Habits and Hustle - Episode 485: Mark Cuban: Why Most Entrepreneurs Hire Wrong (And Go Broke)

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

Listen to the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThY-UBFtGK8  Even billionaires struggle with self-doubt. In this Fitness Friday excerpt from my conversation with Mark Cuban, he opens up about still feeling intimidated in rooms full of domain experts, why he believes most entrepreneurs hire the wrong people at the wrong time, and his surprising take on what business you're actually in. We also discuss his prediction for what will make cryptocurrency boom again and his unconventional take on why brand advertising is a waste of money for startups. Mark Cuban is a billionaire entrepreneur, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and star investor on Shark Tank. Despite his success, he remains refreshingly honest about the psychological challenges of high-level business and the mistakes he's seen countless entrepreneurs make. What we discuss: Why Mark Cuban Still Gets Imposter Syndrome Around AI Experts The "Hamster Wheel" Hiring Mistake That Kills Startups Why He Says "You've Got to Be Able to Solve Problems Yourself" His Honest Take on Losing Money in the Voyager Crypto Collapse The Difference Between USD and USDC That Cost People Millions Why the NBA Thought They Were in the Wrong Business (And How He Fixed It) His Prediction for What Will Make Crypto Boom Again Why Brand Advertising is "Typically a Waste of Money" for Startups The Two Things Every Business Must Sell: Differentiation and Path of Least Resistance Thank you to our sponsor: Therasage: Head over to therasage.com and use code Be Bold for 15% off  BiOptimizers: Want to try Magnesium Breakthrough? Go to https://bioptimizers.com/jennifercohen and use promo code JC10 at checkout to save 10% off your purchase. Timeline Nutrition: Get 10% off your first order at timeline.com/cohen Air Doctor: Go to airdoctorpro.com and use promo code HUSTLE for up to $300 off and a 3-year warranty on air purifiers. Find more from Mark Cuban: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mcuban/  Find more from Jen: Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements

Hi, guys. It's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it. Hey, friends, you're listening to Fitness Friday on the Habits and Hustle podcast, where myself and my friends share quick and very actionable advice for you becoming your healthiest self. So stay tuned and let me know how you leveled up. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to thank our sponsor, Momentus. When your goal is health span, living better, and longer, there are very few non-negotiables. One of them, quality. And when it comes to supplements designed for high performers, nobody does it better than Momentus. Momentus goes all in on NSF certification, which means every single batch is tested for heavy metals, harmful additives, and label accuracy. And that's why they're trusted by all 32 NFL teams

and top collegiate sports dietitians across the country. Here's the thing. They don't sell every supplement under the sun because they believe in nailing the basics with rock-solid consistency and those basics are protein and creatine. Momentous sources creopure. The purest form of creatine monohydrate available, an absolute must for both men and women who want peak physical and cognitive performance. So if you're serious about leveling up, go to livemomentous.com and use code Jen for 20% off. Just act now. Start today. Gen for 20% off. Live momentous.com. Entrepreneurs tend to think, okay, I'm hiring this. amazing marketing person. And he or she is going to know what to do. Yep. And then they tell that to

their investors because that's typically why they're hiring a marketing person. And they say, oh, this person's amazing. You know, our next quarter is going to be great. Then it's not. Then they go to the next marketing person. Totally. Then, you know, then they're in this hamster wheel again and they're screwed. And it's the same way. Relying on other people. Well, yes. And that's the whole thing, right? You've got to be able to solve the problem yourself. Self-reliant. Now, you know, at some point, your business gets bigger and you have to learn how to do a lot of other things. You know, When you go to five people, it's one thing. You go to 10 or 15, it's another challenge, you know, as you learn how to manage and deal with people.

But at the same time, if you're not great at your core competency, how are you going to train those people? Right. How do you going to know what the goals are for the organization and how to communicate to them, how to do what you need them to do? Right. You know, and but every entrepreneur goes to that terror, right? I've gone through it's like, oh, shit, you know, can I do this? right or am I smart enough or good enough or talented enough to do these yeah i mean we all have imposter syndrome i still have imposter syndrome no way oh yeah you walk into a circumstance i'm like

and there's named people that any names anybody would recognize yeah and i'm like what the fuck am i doing no way oh yeah all the time yeah who would you be intimidated by i'm not going to get name names but yeah there are people yeah for sure yeah for sure yeah really and it's not like an Elon Musk or whatever. No, I know. It's just somebody who has domain knowledge. Like, if I'm sitting in a meeting, we're discussing artificial intelligence. Yeah.

Like, I understand artificial intelligence, and I've done a lot of reading, so I have a good grasp of it. But this person has created neural networks and models that, you know, have a billion parameters, things that I wouldn't even know how to start to do. Yeah. I can understand the conversation. Right. The concept.

Right. Yeah. But I'm not going to know operationally how to execute on it. Right. That's just scary. It is scary. Because you're afraid that, okay, did I read enough, right? Because they're living this day to day.

Yeah. And I'm never going to catch up and know this day. Sitting down with the Mavs, you know, with Jason Kidd there, he's forgot more about basketball than I'll ever know. Right. And so you just, you know, it's just. But you're his boss technically, so maybe you can teach you on the side. I don't know. Yeah, but, you know, I can read and learn and add the value that I add, you know, for analytics, et cetera, whatever it may be.

but, yeah, everybody's going to have that self-doubt. The question is, what business are you in? Because a lot of companies don't even know. Like when I got to the NBA, they thought they were in the basketball business. I know. But you changed that whole team around. Well, it's not just a team, right? The NBA used to think they marketed basketball.

Oh, that's true, yeah. But, you know, I sat there with him. I said, okay, name the last game you went to and tell me what the score was. Nobody remembers unless it was just a big game. Right. Name your favorite dunk or shot. No one remembers anyone. Now, tell me who you were with.

And everybody knows. Everyone remembers that. Do you remember the first game you went to with your parents, your aunt, your uncle, whatever? Yeah. The emotional part. Yeah, because that's why you go, because it's the one place you can scream and yell. Yeah, and you do. Yeah, and I do, right?

But where else? You know, you're not going to see me yell here or there or whatever. But when you go to a game, you know, if, you know, you feel that energy and everybody knows they're part of the entertainment, right? because you're yelling defense, defense, and that balls in the air for a game winning or losing shot and everybody's holding their breath. And if it goes through, you're high-fiving and hugging people you've never seen before in your life. That's so true. That's what makes going to a game special, feeling that energy. And they thought it was about, you know, oh, you know, who has the prettiest jump shot. Yeah. You're right. It's all about the emotional part. It's all about the emotional

attachment because that's what sports are. And that's what makes sports different than any other business. And I had to explain that to him. It was just like, you know, when Apple, which has the biggest market cap in the world, has a great quarter, they don't throw parades in Cupertino. No, they do not. Right? When the Lakers or Mavericks or whoever win a championship, the whole city goes insane. It's so true. You know, that's unique to sports. And you have to recognize what business are you in. Basketball is the platform, but emotion and entertainment is what we sell. So how did you turn it? So you bought the Mavericks, by the way. I mean, at, by the way, great investment for you, right? Yeah, it's really good. What, 285? You run for

$285 million and now it's worth like $2.5 billion? How much now is it worth like $4? I'm not going to sell it. Oh, why would you? I mean, yeah, you're not going to sell. But I'm just curious. It turned out to be under value. Yeah. I mean, that's pretty amazing, though. It is crazy. And that's, you bought it purely on just passion for basketball. I mean, I still play pickup, you know, so it tells you, you know, I can go out before the game starts and just get up shots, you know, on my own court, you know, my own arena. That must be so, can you, would you ever, when you were a kid, did you ever think that that was ever, ever going to happen?

Never, never in my wildest dreams that had ever crossed my mind. It really didn't cross my mind until after I sold my company and had enough money and it was like, now what? Shit, yeah, now I can put my money where my mouth is? But you were smart thing. Can you explain why? Like, how did you even think? Because I, like, you took, you got, when Yahoo bought Broadcast.com, you got it in stock, right?

Yes. And you turned, you had to hedged it or something? Yeah. What does that even mean to get it into cash? So it was a public, you know, when we got sold to Yahoo, we were a public company who paid us in stock. And because Yahoo also was a public company, you could sell options on it. So I could sell calls which gave up part of the upside, but allowed me to buy something

called puts, which protected my downside. Wow. And so I sold calls, bought puts. That's called a hedge. And I did it for my entire position. And it was. Wow. And when the whole, you know, bubble burst.

for the dot-com error, you know, I actually made more money. And so, yeah, it's been called one of the top ten trades of all time. Of all time. Yeah. Because that, like, changed your entire life. Well, of course. I mean, because there were a lot of people who made a lot of money in stock and on paper. No kidding.

No kidding. If it wasn't for that, like that little decision point. Yeah, you wouldn't know who I am. I would never know who you were. Like you sold the first one for $6 million or something, like, which is not great for 29, 30 year old, right. Right. But it's not, you know, it's not billions of dollars.

And then, like, you bought this company, you bought the Mavericks from Pratt? How did that from Ross Perra? I was, yeah, he didn't care about basketball. It was a real estate deal for him. But I was a season ticket holder and somebody connected me and, like, in less than a month, I bought it. And I'm sure you can see at Showtime. Yep. That's amazing. And so do you go to all the games?

Unless my kids have something. Unless, well, don't the kids also want to go to, now they're probably, and he is obsessed with it as you are? My son is becoming more and more so. my daughter, my middle daughter likes it, my oldest daughter, it's just, yeah, just social, yeah. Yeah, just for the social part. Yeah. That's amazing. So, so basically right now, it's the, it's the basketball and it's cost plus. Those are the two biggies. Well, cost plus basketball, you know, except for free agency, basketball kind of runs itself. Yeah. Were you at Summer League just now? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I do it because I love it, right? Right. Well, yeah, why do people go anyway,

like your level? Like, are they just going to see the players and all that stuff? Yeah, it just depends. For me, I just like basketball. Yeah. Yeah, you're a different story. But, yeah, you know, you've got to recruit and you've got to identify talent and all that kind of stuff. It's just like hiring programmers or hiring videographers or hiring producers or whatever. But you just like love it so much. Yeah, no, I enjoy it, yeah. Yeah. Wow.

So what was the other? Okay, I lost what I was going to say to you. Hold on. I think that's basically, well, where were we? Before I talked about the summer league, the thing, the, no, not the other thing, too. What was the other thing that's going to ask you? Just about entrepreneurial stuff. Just entrepreneurial stuff.

I don't even remember what I was going to say. Do you have anything else you want? want to say? What were we talking about entrepreneurs? We're talking about entrepreneurs failure. I mean, how that's sure. Sure. This is the mirror. Yeah. I know I saw a shark tank. I got to put that over there. Yeah, exactly. What was it talking about like these companies not raising or not advertising and making margin. That's what you talk about a lot is like what's your margin. Forget about the top line. Obviously with like Facebook and Instagram, there's been an opportunity. for companies to scale using ads?

Well, depends on how much money you have. So the question about, you know, spending money for advertising, whether it's search or other things. It depends what type of company you are. You know, I think for most entrepreneurial companies, particularly startups, that you have to know what sells your product. Now, if you're just trying to get scale and you're selling it direct to consumer, you're probably going to have to advertise unless you find a better way to do it virally, right?

but you have to know what sells your product. Like with Alyssa's, you know, it's... I love the always use her. Yeah, it's easy, right? Yeah. Cost plus drugs, it's easy. It's easy, right? Yeah.

You know, we have another company, Wild Earth, which is vegan dog food. It's harder because you have to explain it. Yeah. The education piece is... Yeah, so there's an education piece. But the challenge now is because of the changes Apple made to privacy, getting a return on advertising span, Roaz is much more difficult. Yeah.

And so you're having to become a lot more innovative in how... you sell your products, you know, in streaming products. Whatever it is, you've got to find what the most cost-effective way to go is. Now, part of the challenge is that learning process. So I'm never a fan of spending a boatload. I'm a fan of test a lot. Test and retest, test and learn, because it always evolves. And spending for search engine advertising or Facebook ads, whatever it may be, YouTube, you're competing with everybody. your category. And that's getting the price higher and it's getting the returns lower in a lot of respects. So you've got to understand what the compelling aspect is for people to say yes.

Yeah. You know, what is the path of least resistance for you getting someone to say yes? And you don't want to go all in. And the other thing I'll say for startups is I'm not a fan of brand advertising. You're not. No, not even a little bit. You earn your brand and your brand captures an identity based off of your execution, right? What do you mean to your customers? Right. That is your brand. Let the customers do.

Yeah, the customers define your brand. If you're trying to show pretty pictures and people running on the beach and all this and you're kind of, you know, virtue signaling to your business. Yeah. That's typically a waste of money. Now, let's your Pepsi or Coke or whatever. And, you know. And then the other thing.

thing that I see a lot of companies make mistakes. And they hire a marketing or finance, whatever, and they just do MBA 101. Yeah. Right? This is what I learned in, you know, in finance or entrepreneurship or my MBA classes. So this must be what you do. Right. No. Right. Context matters a lot. You know, what's your competition doing? How do you differentiate yourself? And you always want to focus on your differentiation. Business is about selling two things. How you're different and why you're the path to least resistance. So the people have a reason to buy. And maybe you can encapsulate that is how do you reduce your customer stress? How about community now? I feel like everybody's doing two different things. One is like they're trying to build a community, right? The other is

attaching to a cause. Yeah. Having a mission is all good. Having a mission, right? And, you know, community typically with NFTs, you see that right. That's what I was like avoiding. Yeah, that's right. But with community, again, it's got to be organic. And it's great to say, up a Discord server or set up a Facebook group and have somebody that you work that works for you or you even, I try to do it myself a lot of cases, be responsive to everybody because you get to learn about your customers. So community is great, right? Right.

And it should be part of every business. To me, that's part of the blocking and tackling. Right. You know, it's like answering your emails or having an info email address. Right. That's, so, okay, so that's actually, I mean, that's interesting because I found, that's the hardest part for companies to do is build that community, right? Yeah, it takes time, but it takes happy customers because it can work against you to.

Yeah. Because if your customers are not happy, you're toast. Yeah. Because that community is just going to turn on you so fast. 100%, especially now, you know. You know I'm all about finding an edge. The small daily habits that give you more energy, focus, and resilience. But that's why I am hooked on mona vitality.

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immunity plus glowing skin. But the biggest win, it fuels your cells for real longevity. Think of it as like a cellular switch on formula, not as a stimulant, but the raw power your body needs to create energy and repair itself. Try it now, and I bet you'll be hooked to. Go to manavitality.com and use code Jennifer 20 for a discount. That's mannavitality.com. com, M-A-N-N-A-Vitality.com, and use code, Jennifer 20. So, okay, this is the area, I'm not great at this area, so I'll just, I'll, like, fake it a little bit here. But, like, the whole cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, blockchain, blah, blah, NFTs. So the whole, by the way, I had a lot of money in Voyager also, but.

Yeah, me, too. a lot. So is it gone now? No, I don't think it's gone, no. It's not? You might not get all of it back. So if you had U.S. dollars, USDA, you'll get it all back. I will. Yes. Yeah. So not USCC, but U.S.D. There's two different things. U.S.D was stored, was in a bank account. USDC is still considered crypto. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. Because that's like, I was mortified. I don't know. I got to check now. Because I just found out obviously a couple days ago about this, I was like mortified. It's brutal. Yeah. It's hard. The whole thing. Because also, So it was such height. It was so hype. They made a mistake. I mean, it's like, look, I've been

investing in a long time, and I've seen companies make mistakes for things that were supposed to be riskless. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly. Right. I mean, nothing's ever riskless, right? But close enough. Yeah. I mean, I remember I had a bank call me. I had a lot of money in the bank. And fortunately, they called me and said, this bank's about to go under. And so you better pull your money out now. And so, you know, I was fortunate. But unfortunately, Voyager did a deal with this company called 3AC, Three Arrows Capital, and it looked good on paper, but the company basically lied about their finances. Wow.

Yeah, because Voyager is a public company in Toronto. I actually even owned stock. I bought stock. You know, and I'm Canadian, too, so from Toronto. Toronto, yeah. So I bought stock in the company on the Toronto Exchange thinking, okay, you know, but when 3AC went bankrupt, it just had that contagion. But, you know, in reading all the filings, basically.

what Voyager is saying is, you know, we have a, we have, the USDA is cash in the bank at their bank, right? Right. And so if you have that, you'll get 100% back. The USDC and crypto, it really depends on how much they're able to collect from, from, Yeah, what's that? I have the other one, not the one I'm going to get back basically. Yeah, the USDC, yeah, and I had a lot of USDC there too.

Yeah. Because it was making 8.5%. It was making, exactly. Yeah. And so, and this is why. was making 8.5%. Yeah, exactly. And so hopefully, you know, if what they say in their filing is accurate, and I have no reason to believe it's not, and the judge that's dealing with the bankruptcy agrees, then they'll be able to put consumer accounts first to get probably 60, 70 percent of

the crypto back. Oh, really? Yeah. And then what they've said in their filings in public that they're going to try to do is for the other 30 or 40 percent, because they're bankrupt, the old stock that I own is worthless, right? Right. They'll try to, in the new company, they'll recreate it and give stock and tokens to those people to hopefully, if it turns out to be worth anything, make up the delta. Wow. So what are you the case? I mean, obviously you're like very involved, you invest in a lot of this stuff. People like me and probably a lot of more, I would say majority of the population don't only understand this whole idea. But then what happens is we get like not pressure, kind of pressure. Yeah, it's like anything else. Everybody's making

money. Everybody's making all, everyone's like telling me that's like crazy monopoly money. So then I feel like I'm missing out. And then I put a bunch of money in. You got to fight that feeling. Tell me about it. Now you know, yeah. And so the question is like, is there a way to educate people properly because you just got to do the work. I mean, I knew you were going to say that. There's just no shortcuts. I wish to the work. there this is one area that you're so one one difference between look stocks are the same way yeah right so if you look at your stock portfolio if you have any tech stocks at all yeah it's gotten crushed yeah everything's getting crushed yeah and it's gotten crushed as much as bitcoin or ethereum right so you always

have to ask yourself is the company a good company you know or is the value because part of the problem with the tech stocks is their valuations went too high because interest rates were so long and so people had nowhere else to put their money so they put it into crypto and they put it into high flyer tech stocks and other things, right? And when interest rates have been going up over the last few months, it's like, okay, well, I can earn two or three or four percent. Why am I going to take the risk on crypto or on these stocks? So I'll just yank it out. And, you know, Amazon is falling, what, 50, 60, 70 percent? Netflix, 70 or 80 percent. Yeah, everything has gotten destroyed. Even Apple has gone down 30-some percent. And so, you know, there's no way you can predict all

of that, you know, it just doesn't matter who you are. Right. Stocks don't always just go up, even though it feels like it. And it's the same with crypto. But for me, with crypto, there's two types of crypto tokens. One is store value, which is really only Bitcoin. And that's kind of like gold. You know, there's all kinds of narratives that say, well, if you hold gold when there's heavy inflation, the price of gold would go up.

Right. Price of gold has gotten down during all this inflation. And so that's bullshit, but it's a narrative that gets people to buy. And it's the same with Bitcoin. You know, there's only $21 million going to be made. So if there's inflation, you don't have to worry about that hasn't worked either. But the reality is those store values are just about supply and demand. If there's more people buying than selling, the price goes up.

If there's more people selling than buying, the price goes down. Now, good news with both gold and Bitcoin is most people just hold them and weight it out. That's one kind of crypto. The other kind are just tokens and, you know, like Ethereum and... You have Doge. Does it, you guys use Doge? Doge coin. Yeah, Doge coin is just fun.

Dogecoin is like the on-ramp for crypto Oh, okay, okay. You can use it to buy stuff and everything. Like, you can go to the MAV store and buy tickets and buy whatever. But, you know, there's, it's, like what I've said, it's just it's a better lottery ticket than a lottery ticket. Because once you scratch it, if you don't win on your lottery ticket, it's over, at least with Dogecoin, it's got a chance still to go.

That has a chance. So like, so how about NFTs? What's with this NFT? It's the same thing. You told me about Chris, what's his face? Chris Brown. Do you see this? He has like a hundred million followers, 120 million followers on social media. He made an NFT. The singer? Yeah. Okay. And he sold like what they made. How many of these? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's like it's like art. Right. No, it's, yeah, no, I understand what

it is. But I feel like everybody in their dog now is like doing one and having one. Yeah, but it's just, it's just like, you know, anybody who collected baseball cards. So is it the same? Same thing. Yeah, only a digital version of a collectible. That's it. And so, you know, if I buy, and if you want to see my NFTs, go to lazy.com slash mcubin. Okay. That's another company I started, right? I was going to ask you about this lazy one also.

What is that? It's just a way you just go to lazy.com, set up an account, connect your wallets, and it's an easy way, you know, to put in your Instagram profile or at the bottom of an email, check out my NFTs, lazy.com slash mcubin. Okay. I'm going to check them out. Yeah. Yeah, so if you have NFTs in your wallet, it's a really easy thing to do. Yeah. But NFTs, you know, they're like any other collectible art, right?

What makes a Picasso worth all that money? True, but it was that I'll have a Picasso. Not like, if I were to buy a print of the Picasso, it doesn't cost me anything. It costs me like $10, $20. Well, yeah, it's the same thing, right? Yeah. But there are certain prints of things that cost you a lot. True.

You know, Andy Warhol. It's online. Like, who cares? Like, wouldn't I rather have it on my fall? Well, well, we'll think about it. this way. If you run out of space on your phone. Yes. And you have to delete pictures. Yes. How painful is that? I don't like it. It's painful. Yes. Oh, there's my baby and there's this. Right. There's value. Just because it's digital doesn't mean there's not value. True. And if it's art from somebody that you respect or like, and you know, you can you can have it show up on your

screensaver, on your laptop, on your PC, on your phone. So, you know, it's just a collectible. And the fact that it's digital doesn't make it, digital doesn't make it any more or less valuable. It makes it easier to buy and sell, faster to buy and sell, but it comes down to supply and demand. If nobody cares about Picasso, that Picasso is going down in value. Like, are you buying, you know how Snoop bought some area in Metaverse and the Webverse? No, I think that's a joke. What is this? You know, in the Metaverse, you know, if you can get people to go there, and that's a place to, you know, congregate and hang out with your avatar. And I look, I...

Do you understand why it's so complicated? Yeah, I get it. You know, in this second life and other places like that have been around forever, it's just that the technology is advanced. Yeah. But the idea of, you know, buying digital real estate in the metaverse and thinking it's going to appreciate for some reason other than just, you know, convincing somebody else to buy it.

Yeah, I'm not sold on that. So you're not doing that. So what's the next wave? Like, what's the next thing you look for? Well, it'll be crypto. Yeah. There's artificial intelligence, but that's way too complicated. That's the whole other beast.

Well, that's all happening. Yeah, for sure. AI's driving a lot. Yeah. But that's one of the things you're really big in. You're right. You're investing in a ton of. Yeah, because I've got to know it for my companies.

Yeah. But with crypto, it comes down to utility. Yeah. Right? So like with the Dallas Mavericks, if you go to a MAVs game and you scan your ticket before the end of the first quarter, for every game, we create a unique NFT. And you get it for free. You don't have to buy it.

You get it for free. and if you go to maths collectibles.com, you can see what we have there. And if once you scan your ticket in, you go to math collectibles, it'll be there waiting for you. You don't have to create a wallet or do all this other stuff.

And you can buy them and trade them and sell them or, you know, whatever. But whoever goes to the most games or collects the most, you know, we'll give you free tickets to a pre-season game, right? And we don't say in advance what we're going to give you, right? We just try to reward you based off of what we see in the market and all that. So sometimes, like in this case, an NFT,

is a reflection of something you've done. And in our case, with the Mavs, you've gone to a game, and we want to reward that. And so, you know, by have, you ever had the biggest collection, I think we sent them a special jacket, you know, and just stuff like that. But we don't, we don't say buy this so you can get a jacket. We say, you know, this tells us your fandom because you're going to games. Right. Because that's the behavior we want to reward more than anything.

Well, exactly. Going to games and even watching a game. You know, so that's one element. And then, you know, there's other utility. it really comes down to crypto will start taking off again when you can use it for some level of utility. Right?

You know, when iPhones first came out, people didn't think Snapchat. Yeah, no way, exactly. You know, they didn't think Instagram. Nope. But when those came out, you started saying, oh, I can use my phone for a whole lot more than just take...

TikTok or... Yeah. You know, I can use it for a whole lot more than just taking pictures and making phone calls. Right. You know, or going on the internet. And so that's an example of utility

where there was an application that was so compelling, people needed that platform to use it. It was just like streaming. When we started streaming in 1995, if you wanted to listen to the Chicago Cubs and you were in Dallas, the only way you can get those games was by getting a PC, downloading, you know, having a mode. It was a pain in the ass. Absolutely. Right. But people went through it because if you're a Cubs fan and you're at work, it was the only way. Right.

And it'll be the same with crypto. So if there's an application that, you know, the only thing. only way I can do this application, then that's what it's going to take. And when that happens, you'll see crypto go boom again. Wow. Well, hopefully sooner than later, right? Kid and right. Like, no kidding. Yeah, from your mouth to God's ears. And then one other thing about, well, actually, I wanted to ask you this only because I was curious when I was like doing all this research. How are you able to get into Indiana without finishing high school? Because I was taking college classes. So don't you need to have like a college, a high school, you know, diploma?

When I dropped out, I went to the University of Pittsburgh, took classes there, and then let me take those classes and apply it. That's how you did it. That's how I did. And then when I got to Indiana, I snuck into a gradual level statistics class, got an A in it. And they thought I was in the MBA program when I was 18. But I just kept on taking MBA classes and I was even tutoring people. It was insane.

Oh, my God. That is so cute. You're so sly. What's your favorite book that you, well, Fountainhead, right? Okay. That wasn't easy. I shouldn't have said that. Well, I should pretend.

And that doesn't mean like I'm a big. iron ran advocate or anything i just like i loved howard work yeah that's the whole thing right howard work is just the big old fuck you guy yeah i love him yeah so that that's why that's right okay other than other than that what's like your favorite business book besides yours yeah how to win a sport of business my little plug in there um it's like 65 pages yeah it's like it's more like a pamphlet than a book yeah i wanted to be really easy to read and and motivating um i don't know probably always so much so you have yeah always the last book I read typically signal noise which is a book about statistics was good fun the master

algorithm which is about AI was good