"Wanna smoke?"
Dirt knows I haven't taken a day off work in a month, so the offer was especially sweet to my ears. God, yes. I'll be right over.
"This is Brian," Dirt said, pointing to a stranger offering me a Cuban cigar.
"You're the computer guy?" Brian asked. "Got any degrees?"
Beware strangers bearing Cubans.
For the glacial next two hours, I smoked that Cuban and listened to Brian's business idea. He made me swear not to divulge it, but as you'll see in 29 words' time, absolutely nothing will come of my sharing it with a mass audience. Brian's big idea: people can use the Web to teach one another...around the world!
His patent was rejected, but he's resubmitting it.
"My friend the second-ranked quantum physicist in the world says this could be the first company in the world with a trillion-dollar market cap."
Maybe with a trillion dollars in venture capital, sure.
Over and over, he talked about the brilliance of his idea, about how he couldn't believe that he beat Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Warren Buffet to it. Eventually Dirt just got up and went inside, abandoning me to listen to the unremitting drone of Brian's self-delusions. "We're gonna save the economy and change the world," he said, shaking his head meaningfully, at least a dozen times.
In fact, I have now shared every last thing Brian said in two hours during which he talked unremittingly. As you might imagine, there was some repetition. Finally, he concluded with "So what do you think of my business idea, John?"
"Enough about you, what do I think about you?" I replied.
"Right," he replied with no self-awareness.