by Alex Banayan
Elliott’s friend shook his head, looking uninterested. He was about forty years old and had broad shoulders.
“You’ll love him,” Elliott said. “Alex is working on a project that’s everything you stand for. He’s interviewed Larry King, Bill Gates…”
Matt’s eyelids slightly widened. Elliott told me to tell Matt my Price Is Right story, and when I did, Matt laughed the whole way through. Elliott jumped in again. “Alex, tell Matt that analogy you told me. You know, the three doors one.”
Elliott and I had been on the phone a few days earlier when he’d asked if I noticed a commonality in the people I’d interviewed. I’d told him I’d been playing around with an analogy.
All the people I’d interviewed treated life, business, and success the same way. In my eyes, it was like getting into a nightclub. There are always three ways in.
“There’s the First Door,” I told Matt, “the main entrance, where the line curves around the block. That’s where ninety-nine percent of people wait around, hoping to get in.
“Then there’s the Second Door, the VIP entrance. That’s where the billionaires, celebrities, and the people born into it slip through.”
Matt nodded.
“School and society make you feel like those are the only two ways in. But over the past few years, I’ve realized there is always, always…the Third Door. It’s the entrance where you have to jump out of line, run down the alley, bang on the door a hundred times, crack open the window, sneak through the kitchen—there’s always a way. Whether it’s how Bill Gates sold his first piece of software or how Steven Spielberg became the youngest studio director in Hollywood history, they all took—”
“—the Third Door,” Matt said, a smile spreading across his face. “That’s how I’ve lived my whole damn life.”
I looked over at Elliott, who was grinning.
“Alex,” Elliott said, “you know Matt created Lady Gaga’s social network, right?” Before I could respond, Elliott added, “Didn’t you tell me you want to interview her?”
Of course Elliott knew the answer to that. He was the one who’d introduced me to Lady Gaga’s manager a year earlier. I’d tried building a relationship with the manager ever since; meeting with him at his office, emailing and calling him. But every time I’d asked for an interview, the answer was no. Just a few weeks earlier, he’d rejected my request again.
Yet still, of all the musicians in the world, I felt no one represented the spirit of the mission better than Lady Gaga.
“I would love to interview her,” I said.
Matt looked at me and nodded.
“Well,” Matt said, “Elliott is friends with her manager. Why doesn’t Elliott call him and set it up?”
I didn’t want to admit I’d been rejected, so I said it was a good idea.
As John Mayer began to sing “Waiting on the World to Change,” Elliott spotted another friend and jumped over to say hello. Matt and I talked a bit more about the mission, and then he took out his iPhone and began swiping through photos. He tilted the screen in my direction. On it was a picture of him with Lady Gaga, her arms around him backstage at a concert. Matt swiped again and there was another photo of the two of them, this time in an office. Gaga was on top of a desk with her arms in the air.
Matt continued swiping—a photo of him at a golf tournament with Condoleezza Rice, skateboarding on a half-pipe with Tony Hawk, ringing the NASDAQ opening bell with Shaquille O’Neal, backstage at a show with Jay-Z, and then sitting on a couch with Nelson Mandela.
There was a gravitational force radiating from Matt and I could feel myself being sucked in. I asked him how he started his career and he told me one Third Door story after another. After training to be a U.S. Army Ranger and getting injured, Matt went off to start a hedge fund. From there, he created a tech platform for electronic trading, began investing in start-ups including Uber and Palantir, and then got a call from 50 Cent that eventually led him to Lady Gaga. We had been talking for nearly half an hour when I felt a hand slap on my back.
Elliott said we needed to head out, so Matt and I exchanged contact information.
“If you’re ever in San Diego,” Matt said, “let me know. You can come by my ranch.”
I heard Elliott faintly whispering, “When it’s in front of you…make your move,” but when I glanced at him, his mouth wasn’t moving. The voice was in my head.
“You know what?” I said. “I’ll actually be in San Diego next month. I could use a place to stay.”
“Done,” Matt said. “We have a two-bedroom guesthouse. It’s all yours.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Redefining Success
ONE MONTH LATER, LOS ANGELES
“That’s perfect,” Cal said.
I was back at Larry King’s breakfast table, and I’d just told Larry and Cal that in a few days I would be interviewing Steve Wozniak, the cofounder of Apple, who built one of the first personal computers with his bare hands. Elliott’s advice to create a pipeline had worked.
“The best part is that you won’t have the same problem you had when you interviewed Bill Gates,” Cal added. “This time, you can’t be nervous. He’s the Woz.”
“Where are you doing the interview?” Larry asked.
“At a restaurant in Cupertino.”
“When I was starting out,” Larry said, “I did an interview show at Pumpernik’s deli in Miami. Restaurants are great. Everyone just wants to have fun.”
“Alex, do me a favor,” Cal said. “Don’t take your notepad. Try it as an experiment. If the interview fails, you can blame me.”
I was hesitant, but I thought it was worth trying after what had happened with the Bill Gates interview. A few days later, I boarded a plane and within hours I was walking up to Mandarin Gourmet, a restaurant two blocks from Apple headquarters. I was standing in front of the entrance when my phone rang. It was my friend Ryan.
“The Woz?” he asked as I told him what I was up to. “Bro, I know you were having trouble getting interviews, but Woz peaked like twenty years ago. Look at the Forbes list. He’s not even on it. I don’t get why you’re doing this. Actually, you know what? Maybe it’s good you’re interviewing him. Try to figure out why Woz never became as successful as Steve Jobs.”
Before I could respond, out of the corner of my eye I saw Steve Wozniak striding toward me, wearing sneakers and sunglasses. A pen and green laser pointer were clipped to the chest pocket of his shirt. I hung up my phone and greeted him, and then stepped inside.
The restaurant was a sea of white tablecloths. As soon as we sat, I picked up a menu but Wozniak motioned for me to put it down. He called over the waiter and ordered for both of us with the enthusiasm of a kid who could get all the desserts he wanted. Our table was soon overflowing with fried rice, vegetable chow mein, Chinese chicken salad, sesame chicken, honey walnut prawns, Mongolian beef, and crispy egg rolls. Even before our first bite, Wozniak already seemed to be the happiest person I’d ever met. Whether he was telling me about his wife, his dogs, his favorite restaurants, or the road trip he was about to take to Lake Tahoe, Wozniak seemed to love everything about his life.
He told me that he met Steve Jobs in 1971, just a few miles from where we were sitting. Jobs was in high school and Wozniak was in college. A mutual friend of theirs named Bill Fernandez introduced them. The moment they met, Wozniak and Jobs hit it off and spent hours sitting on a sidewalk, laughing and sharing stories about pranks they’d pulled.
“One of my favorite pranks was during my first year of college,” Wozniak told me. “I built a TV jammer, which you could hide in the palm of your hand. You could turn a knob and jam any TV set you wanted, making the show go fuzzy with static.”
Wozniak said that one night he and a friend went over to the common room of another dorm to mess around. There were about twenty students sitting around
watching a color TV. Wozniak sat in the back, concealed the jammer in his hand, and made the TV malfunction.
“For the first few tries, I had my friend get up and hit the TV—bonk—and the TV would go perfect! Then I jammed it again. After a while, my friend hit the TV harder and harder, but if he smacked that TV enough, it worked. By the end of half an hour, I had the whole group of college kids pounding the TV with their fists, and if it was a show they really wanted to see, they would hit the TV with chairs.”
Wozniak kept visiting the dorm to see how far he could take this. One time, he noticed a few students were at the TV set trying to fix it, and one guy had his hand on the middle of the screen and his foot in the air. Wozniak quickly turned the jammer off. When the guy took his hand away from the screen or put his foot down, Wozniak turned the jammer on. The guy stood there, with his hand in the middle of the screen and his foot in the air, for half an hour as everyone else watched the TV show.
As Wozniak told me about another prank, a woman with short brown hair joined our table. “Woz,” she said, “did you show him the laser pointer test?”
Wozniak introduced his wife, Janet. He unclipped the green laser pointer from his shirt and held it close to my face, telling me it could detect “how much brains” I had. When he shined it into my right ear, green light appeared on the opposite wall.
“Holy crap!” he said. “Your head is completely empty.”
Glancing down, I spotted a second laser pointer he was holding under the table. Woz and I let out a laugh. He clipped his laser pointer back on his shirt and told his wife about my mission. He shared with her the names of the people I was interviewing.
“You know,” he said, turning to me and lowering his voice, “I don’t know why you’re interviewing me. I’m not a successful mogul like Steve Jobs or anything like that…”
His words trailed as though he was baiting me for a response. It felt like he was testing me, but I didn’t know what to say, so I did the only thing I could think of—I stuffed an egg roll in my mouth.
“When I was a kid,” Wozniak said, “I had two goals for my life. The first was to create something with engineering that changes the world. The second was to live life on my own terms.
“Most people do things because that’s what society tells them they should do. But if you stop and do the math—if you actually think for yourself—you’ll realize there’s a better way to do things.”
“Is that why you’re so happy?” I asked.
“Bingo,” Wozniak said. “I’m happy because I do what I want every day.”
“Oh,” his wife said, laughing, “he does exactly what he wants.”
I was curious about the difference between Wozniak and Steve Jobs, so I asked what it was like founding Apple when it was just the two of them. Wozniak shared a handful of stories, but what stood out most were the ones that made it clear how different their values were.
One story took place before Apple was formed. Jobs was working at Atari and was assigned to create a video game. He knew Wozniak was a better engineer, so he made a deal: if Wozniak would create the game, they would split the seven-hundred-dollar pay. Wozniak was grateful for the opportunity and built the game. As soon as Jobs got paid, he gave his friend the three hundred and fifty dollars he had promised. Ten years later, Wozniak learned that Jobs hadn’t been paid seven hundred dollars for the game, but rather thousands of dollars. When the story broke in the news, Steve Jobs denied it, but even the CEO of Atari claimed it was true.
Another story took place early in Apple’s growth. At the time, it seemed obvious Jobs would be the company’s CEO, but it wasn’t clear where Wozniak would fit in on the executive team. Jobs asked him what position he wanted. Wozniak knew that managing people and dealing with corporate politics were the last things he wanted to do. So he told Jobs he wanted his position capped at engineer.
“Society tells you that success is getting the most powerful position possible,” Wozniak said. “But I asked myself: Is that what would make me happiest?”
The final story Wozniak shared took place around the time Apple filed for its initial public offering. Jobs and Wozniak were set to make more money than they ever imagined. Leading up to the public offering, Wozniak found out that Jobs had refused stock options to some of Apple’s earliest employees. To Wozniak, these people were family. They helped build the company. But Jobs refused to budge. So Wozniak took it upon himself and gifted some of his own shares to the early employees, so they all could share in the financial rewards. On the day the company went public, those early employees became millionaires.
As I watched Wozniak lean back in his chair, cracking open a fortune cookie and laughing with his wife, I could hear the words Ryan had told me before the interview ringing in my ears.
But the only thing that came to mind was: Who’s to say that Steve Jobs was more successful?
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Staying an Intern
THREE WEEKS LATER, MIAMI, FLORIDA
I leaned against the balcony railing and looked at the city as the sun began to set, the palm trees silhouetted by hues of pink and orange. We were on the twentieth floor of a high-rise condo and Armando Pérez was showing me the beauty of his hometown. It felt like the scene from The Lion King, where Mufasa looks over the cliff and says, “Simba, everything the light touches is our kingdom.”
Armando’s finger shot to the left. “Look, there’s Marlins Park.”
To the right. “That’s my charter school, SLAM.
“That hotel is where I hang out.
“Down there is the boat I take out onto the ocean.
“See that white building right there, next to Grove Isle? That’s Mercy Hospital. That’s where I was born.”
If anyone saw me standing beside Armando, they probably would have recognized him by another name—the Grammy Award–winning rapper and musician Pitbull.
Thinking differently and building a pipeline was continuing to pay off. First had come Wozniak, now Pitbull, and just this morning I’d received another confirmation from Jane Goodall. The mission was starting to bear fruit and I couldn’t have been happier.
Pitbull led me inside where a few of his friends were lounging on a couch. He reached for a red Solo cup, filled it to the brim with vodka and soda, and then we headed back out to the patio. As we sat, I noticed how different Pitbull seemed from the fist-pumping persona I’d seen hours earlier at his concert. Now his energy was calming. His movements were slower. I decided not to start with a question and just ease into a conversation, seeing where it would go. He soon told me that ever since he was a kid, he loved looking for new challenges.
“A true hustler is always looking for the next one,” he said. “It’s like playing a video game—let’s say Mario Bros. Okay, you beat the first level, now you got to beat the second level, now you got to beat the third level. Once you beat the game, you’re like, ‘Whoa, whoa. Where’s the next game? Where it at?’ ”
I felt my thoughts being pulled in a new direction.
What’s his key to constantly leveling up?
How do you keep your success growing, when you’re already at the top of your game?
Once you’ve made it, how do you maintain it?
This must’ve been what Cal had meant when he said to let my curiosity ask the questions. I asked Pitbull to walk me through the video game levels of his life, hoping I’d spot his secret along the way.
“What was your level one?” I said.
He reached for his cup, took a swig, and then sat silently for a few moments. In the early eighties, he told me, he came out of his mother’s womb with cocaine in his blood. When his father took off, Pitbull’s mother raised him on her own, using drug money to make ends meet. They were constantly on the move. Pitbull had to switch high schools eight times. Drug dealing was all he saw growing up, so it was only natural he go
t caught up in it too. I could see the pain in his eyes as he reflected on it.
“I sold everything, dawg,” he said. “I had my time, and I sold it all.”
He sold ecstasy, weed, cocaine, and heroin. In high school, Pitbull never kept any drugs on him; instead he hid them in girls’ lockers around school. When he made a sale, he would tell the buyer which locker to get the product from. One day, the principal grabbed Pitbull, threw him in his office and said, “I know you’re selling drugs! Let me check your pockets!” Pitbull emptied his pockets. “Damn it! Let me see your shoes!” Pitbull took off his shoes. “Your hat!” The principal was getting more and more frustrated, and then Pitbull said, “You know what? Why don’t you check this?” and pulled down his pants.
Soon after that, the principal printed out a diploma, handed it to Pitbull, and told him to leave campus and not come back.
“He just fucking gave it to me,” Pitbull said. “I never actually graduated high school. But I still went and got a photo studio to take my own graduation pictures. I took one smiling and another one with my middle finger up. Both photos are still hanging up at my abuela’s house.”
Though in all that time, Pitbull stressed, he never did any cocaine himself. He saw how it affected his parents and didn’t want that for his own life. Now that he’d “graduated” and survived the world of drug dealing, it was time for level two of his video game: becoming the biggest rapper in Miami.
“I started to understand the opportunity I had if I really focused,” Pitbull said. “That’s number one in anything: understanding the opportunity you have. I knew that if I wanted to make money rapping, I had to write to music. So I started writing rhymes. I didn’t know what a record was at the time. I just wrote rhymes, rhymes, rhymes, rhymes.”
Pitbull also knew that if he wanted to be the next king of Miami’s rap scene, he had to learn from the king at the time: Luther Campbell, the leader of the hip-hop group 2 Live Crew.
