A note from the editor

Dear Reader,

We don’t usually publish longform pieces like this one, but the takeaway will be worth your time. You will have better relationships, more “superpowers”, less judgment, less dominating, less shame, more love, more understanding, and more progress.

Sound good? I hope you enjoy.

Onward,

Dave

Cal Fussman has one of the most influential personal networks in the world.

He has met with some of the most recognized icons and wealthiest individuals on earth, from Kobe Bryant to Serena Williams, from Jeff Bezos to Robert De Niro, from Mikhail Gorbachev to Al Pacino and George Clooney. If you were to pool together the net worth of everyone Cal Fussman has interviewed, there is a strong possibility it would be close to a trillion dollars.

“We literally have people using the term ‘Cal Question’… it’s become a part of our culture.” — Chris Sanders, Global Industry Manager at Facebook

Cal Fussman, a 60-year-old writer who wears a Fedora and participates in adventure races, shares breakfast almost every day in Los Angeles with one of the biggest names in broadcasting history, Larry King.

Perhaps you’ve never heard of Cal Fussman until now. Most of his work has been in print, until recently.

You might’ve heard his name as the longtime writer-at-large for Esquire Magazine. He interviewed thousands of icons and athletes and wrote about them in his column What I’ve Learned. “The frame could take me anywhere,” he said about the column. “My style evolved from the broad frame I was given.”

His column had to be 900 words, so it trained him to condense his open, effusive interviews into the most important takeaways.

Or perhaps you know him from where I first heard about him: his most recent endeavor, a podcast show called “Big Questions” where he interviews top performers, psychologists, authors, entrepreneurs, and professional athletes and asks them questions they’ve never been asked before.

Cal’s network replaces the need for a producer for his podcast. He doesn’t use a producer to book his sought-after celebrity guests. He simply taps “Contacts” on his phone, finds the name, and gives them a ring.

For him to build up a network like the one he has, it must’ve taken a special networking strategy.

“How much networking do you do?” I asked Cal over the phone a couple weeks ago.

“I do zero networking,” he replied, followed by a long, signature “Cal Fussman” silence and then a laugh. “It may be a weakness of mine. People tell me, ‘Hey Cal, don’t be a stranger.’ And I don’t try to be. But I never go out of my way to network with them or keep in touch. Maybe it’s a flaw.”

What is most striking about Cal is when you talk with him, you’re talking with everyone he has interviewed, too. An interview with Cal is an interview with thousands of people all speaking through one person. That’s a lot of years, life lessons, and expert tips packed into one limbic system.

When you ask him a question, he usually quotes someone else. When you ask for a story, he launches into a story about a friend. When you ask for his opinion, it comes along with a bit of someone else’s wisdom. As someone who makes his living interviewing people, his head is so full of observations, stories, and patterns from some of the most successful people in the would, he rarely talks about himself.

When you’ve had as many one-on-one conversations with the big names Cal has sat down with, it makes sense why you wouldn’t share as much about yourself.

This made my interview with Cal somewhat unique. I wanted to learn about him, not his index of vicarious experiences and insights.

On the phone, you’d think someone with so many stories, names, and places would be a fast talker — gushing with ideas and words, tripping over himself to get all the memories and advice out, but Cal’s speaking cadence is slow and protracted. He takes his time to speak this thoughts in a vibrant, gravelly voice. His words are chosen deliberately. No syllables wasted. No silence wasted either.

Tim Ferriss, who introduced Cal to the world of podcasting, learned a valuable lesson from Cal about silence

“I asked him to look at transcripts to identify where I should have jumped in, where I should have not jumped in, sequencing, what I should have explored that I didn’t explore,” said Ferriss.

Ferriss said that Cal gave him a very useful guideline:

“Let the silence do the work.”

He explained, “Interviews are different from normal conversations… If you ask someone a question in an interview, and they are searching for an answer, and it goes five seconds, that’s an eternity in an interview. The impulse is going to be to jump in and help them in some way: Let me rephrase the question.

“And when you’re hanging with a friend, silence maybe means don’t go there. Whereas in an interview… You get your prepared answer, your pat answer, your first-level answer — and then the silence draws out the real answer.”

Cal doesn’t feel the pressure to rush, or the need to supply a fast answer, when he can’t think of a good answer.

“Silence is golden when you can’t think of a good answer.” — Cal Fussman

The source of Cal’s trillion-dollar network

“It was handed to me,” he said. He worked at Esquire Magazine for multiple decades and told stories from his world travels and interviews with people he met along the way. “Esquire Magazine would set up the interviews and I just showed up,” said Cal.

Just showed up, he said. Well, anybody can just show up. If a network of powerful people was just handed to him, then the story of how he got to where he is would be over. He just did his job well. Yet, it’s one thing to build a network of rich and powerful people, it’s another thing to keep a network of rich and powerful friends.

Cal is truthful about showing up, but perhaps too modest. If you spend 30 years interviewing people with a platform like Esquire, of course your network will grow. But there was something more under the surface, something secret, that Cal had that others didn’t.

Cal’s approach to life, his №1 key to relationships, and the best asset in his professional reputation comes from one central quality that he brings with him everywhere he goes.

“Childlike curiosity.”

“I have nowhere near their success level,” said Cal about the people he interviews. “They might wonder if I’m successful at all. But I’m not thinking, ‘what do they think of me?’ I’m going in with, ‘Who are these people?’ It’s a childlike curiosity. I don’t see why I should be intimidated. A child is not intimidated. He or she just blurts out their question.”

Being childlike has a natural innocence and boldness that comes from the freedom of childhood. But “childlike” isn’t necessarily the same as genuine, which might explain the trouble with the question, “Who is the real Cal Fussman?”

Be yourself, be authentic, be genuine — you hear these overused maxims all the time when going into a high-pressure event. But Cal’s version of authenticity has a notable difference.

To be genuine, as you know, means to you know yourself and stay true to yourself regardless of what happens.

But someone, maybe someone reading this, could be genuinely unchildlike.

“Some people aren’t curious and don’t want to be. Some people want to wake up and know what their day is going to be like before it starts. At the end of the day, it was exactly how they thought it would be. I’m the exact opposite. I never know what the day will be like or who I will run into.”

This “intentional accidentalism” took Cal around the world for ten years and even led to him meeting his Brazilian wife of now 26 years. But this haphazard, as-the-wind-blows lifestyle has a strategic edge, especially in high-stakes interviews with billionaires, household athletes, and celebrity icons.

How Cal prepares for an interview and his strategy during the session

“I don’t go in pre-disposing what I’m going to get out of the interview. I approach it with research beforehand. I read a lot about the person, check Youtube, past interviews. I get a full picture. In the end, it’s incomplete. I sit down at the table. I start to write questions to find answers to the things I don’t know about this person. Could be all topics. After I write them down, I walk around with the questions. I don’t memorize. I inhale them. Right before the interview starts, I rip the questions up. I walk in completely relaxed. The questions are in my head, but not in any order I need to follow. It enables me to be spontaneous. I’m prepared to improvise, as the saying goes. Once the conversation starts, the questions are waiting to come out. I’m really listening to what the person is saying. I’m not thinking about anything except the person. I’m acutely in the moment, and so prepared, I’m able to come out with questions that take us to a place where other interviewers never go because they’re trying to execute a plan.”

For example, regardless of someone’s net worth or number of Twitter followers, Cal will ask a question that puts both pairs of feet on the same ground.

“Tell me, what was it like if I was looking at your life on the movie screen if you were six years old sitting at the dinner table?”

“People generally aren’t threatened by that,” said Cal. They recollect back to a sense of joy or remember something they haven’t thought of in a long time. There is a positive, grateful sense and they look forward to your next question.

“It’s all in the mind. The only one who can make you intimidated is yourself. If you go in thinking this person is very successful, ask yourself, are they still a person? The answer is yes, they are, and so are you.”

“Cal, who do you model yourself after?”

I felt I may have impressed the master interviewer with a good question, perhaps.

“Nobody,” came the immediate, curt response and he launched into a story.

“When you’re in the presence of an icon and you get more and more comfortable doing the same thing, you’ll eventually want feedback, encouragement, advice,” he said.

At breakfast one day, when they had just finished an interview for Esquire, Cal asked his mentor Larry King, “How did I do?”

King said, “You did great. Stay the same. Be who you are.”

King’s advice was burned into Cal’s mind forever. “You get in trouble when you try to imitate other people,” he said. “You’re not them. Ultimately, you’re just trying to be the essence of yourself. It goes back to being a kid.”

There it was again, the importance of being childlike. If you listen to any of Cal’s podcast shows, every episode touches on this recurring theme. It came up prominently in his interview with Kobe Bryant and peremptorily in his interview with the 8-year-old podcast star Eva Karpman.

Being childlike seemed to be too common a descriptor for an uncommon individual like Cal and quite frankly, betrayed a lack of intentionality. Was this all by accident? Just showing up?

Digging deeper, something clicked after reading a story about how billionaires work.

Every Billionaire’s Secret: Find Your Superpower

Benjamin Hardy, Medium’s #1 most-read writer since 2015, wrote a story about the habits and daily actions of highly successful billionaires and elite athletes.

8 Proven Performance Practices from Billionaires and Elite Athletes

№5 on the list was “Every Billionaire’s Secret: Build a Team Around You Sooner than You Feel Comfortable.”

Under this heading, Hardy recounted the following story.

When he was in his 20’s, Alex Charfen, CEO of Charfen consulting services and founder of the Entrepreneurial Personality Type™ (EPT), was at a friend’s (a billionaire) and was surprised to see a staff of two people working at his house, and a team of 30 people, including a driver. Charfen couldn’t help but ask his friend:

“Is it ever embarrassing to have so much help and so much fuss as you go through the day and get around? I mean at least 10 people have helped us so far and it’s only 11 A.M.”

His billionaire friend responded:

“It would be irresponsible for me to do anything that you observed any member of my team doing today. They are there for me and I am there for them. We have grown together and we built everything together.

If I had done anything that one of my team members had done today they would’ve been uncomfortable and worried. Each one of them is here for a reason and many of them played a role in training and hiring each other. They know that the more they help me get accomplished, the more secure we all are and the more we can grow our foundation.”

Hardy ties it together:

“High performers … are willing to think big, take on greater responsibility, and focus in on their superpower. …Remove yourself from the equation except for your superpower. There are many people out there who will work for you. Many of them are more talented than you. Let go of your ego. Give the control to other people and watch as they build your vision better than you ever could.”

Billionaires usually have just one superpower. As Hardy alluded to, billionaires will be the first to tell you that they are not an expert in everything. Just one thing, and they know that one thing through and through. Ask a question to a billionaire and they won’t have a problem saying, “Help me out, here,” to someone in the room who is smarter than he or she is in that particular area.

Another word for superpower is focus. Ever wonder why Hardy himself never writes about “how to write successfully on Medium?” He, as the #1 top writer on Medium since 2015, would be the expert on the topic. But no, he chooses to focus on his superpower (personal habits to achieve success) and doesn’t write about writing at all.

When you choose to focus on one thing, you let others around you be good at their thing(s). When you’re confident in your thing, it makes it 100% okay to admit when you don’t know something when it’s not your thing. If you are confident in your superpower, it frees you to be detached yet happy for other people and celebrate their superpowers. And that’s empathy — an emotion that makes us all united and happy.

Cal Fussman’s superpower is childlike curiosity.

A great irony begins to unfold when you examine what childlike curiosity really means.

If you’re curious, you constantly learn. Learning leads to growth. Growth fosters change.

Two of the smartest individuals in history had something to say about change.

Stephen Hawking famously said, ‘Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.’

Albert Einstein allegedly said something similar, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”

If intelligence requires change, change comes from learning, and learning starts with curiosity, then this is where it gets ironic for someone who is an expert at asking questions. If childlike curiosity means the willingness to not have the answer, but the boldness to still ask the question anyway, then what does that say about Fussman?

“Somebody told me that one in four Americans believe they don’t have friends,” said Fussman. “And that they don’t belong to communities. You’d be surprised how more and more people are putting earbuds in their ears.”

In a society obsessed with intelligence, information, and expertism, where people don’t appreciate not having an answer, or just being silent, we’re afraid to reach out and get to know each other.

Cal said that he’s seeing a wave of millennials follow him, that there’s something he has that they want but he’s not sure exactly what it is.

“Maybe I’m the last of some kind of breed, but I don’t think so,” said Fussman. “Lots of people have come to me and asked, ‘How do you do it?’ Well, it’s a lot easier now. The internet helps with connections. I have a feeling that a lot of millennials look to me because they want to connect with people. Maybe we have to teach people. Maybe that’s my mission.”

What childlike curiosity really is under the surface

What childlike curiosity really is under the surface is the freedom from a pressure to be the smartest in the room. All around us, in our hyper-information economy, intelligence is glorified. Appearing answerless on social media is feared. There’s shame in not having or knowing the answer. There’s shame in silence. And this hurts one’s willingness to find connection.

Cal Fussman is an example of someone who is influential, smart, well-connected, successful — but doesn’t claim to have the answers. By holding “childlike curiosity” up as the pinnacle character quality that he most desires, he is free from the pressure to appear smarter than the people he surrounds himself with.

If more people adopted this prioritization of childlike curiosity, there would be more listening, less shame, and closer relationships. More superpowers, less judgment, less dominating, more love, more understanding, and more progress.

So the question—who is the real Cal Fussman?—It’s a hard one to answer. But that’s just it. It can’t be answered. He’s always changing and growing. He’s always opening himself up to new people, new ideas, and new experiences. He can’t be boxed in. And that is why droves of millennials are flocking to him. He offers a rare message today.

Be free from the pressure to appear smart. You don’t need to have an answer for everything. It’s better to have a question in your mind than a wrong answer you blindly believe to be right. Instead, always be learning. Always be open to change.

Curiosity as a superpower is growing.

I believe we’re seeing a power shift in our world from people who have answers to the people who have questions. Answers — due to the proliferation of information and ease of access to the internet — are becoming more and more commoditized. Everybody with a smartphone can have an answer in a few taps. Future generations will learn to tune out answers because they’ve learned not to trust them. Instead, future generations will be drawn to someone who doesn’t have all the answers, but has the boldness to be at peace with not having the answers, yet the confidence to ask the questions that need to be asked.

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His Network Is Worth Over $1,000,000,000,000 and Here’s How You Can Use His Superpower was originally published in Entrepreneur's Handbook on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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