From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) — Cyan Banister

1. 0:00 – 2:02

   Start

   1. CBCyan Banister0:00

      It's the same concept that was explored in The Matrix and in, in lots of different fiction, is just to wake up. Wake up. You know? If you see it enough times, maybe you'll understand what it means. Like, if you wake up out of bed and you're awake, you think you're awake, but you're actually not. You're in a form of sleep, and that sleep is what's called your mechanical automaton sort of actions that you take that are in response to what's being thrown at you in the world, what nature gave to you, and what nurture handed to you. And you just accept it, and so you're just sleepwalking through life, and the moment you take the reins and you become the narrator of your own story, and sometimes the captain, then that's when it's a transformational change. [upbeat music]

   2. TFTim Ferriss1:04

      Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, and this conversation is a long overdue conversation. I have been wanting to make this happen for quite some time. My guest today, Cyan Banister, is a general partner at Long Journey Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm. She was also an early investor in a few names you might recognize, Uber, SpaceX, DeepMind, Flexport, Affirm, and has invested in more than 100 companies. She was most recently at Founders Fund. I was actually an LP at Founders Fund way back in the day, a top-tier fund in San Francisco. You can subscribe to Cyan's Substack at uglyduckling.substack.com. Her writing is great. I would recommend subscribing. And you can find her online, at least on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter, @cyantist, one of the best handles I've seen, C-Y-A-N-T-I-S-T. Cyan, nice to see you.

   3. CBCyan Banister2:00

      And good to see you.

   4. TFTim Ferriss2:01

      [chuckles]

2. 2:02 – 7:07

   Early life and education as a white minority on a Navajo reservation.

   1. TFTim Ferriss2:02

      All right. So we just listed off, I'm using the royal we, some very impressive names, and certainly I would consider you one of the top angel investors of many vintages, not just one, across quite a few different time periods. But it didn't start off that way. You weren't the child of Tim Draper or anything leading to Atherton at age seven, things along these lines. Could you take us back to homelessness in your life and how that factors in?

   2. CBCyan Banister2:40

      I was raised on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona, and I had an extraordinary education, and I think I was incredibly lucky to have been educated there because I have about the equivalent of an eighth or ninth grade education. And the reason for this is due to circumstances outside of my control, I became homeless off and on when I was 13, and then homeless officially when I was 15, and became a ward of the state of Arizona, and this was because my, my mother, she had a very difficult time keeping children in her house past the age of 13. My sister was removed from the house when she was a teenager. My brother was removed when he was a, a young boy.

   3. TFTim Ferriss3:26

      So to dive into a couple of things you mentioned, and, uh, if you don't wanna cover any of this, we don't need to, but the first is, I suppose, a question a lot of listeners will have on their mind, which is what was it like for you growing up on a reservation? What are some of the memories that stand out or characteristics that stand out?

   4. CBCyan Banister3:51

      Well, first of all, I am white, and so-

   5. TFTim Ferriss3:55

      Mm-hmm

   6. CBCyan Banister3:55

      ... being on a reservation, I was a minority.

   7. TFTim Ferriss3:58

      Mm-hmm.

   8. CBCyan Banister3:58

      And it gave me a really unique perspective around being a minority. When I was a kid, I thought I was an albino Indian.

   9. TFTim Ferriss4:06

      [chuckles]

   10. CBCyan Banister4:06

       I just thought that I'd lost my melanin.

   11. TFTim Ferriss4:08

       [chuckles]

   12. CBCyan Banister4:08

       And the other kids treated me the same, 'cause when you're a child and you're small, you don't know anything about racism. You don't know anything about being an other. You start to notice these things, but you definitely don't treat each other differently. But as we started to get older, that's when the name-calling started. That's when a little bit of the bullying started from other kids, and I can only suspect that they learned this at home, you know?

   13. TFTim Ferriss4:36

       Mm-hmm.

   14. CBCyan Banister4:36

       Or they witnessed it someplace else, because it certainly was not something they were born with.

   15. TFTim Ferriss4:41

       Mm-hmm.

   16. CBCyan Banister4:41

       And I'm happy that I experienced this because there is a lot of prejudice in this world, and I would say there's probably a lot more prejudice than there's actually racism. But experiencing that really taught me what it's like to walk in those shoes, and made me hyper-aware of it when I became an adult. The other thing is the culture is just a really rich culture, and it's very different than any other place you could ever live. I really recommend that people visit the Navajo reservation or any of the reservations that allow visitors because it's hard to believe that that's in America, you know? Because there's this amazing swath of land with a old, ancient culture that they preserve, and there's just a lot of things that happen there that you can't experience any other place, and it's right here if you're in America in your back door. And so being able to go and experience a ceremony or get a guided tour down a canyon is something that I really recommend that everybody do. But when I was little, there were no guides. I would just walk down into canyons and explore ruins, and the kids and I would run free and wild. It was a very different time. But I also have a little bit of an accent. I don't know if you notice it, but If you go to the Navajo reservation, you will see that people speak the way I speak.

   17. TFTim Ferriss6:08

       Mm-hmm.

   18. CBCyan Banister6:08

       And there's just not a lot of variation in, in my tone, and then it just sort of goes up and down in a certain way that's very specific to that region. It's created some confusion for me because culturally, I am Native American, and that has always been bizarre when I moved to a place where people didn't understand our customs, and the things that we respected, and the, you know, the holidays that we observed, or the customs that we had, are just not anything that anybody I went to school with after I left the reservation even understood. So I've always felt like an outsider no matter where I am.

   19. TFTim Ferriss6:47

       Mm.

   20. CBCyan Banister6:47

       And I think that's been wonderful and incredible for my career. You can certainly look at that and, and have kind of a victim mindset about it, and... But I took the opposite path, which was, you know, this is what makes me special, is that I don't fit in wherever I am.

   21. TFTim Ferriss7:06

       Mm-hmm.

3. 7:07 – 14:28

   Strained family dynamics and a cycle of neglect.

   1. TFTim Ferriss7:07

      Gonna have a lot of questions about that. Before I get there, this is again referring to something you mentioned, sh- that your mom had a hard time keeping kids in the home. What are some of the reasons why kids were removed from the home by the state?

   2. CBCyan Banister7:21

      So my sister was removed first, but I was told a lie about her removal. I was told that she ran away from home. And, uh, it was right after my brother was born. We went out trick-or-treating, and my child mind remembers it as happening the next day, but maybe it wasn't the next day, but my sister's room was vacant and empty, and suddenly my little brother was in it.

   3. TFTim Ferriss7:43

      Hmm.

   4. CBCyan Banister7:43

      And I was expected to just roll with it. And when I asked where she was, I was told, "She doesn't wanna live here anymore. She ran away." But reality was quite different. Uh, about a year later or so, I went to go visit my grandparents and discovered that that's where my sister had been the whole time. And my mother was afraid that she was gonna hurt the new baby. I don't know where these claims came from.

   5. TFTim Ferriss8:09

      That your sister would harm the new baby?

   6. CBCyan Banister8:10

      Yeah, that my sister would harm the baby. And I don't know where this fear comes from. I don't... There was nothing rational about it. From my point of view, there wasn't enough room for another kid, and so we had to make room, and suddenly one was just replaced with the other. And that was very weird because my sister was my best friend in the world. She looked after me. We were incredibly close, and then she was just ripped away. Luckily, I bonded with my brother. I could easily see how that could have gone south, where I would have been filled with, you know, I don't know, disapproval, or I would be upset about having that situation, but he was just really lovely, and I love my brother. But when my brother was three years old, he was removed from the house next. And that was in a really contentious, uh, divorce where a custody battle happened, and then my mother tried to implant false memories with me. She had us try to perjure ourselves in court. And I really feel that this is when my mother and I completely fell out. I refused to testify against my stepfather and accuse him of abuses that she tried to plant in my memory. And I think this is important to highlight because a lot of people don't talk about female abuse. They talk about usually men. But my mother was incredibly abusive in very interesting ways. You know, it wasn't screaming. It wasn't hitting. It was neglect, and it was, you know, these social manipulations. And unknown to me, I was in my mother's truck, and it was still moving when she made the ask for me to lie in court. And I jumped out of the truck, and I rolled on the ground, and I ran, and I ran, and I ran, and I ran, and I ran until I could find a phone, and I called the number that I had on me for our child psychologist that I had no idea was court-appointed. I thought it was just someone my mom was having me see and that I could confide in him. And I called him and told him what my mother had asked me to do, which was to lie about my stepfather molesting me, which he did not. And it all happened very quickly after that. My brother was removed pretty much the, in the next 48 hours from the home, and she lost custody of him. Now, why she didn't lose custody of me, I s- still remains a mystery because I was the last child in the house, and that made me, like, the sole focus of her ire after that, which was... And I'm also the kid who, you know, refused to fall in line and, and tell a lie.

   7. TFTim Ferriss10:51

      Hmm.

   8. CBCyan Banister10:52

      And so we were at odds with each other. It just was never the same after that. And we moved to Flagstaff, Arizona. She quit her job on the reservation as a teacher and decided to become a scientist. So before this, she had an MFA in arts, and I suspect that she wanted to get another degree in science because the, the man that she had divorced was a scientist. And she wanted to prove that she is intelligent. My mother's incredibly intelligent. You know, she... One of the smartest people I've ever met in my life. So I don't know why she had to prove this to anybody. But she went back to school and started taking up many jobs. So she would have one or two jobs and go to school full-time, and at that point, I was pretty much left to my own devices. And she would come home, you know, after work, and that's usually when I would get kicked out, or she'd be angry with how I didn't clean or keep the house, and, and it was just a constant cycle of being kicked out, the police getting called, me getting picked up by the police, ending up in juvenile, you know, ending up in jail sometimes. It's a horrible system for kids, by the way, if we wanna get into that topic. And into foster care and into group homes. But eventually, they had enough of this. So she left me for a summer And basically, she decided to go take a position at Lawrence Livermore, a summer job or a summer research position, and she wanted me to come with her, but I had to go to summer school, and I had to stay in school if I was gonna graduate, 'cause home life was really, really bad. And so I told her about my desire to stay home, and she said no. But the next thing that happened I did not expect, which is I came home from school and discovered a $20 bill on the countertop with a note that said, "Good luck," and her stuff gone. And so the landlord showed up and basically said, "You can't stay here." And so I went out on the street, and the most miraculous thing happened. A lot of my life is a series of miraculous things where people have stepped in at just the right moment to help me. And there was a woman, who is my friend Becky from band class, it was her mother, who saw me sitting on the street corner crying, and she pulled her car over, and she said, "What's going on?" And I just started mumbling to her about what's going on, and she just said, "Get in." And she took me home, and I had no idea that Becky's dad was the general manager of Walmart, which I had a nasty shoplifting habit as a young teenager, and, uh, that Walmart I hit up a few times. And I re- will never forget coming into that home and seeing that man who was opening his home to me and really questioning my life choices and moral decisions at that moment. Really taught me a really valuable lesson. I never stole again. And-

   9. TFTim Ferriss13:50

      [chuckles]

   10. CBCyan Banister13:51

       ... this family took me in, and they tried to actually get custody of me. They tried to go to the court systems and, and become my forever home, but my mother got back, and she, you know, she has this racket that she runs where, you know, you have these kids, and they're really useful for free education, for free childcare, for free housing. And so, you know, we lived in student housing, and if you don't have a kid, you can't live in student housing. You can't have a nice house. You have to live in a dorm room. So when she came back, she got me back, and that's when the cycle of kicking me out started all

4. 14:28 – 19:13

   The intervention of Officer Pratt and becoming a ward of the state at 15.

   1. CBCyan Banister14:28

      over again. And eventually, I got picked up by a police officer named Officer Pratt. I would love... That's actually something I would love to find through this podcast, if I can find Officer Pratt. Officer Pratt probably did one of the most single important things in my life in helping me. He picked me up and brought me to the courthouse, 'cause he arrested me several times. But this particular time, the last time that he did-

   2. TFTim Ferriss14:52

      And this is in Flagstaff?

   3. CBCyan Banister14:54

      Yeah, in Flagstaff. He did something he'd never done before, and he took me to Dairy Queen, and he let me get whatever I wanted. And I was like, "Well, this is weird." And then he took me to the courthouse, and then he paraded me into the courthouse, and he let me sit where the judge sits. And I was like, "This is very strange." And he said, "Would you like some spaghetti?"

   4. TFTim Ferriss15:11

      [laughs]

   5. CBCyan Banister15:11

      And he brought me spaghetti. And I'm like, "Why everybody's being so nice to me?" And then this woman came in, and she introduced herself, and she told me she was my public defender. And I was confused about a lot of this terminology 'cause I didn't understand what I needed to be defended from. Like, what did I do to the public? You know, I remember thinking like, "I don't know what this means."

   6. TFTim Ferriss15:29

      [laughs]

   7. CBCyan Banister15:29

      None of this-- It's like cosplay as far as I'm concerned. And-

   8. TFTim Ferriss15:33

      [laughs]

   9. CBCyan Banister15:34

      But they basically told me, like, "When the judge comes in, you are to stand. You are to say, 'Your Honor.' You are to say, 'Yes, Your Honor,' 'No, Your Honor,' and you are to sit, and that's it. You know, just behave yourself. We got the rest." And I'm like, "Okay, but I don't understand what's going on." And then my mother came in to the right of the courtroom, and I'm on the left, and I look at her, and she never looks at me. And the judge came in. It all happened again. This stuff happened so fast, and time just... I don't know. It's hard to explain, but it changes. It, like, dilates. But he looked at me, and he said, "Cyan, do you wanna live in a cardboard box for the rest of your life?" And he held up some book, which I assume is a book of the law. [chuckles] I had no idea what he was holding up. And I said, "No, I do not wanna live in a cardboard box." And he was like, "Is there anything in this book that tells you that you are above the law?" And I said, "No, Your Honor. Nothing... I'm, I'm not above the law." And then he looked at my mother, and he said, "Do you want this child anymore?" And she said, "No, I do not." And the gavel just came down, and he said, by, you know, the power invested in him and all that stuff, and basically said that I was now a ward of the State of Arizona. And what that means in Arizona, it is not emancipation. It's you get assigned a probation officer, and you're treated like a criminal. And so you, if you wanna live on your own, which is very, very difficult to do if you can imagine at 15, there's not a lot of people that will hire you. Y- And not people will rent to you. You can't sign a contract either. You know, they, they basically said, "You have 24 hours to find a place to live, otherwise you end up in a group home." And the rules of living on your own are you have to be in at nine o'clock. There's a curfew. You're not allowed to have boys over. You're not allowed to have marijuana. You have to work, and you have to go to school. And then the strangest one of all was you had to have a gallon of milk in your fridge at all times.

   10. TFTim Ferriss17:26

       [laughs]

   11. CBCyan Banister17:26

       Because they would show up, and that was, like, sign of adulting is if you can buy a gallon of milk and keep it fresh in your fridge before the expiration date. It was the strangest thing. But I walked out of that courtroom. I never saw my mom... Well, I saw my mom again twice after that, but I didn't see my mom leave. And I-- she never looked at me. She just exited out some other door, and that was the end of my mother. And suddenly, I'm a, quote-unquote, "independent person," not quite an adult. I go out and sit on the curb, and I remember looking up at the sky, and I said, "Oh, sky, what do I do? What now?" Because they gave me 24 hours to find a place to live. They said, "If you don't find a place to live, you know, you're going into an unfortunate circumstance." And so I went through my mental map of how many friends did I have that were adults. And this one woman named Pam just came in crystal clear, and I said, "I'm gonna walk to Pam's, I'm gonna ask her if I can stay there, and that's gonna give me some time." And so I walked over there, knocked on the door, "Pam, can I stay here?" She had no problem. She said, "Come in." She gave me a corner on the floor. I didn't have a mattress. She said, "I recommend you get a pillow, but here's a blanket." And that became my home. And, uh, again, it's-- I think you're gonna see over and over... I didn't see it then. I see it now looking back at all of these precious moments where a person does something extraordinary at just the right time, and that's what Pam did, and I, I had my first home, and that was in Flagstaff. It was next to the train tracks, so it was a very strange home. It rumbled a lot.

   12. TFTim Ferriss19:06

       [chuckles]

   13. CBCyan Banister19:08

       And we got into a lot of shenanigans with the train 'cause we were young and dumb, but, but it was, it was a great home.

5. 19:13 – 28:51

   Crusty punk survival strategies and life on the streets.

   1. TFTim Ferriss19:13

      Wow. What helped save you or put you on the trajectory to where you are today, given those starting conditions, let's call it? So you're sleeping on the floor, at least to begin, at Pam's house.

   2. CBCyan Banister19:32

      Mm-hmm.

   3. TFTim Ferriss19:33

      Looking back, what do you think were the critical moments, decisions, anything at all, if you had to point to one or a few things that helped to bend the arc of your life to not go to a terrible place? Because I could see how many people with the experience you just described could end up junkies, could end up dead, could end up who knows.

   4. CBCyan Banister20:01

      Yes.

   5. TFTim Ferriss20:01

      But certainly not operating at a very high level and with some very good reasons. I mean, neglect, trauma, fill in the blank, right? So what are some of the things that saved you?

   6. CBCyan Banister20:13

      Well, I don't know if you've ever seen those crusty punk kids that hang out on Haight and Ashbury, or you see them in every city that has any kind of population, and they're usually sitting around a record store on the ground with a dog.

   7. TFTim Ferriss20:25

      Yeah, sure.

   8. CBCyan Banister20:26

      Um, yeah.

   9. TFTim Ferriss20:26

      Of course.

   10. CBCyan Banister20:27

       Well, I was one of those kids.

   11. TFTim Ferriss20:28

       Mm-hmm.

   12. CBCyan Banister20:29

       And I fell into that group in Flagstaff. There was a group of wanderers who came in and took me under their wing and, uh, started teaching me the way of the streets because before this, I was thrust onto the streets, and I was on my own, and I did my best. You know, I would stay under people's beds. I would sleep in playgrounds. I would find any place I could stay. But once I met some people who were a little more professional and had a little more time under their belt at homelessness, I started to learn that there's a whole world out there of really interesting ways to get by. For example, you know, there's coffee houses that have creamer, and creamer is relatively free, and it, you know, has fat and calories in it, and they have sugar and honey, and if you get those things and you put them in a cup, you can have a pretty nutritious meal. So there's things like that. Once you're homeless, you can never be un-homeless. It's really strange. Every time I walk around at a conference or anything, I see all the waste. I see if I were a homeless person, I could come, and I could have this, no matter where I'm at. It's really interesting.

   13. TFTim Ferriss21:35

       Hmm.

   14. CBCyan Banister21:36

       But during the time before I got this house, there was a time where I was homeless and hitchhiking, and my boyfriend at the time, who was one of these crusty punk kids, he goes by the name Cuddles. They all had these funny names. And he and I decided we were gonna hitchhike to New York. We got it in our heads from, at the time, Phoenix. I was in Phoenix. And, uh, we set out, leaving from a coffee shop in Tempe, Arizona, and ending up in Jemez Springs, New Mexico. We never made it to New York.

   15. TFTim Ferriss22:09

       [laughs]

   16. CBCyan Banister22:10

       Instead, we ended up in a hippie commune where they basically had us bury pipe to, you know, justify our stay there, and then at the time, they had psilocybin spores.

   17. TFTim Ferriss22:21

       [chuckles]

   18. CBCyan Banister22:22

       I don't know if they still do that or if they're still around. Don't wanna get them in trouble. But-

   19. TFTim Ferriss22:25

       Yeah

   20. CBCyan Banister22:26

       ... that's how they made their, their income. And we lived in this little, teeny-tiny trailer in the dead of winter, and at some point, I got homesick. I couldn't take it anymore. I was just like, "I need to go back to Arizona. I need to be in familiar territory. This is a very strange place to be." And there was constantly different people showing up. Sometimes the police would come and raid the place because there were people giving illegal tattoos. You know, it was just nonstop stuff, and I just, I wanted to be away from it. So I talked my boyfriend into hitchhiking back to Arizona, and I almost died on that return trip. A lot of times you're very lucky if you can get-- hitch a ride where someone takes you the full way. Usually, you get, like, these little partial ways, and you have to stand on the sh-- you know, somewhere, and then someone takes you another segment and another segment. Well, we got dropped off on one side of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and we had to walk from one side to the other and cross a river. But crossing a river as a homeless person is actually not that easy because a lot of the roadways don't have sidewalks. And so we were contemplating some seriously dangerous things. We were thinking about, you know, looking around for flotation devices. Like, how are we gonna get across this river? And eventually, we didn't have a map. We just walked and walked and walked until there was a pedestrian way, which we finally found. And the reason why this is weird is that it was so cold, so we were desperate to find heat, to find some place where we could sleep for the evening and having no luck. Eventually, we did make it to the other side of the river, to the side where we would need to get a car heading towards Flagstaff, and we holed up in a Denny's, and we did that for quite some time. But eventually, during a shift change, they were just like, "You gotta get out of here." And we went and slept in a dumpster outside of a gas station. And eventually, when the, the sun rose- We went out to the highway, and we stuck our thumbs out, and nobody would stop. But this RV apparently had gone, I didn't notice it, but had gone by several times. And he stopped, and he opened the door and he said, "I'm gonna save her, but I guess you're along with the package. But God told me to save her."

   21. TFTim Ferriss24:44

       Now what required saving? What was your condition at the time?

   22. CBCyan Banister24:48

       Oh, yeah, sorry. Uh, why did I need saving? I was developing hypothermia.

   23. TFTim Ferriss24:52

       Mm.

   24. CBCyan Banister24:52

       So I was on the side of the road, and I started to fall asleep, and I was getting really warm.

   25. TFTim Ferriss24:56

       That's not a good sign.

   26. CBCyan Banister24:57

       It's not a good sign. I was getting really warm and very sleepy and happy. And if you're in a very cold place where it's below freezing and you start to feel those things, that is like a very dangerous warning sign. And he stopped at just the right time when I thought I was gonna lose consciousness, and it was just gone. It was over for me. And he pulled me with- along with Cuddles into the RV, and they put blankets around me. They did whatever they knew how to do because they didn't understand what to do when someone has hypothermia, and gave me hot chocolate, and just the next thing I know, I wake up in Flagstaff. This guy took me all the way home. And he just told me that it was God that told him, and at the time, I didn't believe in God. I had no reason to believe in God, and my, my attitude towards God, if there was one, was how could a god do this to me and do this to other people and allow these atrocities to exist in the first place? So I just thanked him and I was like, "You know, I'm so glad that y- God spoke to you. Thank you so, thank you so much." [laughs]

   27. TFTim Ferriss26:01

       [laughs]

   28. CBCyan Banister26:02

       And that put me, again, on an interesting trajectory because when I experienced homelessness again after that, I decided I didn't want to rely on other people. I think the whole experience taught me how my life was just so dependent on spare changing and the kindness of others, and I needed to come up with a way to provide for myself, and I didn't know how. I was underage. I couldn't work, you know, minimum wage and age requirements. I have a controversial view on them. Uh, I'm not saying that people should have child labor, but I am saying that it draws a line, and sometimes it's the difference between life and death for a lot of people. And for me, I almost died many times because I couldn't eat or couldn't have a place to sleep, and I was cold, and just you have to get very, very resourceful. I had to figure out something, so what I started doing was there's these donation centers where people donate clothes or they donate books or things like that, and I found a place that allowed homeless people to take three things every day. So you, you basically check in, and you're allowed to take three items. And I would go in and find items that I could sell to Buffalo Exchange-

   29. TFTim Ferriss27:15

       [laughs]

   30. CBCyan Banister27:16

       ... or I could take to a bookstore.
6. 28:51 – 31:12

   The positive influence of Cyan's "second" mother.

   1. CBCyan Banister28:51

      The other interesting thing that I wanna bring up during this as well is I have two mothers. So when I speak about my mother, there's my mother who gave birth to me, but there's also this guy Cuddles, the homeless guy's mother, who had basically adopted me. And eventually I moved in with her, and when I arrived with her, I couldn't look you in the eye. I would always like look at my feet. I couldn't make eye contact. I would not be able to have this conversation that you and I are having, Tim. It just wouldn't have happened. I would shiver constantly. I was a mess. But she looked at me and she said, "You're gonna look at me when I talk to you. You're gonna stand up straight. You're gonna wear respectable clothing. You're gonna bathe. You're gonna brush your teeth. You're gonna do all the things that your other mother didn't do and didn't tell you to do." She's my mother to this day. She always gets upset when I talk about mother 'cause she's like, "That's not me. That's not me."

   2. TFTim Ferriss29:46

      [laughs]

   3. CBCyan Banister29:47

      But she's the most amazing woman, and I still am in touch with her, and I just was really lucky to have found a boyfriend who had an amazing mother. And you might wonder, why was he homeless?

   4. TFTim Ferriss29:58

      Yeah, why was he homeless?

   5. CBCyan Banister29:59

      Some people are homeless because they romanticize it.

   6. TFTim Ferriss30:01

      Hmm.

   7. CBCyan Banister30:02

      You know?

   8. TFTim Ferriss30:02

      Right.

   9. CBCyan Banister30:03

      I was out there because I had to be there, but he was out there because he read Jack Kerouac or something.

   10. TFTim Ferriss30:07

       I was just gonna say, like Dharma Bums or something. [laughs]

   11. CBCyan Banister30:09

       Yeah, he probably just read Dharma Bums and was like, "I'm heading out."

   12. TFTim Ferriss30:13

       Yep.

   13. CBCyan Banister30:14

       So his situation was totally different, and he brought me home to meet his mother. He was, I mean, this is scandalous today, but he was 19, I was 15, and she was like, "Oh my gosh, what are you doing? This kid is... She's a kid." But she saw my situation, and she saw what I was going through, and he saved me in so many ways. He was my protector. He was my bodyguard. You know, there was a lot of... I could have end- like you said, I could've ended up on drugs. I could have ended up dead. I could have ended up... I was in, you know, squat houses where people were shooting up heroin, but he kept me away from all of this stuff, and I'm not sure what possessed him to, because at first I wasn't even his girlfriend. I was just his tag-along, you know, buddy that hitchhiked with him and slept in squats with him. But eventually, we, we became something, and then he just looked after me, and I... Another special person who just did something-

   14. TFTim Ferriss31:11

       Mm-hmm

   15. CBCyan Banister31:11

       ... really incredible

7. 31:12 – 33:57

   Crass, Chris Collins, and computers.

   1. CBCyan Banister31:12

      for me. But when I was on the streets selling necklaces, I also took up a little hobby of spray painting clothing with stencils, and I learned how to silk screen, and that's when I met my first customer. His name's Chris Collins, and I had put my T-shirts and my patches that I was making of some DIY punk rock bands. So I was really into these, like, British punk rock bands at the time.

   2. TFTim Ferriss31:36

      Mm.

   3. CBCyan Banister31:36

      And I see this guy walk by with a jumpsuit, and he's wearing a patch from this band called Crass. I don't know if you're familiar with any of the old punk bands from the '70s.

   4. TFTim Ferriss31:46

      Sure. Yeah, yeah.

   5. CBCyan Banister31:48

      But who said, "The nature of your oppression is the aesthetic of our anger." I remember exactly what it says. And I stopped him and I said, "Hey, I made that." And he turned around, and he sees this homeless chick, and he's like, "Yeah? Prove it." And I said, "Well, you bought it at either East Side Records or you bought it, you know, at one of these places that I would, would basically consign the mat." And he said, "You're right. That was where I got it." So he sat down with me, and he explained that his mother ran a sign shop. But the most important thing that he did was he asked me to come and spend time with him on his computer. And [chuckles] I was like, "Computers are portable now? This is weird. I didn't know you could do that." And I blew him off for a while, but a month later or so, I saw him at a coffee shop, and he was on a laptop, and it was my first time ever seeing a portable computer, and it was like, I don't know, I, I, I was in heaven. And I came over to him and I said, "Well, what can we do with this?" And he says, "Well, what can't you do with it?" He's like, "Let's go get online, and I'll show you." So we found a place to do dial-up connection, and I remember hearing a modem for the first time, and he started showing me this thing called IRC and how I could meet friends from all over the world. And back then, there wasn't a search engine, so there was, like, linked sites that you had to go to, and you had to, like, discover content. But I knew that no matter what it took, I had to be a part of that world. So he and all of his hacker friends basically started wooing me over to their side.

   6. TFTim Ferriss33:18

      [chuckles]

   7. CBCyan Banister33:19

      They're like, "You don't wanna hang out with these crusty punk kids. You don't want this life. You wanna learn about Unix, and you wanna do this stuff with us. You wanna be a hacker chick."

   8. TFTim Ferriss33:28

      [chuckles]

   9. CBCyan Banister33:28

      And so they basically encouraged me to be bigger, to think bigger, and to start reading and start studying, and they bought me books, and they got me my first computer, and, you know, that's... Again, I credit people, magical moments where people just sort of step into my life at just the right moment, and me paying attention, if you will, if I had a part to play in this, is paying attention when those moments arrive and seizing them.

8. 33:57 – 44:48

   An unorthodox path to angel investment beginning with Uber.

   1. TFTim Ferriss33:58

      So let me hop around a little bit, 'cause I wanna bring us a little closer to the current day, and we're probably gonna bounce back and forth. But the curiosity that you exhibit, the [inhales] ability to, I don't wanna say put yourself in the right place at the right time, but somehow increase the surface area to which that type of experience can stick, seems to also translate to how you have, [exhales] I, I don't even know if this is the right term to use, but sourced some of your very successful angel investments, right? It's not... [chuckles] Some of them don't seem to travel what we might consider a typical Harvard Business School case study type of path.

   2. CBCyan Banister34:47

      No.

   3. TFTim Ferriss34:48

      Could you share just a few of those so that [chuckles] people get a taste?

   4. CBCyan Banister34:53

      Yeah. I'll start with Uber. The Uber story is really fascinating because it starts with a thesis. So they all start with a thesis, and then eventually, I'm just gonna say maybe the universe just puts the people in front of me, and I have to recognize they're right in front of me. You know, obviously you can walk the other way. You can be asleep to what's being presented. But I developed a thesis around the taxi medallion system, and I was fairly libertarian. I still, still am, and was thinking about how when I go out to get a taxi and it's a rainy day or it's busy outside, why wasn't I getting one? Every time I would get into a taxi, I would ask them, "What is your day like? You know, as soon as you get your car, what happens?" And they were like, "Well, I'm already $200 in debt, and I've got to make $200, and I've got a... There's a clock ticking because I have to return the car at a certain time." And this is why they were driving around like bats out of a, you know, out of hell. And everybody would complain about taxi drivers and how they drove. It's because they were racing a clock. They were already in debt. And then I asked him, I said, "Well, do you own this taxi?" And he said, "No, you know, we, we rent them. We have to pick them up and pay for them. There's a guy that has the medallion." And this is the first time I learned about a medallion, which is a license that somebody owns that allows you to operate that car. And it got to the point where these medallions were worth millions of dollars in some cities. They were worth that much in New York, and in San Francisco they were worth a lot. In LA they were worth a lot. And so what happens is your retirement plan is you rent out your medallion to someone who doesn't have a medallion And you just make money while you sleep, and that's pretty much the whole plan of taxi drivers everywhere at the time. And I started thinking about how it was unfair, this system, just kind of like how I thought minimum wage was unfair because if you create a line, that means that only certain people can cross it, and some people are privileged and some people are not.

   5. TFTim Ferriss36:54

      Just not to leave that hanging, so minimum wage unfair, just another line or two, meaning that you should be able to charge less and get paid less if you want that to be the case, or that it should be-

   6. CBCyan Banister37:05

      Yeah

   7. TFTim Ferriss37:05

      ... higher? Yeah.

   8. CBCyan Banister37:06

      Yeah, so when I started working, minimum wage was $3.15 an hour, and I would've gladly cleaned your toilet bowl for 25 cents, because 25 cents is half a bagel. Again, I think we need to allow homeless people and people who are in those lower financial or economic realms to make decisions for themselves 'cause they actually... We know how.

   9. TFTim Ferriss37:31

      Mm-hmm.

   10. CBCyan Banister37:31

       You know, we know where that 25 cents goes and how we're gonna use it. We are very, very acutely aware of every cent in our lives. And there were so many jobs I wasn't allowed to have. Now, I did end up working at a record store where they did pay me under the table, but think about that. We shouldn't have to break laws.

   11. TFTim Ferriss37:48

       Mm-hmm.

   12. CBCyan Banister37:48

       Like, that person shouldn't have to do something illegal in order for me to make money.

   13. TFTim Ferriss37:53

       Great. I don't wanna take us too far afield of the-

   14. CBCyan Banister37:55

       Yeah

   15. TFTim Ferriss37:56

       ... the through line, but thank you for that. I think that-

   16. CBCyan Banister37:58

       No problem.

   17. TFTim Ferriss37:59

       All right. So coming back to the unfair aspects of the medallion system.

   18. CBCyan Banister38:06

       The medallion system is incredibly unfair, and I started thinking about how could you disrupt taxis, and I didn't have a clear answer, actually. What happened was I was staying at a hotel in San Francisco at the time, and I asked for them to arrange a car for me to SFO, and so they arranged a livery car, and it was a guy named Roger. And when he picked me up, he told me, he said, you know, he got to know me, and he ended up giving me several rides to the airport, but one day he picked me up and he handed me a card for a gentleman named Ryan Graves.

   19. TFTim Ferriss38:37

       Mm-hmm.

   20. CBCyan Banister38:37

       And he said, "I don't know anything about investing, but if I were an angel investor, I would put my money into this company. I'm driving for them, and basically it's a black livery car on demand. You just text this phone number, you get a car." And I was like, "Well, how many drivers are there?" And he goes, "Well, I'm the only one. It's just me."

   21. TFTim Ferriss38:56

       [laughs]

   22. CBCyan Banister38:57

       And I was like, "Well, how's it work?" And he said, "Well, they're paying me by the hour." And I was like, "Huh, that's interesting," and he hands me the card. And at the time, I only invested in companies that were in the Bay Area because it's the ecosystem that I understand. It was how I could actually help founders when they went to raise more money. You wanna be kind of locally centric. Now that, after the pandemic, that's less true. But, so I just kind of ignored the card, but the next ride, he brought it up again. The next ride, he brought it up again.

   23. TFTim Ferriss39:27

       [laughs]

   24. CBCyan Banister39:27

       I started having a collection of Ryan Graves cards.

   25. TFTim Ferriss39:29

       [laughs]

   26. CBCyan Banister39:30

       But then I went to Hawaii to this event held by August Capital called The Lobby.

   27. TFTim Ferriss39:34

       The, The Lobby. Yeah.

   28. CBCyan Banister39:36

       Yeah. And this conference is centered around the most important discussions happen by the pool or in a hot tub or in a lobby, and there's content, but it's, it's an unconference. The content is every person there is capable of giving a speech. So I was at this event, and everybody kind of retired to this very large hot tub. There was about 20 people in the hot tub.

   29. TFTim Ferriss39:59

       That's a huge hot tub.

   30. CBCyan Banister40:00

       It was big. It was big.
9. 44:48 – 53:16

   Niantic/Pokemon GO.

   1. TFTim Ferriss44:48

      right. So I wanna ask you about another one, and I'm going to potentially get the pronunciation wrong. Niantic? Am I getting this right?

   2. CBCyan Banister44:56

      Yeah, Niantic, the makers of Pokemon GO.

   3. TFTim Ferriss44:58

      Pokemon GO. Okay. So how does this, how does this show up?

   4. CBCyan Banister45:01

      Oh, this one's a great one.

   5. TFTim Ferriss45:02

      [laughs]

   6. CBCyan Banister45:03

      So the same Chris Collins that met me and showed me a computer started playing a game called Ingress, and Ingress was this early game that came out of Google that overlaid on top of the real world map, where you would team up with people and go to really weird remote locations so that you could cast invisible triangles over large swaths of land. I'm, I'm simplifying this because there's a storyline behind this, but if you can imagine this, it's basically a gigantic game of green versus blue.

   7. TFTim Ferriss45:35

      Mm-hmm.

   8. CBCyan Banister45:36

      And we were on Team Blue, which is called the Resistance, and then Team Green is called Enlightenment. And we played this game and we were hooked, and there were people that were so hooked they were chartering helicopters to go to remote places.

   9. TFTim Ferriss45:48

      [laughs]

   10. CBCyan Banister45:49

       And what we were creating, and we didn't realize what we were creating, was PokeStops.

   11. TFTim Ferriss45:53

       Huh. And what time was this? Like, what year roughly would you say?

   12. CBCyan Banister45:57

       Oh, gosh, I'm gonna get the years wrong on this.

   13. TFTim Ferriss45:59

       That's okay.

   14. CBCyan Banister45:59

       I was at AngelList when this, around this time that this was happening, so I wanna say 2012.

   15. TFTim Ferriss46:05

       All right, cool. Just roughly. Yeah, around there. All right.

   16. CBCyan Banister46:07

       So I picked up this game with my friends. We started going out every night playing Ingress, doing walk-arounds, and we would run into... What's really funny is people who knew you were playing Ingress on the other side would come up to you, and there was some banter. You know?

   17. TFTim Ferriss46:19

       Mm-hmm.

   18. CBCyan Banister46:19

       People would be like, "Oh, Resistance," and, 'cause we're blowing up each other's virtual things.

   19. TFTim Ferriss46:25

       Mm-hmm.

   20. CBCyan Banister46:25

       And I started asking myself the question, why is Google doing this? Why is Google making this game? Why are we doing all this work for Google for free? They were collecting what's called points of interest, which are not mappable by cars or by sometimes satellites.

   21. TFTim Ferriss46:44

       That's clever.

   22. CBCyan Banister46:44

       So things like tombstones.

   23. TFTim Ferriss46:47

       Yeah.

   24. CBCyan Banister46:47

       You know, where you can then take the text and... So we were going around taking pictures of everything and submitting it to this database that was then used to create Pokemon GO. Now, how I got involved, I thought I would invest in this company in a heartbeat if it was not part of Google. And one day I get a text message from a friend, and he says, "They're spinning Niantic out of Google. There's this whole weird thing called Alphabet that's happening."

   25. TFTim Ferriss47:14

       [laughs]

   26. CBCyan Banister47:14

       "And Niantic's becoming its own thing." And I was like, "You've gotta be kidding me." And I was like, if there's one moment, this is the only moment to strike, where we can go put money into this thing, this is it.

   27. TFTim Ferriss47:25

       Mm-hmm.

   28. CBCyan Banister47:26

       But I didn't know anybody at Google. I am not Google alumni. That's probably where my network is probably the least effective. And I just didn't know how to reach this guy. But I'd invested in a company called Hint Water. I don't know if you've ever had Hint water, but they're these flavored-

   29. TFTim Ferriss47:41

       I know Hint Water. Sure, of course.

   30. CBCyan Banister47:42

       Yeah. So I invested in Hint Water, and I was helping the founder set up her ticketing system. She didn't have a support-
10. 53:16 – 57:06

    How stalking Garrett Langley led to a Flock Security investment.

    1. TFTim Ferriss53:16

       Right. Yeah, and we've seen this play out with Tesla in terms of launching higher priced vehicles and then using that to subsidize the development of the lower cost vehicles. We've seen this in computing. Exactly. So we have, we have the Uber story. We talked about Niantic. Are there any other companies from unusual places?

    2. CBCyan Banister53:38

       A lot of interesting deals come out of hotels. So I was at a hotel-

    3. TFTim Ferriss53:41

       [laughs]

    4. CBCyan Banister53:41

       ... and I had time to kill, and my background is in security, so I'm an engineer, self-taught, and my friends taught me, and I started getting in InfoSec. So I notice some things that other people don't notice about their OpSec or their security. And I got on the Wi-Fi and noticed that all these people were tethering their phones to the Wi-Fi using their real name. And I see Travis K.'s iPhone, and I look over in the corner, and there's Travis Kalanick, and I'm like, "Oh, there's Travis." And then I see K Pixel, and I'm like, "K..." And then I look over, and I see Keith Rabois.

    5. TFTim Ferriss54:17

       [laughs]

    6. CBCyan Banister54:18

       And I see he has a Pixel phone, and I'm like, "Oh, Keith Rabois, Pixel. Interesting." Keep in mind, their MAC addresses at the time were also in the clear. Like, you could track where these guys were-

    7. TFTim Ferriss54:27

       Yeah

    8. CBCyan Banister54:27

       ... if you were very clever. But then I see this name Garrett Langley, and I... it's a name I've never seen, so I go and Google search it.

    9. TFTim Ferriss54:34

       [laughs]

    10. CBCyan Banister54:35

        And Garrett Langley is the founder of Flock Security.

    11. TFTim Ferriss54:37

        [laughs]

    12. CBCyan Banister54:38

        And there's his mug picture of him, and he's in the current YC batch at the time. And we at Founders Fund had been thinking about some of the biggest opportunities, and one of the opportunities we were, we were considering was somebody needs to come up with some sort of neighborhood camera or neighborhood association or where people are all pitching in and agreeing to some rules around safety and some equipment and technology to enable that safety. And so I started reading about Flock, and I'm like, "We didn't think about OCRing license plates. We thought about cameras. This is a much better solution." So I messaged our associate at the time, John Luedige, who I think is now a partner, that I'd found this guy, and he's like, "Oh, you know, that's a company we're interested in." I said, "What should I do?" And he's like, "Just walk over there. See what happens." So I walked over, and I decided to play, I don't know, the magician card, if you will, and I looked at him and I said, "Garrett Langley?" And he said, "Yes." I said, "I'm Cyan Banister of Founders Fund. We'd like to bring you in for a meeting." It sounded very official.

    13. TFTim Ferriss55:39

        [laughs]

    14. CBCyan Banister55:41

        You know? And he starts-

    15. TFTim Ferriss55:42

        Yeah

    16. CBCyan Banister55:42

        ... looking around, and he's like... 'Cause YC, his batch hadn't demoed yet, and he hadn't seen me at YC.

    17. TFTim Ferriss55:48

        Yes. He's like, "How do you know who I am?"

    18. CBCyan Banister55:49

        "How do you know who I am?" He was, like, looking around, like, "How do you know?" And then it was killing him, and he finally asked me, he said, "I, I'm so sorry. I need to know how you know who I am." And I'm like, "Are you sure you wanna know?" And he's like, "Yeah." And I said, "Well, you tethered your phone to the Wi-Fi, and it says Garrett Langley's iPhone, and curiosity just got the best of me." And-

    19. TFTim Ferriss56:10

        [laughs]

    20. CBCyan Banister56:10

        ... we ended up getting the last allocation of that round and sharing the Series A with BedRock. It's now valued at over $6 billion. And I tell this story because one of the things that-

    21. TFTim Ferriss56:22

        [laughs]

    22. CBCyan Banister56:23

        ... I think makes me good at what I do and other people is identifying patterns and opportunities and striking when you see them. And for whatever reason, I am gifted with the ability to make these connections. So a lot of the best deals I've ever done have these interesting things in common, which is I see something, I put the pieces together, I'm like, oh, for example, Hint Water bottle caps is gonna get me in this deal. I had to think very quickly about that. But same thing here, it's just I didn't wait. I didn't email the guy. I decided to go be a creeper. And it ended up being funny.

    23. TFTim Ferriss57:03

        [laughs]

    24. CBCyan Banister57:04

        It ended up being totally funny.

11. 57:06 – 1:04:27

    GameCrush, activist investors, and lessons learned.

    1. TFTim Ferriss57:06

       Yeah, totally. All right, so I wanna do a post-game analysis on another deal of a slightly different variety, and this is GameCrush and lessons learned.

    2. CBCyan Banister57:17

       Ah, yes, GameCrush. Could have been Twitch.

    3. TFTim Ferriss57:20

       Could you explore this, if you would?

    4. CBCyan Banister57:22

       Yeah. GameCrush was a brilliant business, actually. And at the time... Let's put this in perspective. There was... MySpace was a thing still. Facebook came out and was sort of on the rise. Twitch didn't exist. Discord didn't exist. None of that stuff existed. There were webcam sites, and then there was a site I started called Zivity. And what I saw was really interesting because they brought women who were... mostly women, men also played, off of MySpace who were a little more provocative and wanted to play more provocative gaming. And so it was a way for you to pay to play games with girl gamers. And it was growing like crazy, and everything was fantastic, and then they started getting activist investors who wanted them to get rid of the more adult-in-nature content. This is very... This happens with company after company after company.

    5. TFTim Ferriss58:17

       Can you explain, just for folks, the activist investor, just for people who might be curious as to what that is?

    6. CBCyan Banister58:23

       An activist investor is someone who invests in a company and decides that they wanna play CEO or operator, and they start telling the founders and the employees what they should be doing with their company. And if you've structured your company correctly, you can take that advice and then tell them to pound sand. But if you haven't, you know, you're a little... The power struggle, the power dynamics are not in your favor, I'll just put it that way. And then there's people who, because people gave them money, they think they have to listen to them, but then they don't, and that was the situation.

    7. TFTim Ferriss58:54

       Mm-hmm. Got it. And for people who want a showcase, granted a slightly different species of activist investor, I assume you're talking about venture capitalists, maybe private equity guys. But if somebody wants a great documentary, watch Icon: The Restless Billionaire. If you wanna see what, like, h- super hardball activist investing looks like, you can check that out. Okay, so please continue. So they've gotten... They've got activist investor-

    8. CBCyan Banister59:19

       Yeah, an activist investor can fire you.

    9. TFTim Ferriss59:21

       Yeah.

    10. CBCyan Banister59:22

        That can happen, too.

    11. TFTim Ferriss59:23

        So they wanna basically remove the sex appeal and the fringier magic. Is that what's, what's happening?

    12. CBCyan Banister59:30

        Correct. They wanted to remove the sex appeal and what made this entire product special and the whole reason I invested it in the first place. They cannibalized it.

    13. TFTim Ferriss59:38

        Mm-hmm.

    14. CBCyan Banister59:38

        You know? And so after that, Twitch took off, but they didn't have-

    15. TFTim Ferriss59:44

        Mm-hmm

    16. CBCyan Banister59:44

        ... the right tools or the right anything to be a Twitch. And they had all these amazing girl scr- streamers, which just jumped ship as soon as they could go someplace where they could actually show more than what GameCrush was allowing.

    17. TFTim Ferriss59:57

        What were the rules? What were the constraints that the activist investors either applied themselves or convinced the founders to apply? Like, how did it change?

    18. CBCyan Banister1:00:07

        The streamers couldn't be in various states of undress. They couldn't even be sexy. They couldn't be in bikinis. They wanted it to be where technically, I guess, younger people could get on, but it was never meant to be for kids. It was supposed to be for adults, adults with adults. And it just got weird because they wanted to make a very mainstream product. They wanted to be Twitch. They were onto something. It's just that the product was never, ever designed to be that.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:00:35

        Mm-hmm.

    20. CBCyan Banister1:00:36

        And I think if they'd stuck to that niche, they would've done quite well, incredibly well, as a matter of fact, because they could have expanded later into something had they completely monopolized that audience, because that's what drove people ultimately at the end of the day to watch Twitch-

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:00:53

        Mm-hmm

    22. CBCyan Banister1:00:54

        ... is these girl streamers.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:00:56

        Yeah. That's, I mean, that's like [chuckles] Internet 101, right, on some level for so many, so many different things. So- Let me come back to GameCrush and ask, and maybe this is a dead end, but looking back with hindsight 20/20, were there other warning signs prior to the death knell? Were there other things that you saw that maybe you overlooked, or things that you observed where you're like, "That, next time I'm gonna pay more attention to that"?

    24. CBCyan Banister1:01:26

        Yeah, this was early in my investment career, actually, and so I was learning a lot of lessons from that particular company. The check size that I wrote was rather large for the time. I think it was like 250K, which was pretty big.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:01:38

        Yeah.

    26. CBCyan Banister1:01:38

        And the warning signs that I saw were how disorganized the company was after we did the first closing of that round. They invited us to a dinner, in which I brought Byron Singerman and a few other people, and it was really clear that there was just leadership issues. But by that point, we'd already committed capital. You're not gonna change your mind. You can't withdraw anyway.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:02:03

        What kind of leadership issues?

    28. CBCyan Banister1:02:04

        It was unclear who was the CEO.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:02:07

        I see. So there were multiple founders, and it just-

    30. CBCyan Banister1:02:10

        Yeah, multiple founders, always a recipe for disaster, you know. And they were putting forth someone as the CEO, but it was really clear that he was only the CEO just for the fundraise, and after the fundraise, it was a bit of a shell game. And I've seen this happen. I learned this interestingly with another company, HQ Trivia, which would, I would argue is a much bigger disaster and failure.
12. 1:04:27 – 1:07:41

    Sales lessons from the street.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:04:27

       I have a question going back to the, the hemp jewelry. I don't wanna force a narrative on your story that is not true, but when you're telling me about some of the deals you've sourced, and I'm sure this applies to many others, there's a certain level of proactivity and, like, chutzpah in approaching people, cold approaches, right? Just not seemingly being overly concerned or over, like, cogitating on just being a creeper, I think, as you put it, or-

    2. CBCyan Banister1:05:01

       Yeah

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:05:02

       ... going for the direct contact pretty quickly. Does that come in part from the kinda training on the street of making these approaches to tables, making approaches to different folks, asking for things? Or were you out of the box seemingly programmed to be that way?

    4. CBCyan Banister1:05:20

       I think being homeless taught me that a lot of things that people do are suggestions. When I was homeless and I was selling necklaces, one, I learned about rejection, but before I did the necklaces, I also had a weird job at Greenpeace for a period of time where I was a phone canvasser, and I lied about my age, and they allowed me to work there.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:05:46

       [laughs]

    6. CBCyan Banister1:05:46

       So that was another funny, weird job I had. But I also did telemarketing as well, so I did a lot of telemarketing when I was 17, 18, and then of course tech support, dial-up tech support was a thing that I did for a while. So I spent a lot of time being rejected and being on the phone and being abused in customer service. And I don't believe in no until it's the final no, and I also think that when you're an investor, people, and especially if you start to get good at it, people wanna hear from you, you know, and they want the opportunity for you to invest in them. I just never seen that anything is a barrier. To me, it's like a sport. It's a game.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:06:28

       Mm-hmm.

    8. CBCyan Banister1:06:29

       Not that money's a game, but getting into the deal and winning the deal to me is a sport.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:06:34

       You're saying that, and I'm paraphrasing here, but things that people say are suggestions.

    10. CBCyan Banister1:06:40

        Yes.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:06:40

        Something like that? What does that mean?

    12. CBCyan Banister1:06:42

        We apply a lot of our own perception to everything that everyone says around us. We make up stories that are fiction, and, you know, a lot of what people suffer with today are these stories, these narratives that we tell ourselves and one another, and I've just always felt like that's something that someone said right now. It's not a hard no. You know when you hear a hard no. I know the difference between an objection, and I just have a rebuttal for it. Versus a hard no. And until it's a hard no, there's wiggle room to get something done.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:07:16

        Mm.

    14. CBCyan Banister1:07:17

        You know? And so I- I've just always felt this, and it's been-- It's interesting that you honed in on it, but it's definitely been a guiding principle in my life, which is, don't give up. You know, just try different approaches. Maybe you didn't ask the right way, or maybe you didn't give the right incentives, or maybe it was Monday and they're in a bad mood.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:07:38

        On Mondays. [laughs]

    16. CBCyan Banister1:07:39

        You know? Exactly. Fuck Mondays.

13. 1:07:41 – 1:13:27

    A mindful approach to questioning narratives.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:07:41

       [laughs]

    2. CBCyan Banister1:07:41

       But, you know, all of these things are just things that we make up truths.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:07:45

       Mm-hmm.

    4. CBCyan Banister1:07:46

       But what if they're not true? So you've got to always question these narratives that you tell yourself and that other people are telling you.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:07:53

       How do you do that? I mean, is, is it just an instinct at this point, or is there some systematic way that you do that for yourself?

    6. CBCyan Banister1:08:01

       I meditate a lot, and I practice mindfulness as often as possible, and I try to remind myself to be conscious whenever I can. And being conscious to me is being aware and present and being here now, and a lot of times you'll hear that and it doesn't really mean a whole lot-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:08:20

       Mm

    8. CBCyan Banister1:08:20

       ... until you've practiced mindfulness for a period of time and you start to realize what now is. And so anything that I tell you happened, it's gone. You can't go back to it. I can't do it again. It's a fiction that becomes a, you know, something in my mind that people put too much weight on that fiction. And I'm not saying that nothing matters. A lot of things matter, but the human mind and the ego is so capable of spinning up fictions and creating narratives that we hold as truths to the point where it leads people to paralysis.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:09:00

       Mm-hmm.

    10. CBCyan Banister1:09:01

        The amount of times... So I'm at a convention right now, that I've heard people apologize to each other for saying something rude in the past, and the other person not even remembering it.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:09:08

        [laughs]

    12. CBCyan Banister1:09:09

        And I'm thinking about how this poor person carried around that trauma with them for how long? I've heard it twice now. 'Cause right now there's this something happening in the world, that I'm really excited about though, is that people are starting to apologize-

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:09:22

        Mm

    14. CBCyan Banister1:09:23

        ... and starting to own being wrong for the first time in a long time. And I think one of the things that I am hyper accountable, so I take responsibility for my every action, and ideally my every thought. And that's really hard for a lot of people because, you know, it's easy to be a victim. It's easy to, to say that things happen to you or the circum... You know, I easily could have rolled over and said, "I was homeless. Woe is me. I can't succeed in life." And instead I was like, "Nah, game is just, you know, this life is just a big old game, and, and we've gotta play it, and a lot of it is cosplay and suggestions."

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:10:07

        [laughs]

    16. CBCyan Banister1:10:08

        When I was younger, I saw these people dress up in their suits, and you just gotta realize they're grown children dressing up in suits adulting. You know?

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:10:15

        Mm-hmm.

    18. CBCyan Banister1:10:16

        It's a costume.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:10:17

        [laughs]

    20. CBCyan Banister1:10:19

        So I look at everybody walking around in their costumes with the narratives and the stories they're telling themselves, and, and I like to analyze it, and I like to think about it a lot.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:10:28

        Hmm. Now, I think it's worth, if you're open to it, just mentioning where you are. So what is this conference? What is it?

    22. CBCyan Banister1:10:34

        So I'm at HereticCon. It is put on by my alumni at Founders Fund.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:10:38

        When you say your alumni, you mean portfolio company folks?

    24. CBCyan Banister1:10:41

        No, the people I invested with. So I was a partner at Founders Fund for four years.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:10:45

        I got it. Got it. Got it. The, the other GPs, the general partners.

    26. CBCyan Banister1:10:48

        Yeah, so the other GPs.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:10:49

        Yeah.

    28. CBCyan Banister1:10:49

        And some of the founders I've invested in are here. Endural, Palmer Luckey is here, and I invested in Endural.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:10:55

        Mm-hmm.

    30. CBCyan Banister1:10:55

        And there's a few others. There's TrueMed that's here. Mindbloom, which we invested in-
14. 1:13:27 – 1:23:09

    The pre-OnlyFans story of Zivity.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:13:27

       You mentioned a, a company a while back that I, I do wanna touch on, and that is Zivity. So, [laughs] um, I, [laughs] I mean, I'm reading here, right? The [laughs] OnlyFans before OnlyFans. I do like the General Magic of pornography [laughs] for people-

    2. CBCyan Banister1:13:46

       Yes

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:13:46

       ... for require a lot of background on General Magic, but people can look it up. Actually, I had Tony Fadell on the podcast, so people can, can dig into that to get a whole b- a bunch of background there. But why Zivity, and then what happened and what did you learn from it?

    4. CBCyan Banister1:14:03

       Well, can I go back to the very beginning of when I discovered my very first porn?

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:14:07

       Of course. How could I say no to that? Yeah.

    6. CBCyan Banister1:14:10

       Yeah, I mean, I think it goes back to that. So it's a great story.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:14:12

       [laughs]

    8. CBCyan Banister1:14:12

       But I got a summer job. I wanna say I was 12, 11, 12.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:14:18

       Mm-hmm.

    10. CBCyan Banister1:14:19

        And I know this is gonna sound disturbing, but it's, it's really not. I got a job-

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:14:24

        [laughs]

    12. CBCyan Banister1:14:24

        ... watching a wolf dog-

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:14:25

        [laughs] Okay

    14. CBCyan Banister1:14:26

        ... which is basically a wolf. And the guy that ... You don't own a wolf. Like, they're very, very wild and untamable creatures. I don't know if you've been to a wolf sanctuary, but you, you can't live with them.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:14:37

        Yeah, I've been around, I've been around wolves, yeah.

    16. CBCyan Banister1:14:39

        Yeah, so you know. And this guy said, "Okay, all you have to do is come over to my house. You open the door, you go to the freezer, you get out a steak, you microwave the steak, and you crack an egg on it, and you leave it in the doorframe, and Wolfie will just show up." And I was like, "Okay, I could do this," you know, and it was a great summer gig.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:14:55

        [laughs] I love that somebody, some guy, right, is like, [laughs] "You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna hire an 11-year-old, and then leave this 11-year-old alone with this wolf dog [laughs] -

    18. CBCyan Banister1:15:06

        Yeah

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:15:07

        ... just putting steak in the doorway." [laughs] This is a great idea.

    20. CBCyan Banister1:15:10

        Exactly. Exactly.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:15:11

        Okay. Please continue. [laughs]

    22. CBCyan Banister1:15:12

        This dog shows up, and this dog is so big, and I'm so small. And-

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:15:18

        [laughs]

    24. CBCyan Banister1:15:19

        ... they have these fierce-looking eyes.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:15:21

        Yeah.

    26. CBCyan Banister1:15:22

        And this thing, I'm like, "This thing could eat me." But she would come in, and she would eat the steak, and she would roam around his apartment, and stare at me, and then she would, you know, do her thing, and then eventually leave.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:15:34

        Mm-hmm.

    28. CBCyan Banister1:15:34

        And then I could lock up and then go.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:15:36

        [laughs]

    30. CBCyan Banister1:15:36

        But Wolfie didn't come ... She doesn't work on a schedule.
15. 1:23:09 – 1:27:27

    Views on sex and relationships.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:23:09

       I, I hesitate to ask this question, but I'm so curious because you're, you are very good at embracing your weird self and you're very forthright in your opinions and you have controversial, or I should say, uh, maybe uncommon takes on things like minimum wage, what you said earlier, for instance, as one of many examples. So feel free to take this question wherever you wanna go, or if it's just a bad question, we can abandon it, but how do you relate to sex? Like, how do you think about sex and sexuality? It's such a broad question, but I, I feel like it would be neglectful of me not to ask.

    2. CBCyan Banister1:23:48

       Yeah, I love this question because we don't talk about it enough, to be honest with you, and it's, you know, along with eating and pooping and everything else that we do, sex is up there. I mean, it's how we have babies and how we express our love and how we connect with people and we don't... It's so stigmatized, and I don't think it should be. But I became sexually active when I was 15, despite finding the pornography and everything like that. It was, uh, later in my teenage years, and I was so disappointed. I thought, "Why did everybody make movies and write poetry and build the Taj Mahal for something so awful?" And I had a very negative view of sex, and so negative that I started experimenting on boys. And I, this is maybe terrible, but this is what I did, is I was determined to find that one connection that was worthy of writing a poem for. You know, there has to be somebody. There has to be something. And it just didn't work. Like, I, I would try different things. I would try different scenarios. I was like, "Well, maybe I need to be in the, the racquetball court," or, "I need to be over here or there." It, I thought it was situational. And, and then eventually, I developed feelings for somebody, and I didn't realize that that was the missing ingredient. I was like, "Wow, feelings for someone else. That's a concept." And I broke up with this guy immediately. So it was my first love, and it was a communist. Interestingly, he still is a communist. He has the hammer and sickle on his arm and everything, and I still love him to this day, and we're still friends. But I saw myself worrying about him, like where he was, what he was wearing, did he eat, has he slept? I started asking myself all these questions that were so weird, and I just didn't have time for them.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:25:39

       Mm-hmm.

    4. CBCyan Banister1:25:40

       I had to survive, and when you have to survive, you can't worry about someone else's wellbeing 'cause you're drowning yourself. Like, you can't worry about someone else drowning. You gotta save... You gotta put your, your oxygen mask on first. So I broke up with him and, and left, and I put him in a little snow globe. I like to call it a snow globe of emotion because it taught me that that was possible, that someday I could love someone, and maybe that person would love me back. But I didn't have time for it then. So when I got into tech, I did date, and I had some long-term relationships, and then obviously there was the homeless relationship with Cuddles that lasted a long time. And my relationship to sex was just kind of like, it's fun, and it's just something you do, but it, it was never earth-shattering. I never wanted to build a Taj Mahal, and that was my bar. I was like, that guy, that woman must have been something, you know, to, to erect a monument to her that is just so grand. Like, she must have been very, very good in bed is what I thought.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:26:48

       [laughs]

    6. CBCyan Banister1:26:49

       Right? So I got my hands on books, magazines, Cosmo, everything, and it wasn't until probably my mid-20s that my relationships to sex changed and I started having a much more positive outlook on it and enjoying it, but it took some time because in the beginning I just thought, "Why on earth? How did the human species survive? This is just awful." 'Cause when you're young you don't really know what you're doing.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:27:20

       [laughs] Yeah, no. [laughs]

    8. CBCyan Banister1:27:24

       But when you get older, if you're lucky and you find the right partner, then

16. 1:27:27 – 1:44:18

    Magic glasses, esoteric rabbit holes, and rolling the dice.

    1. CBCyan Banister1:27:27

       you do.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:27:28

       So I'm gonna switch gears, and I wanna talk about rolling the dice, but not metaphorically, literally.

    3. CBCyan Banister1:27:35

       Literally.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:27:36

       [laughs] I'll just let you take it from there because I might wanna spend quite a bit of time on this. [laughs]

    5. CBCyan Banister1:27:42

       Okay. Okay. Dice rolling is a lot of fun.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:27:45

       How did this even come up? Yeah, how did this even start?

    7. CBCyan Banister1:27:48

       Yeah, it came up during the pandemic. So during the pandemic, the world was kind of divided into two camps. There was the people that were first responders, critical responders, critical infrastructure for the country who had to continue to go to work, so they were in their own kind of suffering and their own kind of experience of the pandemic. And then there was people who were forced to pause, and I was one of the forced to pause people. And so I started reading all of this early 1920s esoteric philosophy, and-

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:28:19

       [laughs] Hold on, hold on

    9. CBCyan Banister1:28:20

       ... Yeah

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:28:20

        How the fuck does that happen? [laughs] Like, why, why that?

    11. CBCyan Banister1:28:24

        Gosh, I don't even know where to jump off here to tell... I go in rabbit holes, and-

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:28:29

        Mm-hmm

    13. CBCyan Banister1:28:29

        ... I go deep down these rabbit holes-

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:28:31

        [laughs]

    15. CBCyan Banister1:28:31

        ... until I'm satisfied, and then I go down another one, another one, another one. And this particular one gripped me because I was interested in mysticism, and I started reading works by Aleister Crowley-

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:28:44

        Oh. [laughs]

    17. CBCyan Banister1:28:44

        ... which led me, which I'm sure you're familiar with him, which led me to this weird publication that he published, which also led me to a weird short story called The Magic Glasses by Frank, hmm, I forget his last name. It'll come to me later.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:29:01

        I'll find it.

    19. CBCyan Banister1:29:02

        It's really, really great. I'm making a movie based off of this short story, so it's actually a really great story.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:29:09

        Frank Harris?

    21. CBCyan Banister1:29:10

        Frank Harris, yes.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:29:11

        Mm-hmm.

    23. CBCyan Banister1:29:11

        So I highly recommend reading this story. It's fantastic. The rest of Frank Harris' stuff is a little more challenging. So he was a cowboy who at the age of 14 basically ran away from home, and the in vogue thing when you ran away from home in Europe was you ran off to America. Like, that was your big F you.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:29:32

        Yeah.

    25. CBCyan Banister1:29:32

        It's like, "I'm gonna go get on a ship, and you'll never see me again."

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:29:35

        Mm-hmm.

    27. CBCyan Banister1:29:35

        So he ran off to America. He ended up falling into some amazing intellectual groups of writers, and he wrote one of the smuttiest books of the time called My Life and Loves, which was banned worldwide.

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:29:47

        [laughs]

    29. CBCyan Banister1:29:47

        And it was an account of every single sexual encounter that this guy had.

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:29:51

        [laughs]
17. 1:44:18 – 2:02:10

    How Aleister Crowley and Bill Murray paved a path to ex-atheism.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:44:18

       so you said you were religious about it, so religiously random. You mentioned Pendula, who I've had on the podcast. Brilliant guy, incredible weight loss story too.

    2. CBCyan Banister1:44:27

       Oh, yeah. The potato diet.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:44:29

       I think fair to describe as a militant atheist.

    4. CBCyan Banister1:44:33

       Yes.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:44:33

       I think that's a fair, a fair description. When you were talking about being saved on the side of the road so long ago in this conversation, I want to say the wording you used was, "At the time I didn't believe in God," because-

    6. CBCyan Banister1:44:49

       Yes

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:44:50

       ... this driver brought up God. Now, to me that implies there might have been a change. Has there been a change?

    8. CBCyan Banister1:44:57

       There has, and interestingly, I was so nervous to call Penn and tell him that I was no longer an atheist, and I thought-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:45:04

       [laughs]

    10. CBCyan Banister1:45:05

        I didn't know what to expect. It was like-

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:45:06

        Coming out of the closet [laughs] to Penn

    12. CBCyan Banister1:45:08

        ... it's coming out of the closet. And he was so sweet about it. He said, "Who cares?"

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:45:14

        Oh, amazing. That's so nice to hear.

    14. CBCyan Banister1:45:16

        He's like, "You're a good person and you're a kind person, and if you're a little woo woo, whatever."

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:45:22

        Mm-hmm.

    16. CBCyan Banister1:45:23

        He's like, "I'd rather be around a good person who's woo woo than an unkind person who's atheist, so..."

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:45:28

        Hmm.

    18. CBCyan Banister1:45:29

        And he also has seen, if you look at pictures of me before my spiritual change and after, night and day. I am healthier, I look younger, I have more energy, I'm happier. Everything has been better since I became a spiritual person. When I was an atheist, everything was worse and I had a stroke.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:45:51

        Oh, okay. We're gonna come back to the stroke. What catalyzed the spiritual change?

    20. CBCyan Banister1:45:58

        Well, part of it was this weird rabbit hole I went down during the pandemic of Aleister Crowley and all of these guys.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:46:04

        For people, just because you've invoked the name Aleister Crowley a few times, could you just brief, doesn't have to be super factual detail, but who is this person you've, you've referred to a number of times? And then how, how on earth, I mean [laughs] does that lead to the spiritual change?

    22. CBCyan Banister1:46:21

        He's an occultist leader-

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:46:23

        Yeah

    24. CBCyan Banister1:46:23

        ... who practiced what you might consider witchcraft or magic, "magic."

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:46:31

        Yeah.

    26. CBCyan Banister1:46:32

        I said magic in quotes because obviously there's gonna be atheists and people that don't believe that what Aleister Crowley does is, or did, was real. He had a very big following, and then a lot of fractures that came out of those followings of people who-

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:46:46

        Massively popular

    28. CBCyan Banister1:46:47

        Massively popular guy

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:46:47

        ... and massively controversial.

    30. CBCyan Banister1:46:50

        He was controversial because he also showed up in weird outfits.
18. 2:02:10 – 2:04:34

    Cyan's billboard.

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:02:10

       Mm. If you could put something, metaphorically speaking, on a billboard, message, quote, anything to impart or display, could be an image, somebody else's quote, to great, great masses of people, what might it be?

    2. CBCyan Banister2:02:31

       It's the same concept that was explored in The Matrix and in, and lots of different fiction, is just to wake up. Wake up. You know, if you see it enough times, maybe you'll understand what it means. Like, if you wake up out of bed and you're awake, you think you're awake, but you're actually not, you're in a form of sleep, and that sleep is what's called your mechanical automaton sort of actions that you take that are in response to what's being thrown at you in the world, what nature gave to you and what nurture handed to you, and you just accept it. And so you're just sleepwalking through life, and the moment you take the reins and you become the narrator of your own story, and sometimes the captain, then that's when it's a transformational change.

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:03:20

       Hmm. Dig it.

    4. CBCyan Banister2:03:23

       And that ties back into dice rolling, right? Like-

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:03:25

       Mm-hmm

    6. CBCyan Banister2:03:25

       ... dice rolling is a way to stay awake.

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:03:28

       Yeah.

    8. CBCyan Banister2:03:28

       Staying awake and staying conscious and staying present is a practice that you must practice every day, and if you don't, then you just have to accept the cookie falls how it crumbles or how... What are, what are some cliches?

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:03:41

       [laughs] Accept how the cookie crumbles.

    10. CBCyan Banister2:03:43

        Just accept how the cookie crumbles. But you could introduce a little more random. You could go to work dressed as SpongeBob SquarePants, as I like to say, but people don't.

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:03:53

        [laughs]

    12. CBCyan Banister2:03:54

        There's a lot of things you could be doing that you're not doing.

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:03:57

        Mm-hmm.

    14. CBCyan Banister2:03:58

        Another movie that actually really helped me in my life was the movie American Beauty with Kevin Spacey, and I was probably in my early 20s when that came out, and I came out of the theater and I sat on the floor and I said, "My life is a broken record. I'm stuck in a groove that I can't seem to get out of. I'm gonna break up with my boyfriend and switch my job." And the movie inspired that. You know, art has a way of being at the right place at the right time for you.

    15. TFTim Ferriss2:04:25

        Mm-hmm.

    16. CBCyan Banister2:04:26

        And sometimes you really do need to switch things up, and you need to get out of your groove because you're your own worst nightmare.

19. 2:04:34 – 2:08:38

    Enduring a stroke and its aftermath.

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:04:34

       How did you end up, and maybe you don't know, but how did you experience a stroke?

    2. CBCyan Banister2:04:40

       Hmm.

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:04:41

       And what effect did that have on you?

    4. CBCyan Banister2:04:46

       Yeah. I was at Founders Fund when it happened, and I experienced it as the worst headache of my life. It was a migraine. On a scale of one to 10, it was like a 15. It was like the worst headache you could possibly have, and it progressively got worse every day, and the doctors just treated it as a migraine because I was young. When you're young and you're experiencing a stroke, it doesn't make a lot of sense to people, and so they start going down this decision tree and they're like, "It obviously has to be either a cluster headache or a migraine or something like that." And so I was treated for a migraine. I went to the ER. Again, they treated me for a migraine, didn't give me a CT scan, and eventually I started seeing double. I started falling. I always like to say you don't wanna actually feel what gravity feels like, 'cause there's falling and you have resistance, and then there's falling with no resistance, and falling with no resistance is really spooky. And so you're standing and then you're down. It's just like there's nothing to keep you up. And so that started happening to me, and I went to a, a second ER and they did a... I had to wait in the ER for six hours, but eventually, again, magical woman came over and rubbed my leg and she said, "I think you're having a stroke." 'Cause n- at this point, nobody knew what was wrong with me. And she raised the alarm bell and then suddenly I was put in a CT scanner and they discovered that I, I had what's called a, a DVST, which is a deep venous sinus thrombosis, which is clotting throughout the entire center of my brain and down my jugular, uh, my right jugular.

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:06:23

       Mm.

    6. CBCyan Banister2:06:23

       And I was moments away from death by the time they found it. And that definitely helped kick me off on this quest because when you're in a hospital for a couple of weeks, which I was, and you come outside, the very first thing that hits you is air. Like that first breath of air. I mean, there's air in a hospital, but there's really no fresh air, and suddenly you realize that the most important thing in the world is not what you thought it was. It puts everything in perspective. It's like, okay, first it's air, then it was the sun on my face, which brought me to my knees. Like, I started bawling, 'cause what if I never, ever got to experience the sun again? You get really grateful and filled with gratitude for everything. But we're human beings. We love novelty. You go back to sleep. So I had a deep appreciation for life, but as soon as I was walking again and I was somewhat normal again, I started living the same way again, and I knew that if I kept living that way, I would die.

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:07:27

       What do you mean by that?

    8. CBCyan Banister2:07:28

       It was really clear that I had put myself in this position.

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:07:32

       Oh, die physically, you mean?

    10. CBCyan Banister2:07:33

        Yeah. I put myself in this position through avoiding all my suffering, avoiding my trauma, working through it, working as hard as I could. Avoidance, avoidance, avoidance, avoidance. And then it came clear that I had to have some kind of therapy. I had to do something because I couldn't keep running away from this ghost of a mother. And I had to find something that worked, and talking to therapists never worked. Psilocybin worked. Psilocybin helped a lot. I did a couple of hero doses of psilocybin that, that taught me quite a bit about myself, and they were super helpful. IFS, I started looking into integrated family systems, and that helped a lot. But really, it was meditation and philosophy that got me over the line. Whatever works, man. Like-

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:08:21

        Mm-hmm

    12. CBCyan Banister2:08:21

        ... just go out and really study yourself and know yourself. Like, know thyself is an important mantra for a reason because I do honestly believe we're in school, and when you start realizing, oh, I'm in a school and all of these hard knocks in life are just lessons, you think about them very differently.

20. 2:08:38 – 2:18:21

    Meditation, throat-singing, and philosophy.

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:08:38

       Who would your go-to philosophers be who helped you in that period, in those early chapters of this, let's call it awakening? And then what type of meditation do you practice? What does it look like? You can tackle those in either order.

    2. CBCyan Banister2:08:56

       So I tried all sorts of different types of meditation apps, and none of them really stuck with me. I would get hung up on people's voices.

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:09:04

       Mm-hmm.

    4. CBCyan Banister2:09:05

       And I would always criticiz- you know, there's a critic inside of us, and I would criticize everything. So somebody turned me on to Tibetan throat singing, and that's what did it.

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:09:18

       Okay. Did not see that coming. So are you then the one singing, or are you listening to Tibetan throat singing?

    6. CBCyan Banister2:09:23

       Both. I do both.

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:09:24

       All right.

    8. CBCyan Banister2:09:25

       So I chant along with the chants. I moan along with the moaning to the best of my ability. I listen, and I don't do the bead counting.

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:09:39

       Mm-hmm.

    10. CBCyan Banister2:09:40

        You know, I, I haven't found that necessary.

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:09:42

        How did you find Tibetan throat singing? Was someone like, "You know what? I know you've tried everything, but try one more thing"?

    12. CBCyan Banister2:09:48

        Again, embracing random, you know. Sometimes the universe gives you, if you're paying attention, exactly what you need. So a friend of mine went to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, and they had some Tibetan throat singers there, and he brought me back a necklace.

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:10:01

        Hmm.

    14. CBCyan Banister2:10:01

        And he said, "Look at this necklace," and it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen, and I was like, "Well, I'm gonna go check these guys out." And it was a huge unlock.

    15. TFTim Ferriss2:10:09

        [laughs]

    16. CBCyan Banister2:10:10

        Huge. And-

    17. TFTim Ferriss2:10:11

        Mm-hmm

    18. CBCyan Banister2:10:12

        ... but again, your mileage may vary. Like, try different things and see. I think the biggest mistake I made with meditation was trying to treat it like a sport or it was something that I had to judge myself. I mean, you're approaching it all wrong if you're entering meditation, I think, that way. There are different kinds of meditation, some that even allow and permit thoughts to flow freely, and you're supposed to look at them and pay attention to them, and then there's types of meditations where you're supposed to clear your mind. I think people get really scared of meditation because they think of a blank canvas, a blank mind, and that really scares them and frightens them. And once I got over that and I started realizing that's not the point of it, at least it wasn't for me, I can now meditate for six hours at a time.

    19. TFTim Ferriss2:10:58

        Oh my God. [laughs]

    20. CBCyan Banister2:11:00

        Yeah.

    21. TFTim Ferriss2:11:00

        Yeah. I'm doing my 10 minutes twice a day. I'm pretty happy with myself for now. [laughs]

    22. CBCyan Banister2:11:04

        Yeah, I mean, my coworkers laugh at me 'cause they'll take me some place and I can sit still for an abnormal amount of time, and I think that's when you process all of the inputs that are being thrown at us. How you can synthesize the information that's been handed to you or you've encountered is by those moments of stillness. And so even if it's 10 minutes a day, it's something.

    23. TFTim Ferriss2:11:24

        Mm-hmm.

    24. CBCyan Banister2:11:25

        You know, it, it's not about length of time or anything. It's about the effort.

    25. TFTim Ferriss2:11:29

        Yeah, it's not, it's not the size that matters. [laughs] It's-

    26. CBCyan Banister2:11:31

        Yeah, it's not the size that matters. [laughs]

    27. TFTim Ferriss2:11:33

        So I will say also that whether it's with exercise or meditation, any new habit or something you're trying to build as part of your new programming, the difference between doing nothing and something is the biggest zero to one, right? That's the unlock. So if you're going from not exercising to exercising, it's like, okay, don't set yourself up for failure making the pass-fail an hour a day. Do 10 pushups every other day. Start there. Or-

    28. CBCyan Banister2:12:02

        Mm-hmm

    29. TFTim Ferriss2:12:03

        ... five blocks. Same with meditation. The difference between zero and 10 minutes once a day or twice a day is, is, in terms of quality of life for me, huge, enormous, and if I want to add more time, great, but what I shouldn't do is set the pass-fail at an hour a day and then when I don't have an hour to not meditate. Just reduce the scale, right? Reduce the scope. What about philosophers? Any, any folks you might point people to?

    30. CBCyan Banister2:12:29

        I'm a big fan of Gurdjieff. He's not for everybody, and he's very confusing.
21. 2:18:21 – 2:42:03

    The Boston spiritual experience and duck boat baptism.

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:18:21

       and fascinated.

    2. CBCyan Banister2:18:21

       Wanted to tell you about a spiritual experience I had that you won't believe.

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:18:25

       Oh. Oh, yes. Of course.

    4. CBCyan Banister2:18:27

       So after I had this awakening, I started getting this really weird vision of an Irish man, and it was like a cartoonish Irish man, and it was hijacking me every moment. I couldn't think about anything else.

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:18:39

       It was like Lucky Charms kind of like-

    6. CBCyan Banister2:18:40

       Yeah, like the guy going like this, you know? Like with his fist in the air, and he's like a fighting Irish man. He's a caricature of an Irish man.

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:18:47

       Yeah?

    8. CBCyan Banister2:18:47

       And I was like, "I do not know what this means, but I'm going to go do something about it." And so I went to my husband and I said ... And I noticed that the Celtics were playing the Warriors, and it was the finals in Boston. And so I made the excuse, because it was the only Irish thing I could think of at the time.

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:19:07

       [laughs]

    10. CBCyan Banister2:19:07

        And I went to my husband and I said, "I wanna go to the Celtics game." And he was like, "What is wrong with you? You hate basketball. That makes no sense." And I said, "I know. It makes no sense, but I'm getting this weird sign that I need to go to the Celtics game." So he bought me the ticket. I didn't even choose the ticket. And I had a knowing, I'm gonna call it a voice, which makes people worried sometimes. They're like, "Oh, you're hearing voices. I don't wanna get locked up." But I have a knowing, I'm just gonna call it a knowing, that basically told me that I didn't need to bring anything with me to Boston, that everything would be given to me. All I had to do was bring my wallet and my ID and just show up. So my husband brought me the ticket to the game, and I show up, and I go into the arena early 'cause I have a little bit of agoraphobia. I'm a introvert. And so now they don't call them hallways at sporting arenas. They call them portals. So I had to find my portal.

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:20:02

        That's fancy.

    12. CBCyan Banister2:20:03

        And go through my portal, which is already weird in sci-fi anyway. You're in a portal.

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:20:06

        [laughs]

    14. CBCyan Banister2:20:08

        I go and find my seat, and the, the whole arena's covered in chairs covered with green shirts. And I'm disoriented. I call my husband, I'm freaking out. He's like, "Look, you chose this adventure. You're in it. Good luck."

    15. TFTim Ferriss2:20:20

        [laughs]

    16. CBCyan Banister2:20:20

        And he hung up on me. I was like, "Ah." So I see down this aisle that there's one chair that doesn't have a shirt on it. So I said, "I'm gonna go down to that chair, and I'm gonna use that number as my reference point, and then I'm gonna work out from there where my seat is."

    17. TFTim Ferriss2:20:32

        [laughs]

    18. CBCyan Banister2:20:33

        I get to the chair, and it's mine.

    19. TFTim Ferriss2:20:35

        [laughs]

    20. CBCyan Banister2:20:36

        And I look around the whole arena, and there's not a single other chair that doesn't have a shirt. And I was like, "Okay, that's a weird start to this trip. By itself means nothing." And all of a sudden this song comes on over the loudspeakers, and usually at a basketball game they play a song for 20 seconds, but this time they played this whole song, and it was Phil Collins, I Can Feel It in the Air Tonight.

    21. TFTim Ferriss2:20:59

        [laughs]

    22. CBCyan Banister2:21:01

        And I had this weird superstition as a little girl that when that song came on it was gonna be a good night.

    23. TFTim Ferriss2:21:08

        Yeah.

    24. CBCyan Banister2:21:08

        It's a weird superstition. It's just everything's gonna be all right-

    25. TFTim Ferriss2:21:10

        Mm

    26. CBCyan Banister2:21:10

        ... 'cause Phil Collins is here.

    27. TFTim Ferriss2:21:11

        [laughs]

    28. CBCyan Banister2:21:12

        And he sings that song, and it comes on the airwaves, and it's just everything's gonna be okay. And it was in that moment, 'cause I'm, keep in mind I'm having this kundalini whatever going on with me-

    29. TFTim Ferriss2:21:20

        [laughs]

    30. CBCyan Banister2:21:21

        ... that I realized that I wasn't completely without superstition, I wasn't completely without belief, 'cause I still believed in Phil Collins.

Episode duration: 2:47:30