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

it's the same concept that was explored in The Matrix and in in lots of different Fiction it's 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 Reign and you become the narrator of your own story and sometimes the captain then that's when it's a transformational change [Music] hello boys and girls ladies and germs this is Tim Ferris welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris 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 and early stage Venture Capital

firm she was also an early investor in a few names you might recognize Uber SpaceX Deep Mind flexport affirm and has invested in more than 100 companies she was most recently at Founders fund I was actually an LP in Founders fund way back in the day a top tier Fund in San Francisco you can subscribe to cyan substack uglyduckling dos substack do.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 at scientist one of the best handles I've seen c y

a n t i s t scian nice to see you and good to see you all right so we just listed off I'm using the Royal Wii 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 Aon at age7 things along these lines could you take us back to homelessness in your life and how that factors in 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 eth or nth grade education and the reason for this is due to circumstances out 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 young boy so to dive into a couple of things you mentioned and if you don't want to cover any of this we don't need to but the first is I suppose 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 well first of all I am white and so

being on a reservation I was a minority and it gave me a really unique perspective around being a minority when I was a kid I thought I was an albino Indian I just thought that I'd lost my melanin and the other kids treated me the same because when you're a child and you're small you don't know anything about racism you don't know anything about being another 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 their kids and I can only suspect that they learned this at home you know or they witnessed it someplace else because it certainly was not something they were born with 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 an 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 and 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 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'll see that people speak the way I speak 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 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 going to have a lot of questions about that before I get there this is again referring to something you mentioned 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 so my sister was removed first but I was told a lie about her removal I was told that she ran away from home home and it was right after my brother was born we went out trick-or-treating and my child mind remembers it is 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 and I was expected to just roll with it and when I asked where she was I was told she doesn't want to 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 going to hurt the new baby I don't know where these claims came from that your sister would harm the new 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 3

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 perger ourselves in court and I really feel that this is when my mother and I completely fell out I refus 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 in the next 48 hours from the home and she lost custody of him now why she didn't lose custody of me I Still Remains a mystery

because I was the laugh child in the house and that made me like the sole focus of her ey after that which was and I'm also the kid who you know refused to fall in line and and tell a lie 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 Reser 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 want to get 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 going to graduate because 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 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 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 child care 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 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 and helping me he picked me up and brought me to the courthouse because he arrested me several times but this particular time the last time that he did and this is in Flagstaff yeah and Flagstaff he did something

he'd never done before and he took me to Dairy clean and 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 I like this is very strange and he said would you like some spaghetti 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 CU I didn't understand what I needed to be defended from like what did I do to the public I remember thinking like I don't know what this means none of this it's like cosplay as far as I'm concerned and 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 into 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 happen again this stuff happens 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 Sayan do you want to 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 I had no idea what he was holding up and I said no I do not want to 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 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 Award 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 want to 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 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 9:00 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 because they would show up and that was like sign of adting 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 going to walk to Pam's I'm going to ask her if I can stay there and that's going to 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 going to 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 and we got into a lot of shenanigans with the train because we were young and dumb but but it was it was a great home 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 MH 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 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 well I don't know if you've ever seen those crusty Punk kids that hang out on

haon ashberry 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 yeah sure course well I was one of those kids and 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 start 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 are 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 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 going to 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 tempy Arizona and ending up in him as Springs New Mexico we never made it to New York 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 I don't know if they

still do that or they're still around don't want to get them in trouble but yeah 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 non-stop stuff and I just I wanted to be away from it so I talked to my boy 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 or someone takes you the fool away usually you get like these little partial ways and you have to stand on the 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 going to 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 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 H up in a Denny's and we did that for quite some time but eventually during a shift change they were just like you got to 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 snuck 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 going to save her but I guess you're along with the package but God told me to save her now what required saving what was your condition at the time oh yeah sorry uh why did I need saving I was developing hypothermia so I was on the side of the road and I

started to fall asleep and I was getting really warm it's not a good sign 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 going to 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 God spoke to you thank you said thank you so much 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

how I was underage I couldn't work you know minimum wage and age requirements I have a controversial view on them I 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 were allowed to take three items and I would go in and find items that I could sell to Buffalo Exchange or I could take to a bookstore so Buffalo Exchange is it fair to describe there's there's one probably a few miles from where I'm sitting right now a vintage clothing store where folks can come in and buy various pieces of

used clothing is that a fair description just just for people who don't know it yeah but I developed a really good eye for what people like to buy at the time and this was uh in timy Arizona where there's college kids and so college kids throw out the coolest stuff and the books were great too because you could get a really nice premium on books if you could find a good textbook or something like that but my job was to make $2 a day if I could make $2 a day I could afford a bagel

cream cheese if I was lucky a 99 cent ER and if I was extra lucky I got a bowl of rice and some vegetables from my favorite Vietnamese joint over on mil Avenue and that was all that mattered during the day and once you were done with that task you just got to lay around swim in fountains you know walk around take creamers from coffee shops I mean life was Grand but the seeds of self-reliance were planted then and I Hon honestly think the beginnings of my love for capitalism because then somebody taught me how

to make jewelry hemp jewelry in particular and gave me some hemp jewelry and some beads and uh taught me how to braid them and I made some really beautiful jewelry and I would go from table to table I was one of those people that would annoy you during dinner coffee when you're out on a date and guilt you into buying a necklace and I would sell them and eventually I made enough money to pay for rent the other interesting thing that I want to 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 happened I would shiver constantly I was a mess but she looked at me and she said you're going

to look at me when I talk to you you're going to stand up straight you're going to wear respectable clothing you're going to bathe you're going to brush your teeth you're going to do all the things that your other mother didn't do and didn't tell you to do she's my mother to the St she always gets upset when I talk about mother because she's like that's not me that's not me but she's the most amazing woman and I still am in touch with her and I'm just was really lucky to have found a boyfriend who

had an amazing mother and you might wonder why was he homeless yeah why was he homeless some people are homeless because they romanticize it you know I was out there because I had to be there but he was out there because he read Jack carak or something I was just gonna say like Dharma bums or something yeah he probably just read Dharma bums and was like I'm heading out yep 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 have 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 tagal 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 really incredible 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 in 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 and I see this guy walk by with a jumpsuit and he's wearing a patch from this band called crash I don't know if you're familiar with any of the old punk bands from the 70s sure yeah yeah but we 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 the 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 them at 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 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 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 dialup 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 Hopper friends

basically started wooing me over to their side they're like you don't want to hang out with these crusty Punk kids you don't want this life you want to learn about Unix and you want to do this stuff with us you want to be a hacker 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 so let me hop around a little bit so I want to bring us a little closer to the current day and we're probably going to bounce back and forth but the Curiosity that you exhibit the ability to I don't want to 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 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 some of them don't seem to travel what we might consider a typical Harvard Business School case study type of path no could you share just a few of those so that people get a taste yeah I'll start with Uber the Uber story is really fascinating because it's starts with a thesis so they all start with a thesis and then eventually I'm just going to 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 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 you know out of hell and everybody would complain about taxi drivers and how they drove is because they were racing a clock they were already in debt and then I asked them I saidwell do you own this taxi and they 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 just not to leave that hanging so minimum wage un fair 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 higher yeah yeah so when I started working minimum wage was $315 an hour and I would have gladly cleaned your toilet B 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 because they actually we know how you know we know where that 25 cents goes and how we're going to use it

we are very very acutely aware of every sent 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 like that person shouldn't have to do something illegal in order for me to make money great I don't want to take us too far field of the the through line but thank you for that problem all right so coming back to the unfair aspects of The Medallion

system 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 Sao 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 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 just me 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 want to 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 I started having a collection of Ryan Graves

cards but then I went to Hawaii to this event held by August Capital called the lobby the lobby yeah 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's about 20 people in the hot tub that's a huge hot tub it was big it was big

and I got in there and Travis Ken was in the hot tub mhm and I observed him and he had a very distinct demeanor that I had not seen in any founder he had a lot of Gravitas like if there was someone who was king of the hot tub that night it was him if he was managing the hot tub it was him you know you could just tell this is a person who's going to lead and he declared in the hot tub that he was working at some company called red swish but now he

was on the bench or he started a company called red Swish and sold it he was on the bench and looking for his next thing and you know if you're an investor a lot of what we do is we it's kind of like reporters or hackers with zero day Wares you're looking for secrets you know we are on the hunt for secrets for insights that nobody else knows about and then I got invited to a dinner with him and I observed him some more I observed how he talked to people at the dinner table how

the opinions that he had and I just thought this person's remarkable I don't know what he's going to do but I'm going to watch him about three weeks after maybe a month after this Lobby thing Jason calanis held this event called open Angel forum and at the time he was sharing his deal flow because it was it was very much a you know there were party rounds people would get together pull in money and a lot of things were done at the earliest stages Just By Angels now institutions are getting into this game but in

the beginning it was just individuals and I see Travis get up and Pitch this Uber cab thing that my driver's been telling me about and I took it as a sign from the universe or whatever and I wrote to my husband and I said we need to invest in Uber cab today right now and he was like how much and I said 75k and he said fine get us in get us a meeting so I got us a meeting and they ratcheted us back to 50 but we were the second only the were only two

individuals that were able to put that much money in at the time so it was pretty sizable for that round and I really credit Roger because had he not flagged this for me had I not paid attention to Travis in the hot tub keep in mind Ryan's still the CEO I just realized there was something about him and there's no way he's going to just raise money for this company he's becoming the CEO yeah Ryan at the time Ryan Graves that you mentioned was CEO of uber and then that that changed shortly thereafter and wonderful

man too but he became the CEO oh he's great yeah he's great great guy and I just want to so I have a couple of questions but I want to share just a few anecdotes for people to add some color also because a lot of folks are familiar with Uber but they don't know the red Swoosh story and I'm going to get some of the details wrong but I'll just share two things related to Travis often called TK by folks so Travis with red swoosh created this company that became very quickly sort of an enemy

of all these huge music and entertainment companies because it was think of it as like an not quite Napster but it produced that amount of blowback and he got served with some type of lawsuit which was like $250 billion or something not a good day now so then he has to this actually may have been the predecessor to Red swo shuts it down because he doesn't have any choice starts a new company which I believe is red swoosh then goes back to all the people who hated him and sued him and makes them customers so

just let that settle in like what type of stage magic and Charisma and sales abilities required to do that okay so he did that and then very unrelated but still glimpse into the personality story and I'm getting some of the specifics wrong but not by far so he was at a friend's house I want to say in trucky and he was playing with all sorts of people in wi tennis and he was just slaughtering everybody wasn't he like number one in the world or something that's the thing so he was playing with his non-dominant hand

and then oh by the way I'm like top four in World in my spare time is just if you can imagine that level of competitive drive and then you mesh this thing together and you get arguably the only person who could have helped build Uber into what it is right I mean really Just One of a Kind fascinating fascinating guy all right so I want to ask you about another one and I'm going to potentially get the pronunciation wrong Niantic am I getting this Niantic the makers of Pokémon go Pokémon go okay so how does

this how does this show up oh this one's a great one 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 swaps of land I'm I'm simplifying this because there's a storyline behind this but you can imagine this it's basically a gigantic game of green versus

blue 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 and what we were creating and we didn't realize what we were creating was Poké stops H and what time was this like what year roughly would you say gosh I'm going to get the ears wrong on this that's okay I was at angelist when this around this time that this was happening so

I want to say 2012 all right cool just roughly yeah around there all right so I picked up this game with my friends we started going out every night playing Ingress doing walkarounds 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's some banter you know people would be like oh resistance and because we're blowing up each other's virtual things and I started asking 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 that's clever so things like tombstones yeah 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 Pokémon 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 and niantic's becoming its own thing and I was like you've got to 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 m 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 I know hint water sure of course so I invested in hint waterer and I was helping the founder set up her ticketing system she didn't have support what's oh for support related yeah for support so she didn't have anybody to help her set up her support system and I knew how to set up Zen desk so I went in and set it up for her and I started noticing all of these weird messages coming in saying Ingress in

the subject line and so I walked over to her and I said why is everybody sending you emails that say ingis and she says well we give out game codes on the bottle caps and I looked at her and I said you're kidding me who over at Ingress did this deal with you and she said John Hanky the the guy who runs Ingress can you introduce me to him well sure why I'm like I just I want to go talk to him so I emailed him and he said come by the office in San Francisco

I'd love to meet you we're not looking for any investment but thanks and so I showed up with my best friend Lucas and who was also a player and we sat at his doorstep and we waited and we waited until we could get a meeting with him and we went in and he told us flat out no at at the beginning but we sat there and showed him how Lucas was a level 16 player and how many hours we had put into this thing and how amazing it was because we had this Insight which is

we'd heard that as an April Fool's joke they'd put Pokemon on the map and I had this realization that that was going to be the biggest game ever and if I could just get a check in here at just the right time I it would be timed perfectly by the time we left the office he gave Lucas a desk and he hired Lucas and he let us both invest in the company Okay so let me slow this down a little bit all right so right off the bat no and no no means no yeah all

right so by the end one of you gets hired and then you get to invest but you're not hired now I'm actually more interested in your case not the least of which because I'm interviewing you right now but the I'm going to hire you okay fine right like there's there's some use for that person how did you pitch becoming an investor or why did he let you invest I think he saw that Lucas and I were going to give really valuable input on the gamer experience and if I was bringing in someone of Lucas's caliber

who is you know I think employee number 13 or something at Facebook he's a brilliant engineer I think he thought maybe I'd bring in some more brilliant Engineers so he was looking at this like for the long run right and it's not like you're not putting in 10 million bucks or taking 20% of the company or something at that point yeah exactly exactly the other thing is I couldn't get anyone else to once I invested in this I thought I got the deal of a lifetime and I went to angelist had just started and we

they were allowing syndications and I wanted to Syndicate this deal and at the time they were approving whether you could Syndicate a deal or not so it wasn't just a free-for-all and I wanted to Syndicate my antic and I was told no because the only other investors were Nintendo and Google and they're like well we don't do corporate investors the other thing is nobody could see everybody told me no one's going to walk around searching for invisible creatures they're like no one's going to play this game and you're like I'm like wait and see I

would argue that it was probably the closest we've come to world peace in our lifetime is the day that Pokemon go came out I think it was like July 6th I remember it was right after July 4th and I was in Alaska when it was released and even in Alaska in Juno Alaska people were running around looking for invisible creatures yeah incredible that's one of my favorite stories because it really took figuring out how all the connections work to get that meeting and then it took a lot of grit and hustle to get him to

let us in and I do have a key card to Niantic so I an honorary lifetime employee and I can come and go as I please I'm kind of like a weird spirit animal there that's awesome all right so we talked about Uber side note tying Uber at angelist after you invested I think it was after you invested they ended up at some point having Uber put on Angel list and they were turned down by everyone like 300 plus people passed on U yeah because fill in the blank right well if we look at it

as a percentage of the current XY andz Market it makes no sense nobody's going to pay that much like these high conviction statements that obviously in retrospect weren't defensible at all I think it's very easy to come up with the reason for no because a lot of things fail yeah but I heard all those excuses too I'm glad that you are mentioning this because people have argued with me that Uber was the hottest thing around and I said no it wasn't not at all it was not hot oh no there were also media pieces probably

on Gawker maybe on TechCrunch but it was like the 1% ride for Tech Bros and it was I mean I don't to say universally but pretty much everybody was like this isn't solving a problem this is just another thing for people with too much money who think this is a problem but they're in their bubble in San Francisco I mean there are a million and one reasons that people said it was a bad idea people couldn't see past the black car too they thought that you know that one of the objections I saw is everyone

doesn't want or can afford a limo and I said well of course not but that's where it starts not everyone could ride in an airplane but now everybody can that's the way it works right yeah 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 Computing exactly so we have we have the Uber story we talked about Niantic are there any other companies from unusual places a lot of interesting deals come out of Hotel so I

was at a hotel and I had time to kill and my background is insecurity so I'm an engineer self-taught and my friends taught me and I started getting an infos SEC so I noticed some things that other people don't notice about their sick 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 kenic 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 raboy and I see he has a pixel phone and I'm like oh Keith raboy pixel interesting keep in mind their Mac addresses at the time were also in the clear like you could track where these guys were and 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 and Garrett Langley is the founder of flock security 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 associ a 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 ocing license plates we thought about cameras this is a much better solution so I messaged

our associate at the time John ludig who I think is now a partner that I'd found this guy and he's like oh you know that's the company we're interested in I said what should I do and he's like just walk over there see what happened 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 Canan banister of Founders fund we'd like to bring you in for a meeting sounded very official

you know and he starts looking around and he's like because wey his batch hadn't demoed yet and he hadn't seen me at YY yeah she's like how do you know who I am how do you know who I am he was like looking around like how do you know and then it was killing them and he finally asked me he said I'm so sorry I need to know how you know who I am and I'm like are you sure you want to 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 we ended up getting the last allocation of that round and sharing the series a with bedrock it's now valued at over6 billion doar and I tell this story because one of the things that I think makes me good at what I do and as 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 going to get me in this deal I had to think very quickly about that but same thing here is just I didn't wait I didn't email the guy I decided to go be a creeper and it ended up being funny it ended up being totally funny yeah totally all right so I want to do a postgame analysis on another deal of a slightly different variety and this is game crush and Lessons

Learned ah yes game Crush could have been twitch could you explore this if you would yeah game Crush 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 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 can you explain just for folks the activist investor just for people who might be curious as to what that is an activist investor is someone who invests in a company and decides

that they want to 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 got it and

for people who want a showcase granted a slightly different species of activist investor I assume you're talking about venture capitalist maybe private Equity guys but if somebody wants a great documentary watch icon the Restless billionaire if you want to see what like super Hardball activist investing looks like you can check that out okay so please continue so they've got they've got activist investor an activist investor can fire you yeah that can happen too so they want to basically remove the sex appeal and the fringer magic is that what's what's happening 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 you know and so after that twitch took off but they didn't have the right tools or the right anything to be a twitch and they had all these amazing girl streamers which just jumped ship as soon as they could go someplace where they could actually show more than what game Crush Was allowing what were the rules what were the constraints that the activist investors either applied themselves or convince the founders to apply

like how did it change 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 they 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 MH and I think if they'd stuck to

that Niche they would have 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 is these girl streamers yeah that's mean that's like Internet 101 right on some level for so many so many different things so let me come back to game crush and ask and maybe this is a dead end but looking back with hindsight 2020 were there other warning signs prior to the death nail 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 going to pay more attention to that 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 yeah 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 and which I brought Byron singerman and a few other people and it was really clear that there was just just leadership issues but by that point we'd already committed Capital you're not going to change your mind you can't withdraw anyway what kind of leadership issues it was unclear who was the CEO I see so there were multiple Founders and it just yes 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 fund

raise 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 and that was due to two Founders who who ultimately could not see eye to eye and had a 50-50 partnership I broke my rule where I I normally never invest in a company where there's a 50-50 partnership or the there's not a clear delineation of who's the CEO and who's not and for a variety reason right who's the

tiebreaker yeah who's the tiebreaker like who's actually ultimately into the day is their fault who are we going to all point at and blame and with HQ trivia there was nobody to point at and blame as a matter of fact it became more of a Game of Thrones for the position and was tragic and he ended up with one of the founders dead oh my God yeah but game Crush was a great Learning lesson I also learned that just because you commit to something if there was a period of time in there that I was

able to get material information as to a decision that I made may not be a good one I have the right to say I'm not investing which is something that has been challenging for me because I don't know if you watch Game of Thrones where they say a Lister plays their debts will abandon for PS Her debt you know yeah now you're saying after docs have been signed or after you've wired the money if they're sort of material items that should have been disclosed that were not disclosed before signing like if there was anything that

I could have figured out before then which there were some little things like some little things that were signs you know I realized then I could adjust and make that decision in the next investment that I did where I could try to find out more information and even if I committed before those docs are signed it's not it's not done that was a Learning lesson there because I always thought that my word is my bond and if I say something verbally it's as good as signing something sure but sometimes people misrepresent things and they lie

so L true I have a question going back to the the hemp jewelry I don't want to 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 hutzpah 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 going for the direct contact pretty quickly does that come in part from the kind

of 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 I think being homeless taught me that a lot of things that people do our 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 Green piece for a period of time where I was a phone caner and I lied about my age and they allowed me to work

there so that was another funny weird job I had but I also did tele marketing as well so I did a lot of telemarketing when I was 17 18 and then of course Tech Support dialup 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 invester people and especially if you start to get good at it people

want to hear from you you know and they want the opportunity for you to invest in them I just never seen that anything as a barrier to me it's like a sport it's a game not that money is a game but getting into the deal and winning the deal to me is a sport you were saying that I'm paraphrasing here but things that people say are suggestions something like that what does that mean 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 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 on Mondays you know exactly [ __ ] Mondays but you know all of these things are just things that we make up truths 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 how do you

do that I mean is is it just in Instinct at this point or is there some systematic way that you do that for yourself 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 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 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 M 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 and I'm thinking about how this poor person carried around that trauma with them for how long I've heard it twice now because right now there's this something happening in the world that I'm really excited about though is that people are starting to apologize 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 account 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 home 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 got to play it and a lot of it is cosplay and suggestions when I was younger I saw these people dress up in their suits

and you just got to realize they're grown children dressing up in suits adulting you know it's a costume 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 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 so I'm at hereticon it is put on by my alumni at Founders fund when you say you're alumni you mean portfolio company

folks no the people I invested with so I was a partner at Founders fund for four years I got it got it got it the other GPS the general part so the other GPS and some of the founders I've invested in are here URL Palmer lucky is here and I invested in endural and there's a few others there's true Med that's here mind Bloom which we invested in that does psychedelic medicine ketamine therapy for ppsd why is it called hereticon right heretic conference it's because some of the best ideas look heretical at the time when

people claim that they can do something that is indistinguishable from Magic for example you know they might be labeled a witch back in the day and when you make a technological advancement it is indistinguishable from what looks like witchcraft sometimes and then people in order to get to the best possible answers we need to have debate and so this conference is about people debating and completely oppositional viewpoints so there are people here who are hardcore atheists there are people here who read carot cards there are people who are anti Ai and there's people here who

are AI is going to save the world and it might even bring the second coming of Christ it runs the Gambit I mean it's just so exciting and it one of the things I love about it Tim is it really reminds me of early 90s Tech futurism back when we thought everything was possible and and what we were going to build and didn't turn into any of that I would argue that you know social media and things like that did not do what we set out to make them do but for the most part I

had thought that this optimism had died you know because of things like uber because because of the backlash against tech people that we had become Paras but this has this feeling of it coming back together and people are discussing the things that matter again without the fear of being canceled and I think that's the other thing that happens here is it's a Chatham House Rules I think some things are leaking out on the internet but for the most part they're not and you're encouraged to be yourself and you're encouraged to be respectful and you're encouraged

to make friends across the aisle I dig it how large is it how many many people attend there's about 500 people oh that's big Founders fund pays for the whole thing so our hotel room I'm in a hotel room right now that's paid for our meals are paid for and it's just incredibly generous for them to give this gift to the community I know they Source deals out of it I know they get something out of it but at the same time I know how much effort it takes to roll up your sleeves and do

what Mike salana has done and it's probably my favorite conference I attend by far it's a it's my number one favorite place to go you mentioned a company while back that I do want to touch on and that is zivid so um I mean I'm reading here right only fans before only fans I do like the general magic of pornography people require a lot of background on General magic but people can look it up actually had Tony Fidel on the podcast so people can can dig into that to get a whole a bunch of background

there but why zivid and then what happened and what did you learn from it well can I go back to the very beginning of when I discovered my very first porn of course how could I say no to that yeah I me I think it goes back to that so it's a great story but I got a summer job I want to say I was 12 11 12 and I know this is gonna sound disturbing but it's it's really not I got a job watching a wolf dog okay 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 I've been around I've been around Wolves yeah 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 of 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 it was a great summer gig I love that somebody some guy right is like you know what I'm going to do I'm going to hire an 11-year-old and then leave this 11-year-old alone with this wolf dog just putting steak in the doorway this is a great idea exactly please continue this dog shows up and this dog is so big and I'm so small and they have these Fierce looking eyes and this thing I'm like this thing could eat me but she would come 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 and then I could lock up and then go but Wolfie didn't come she doesn't work on a schedule so I would go over there and sometimes have nothing to do so I started going through this guy's drawers his cabinets his books his everything there was nothing to do it was so boring eventually I found a Playboy magazine and I looked in there and I was like that has to be the most beautiful at

the time these were vintage Playboys depiction of the human body I had ever seen because before this I thought that the Sears Robux magazine was like the sexiest thing I'd ever seen the underwear section this was like holy cow this is next level women are beautiful and I dreamed about being beautiful like that someday I was like you know I want to be beautiful like that I want to be like that someday and Beauty back then in those magazines was very natural and very accessible you could be that beauty whereas the beauty of Playboy later

when Hefner was older became a very unaccessible Beauty but my mother also is an art teacher and she kept around all of these books with these Chinese sculptures where they were doing very very lwd sexual acts and so to shock my friends at school I would sneak these books to school and show them in the locker and sometimes charge people for it you know come come look at my porn in my locker so I really really felt that it was a beautiful art form that deserved a little more respect and that started very very early

when I set out to start a company at the time there was Myspace and then there was a competitor which became a friendly competitor of mine called suicide girls that had launched and I tried to start zivid before suicide girls even but then suicide girls started and I was like well they're doing a fine job I don't need to start a company because suicide girls is doing most of what I wanted but what they didn't do was I didn't like the financial model of how they acquired content and how they treated the artist so what

they would do is they would buy a photo shoot that an artist did for $500 and you would sign a release for your likeness and your name and they pretty much owned it in perpetuity so if I'm cyan on suicide girls I can't be cyan anybody's place else and so a lot of these young women had no idea what they were signing o yeah and then they would get famous and then they would use these images and you know they had stage shows and all sorts of things this is pretty standard though they weren't doing

anything wrong it was the industry standard it was the Hollywood standard at the time and I thought to myself there has to be a better way there has to be a way where photographers and models can have a fan interaction that's meaningful and then the fan becomes a patron of the art that they're making and at the time there was webcam girls they they did exist and you could buy packages and they've got some portion of the package but the micro payment system was not really a thing and so we started coming up with we

didn't know what to call it it was technically tipping but we didn't want to use the word tipping with the content that we were putting on zivid so zivid was a nude fully nude platform with no sex acts on it actually and we didn't want to call it tipping because we didn't want to equate ourselves with a strip club we wanted to bring up the class of what was happening more so later on patreon figured out it's called patronage and Kickstarter figured out it's called backing somebody but we didn't have the marketing language so we

called it voting now voting was a very very confusing word of a call to action for anybody because you're not supposed to stuff a Ballot Box you're not supposed to vote multiple times but we were encouraging people to vote multiple times because each boote was basically worth a dollar and then when you cast that boat or you voted 70% went to the artists and was split between the photographer and model eventually we started bringing in makeup artists and costume designers a lot of people don't realize that a lot of these really really beautiful photo shoots

involve a lot of people there's a lot of people there and then they you know the compensation chain is complicated but the person who does the hardest work is the model so the model is the one who talks to the fans and what I figured out was zivid actually which only fans has figured out and a lot of these other platforms figured out is it's about not about the content at all because over and over again I would get told why would anybody pay for this content's free it's all over the Internet there's porn everywhere

what isn't free is the real human interaction with the person and we figured that out with zivid at the very end but I shut down zivid when I was at Founders I ran it for 10 years we were the first company of Our Kind to raise venture capital and we couldn't see eye to eye the the board myself the executive team on what zivid should be because people thought it was about beauty it was about an aesthetic and I argued that it has nothing to do with beauty like nobody really cares about that because they

wanted to editorialize it like Playboy and I had this Insight which ended up being right which is anybody can be a model and anybody can make money as long as they have more than one fan and we did register a domain called top fans and we did experiment with what only fans is but what happened is I just ran out of gas I ran out of the ability to run that company and I was far more successful as an investor and I was tired of fighting I was really really tired of fighting everybody like I

was not allowed to be in the Apple App Store I wasn't allowed to advertise on Instagram I wasn't allowed to use normal payment processors I wasn't even allowed to have an office at Wei work I was protested at Tech conferences there were women who would come and protest me why would they protest you well back then it was a lot more controversial to do what we were doing and they thought that my mere Presence at a conference meant that I was going to porn them in some way like I was going to start taking pictures

of them or taking my top off or I don't know I don't know what they thought but they thought that I was going to do something and there was a Facebook actually asked me to come and speak to a group of Engineers and they had a wonderful event and I was the headline speaker and there was a a protest that happened and they held a protest across the street and at our event we did nothing but talk about code and engineering and at their event they did nothing but talk about porn to this day laugh

about yeah you know I never envisioned zivid becoming as big as only fans though I think only fans has really proven and hit a nerve and one could argue that maybe it remains to be seen whether a product like this is a net positive for society or a net negative but we did succeed at enabling this Freedom which I still think is valuable because a lot of people need this kind of Freedom so that they can put themselves through school so that they can buy their first home so they can start a family and not

everybody is blessed with being able to get certain types of jobs and this gives them that flexibility 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 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 want to 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 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 a tajah hall for something 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 rocketball court or I need to be over here or there 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 a 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 I had to survive and when you have to survive you can't worry about someone else's well-being because you're drowning yourself like you can't worry about someone else drown and you

got to save you got to put your your oxygen mask on first so I broke up with him 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 relation ship to sex was just kind of like it's fun and it's just something you do but it was never Earth shattering I never wanted to build a tajma hall 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 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 because when you're young you don't really know what you're doing yeah no but when you get older if you're lucky and you find the right partner then you do so I'm going to switch gears and I want to talk about rolling the dice but not metaphorically literally literally I'll just let you take it from there because

I might want to spend quite a bit of time on this okay yeah dice rolling is a lot of fun how did this even come up yeah how did this even start 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 force to pause people and so I started reading all of this early 1920s esoteric philosophy and hold on hold on how the [ __ ] does that happen why why that gosh I don't even know where to jump off here to tell I go on rabbit holes and I go deep down these rabbit holes 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 Alistair

Crowley 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 magic glasses by Frank I forget his last name it'll come to me later I'll find it it's really really great I'm making a movie based off of the short story so it's actually a really great story Frank Harris Frank Harris yes so I highly recommend reading this story it's fantastic the rest of Frank Harris's stuff is a little more challenging so he was a cowboy who

at the age of 14 basically ran away from home and the invogue thing when you ran away from home in Europe was you ran off to America like that was your big Fu like I'm GNA go get on a ship and you'll never see me again 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 and it was an account of every single sexual encounter that this guy had and

it's a fantastic book but again tough to read because he was also a cattle rancher he became a cattle rancher and he ended up killing people for cattle and it's hard to tell what's real and what's fake but back at the time this might have happened you know it might have been real but what led me down this Rabbit Hole was because I was trying to ask a very important question which is the question I hope that everybody asks which is why are we here why do any of this anything that we've talked about at

all like what is the purpose of any of it has been a question a rabbit hole that has continued throughout my life continues probably will till continue till the day I die it'll be an unanswered question I have some answers but mostly it's an unanswered question and I started playing with artificial constraints it first started with my clothing I realized I can't be like Steve Jobs I can't be Mark Zuckerberg I just wear a uniform and flip-flops and call it a day I would I would feel dead inside I just couldn't do it let me

pause for a second how does the applying constraints relate to Frank Harris and the why are we here question yes okay so Frank Harris the story about Frank Harris that magic lashes when you read it is about trying on different perspectives and seeing the world in a new way I see and if you were to put be able to put on a pair of magic glasses that allowed you to see the world in a magical way would you do it and for how long would it be magical before you just relegated those glasses to your

drawer of all the other Cho keys and novelties that the human brain grows bored of and I started looking around all the Novelties in my life and all the things I had grown bored of and all of the perspectives I had tried on and tossed into the drawer and I started looking at my wardrobe as being a interesting side effect of novelty MH and so I started thinking about that story and thinking about my closet and I love clothes I just love them I love expressing myself with clothes I love costumes I love cosplay I

love textures I love fabric I love fashion and so I've always had this guilt around loving these things and so I tried to figure out how to be the best minimalist maximalist I could be and so I started playing all sorts of forcing function games and it was came out of reading you know gerf and and Frank Harris and Alistar Crowley and all these things dice rolling oddly came out of all of that so I went to my friends and family and I said I am tired of picking up my outfit every day but I

can't get a uniform so can you guys pick a theme and so the First theme was plaid and I was plaid from head to toe so everything underwear socks shoes hat gloves it didn't matter what it was it had to be plat and when you go into a store and they're like can I help you and you're like uh do you have anything plaid the answer is usually I have two things like two items of clothing or three items of clothing so it automatically forces you to not buy things and to constrain yourself with this

weird pattern you've picked for the season okay so when you say season how long are you wearing flaid for three months yeah got it it was brutal it was brutal so again that wasn't enough I had to learn all about plaids like what is plaid is a check a plaid you know is gingham a plaid what makes a plaid a plaid you know it's really fascinating so the second season I hated the most which was polka dot it was awful and I'll tell you why polka Dot's awful because most prints and fabrics the polka dots

are either printed and layered on top of the fabric but they're never woven into the fabric and so polka dots are usually made out of really cheap fibers so polyesters and things that are really hot and sticky and gross so in each of these cases are you ending up with like 12 storage units full of PLA and polka dot stuff respectively not that much so it constrains the volume it constrains the volume and it got to the point where I mean I can't wear a polka dot again probably for the rest of my life if

you ever see me wearing polka dots like I've gotten over the trauma but plaid was one of my favorites actually because learning how to wear mismatch plaids but the thing that was really interesting was when I would go into a store how people would be delighted and just light up when they saw what I was wearing they would just start laughing and giggling and I realized that clothing could be a source of joy not just for yourself but for other people so it's like minimalism plus Joy or like yeah how can you reduce decision making

and increase Joy at the same time correct that's a great way to distill what I'm I'm obsessed with with right now how did the dice come into this I don't want to cut off the story at all after I I I ran this experiment for a year and a half and I learned a lot about what I like and don't like and what kind of fashion suits me and doesn't suit me and you know which friends to allow to pick my wardrobe and which not to I started looking at my dining choices and I started

looking at my holiday choices and my driving choices and I started asking myself the question do I even make good choices now you would think that because I'm successful the answer is yes I make great choices but I make choices just like any other person that are ingrained choices formed out of habit so I wanted to see what would happen if I became more random what happens if you introduce random to your life and you start to eliminate Choice are you as successful are you as joyous how much of what we do is really because

we're brilliant or is because that's just how the the cards fall mhm well I have not been LED astray by the dice a single time so how it works is let's say you and I want to go to dinner Tim and Y I'm like what do you want to eat you're like I don't know and we go around and we do this thing that everybody does for five minutes trying to decide so this is why I wanted to get into the dice because this literally I had one of my closest friends text me yesterday we

were talking about decision fatigue and he's like you more than most people are exhausted and get very frustrated by tasks or assignments like choosing a restaurant where there is no right answer correct right because it can chew up so much [ __ ] time and energy and there's so much tail chasing and back and forth anyway rant complete for now but please continue right so we so we're trying to decide what to do for dinner I can help fix this for you Tim I'm so excited to introduce you to dice rolling so I I wear

dice around my neck and I take them everywhere I go and this gives me you know 1 through 12 obviously you can get multi-sided Dice and you can come up with all sorts of different options you can use dice to even just do coin flip type stuff because you can do odds or evens but you and I want to go to dinner we can't decide even on a genre so but maybe we we hone in on a talian like we we're making some progress here so we basically put Italian into Open Table we roll the

dice whatever it lands on we committed we are going to go it doesn't matter what the reviews are if you cared about the reviews then you could have constrained it by reviews you set the parameters right but the thing is everyone of these choices shouldn't take you longer than a minute so you can move on with your life and every time I've gone to these places it's been better food than I could ever imagine I meet random people that are so incredible I've gone on strange road trips where I've just had the most magical experiences

and the list goes on and on and on and on my life has only been improved by taking myself out of the decision-making process because I am the hindrance what other examples could you give of situations in which You' use the dice right because there's also a question of at what point do you introduce the random right because you could you could decide on like genre reviews geography and then before you know it you've spent a bun time on this decision anyway and then you introduce Randomness at the end the savings isn't necessar really super

great nor is the like the the breadth of the randomness so to speak so what are some other situations where you might use the dice road trips are they great for road trips so I went on a road trip one time where I rolled and landed on something called Pioneer City I think in California Pioneer town and it's this abandoned and what was the list I'm sorry just to know how this work thrift stores thrift stores so you're like thrift store best thrift stores in the United States or like what in California I had I

had some time to kill and I was driving from Nevada through the Palm Desert and then to Southern California and so I had time and so I put that in and I rolled I don't know like a 13 or whatever or 12 and it landed on this thrift store in a place called Pioneer town which is a ghost town old western town and the only thing that's there is this thrift store and some weird little store that sells water that's it I mean good to have water in a harmonica I got a harmonica there I

still have my harmonica but I went in and the experience was spiritual for me like when I roll the dice it puts me in places and it puts me in a frame of mind where anything's possible and anything at any moment can happen and you just have to be ready for it you have to not be thinking about what you're doing tomorrow or what you did yesterday you're just there and you're going to trust that the whatever the dice is going to throw at you is going to be amazing could I see what's around your

neck again because as a former D and D player I have tons of experience with dice I'm just curious are they two separate yeah let me get it open for you yeah they're little Dice and they come out of this little cage uhhuh if you can see them oh yeah I see it and so they're teeny tiny dice and they're in this little cage and then the cage locks and it just a little lock it I but I carry around everywhere okay that's cool I introduced so many people to it and they've started adopting it

I use it for giving public talks I've done it for public talks which is I'll have the audience scream out 12 topics and then whatever the dice rolls on is what I start with and then we just go through the dice and so it's not in order and it makes things much more fun picking what movies to watch you get movie paralysis and the one thing I haven't done yet is make business decisions with dice but at some point I might yeah I would do it probably with my own personal money wouldn't do it with

my LP's money disclaimer but interestingly when I started down this dice experiment my friend pendulette who's who's a magician wrote a book called random at the exact same time and that book is a bit graphic but it involves a guy who who basically has to come up with a million dollars in a very short period of time and he uses dice that make all that money for him and then some but it's exploring the same thought experiment which is I guess the question is do you believe in free will or not oh boy we're Sam

Harris when we need him right how much of what we're doing is consciousness versus not and how much of our patterns actually hinder US versus open us up to possibility I think that's the big one for people who might get lost like me honestly I listened to so many discussions of Free Will for and against and I can't make heads or tailes out of it I wish I were smarter but the last question I feel like I can wrap my head around and and Gro right how much do our habits and patterns help us versus

hinder us that's a good question and this is where dice rolling really comes into play now I have a very hard rule which is I never ever say oh I don't want to do that and then I don't do it I'm a little if you will religious about the dice and whatever it lands on I do no matter what so I even do house cleaning chores that I don't want to do and I use the dice so I'll put like six things on a list and maybe there's one really fun thing that I really want

to do and then five things I really don't want to do and the dice almost always land on the things you don't want to do and that's actually great because I don't betray it I get through the thing and then I roll again and then eventually at some point I might land on that sweet treat thing I wanted to do and then I'm excited I'm like yay I get to watch a movie finally after doing my taxes and everything else I really wish people would try more things like this because I think people think that

the way that they are is unchangeable that they are static that they have no ability to break their habits or form new ones and introducing something simple like this that allows you to make decisions quickly move through life fast and then puts more joy in it just seems like a win win win yeah I love this idea I'm gonna try this I would love if it's possible I who knows maybe you had this made by an artisan in Siberia for all I know but the L locket with the dice that would be good right because

if it's in my pocket or something I can send you one of these oh yeah I would love to try one of those yeah they make them in San Francisco there's an artist that makes them perfect I'd be happy to send you one amazing thank you so much and get you dice rolling that would be great oh I'm in and I'm probably G to get a placeholder set because I have a trip coming up this week and it's very last minute for me I was just kind of like [ __ ] it throw caution to

the wind I'm going on this crazy last minute international trip and it's the perfect opportunity to use dice yes a lot so I'm GNA I'm going to try that and so you said you're religious about it so religiously random you mentioned pendula who I've had on the podcast brilliant guy incredible weight loss story too oh yeah the potato diet I think fair to describe as a militant atheist 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 this driver brought up God now to me that implies there might have been a change has there been a change there has and interestingly I was so nervous to call pen and tell him that I was no longer an atheist and I thought I didn't know what to expect coming out of the closet coming out of the closet and he was so sweet about it he said who cares oh amazing that's so nice to hear he's like you're a good

person and you're a kind person and if you're a little woo woo whatever m he's like I'd rather be around a good person who's woooo than an unkind person who's atheist so 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 oh okay we're going to come back to the stroke what

catalyzed the spiritual change well part of it was this weird Rabbit Hole I went down during the pandemic of aliser Crowley and all of these guys for people just because you've invoked the name aliser Crowley a few times could you just brief doesn't have to be super factual detailed but who is this person you you've referred to a number of times and then how how on Earth I mean does that lead to the spiritual change he's an occultist leader yeah who practiced what you might consider witchcraft or magic magic yeah I said magic in quotes

because obviously there's going to be atheists and people that don't believe that what alexer 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 massively popular massive massively controversial he was controversial because he also showed up in weird outfits he kind of like the Nixon Timothy ly Dynamic and in so much as like Nixon saying this guy's the most dangerous person in America I feel like Crowley also occupied a similar mind space yeah a lot of people thought

he was a Satanist and he was not as a matter of fact a lot of what he studied was the teachings of Christ and he talked about Christ a lot and I think a lot of people don't realize that new age stuff and occultism and all of this early stuff actually is deeply rooted in monotheism and has nothing to do with with Satan anyway that I could discover other than they believe that or they theorize that there are dark energy forces or dark Spirits out there and people who know how to harness dark energy and

Alistair actually worked in what we call the light and so he wanted to repel people because what he was teaching wasn't for everybody he actually didn't want you to read his stuff MH he did not want you to follow him but there's a lot of Wy stuff in there so how does this lead to radiant skin this is the question on everyone's mind so I got my hands on every book every movie every everything I could find from that time and I realized that people in the early 1900s were on to something they were on

to something about what life is really all about mhm all these great works that people wrote back then and you say back then just to time frame it I looked it up so Alistar Crowley was born in just wrote it down and then I lost track of it 1875 died 1947 1875 yeah so that period of time was a wackadoodle time where people were publishing all these crazy books and practicing these occult practices and running around in weird robes and looking like Harry Potter and doing some psychedelics too so of them did psychedelics and some

of them used THC or hashish as part of their ceremonies or things that they did but a lot of it was sober and what they were trying to figure out is is there something is there a veil is there something beyond what we can see in what we know and is it Supernatural or can it be explained by science later and a lot of them believe that it could be explained by science later that actually it's just undiscovered science and I became really interested in and those people in particular and I really went down a

rabbit hole with this author and philosopher named gerf and gerf I believe was Greek and his underst study was named Alinsky and Alinsky wrote a book called I think it's called The Curious Case of Ivan oin which is what Groundhog Day is based off of and I was studying at the time kind of what made Bill Murray make the art that he makes without asking him I like to form my own opinions you know just like what did I think it was it was really clear that you know I didn't watch any of his movies

until the pandemic I did a lot of stuff in the pandemic I've never done but I hadn't seen groundhog Bay I hadn't seen catty Shack I hadn't seen any of these movies What About Bob I hope I so what about Bob oh are these hands shocked Pam The Man Who Knew Too Little Broken flowers like I watched them all and I realized that this is an artist who's on a mission to us something he wants us to learn something what is that thing and I notic he kept repeating a phrase over and over again in

a lot of his movies which is it just doesn't matter now if you look that up that's a nihilistic sounding statement it just doesn't matter it is taking on the surface you would just assume that that's it was a nihilist thing and that's what it means but if you go under that and you actually look at the root of the philosophy of which that statement is coming from from it goes back to what we were talking about in a previous conversation about the fictions that we make in our mind and I realized that my mother

is a fiction the mother that left me that left the $20 that you know gave me up to the court system I haven't given her a chance to know who she is today I don't even know who she is today but I carried around this grief this suffering this loss this story and I was harming myself every day by carrying that story inside of me and so I started watching this movie called The Razor's Edge which is based off of a novel by Somerset mom I think is how you say his name and there was

a 1930s version of the movie and then there's a version that Bill Murray did and Bill Murray's was very interesting to me because I believe that he agreed to make Ghostbusters too in exchange for them making this movie that he wrote The Razor's Edge The Razor's Edge yeah it's a very lowbudget film because they didn't give him a ton of money to do it and it involves many locations and period stuff and that's all very expensive so and his acting is you know he's built he he did a great job but at the same time

it's not going to be the best produced film he's ever made but it explores all of these ideas around gf's philosophy around suffering and what suffering is and there's a line that he says in the movie when someone he loves died and he is trying to comprehend it and he looks at this woman who is previously his fiance and she explains this whole story but the woman's dead you can't bring her back and he just looks at her and he just says well it just doesn't matter and in that moment when I watched that movie

I had this energy at the bottom of my spine basically shoot out the top of my head and there was a bunch of people in the room when we were watching the movie and they all paused you know they paused the movie and they looked at me and everybody said what was that and I was like what was what because I thought maybe they got chills too you know maybe that line hit them hard like it hit me hard but no it was a singular event only for me in that moment that impacted the whole

room energes where everyone's hair was standing on end at what just happened to me and from that day forward nothing has been the same it's like a veil got lifted on the universe around me and now I see things that I never was able to see before I'm able to see art and poetry and all sorts of things it's almost as if some sort of PTSD Veil that was in my body got lifted because I started believing or believing is a weird word I don't like to use that word too much but I started suspecting

in that there's something bigger out there than all of us that we're in a simulation or we're in some kind of something the randomness in the dice actually taught me a lot of that because things start to get really magical and you can't explain it but it's beautiful and you're just like I'm along for the ride I'm on some weird Earth School is what I've determined we're all an earth school and we inhabit human bodies but we're nothing but an energy life force inside of them and that life force does not dissipate in it doesn't

go nowhere it goes somewhere mhm it doesn't disappear life force does not disappear do you want to hear about a really strange spiritual experience that I had because I think he'd like it of course I do I mean I'm keeping track here it's like Crowley to gerf to aspiny to ground the concept of Groundhog Day to Bill Murray to just asn't matter welcome to my mind to what seems like I mean I didn't know anything about this but like you've probably read a million things about anyway we're going to come back to the spinal thing

CU it's like huh that seems to be what some people might describe as like a some people call it Kundalini Awakening I was just going to say Kundalini Awakening yeah when I explain people what happened to me they go oh you had Kundalini and I'm like huh I had no idea what happened to me I don't really know what that is I've just heard the phrase but you said strange spiritual experience I do want to come back to this placeholder Kini Awakening just to know how you now make sense of that maybe we start there

and then we can go to the other spiritual experience like how do you explain to yourself what happened in that instance I thought I was losing my mind of course you did yeah yeah I had a lot of sympathy for people who have mental health issues and end up in hospitals on 5150s because I realized we're just a hair away from being crazy every one of us because it wasn't just that energy that shot through me I mean that itself was just powerful and then the realization the ephany that I was carrying around this fiction

and that I was responsible for that fiction I was spinning it up and my ego was spinning it up and I experienced ego dissolution for the first time was this at the same time that you're watching this movie Yes it happened right afterwards and it was very sudden and it was frankly scary and so I started getting visions of places to go started having dreams that were predicting people calling me talking to me I started knowing what people were going to say before they said it and all sorts of strange things that I can't explain

and like I said maybe science someday will discover that we have a form of communication as human beings as animals that we're unaware of you know humans can only see a certain amount of perceptible light and sound so it's not completely out of the question that we can't see or hear certain things that are happening around us but the veil for lack of a better term was lifted and uh when I turned away from my practice of meditation and mindfulness that Veil would come back down when I was introspective and thinking about the bigger question

which is what is the meaning of life and what is my purpose in it which it answered for me I know what my purpose is now before that I was a drift as an atheist I thought there was no point you know just have to be good people we have to get by we have to love one another I knew that love was a universal thing that we should all strive for but I didn't have a purpose and after this experience I suddenly had one and my purpose is very simple which is to spread joy

to lift other people up around me and to do my best in my own way to end poverty now I'm not responsible for anything poverty I think we're all responsible but it informs a lot of my investment decisions now it informs I realized I was already doing a lot of these things anyway but I became a mer a more service oriented person I started becoming more a part of a bigger hole whereas before I was more of an individual and now I realize that I'm part of something much bigger and much more beautiful than I

ever could have possibly imagined so I'm imagining that you've done a ton of reading after having this experience furthermore I imagine you reached out to anyone you thought might be able to shed light on this in some capacity and talk to those people let's just say there are a bunch of people listening who are atheist or maybe they describe themselves as agnostic which I I think is a bit of a slippery term frankly because a theist says I believe in God are gods and if you can't say that then you are kind of by definition

an atheist but I'll let agnostics slide people are listening and they do feel somewhat a drift or rudderless or choose your metaphor without a North star in their current relating to the world they would love to have a purpose they would love to feel like they have a purpose what advice would you give to these people because it sounds like I would imagine even if they were to watch this movie that few or none of them would experience the same thing that you did so repeatable you have to be in the same place yeah so

what do you do right if you're hearing this and you're like you know what I yearn for that type of purpose you have to face something very ugly which is yourself you have to look inside and see who and what you really are and then you have to love yourself even when you don't like what you see when people used to say practice self-love I thought it meant go eat Bon bonss and go see a good movie and smoke a joint that was self L you know but it wasn't getting me anywhere and I was

like this whole self Lov thing is Jive it's just not not working out but I didn't realize that self-love is learning how to give yourself unconditional love and the best way I've learned how to give yourself unconditional love is imagine yourself as a ball of light and then take that ball of light and visualize it outside of your body and cradle it like it's a baby now when you look at that baby would you hurt that baby would you do anything to hurt that baby or harm that baby like would you kill the baby would

you you know you're just a ball of light I think when you start looking at yourself that way and you start talking to yourself and I'm cradling right now and trying to show Tim like I'm my ball of light and you start to realize that all of the things that we experience are often well actually they all are a simulation in our mind that we start to talk about ourselves a certain way and you would never hurt a ball of light until it's an awful piece of crap like why do we tell ourselves we're an

awful piece of crap so the other thing is that we're the only species or animal on this planet that punishes itself more than once we ruminate and think constantly about what we [ __ ] up on or how we could be better when in reality we'd be better served if we just let it go so if you want to experience something like this and I do warn you that a lot of the stuff leads to things that can be jarring and very scary if you're not ready for them yet there are psychological events that can

happen that are sometimes indistinguishable from Mania and everything else so you just have to be careful but I found my path to this by looking Inward and trying to know myself and then taking accountability for all my ugliness and once you get through that and you forgive yourself and you love yourself there's nothing but light on the other side but really it's about it's about love you know at the end of the day it's about love which sounds TR everybody says Love Is The Answer like what does that even mean but it absolutely is the

answer 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 it's the same concept that was explored in The Matrix and in in lots of different Fiction it's 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 sleep walking through life and the moment you take the Reign and you become the narrator of your own story and sometimes the captain then that's when it's a transformational change it and that ties back into dice rolling right like dice rolling is a way to stay awake yeah staying awake and staying

conscious and staying present is a practice you must practice every day and if you don't then you just have to accept the cookie follows how it crumbles or how what are what are some cliches except how the cookie crumbles accept how the cookie crumbles but you could introduce a little more random you could go to work dressed as SpongeBob SquarePants I like to say but people don't there's a lot of things you could be doing that you're not doing MH another movie that actually really helped me in my life was the movie American Beauty with

Kevin spacy 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 going to break up with my boyfriend and switch my job and the movie inspired that you know know art has a way of being at the right place at the right time for you 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 how did you end up and maybe you don't know but how did you experience a stroke and what effect did that have on you yeah I was at Founders fun when it happened and I experienced it as the worst headache of my life it was a migraine on a scale of 1 to 10 it was like a 15 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 want to actually feel what gravity feels like because 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 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 because 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 dbst which is a deep venous sinus thrombosis which is clotting throughout the entire center of my brain and down my jugular my right jugular 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 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 balling cuz 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 started living the same way again and I knew that if I kept living that way I would die what do you mean by that it was really clear that I had put myself in this position oh die physically you mean 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 therapist 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 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 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 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 and I would always critici 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 okay did not see that coming so are you then the one singing or are you listening to Tibetan throat singing both I do both all right so I chant along with the chance I moan along with the moaning to the best of my ability I listen and

I don't do the bead counting you know I I haven't found that necessary how did you find Tibetan throat singing was someone like you know what I know you've tried everything but try one more thing 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 tell ride Bluegrass Festival and they had some Tibetan throat singers there and he brought me back a necklace and he said look at this necklace and it was one of the most beautiful things i' ever

seen and I was like well I'm going to go check these guys out and it was a huge unlock huge and 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 meditations 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 6 hours at a time oh my God yeah I'm doing my 10 minutes twice a day I'm pretty happy with myself for now yeah I mean my co-workers laugh

at me because they'll take me someplace 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 even countered is by those moments of Stillness and so even if it's 10 minutes a day it's something you know it it's not about length of time or anything it's about the effort yeah that's not it's not the size that matters it's yes it's not the size that matters 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 no exercising to exercising it's like okay don't set yourself up for failure making the past fail an hour a day do 10 push-ups every other day start there or 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 past 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 I'm a big fan of gerf he's not for everybody and he's very confusing a lot like Alistair Crowley or Crowley was a wackadoodle person who liked to drive people away when they came up to talk to

him if he didn't like you he would say obscene things just so you would go away this is George gerf GF g u r d g a i e FF ggf yeah ggf yeah George ggf one of the things he talks about is there's a lot of things he talks about the thing that resonated with me the most is who is the captain of your ship are you the captain of your ship or some Rogue process I have a Unix background so I like to think of things as cron jobs or automated processes but is

there Rogue process running you or are you running yourself and I think you'll disc discover of you do a lot of introspective work that you are not in charge so one of the concepts that he talks about is sort of like a horse carage MH there's a person who's driving the horse and then there's the horse obviously there's the carriage but there's also the narration of what's happening and it's even taking control of that inner narration like where does that even come from are you in charge of that are you letting it run a muuk

which is your ego is it determining where you go what you do what's next or are you doing that so ggf delves deeply into those Concepts and more Alinsky which is his underling which a Russian philosopher and I really really recommend reading him love to think about and again I'm self-educated so I say things wrong sometimes but n yeah depends on which country n yeah n knows he had a concept called The Eternal recurrence which is yeah yeah that we're stuck in a constant Loop until we learn how to be good people and that's the

premise of ground hung day yeah and it might explain deja vu it might explain why you've done something and you're like I feel like I've done this before I've met that person before because maybe you have yeah and that's what they talk about in their philosophy and it's it's pretty interesting the Eternal recurrence can get super confusing it can get super confusing it features quite heavily in the unbearable lightness of being by Milan Kera who which I highly highly recommend to folks and I'll just read a quick thing about gerf also for folks who may

be interested so this is George Ivanovich GV born 1867 in what was formerly Russian Empire now Armenia and he was a philosopher Mystic spiritual teacher composer and dance teacher he taught the people are not conscious of themselves and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic quote waking sleep and quote but that it is possible to awake to a higher state of consciousness and serve our purpose as human beings and it goes on he also has a great look he's got the bald head with the old timey strongman mustache I'll include links to the

names you mentioned as well any particular book that you would recommend people start with if they wanted to dip their toes in the water but maybe something that's like a gateway drug and maybe the user friendlier option there's a book that he has called Basel buubs Tales to his grandson beel buub that's a word I haven't heard in a while all right yeah and then you know alinsky's the uh The Curious Case of Ivan oakin is about a guy who falls in love with a girl but he has to pursue his career because he wants

to be able to provide for her so he decides to put off being with her so he can pursue his career but he misses his moment and she marries another man and he's so distraught that he goes to a magician and the magician is gerf in the book and says can you please send me back to age 11 so I can do this all over again and I will not make the same mistakes again and gerf the magician says actually you will you'll do the everything the exact same again because you can't help yourself you

may deviate slightly but you're going to end up in the same place without her and so the guy is insistent and he sends him back to 11 years old sure enough he makes every mistake exactly the same sure as [ __ ] Hug Day gets back to finally to the magician who says wow you're lucky that you made it here because you could have lost me you could have made a wrong decision along the way and then I would have disappeared too he goes what have I told you that the wedding was fake and she

got married to upset you and he's like what she's not married and he's like no she's really not married and he's like well I want to run off and be with her now and goes ah that'll end badly and he's like why and he said because you haven't done the work right you've realized that you need to change but you haven't done anything to actually change so he says come with me and spend a few years with me and then maybe you might have a chance of being with her but otherwise all paths lead to

you not being with this woman so the movie is Groundhog Day I believe it's what Groundhog Day for my research is based off of is that that book mhm but it's just a beautiful tale and I think that you know you can't take these things literally and to be cleared when you say bason you mean Groundhog Day the movie not the the movie Holiday the movie not the Holiday the movie okay and gf's Wikipedia page is very very extensive so that's going to be my my stop number one in addition to figuring out how to

get some dice okay s we've covered a hell of a lot of ground I am be wered and fascinated I wanted to tell you about a spiritual experience I had that you won't leave oh yes of course 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 it was like a Lucky Charms kind of kind 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 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 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 and I went to my husband and I said I want to 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 going to call it a voice which makes people worried sometimes they're like oh you're hearing voices I don't want to get locked up but I have a knowing I'm just going to 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 because I have a little bit of a goreaphobia 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 and go through my portal which is already weird in sci-fi anyway you're in a portal I

go and find my seat and the the whole arena is 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 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 going to go down to that chair and I'm going to use that number as my reference point and then I'm going to work out from there where my

seat is I get to the chair and it's mine 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 and I had this weird Superstition as a little

girl that when that song came on it was G to be a good night it's a weird Superstition it's just everything's going to be all right because Phil Collins is here and he sings that song and it comes on the airwaves and it's just everything's going to be okay and it was in that moment because I'm keep in mind I'm having this Kundalini whatever going on with me that I realized that I wasn't completely without Superstition I wasn't completely without belief because I still believed in Phil Collins so then I said okay well what if

I just start to be hyper presentes and I start paying attention to what happens around me what if I am in a simulation and this is a video game what will the video game reveal to me well that's when stuff got weird so this guy to the right of me came in and he's wearing a Celtic shirt and he sits down next to me and a guy to the left of me comes in wearing a warrior shirt the guy to the left of me stands up taught in like a military person when they do the

the national anthem you can tell a little bit about him because of this you can like okay well he might be a veteran or very least patriotic the guy to the left of me from the Bay Area didn't stand up for the national anthem he had it out when Kathy gford got up and started talking about gun control this is the woman who was shot in Arizona mhm the guy on the right sat down the guy on the left stood up and started cheering and I was like so just so I can keep them straight

now the guy from the Bay Area the liberal guy stands up yeah he stands up for gun control yeah the guy to the right sits down for gun control and I realized I'm in the middle of America I'm in the middle of the Great Divide of what divides our country and it's like representing and playing out right in front of me with these two guys so they started fighting over me because it started with the game with the Celtics winning and so the guy from the Celtics was talking [ __ ] to the guy from

The Warriors and guy from The Warriors team was just this insufferable entitled person like when he showed up he took all the green shirts and threw them and I ended up with the green shirt finally and he's like I don't need these I'm a champion I got plenty of I mean he was just rude yeah bad behavior so the guy on the right at some point about when the Celtics start losing the Warriors start winning he starts getting angry and I can tell you can just tell the tension that a fist fight's about to happen

so he looks at me and he says are you with him this is which guy sorry the Celtics guy oh the Celtics guy okay yeah he's like are you with him and I said no I'm not with him and he goes well who are you with then and I was like well basketball and he goes what and I said yeah I'm here for basketball and he looks at me like you are absolutely freaking out of your mind woman like you bought a ticket to the Finals game The Last Game you flew across the country because

he asked me where I was from and you don't even have a team I was like nope I don't have a team just here for basketball so the guy on the left hears this and he goes oh the moers guy and he goes you're about the meta game I get it and I was like what is the meta game and he starts teaching me all about the meta game and then I get a no what the [ __ ] is the meta game oh it's paying attention to like the popcorn people the business I see

I got it of basketball there's meta within meta within meta within meta I you find lots of meta games got it you're to The Meta game okay yeah so I told him I said well maybe I am and so I started playing the metag game with him and the guy to the right I got a knowing again a weird intuition a voice if you will that said to turn around to him and tell him that their main player the Celtics and I don't know his name but when he comes to the Warriors and he comes

to the baraya he brings his three-year-old son and to tell him that his favorite player is a good father and so I told him this and all of a sudden you could see all the angst and the anger in his body just disappear it just softened and he wasn't fighting anymore now this is I can't do it this is the Warriors guy Celtics guy sorry okay so told the Celtics guy about the Celtics player got it and all of a sudden because he's losing I got the sense that he probably scraped together money to come

see his team win finally on his home turf and it was like a dream come true for him and it wasn't happening and so I took a moment to give him love and then that was it and then I thought this can't be the reason why I came to Boston is to start a fight between two Sports guys this cannot be why I got a weird vision of an Irish guy this cannot be it so I went back to my hotel room and I got a bottle of water and I go up to the front

desk and I say can you build this to my room room 340 and the person behind the desk looks at me and says you don't exist and I said excuse me and they said yeah you don't exist and they then they pull their monitor around and tap on it and they're like see there's nobody in that room there's nobody in room 340 and said I guarantee you I'm in this room I guarantee you I have a key to this room I guarantee you if I go up there my stuff is still there unless you got

rid of it and they were like nobody's been in this room for a week I'm like that's not possible it's just not possible so I called my assistant and I put on a speaker phone I'm like tell me the the number for our you know our reservation she rattles it off the guy puts it in sorry you don't exist and I'm like okay this is getting weird well I'm just going to go to my room where I don't exist and what do you want me to do with this water and he said keep it I

was like okay that's really strange so I went to sleep and the next day I woke up and like any good science experiment I went back down to the front desk and there was a different person there and I grabbed a Kit Kat bar and I went up to them and I said can you put this on room 340 and they said sure and they said the same thing again you don't exist well that really put me on tilt because I was like this is getting weird what do you mean I don't exist and uh

I was like what do you want me to do with the candy bar keep it remember I said I went there and I had this crimination that everything would be given to me mhm so I start walking around the neighborhood and I'm looking for another shirt so I've got a Celtic shirt that the guy the Warriors guy threw at me but I need another shirt for the next day because I'm there for three days so I got to find another shirt and I wanted one that wasn't made in China so I went around from store

to store to store looking at labels finally gave up and I end up at this food court and I hear Phil Collins play and it stops me in my tracks I'm like again you don't normally hear Phil Collins two days in a row that's weird Groundhog Day Redux right and so I start recording it but all of a sudden I look over to the right of me and there's a guy dressed in all white he's got a white hat on white glasses white shirt white shoes and I think he was wearing blue jeans and I

have this feeling that I know him I'm like how's it possible that I know that guy it's not possible I'm like sign stay on target find your shirt but there was this pulling this magnetism this no this feeling this voice I don't know what you want to call it once you have one of these Awakenings but it is unmistakable that if I didn't go over and talk to him the whole point of coming to Boston was for nothing and I was like okay so I Wander over to this guy and he's talking to a young

man and I said I'm sorry do you mind if I bother you uh do you know me and he looks at me he's like no I do not know you and he looks at me like I'm crazy cuz I kind of am what I like is that you weren like do I know you yeah it's do you know me yeah do I know yeah no I said do I know oh that's very cyan and he's like I don't know you I've never met you you don't know me and I was like well are you a

VC and he goes no and I'm like are you in the tech industry no did you ever live in the Bay Area no and I start asking all these questions and finally I'm like I'm sorry I'm being rude what are you guys up to and he says well I'm talking to my friend here because he has a startup and he's he's got a company that he's building and I'm trying to help him with it and I was like oh so you are in the tech and he's like no no I'm not in technology and I

was like well what do you do and the guy's like I'm a t-shirt entrepreneur I go no way you're a t-shirt entrepreneur okay what kind of shirts do you make and he says well you can have as many as you like if you can guess what they mean and so he lays them all out on this table and each one of them is a different color and in the middle of each shirt is a square with another color in it and then there's this weird hex code and then some weird Latin root name so I

deduced by looking at it that the hex code was probably a color and the Latin root name was some kind of condition so that's what I told him I said gleaning from what I appears to me as a condition and a color and he goes yes each one of these shirts represents a type of color blindness and then he looks at me and he goes you know we all live in different realities and I was like what and that's when the guy in white says cyan Banner Minister and I look at him and I'm go

oh we do know each other and he said yes I met you in the basement at Ted several years ago like 10 years ago or eight years ago and there was a big party going on and there was a bunch of people who not even a bunch of people a handful of people I want to say like a dozen people that went into the basement to hide and I was one of those dozens people I was down there with like L tall hi meaning like escape the crowds escape the crowd yeah so I'm down there

with Len torald and all the the people who don't want to be around crowds and this guy walked in and all of a sudden the movie of meeting him played in my mind and it must have played in his at the same time because we were answering each other's sentences and I said I was leaving because the party was still too big and there was too many people coming into the introvert space and as I was leaving you were coming in and I said hi my my name is Sayan banister I like your outfit and

he said hi my name's Tango I like your outfit too is this where the introverts hang out I said yes have fun I'm leaving that was the end of our interaction so I said have we ever met again after that and he said no we've never hung out a single time after that and he's like but it's okay I died 5 years ago and I was like what do you mean you died 5 years ago and he said well I have a very strange heart condition it's a very rare heart condition that Einstein also had

and the only person who could operate on me is here in Boston and so he told me the surgeon that he couldn't leave Boston and he tells me I'm stuck in Groundhog Day I can't go anywhere because I can't be more than 10 minutes away from the surgeon otherwise I might die and I was like well tell me more about this death that you had he said well they had to lower my heart rate they had to stop my heart and kill me in order to do this operation so I wasn't even sure if this

guy was alive okay I'm having a really weird time mentally and so I'm touching him and I'm like are you real now are you alive now do you exist and he's like I'm not really sure if I exist or not he goes I always Ponder this question so anyway I take my two shirts I go back to my hotel room I get we exchange phone numbers by the way and I run the experiment again and there's another person at the desk and I still don't exist and so I call my assistant and I'm like get

me out of here I think I can't handle any more of this I think I need to be around loved ones because I'm losing my mind if she tries to get me a flight out and every flight she books me on gets cancelled so I message a spiritual friend of mine and I say I'm in Boston what do I do and he says you might enjoy a duck boat ride good spiritual advice right and so I get angry I'm like I'm not going on a duck boo in this condition with my mind doing all this

weird stuff are you crazy and my assistant says well you never have not listened to him before why are you not listening to him now so I was like [ __ ] it get me a ticket to a duckboat so she gets me a ticket and if you go to these duckboats in Boston it's first come first serve you don't get to choose your duckboat you just get on a duckboat you know but it's the next duck boat is yours so I get on this duckboat and there's nobody on it and so I take a

seat that looks like it's made for a single person and it's facing sideways so it's not facing front or back and it's definitely not the captain it's not the wheel so I take that seat and this guy gets on the boat and he says to me are you the new narrator and I looked at him I said no and he goes well unless you want to narrate you got to get out of my seat because that's where I sit and I was like okay where should I sit and he's like right in front of me

sit right in front of me I said okay so then the captain gets on and the captain drives the car until it becomes a boat and all these families file on and suddenly he's got a microphone and this guy starts talking to only me only me it's like everyone on the boat disappears and he looks at me and he says when you think that you're so important or so big and your ego starts getting the best of you go to the Planetarium mhm realize that you're part of a galaxy among galaxies and you're just a

little piece of dust clinging to a rock and he starts telling me story after Story and but what was really interesting was that he started breaking down gf's philosophy on a boat what yeah and I was like this is getting really strange I mean I'd love to know what the rest of the people were thinking too they're just like what the [ __ ] did I pay for yeah I think they were going back to sleeping I think they were asleep and they really weren't paying attention to anything he was saying yeah yeah they were

just like he was droning on to them you know got it but for me he was dropping like truth bombs M so we're about to go in the water and he looks at me and he goes are you ready to be baptized and I said I think so yeah sure let's do this and he's like okay great because there's a decision in life where sometimes you have to relinquish control you have to surrender to someone else or to something higher and right now is that moment where you can get off this boat and be on

dry land but once we're in the water in charge you are no longer in charge can you surrender and I was like I Surrender and we go into the water and the sun remember I told you that the sun was the second thing after air the Sun hits my face and I just start sobbing and it felt like being baptized it felt like I was being touched again by something profoundly beautiful profoundly reaffirming of Life profound about my purpose and my place on in this world and then he pulls up to a Mental Health institution

in Boston I don't know if you've seen this building but it's like this horrible brutalist Building made out of concrete he pulls up to it in the amphibious duckboat yes in the amphibious duckboat okay so the boat pulls up to this Mental Health institution and he says to us you know sometimes you're just having a conversation with God or with the universe or whatever and you're on a spiritual path but people think you've lost your mind and you're crazy and they lock you up in that place and he goes I don't know how you're going

to get better if that happens and he said but there's Beauty everywhere and it's hidden in plain sight and if you look at that building long enough something really pretty will emerge from it and then he started using kind of like a kid-like voice which triggered all the children on the boat to go a frog and I was looking at this building and not seeing a frog and I was like okay I'm looking for the Frog I'm looking for the Frog and all of a sudden a frog emerges from the building and once you see

it you can't unsee it so if you go to Boston look for the Frog building there's a frog that shoots out of the building and then you're like wow there was a frog there the whole time and he explains to me he said you know when we're children we see all this magic we're plugged into it we're part of the source and as we get older we start cosplaying obviously and start putting on these costumes and we start telling ourselves these lies and we lose touch of this magic that's just right there in plain sight

because we become calcified to it and when we got back to the duckboat he asked me to stay my first instinct as a woman is I'm being hit on yeah so I'm like oh crap so I'm the last person off cuz I was the first person on so I'm like I have no way I always do like threat assessments I'm like [ __ ] how do I get out of here I'm stuck and so I'm like what is the worst that could happen with this guy like I'll just stick around and talk to him he

could be interesting so I get off the boat he asked me to wait he says wait on this bench and I said okay and then I watched him for 45 minutes go to each individual person that worked at this duckboat company and hold their hand and thank them for showing up that day thank you for driving the boat and giving it 100% thank you for taking the tickets and giving it 100% he goes on and on and on and on and then he eventually gets back to me and I said are you a manager and

he's like no no and he looks at me he says why are you here and I'm like well a spiritual guide of mine told me I needed to go on a duckboat ride and clearly I did and then the voice The Knowing happened and it said to tell him something which is ask him why he's a duckboat narrator so I did I said 'why are you a duckboat narrator and he saidwell I have ADHD and I'm a comedian and I can't hold down a job and I started doing this job because a friend of mine

was a duckboat narrator and I got hooked because I started telling stories that I hoped would improve a family's life one tour at a time if I could reach one person a day I feel like I've done the work I feel like I've done great work that I have a purpose in this world and then the voice says tell him he's doing God's work so I'm like I don't know I'm supposed to tell you this but you're doing God's work and then tell him that someday his wife will understand and when I did that this

man welled up and cried and the voice said his tears are not for you you need to leave now so I said your tears are not for me sorry I got to go I got to leave this place and that's when he said you're beautiful he said you are really beautiful and the voice says I'm just a mirror you're the beautiful one and when I got back to my hotel they suddenly knew who I was and I was able to leave but until that point I did not exist and I was in this weird time

warp of weird events that kept happening the person dressed in all white and things were just being given to me things being given to me happened for a few weeks after that like people were giving me sandwiches and giving me necklaces and giving me really weird stuff and the only thing that I can think of is that when you have a spiritual experience like this you just show up in the world differently you're more inviting you're more open you know I'm trying to think of the science I'm I'm you know at the end of the

day I like to think about science and how this all could work and I think there's probably a explanation for it but ultimately I think we're connected on some sort of level that we don't quite understand because we just don't understand it yet but I just want to share that story because it's one of many stories that has happened to me since I watched that movie that's just one of many and the miraculous thing about Tango is Tango texted me and he's now traveling the world he had Amnesia and the en with me brought back

all his memories so that's wild yeah what an amazing life you leid you and your husband and what a broadly and intensely curious life you have led curious not in the like raisin eyebrows strange sense but curious in the very literal sense of engaging with things around you and and seeking out the things that stick out seeking out the things that blend in I've just been struck over and over again by how relentlessly curious you are yes I am and I think that is a real virtue wellan this has been an incredible conversation we've covered

a lot more than I expected to is there anything else you'd like to leave my audience with Point them to request of them and anything at all that you'd like to add before we wind to a close yeah I'm writing a book you mentioned my substack in the beginning I did and my substack if you go and read it is free you don't have to pay the only only reason why I charge anything is if anyone wants to leave a comment they have to pay to leave a comment so if you're going to bekind you

got to pay me I learned that from zivid but what it is is it Source material for my book and it's me remembering things like a child the story about you know my mother and the $20 bill is in there there's all these stories in there and it's me doing this search internally for you know how I can be a better person and how I can show up in this world in a better way and and so I recommend a lot of people get a lot out of it there's a lot of stories that you

might resonate with I love hearing from people and when I get the feedback that a story resonates it I incorporate it into the actual physical book so I am working on a book and I'm about halfway done with it and so my call to the audience is to keep encouraging me to finish it and keep encouraging me to write on substack because I get disheartened I I get sad sometimes writing these stories I'm human but I think that I want to write a story that isn't about business but it is about philosophy and it is

about some of the lessons that I've learned but I found that in order for philosophy to really hit home you can't you can't be obvious so you have to tell a tale and so it's a tale of my life but hopefully at the end of it it unlocks something inside of you the reader that helps you in some way in the way that the razor's Edge helped me if I could have one Razor's Edge moment with a human being I will feel like I have I have really achieved something in life uglyduckling dos substack docomo

my mother was very devastatingly beautiful and at least I thought so and I think that that beauty gave her it opened a lot of doors for her and also allowed her to manipulate people with her beauty and she tried a weird tough love approach with my sister and I and she basically told us we're ugly and she said you're very ugly so you better be smart because you're not going to find a good man if you're not smart and if you don't find a man at least you can provide for yourself and when you hear

that as a little girl I took it to heart and it definitely gave me a sense of dysphoria it detached me from my body and I just thought I was just the ugliest creature that ever lived but she told me that someday I'd find my swans because I was just an ugly duck among Ducks searching for my swans h and I didn't know what it meant you know she kept telling me this and so really it's about overcoming the fear of that narrative and and looking for my swans I am turning into a swan I

mean the person you're talking to right now is becoming a swan finally and shedding that narrative and shedding that story and so that's why it's called ugly knuckly well I think of you as a swan and I can see it and I'm so grateful for the time that you've offered in this conversation and the stories that you've shared and the vulnerability that you've showed so thank you for that very much thank you Tim thank you for all that you do and for opening people up and for sharing stories and you're clearly on a mission and

you have a purpose a really great purpose and I want to hear about after you do dice rolling for a while because I know you take things to the next level I've you know you don't half ass do anything so I want to see what comes with your dice experiments yeah yeah for sure I I will gladly share and there's a lot to explore here so for people listening there is a lot that we will be linking to in the show notes as always at tom. Blog podcast cyan Cy an cyan ban scientist c y

a n TI s t on X and elsewhere uglyduckling dos substack docomo which is until next time be just a little bit Kinder than is necessary not only to others but also to yourself and thanks for tuning in