>> Jon: Wouldn't you rather cover tech in Silicon Valley? And I said, yeah, I guess I would.
>> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with Turn the Lens and I'm so excited about this next episode. This is a guy I've been watching for a long time. I actually used to see him on the floor at shows, you know, kind of getting ready for the lights to turn on from New York when we were getting ready for ours show. So I'm excited to finally get him on the show and get to meet him. Not quite person to person, but certainly face to face. So joining us all the way from New York, he's Jon Fortt. You know him from CNBC. You probably know him from the "Squawk Box," you know him from "Fortt Knox," you know him from The Black Experience. Jon, great to see you.
>> Hey, thanks for having me.
>> And happy Friday.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. So this-
>> I love a Friday.
>> Yes, yes. We all love Friday. So it was just funny, you know, our paths, like I said, used to cross at all these conferences and we would be setting up for "The Cube." We'd be on the show floor early before the keynotes and there was a little secret for people who go to re:Invent, you know, if you need coffee before everything opens up, go over by the Amazon area. And usually if you look behind a corner, you can find coffee. So I go back there to find coffee at 7 a.m. and there's Jon sitting, all the lights on, just kind of waiting for that feed, bug in his ear to go live so it's so great to meet you. You know, tell us a little bit about your interest in technology and how do you get here? You've interviewed every great tech CEO, you go to every great tech conference. How'd you get here, Jon?
>> Well, I try, I've been trying. I don't know if I've gotten everyone 'cause there's new ones cropping up all the time.
>> That's true.
>> That's the fun thing about it. I've been doing this for most of the past 20 years plus. You know, I moved out to Silicon Valley at the end of 1999. I had been covering technology, telecommunications, and coal at the "Lexington Herald-Leader" so I was cut my teeth in tech there. And you know, I like to say that the Merc didn't want to give a relatively junior reporter too much responsibilities. So after some fighting for a beat for a couple months, they gave me a couple of companies that were sort of on the bubble, not the big important ones like Cisco and Intel. They gave me Apple and Adobe. So that's from the first couple of companies that I was covering and they did pretty well.
>> Yeah.
>> And so that helps.
>> Yeah. So we'll get kind of into your journey a little bit later, but I'm just curious from now, you know, you talked to all these great leaders and you have talked to a lot of 'em and I'd just love to get your perspective on kind of leadership, the evolution of leadership. You know, I would never ask you to pick a favorite but I would ask you to share some lessons that you see in terms of kind of consistent patterns, consistent behavior, or maybe not consistent. Maybe there's some special things with special individuals that are so unique for that, you know, kind of their particular situation. But as you sit down with these people, you know, what strikes you, what do you love to go home and, you know, tell your wife after you have one of these interviews?
>> Oh, she loves hearing about tech leaders let me tell you. not necessarily, right?
>> Mine to.
>> Profit is not without honor, right? Like nobody wants to hear about that when I get home, but I'll give you a little preview as a matter of fact. I'm very interested lately in longer form writing. So I'm actually sketching out a book right along the lines of your question around the kind of tactics, methods, principles that I find in common across leaders. And as a bit of a preview there are four that I'm focused on; creativity, purpose, resilience, and curiosity. And I don't necessarily tackle those in all the traditional ways. For example, in the creativity slot, I've got both Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO, and Shantanu Narayen, Adobe CEO and Sandy Speicher, IDEO's CEO.
Because the type of creativity that I'm interested in is how do you come up with brand new business structures, product ideas, service ideas that sometimes serve a problem that isn't obvious. I think a AWS fits in that category. I think Adobe Creative Cloud fits in that category. Sandy Speicher the CEO of IDEO had really led the development of a different model for schools in Latin America, which was a really difficult problem that, that she almost didn't figure out. And so the type of leadership that solves problems under those conditions I think is really interesting and it takes a certain type of creativity. Getting to I'll use a phrase that Frank Slootman of Snowflake just used yesterday when I was talking to him, "first principles." And like, what's really most important both to me as a leader and to this organization.
And when we're looking at the customer, what's most important to them, what's the problem behind the problem that we need to solve. So I think that kind of creativity is important. And then when I talk about purpose, I think there's mission in organizations but there's also a sense of mission in leaders and people. And I think some of the most effective leaders that I've spoken to over time and certainly recently are able to find the points of connection, especially founders, right? Whatever it is that has motivated them, inspired them in their formation, in their growing up sometimes is reflected in what they're doing with their organization and Hardika Shah of Kinara Capital is an example of that.
Kinara Capital in India is helping to provide loans to small businesses that would otherwise get overlooked because you generally have to own property in India to get any kind of a loan even if you're a successful small business, partly because there's not a great culture and legacy of bookkeeping and paperwork there. So what she's been able to do is go in and help the businesses with that documentation piece to document their cash flows, get them capital, get them funding. And part, the connection that I made here is her father's blind and he's a professor and she growing up would read his books to him that he needed to do his research. She would read the student tests to him and give the grades that he determined that they needed.
So even back then coming up, she was seeing the potential in somebody in society that society had overlooked and she was being a bridge right, in the process to help them and for society to benefit from their productivity. So that's another one. And I'll stop my monologue 'cause I've been monologing for quite a while.
>> No, that, no, that's great. I mean, it's funny. I've got a post I want to do soon about kind of the creation of companies and you know, there's kind of the business school aspect where you know, you find a green space on a market fit analysis, that's like any other but what I think the much more interesting is, you know, I need something and I'm going to build something that I need and maybe other people need it too. And there's a great TED talk with Linus Torvalds who says, you know, I never built anything that I didn't want for myself. And it's just so happened that other people were interested in it too. And that example that you just, that you just talked about. You know, when people really live it and really know, you know, kind of what this, this crazy opportunity is. What I'm really enjoying in your long format stuff is you really get to get under the covers. You know, I really enjoy, you just had one with Francois from F5, which was-
>> Yeah.
>> Which was fascinating. His story of going back, I mean, the story of going back and forth from Togo to France from being a white guy and rich in Togo to a black guy, an outsider in Paris and then back and forth, what an amazing perspective in terms of empathy and being able to put yourself in somebody else's shoes. To be able to do that as a leader, 'cause I love to get your take. One of the kind of hypothesis that I think is pretty strong is that in the leadership position, you know, your primary job is communication. You know, your primary job is convincing everybody to come on your journey and the first person that kind of splash water my face on this was Dey Patrick, the Schwab back in the day. And you know, whether it's customers or employees or potential employees or potential investors or potential customers, you know, the role of communication to come along with me, especially in this hyper-competitive environment to me seems like such an important attribute for leaders. Some get it and I think some just don't.
>> Yeah, I think you're onto something with communication. I mean, it might also be influence, motivation. I mean, none of that happens without communication and I think for different organizations and in different industries, the balance of what's needed, you know, skill wise from the leader might shift a bit. I'm also sort of intrigued by culture and how successful companies, very successful companies can have very different cultures. I think we tend to want to embrace the idea that there are certain right cultures and certain wrong cultures within companies. And you know, the idea that a company should be a family or that a company should be a team or, you know, we want to embrace one metaphor.
But it's really interesting to me that authenticity and consistency seems to be more important than any one particular culture. People get attracted or repulsed, right, by certain leaders and certain sets of conditions. But if they're authentically communicated, people know what they're getting into, right, that seems to help quite a bit. And so, you know, for example, I remember years ago talking to Bruce Chizen who had been an earlier CEO of Adobe. He's now on the board of Oracle and I was like, Bruce, what's up with that? How do you go from Adobe to Oracle, right? You know, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke and Larry Ellison are very different personalities and the companies have very different culture. And he was like, oh, well, you know, Jon, I, you know, I had the same questions. But he found that Oracle's culture works for Oracle. And, so that to me was fascinating and I found it continues to be true.
>> Right, right. Well, what's interesting as you say that I can't help but think of a couple of recent high level executive moves, where from the outside looking in they look like massive culture clashes. Like there's just no way that somebody who's a senior executive in company A can now be the CEO of company B, but it seems to be working. So I don't know, you think, you know, they kind of bring the culture and you come along and they turn everybody or do.
>> (mumbles) Talking about. I think that can be tough. I think that can be tough. I think when you get those leaders in situations where they don't seem to be a cultural fit, sometimes they're more of a fit than it might appear on the surface. Or sometimes they really do have to make significant changes in order for their style and approach to work. What are you talking about?
>> I'm not telling you.
>> All right, okay. (both chuckles)
>> Shift gears a little bit, but the other thing I love with really great leaders is the acknowledgement of the role of luck, the acknowledgement of the role of other people. And one of my favorite things to watch if I'm ever feeling down is the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, induction ceremony speeches which will inspire you to no end 'cause you have the greatest of the great, John Thompson, you know, talking about all the people that made it possible to him. And I find it the really great leaders, you know, will always, you know, have a little bow to a little bit of the magic and a little bit of the timing and a little bit of the secret things that came together to make that opportunity. You know, Bill Gates getting that meeting, you know, early on in the Windows days to get that IBM opportunity. So I just, it's really interesting to me, it seems like the people, usually a couple tiers down are a little bit more cocky and they think they did it all themselves, but the really good ones seem to always acknowledge, you know, that it's a team effort. You can't do it yourself, by yourself.
>> Yeah. I would say that's true. I... There's some, there's also a spectrum there, right? You got some leaders who are bit more, they'll talk about the team and they'll talk about luck, but you can also sort of tell they understand what they bring to the table and they understand the difference between that and somebody who brings less to the table.
>> Right.
>> That goes back to that just issue of authenticity.
>> Right.
>> Okay. Like if you're really all that and you have a track record and you understand what it is that you bring, fine. But do you also understand what it is that you don't bring and do you bring people alongside you who can help to provide that?
>> Right.
>> And I think that the leaders who succeed over time and repeatedly are self-aware, right? Even if their EQ isn't really high by broader society standards, I think there's self-awareness is pretty on point.
>> Yeah, well, you know, you mentioned Frank as an interesting one, Slootman, 'cause you know, when he went to ServiceNow is when I first met him. You know, and Slootman's a really interesting one 'cause he did it before a data domain, he did it at ServiceNow and clearly he's an operator, you know, that they wanted somebody that can drive really big scale, really fast at Snowflake and they seem to be kicking tail and taking names. So I think he definitely knows his, he knows his thing and if he's not doing that, he's out sailing, right. That's his passion.
>> Right. Right, yeah. Frank is I think a breath of fresh air in the current environment because he doesn't tow the social line about, you know, I jokingly asked him yesterday, you're probably not going to a four day work week, are you?
Cause I've gotten a couple of emails from companies that have shifted to a four day... He's like I'm on a seven day week, you know? And you know, I also asked him about diversity issues because I think he hasn't spoken about those in ways that other, in others in the industry have and he's faced some blow back for that.
>> Right.
>> So I want to find out how he can address those things. And he talked a bit about pipeline and how he and Snowflake have been trying to address that. I think it's important that in these issues that are broadly important to industry and to society, we get a broad spectrum of viewpoints and ask questions beneath the surface instead of pushing, you know, why don't you think this or why don't you approach it that way? That's my approach anyway. And so it, I think it's good to have the Frank Slootman's because for everyone that's willing to speak up and represent that point of view, there are a hundred more who are thinking that, but don't want to take the arrows.
>> Right. You know, it's interesting the, the little segue as you mention that, and kind of the role, of just pick on tech leaders, 'cause that's who we cover mainly as, as you know, people that should set societal goals or societal, I'm struggling for the right words. But you know, you have people just, and I'll just pick on Facebook 'cause everybody likes to kick on Zuck, right. I mean he started a company for a particular reason that now is giant and powerful and having influences far beyond, I'm sure his wildest dreams. You know, and it always comes back to, you know, did he intend to be in a position of significant social power? You know, is he qualified to be in this position? Should he be in this position? And it seems kind of like a lot of these guys get these kind of accidental positions where they weren't necessarily intending to be here, but suddenly because of the development of the platform for a whole lot of reasons, suddenly their influence way, way, you know, kind of outweighs what it probably should based on, you know, kind of who they are and what the objectives were when they started this journey.
>> I think there's Zuckerberg example where there's no way, right?
>> Right, right, right
>> As a teenager, he might have known that social platforms were a big deal and the idea of connecting people was powerful. But I think he really believed that connecting people is fundamentally good, right. And you end up with a Pandora's box sort of situation where it's like, oh yeah, not all people are good so not all connections between people are going to be good. And then people just like they do in real life in person, you know, try to corrupt social processes. Boy, what happens when they're doing that at scale-
>> Right.
>> Because the platform enables that. So you have that. You also have leaders sometimes who aren't founders who are able to come in and I think have a broader social impact. And I would point to two things with Satya Nadella at Microsoft. One, he has spoken and written about how he's got kids who have challenges in how they operate, right? So he's been very focused on accessibility within Microsoft even before he was CEO and he advocates for it now from that position. You could debate whether that is as fundamentally important to a technology company today as cloud technology or what have you.
I think it certainly has yielded a lot of benefits, but regardless it certainly hasn't hurt Microsoft to be focused on it. It has helped it and so people are able to focus on values and goals beyond that. And then, you know, you look at what Microsoft is dealing with right now. They just put out this statement about the review they're going to go into on sexual harassment and gender discrimination. And they will make the report public later. A lot of people forget Satya Nadella when he came in, you know, a few months in stuck his foot in his mouth that Grace Hopper and said some things about-
>> I was there. I was there.
>> Women getting raises.
>> I did, I did the interview as he came off stage. I was like, oh my goodness.
>> And you know, since then people have said that might have been the best mistake ever because of the genuine way that he and Microsoft focused on that problem and how the culture needs to change after that so that when you get to 2020 and the allegations and concerns about Bill Gates, treatment of women in the organization while he was active in it, now Satya Nadella has the leadership authority and has the track record to say, here are the things that we put in place. It's not the same Microsoft in 2020, 2021, as it was in 2000 whatever and now we're going to do this transparency thing. And I think he gets the benefit of people perceiving Microsoft to be ahead of the curve on this issue because they've been working on it right, over these years since Nadella took over.
>> Right? Yeah, it was at Grace Hopper in Phoenix and I was in the green room waiting for the president of Harvey Mudd College, I'm blanking on her name right now. She was interviewing him 'cause she's also on the board-
>> Yeah.
>> And I was going to interview her and she came off and I was like, whoa, that was, that was interesting. But it also, it takes me to another thing, you know, as we lament, you know, some of the negative impacts of a lot of the algorithms that are driving a lot of this kind of negative engagement on social media, sometimes it just strikes me as like, what, if they're willing to give up some money, right, the algorithms could easily be written and re-optimize for something other than time onsite and maximum value extraction, right? You could easily start to put in things like, you know, you've been on too long, apparently TikTok has it. I'm not a big TikToker but apparently they'll kick you off after you've been on too long, you know, or to show you things. You know, you talked about, you know, gender stuff that makes you feel good instead of making you feel bad or, you know, gives you a positive uplifting notice instead of, you know, your fat kind of a notice. It seems that it's actually maybe not as hard to fix these things, but it, you know, it'll take money out people's pockets, but ultimately every algorithm is derived around a rank order of priorities. And we just have to somehow change that, that rank order.
>> Yeah. That beyond my, you know, ability set to be able to compare those things but there's so many things in our society that should operate that way, right? Like food.
>> Right.
>> We should be able to have more great tasting, healthy food. We got a lot of junk food though. We got a lot of fast food. We also have some companies that are trying to change the algorithm right, in food and, and have done pretty well with that. You know, the Paneras of the world, et cetera, that are using more whole and healthy ingredients. You know, you've got regulations in Europe, certainly that are different from the ones here that we could look at. But yeah, I think what with this points to is that as our society and our economies become more digital, we have to, we are challenged to pay a lot more attention to incentives and unintended outcomes. And how much are we measuring and tracking those things and who are we empowering to make changes?
>> Right.
>> I think as the end user, as the citizen becomes audience, there's the risk of the end user and the citizen becoming disempowered and becoming the product and instead of the driver and the decider. And so a challenge of the next 10 to 20 years is going to be how to shift that and maybe reverse that, that troubling trend.
>> Yeah. I want to shift gears and talk about media 'cause you're again, you're in a really cool spot. We talked about before, I think before we turn the cameras that you, you know, you were at Knight Ridder so you, you came from the old school, traditional, you know, print, then you're at "Time" and "Fortune" and now you're at CNBC, you know, so these are big name brand traditional media companies.
And yet you're starting to stick your toe in some of these alternate forms. You, you created the "Fortt Knox" program, which distribute content across a lot of different platforms. You're getting into, as you said, not only long form writing, but long form interviews. So I wonder if you can share, and then you just moved your "Fortt Knox" from Spotify, into LinkedIn using LinkedIn really as another publishing platform. So I'd just love to get your take 'cause you're sitting there and I'm sure there's a lot of interesting discussions about media and media consumption and how it's evolving and staying, you know, relevant across multiple ways to connect with your audience.
>> Yeah Jeff, well, I've always been a little bit of a rebel when it comes to this stuff. When I had my first job out of college at the Lexington Herald-Leader, I did a stint working on dot com side, even back then in the late 90s. And at the San Jose "Mercury News" for a bit in the mid 2000s, I was, I forget what the title was, Senior Web Editor. Which I'm not sure exactly what that meant, except I was in charge of producing podcasts and that's back when a podcast was you downloaded the file on your computer and transferred it to your iPod and you know, walked around with, and that's how it had to work. It had to go through iTunes. And some digital shows and packages like that. So I think a big shift coming out of the rise of the web was the idea that it doesn't take so many people to put a brand, a media brand, a story together.
Not just a written story, but even audio video story. It used to be boy, you can write something but you can't distribute it by yourself. And Blogger and WordPress and all kinds of things like that changed that. And then it was okay, well you can take a picture, but you know, developing it and distributing is harder. And then things changed with that and then audio and now video. And so I think I've always been eager to try to adopt these tools and get around whatever institutional barriers there are to figuring out the distribution piece because organizations, large organizations are by nature most of them cautious and slower to adopt new technology because they're trying to protect the focus and processes and businesses that they have in place already. So it, I think it takes individuals who are willing to take some risks to go out there and try to figure it out.
>> And so how, how have they responded? So you've been at it for a while. I think I saw in your Spotify thing, 147 episodes. I mean, you've been doing it for a while, so clearly you're still doing it. So they didn't say stop doing it, Jon. But I'm curious, you know, kind of the feedback inside CNBC as you've explored some of these alternatives.
>> Well, I think that 147 was when the clock on podcasting, my actual distributing just the audio files stopped.
>> Right, right.
>> Boy, two plus years ago.
>> Oh, is it that long ago? I'm delinquent.
>> It was that long ago.
>> I've been watching your video so I only just went to go check this Spotify this morning.
>> That's right. So it's probably been another 150 at least since then. You know, it's been hundreds at this point safely of Founder and CEO interviews, which has been fun. I don't think the organization understands even now why I'm, oh why I'm doing it. I think organizations tend to look at just volume of downloads and say, how many ads can we sell against this, right? And that's a consideration. But another consideration is in media right now events, both digital and in person are increasingly important because if you're talking to the right people and having the right conversations with the right people, you can convene at a level that's not just volume based and draws advertising dollars, but that's deeply meaningful and draws membership or ticket dollars, which is what most in person and membership based events do. And then you don't need thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people witnessing that. You really just need a hundred of the right people-
>> Right.
>> For it to be extremely valuable. And so, I think organizations don't always understand that the ad dollar or even the sponsorship dollar is not the strategic goal or value. It's credibility, it's understanding, its relationship and its engagement. And then other things flow from that based on how you choose to invest and grow. So that's been my first principles thing is I want to understand these leaders, I want to understand these technologies, I want to understand these strategies and deeply connect and engage. And what that has allowed me to do is I have a bit of an easier time than so of the people perhaps, and calling up a leader and say, hey, will you participate in this event?
Or will you come on TechCheck? Or, because they know where my focus is. They know that often by this point I know them at a level that not a lot of other reporters have taken the time to, and that's yielded a lot of benefit.
>> Right. Well, there's two sides of that I want to dig into a little bit. One, one is like you say, on the guest side kind and kind of what it means when you can have, like, we're having a long conversation with someone that, that you just can't do in regular broadcast media, right? It's just the, the mechanics and the numbers don't work and how that's changed your relationship with the guests as you mentioned. and output of that interview as well and the tertiary effects. And then, and then in terms for the audience, you know, for you to have a direct connection with the audience, that's the other thing I think that's so different about today's time. There's a great Amanda Palmer TED Talk. I reference it all the time where she talks about getting her big record deal. And she told 25,000 records and the record deal said, you suck And she's like, wow, 25,000 people want to buy my music.
I'm really excited. I want to go meet them all. So it's just a completely different kind of way within the kind of micro segmentation content to have that direct engagement and to not have necessarily a giant broadcast model with some conversion number. But to actually, like you said, the 100 people that matter to engage them directly through some of these more kind of direct and kind of two-way communication channels.
>> Because what you get sometimes if you're not focused on the right audience, consciously or subconsciously, you end up getting steered by the audience you choose, or the audience that chooses you. So, part of the reason why I started "Fortt Knox" was because of what linear or live business news is, I would get at most 10 to 15 minutes and this is if it was a huge CEO, I'd get 10 to 15 minutes worth of an interview on air, right. But these CEOs would be willing to give me an hour sitting down. And so I would know, well only 10 or 15 minutes of this is going to get on air and I would start to feel bad. And so for some of it was five minutes or less.
>> Right.
>> So I would, I found myself asking fewer questions and kind of dumbing down my interview and taking less of the time than they were willing to give because I didn't want them to feel like their time had wasted. And eventually I just thought this is terrible. This is making me dumber. So in a digital era, why should I constrain my work to the traditional space of output and distribution that I've been given? Why shouldn't I create my own distribution for perhaps a smaller but more educated, more invested audience that wants to hear this conversation and then it'll make me ask better questions and then it'll yield better output and then it'll yield. I didn't know this at the time, but it'll yield more guests who then give more insights, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And that's eventually what happened. But I think when, you have to be careful. I found out I have to be careful to pick my audience and not let my audience pick me and think about the real principles behind what I'm doing. What is it that I really need to learn? What do I need to understand to get better at what I'm trying to do here and to have deeper insight. How long a conversation do I need to have in order to get to that level of insight. And so then how do I construct my process and design my product so that it gets me what I need to.
>> Right, right, that's great. I mean, so how do you structure your process? That begs the question, 'cause you're long form interviews. I've watched a number of 'em and I love that you have the opportunity to just follow up, follow up, follow up. I forget whoever said it back in the day, right? Say why, why, why seven times in a row and you get to the answer of the universe. But it's really interesting that you can go down these, you can go down these rabbit holes and again, just picking on Francois 'cause I just happened to watch that one most recently and you know, his birth order, which you always check in and know your Death Valley Moment, you've got a good little, little format, but you know, really insight as to what makes this sky tick and the level of empathy that he has as a boss, having gone through what he did. I mean, you're never going to get that out of a five minute conversation.
>> Yeah, and it took me a while to get to the process where I am now and I'm not supposing that this is it forever. Hopefully I'll continue to learn and improve. But this phase really started two years ago and it was pre-pandemic. I was getting bored with Fortt Knox and I was frustrated because I didn't have all the resources that I needed to do what I wanted to do. And a couple things happened. LinkedIn Live was relatively new at the time, but they had certain tools that were enabling the live process. I had been using an encoder based tool to do multi-platform live streaming, and that was pretty complicated and required multiple people and I like to require as few people as possible.
And I sort of discovered StreamYard through the LinkedIn Live options. I thought, huh, this is pretty cool. I could run this by myself. Then around the same time I was thinking, all right, if I'm going to continue doing these "Fortt Knox" interviews, I need to make a few changes. Pandemic was starting hit. Before that had happened I had never done a "Fortt Knox" one-on-one interview that was not in person. I insisted on physically sitting down with the other person because my sense was, chemistry is important here. I'm trying to go beyond just the speeds and feeds, the product and strategy stuff actually into getting to know the person. And it was a filtering mechanism, but I thought, okay, this isn't going to work now necessarily going forward. I want to focus on digital video. So, and live streaming that way. So let me do remote interviews.
But if I'm going to do that and it's going to scale, I need to have more of a format. Interviews before that, yes they had gotten some into personal stuff and into strategic stuff and et cetera, et cetera but it was very extemporaneous. It just sort of went wherever it went. So I went back and I thought about what I felt were the most effective interviews that I had done, the ones I had gotten the best feedback on and what were the elements in them. And what I ended up picking out was I start off talking about today's toughest problem. It might be the toughest problem the company's having, it might be the toughest problem the leader's having, but then we sort of iterate from there for a while. And then I go into backstory and I like to, as you said always start at the very, very beginning. Where were you born? Tell me about your parents and siblings because, and people want to rush through that part, but I find there's-
>> You don't let 'em.
>> So much richness that I don't let 'em.
>> You don't let 'em.
>> Sometimes I want to know where did your parents grow up and what did they do and what were they interested in? And, because you start to get a sense of either what inspired someone, what they want to continue or what they're trying to get away from, right? From getting a sense of the soup in which they were cooked. And then from there, you know, after we go through the backstory, I ask about what you refer to the Death Valley Moment and, you know, I'm a person of faith. And so that's partly out of, "Ye though I walk through the value of the shadow of death I will feel no evil for thou art with me," the idea that we go through these really dark and difficult times, but there's power to get through these moments and also just California's Death Valley it's really low, right, so your lowest point.
And the purpose of asking that question is to figure out what it was they learned that helped bring them through that moment. And it's a way of getting to a question that leaders often tend to gloss over about their weaknesses or harder times. And so far it's been, it's been pretty effective. And I also found that by talking about the company's challenge and strategy in the first part of the interview, it opens up permission to talk about the other stuff later.
>> Right.
>> 'Cause it's like, okay. Yeah, starting off trying to, you know, get me on the psychiatrist couch and, you know, talk about my feelings. We've talked about the strategy. You know, we've addressed the technology stuff, we're going to come back to that even, but now we're talking about, we're talking about me and boy, so many conversations and revelations from these interviews. I get off the stream and I just have to take a breath, I have to take a beat. I'm like, wow, I cannot believe we just talked about that.
>> Right.
>> And it's helped me in my coverage I think to be more empathetic. It's made me think a lot.
>> That's great. And, the video, you know, opens up a lot of possibilities that you can't do, you just can't do in face to face. I mean, to me, the big moment was the NFL draft. When they did the NFL draft, to me, that was kind of the, okay, we've now normalized this. No one is going to think anything strange about Zoom or online or this or that. That was kind of the, okay, I guess, I guess this is the way we're going to have some portion of our communications going forward.
>> Well, here's the beauty of it too, is that when I first got into broadcast it was so hard to record a remote interview. So say a company's got a big embargoed announcement and they want to talk to me about it the evening before to break in the morning, you know, I would have to be in the studio at a camera, some people in a control room that are taking the feed in from somewhere else and then it's got to be recorded at ingest somewhere and then it goes into the system somewhere, and then you got to pick a bite. And so sometimes somebody's got to play it back afterwards, or maybe a producer's taking some rough notes and it's like, oh, which bite do you want? And I have a hard time remembering, what's been said the entire time, 'cause I'm busy focused on doing the interview. So lots of people, location issues, logistical nightmare in the past.
Now I can do that same interview over Streamyard, myself involving no one else, right. I've got the download of the interview and I'm done. I can put it in Adobe Premier, which over the past couple of months got an auto captioning feature, send the audio up to the cloud and 20 minutes later or less have a transcript in Premier that's searchable-
>> Right.
>> Where I can say, here's the bite I want, here's the entry point in seconds where it is in the video and here's the exit point. Boom.
>> Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy, huh? Yeah. Well, let's shift gears one more time since we're talking about stories and I won't ask you all your own questions. I won't be quite that bunch, but let's do talk about your journey. And again, the part that jumped out to me right away was Kentucky. I was also born in Lexington, Kentucky. There aren't a lot of the Kentucky people out in California. So let's, you know, kind of take us back when you got out of school, you know, you jumped in with doing newspaper reporting in Lexington, Kentucky. How did you get from there to San Jose?
>> I was fortunate enough actually in senior year in high school to get a scholarship from a Knight Ridder Newspapers, which was the second largest newspaper chain in the country at the time behind Gannett. It no longer exists. It was taken out unfortunately by private equity, but this was a chain that owned the "Miami Herald," "The Philadelphia Inquirer," the "Detroit Free Press," the San Jose "Mercury News," "Fort Worth Star-Telegram," just a number of papers and large papers across the country. And they had a minority journalism scholarship where every year they would pick four students from the whole, you know, nominated by the chain of newspapers. It'd be a local competition. People would submit, kids would submit and then they would narrow it down and send a candidate to corporate. They pick four out of those, two for newspaper and two for the business side would win. So I was fortunate enough to get that, not for newspaper, but for the business side, actually.
>> Of course.
>> And so, you know, as a 17 year old high school graduate, I was interning at Knight Ridder "Washington Bureau," which was crazy, way in over my head, but just a great experience. And part of the scholarship was they expect you to do summer internships at Knight Ridder Property every summer and then they would give you a job afterward. Corporate would pay your salary at the local paper for the first year. The idea being it was a risk free, was a free hire-
>> Right.
>> For the paper. And then hopefully you were good enough that after that year was over they would still pick you up.
>> So your big journalism in high school then obviously to get in this. So you got into this early.
>> Yeah, I was a little bit of a problem though. So I was, I got hooked on newspapers halfway through high school but I was also in student government. So senior year for a period of time, I was the opinion pages editor of Montgomery Blair's award winning student newspaper and I was also the president of student government. You can see the problem there.
>> Well, that's a problem, not necessarily. Depends.
>> You kind of running the executive branch.
>> Depends if you're holding the pen or if you're reading the ink.
>> You're the head of the executive branch of the student body and also writing the opinions, the editorials. That doesn't work for too long. So I had to, maybe there were some competence issues too but I was encouraged to give up the opinion pages post after a while. So, I was interested in both the leadership and business side of things and in the journalism side of things and that is how I got involved in this. A guidance counselor at the high school at Blair said, hey, there's a scholarship. You should apply for it. And she gave me the application and I proceeded to stuff it into my book bag and forget about it. And the day it was due, she called me to her office and she said, did you turn it in? And I said, oh, I forgot. She was like, she called up the "Washington Bureau" editor right there and said, I got your scholarship winner here. You'll have the application to you tomorrow.
She said, don't make me a liar. Turn that thing in tomorrow. And I did. And I'm very thankful to this day to that guidance counselor, because yes, that's how I got professionally into newspapers and ended up in San Jose and covering Silicon Valley.
>> Right. And these are these little moments, like I was saying these critical moments that these people, you know, have such a huge impact on us. So then you go to San Jose and unfortunately you arrived in December of '99 and there was this little thing that happened in March, 2000. Not quite the same as March, 2020, but you know, kind of ironic. It also happened in March in dot com crash. So now you're in San Jose and you're covering all these, you're covering all these tech companies but the things are not going so well in 2000. So how did that work out?
>> Very fortunately I got in there in December '99 as a matter of fact.
>> That's right. Probably would've been a door in April, right?
>> You know, actually April, 2000, wasn't that bad. We didn't know at the time that the NASDAQ had peaked. It's still, you know, times were still pretty heady. We still had AOL Time Warner going on. Stuff was nuts. The real canary in the coal mine for me was September of 2000 when Apple had the big miss on earnings and the stock was cut in half. And even then at the time, people thought it was just an Apple issue.
>> Yeah.
>> But to me that was the first sort of, whoa, these things can go down. Like even the, even the popular ones can go down.
>> Well-
>> A lot.
>> Let me tell you, I was, I'm about 15 years older than you and we were doing lots of good day trade. That was when they very first, the first time you could ever get a stock ticker on your computer at work, right? Because that's why we have cyber Monday, nobody had broadband at home. So you could only do your day trading at the office and everybody had, I can't remember what it was called, it was this little startup that would have, they had like a stock ticker and a weather ticker and a news flash ticker. And it crushed, have to look it up, it destroyed all Silicon Valley, 'cause everybody put it in and it took so much bandwidth back in the day.
>> Is that PointCast?
>> It may have been PointCast. Yeah, it was point cast, just destroyed it.
>> Yeah.
>> So, I was like, wait, can it go down? Can it go down more than 50? Wait, it can't go down more than 60. Wait, it can't go down more than 70. Oh, that was, that was rough.
>> Yeah.
>> Those were rough rough times for sure.
>> Yeah, when Cisco was buying out the whole valley and you know, Sun was the dot in dot com and then all the office furniture went on sale that was quite a lesson.
>> Right.
>> A lot of people around now who don't remember that.
>> Right. So then how'd you make the move into broadcast then from print?
>> Well, so I was covering personal technology, consumer technology for my first four or so years at the Merc. And there was a lot great about it. I mean, hey, I was covering Apple. I was there at the launch of the first iPod. I was writing reviews at the same time, you know, the Titanium, the TiBook, the Titanium Powerbook. I remember reviewing GarageBand. I wrote a bunch of songs in college and picked up guitar and play piano growing up so I was able to actually in my review of GarageBand, compose a song and it wasn't easy to host audio files online at the time. So I drove over to Apple's campus and they put it on their servers so that we could stream it from our online review. So it was tons of fun but I started to feel like I'm not really going anywhere. Like the Merc is going to have me doing this job till I'm 50.
>> Right.
>> And I don't want to do just this job until I'm 50. So I thought that what I really wanted to do was management and be an editor. And they said we don't have any jobs open. So you can go to the "Peninsula Bureau," Palo Alto and for a few weeks, couple months and be an editor there. So I did that, enjoyed it. And then they said, okay, time's up? There's no slot open. You can go back to doing what you were doing before. And I was determined not to do that. So they said, okay, well you can be an education reporter until, and see if something opens up. Do that year. I didn't really want to go, I went from covering Apple keynotes, right, and talking to Steve Jobs to covering the East Side Union High School District in San Jose.
>> Yes,
>> School Board meetings. School Board meetings.
>> And cops and courts, some nights on the rotation. But I was determined not to get stuck where I was. Did that for a year. Still didn't open anything up so I was a senior web editor for a while. And then eventually an editing job opened up in the business department, but not editing tech. It was real estate and personal finance. But I went back for that. Did that for, I don't know, maybe close to a year. And then "Business 2.0," Time Inc. magazine called about a writing job. And I-
>> Oh, as in "Business 2.0" magazine?
>> It was big, it was "Business 2.0."
>> That was a great magazine.
>> Great magazine. I learned, such great people, I learned a ton. And I didn't want to write, right. I'd done all this fighting to get an editing job, 'cause I was determined not to go back to being just a writer. But hey, I had learned by that point, after having survived rounds of buyouts and layoffs, if somebody wants to talk about paying you money, you talk to them. So I went in and great conversation. And Josh (Quittner), the editor said, what do you think? And I said, ah, I don't really want to write. I really want to be an editor. And he's like, go well, we just had a senior editor quit last week. Would you be interested? As a matter of fact, I would. And yeah, the rest of, that's how my magazine journey started.
>> That's great.
>> And then I promptly learned that at a magazine, if you're an editor, you're rewriting everything all time. So... (chuckles)
>> Are you?
>> Yes.
>> Which is more painful than writing at the first, in the first place, right?
>> It is. But what was so painful about it is that my rewrites would then get rewritten. So I learned a ton from, you know, Philip Elmer‑DeWitt was my top edit there. And he had been a long time writer and editor at "TIME Magazine," just a great guy. And so I learned a ton working under him as well as the other folks there at the magazine. And so about a year after I was hired there, Time Inc. decided to shut down "Business 2.0." But what they also decided was that they were going to take a third of the staff and move us to "Fortune" magazine. And I was given a title senior writer at "Fortune" magazine. Now there's no way I ever would've gotten hired as a Senior Writer at "Fortune" magazine at that poinT anyway, other than that circuitous route that I took from trying not to write for the San Jose "Mercury News" to becoming a senior writer at "Fortune," but I was very fortunate.
>> That's great. And then, so how'd you get to CNBC?
>> Right, that was your question wasn't it?
>> Yeah, yeah that's okay. We're getting there. We're getting one step closer.
>> Getting one step closer. So I told you I started off covering Apple in 2000 when I was first given a beat at Merc and I always-
>> Let me stop you there. Did you, and you did get to interview Jobs during that time?
>> Yeah, a couple times, couple times. The very first real interview interview that I got with him was actually not exactly about Apple. It was when John Warnock, the Adobe co-founder and longtime CEO was retiring as CEO. And he and Adobe had meant so much to Apple and Steve Jobs that Steve says, I want to talk about John Warnock in the local paper. That elevated, clearly elevated the story. And so, you know, I talked to him then. I, you know, was able to talk to him at a couple of other events, you know, the first Apple store's opening, things like that as well. But I had been a student of the company up close, been over to the campus for the briefings many times. So I'd gotten a real sense of the culture and how the place ticked and operated.
And they like to talk about Apple on TV. So starting when I was at the Merc and then really intensifying after I moved to magazines, I was asked CNBC would call up and ask if I would come on and talk about Apple events often because their Apple reporter had worked a long day by that point. By the time the keynote was over, it was like 7 p.m. you know, East Coast time, 4 p.m. Pacific time. So, you know, they needed somebody to swap in. And so I would go on and give commentary and I was comfortable on camera from, I guess, the student government days and the drama that I did in high school also and learned a bit there. And then eventually CNBC said, we're looking to add another reporter in Silicon Valley, would you be interested? And I said, yeah. And then days before they announced that I was coming to CNBC, they announced that the reporter who was already there who I was hoping to learn the ropes from was leaving right as I was coming in. So, I was brand new on TV and the only Silicon Valley reporter in the Bureau and we figured it out.
>> And then how did that part lay into doing all the fun CEO interviews? That is, I mean, you are sitting in a really awesome position to be able to really, you know, learn from some of the greatest minds out there.
>> Well, I always liked to have long form conversations. It just, I couldn't figure it out going from print to broadcast. When it's print, it's a conversation, it sort of understood. We'll talk for an hour and a few quotes will make it in there and it affects the texture of the piece. And the piece itself ends up being usually longer or longer form. It's just a, a different feel and understanding anyway. So it took a while, it took "Fortt Knox" for me to figure out how to be able to have those same conversations in a broadcast context. But it was never that CNBC or the organization itself prioritized long form. I had to figure out how to prioritize it myself. And I think that's some of the shift that's happened in media is that we have to make choices and bring the organization along where we can. And when the organization isn't ready or doesn't have the same priorities, figure out how to do it anyway.
>> Right, right. Well, it's interesting 'cause you've created all these different kind of show formats in CNBC, you know. There was a "Squawk Box" and your "Working Lunch" And the one that I like to watch now that you do all the time is Re-argue Against Yourself and I'm not convinced that senators should not be buying stock. But you know, it's cool you're coming up with all these kind of different, you know, kind of innovative packages of, you know, it's still media, right? You're still sharing information, but, you know, mixing it up right and changing the flavor, changing the pacing, changing the duration, kind of... It's pretty cool how you keep recreating all these little different ways to fill a 24 hour news network.
>> It's been a blessing and I've been fortunate to work with people who are willing to give me a lot of rope. You know, I'll call out Max Meyers, the executive producer at "Squawk Box." And there was kind of this vague idea that I should be on "Squawk Box" more often, but it hadn't really crystallized into what that was going to look like. Like Jon should be on "Squawk Box" every week. Oh, okay. But I was like, "Squawk Box" is early, man. And if I'm going to wake up and be on "Squawk Box" every week, it's got to be special so let's come up with something special. And if you watch "Squawk Box" you know that Andrew Ross Sorkin and Joe Kernen argue a lot. So I thought, okay, well let's make it debate but let's make it civil. What if I debate myself on an issue in business and technology. I will, you know, do a full on 45 second to one minute argument about one side so that yeah, you get the sense, that's the only, I think that's the only way to think about it. And then I'll say on the other hand and argue the exact opposite as if I had, I had never made the first-
>> Great
>> Argument at all. And if you know me and especially my mom's side of the family, you know, we love a good argument. A good debate.
>> I love it. No, I think it's-
>> It's fun.
>> It's very creative. And I love the like super hard stop, you know, like the very specific, like stop, shift 180 degrees, go. You know, it's very intentional. Yeah.
>> Yeah. It's, you know, that's what makes it fun and the whole team has embraced it. It's not so fun on Wednesday night when I'm writing it, but on Thursday morning when I've done it, it's fantastic.
>> Yeah, it's Good.
>> That's that the old saying it's writing is torture but I love to have written.
>> Right, right. Well, again, I appreciate all the time that you're sharing today. And I want to come up with, you know, kind of something that a lot of people might not know about you. I'm sure everybody knows your CNBC stuff and that's your class, that's your Black Experience course that you put together. I took it over the last couple days. We've talked about it online a number of times. I wonder if you can share with the audience, you know, kind of what was the catalyst, you know, what are the objectives? What is, you know, what is The Black Experience, a class project? I'm not sure what the right noun to use. What's it all about? Where did it come from and where's it going to go?
>> Yeah, thanks. Well, you can find it at ForttMedia.com and the way it started was really when George Floyd was murdered. And I was trying to figure out what to say to our kids, my wife and I have two boys, about it. And, you know, around the community people were going to marches and protests and as a journalist, I don't go to protests. I don't go to marches so I wasn't doing that. I said, you guys can feel free, but we're not putting signs in the yard and I'm not going marching anywhere. And we had had the conversation about, you know, the talk that black parents so often have with kids around authority and police and things like that. But this was lot deeper than that. And so I thought, well, what really needs to be is a course. And first, some friends convinced me, hey, you don't need to write a course.
This has been done before. I'm sure there's some stuff online. So I went and looked but I didn't see anything that was really what I was looking for. Because part of what I wanted was something that wasn't rooted in just slavery and civil rights, primarily because that's a lot of how I find that race is taught. And, you know, if you are a person of color, particularly a black person that puts you immediately kind of, that's kind of traumatic to start off with the middle passage and racism and, you know, slavery and the beatings and then go from that into civil rights, which is often taught as there was a movement, Martin Luther king was great, and then all the problems got solved, free at last, "I Have A Dream," and yet, is it all really fixed? 'Cause if that fixed it what happened in between the mid 60s and now, and that very often is not covered.
So I wanted to address those too what I saw as shortcomings in the way it's traditionally taught about. So I really focus on identity in the first third. Really starting off with double consciousness and W.E.B DuBois' "The Souls of Black Folk." And I found over time that this is a American concept but it's not just about black America, right? Every group that comes into America has the opportunity perhaps to experience a double consciousness where you're trying to be American, but you're also something else. And that might be Latino, that might be, you know, coming from an Asian country, it might be coming from a European country, it might be a religious issue, but the idea of feeling that there's a split, perhaps a dichotomy and how do you reconcile those two things?
And then I'm a bit of a student of American history. I love America. And I'm a fan of the way the country was founded and structured on ideals that it had not yet lived up to.
>> Right.
>> And there's a certain tension in there that also involves slavery and race and identity and so we do an exploration of that. And then the last section of the course is called false restarts based on the idea that there's a pattern in our history where we take three steps forward and then we take two steps back and that might be, you know, emancipation and then botched reconstruction, civil rights, but then, you know, the approach to multiculturalism that was busing, you know, that led to protests and didn't, it didn't completely work. And my expectation at the time of the outpouring after George Floyd was killed, a lot of people were saying, well, everything's different now, and it's going to be so much better and we're taking three steps forward. And I was like, hold on a minute, we're going to take two steps back because that's the pattern.
Now it's still progress so don't be completely flattened by this, but this has happened again and again, and there are people who have done work and there are principles and there are ideas that can undergird what forward progress should look like and that's an inherent part I think of what we're called to do and pursue as Americans. So those were the principles behind the project. And now, you know, I built in an online component to it, which as always is a work in progress. You've experienced part of that. I hope that you got something out of it and I'm going to continue to try to build around and improve.
>> Yeah, I did. So I just, you know, when George Floyd was murdered and all that was going down, you know, it's interesting you say that I reached out to some of my black friends and said, you know, I'm just checking in, checking in on you. How you doing? And all of 'em, like four of 'em I talked to said, you know, it's nice that you're interested. This happens every day. We're not quite sure why this particular time you know, it's kind of raised this national consciousness but it's happened the day before and it's probably going to happen tomorrow. So I found that really, really sobering. I love the course. I learned a bunch of stuff. I hadn't really heard the expression double consciousness. You know, I've heard imposter syndrome a ton of times which is kind of a similar, a similar kind of thing. But the piece that really hit me hard was the lifetime of W.E. DuBois is basically connected me to the Civil War, 1868 to 1963. I was born in 1962. So-
>> Amazing, right?
>> That was a little, that was a little, that was a little crazy. But I thought it was very well done. You know, I love the - and again, it kind of goes back to our media conversation, the use of, you know, lots of different media assets, the KQED you know, the PBS Special. And the other thing that was striking, actually the W.E DuBois video that you use in your class is actually a 40 minute long speech in his own words. I listened to the whole thing. He's talking about stuff that's relevant today, specifically things like when are the magazine subscribers going to pay you to read the ads? I'm like, oh my goodness, this guy has flash forwarded a hundred years and the kind of depth and richness of simple callouts of just complete illogical situations, I found it really, really insightful.
And then just, you know, kind of a refresh of the, of kind of the timeline in the sequence of events. It's in interesting to know, you know, how close these things are. I did not know. I did not know that university presidents would rather shut the university down rather than let a black person in the door. Are you kidding me? I did not know that part of the story. So, I actually found it, you know, super, super useful and very educational. It was a little bit different than I thought. I thought it was going to be more of the, you know, don't mess around with cops 'cause they might just shoot you for no good reason but it wasn't. It's much more, much more depth and much more kind of here's who we are. and here's what you need to know of how we got here and how we move forward. So I thought it was good.
>> Thank you. And I don't take a position on critical race theory. The way I look at it is I took some women's studies courses in college and there were different, you know, there's liberal feminism and radical feminism, et cetera, et cetera. And there were different ways of looking at the world and history and dynamics. And I think CRT is a way of looking at the world. Now you might not agree with it but it's just a group of people, a certain school of thought has decided to line things up in that way. The purpose and the structure that I used for this was more America and the principles of America, the journey that we've been on socially and culturally, the identity of the person who's taking the lesson black or not, and how do we understand other people's identity, our own identity and how that knits into being a society, being a country and being a community and working together. So, and also, I try to have a little fun. Lesson two is called a Othello because I-
>> I had no.
>> Othello is about double consciousness, right?
>> Right.
>> He was a very successful black man in Venice who was doing a very good job at what he was employed to do. And yet he didn't understand the undercurrents of racism around him and he ended up getting consumed by it. It's a very relevant kind of tale that was written before the first African slaves, you know, are documented to have arrived in North America.
>> Right. Just to bring it back full circle then as a journalist, having gone through that experience, you know, kind of what is real, what is the truth? You know, the victors write the history books as people like to say, and, you know Yuval Noah Harari on "Sapiens," right, talks about kind of, you know, we all had kind of this common, a common myth that we all bought into and suddenly when you start peeling back and saying, you know, it isn't, there isn't just one story here.
It depends where you were. You know, there's a lot of different stories and it's not just universally good or bad. It's nuanced and complex and it takes a point of view, but it really kind-
>> On the other hand.
>> Begs this question of there's truths but then there's truth and the relevance of the truth and the impact of the truth and the compact, the context of the truth, which is way more important than the actual dataset.
>> Yeah. I'll tie on the other hand back into that, right, is the idea that we might be compelled, feel compelled to arrange the facts in a certain order to serve our predisposition of what we either thought was true already or want to be true. But are there other ways of looking at this? From another point of view, might you arrange those facts in a different way? Are there facts that we haven't considered? And I like to think that my journalistic training, is helping me to challenge myself both in business and tech and outside of it to consider other points of view and to consider broader sets of facts than we might traditionally present.
>> Yeah. Well, Jon, thank you. Thanks again for your time today. I really appreciate it. You know, I've reached out, I love your work. I love your creativity and you know, the way that you're able to kind of explore different things even within the context of working in a big traditional media company. So, you know, kudos to you and, and keep up the good work.
>> Jeff, thanks for having me. It was great to get to talk to you.
>> All righty. He's Jon, I'm Jeff. You're watching Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.
