by Alex Banayan
“MR. KING!” I shouted through the glass. “WHAT TIME?”
He turned on the engine.
I was now standing in front of his car, flailing my arms in front of the windshield. “MRRRRR. KINGGGGGGG! WHAT TIIIIIME?”
He glared at me, then at the crowd, and then shook his head and said, “Nine o’clock!” and then drove off.
* * *
I arrived at the restaurant the next morning. Larry King was in the first booth, hunched over a bowl of cereal, sitting with a few other men. Above their table was a large silver picture frame with photos of Larry interviewing Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Jerry Seinfeld, Oprah Winfrey, and more. There was an open seat at the table, but because I was embarrassed about how I’d acted the prior day, I didn’t want to boldly pull back the chair and plop down. So from a distance, I gently waved a hand and said, “Hi, Mr. King. How are you?”
He acknowledged me with a lift of his head, mumbled gruffly, and then turned back to his friends. I assumed he wanted me to come back in a few minutes, so I took a seat at the table next to him, waiting to be called over.
Ten minutes passed.
Thirty.
An hour.
Finally, Larry stood up and stepped toward me. I could feel my cheeks lifting. But then he walked right past me and headed for the exit.
I lifted my hand. “Mr….Mr. King?”
“WHAT IS IT?” he said. “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”
A sharp, familiar pain shot through my chest.
“Honestly,” I said in a depleted voice, “I just wanted some advice on how to interview people.”
Then, a slow smile appeared on his face. It was as if his eyes were saying, “Why didn’t you say so before?”
“All right,” he said. “Sometimes when people are starting out and feel they don’t know how to interview, they look to the people they admire—maybe it’s Barbara Walters or Oprah or myself—and they see how we interview and they try to copy that. That’s the biggest mistake you can make. You’re focused on what we’re doing, not why we’re doing it.”
He explained that Barbara Walters asks thoughtful questions that are strategically placed, Oprah uses loads of enthusiasm and emotion, and he asks the simple questions that everyone wants to ask.
“When young interviewers try to copy our styles, they’re not thinking about why we have these styles. The reason why is because these are the styles that make us the most comfortable in our seats. And when we are the most comfortable in our seats, our guests are the most comfortable in their seats—and that’s what makes for the best interviews.
“The secret is: there is no secret,” Larry added. “There’s no trick to being yourself.”
He checked his watch.
“Listen kid, I really gotta go—” He looked me in the eye, then shook his head again as though debating something in his mind. He put a finger in my face and said, “All right. Monday! Nine o’clock! See ya’ here!”
When I showed up on Monday, all the seats were taken at Larry’s table, but he waved me over anyway and asked why I was so interested in interviewing. I told him about the mission, and as soon as I asked if I could interview him, he said, “All right, I’ll do it.”
We talked a bit more about the mission, then he said he had someone he wanted me to meet.
“Hey, Cal,” he said, turning to one of his friends at the table. “Can you give this kid a few minutes?”
Cal wore a sky-blue fedora with horn-rimmed glasses. He seemed to be in his fifties, decades younger than the rest of Larry’s crew.
Larry told me that Cal Fussman was a writer at Esquire, where he’d interviewed Muhammad Ali, Mikhail Gorbachev, George Clooney, and dozens of other icons for the magazine’s “What I’ve Learned” column. Larry asked Cal to share some more interview advice with me.
After Cal and I peeled off to a nearby table, I told him about my prior interviews.
“No matter how much I prepare,” I said, “things don’t go the way I plan. And I can’t figure out why.”
“How are you doing the interviews?” Cal asked.
He nodded along as I told him I spent weeks, sometimes months, researching my questions. Then his eyelids narrowed when I said I brought my notepad filled with questions into the sessions.
“Are you bringing your notepad because it relaxes you,” he asked, “or because you’re afraid that without it you won’t know what to ask?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’ve never thought about that.”
“Okay, let’s try something,” Cal said. “Come back to breakfast tomorrow. You’ll have a seat at the table. Don’t think of it as an interview. Just eat breakfast and relax.”
I spent every day the next week doing exactly that. Each morning, I sat next to Cal and watched how Larry ate his Cheerios with blueberries, how he pushed his bowl away after he ate the final blueberry, no matter how much cereal was left; how Larry talked on his flip phone; how he interacted with strangers who came over to say hello and ask for a picture. Larry couldn’t have been kinder to each of them, which made me wonder how crazy I must’ve looked when I chased him in front of the grocery store.
At the end of the week, Cal told me to bring my audio recorder to breakfast the next day. “But leave your notepad at home,” he said. “You’re comfortable now. Just sit at the table and let your curiosity ask the questions.”
The following morning, everyone was in their usual positions. Larry was across from me, hunched over his Cheerios; to his right was Sid, one of Larry’s best friends for more than seventy years; next was Brucey, who went to middle school with them; Barry, who also grew up with them in Brooklyn; and then there was Cal, with his sky-blue fedora. I was halfway through my omelet when I asked Larry how he got started in broadcasting.
“When we were kids,” Sid said, jumping in. “Larry used to roll up sheets of paper, pretend it was a microphone, and announce Dodger games.”
“When Larry used to describe movies,” Barry added, “his description took longer than the actual movie.”
Larry’s dream was to be a radio broadcaster, he told me, but he didn’t know how to get started. After graduating high school, he worked odd jobs—delivering packages, selling milk, working as a bill collector—until one afternoon when he was twenty-two years old. Larry and a friend were walking down the street in New York City when they bumped into a man who worked at CBS.
“He was the guy who hired radio announcers,” Larry said. “He was also the guy who announced between shows: This is CBS! The Columbia Broadcasting System!”
Larry asked him for advice on how to break into the industry. The man advised him to go to Miami, where a lot of stations were nonunion and had open slots. Larry jumped on a train to Florida, slept on a relative’s couch, and began searching for a job.
“I just knocked on doors,” Larry said. “There was this small station where I took a voice test and they said, ‘You sound pretty good. Next opening, you’ve got the job.’ So I hung around the station—I watched people read the news, I learned, I swept the floors—then one day, a guy quit on a Friday and they told me, ‘You start Monday morning!’ I stayed up all weekend, nervous as hell.”
“Wait, what did you mean by ‘knocked on doors’?” I asked. “How did you do that?”
Larry looked at me like I was in preschool. “Bang! Bang! Bang!” he said, pounding his knuckles on the table.
“It isn’t a figure of speech,” Sid said. “Larry knocked on the doors of different radio stations. He introduced himself and asked for a job. That’s what we did in those days.”
“That’s all I could do,” Larry said. “I didn’t have a résumé. I didn’t go to college.”
“Okay, I get that that’s what you did back then,” I said, “but if you were starting out today, what would you do?”
“Same thing,” Larry said. �
�I’d knock on doors. I’d knock on whatever doors I’d have to. There’d be many more places to knock. And look—nothing is new. We have the Internet, but nothing is new except the transmission. Human nature hasn’t changed.”
Cal explained that it’s still a human being making the hiring decision. Only after looking you in the eye can someone get a sense if you’re genuine. You may be using the same words in an email, but it’s a different experience in person.
“People like human beings,” Cal said. “People don’t like random names in their inbox.”
It dawned on me that when Spielberg gave me that early encouragement, when Elliott took me to Europe, or when Larry finally invited me to breakfast—those moments happened only after I met them in person and looked them in the eye.
Wait a minute…
For the past year, I’d been a random name inside Bill Gates’ Chief of Staff’s inbox. He took that original phone call with me because Qi Lu had asked as a favor, not because he knew me. I had taken it personally when the Chief of Staff stopped replying to me, but it wasn’t personal at all. I was just a random name to him.
And I knew exactly how to fix that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Final Bullet
FOUR WEEKS LATER, LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA
I pulled back a chair at the lobby espresso bar of the Westin hotel. I was at the main lodging for the TED conference, and over the course of my journey, I’d never been in such a perfect position.
As I looked around, a wave of déjà vu washed over me. In the dining area twenty feet away was the table where I’d had my first meal with Elliott. That meeting with Elliott had taken place one year earlier, almost to the day. The timing was so eerie it felt like fate was smiling upon me.
My mood was high to begin with, because minutes earlier I’d just finished having breakfast with Tony Hsieh. When he heard why I was at the Westin, he invited me to watch the TED live-stream in his RV parked in front of the hotel.
But all this hadn’t come together easily. Four weeks earlier, I’d reached out to Stefan Weitz, my Inside Man at Microsoft. I knew Bill Gates’ Chief of Staff attended TED every year, so I asked Stefan if I could meet with the Chief of Staff at the event for five minutes, in person. If this didn’t work, I swore to Stefan I’d never ask again. This was my final bullet.
Stefan agreed and sent the Chief of Staff email after email for weeks. When he didn’t get a reply, he even had one of his colleagues email the Chief of Staff. Stefan’s generosity had always been astonishing, but this time it left me speechless.
The day before the conference, Stefan still hadn’t received a response. Then at 7:27 p.m. the night before, a reply arrived. Yes, the Chief of Staff said, he’d be at TED; and yes, he’d like to see me. He said he’d meet me after the conference’s first session, around a quarter past ten, at the lobby espresso bar.
Now here I was, looking up at the clock on the wall. It read 10:14 a.m.
“Sir,” the barista said, “what can I get for you?”
“Just a minute, please,” I said. “My guest should be here any moment.”
A short while later, the barista was in front of me again, asking if I was ready to order.
I glanced up—10:21 a.m.
“Sorry,” I said. “He must be running late. Just a few more minutes, please.”
I looked across the lobby and scanned the faces emerging from the rotating glass door. The next time I looked at the clock, it read 10:31 a.m. My gut sensed something was wrong, but I brushed it off. The conference’s first session was probably running behind.
Time began to slow. Then I heard again, “Sir, are you going to order?”
It was 10:45 a.m. The barstools next to me were still empty. After all I’d been through, after everything I did to get to this point, this was how it was going to end?
I pulled up an old email from the Chief of Staff’s assistant and called her office line, forcing myself to take deep breaths.
“Hi, Wendy. It’s Alex Banayan. I know we had this 10:15 appointment today, and I’m sure he’s really busy—I’m grateful he even gave me an appointment—but I just wanted to make sure everything is okay. It’s been thirty minutes now and he hasn’t showed up.”
“What are you talking about?” she said. “He called me and said you didn’t show up.”
“What?”
Apparently, there were two lobby espresso bars, one at the hotel and one at the convention center, and I was at the wrong one.
I clutched my phone and tried to hold myself together, but I couldn’t. Tears formed in my eyes as I poured my heart out to Wendy, explaining everything I’d gone through the past two years to get this meeting.
“Okay,” she said, “give me a little time. Let me see what I can do.”
An hour later, I got an email from Wendy. She said the Chief of Staff was going to the airport that afternoon at 4:30 p.m. His town car would be in front of the Westin valet, and he’d agreed to have me ride with him to the airport and talk in the car.
I was too drained to throw a fist in the air, but I still felt a faint smile on my face. This time, I knew there was only one Westin valet.
* * *
I passed the time inside Tony Hsieh’s RV, watching the TED live-stream on a flat-screen TV, and then going out for lunch with Tony’s friends. On my way back, I traced the route from the Westin valet to the RV, timing it at just about a minute. I set my phone alarm for 4:10 p.m., guaranteeing I would get there early.
As I lounged on a soft brown couch in Tony’s RV, a man stepped onto the bus. The sun shined through the window behind him, so all I saw was a silhouette. He slowly lowered himself onto the couch across from me. His face looked familiar. He was an older man with thin white hair, a white beard, and a round belly. I looked closer, and that’s when I realized—this was Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of TED.
“You,” he said, looking my way, “what do you think of this thing?” He was pointing to the TV displaying the live-stream. The founder of TED was literally asking me what I thought of his conference.
I shared with him what I thought, and before I knew it he was telling me the entire story of how he started TED. He enthralled me with story after story and I felt like I’d broken the wisdom piñata and was trying to stuff as many nuggets into my pocket as possible.
“You want to know the secret to changing the world? Stop trying to change it. Do great work and let your work change the world.”
“You won’t get anywhere significant in life until you come to the epiphany that you know nothing. You’re still too cocky. You think you can learn anything. You think you can speed up the process.”
“How does one become successful? You’ll get the same answer if you ask that to any other older, wiser, and more successful person: you have to want to do it very, very badly.”
“I don’t understand why people give speeches with slides. When you speak with slides, you become a caption. Never be a caption.”
“I live my life by two mantras. One: if you don’t ask, you don’t get. And two: most things don’t work out.”
ERRH-ERRH-ERRH-ERRH!
My phone was blaring. It was 4:10, but he was talking a hundred miles a minute and there was no way to excuse myself without cutting him off. His insights were so good I didn’t want to leave. Plus, I couldn’t just walk out on the founder of TED. Whatever, I thought, I’ll just hit snooze this one time.
He kept going and going and then—
ERRH-ERRH-ERRH-ERRH!
He kept talking over the alarm. It was like I was on an express train with no local stops. I felt I couldn’t leave while he was mid-story. And the Westin valet was a minute away. I’ll just hit snooze one more time.
I kept sitting there, waiting for him to take a damn breath. I couldn’t decide if this was one of the greatest conversations o
f my life or a hostage situation. I kept checking the time, and then—
ERRH-ERRH-ERRH-ERRH!
“Genius,” he said, “is the opposite of expectation.
“Genius,” he repeated, looking at me with deep, knowing eyes, “is the opposite of expectation.”
ERRH-ERRH-ERRH-ERRH!
I didn’t know what else to do, so I just jumped up and said, “I might regret this one day, but I have to go,” and before he could say another word, I sprinted off the bus.
I dashed down the sidewalk, cut a left up the hotel’s driveway, and spotted the town car. A driver in a suit and tie stood out front. While catching my breath, I checked the time—I’d made it with a minute to spare.
The driver and I made small talk while I kept my back to the car, glancing at the Westin’s rotating glass door, until finally, the Chief of Staff stepped out.
He was holding a leather bag in one hand and a phone in the other. His hair was dark and thick with subtle streaks of gray, which perfectly complemented his blazer and black Ray-Bans. He approached the car and lowered his sunglasses.
“So, you must be Alex.”
I introduced myself and we shook hands. “Please,” he said, motioning toward the car, “come on in.”
We took our seats and the car pulled out of the driveway.
“Tell me,” he said, “how is your project going?”
“Oh, it’s going really well,” I said, and I began to list one thing after another, saying whatever I could to show momentum.
“So,” he said, “I take it you still want to interview Bill.”
I said it was my biggest dream.
He nodded silently.
“Who else have you interviewed?”
I pulled out my wallet and took out the note card that had the names of the people I wanted to interview, with the ones I already had checked off in green. The Chief of Staff held the note card with two hands and slowly moved his eyes down the list, examining it like a report card.