The recent death of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman led me to reminisce about two of my one-on-one encounters with celebrities -- with Mr. Friedman and Bill Gates.

William R. King is University Professor in the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh (billking@katz.pitt.edu).

In the mid-1970s, I studied the feasibility of a national service program at the behest of Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia and got a good deal of attention and some national TV coverage after my testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, during which I recommended that we embark on such a program.

One of the many invitations that I got in response to my testimony was to go to California to give a talk on the subject. After accepting, I was casually told, "By the way, in the afternoon after your morning talk, we'd like you to participate in a panel discussion." Of course, I said "yes."

At lunch, I was introduced to this short professorial guy -- Mr. Friedman -- who hadn't yet won his Nobel and was not nearly as well known as he subsequently became.

When the time came for the "panel discussion," it turned out that the panel was made up of Milton and me. My position was that the nation would benefit from a mandatory national service program for youth. He was a libertarian on the issue, as on most things, believing that, "In a free society, nobody should be forced to do anything by government."

I thought that I had a pretty well-reasoned viewpoint, and I'm used to the give-and-take of the academic world, so I did not have misgivings about what was essentially a debate.

Boy, was I wrong! With his incisive and quick mind, and his command of the facts, he tore me apart. When it was over, I avoided talking to anybody, went to my room and slept off my humiliation.

When the editors of The Wall Street Journal once had a similar disagreement with Mr. Friedman and he responded, they wrote that "being spanked by Milton Friedman is one of life's most humiliating experiences." I can attest to that.

The second such encounter was pretty much the opposite. I worried about it for a week or so and then did pretty well.

I was invited to give a talk at a breakfast meeting of CEOs in Seoul, South Korea. I was told that there would be two speakers and, assuming that the other person would be a professor from Seoul National University, I wasn't much concerned.

About a week before I was to leave for Korea, I got an e-mail telling me that the other speaker would be Bill Gates. Uh-oh. Another catastrophe?

The first thing I did was have my secretary look on the Internet for a good Bill Gates or Microsoft joke that I could use in my talk. After several hours, she reported that there were thousands of such jokes, "but none that you could tell with Gates in the room."

So, I went to the breakfast in about the same mood that I'd have on the way to my execution. After Mr. Gates and I ate together with the meeting organizers, with several bodyguards lurking around our table, he was the first to speak.

His speech was terrible. It was a sales presentation for Microsoft products given at a level that my then-13-year-old daughter would have found embarrassing in its lack of sophistication.

The Korean executives listened and applauded politely, but clearly we all felt it was a downer. Mr. Gates answered a couple of questions and then was quickly whisked from the room by his entourage.

When my turn came, I could have told one of those jokes from the Internet because Mr. Gates had left, but that would have been ungracious. The gentleman who introduced Mr. Gates noted that he was the "richest man in the world," so I began my talk by saying that I was the second speaker, but not the second-richest man in the world. Believe it or not, that got a big laugh from the audience, maybe because it suggested that they weren't going to be bored to death as they had been by "the other Bill" -- a phrase that our PR people created in reporting on this.

My talk went well, and afterward a crowd lined up to talk with me. Many were outspoken, "You did well, Mr. Gates was a dud," seemed to be the prevailing view.

So, I left the room feeling like I was walking on air. The next day, in the Korea Business Times, Mr. Gates got two-thirds of a page with a big picture and I got the rest. "Not bad," I thought, "when it's little old me versus the world's richest guy."

So my two encounters with celebrity were a 50-50 split -- one win and one loss. I'd sparred with a giant -- Milton Friedman -- which the whole world realized some years later, and I had appeared with a man who had built a giant company but who had, at least on this occasion, been ill-prepared and unimpressive.

I learned from both experiences and feel fortunate to have met them both.