He Sold Garbage Bags at 12. The Pitch Hasn't Changed.

Lex Fridman introduces Mark Cuban as a billionaire investor, a star of *Shark Tank*, longtime principal owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and someone unafraid to fight on X over DEI, wokeism, and identity politics with Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson. Then he asks the question Cuban is built to answer: what makes a great entrepreneur? Cuban's list is three items. Curiosity, because business is never static. Agility, because new information and a changing environment demand that you adapt. And the ability to sell, because no company has ever survived without sales. If your product is not the thing you are dying to tell people about, he says, you are not going to succeed.

Selling, for him, is not charisma. It is helping. He puts himself in another person's shoes and asks whether his product can save them time or money. At 12 he sold garbage bags door to door in Pittsburgh: *Hi, my name is Mark, do you use garbage bags? Can I drop them off once a week?* Rejection was rare enough that he does not remember the rate. "Who's gonna say no to a 12-year-old kid who's gonna save him time and money?" At MicroSolutions the question was whether connecting PCs to a local area network would improve productivity and profitability. The answer was always yes. The live question was whether he could do the job cost-effectively. You do not have to be born a salesperson to ask that, he says. You have to be willing to learn the business. That is the hardest part.

The skill he actually claims is reading. Give him any kind of company and he says it takes two seconds to see how it makes money and how to make it more productive. Then he asks whether he can introduce something the company has never seen. His father, who did automotive upholstery, used to say they did not live in the world they were born into. If you are not a voracious consumer of information, sales skill becomes useless. The older Cuban got up at seven, came home exhausted, lost an eye when a staple broke at work, and brought his sons to sweep floors at Regency Products so they would feel how backbreaking the job was. He had no business advice to offer. He wanted them in college, never working like that, and he taught them to be nice, caring, and accepting.

Nice was the family lesson. Early Cuban was still more of an asshole than he wishes. He yelled. He had no patience for people who did not share his common sense. He was always going, trying to get to independence, and he told colleagues they were either speeding up and getting on the train or getting dropped at the next station. Firing people felt like admitting a hiring mistake, and the salesperson in him always wanted to talk someone into working out. About 99% of the people he interviewed, he wanted to hire, because he thought he could make them work. They often did not. People at the company told him he sucked at it. So he delegated hiring and firing to partners who had no problem with either.

The self-diagnosis is clean. He was a ready-fire-aim guy. He partnered with people who were anal and perfectionist, who dotted i's and kept him inside the baselines. Knowing what you are bad at, he tells Fridman, is as important as knowing what you are good at. The first leap into a company depends on personal circumstances. Cuban got fired, was sleeping on the floor in a three-bedroom apartment with six guys, and could not go any lower. There was no downside. At 25 he started MicroSolutions by going back to prospects from the job that had just dumped him. Architectural Lighting put up $500 so he could buy software at 50% margins. That was the company.

People email him asking what business they should start. That question, he says, means they are not ready. Either you are prepared and you know it, or you are not. The American-dream sequence is familiar: an idea, friends who say it is great, a Google search that shows nobody doing it, without noticing that ten companies already died trying. Then most people stop, because the next step means changing their life. If you have a mortgage and a family, save money. They have to eat. If you have nothing, it is the perfect time. Preparation looks like nights, weekends, and lunch hours spent calling to see if anyone will write a check. Geronimo off a cliff is a hard way to start, especially once competition shows up and refuses to let you kick its ass.

Joe Biden, of all people, once told him at a vice-presidential entrepreneurship conference that the United States is the most entrepreneurial country in the world, and no one else is close. Cuban traces that to Horatio Alger stories and to the origin myths of Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs. Fridman worries that wealth now arrives pre-packaged with distrust. Cuban dates the shift to social media after the 2012 peak of linear television, when everyone got a sandbox and a way to amplify the feeling that billionaires are bad. *Shark Tank*, he says, is the rebuttal: every minute of every episode celebrates the American dream, advertising it to kids in Dubuque and Ketchum, Idaho, and to countries he cannot even count.

Cuban does the show because kids walk up to him and say they started watching at five or ten and then started a company. He loves even the horrible ideas, for the guts to step onto the carpet. The Sharks miss good ones and sometimes motivate founders by saying no. He passed on Spikeball, the beach rebound game that now fills New York and Los Angeles sand, because the founders wanted him to commissioner a league. He does not need every deal to be huge. A 19-year-old named Laney came on with a sugar scrub that he did not see becoming a $100 million company. He thought it could be a $2 million to $5 million living. Six months after the episode aired she called: she had a million dollars in the bank. He told her to set aside taxes, enjoy it, and go back to work.

Valuation is where the fights happen. Cuban’s math is simple. If a company is worth $1 million and he buys 10% for $100,000, it has to generate $100,000 in after-tax cash to return his money, unless he sees an exit in unique technology or a product another firm would want. Barbara Corcoran, he says, can listen for 20 minutes and know whether the person will do the work. Cuban finds delusion by asking questions. Supplements that cure cancer, gadgets that build core strength without exercise: he pounds on them. Ambition that sets reality aside is required at some level if you want a $10 million or $1 billion company. Delusion works against you, because you still have to execute. Founders also lie to themselves that bigger, faster, cheaper is a permanent state. He calls the competitors leapfrog businesses: if you do A, B, and C, they will try C, D, and E.

Fridman asks about pivots. Cuban would rather not see a full pivot at the riskiest moment. If you did the homework, including product-market fit, you should be able to sell what you built. Pivoting after raising money often means you could not read the market; more often than not, those bets fail. Micro-pivots are different. Every business is continuous iteration of product, pitch, advertising, people, and now AI. Digital businesses can change a business model in a millisecond. That is the segue into how he made the first billion.

In late 1994 and early 1995, Cuban and Todd Wagner sat at a California Pizza Kitchen in Dallas and talked about using this new thing called the internet to hear Indiana University basketball. Their old method was a speakerphone next to a radio in Bloomington, another speakerphone in Dallas, and a 12-pack of beer. Cuban had written software and done network integration at MicroSolutions, so they started AudioNet in a second bedroom: a server, a 128K ISDN line, Netscape server software, and progressive-loading files so you could listen while the audio downloaded. It buffered. It was not good. Nobody else was doing it. They stuck a $49 FM radio next to a server at local stations, ran analog cables in, encoded KLIF, and posted on UUNET, CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL that office workers outside Dallas could now listen. They spent nothing on advertising.

Users went from 10 a day to 100, 1,000, hundreds of thousands, then a million over four years. Before the Digital Millennium Copyright Act they bought CDs and hosted music. In-office listening exploded because cubicles had PCs and bandwidth, not radios or TVs, and companies had not yet discovered firewalls. AudioNet became Broadcast.com in 1998, audio and video, the largest multimedia site on the internet. The consumer network was the proof of concept. The money was corporate. In 1996 through 1998, companies spent millions putting employees in hotel ballrooms with satellite downlinks for product launches. Cuban offered to push the same event to PCs at work for about $500,000. Intel’s P90 announcement and Motorola phone launches were clients. They took the company public in July 1998, then the largest first-day jump in stock-market history. A year later they sold to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock. Cuban owned around 30%.

He had seen bubbles before. After selling MicroSolutions he told his broker to invest like a 60-year-old, then started trading because Wall Street analysts were calling him about networks he had actually installed. He made 80% to 100% a year and even seeded a hedge fund with his trading history. PC makers and networking vendors had gone up and then straight down when someone leapfrogged them. When the Yahoo shares arrived he wanted a B next to his name, nothing more. "I don't want to be greedy." Almost everything he had was in one stock, so he and his Goldman Sachs broker shorted an index that contained Yahoo, using some $20 million in cash, under a rule that barred shorting indexes more than 5% in a single name. They sold calls and bought puts. When the market cratered, the collar converted to cash over a couple of years. It became one of the top ten trades of all time. On CNBC, with Yahoo already up from the collar price, Joe Kernen asked if he felt stupid. "Yeah, I feel real stupid sitting on my jet."

The bubble tell, for him, was taxis. Cab drivers talked about internet stocks. Companies with a website and no operating profit were going public to harvest froth. That was a bubble. He does not see that now: almost no IPOs, and no rush of AI skins going public. If that rush arrives, then yes. His 14-year-old bragging about Nvidia on Robinhood is a thing to watch, not yet the tell. Becoming a billionaire, he says, requires luck. He could start over and make a million, probably ten million, hopefully a hundred. A billion needs something good to happen. Timing is that something. The internet market went nuts as they built. GPUs sat in gaming and crypto mining until they suddenly became cheap enough to train models. Nobody wrote that into a business plan.

Fridman treats luck as gratitude. Cuban applies it to the usual names. Bezos could raise huge sums while unprofitable because the environment allowed it. Mark Zuckerberg, Cuban says, was trying to get laid, wrote some good software, and could not have done it five years earlier or later, when Friendster or MySpace might have been the winner. Apps did not take off with the 2007 iPhone; they took off in 2011 and 2012. Google and Facebook also raised "a shitload of money." Raising is not only sales. It is the mood of people with capital, and it is proximity. Same idea, same person, same execution at Miami University in Ohio or Richland Community College instead of Harvard, and nothing. Individuals can realize their potential anywhere, he agrees. The delta is scale. Not everyone gets the tools for a grand slam.

A billion is not his definition of success. Success is waking up with a smile, excited about the day. If you were happy broke, you will be really happy rich; if you were miserable in the job, money may not fix who you are. He never looked at his father as unsuccessful. They celebrated what they had. The most valuable asset is time, which is why he wanted to retire young enough to experience everything. His father's grand slam was three kids in college. Cuban's is his own kids. The miss he is willing to narrate is Uber. Bill Gurley sent him Travis Kalanick and Red Swoosh, a peer-to-peer company Cuban saw as stealing scarce bandwidth. Kalanick sold it for about $18 million, then came back with Uber Cab at a $10 million or $15 million raise. Cuban liked the idea, warned that taxi commissions would try to kill it, thought the marketing budget was light, and offered to invest at a lower valuation. Kalanick never came back. Cuban’s read on him: he will run through walls, including walls he does not have to run through. That ambition cost Kalanick the company, not the fortune. It is also what made him a great entrepreneur.

In January 2000 he paid $285 million for a majority stake in one of the worst teams in the league. On the court he had Dirk Nowitzki, and he let Dirk be Dirk. The rest of the basketball turnaround was a message. The Mavs had three or four coaches covering everything. Cuban noticed companies spent more training people on PC software than they spent developing their most important assets, the players, so he hired about 15 development coaches, one per player. People thought he was insane. It told the locker room that winning, not making money, was the goal. Attitudes and effort changed.

On the business side he asked what business they were actually in. Within a few months it was obvious: the entire NBA thought basketball, and they were in the experience business. You do not remember the score or the dunk. You remember who you were with and why you went: first date with the woman who became your wife, buddies, a dad, an uncle. What happens off the court is as important as what happens on it, maybe more, because a parent bringing a 10-year-old needs something for a short attention span. When the last shot is in the air, strangers hug if it drops and commiserate if it misses. That is unique to sports, and the Mavs had never sold it. He fought the league, which he says was nothing but attorneys with no marketing skill, and the league, to its credit, started hiring better marketers. Arena energy, cheap resale tickets packed with screaming kids, and his own sideline yelling were all part of the product. TV, local and a 1/30th share of the national deal, keeps fans connected when the team is bad.

Fridman calls the X argument with Musk a beef. Cuban will not. It is Musk's platform; he paid for the right to run it as he pleases, and Cuban respects that even when he disagrees. Because it is Musk's house, people with their own platforms are less likely to push back, which is why Cuban does. When DEI is treated as de facto racist, he calls that nonsense and shares the opinion. Musk, he says, mostly answers with snark. Cuban's definitions are short. Diversity means expanding the applicant pool to people you would not otherwise reach, looking where others are not looking. Equity means putting a new hire in a position to succeed. Inclusion means giving someone who is not "typical" the support to do the job and feel confident coming to work. "It's that simple."

Quotas, he says, are illegal except in narrow attempts to repair past discrimination, and treating DEI as quota-based is a straw man. Of course some programs are implemented poorly. So are sales, marketing, and HR. That is the point of a mostly free market: wrong choices lose you the best people and wreck the plan. Reverse discrimination happens, because no human is 100% objective and almost no job is purely quantitative. How do you rank two janitors, or two salespeople who have not sold your product yet? He still believes there is far more discrimination against people of color than against white people, and that "reverse discrimination because of DEI is prevalent" is a straw man.

Fridman presses the overcorrection: DEI programs are hard to criticize inside a company because the racist or sexist label is sticky. Cuban analogizes to getting fined for yelling at NBA referees, and to the Google engineer fired for claiming the company had AGI. Leadership decides whether speech helps or hurts the firm. He has not seen conservatives silenced in organizations at the volume Twitter claims. When he asked Bill Ackman who was forcing DEI on him, Ackman pointed at universities and ideology, then conceded it was not happening inside his own companies. It happens to other people. Conservative friends in DMs said the same: the ideology is everywhere, look at Harvard and North Carolina. Cuban has never had anyone push him. It was his business choice, and he is not telling anyone else they have to make it.

A Wall Street Journal piece on two million workers found that 40% of people who were fired thought the firing was wrong and that they had been doing a great job, even after performance reviews said otherwise. Cuban reads the reverse-discrimination noise through that disconnect. Feeling you cannot speak because you are white will show up in a review; HR will have to deal with it; you cannot just be fired for speaking. He does not trust the supposed volume. Universities and companies, he insists, are different worlds. He grants that universities spend too much on DEI, that tuition has outrun inflation, and that they are poorly run. He has not been arguing the campus case. He lives in companies. Christopher Rufo's call for decentralized activism against DEI, as Cuban remembers it, also sits oddly next to a Republican politics of centralized power.

Musk's line that the woke mind virus always sides with the weaker party gets a Cuban inversion: the anti-woke mind lets historically powerful groups play victim by packaging anecdotes into a conspiracy that threatens the structures they depend on. Both sides, Fridman notes, can be abused. Cuban will not defend $20 million DEI bureaucracies on campus, and he did not cheer the Harvard and North Carolina admissions decisions even though he thinks a diverse student body prepares kids for the real world. Then Fridman brings up Gemini generating Black George Washingtons and Black Nazis. Cuban’s comparison is Grok. When users showed Musk that his own model answered in a "woke" way, the response was that it was a mistake and they would fix it. When Gemini did it, it was the end of the world and a portrait of Google's culture. Google called it a mistake; then the product manager was doxxed over old tweets.

Fridman argues Google Search is a trust brand that has to look objective. Cuban thinks that grants the company too much power and undercounts the market. Until about a month before the taping, "Shark Tank keto gummies" on Google returned scam ad after scam ad. Elderly people emailed him asking why the gummies failed and why they could not cancel monthly charges billed as the number-one deal in *Shark Tank* history. He worked with Google on a fix and discovered the same URL rendered one page on the internal google.com domain and another outside it. They had to look at it at the same time to see the bug. A lot of technology problems, he concludes, are hard to fix. "They have bias" does not explain a split-render ad scam.

He also rejects the idea that Silicon Valley's ideological bubble is immune to customers. Billions of users, employees who know they will be doxxed, and financial self-interest are supposed to correct it, with a delay. Neural nets plus safety layers will misfire, which is why he expects millions of models rather than four or five foundations. If a company staffs only left-leaning people, that too is self-correcting. He is working on a meta-search over about 30 models so a user can ask whether DEI or the COVID vaccine is good and compare the outputs. Mayo Clinic and MD Anderson, he says, will not donate their IP to ChatGPT or Gemini. That would be business suicide. They will train and license their own models. Brands will fragment the stack.

The deeper problem, Cuban argues, is not woke ideology. It is attaching your identity to a platform. Whoever controls the algorithm or the programming, if that is your singular source, controls you in a lot of respects. He has never felt pressure to adopt DEI, and he has never told anyone else to. On Dylan Mulvaney and the Bud Light backlash, he would bet that 90% or more of the impressions came from right-leaning media. She had on the order of 250,000 followers. If Kid Rock had not shot at Bud Light cans, Cuban says, she would be long forgotten.

Peterson's worry, as Fridman restates it, is that Mulvaney popularized a life-altering medical path that can harm children if it becomes a trend for kids who already feel like outsiders. Cuban asks for evidence. He has not seen data that she influenced people to transition. The TikTok documentation of her year of transition did not, in his memory, draw enormous views. JAMA numbers he cites showed transitions falling from 2021 to 2022, and there were no 2023 figures yet, after the Mulvaney episode, so the assertion could not be checked. Analogies to Trump and bleach injections, he says, make the same leap: find one person who did the thing, declare a trend.

His own line is that surgery should wait until 18, with earlier cases a conversation among parents and a doctor. What he will not accept is that every doctor, psychologist, hospital, and insurer in the chain has been corrupted by a social-media mood. Hospitals already halt abortions under state law. Alabama stopped IVF immediately after a judge's ruling. He does not believe those institutions will risk the business, the livelihood, and the relationships to skip checking whether a 14-year-old is ready. Peterson's Auschwitz comparison he calls ridiculous. Fridman notes Godwin's law: once Hitler is in the room, the conversation is over. Cuban agrees, and adds a distinction. Wartime atrocities ride on nationalism, patriotism, and self-preservation. DEI, wokeness, and transgender medicine do not. Comparing them to Auschwitz, he says, is insane.

Cuban had written that if they were giving Biden last rites against Trump, he would still vote Biden. Musk caricatured it as voting for a flesh-eating zombie who would plunge Earth into a thousand years of darkness. Cuban used the reply to thank Tesla consultants for following up on Cost Plus Drugs, and allowed that his limit is 300 years of darkness. The serious test is who they hire. Nobody from Biden's cabinet, he says, has left to write books about how the president is bad for the country. Almost everyone closest to Trump has turned, unless money is still involved. "If you're gonna be the most powerful person in the world, you better know how to manage and lead." He still thinks Biden's border is a horrific mistake, and he dislikes that Biden will not admit errors, including Afghanistan. Commanders-in-chief make mistakes. The other guy never admits them, and the list is long.

The conservative theory that the border surge exists so illegal immigrants can vote, he calls insane. You cannot vote as an illegal immigrant. Texas already requires state ID. The story's real function, he and Fridman agree, is to seed doubt about whether elections are legitimate. Cuban heard Trump say in the 2016 Clinton debate, before he had won anything, that if he lost they would not even know if the election was legitimate. A Roy Cohn biography, deny, deny, deny, reads to Cuban like a template for Trump, who had Cohn as a mentor. The facts still matter: red states will check IDs, swing states know Trump will sue, and enough people will do the right thing to keep their jobs. Treating fellow citizens as people who will do *anything* against the country's interest is, he says, wrong.

He guesses, and labels it a guess, that the Biden team saw flat-to-declining birth rates, a fiscal case for more immigration, and crime rates no higher than citizens', and made a calculated mistake they now have to fix or it will hurt them severely. He does not buy Musk's claim that the whole point is future voters. Immigrants, including Cuban's own family, are what make the country. The deeper failure he names is leadership: nobody will tell Republicans their hyperbole is wrong and Democrats they blew immigration and Afghanistan, then staff a mix instead of a tribe. Labels work on social media. If Musk took his own account out of the algorithm, Cuban thinks the output would change. Musk's followers and positive engagements are almost all right-leaning; negative ones include Cuban. The ranking, as Cuban last read it, is nearest-neighbor around the biggest accounts. He tells Fridman to open a burner and see who X recommends. Pre-Musk X was not open source, so Cuban could not audit the old left-leaning dominance conservatives remember. Anecdotes, Fridman says, are sexy. Cuban’s gloss: more noise than signal.

What is broken in American healthcare? "There's no transparency." No transparency, no trust, except maybe in your doctor, and that is a broken system. Cost Plus Drugs is trying to sell trust. On the site you enter a medication among the 2,500-plus they carry and see what they paid, a 15% markup, the pharmacy fill fee, and shipping. That stack is the total. Research comparing their prices to CMS, he says, finds them cheaper than what the government negotiates. Millions of people have saved hundreds of millions of dollars. The opponents are the three pharmacy benefit managers that control most of the market: CVS Caremark, Cigna's Express Scripts, and UnitedHealth's Optum Rx. The first clause in their contracts is that you cannot disclose anything. Opacity lets them tell one company it is getting a great price at X and another company it is getting a great price at X plus, with no way to check.

Humira, the country's top-revenue drug, runs about $8,000 a month before rebates and $3,000 to $6,000 after, depending on company size. A biosimilar Cuban carries, Yusimry, is $594 out of pocket. The big three will not let clients have Yusimry, he says, because they get no rebate on it. They would rather keep the expensive drug on formulary. CVS Caremark spokesman Phil Blando replied that employers and the government choose them for lower costs, better outcomes, and access, and that they lead on transparency. Cuban calls that a whole lot of nothing. Cost Plus will hand you the full price list. Call the big three for the same thing and they will laugh. Even your own claims data, how many people used Humira and what you paid, arrives in six months if you scream, and they charge you. When Cuban's companies left, they waited six months and paid for their own data.

As an employer he was paying benefits consultants $30 per employee per month, millions a year, to be steered toward whoever paid the fattest commissions. He cut them. A slice of Mavericks generic drugs that Cost Plus sold for more than $30 had cost $169,000 through a big-three PBM and would have cost $19,000 at Cost Plus. Self-insurance charged $17.15 per employee per month just to use a provider network other firms will assemble for free. The same companies decide authorizations, including step therapy that can force three other drugs, not always cheaper, because the rebate is higher. No CEO understands this, he says. It is not a core competency. CFOs do not either. HR spends its time fighting pre-authorizations after a kid breaks an arm. Any company over about 500 employees should have a chief healthcare officer. Healthcare is the second-largest line item after payroll. Opacity survives because the people writing the checks do not understand the bill.

The company started with a cold email from Dr. Alex Oshmyansky, a radiologist and physicist who wanted a compounding pharmacy for shortage generics. Cuban told him he was thinking too small. Martin Shkreli had just been on his way to jail for jacking up Daraprim on the order of 7,500%. If that could work, the market was inefficient, and the reason was opacity. They built a fully transparent cost-plus company and it took off. They work outside the cartel, which means brand manufacturers are warned they may lose formulary placement if they work with Cost Plus. Community pharmacies, meanwhile, buy a $600 Medicare drug, collect a small copay, and get reimbursed less than their cost, so they eat the loss and close. The government, via Medicare Part D and Medicare Advantage, is complicit. Big brands know that if independents die they will have even less leverage, which is why some are now working with Cuban on programs that support those pharmacies. It is the only company he has ever put his name on. At 25 he would have built inside the system and sold. He does not need that money now.

On open-source AI, Cuban stepped between Vinod Khosla and Marc Andreessen. He likes open weights as a business choice, not as a mandate. Meta's release is smart for Meta; it should not be forced on everyone. The industry is incestuous in the way early streaming was: same papers, same conferences, a couple of extra-smart people at Anthropic, slightly better efficiency. He analogizes to IBM and Digital Equipment, whose mainframes needed captive software, versus PCs that ran off-the-shelf MS-DOS and Windows. As training gets cheaper, more reasons to open-source will appear. He does not buy Khosla's Manhattan Project comparison. He is an AI optimist, which is not a claim that nothing scary will happen, especially in the military. He believes there will be millions, even tens of millions, of models. Mixture-of-experts setups will let specialists keep and license what they know. There will not be one medical database.

Advice to young people is almost the opposite of a five-year plan. Love your life. Find things you can enjoy. Be curious. You do not need the answers at 12 or 15. He gets emails from teenagers who feel held back and tells them that at 15 they are not supposed to know. He is a hardcore believer that every person is really, really, really good at something, maybe world-class, and that the hard part is finding it. He took one tech class in college, Fortran, and cheated. Only at Mellon Bank, learning a scripting language called RAMIS, did he realize he liked this. That led to selling software. You do not know what the thing will be until you experience different things. It might click at 15, 25, or 55.

In 1992, after selling MicroSolutions, he went to Moscow State University to teach kids how to start businesses, using high-school Russian. People there did not know what "profit" meant. After the Soviet Union fell, entrepreneurship went through the roof, some of it mafia-driven, but the spark was real. He thinks the spark is natural, and that you never know when circumstances will let you use it. Fridman says Russian and Ukrainian systems suppress it in adults. Cuban believes that; otherwise he would not have gone. If Ukraine survives the war, rebuilding, as in Europe after World War II, will create opportunities. First the war has to end.

What gives him hope is looking in his kids' eyes, and the emails from 13-year-olds around the world who watched *Shark Tank* and took the time to ask business questions. He sees the spark when he talks to schools: something bigger and better is out there. Fear of climate and the rest is real. That is also the beauty of kids, and of Gen Z. In elementary-school talks he has children look at a light that once did not exist, and a chair that did not always look like that. Somebody had the idea. Somebody made the product. The school bought it. Then he makes them walk out asking a question. "Why not me? Why can't I be the one to change the world?"