The Third Door

by Alex Banayan

  The cycle continued. Reporter, analyst, Station 2. Reporter, analyst, Station 3. Ryan calculated we had about an hour before our first question. We all headed to the concession corridor to prepare.

  “These are my top interview questions for Buffett,” I said, pulling a sheet of paper from my pocket. “Andre, your ticket got pulled first, so you’re asking the persuasion question. I’m going second, and Brandon, you’re third. You’re asking the fundraising question. Corwin, you’re fourth and asking the value investing question. Guys, make sure when you—”

  “Yo,” Corwin blurted. “Anyone have an extra belt on them?”

  I knew I shouldn’t have asked, but I did anyway. “Why would anyone have an extra belt?”

  He shrugged.

  “Wait,” I said. “You didn’t forget a belt, did you?”

  “Don’t worry, man. I’ll figure it out.”

  I tried not to dwell on how ridiculous we looked. In a sea of khaki pants and comb-overs, Andre had his shirt unbuttoned past his chest, Brandon and Kevin were in hoodies, and Corwin looked like he’d locked himself in an editing bay for the past three weeks. I was in my Tony Hsieh Zappos T-shirt, and for extra luck, the same underwear I had on for The Price Is Right.

  The question I’d saved for myself was my favorite: the Avoidance List. I had called Dan a day earlier to tell him I’d be asking about it if I got a winning lottery ticket. Dan said it sounded great, but then for some reason he asked me not to mention his name.

  We returned to our seats. After Buffett wrapped up his answer for Station 7, I handed Andre the white paper with the interview questions and he marched toward the Station 8 microphone. A reporter asked a question, then an analyst, and then the spotlight centered on Andre.

  “Hi, my name is Andre and I’m from California,” he said, his voice booming from hundreds of speakers, resounding around the arena. “During key events, like the Sanborn incident, when you were buying See’s, or when you were buying Berkshire stock—you persuaded people to sell you their shares when they really didn’t want to. What were your three keys in influencing people in those specific situations?”

  “Yeah—” Buffett said, “I don’t think—uh—you brought up Sanborn—and you brought up, uh, See’s…”

  When I’d originally written that question, it had sounded fine. But now when I heard Andre bellow “when they really didn’t want to,” it sounded less like a question and more like an accusation.

  “The See’s family—” Buffett continued, “there had been a death in the See’s family…”

  I listened to see where Buffett was going with this, but then I realized he was going nowhere. He was just spewing different facts about See’s Candies and avoiding sharing any persuasion advice, which is what I actually wanted.

  “Charlie probably remembers this better than I do,” Buffett said, but then he continued for a bit more, and then moved on to the next question.

  The See’s and Sanborn incidents had taken place nearly forty years ago, so they were probably some of the last things Buffett expected to hear. It became painfully obvious to me that by packing the question with so many details, and unknowingly wording it to sound like an accusation, I’d caused it to backfire.

  Thankfully, we still had three more questions.

  The cycle continued and eventually it was my turn. The volunteer examined my ticket and then motioned me to the microphone.

  I peered over the balcony in the darkness, looking down at the man whose picture had been taped above my desk for the past six months. After all it took to get to this point—plowing through thousands of pages, poring over hundreds of articles, agonizing on the phone for dozens of hours with Dan—I felt I had earned this moment.

  “Okay,” Buffett said, his voice coming from all directions. “Station 8.”

  The spotlight flashed on. It was so bright I could barely see the paper in my hands.

  “Hi, my name is Alex”—my echo boomeranged back at me with such force it almost knocked me off balance—“and I’m from Los Angeles. Mr. Buffett, I’ve heard that one of your ways of focusing your energy is that you write down the twenty-five things you want to achieve, choose the top five, and then avoid the bottom twenty. I’m really curious how you came up with this, and what other methods you have for prioritizing your desires?”

  “Well,” Buffett replied, chuckling, “I’m actually more curious about how you came up with it!”

  A deafening roar of laughter came from the crowd. It’s hard to explain what it feels like when an entire stadium of people laughs at you at once.

  “It really isn’t the case,” Buffett said. “It sounds like a very good method of operating, but it’s much more disciplined than I actually am. If they stick fudge down in front of me”— he pointed to the box of See’s—“I eat it!”

  I felt my face turning red under the spotlight.

  “Charlie and I live very simple lives,” Buffett added. “But we know what we do enjoy and we now have the option of pretty much— Charlie likes to design buildings. He’s no longer a frustrated architect. He’s a full-fledged architect now. And, you know, we both like to read a lot. But I’ve never made a list. I can’t recall making a list in my life.

  “But, maybe I’ll start!” Buffett said, triggering even more laughter. “You’ve given me an idea!”

  In an instant, the spotlight shut off.

  I staggered back to my seat, unable to make sense of what had happened. What I could make sense of were all the whispers and chuckles I heard as I passed through the aisles. I kept my head down, trying to avoid eye contact.

  * * *

  After I settled in my seat, Kevin leaned over and brought up a good point: our first two questions probably surprised Buffett, and if we wanted to get a good answer out of him, the next one needed to be simple and straightforward. I agreed, and we both pulled Brandon aside and told him his question needed to be completely clear so Buffett would have no choice but to answer it.

  Kevin and I then stepped into the hallway with Brandon so he could practice projecting his voice and enunciating every word. We returned to our seats, and soon enough, Brandon was at the mic.

  “Hi…I’m…Brandon…from…Los…Angeles.”

  It was the clearest sentence I could have asked for. The problem was Brandon was so clear, and enunciated so slowly, it sounded suspicious.

  “If I’m in my twenties…,” Brandon continued, “and I’m starting a partnership…what advice do you have…about getting people…to put in money…before I have a track record…as a solo investor?”

  There was a pause.

  “Well,” Buffett said, “you haven’t sold me!”

  Another wave of laughter shot from the crowd.

  I wondered if Buffett had caught on to what was going on. Here was another twenty-something, also wearing jeans, also from Los Angeles, also at Station 8, and also asking another unusually specific question that had nothing to do with Berkshire’s recent performance.

  “I think people should be quite cautious about investing money with other people,” Buffett said, “even when they have a track record, incidentally. There are a lot of track records that don’t mean much. But overall, I would advise any young person who wants to manage money, and wants to attract money later on, to start developing an audited track record as early as they can. I mean, it was far from the sole reason that we hired Todd and Ted [who manage investments for Berkshire], but we certainly looked at their record. And we looked at a record that [Charlie and I] both believed and could understand, because we see a lot of records that we don’t really think mean much.

  “If you have a coin flipping contest,” Buffett continued, “and you get 310 million orangutans out there and they all flip coins, and they flip them ten times, you’ll have 300,000 roughly that flipped [heads] ten times in a row successfully. And those orangutans wi
ll probably go around trying to attract a lot of money to back them in future coin flipping contests.

  “So it’s our job,” he went on, “when we hire somebody to manage money, to figure out whether they’ve been lucky coin flippers or whether they really know what they’re—”

  “Well…”

  A voice cut Buffett off.

  “…when you had his problem, didn’t you scrape together about a hundred thousand dollars from your loving family?”

  It was Charlie Munger.

  “Yeah,” Buffett said. “Well, I hope they kept loving me after they gave me the money.”

  Buffett chuckled again.

  “Well, I…it…” he continued, stammering, “it was very slow, and it should have been very slow. As Charlie has pointed out, some people thought I was running a Ponzi scheme, probably. And other people may not have thought it, but it was to their advantage to sort of scare people, because they were selling investments in Omaha.

  “To attract money, you should deserve money. And you should develop a record over time that does it. You should explain to people why that record is a product of sound thinking rather than simply being in tune with a trend or simply just being lucky. Charlie?”

  “You’re starting in the game and you’re twenty-five years old,” Munger repeated, with a sense of thoughtfulness in his voice. “How do you attract money?”

  I’ll never know what Charlie Munger was thinking, but perhaps he too noticed Buffett wasn’t giving us straight answers. I felt like Munger was saving me from another round of humiliation.

  He said that the best way to raise money before you have a track record is to do it from people who already believe in you and trust you, because they’ve seen you do other things in the past. Those people can be family, friends, college professors, former bosses, or even the parents of your friends.

  “It’s hard to do when you’re young,” Munger added, “and that’s why people start so small.”

  Munger and Buffett’s conversation veered off to hedge funds, and then they moved on to the next question. Brandon returned to his seat. Although he had to endure some laughter, at least we had gotten a response.

  We had one more shot. It was up to Corwin.

  After Buffett fielded a question from Station 7, Corwin headed to the mic. The journalist asked a question, then the analyst.

  The spotlight flashed on Station 8.

  Corwin was leaning in, holding the sheet of interview questions with one hand, pulling up his sagging pants with the other.

  He began asking the question, but I couldn’t hear him.

  His microphone was shut off.

  Buffett’s voice boomed. “We’ll take a five-minute or so recess. I thank you for coming! And I hope you come next year!”

  Just like that, Buffett ended the Q and A.

  Corwin just stood there, under the spotlight, holding up his pants.

  * * *

  My friends and I made our way out of the arena, overwhelmed with confusion and defeat. As we moved through the crowded halls, people stared at me. One guy patted me on the back and said, “Nice question, pal. I needed a good laugh.”

  Out on the sidewalk, people were still snickering at me. Kevin put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t let them get to you,” he said.

  We walked on in silence.

  A few minutes later, Kevin gently spoke again. “It doesn’t make sense…how could you have been so off with your question?”

  “I wasn’t off,” I shot back. “It was Buffett who was off.”

  I told Kevin about the Avoidance List and how I had met Dan; how he’d promised to get me to Buffett, about the stories he had shared about working for Buffett; and about Dan’s ideas to make the website and send the shoe.

  Kevin began to squint.

  “How could Buffett say he doesn’t know about the Avoidance List?” I said, holding myself back from screaming. “I can’t believe Buffett would lie like that.”

  Kevin just looked at me and said, “What if it wasn’t Buffett who lied?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  MR. KINGGG!

  I soon learned that Kevin was right. Shortly after the shareholders meeting, Dan’s girlfriend called and told me she’d been getting suspicious about him too. She contacted Buffett’s assistant, who revealed that Dan never worked directly for Buffett.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  When I called Dan, he denied it—and then he suddenly asked if anyone else was on the call, listening to our conversation. I told him no, and when I asked him more about his background, the conversation filled with tension. He answered my questions, but the details didn’t add up. Dan hung up, and it was the last time we ever spoke.

  Never before had I felt so betrayed. This wasn’t just a stranger with a lie. This was someone I’d trusted, someone I cared about. That’s what made the pain sear so deep.

  Perhaps this was something I needed to learn the hard way. Some people are not who they say they are. My problem was that I’d been so desperate to get to Buffett that I ignored the red flags about Dan that had popped up all around me. The lesson was clear: desperation clogs intuition.

  At the same time, I hadn’t been transparent either. I had an agenda from the moment I’d met Dan. The only reason I befriended him was to get to Warren Buffett. When I was on Dan’s boat in San Francisco, I put him on the spot in front of his girlfriend. Although he twisted the truth, he never would have kept pushing the lie if I didn’t keep pulling on it. My strategizing and lack of transparency backed him into a corner. Dishonesty breeds dishonesty.

  My gloom was unshakable after I returned to LA from Omaha. A short time later, Corwin was trying to lift my spirits as we sat on a curb one afternoon, eating sandwiches in front of a grocery store.

  “Dude,” Corwin said, his mouth full, “I know you’re upset, and I don’t blame you, but at some point you have to let it go and move on.”

  I sighed, then bit into my sandwich.

  “You got to get back to your routine,” he went on. “Don’t you have any other interviews lined up?”

  “I’ve got nothing,” I said. “And even if I did, I’d probably screw it up. Look what happened at the shareholders meeting. When I sent Andre up with that persuasion question, I packed it with so many details it turned Buffett against us. Not only can I not get an interview, I don’t even know how to interview.”

  “You’ve got to stop being so hard on yourself,” Corwin said. “Interviewing isn’t easy. It’s more than just asking questions. It’s an art.”

  As we continued talking, the most inexplicable coincidence of my journey occurred. A black Lincoln with tinted windows pulled up to the curb and parked in front of us. The door swung open—and out came Larry King.

  One of the most iconic interviewers in the world was walking into the grocery store right in front of me, and he was all alone. Larry King’s show on CNN had run for twenty-five years. He’d interviewed more than fifty thousand people over his lifetime. Why hadn’t I tried to track him down before? I knew he lived nearby and it was practically public knowledge where he ate breakfast every day.

  But I sat motionless, watching him walk away through the store’s sliding doors.

  “Dude,” Corwin said, “go talk to him.”

  I felt like I had sandbags on my shoulders.

  “Just go into the grocery store,” Corwin pressed.

  I wasn’t sure if I was dealing with The Flinch or if I was just depleted from the six months of rejection and humiliation.

  “Come on!” Corwin said, nudging my shoulder, pushing me to stand. “He’s eighty years old. How far could he have gone?”

  I lifted myself off the sidewalk and walked through the store’s sliding doors. I glanced around the bakery. No Larry. I jogged to the produce section: towers of colorful fruits, walls of
vegetables. No Larry.

  That’s when I remembered he’d parked in a loading zone. He must be leaving any minute now.

  I ran to the back of the store and dashed across the aisles, turning my head down each one. No Larry, no Larry, no Larry. I cut a sharp left, dodged a tower of canned tuna, and sped down the frozen food section. I sprinted to the front of the store and looked at every register. Still, no Larry.

  I stopped myself from kicking a stray shopping cart. Once again, I’d blown it. When Larry King had been right in front of me, I didn’t do a thing.

  As I moped through the parking lot, I lifted my gaze and right in front of me, thirty feet away, was Larry King, suspenders and all.

  In that moment, all the pent-up anger and energy inside me began to combust, erupting from my mouth, causing me to yell at the top of my lungs—

  “MRRRRR. KINGGGGG­GGGGG­GG!!!!!!”

  Larry’s shoulders shot straight up. His head slowly turned around; his eyebrows arched toward his hairline, his mouth gaped open, and every wrinkle on his face sprung back. I sprinted toward him and said, “Mr. King, my name is Alex, I’m twenty years old, I’ve always wanted to say hi—”

  He lifted a hand. “OKAY…HI,” then he speed-walked away.

  I followed in silence until we were finally out on the sidewalk, in front of his car. He unlocked the trunk, stuffed in his groceries, opened the driver-side door, and was about to climb inside, so I yelled again—

  “Wait! Mr. King!”

  He looked at me.

  “Can I…can I go to breakfast with you?”

  He looked around. A dozen people were on the sidewalk, watching the scene unfold.

  Larry took a heavy breath, and then said in his gravelly Brooklyn voice, “Okay, okay, okay.”

  I said thank you as he clicked his seatbelt. Before he shut the door, I called out, “Wait, Mr. King. What time?”

  He looked at me—then slammed the door.