got to have a 50 hundred year view, right? And 50 to 100 years, maybe it's an esports arena. I don't know. Golf might not existed? I don't know. 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.

1:02:33The Generalist Host: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 like there's this woman who lived to be 93 and um she died at home with a window looking at the golf course everybody came by and waved at her and you know put it in front of her window

1:03:11Cyan Banister:and she died very happy yeah i thought to myself that's what i want for me and my friends and

1:03:17The Generalist Host: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. But 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.

1:03:50Cyan Banister:Yeah. 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 Alistair Crowley. What are your reading habits? How do you decide where your curiosity takes you? What do you take from people like like a Crowley?

1:04:13The Generalist Host: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's 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.

1:05:11The Generalist Host: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, and it gets you thinking about like, I don't know if you know this, but in the twenties, New York had all these automats everywhere. And so what is an automat?

1:05:29Cyan Banister:Sorry.

1:05:29The Generalist Host: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.

1:05:39Cyan Banister:Oh, interesting.

1:05:41The Generalist Host:So 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.

1:06:16The Generalist Host: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 uh sometimes people will just hand me a book or i'll find it on the ground and the alistair crowley stuff came because um 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 alistair 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

1:07:36Cyan Banister:woman he'd ever been with in one book oh wow you can imagine that was pretty controversial back

1:07:41The Generalist Host:then yes yes and uh 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'd 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.

1:08:20The Generalist Host: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, 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 and inspires you to read another thing. And that's kind of how it all works for me.

1:08:44Cyan Banister: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?

1:09:03The Generalist Host:OK, there's the the answer I want to give. And then there's an answer that's probably the right answer.

1:09:10Cyan Banister:We'll take both. Both are great.

1:09:14The Generalist Host: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.

1:09:41Cyan Banister:Wow. Why that book? That's such a great choice.

1:09:44The Generalist Host:It's such a beautiful book. Somerset Maugham is just, in study his life and study where he lived and why he wrote what he wrote when he wrote it and the period and setting of 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 is 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.

1:11:08The Generalist Host: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 and 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 mom was trying to do to convey to you.

1:12:18Cyan Banister: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.

1:12:27The Generalist Host:Thank you. I'm a huge fan of your work and your writing and of Hummingbird. So yeah, I'm really excited where you've landed because they're remarkable people and truly, truly independent thinkers.

1:12:42Cyan Banister:Yes.

1:12:42The Generalist Host:And so it's a great place to land. So congratulations.

1:12:46Cyan Banister:Thank you so much. That's it. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Generalist Podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast app. Ratings and reviews help others discover these discussions. So if you enjoyed the conversation, 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. Thank you.