I’d like to tell you that he travels with an entourage, that he’s unapproachable, that you play by his rules. But I’ve never met a celebrity so honest, so unguarded, so willing to go on the record as Mark Cuban. He’s got no agenda, he’s just being him.

Maybe you know him as the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, the NBA champs. Maybe you saw him on "Dancing With The Stars". But to those paying attention, it was his huge financial victory selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo that put him on our radar…how did this happen?

I hate to tell you, but rich guys are smart. The self-made ones. Those who inherit tend to piss it away, they just don’t know about hard work. And that’s what it takes to make it and keep it.

So Mark graduates from college and moves to Indiana where he’s living in a veritable frat house, six guys, working as a bartender. So what does he do? He buys a Texas Instruments computer and learns how to program. Now let me be clear, he’s got no degree in computer science. He’s not being paid to learn. But he can see the future, and he wants to participate.

Can you see where we’re going as opposed to where we’ve been?

Are you willing to put in the hard work to get there?

Hell, I’ll be honest, I was stunned Mark Cuban knew who I was, never mind wanted a meeting with me. To shoot the shit no less, with no agenda, because he thought it would be fun… I’m just a guy sitting in front of a computer screen in my underwear, how did this happen?

Hard work and a paradigm shift. When I was printing my newsletter and sending it via snail mail, my audience was limited. But the Internet opened the world to me, and if I can just write something special enough, it’s astounding who I can reach.

There are no limits online. Everybody’s got an e-mail address. Yes, doors are closed, but you have the key in your pocket, you can open them. And it doesn’t happen by knocking. It happens by creating.

So Mark gets a gig selling software. And when he makes a $15,000 deal, with a $1500 commission, his boss fires him, for going out on a call instead of opening the store, a task he delegated to a coworker.

If you play by the rules, you’re screwed. Successful people think for themselves. They may not break the law, they may not be dishonest, but if something doesn’t make sense, they say so and take action. Because if it doesn’t make sense to them, it doesn’t make sense to a whole lot of other people…and with these other free thinkers lies your future.

So Mark went independent. Started his own firm, eventually sold out to CompuServe, owned by H&R Block, and took his two million and retired.

Oh yeah, there was one good story just after the deal went down. How he was drunk in a bar with his buddies and he called American Airlines and bought a lifetime pass for himself and a partner. He was slurring his words, but they took his $125,000.

And then he visited 11 countries and ended up in Manhattan Beach, taking acting lessons, meeting women.

But he moved after driving his Lexus down La Cienega during the riots. To Hollywood. Where the building shook so hard two years later, during the Northridge quake, that he departed back to Dallas.

And that’s where a buddy brought up the concept of listening to Indiana games, their mutual alma mater, in Texas. There came the birth of Broadcast.com, which was sold to Yahoo for in excess of five billion.

But Mark couldn’t sell his stock immediately.

So he took every dollar he had and hedged against the dot com crash. That’s twenty million in case you wanted to know. Yup, he’d grown his two into twenty, by trading technology stocks. You can’t have someone else manage your money, you’ve got to do it yourself.

And yes, the market crashed. But even though six months went by, he couldn’t cash out right away because of the tax implications. So he got into LEAPS with Goldman Sachs and…

I was stunned at the confidence. I was always taught there was someone else who knew, someone smarter, better trained. But Mark believes if he just concentrates and dedicates himself, he can play.

And speaking of playing, he bought the Mavericks. Everybody said he overpaid, but Jerry Jones called him and said no. You can’t listen to the naysayers, you’ve got to do what’s right in your heart.

And now Mark is a contrary. He doesn’t want to be where everybody else is. He’s investing all the time, in new ideas, where no one else is playing. Because big wins are about risk. Which might be why the music business is in trouble, everybody’s playing it safe.

And yes, he’s got the Gulfstream V. And yes he was on not only "Dancing With The Stars", but "Entourage". But Mark Cuban is just like you and me, a denizen of the Net, he’s hooked up, wired, he knows what’s going on.

He uses a Sidekick, on T-Mobile. Why? Because of the keyboard, he rarely surfs the Net, but he taps out responses all day long.

And he implored me to put all my e-mail in the cloud. He’s got all of his back to 1985, he uploaded it to Gmail, he demonstrated the instant access he had, the searchability.

And he’s got tens of thousands of unread e-mails.

But he spends hours combing over his incoming every day.

You get two sentences. Complain, ask for a favor and he hits delete. Deliver a straight up business proposition, he might not only respond, he might invest, Mark’s accessible.

And he went on and on about Twitter. How we all know what’s going on now. We see the highlights on the instant service. He talked about programming on HDNet, one of his companies. If they air something tweetworthy, viewership skyrockets! They had 125,000 viewers at one in the morning. Which is insane. Then again, air enough boobies and young men get titillated.

And he said although the press constantly claims young kids aren’t on Twitter, he said everybody in the African-American community was. It was where information on basketball was exchanged.

And he spoke about how every kid knows every lyric. They’ve got to know what Jay-Z and Kanye have to say about Weezy, and vice versa.

And he believes newspapers survive, in a physical format. And he reads the "New York Times" as well as the "Wall Street Journal". And he believes you can’t know everything, but you’ve got to be informed on what you sell, your brand.

And you’ve got a question and Mark’s got an answer.

Solving our nation’s economic problems? Tax the rich, but be smarter with government distributions. He’s also about tearing down vacant homes. It gives work to laborers and then when demand picks up, new homes have to be built!

As for jobs… If only people were educated. There are $100,000 gigs in Silicon Valley there for the taking, as long as you know how to code. That’s not impossible, but are you willing to put in the effort?

And we bonded over how we handle haters. Mark said he loves it, indicates he’s on the right path. And if you e-mail him three or four hundred times, he’s gonna send you a message that this e-mail address has been deleted. Just because you have access, that doesn’t mean you can abuse it.

This guy was so smart and so informed I wanted to hand him the keys to the country. Not because we agreed on everything, but because he’s got no filter. What I mean by that is he’s not concerned with what everybody else thinks, his image, but what he believes is right.

He knows the stock market cold. If you want to make money, that’s where it is.

But he laments that Wall Street is not a haven of investment, that it’s a casino, where too many smart people go to get rich. If only the tax laws were changed to incentivize investment. What if you started a company and profits were tax free for five years? Just maybe all those Ivy League grads would create companies of value instead of working for banks trying to figure out another way to beat the system.

And he would have talked all night. We went at it for two and a half hours and he proclaimed no agenda for the rest of the evening. Usually the rich and powerful are all about image, deigning to see you briefly, making you wait and ushering you out, signifying that you’re just not that important.

And I won’t say that Mark made me feel important, that’s not his personality. He’s got that always on, ADD kind of vibe. His eyes wander, his neurons are firing. But if you stimulate him, he’ll stimulate you back.

And this was the most stimulating conversation I’ve had all year.

Now THAT’S a movie star.

He’s making a movie. About 30 Seconds To Mars and its fight with EMI in the wake of the Terra Firma takeover. They were bugging me eons ago, but then faded away, I saw the album came out, I figured the film was shelved. But then Jared himself tracked me down, said it was still on and would I come on camera and testify.

Sure.

So I drove into the Hollywood Hills on a smoggy Tuesday morning and pulled up to a house that doubles as both a domicile and a studio, not that Jared stays there much, he was on the road 300 days last year. The pool was covered with leaves. This is where he works, there’s not much playing going on.

Even the pool table had a cover on it. To tell you the truth, I’d never seen one of those. But this was the same room where 30 Seconds To Mars cut their last album. In this house. We shot in the control room.

But before we settled in, I wanted to get some background, some context, what this movie was about.

And I just couldn’t get over how good-looking Jared was. Not only the angular face with perfect symmetry, but those eyes. No makeup was required, no special effects, in real life, this guy was gorgeous.

I’d say it made me feel inadequate, but that was trumped by his magnetism. You just want to get closer to someone that special.

So he was born in Louisiana but moved around, played music all his life, his brother started hitting the skins when he was barely more than a toddler. And this same brother followed Jared to L.A. when he became an actor.

And that’s how I know him. As Jordan Catalano, in "My So-Called Life". Which I watched in its original network incarnation, being addicted to every show Zwick and Herskovitz did, having been infected by "Thirtysomething".

Jared was cool in that show and is still cool now.

But he hasn’t made a movie in five years, music’s his full time gig now. However great he was in "Requiem For A Dream".

You see the band was signed in 1998, thirteen years ago. It’s taken that long to break through, to get traction. Hell, Jared’s 39, even though he looks 26. Be prepared for this. Despite the prevalence of prepubescents, our rock stars are going to be older and older, because not only does it take that long to get noticed, but it takes that long to be good. Hell, many 30 Seconds To Mars fans don’t even know about Jared’s previous career.

As for the interview, it was the usual fodder. History, Terra Firma, EMI.

But then we got into albums and the future. I said how it’s about having a body of work, that the album format is an anachronistic revenue event. Sure, if you’ve got something to say in a long form way, go for it, but how many truly do? And that the focus must be on the band/fan relationship. Constantly feeding it. Fans are in charge today, the labels lost their power long ago.

And I spoke about freedom and referenced skiing and it turned out Jared was a snowboarder, and an avid fan of Jon Krakauer.

And I just wanted to tell you because this was so L.A., so not New York. Where you get in your car and behind the wall of a seemingly normal suburban house is a factory of ideas. You walk through the front door and you’re in the center of a dream. It’s exciting, it’s fulfilling, it’s what people come to Hollywood for.

For his twentieth birthday, Jeff Foskett was determined to meet Brian Wilson.

Attending UCSB, Jeff drove down to L.A. and combed Bellagio Road looking for a house with the stained glass window from the cover of "Wild Honey".

Moving slowly, he found it and got out of his car and knocked.

Marilyn Wilson answered the door and Brian Wilson invited Jeff inside to jam. After an hour, Jeff left and Brian said to stay in touch.

And then what happened?

Nothing.

Everybody thinks you get one big break. Instead, there are a ton of temblors, a ton of dead ends. If you hang in there long enough they might accumulate into something.

Now before you start MapQuesting and knocking, please know that it’s 2011 and this is a good way to get arrested, and that in 1976 the Beach Boys were at a nadir, although their touring revenue had accelerated, Brian was not yet "back". That was a promotional scheme cooked up later in the year, with the great special featuring Aykroyd and Belushi knocking on this same door and imploring Brian to go surfing now, everybody’s learning how.

John Belushi & Dan Aykroyd take Brian Wilson Surfing 1976

Fans are not fair weather. And fame might be forever, but too often people point you out and laugh behind your back, snickering that in retrospect what you were known for wasn’t that great.

So Foskett went back to Santa Barbara and his cover band until one day he heard Mike Love was at the bar with his paramour. Getting up his gumption, Jeff went out to say hi, implored Mike to come into the back room and see his band play. Mike said no, this was before the no smoking law took effect, he didn’t want to wreck his pipes and get that smell all over his clothes.

But Jeff cornered the waiter and paid for his meal and Mike showed up. And after exchanging numbers, Mike’s manager called Jeff up days later to put together a backup band for Mike’s solo tour. Which was brief. But then Carl Wilson left the Beach Boys temporarily and Foskett was called in, he was a made man, eventually working with Brian and Eugene Landy on Brian’s unreleased second solo album.

And now that Brian is touring again, it’s Foskett that runs the band and plays the leads and sings the high notes. And you might think he’s supporting an oldies act, but Brian Wilson wrote some of the best music ever recorded. And last night they played it.

And what struck me was how it was all so different. "I Get Around" sounded nothing like "God Only Knows". "Surfer Girl" and "California Girls" both might both be about females, but that’s about the only similarity they have. I’m listening to hit after hit stunned that not only did Brian write these, the uninitiated might believe they were recorded by different acts.

And yes, Brian’s voice is ragged. And yes, the show is on teleprompter. But unlike Dennis and Carl, Brian’s still here.

I was invited on the bus. Just me, Jeff and Brian before the show. And I was speechless. What do you say? That you changed my life, that you’re the reason I live in California?

And I’d like to tell you Brian was lucid and forthcoming, but he was a bit distant and frozen. But Jeff told me he’s always this way before the show. He’s shy. But catch him after and he’s talkative and normal. And I’d doubt Jeff but I’ve seen it myself. Seen Brian after a show at Disney Hall chatting up everybody like it was a high school reunion.

And they played a ton of hits.

But it was the album tracks that thrilled me.

Like "Catch A Wave". And "Salt Lake City", from "Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!)"

And it’s kind of mind-blowing that it’s almost fifty years on. Funny how those records are frozen in time, set in amber, yet the people who made them live on, age, change, unlike the recordings.

Sometimes you’re better off not connecting with your high school crush. Sometimes you’re better off leaving the past alone. It’s hard to square the records with the man on stage performing last night.

But, like that old Kiki Dee song, Brian had the music in him. He followed his muse, needed to get it right in an era when musicians were the biggest stars in the world, when everybody tuned in on the transistor to hear the hit parade.

In an era where everybody repeats the same track over and over again and almost no one sustains, it’s jaw-dropping to think that not only did one guy write these songs, albeit with attendant lyricists, but he’s still alive, still touring. Deep inside it’s still him.

And when you hear these songs, deep inside, it’s still you.

I encountered the paramedics on my way out. They were about to lift a twentysomething man onto a stretcher.

Yes, electronic music fans are on drugs. But so were their parents. And people die at Bonnaroo, read Pasquale Rotella’s piece in the L.A. "Times" linked below, he delineates the issue well. But people clamp down on what they cannot understand.

Concerts are supposed to be old guys overcharging for an audience that can barely stand or teens and twentysomethings overexposed in the media, hoofing to a recorded beat for screaming little girls.

Most people have no idea who Deadmau5 is.

But he just did four nights at the Palladium. And somehow his fans got the message.

You should go to one of these shows. It’s not that different from the gigs you went to as a kid. It’s about the experience, feeling something. You had to be there.

Most shows are akin to the crappy films Hollywood opens every weekend. But this is different.

You have to go primarily for the special effects. The lights. The screens. And Deadmau5’s mouse helmet. Which at times lights up and flashes like the Goodyear blimp.

These shows are not for wimps. Don’t expect your parents to pick you up when it’s over. Deadmau5 didn’t go on until midnight. As if to say we’re playing by nobody’s rules but our own.

And the beat is constant and you feel the thump in your gut. And you watch the sea of humanity go up and down with mouse ears pinned atop their heads. You get the feeling you’re where it’s happening. And that’s so rare in this overhyped entertainment world where acts have the shelf life of a Big Mac and are just about as fulfilling.

Tickets were fifty bucks. Deadmau5 insisted they be no higher.

There were no presales. This audience doesn’t have AmEx cards.

It’s about building for the long haul. Even though Live Nation ended up with almost forty percent of the take. You can argue all day long with those behind the scenes, but it’s about the fans. If tickets are cheap people will come. And come again, if you’re good.

Just like punk, electronic music is burgeoning in the U.S. long after its advent, long after it was underground and almost flamed out.

It’s been happening forever in Europe and the U.K. But it’s finally getting traction here today.

You can tell your classmates you went to see Rihanna. Or Taylor Swift. Or even Justin Bieber. You’ll feel a member of the group, cool for a day. But if you want to be cool for the rest of the school year, tell them you went to see Deadmau5.

This sound ain’t gonna evaporate tomorrow. It’s ascending and taking its place in the firmament now.

It’s everything the rock and pop shows are not. It’s not about looking so much as feeling. You know, that light inside that makes you feel alive.

You missed it.

Deadmau5 at Coachella

Don’t trample the Electric Daisy