by Alex Banayan
“Not only was Luther Campbell the biggest guy down here,” Pitbull said, “but he did it as an entrepreneur. For one, he was able to press his own records, promote them himself, and sell millions. He taught me that independent mindset. No one’s going to envision your vision the way you envision your vision.”
Pitbull signed his first deal with Campbell’s record label and got an advance of fifteen hundred dollars. Pitbull couldn’t have had a better mentor at the time, because in 1999, Napster upended the music industry by allowing people to download songs without paying. The artists who prospered, for the most part, were the ones with that entrepreneurial mindset.
“The best thing I learned from Luther Campbell,” Pitbull said, “was that there’s nothing better than to be an intern in life. The best CEOs in business started out as interns. Because when you go from intern to CEO, no one can bullshit you. But all you can do is help them. ‘Look, I already did that job. I know exactly what it took to make that happen.’ ”
Pitbull’s talent for rapping, plus the lessons he learned from Luther Campbell, finally paid off. Pitbull’s debut album M.I.A.M.I. became certified gold.
“What was the next level of your video game?” I asked.
Pitbull said that although he became the biggest rapper in Miami, he had trouble breaking into the mainstream. His most successful single at the time peaked at thirty-two on the Billboard Hot 100. He wanted to hit number one. So he sought out new experts to collaborate with and learn from—music executives who worked with David Guetta, Flo Rida, and Chris Brown; songwriters who produced number one hits with Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and Britney Spears.
“I’m constantly studying the game,” Pitbull said.
After years of repositioning his sound and brand, he released the album Planet Pit, which not only earned him his first Grammy win, but also included a number one record.
His video game continued. The next level: turning himself into more than a musician. Pitbull wanted to stand for something. He wanted to use his influence for good, so he began working with a charter school in Little Havana called SLAM, where he’s helping kids from the same neighborhood he grew up in. In a part of town where street corners are covered in chain-link fences and run-down liquor stores, SLAM’s brand-new seven-story school is a beacon of hope. At the same time, Pitbull also became more intentional with his lyrics, using them to highlight the influence of Latinos in America.
Latin is the new majority, ya tú sabe [Latin is the new majority, yeah you know]
Next step: la Casablanca [Next step: the White House]
No hay carro, nos vamos en balsa [If there’s no car, we’ll get there in a raft]
That song, “Rain Over Me” featuring Marc Anthony, went number one in six countries. Pitbull’s political commentary didn’t stop there, because in 2012 President Obama asked Pitbull to help campaign for his reelection. Two years after that, Pitbull performed at the Fourth of July celebration at the White House.
As Pitbull reached for the red Solo cup again, a moment of quiet crept up in our conversation. Something told me not to say anything and just let the moment sink in.
“Last month,” Pitbull said, breaking the silence, “I was walking into a meeting with Carlos Slim Jr. in Mexico. I told him, ‘I don’t really know what you guys got going on in your world, but I want to learn. Hey, I’ll intern for you.’ ”
“Seriously?”
“One hundred percent, papo. I told him, ‘I just want to be around you to see what you’re talking about, how you’re doing things. I don’t have a problem being down here for a month, getting doughnuts, making coffee, I don’t care.’ ”
The look in Pitbull’s eyes made me feel like he wasn’t kidding. A part of me couldn’t believe it—here’s one of the most famous musicians in the world, who can headline Madison Square Garden, yet he seems dead serious about fetching coffee for Carlos Slim Jr.
Our conversation continued and Pitbull kept tapping on the idea of being an intern in life. He said that while he can now walk around record labels like a king, the following day he’ll be walking through the halls of Apple or Google taking notes. It’s that duality that makes him, him. And that’s when I realized Pitbull’s key to continued success: it’s about always staying an intern.
It’s about humbling yourself enough to learn, even when you’re at the top of your game. It’s about knowing that the moment you get comfortable being an executive is the moment you begin to fail. It’s about realizing that, if you want to continue being Mufasa, at the same time you have to keep being Simba.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Collision
TWO WEEKS LATER, SAN FRANCISCO
“This is Mr. H. He goes everywhere with me.”
I’d just stepped into Jane Goodall’s hotel room, and she was introducing me to her stuffed animal monkey.
Goodall motioned for me to follow her to the couch, and then asked me to hold her stuffed animal as she reached for a cup of tea. As I sat beside her, the seventy-nine-year-old anthropologist couldn’t have made me feel more at ease. Nothing about this initial greeting foreshadowed how I would walk out of this interview—anxious, disoriented, and completely conflicted. Goodall made me see myself in a new way, and frankly, I didn’t like what I saw.
Our conversation began simply, with Goodall telling me about a toy chimpanzee her dad gave her when she was two. The gift was significant, because while bombs dropped on London during the Second World War, there were times Goodall’s family didn’t even have enough money to afford an ice cream cone. Goodall carried that toy chimpanzee wherever she went and her obsession with animals grew. Her best friend was her dog, Rusty; her favorite books were Tarzan of the Apes and The Story of Doctor Dolittle; she daydreamed about living among primates and being able to talk to them. As she grew older, she became determined to pursue her biggest dream: studying chimpanzees in the jungles of Africa.
Goodall couldn’t afford college, but that didn’t deter her. She continued reading books on chimps while working as a secretary and a waitress, which were among the few jobs women in England could get in the 1950s. At twenty-three, she finally saved enough money for a ticket on a ship to Africa. After hitting shore in Kenya, Goodall ended up at a dinner party where she described her obsession with animals to another guest, who recommended she contact Louis Leakey.
Leakey was one of the most prominent paleoanthropologists in the world. He was born in Kenya but of British descent, held a doctorate from Cambridge, and his research focused on understanding how humans and apes evolved. There couldn’t have been a better mentor for Goodall, except for one thing.
While his wife was pregnant, Leakey had an affair with a twenty-one-year-old woman who worked as an illustrator on his book. He took the woman on trips across Africa and Europe and they eventually began living together. Leakey’s wife filed for divorce and Leakey married his illustrator, moving with her back to Kenya. Then Leakey began another affair—this time with his assistant. Leakey’s second wife found out and he ended the affair, and his assistant moved to Uganda. Now Leakey’s office had an opening, and it was right around then when he got a call from Jane Goodall.
Here were two people: a twenty-three-year-old woman with a dream and a fifty-four-year-old man with the key to that dream. And now they were destined to collide.
Goodall arrived at Leakey’s office, which was housed in a museum in Nairobi. They roamed the exhibits and talked about African wildlife. Leakey was impressed and, naturally, gave her a job as his assistant. Goodall grew close to Leakey. He mentored her. She traveled with him on fossil-hunting expeditions. Then, just as Goodall felt her dream of studying the chimps was within her grasp, Leakey made sexual advances.
For some reason I stopped thinking about Goodall and started imagining my sisters in this situation. Talia was eighteen. Briana was twenty-four. The thought of either of them working
for years toward their biggest goal, traveling to another continent to achieve it, and then right before they make it a reality, the mentor who holds the key implies, If you have sex with me, I’ll give it to you, made me disgusted in a way I’d never felt before.
Although Goodall was terrified of the idea of losing her dream, she told me she still rejected his advances.
“I have two sisters,” I said to Goodall, shifting on the couch. “When Leakey came on to you—how did you deal with that?”
I braced myself for an explosion of emotion. But Goodall replied softly, “I just expected that he would honor what I said. And he did.” Then she sat back, as if to say “end of story.”
I’d expected dynamite, but there wasn’t even a spark.
“How did that feel,” I asked, “right in that moment?”
“Well, I was very concerned,” Goodall said, “because I thought if I just reject his advances, maybe I’ll lose my chance at the chimps. He never explicitly proposed anything; it was just the way he was, you know? But of course, I rejected it anyway. And he respected it because he was a decent person. He wasn’t a predator.
“He just fell for my charms,” she added. “He wasn’t the only one either. So I’m kind of used to it.”
A part of me felt like Goodall was defending Leakey. In my view, he was her mentor and should have been looking out for her. What he did felt like an injustice. But Goodall’s response seemed as if she was shrugging it off and saying, “Hey, that’s how the world works.”
Goodall explained that Leakey not only respected her decision not to have an affair, but also granted her funds to study the chimps. She then spent three months living in the jungle with the wild chimpanzees, crouching behind bushes and observing that they use tools just like humans. Before Goodall’s research, the very definition of human beings was that we were the only species who used tools, so Goodall’s findings rocked the scientific community and forever redefined the human-ape relationship. Since then, Goodall has continued her research, publishing thirty-three books, receiving more than fifty honorary degrees, and becoming a Dame of the British Empire and a Messenger of Peace of the United Nations.
Goodall and I moved on to other topics. Though, as much as I tried to stay present, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Louis Leakey story. I became frustrated with myself. Goodall had said it wasn’t a big deal. If it didn’t bother her, why did it bother me?
Goodall and I wrapped up the interview and said goodbye. I climbed into a cab and headed for the airport. As I pressed my head against the window, I couldn’t stop wondering how my sisters would have felt in the position Leakey had put Goodall in.
And then an unexpected thought entered my head…This is the first time I’ve ever left an interview and wanted to share what just happened with my sisters. I usually called my best friends or mentors, who I suddenly realized were all…male.
My mind began flashing over all the interviews I’d done so far—Tim Ferriss, Qi Lu, Sugar Ray Leonard, Dean Kamen, Larry King, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Pitbull—and, as if I was looking at my reflection for the first time, it was shockingly, and embarrassingly, clear: male, male, male, male, male, male, male, male.
How could I have never noticed this before?
When I’d come up with my list, it was me with my male friends dreaming up whom we wanted to learn from. When I brainstormed questions before an interview, it was me and my male friends thinking about what we wanted to learn. Not once had it crossed my mind to wonder whom my sisters or female friends wanted to learn from. I was so stuck inside my own bubble that I was blind to anything outside of my one-sided version of reality. And just because I didn’t know I had a bias didn’t mean I was free of guilt. I was the perfect example of a guy claiming to care about equal treatment, but not once had I ever looked within myself and asked if I was walking the walk.
It made me wonder how many men like me were out there. Just as I’d been sitting with my male friends thinking about whom to put on my list, there must be male executives in boardrooms with their male friends thinking about whom to hire and whom to promote. Just like my friends and me, those executives probably don’t know their instincts are to give preference to people who look like them. It’s the biases we don’t know we hold that are the most dangerous.
My cab pulled up to the airport curb and I slung my duffel bag over my shoulder, but it felt heavier than before. I dragged my feet through the terminal. The view out the windows darkened as the San Francisco fog rolled in. I made my way to my gate and couldn’t stop wondering: How could I have been so blind to something so obvious? How did I not even know I was part of the problem?
I didn’t know the answers, but I knew what I had to do first.
I headed straight to see my sisters.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Turning Darkness into Light
I rushed home full of questions. But when I sat with my sisters in our living room, I found out I didn’t even understand what I didn’t understand.
“You just left an interview with one of the most accomplished women in the world, and all you can talk about is that she got hit on by her mentor?”
That was Briana. She’s three years older than me, was in her third year of law school, and for as long as I’ve known her, she’s been fighting for what she believes.
“Even during the interview,” Briana continued, “when you asked Goodall about it again, she told you it wasn’t a big deal. Her response to Leakey’s advances was everything I hope I would do if that happened to me.”
She stood up from the couch. “I think I know why you were so upset. It’s because you see a sexual advance as an act of disrespect. Sometimes it is, but it isn’t always. For my whole life, you and Dad were always like this. Dad made it clear that if a guy even showed interest in me or Talia, it was an act of aggression—which is why you got so triggered.
“And I’m surprised it took you this long to realize that women deal with these kinds of things all the time. You’ve been living with women your entire life. You grew up with two sisters, a mom, and nine girl cousins who were your best friends. I can even remember you reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in high school. If anybody should have realized this stuff earlier, it should have been you.”
My gaze lowered and I stared at my feet. When I looked over to my younger sister, Talia, she was sitting there quietly, taking it all in. I knew I’d be hearing from her soon.
“I’m not trying to make you feel bad,” Briana added. “I’m just trying to make a point. If even you didn’t understand the issues women face, and you grew up surrounded by women, imagine what it’s like for guys who didn’t.”
A silence settled over the living room, and then Talia took out her phone. She pulled up a meme on Facebook and put the screen in front of my face.
As I stared at the image, Talia said, “I bet you’re focusing on the wrong part. It’s not only all the extra obstacles women face that bothers me—it’s that sentence on the bottom. It’s the fact that most men won’t even acknowledge our reality. There are problems women face that most men will never understand…because they never try to understand.”
* * *
It’s hard to know for sure why I hadn’t experienced Maya Angelou’s memoir the way Briana assumed I had. When I’d read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as a teenager, I was so overwhelmed by the African American experience that it was all I’d focused on. Maya Angelou was born in an era when you could see a black man dangling from a tree, or look out a window and see hooded Klansmen setting fire to a cross. When Maya Angelou was three years old, she and her five-year-old brother were placed on a train car all alone headed to the South, with nothing more than a nametag tied to their feet. Angelou and her brother were received by their grandmother and taken to her home in Stamps, Arkansas, a town clearly divided between blacks and whites.
Only now, as I picked up M
aya Angelou’s memoir again, did I try to see it through the lens of her gender. One afternoon, when she was eight years old, Angelou was headed to the library when a man grabbed her arm, yanked her toward him, pulled down her bloomers, and forced himself on her. He then threatened to kill her if she told anyone what had happened. When Angelou finally reported who raped her, the man was arrested. The night after his trial, he was found dead, kicked to death behind a slaughterhouse. Shaken and traumatized, Angelou internalized it as if her words caused that man to die. For the next five years, Angelou didn’t speak.
As time wore on, she faced even more obstacles. She got pregnant at sixteen, worked as a prostitute and madam, and was a victim of domestic violence. At one point, a boyfriend drove her to a romantic spot by the bay, beat her with his fists, knocked her unconscious, and kept her captive for three days. These events, though, are not what define her. What defines Maya Angelou is how she turned darkness into light.
She channeled her experiences into works of art that made waves in American culture. She became a singer, dancer, writer, poet, professor, film director, and civil rights activist, working alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. She wrote more than twenty books, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings spoke so directly to the soul of readers that Oprah Winfrey has said: “Meeting Maya on those pages was like meeting myself in full. For the first time, as a young black girl, my experience was validated.” Angelou won two Grammy Awards and was the second poet in American history, preceded only by Robert Frost, to recite a poem at a presidential inauguration.
And now I was about to pick up the phone and give her a call. A friend of mine had helped arrange the interview. Angelou was eighty-five years old and had recently been discharged from the hospital, so the interview was just fifteen minutes long. My goal was simple: not only to ask the questions my sisters had come up with, but to listen and, hopefully, understand.