Pressing Matters
Pressing Matters
Cory Johnson, Business Podcast Network CEO
Cory Johnson, CEO of the Business Podcast Network, joined Dave on the podcast to talk about SLAM 🏀 Magazine, surprising Carmelo Anthony, the stories we tell and where we choose to tell them, a past (and potential future) in music ... so much ground was covered. We are excited to bring it to you!
Who is Big Valley? We're a communications firm focused on B2B technology, with a team of experts specializing in brand positioning, narrative and story development, media and influencer relations, and channel planning. You can learn more about our team at www.BigValley.co
Would you be interested in more from Cory?
- Listen to Cory on The Drill Down Podcast.
- You can find him on Twitter at @CoryTV.
Have an idea for Pressing Matters? Email pressingmatters@bigvalley.co
Like some of our previous guests, Cory Johnson started his career as a sports writer. He founded Slam Magazine in 1993, an outlet focused on the sport of basketball, not merely the players, although he's long since moved on. Slam is still in circulation today, and in a sense, it represents two hallmarks of Corey's career. He likes to try and start new things, and he really likes digging deep, both as a storyteller and in life. Despite more than two decades covering tech finance, he'd rather talk about a business than a stock chart and after being an attendee, and then the parent of attendees at Y M C A Camp Corey in the Finger Lakes, no, it's not named after him, he became a member of its board. Simply put, Corey doesn't settle for the five Ws and the H. He finds the fresh story, a talent that has served him in several roles. The original Silicon Valley correspondent for C n BBC some 20 years ago, the founder and host of Bloomberg West a decade ago, and now as the c e o founder and host of his own podcast company and his weekly show, the Drilldown, which just hit 200 episodes. Corey took a break from the drill down to tell us stories about checking out Secret Barnes in Northern Minnesota, sharing an old bank vault as an office with his colleagues at the street in the nineties, and his desire to be the next great jazz guitarist for this edition of Pressing Matters by Big Valley Marketing. Pressing Matters is the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B tech. I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley's Media and Influencers Practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B tech's, top 200 media and influencers, including Corey Johnson. Here's my chat with Corey. Enjoy. Corey, thanks so much for joining us on, uh, pressing Matters. I've, I've known you a long time, but I'm looking forward to getting to know you even better. Are you coming to us from the ferry building?
Speaker 2:I am in a ferry building. My favorite building in the world,
Speaker 1:<laugh>. It's, it's a heck of a building. I haven't been there in ages, you know, the, the post pandemic, I, I don't bother ever leaving my house, but that's another story. Congratulations on your, I think you recently or are about to record your 200th episode of the Drilldown Pod podcast. So Bravo. Yeah,
Speaker 2:It's recorded. It's out. We're really happy with it. My, my partners in crime, Isaac Webster, my producer, and Ben Wilson, my editor, we've, yeah, we've made 200 shows and, uh, it's, it's been, I've been very pleased with the result. I think it's, it's been successful. It's, we're doing well in the marketplace, but I think that the editorial content's been been on point. The show's been really interesting to listen to when the listeners we're
Speaker 1:Gonna dig into it a lot later on. But I, I want to ask you just off the top, what have you learned? It's a, it's a different medium for you. It's a different medium for most everybody, including me. What have you learned doing these shows?
Speaker 2:Well, it's a little bit different. You know, I, I did a Bloomberg radio show for about four years, and Bloomberg would chop that up and put pieces out and call it a podcast. Um, but I, so I've, I certainly have experience with audio and I think audio is a just terrific medium. I think it's a different medium than, I don't think it is a different medium than television. It is a different medium than print and podcasts are different than radio and there's things that work in podcasts that don't work in radio and vice versa. So it's been really fun to get really in depth to get guests on, to get CEOs on the show who seem to really appreciate 20 minutes to talk about their companies and understand their businesses. They, it's interesting to watch the guests really kind of let go a little bit and, and really have a substantive conversation about how their businesses work. And I have great interest in those businesses and I do my homework beforehand so that we can have a smart conversation. And so that's been really fun. That's been, um, I've, I've learned that there's a lot these companies are worth digging into and they're worth having lengthy conversations about. And that the format of Bye bye buy, sell, sell, sell or whatever else is on television business. TV for example, doesn't really tell a story the Drilldown podcast does.
Speaker 1:When we first talked about it a couple years ago, you were nice enough to have a couple of our client CEOs on. You mentioned to me that you really didn't want to just do the whole stock thing that you and others had done at C N BBC or Bloomberg or what have you. You did ex you wanted to do exactly what you just said. You wanted to dig into the company and the personality.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's the business story behind a stock on the move, you know, the, the default position of CN B c I criticize CN BBC before, during, and after my working at CN BBC in the early parts of the, of the two thousands. And I, and believe me, I have a lot of friends there and sometimes they do good work, sometimes they do garbage. And the worst of the garbage that C N B C and Bloomberg and, and, and you know, any imitators of c n, BBC Cheddar, Yahoo Finance, whatever, when they imitate, they do the worst, which is they're not thinking about what they're doing. They put a chart somewhere behind the anchor in front of the anchor and they say, see, the squiggly line goes up, that's good. And the squiggly line goes down, that's bad. And the business might be banks, it might be consumer, it might be technology. This might be a bond yield, it might be gold. What about Bitcoin? It's all the same crap. Cuz the YA anchor might actually not know what they're talking about. They were working in one of the other 20 interviews or five interviews they've gotta do for the day. And the result is they point at something as if the squiggly line conveys an interesting story. In fact, the practice of doing business, the practice of solving problems, the practice of trying to get money for people more than the thing costs that you're selling, that is business. Well, that's really interesting and that's a really interesting story. And every industry is different and every business is different. And what makes us interesting is not what makes us the same, it's the things that are different and what makes businesses interesting is how they are different and what is unique to them. And it's, it's really fun to tell that business story behind the stock stock's just a number, a business is, is a story.
Speaker 1:I'm, I'm going to presume that some of the things that are not so desirable about Wall Street predated television and maybe even radio, but, uh, how much of what you were just talking about do you think feeds into the looking at a business, particularly if you're running a public business on a day-to-day or quarter to quarter level as opposed to for the long term. And how much of that feeds into, say these interestingly, perfectly rounded numbers of layoffs that we see at a time like this, you know, 10,000, 8,000. It's not 9,875, it's 10,000. So,
Speaker 2:But of course it is 9,875. So my, I had an editor, Gil Rogan was my editor at Sports Illustrated. I mean, he was a legend in, in, in the time incorporated world, uh, and and beyond. Great writer for the New Yorker and, and elsewhere. But, uh, Gil would reject any story I turned in if a number ended with zeros. He's like, this is. If someone told you that number, they're not telling you the truth. Go get the actual number and find out what else they're not telling you.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. I, uh,<laugh>, I you were a sports writer. I was also a sports writer. This has become a theme on this podcast. We'll talk about that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Everyone wants to be you. Well, of course we do. Look at you.
Speaker 1:Oh, well of course the great life. You've not only that, so, so many of us techies, uh, should probably not call myself one of those, but so many of us in tech, uh, on journal on the journalism side seem to have a, a sports background. Uh, really, I, yeah,
Speaker 2:This is, this is an interesting full of 98 pound weaklings, the technology people, let alone the journalists.
Speaker 1:You're the third or fourth guest. I've only had six or seven that's got a sports background. Not to mention my colleague Charlie Cooper, you know, used to work at CNET and is our editor in chief here at Big Valley also a sports background. So I think the one thing in common is we all run away from it. Uh, but back to the business thing, how much of that, how much of typical investor journalism leads to the tail wagging the dog, if you will? You know, just this, this really short-term thinking.
Speaker 2:Well, I, I don't know. I think that that's really driven by the model, not by the individuals. I don't think that any journalist comes in really thinking about, you know, I think this thing in business news where, and maybe all news, but where young reporters come in and they are told about the way things are done. And so they do them that way. They don't really think about the form of what they're doing. They think about the message maybe more than the medium. I, I always tried to think of both. But I think that, uh, the, the, the criticism of short-term thinking I think is more about short-term business planning. I think it's perfectly reasonable for, to look at what a company does when they tell you what they've done. I think it's really important to look at earnings and look at the numbers and earnings, but it's really important to compare them to the trend that they, they elicit. When you see a company where the quarterly report shows you a big change in the business, it's worth looking at that change. And it's worth asking the company, is this an outlier or is this a change? And, um, we've seen that with different companies over time where there is one quarter where all of a sudden the rug's been pulled out for under them or they can't anymore. And so I, I don't mind looking at a company on a, on a quarterly basis and say, this day matters, but you've gotta have the intelligence to say, this number's different, but this day doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:Right, right. Again, are you, are you not only looking at the immediate, but almost like when you're driving a car and, and when you first learn how to drive, or at least in my case, all you do is look at the, the car in front of you. Are, are you, are you also looking a hundred yards ahead and I wonder how much that happens?
Speaker 2:Well, and, and so perfect example is, is a company we had on the show a few weeks ago, Lululemon, you know, the maker of yoga pants and so on. They have seasonal items and they have kind of the standard items, uh, certain outfits. There are certain yoga pants in particular and tops and things are, are a core of what they sell, 40 to 50% of what they sell. And so the company was, gross margins were going down three or four quarters in a row. Uh, inventory was going up as measured by day sales outstanding three quarters in a row. So when they reported a quarter where all of a sudden inventory was down and gross margins were up, which is profits were up and stuff you couldn't sell was down. That was worth noting, Hey, this is one quarter that matters. The trend has changed. The business is different today than we thought it was for the last 13 weeks. Let's zero in a focus on that. I don't have any problem with that kind of short-term focus cuz it reflects the moment of change. But I, once again, you've gotta know the numbers and you've gotta look at the numbers to understand that.
Speaker 1:Uh, I do wanna come back to this topic, but we're would like to back up and please start from the beginning. So you graduated from nyu. Are, are you a native New Yorker?
Speaker 2:I grew up in New York. I was born in Michigan, but I grew up in New York, grew up in New York state and uh, went to nyu, lived in Greenwich Village. Uh, my kids are going through the, the college, uh, defining deviation process. I have a son who is at Connecticut College. My oldest daughter just got into Lehigh University. But that process of picking college is very top of mind for me right now.
Speaker 1:Yep. Going through the same thing. Got one at U C S B one who's done and a and a and a third who will be, well we'll see. She's, she's merely a high school sophomore. So why N Y U, was it because you were in New York State? I know it's got a fabulous journalism program. It's in the city. Was there anything in particular why you went there?
Speaker 2:I applied except for the University of Miami, which has a great jazz music program. I applied only to jazz music programs in New York City. I wasn't interested in anything else. I wasn't interested in going anywhere else, floated the idea of Miami. But I wanted to go study jazz in New York City. NYU gave me housing in Greenwich Village, so I didn't go to City College. I didn't go to, you know, the other schools. I looked at William Patterson College in New Jersey way too far away. And Wayne in New Jersey, I wanted to be in the village and wanted to be in the jazz clubs. And I was
Speaker 1:So let's talk about that because Don Clark was a previous, uh, guest and he plays virtually every stringed instrument. He
Speaker 2:Was a wonderful musician. He
Speaker 1:Is. He's a fan. He played the Bazookie for us. Were
Speaker 2:You at his retirement party? I played in his retirement party.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Tell us about that. You told me about that. What were you, you the guitarist?
Speaker 2:No, he, I, he, I think he asked me to sit in, I, and I must have, I don't walk around town with my guitar, but he asked me if I would sit in for tune and I ended up playing a half dozen or so, uh, to the amazement of all of our mostly PR friends in the crowd because they just were like, what the heck is going on? Corey's holding a guitar. I, my parents are musicians and I went to study jazz. I was intent in becoming the white George Benson. Uh, I have yet to become the white George Benson of no one else has still talent, but, uh, but they're still telling exactly. I I'm still shedding, I'm still working those chromatic scales that George is the master of. I, uh, yeah, I, you know, I played guitar. I grew up as a musician. I grew up wanting to be a musician like my parents. My mother was an opera singer, my father was an amateur musician. And I, I thought that was in my future. And I got to a point in college where I saw that other people liked to practice even more than I did, that after eight hours of practice I was done. And other people wanted to go after 12 hours. And I wanted to, you know, meet girls and bop around Manhattan. And, and, and so I realized that probably wasn't my, my, my end gonna be my end result. And dropping guitar was a thing that I completely did. I worked so much in practice so much. And, and when you're a musician trying to master the instrument every second, you're not practicing someone else is. And so that's a concern, right? It's a, it's a, it's a stress level that when I quit playing really changed things for me.
Speaker 1:I'm reminded of the, the film, the name of which escapes me was out about 10 years ago. Miles Teller was a, a thriller in a jazz band. That was some real movie that could
Speaker 2:Have been a, anything. Well, the teacher was a dick, but I definitely had a nose to nose shouting conversation with one of my teachers at, uh, nyu, Ralph lo Lama, great tenor player. I'm told that he is reminded of that story by a mutual friend of ours on a regular basis. And he gets laugh out of as I do. But absolutely, that's real.
Speaker 1:Wow. So, uh, was it the lack of, was it the fact that you didn't practice as much as everybody else that led you to journalists? Or was it getting yelled at by your teachers? Which, which one
Speaker 2:It wasn't, it wasn't everybody else. It was just like, there, there was one guy, this tenor player, Mike Carn, I play guitar. We were good friends. And Mike, you know, we would practice, we'd be in class all day. We'd practice in the practice rooms until they'd close'em at 10 o'clock at night. Then we'd go back and we'd go in the basement and, and practice in the laundry room of our dorm at Fifth Avenue and 10th Street at Ruben Hall. And, and then at midnight Mike would go, wanna stay for another two hours and play scales. And I was just like, dude, can we get a beer or something like, this just is a life that I want. There weren't none of the guitar players who were practicing more than me, but somewhere there was. And I knew that I wanted more outta my life than just practicing guitar.
Speaker 1:Now you went to school for music, jazz and so forth. You also majored in journalism. Was that, was that a switch or did you have the journalism bug earlier in your life as well?
Speaker 2:So I tacked on other majors while I was at NYU U I was, I was, you know, I, by the time I decided to get out of playing guitar, I was already two years in and I had most of the prerequisites done to play guitar, graduate, the ma music major, sorry, I didn't do all other classes that I might have filled out and made a more of a, a robust student outta me. I just did all the music classes. And so with that almost done, I thought, well, I, instead of dropping music as a major, I can add on another major. So tweaked it a little bit and added music business, which is a program at nyu or at least wasn't back in the day, where you would take accounting and statistics and economics and maybe get a job in the record industry. I figured it'd just make me a great contract negotiator for my big album. Again, that has yet to happen. But the night is young, but I add on a second major of urban studies at nyu. They called it Metropolitan Studies. And I studied cities and how cities worked, and I was driving a taxi cab at the time. I knew New York City like the back of my hand. And so I studied cities and I did well at that. But as I approached graduation and did not know what the hell to do with myself, I kind of accidentally became the editor of the alternative paper at nyu. I'd written an article for it and the NYU Courier, and thank you for knowing that. And I was the editor of the NYU Courier and thought, well, as long as I was doing it, I would add a, a third major in journalism and postpone the real world in graduation by adding a fifth year of college. And I didn't really have great intentions of being a journalist, but I liked the idea, what I liked about it. And I had this great professor, John Katz, who talked me into it, he said, you know, the fact that you change your interests all the time, the fact that you become deeply involved in something like music, like urban planning, like architecture, like, like transportation, like, you know, all these things that I've been in interested in. The idea that you can go so deeply into it and then walk away is something that is very unique to journalism. I think other things can do that. I think investment banking and accounting, they can do those kinds of things. But journalism really lets you get really dig really deep into a thing, but then leave it for something else and, and keep your skills and maybe even your job intact.
Speaker 1:And you come outta school and your first job, well, at least the first job that that you list is editor-in-chief of Slam Magazine, which is a basketball magazine. I actually kind of remember that from back in the day. There was no, back
Speaker 2:In the day, it's still there news. It's out there right now. Slam is a thing.
Speaker 1:I I re I remember some of the guys at the Mercury News at the time were, uh, freelancing for it. Uh, why hoops? I know you're, you're rather tall. Did you play or did you just have an interest in it and and how did you end up there? So I
Speaker 2:Love basketball and I love basketball for every reason. You can love basketball. So do I love to play basketball? Absolutely. But maybe, you know, I think basketball's reflective of our culture and our country in particular. It's, it's a, uh, the stories about ba I thought that the way that Sports Illustrated War, I used to work, told the story of sports was upside down. I thought that they looked at a pyramid that the very top of the pyramid were, were the all-time Hall of Famers. Not just the Hall of Famers, but the great ones. And we were only interested in the N NBA A to see who the all stars were below the Hall of Famers and below the Hall of fam or the All Stars were the, the N B A players. Below the N NBA A players were the college players, which we were less interested in. We were never interested in high school, we were never interested in playground. We didn't really love the game. We loved this sort of notion of the accomplishment of the game. So that the greatest of all time might be a Bill Russell or a George Micen or something. And, and I think that, uh, to me, what what experience of individuals, I said before, the things that make us different, not the things that make us the same. Those are where stories happen. Those are where we all live as humans. That's how we, every every human life is important and, and and deserves dignity. And it deserves the dignity of a journalist. Not every human life is worth a a story, but if you're gonna do a story, you have to pay attention to the dignity of the moment and the person involved. So that a story about some guy who was a drug addict who once, once a great ball player and is now in a playground schooling, everyone is at least as interesting as a story about an n b A point guard. And I wanted Slam Magazine to celebrate the sport and the people that played this sport like Surfer Magazine does, which at the time was my favorite magazine. Not like Sports Illustrated, which would only build up the biggest stars and the biggest all time Hall of Famers. I want to tell a story in a different way. Basketball's a great way to do that. And Slam Magazine is doing that to this day. Very proud of the fact that that that Dennis Page or the the publisher of Slam Magazine is is back there still doing that with that magazine. Now it's a little different than what I did, but I'm thrilled with it.
Speaker 1:Are you at all involved in any way with Slam?
Speaker 2:He and I usually go out for drinks or have lunch once a year in East Hampton. That's about it.<laugh>
Speaker 1:And talk basketball up. Sure. Well,
Speaker 2:The other thing that's funny is when I meet basketball, like N B A players or something and, and you know, the first time I met Steph Curry and, and I had someone else do it completely orchestrated, but I had someone say, you know, do you know that Corey started Slam Magazine? They're like, what? And what they're really saying is a white guy started Slam Magazine. They will often just say that to me. Carmello said that to me when I met him for the first time. But it's getting to the point where, yeah, I mean there's, there's no one left. Jason, I think Jason kid's the only person left in the league that I knew. He was in the first issue of Slam Magazine when he was a freshman at Cal. So that's how long ago it is now. He's a coach of the Mavericks. But, uh, 30 years ago. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then you take another left turn, you're, you've got a lot of left turns and you get into finance, journalism, the street, the industry standard God rested soul, and then eventually the prototype Silicon Valley correspondent at cnn. What attracted you to the markets again? Were you, as a kid and as a student, I know you were looking at business. Were you interested in, in finance or was that again just something you hopped into? You
Speaker 2:Know, I had a, I had a complicated relationship with my father and we talked about the only things we could kind of talk about with ease were baseball and stocks. And so since I was a kid, we talked about stocks. He wasn't home a lot. He worked a lot. And every year when he'd get his bonus, he would get some shares of stock in his little food company and he would give some to my brother and I, my brother would instantly sell his and, and buy really cool. I would sit there and keep thinking the stock was gonna go up and watch it kind of sit at the same price every year. But I followed stocks, I followed stock prices since I was, since I was a paper boy. So the markets were always something that was adjacent and you know, I was in New York City, you know, forever and, and you know, those people in Wall Street cut a big path in New York City. Um, you know, I think when we started the street.com, my girlfriend was a trader on the New York Stock Exchange. And so I was, you know, involved with the markets. Um, and so, you know, I knew the markets in a certain way and a way that was more comfortable I think, than other reporters would approach'em. I was also interested in the markets culturally. When, when, when Jim Kramer started calling me up at ridiculous hours of the morning and I was writing about sports, he liked the idea that I was a sports writer cuz he thought I would bring a different flavor to the coverage of the markets. And what I ended up writing initially for the street.com, when we, again, when we very first started, I mean when, when I, it was just three or four of us when we were starting things. We had, we had a, we had, this is one of those stories Old Men Tell, right? But this is, we had two modem lines. We were in a bank vault at two Rector Street, kind of behind Trinity, behind the cemetery at Trinity at Trinity Church. And we were in this bank vault to literally go through the vault doors, the, the iron, you know, it had once been used for a securities thing where they would actually hand the stock certificates into this vault. And we, in this bank vault, we would pass around the cord that we would use to, for our dial up modems to get online. And that was the, the first days or the street.com. And so, you know, for me, wall Street wasn't foreign entity. It was knuckleheads that I knew and shared summer houses with or my girlfriend's friends or whatever. And so I went and started telling stories. One of our marketing guys called me the Troubador of Wall Street, which I thought was the stupidest name ever. But it was this notion that I would kind of bop around and come back with stories about these weirdos who would be these like fervent right wing anti-communists, but they'd be selling Cuban cigars outta the trunk of their car, parked behind the New York Stock Exchange. That was back before the attacks of the World Trade Center. And you could park a car behind the New York Stock Exchange. And I would write these stories about the characters on Wall Street and kind of the, the color of Wall Street.
Speaker 1:And then you became one of those characters. So you, you do a few years on the street and out here, uh, and I remember this, I when you left journalism to become a money manager yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I quit CN b c to to be a hedge fund analyst and portfolio manager. And eventually, and uh, yeah, I had a source who offered me a job, offered me a job as an analyst. And the idea was that I would look at stocks differently than other analysts. Uh, at the time he hired two analysts for this, you know,$2 billion hedge fund. One guy had a, was had eight years in private equity and was a Harvard mba. And I was sitting right next to him was me who had more experience putting on makeup than building financial models. It was an odd moment, a terrifying moment for me, cuz I bet everything. And I took a huge pay cut to take this job. There was no guarantee of any kind of bonus. The boss said he was gonna fire me if, if I didn't work out within the first year with no bonus paid to me. So I sitting in that room looking at a Harvard mba who's also trying to make money knowing that the rules of this firm were that 90% of the profits would get paid to two of the people in the room, not the boss. He'd take his piece, but most of it. But what was left over 90% of what was left over was gonna go to two people. Everybody else is gonna get screwed. How could I get be that person who is the most adding the most value? And the, and the trick to that I think was at least for me was, well, I'm not gonna do it by out modeling this Harvard mba, right? I'm not gonna do it by, uh, I don't know, reading the analyst notes better or whatever those guys did. What I had to do was, was the things I did as a journalist was be an investigator, find information that nobody else has, listen to someone tell a story and think, I don't know, that's, that doesn't sound right. And look for mispriced securities, look for companies, maybe we're doing great things that no one was giving'em credit for. Or what I found to be my specialty was finding fakes and frauds and failing businesses where you would just hear something that didn't make any sense. And then try to figure out how you could find an asymmetric fact that they didn't want you to know that's what journalists should be doing all the time. And that's certainly what I was doing as an investor. Let me give you an example. So there was a company that sold these little mini bulldozers. You see these things sometimes the most popular brand of the market is Bobcat. This was another company, well, I'll name it, what the hell called a s v and a s v made these, they had rubber tracks like a snowmobile. In fact, the CEO e o was a beloved Minnesota character who'd once run a snowmobile company. So like an art cat snowmobile. He had these little bulldozers that could be used extra, really great for small construction jobs. Or they would say, they would say that bulldozer was lighter than air wasn't lighter than Air Dave. They said, uh, uh, you could drive over someone's foot and they wouldn't even feel it with one of these things. They were so dainty they could be used in a golf course. Well, that wasn't true. They said it was the most successful product in the history of construction. I'm gonna guess that the nail was a bigger product than this mini bulldozer. So would perhaps, so some of these things didn't look right. I started reading the financial filings and I, and I, and I noticed that they changed. I was reading the financial filings one day. I went back to it the next morning. I was like, wait, did I pull up the wrong document? The revenue recognition. So the moment that they decided that something was a sale, so if a customer prepays for something, you can't count that as revenue unless the customer has the product. But they change their definition of revenue recognition from when the customer has the product and accepts it to when we ship it to the customer, just a little more aggressive. But there's no good reason a CFO f changes that unless the sales are slowing down. Unless the payments are slowing down. So just a concern that maybe something wasn't right there. So I flew to Minnesota, uh, they were in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, not Grand Rapids, Michigan, but five hours north of the Twin Cities. There's a town called Grand Rapids, Minnesota. You wouldn't think you could fly to Minneapolis, drive North five hours and not be somewhere near the Arctic Circle in Canada. But somewhere near the Canadian border, there was a town called Grand Rapids and there was an a s v manufacturing plant there. And I went to the county courthouse to look up records of other things that a s v owned and rented. And they were, they had, they kept business records that showed there was a field in another town about 12 miles away. I wanna say it was called Deer Park or Deer Valley or Deer something. So I get in my rental car and I drive 12 miles west of Grand Rapids and I get to this one stoplight town such that it is a town, it's one stoplight. I go into the 7-Eleven or the Quickie Mart or whatever it is, trying to find this address. It's this kind of pre-phone g p s And uh, this two toothed woman comes out from behind the counter and says, I give her this address. And she says, you looking for them bulldozers? I'm like, yeah, yeah, what's up? So I go with this woman leading the way in her, in her car. She takes me over this berm. I think I'm about to get kidnapped and sold to Canadian slavers or something, I don't know. And, uh, she says, it's back there behind the barn. So I go out into this by park my, my rental car. I go behind this barn and there I see dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of these little mini million dollar bulldozers that had been shipped out of the factory, but the company was recording as a sale and weren't actually sold. Oh dear. And so I called my trader, I say four short 40,000 shares of a s v right now. I've got 40,000 more behind it tomorrow morning. And that was, you know, that was an investigative instinct, seeing something that just didn't seem right, pulling on loose threads until I could find out what was wrong. And then finding this thing. And sure enough, not the next quarter, but the court after that, they reported that they missed earnings numbers, that their inventory was suddenly growing more than they expect, and the CEO is suddenly retiring, if I'm remembering all that. Interesting. Interesting. And so that's, that's the kind of work that I did as a shortell and investigator, which is try to find out what was really going on sometimes from companies that didn't want to tell us.
Speaker 1:That is a pretty amazing story. And, and yet you only did that for six years. I know you're, I think you're still at it a little bit, but then you decided to create and co-anchor Bloomberg West. So what led you back to journalist?
Speaker 2:So I left, thought I was gonna start my own hedge fund and found it very harder to raise money than I had had hoped. It was, you know, I had a really nice run there, but I, I had little kids who'd never seen me do any anything really. They were bo they were babies when I was doing the hedge fund thing. And then I was kind of full-time doubting it, or at least halftime and running my own investments. Say that again. Cause there was some sound back there running my own investments and there's a door slamming. I'll do that even one more time just so I lean cuz I have a lot of fun editing. So there I was running my own investments, little babies had never really seen me work. And I got a phone call from Dan Colarusso and Mark Bernicker who were executives at Bloomberg Television. Mark was a producer, Dan Colarusso was a managing editor. And they wanted to know if I wanted to do a tech stock show. And I was, that's dumbest idea in the world. What are we gonna say? Bye-bye, buy, sell, sell. So this is up, this is down. I have no interest in doing that whatsoever. But I thought about it and thought about it and thought about it and thought there might be a way to tell a story of technology for business television that isn't being done. So I sat down with David Rhodes, who was the head of Bloomberg TV and Andy Lack at the time, and I proposed to them a different kind of story. And the story was essentially there's a little world of bye bye, buy, sell, sell, sell. And that is almost all of what we see in business television right now. Then there's a bigger world. Think of concentric circles if you would. Right. A little world of bye bye, buy, sell, sell, sell. And that's, that's almost all of, of, of of business news even in print now. And yet those of us, you know, those of us in journalism and those of us in the world of business, those of us people do pr, right? You're all sick of those stupid stories. Why is your stock up? Why is your stock down? Why did you miss the quarter? Are you gonna beat the next quarter? Just the stupidest, least informed, least interesting thing you could say about a business that's by, by buy, sell, sell, sell. Slightly wider in that perspective is investing, right? So investing includes trading by, by buy, sell, sell, sell. Investing is private equity buying companies, whatever, making companies bigger, venture capital, starting companies, Warren Buffet making long-term investments in the cn, bbc, buy, buy, sell, sell, sell world, right? There is no room for Warren Buffet. How do we explain a guy who, who's the richest, greatest investor of all time according to C N B C? And yet he tells us, don't trade every day. Don't look at a a stock after they report and make a decision that it's a buy, it's a sell. Which right, which is a whole ethos of bye bye. Buy, sell, sell, sell. So what does Warren Buffet, oh, he's just slow. He's old. He would trade faster if he was smart. Like the guys on Fast money. Hope the guys in fast money, many of whom are friends. I don't hate me after listening to this<laugh>, there's also the world of private equity. What do they do? Well in the world of, of if everything takes place in New York, stock exchange, private equity shouldn't exist, but private equity makes tons of money. Oh, private equity takes stocks away. That's what it private equity is in that world. What does venture capital, they make even more money than private equity. Oh, they give us IPOs and after the ipo o we don't care. I wanted to take that, those two concentric circles. A little one. Bye bye. Sell. So sell the bigger one of investing. I wanted to look at the really big one, which is business. It is everyone who goes to work every day and thinks about their work when they're not at work. It's everyone who's got a sales quota. It's everyone who's got a difficult client or looks forward to working with a great client. It's everyone who wants to invent a new product. They might know Jack about investing in what the stock market did today. And they don't need to to be successful at business. There is a bigger world of business than there is of trading stocks. And so I wanted this new show, which we called Bloomberg West to draw a line through all three of those things. So yeah, we're gonna cover trading and what's up and what's down, I guess a little bit that might be the sizzle, the investing might be the interesting thing on who's looking at some businesses on that straight line that are technology. But the big world of business, everyone in the world of business is seeing their jobs and their careers and their work change because of changing technology. If we tell the story of technological change, we will great, give great valuable information to all the people in that little world of bye bye buy, sell. So sell to all investing in the bigger world of investing and the giant world of business. That's the story of technological driven change in business. And that's the story we wanted to tell at Bloomberg West. What I see them doing on Bloomberg TV right now is just doing, you know, stocks are up, stocks are down, this company might do an IPO someday. Uh, it's hard to find stories that no one else is telling. And the stuff that they do in Bloomberg now, it's, it's great. They're doing a great job. Really good nights, people doing those shows, but I don't think they're trying to really change the way we tell the story of business news. But I'm trying to do that on the Drill Down podcast every week.
Speaker 1:And that's why I'm guessing after eight years, and you've done a lot of other things I want to talk about quickly, but after eight years, you, you left for the drill down to be able to control, uh, control the story, if you will, to your tastes digging deeper, being more in investigative
Speaker 2:Eight years is long enough to do anything. Parenting maybe a little bit longer marriage unclear to me, but, uh, but I think, uh, um, uh, yeah, it was, it's a long time to be any, any place, at least for me. You know, you're talking about about career, like all these different things. But to me, these things were all startups. Slam Magazine was a startup. Vibe magazine was a startup. The street.com was a startup for me. Going to work at these hedge funds in in its own way was kind of a startup cause we were creating kind of new ways to look at, find these companies and find new truths that whatever Bloomberg West 100% a startup, Bloomberg, uh, technology conferences were startups. Our Bloomberg radio show on Bloomberg Radio on the west coast, that was a startup. The Drilldown podcast is a startup. I've always done these things where I try to find a, a new way to solve a, a problem that isn't being a way that isn't being addressed to my satisfaction.
Speaker 1:Well, to that end, there are a lot of things you're doing right now, but one I want to ask about, what is Y M C A camp Corey all about?
Speaker 2:Oh, it's, it's, it's a Y M C a camp. Not, it's a big deal for a lot of young people. Thousands, over thousand young people every summer get to go to Camp Corey for between the day camp and the sleepaway camp, as we say back east, it's up in the, it's on UCA Lake in the Finger Lakes. I attended this camp when I was a child, when I was a teenager. I'm on the board of directors there. All four of my children go to Camp Corey now this year all as counselors. They all with there as campers, but I'm the board of directors. I, you know, try to support the camp in any way I can. Um, we've got a very active scholarship program that lets people can't afford to go to camp. It's pretty cheap anyway, but Northstate New York pretty cheaps a different number than it is in San Francisco. And it's just a great experience for kids. It's just a great experience where they go learned things, socialize, learn how to socialize, get their, get out out of the world that they might be in the rest of the year. Summer camps, did you go to summer camp? Is summer camp's an amazing thing? I,
Speaker 1:I grew up on Cape Cod, so I lived on summer camps, so no, I was one of the You
Speaker 2:Lived in summer camp? Yes, yes.
Speaker 1:So,
Speaker 2:And people in the West coast don't do summer camp with our kids as much as we did to the East coast. But for my kids it has been a life-changing thing. To my great surprise, my oldest son, his, he's got fortunately had some real material to use in his college essays, but he wrote about how being a camp counselor changed his life and uh, it's just such a great experience and so I'm thrilled to be able to help Camp Corey. I strongly encourage everyone listening to this go to the Y M C A Camp Corey website. Uh, sending our kids from the West coast. It wasn't as easy as driving em, you know, over from Syracuse or Buffalo or Rochester or whatever, Elmira up to the Finger Lakes. But the Finger Lakes are absolutely gorgeous and it's a wonderful experience for these kids. For a couple weeks when I was a kid, we'd go for the entire summer and it was just life changing for all of us. I was still friends with some of my Camp Corey friends. Amazingly.
Speaker 1:You've also more recently helped run a campaign for Joe Alito, uh, Verynice, if I'm pronouncing that right for San Francisco da that not even close. You didn't work out the first time
Speaker 2:You got the Joe part, right?
Speaker 1:<laugh>, I'll let you say his name. The second time around. Is Joe running again and are you gonna be involved?
Speaker 2:Joe Alioto Verne says his close friend and he asked if I, he and I will regularly go out to dinner and talk about the politics of San Francisco. Talk about the problems of San Francisco. Talk about what's really going on with, with the firefighters, with the police department, with the police unions, what's really going on inside of City Hall. Joe's grandfather was the beloved mayor of San Francisco for two terms in the sixties and seventies. His mother was on a board of supervisors for I think a decade. Uh, his family has been deeply involved in this city trying to make the city a better place because they fundamentally believe that it is their responsibility to give to the city and try to make the city a better place. Um, Joe and I will go out to dinner. I would drink a lot of wine or at least enough we are these big meals and we'd talk about the ways that we might, you know, that he would talk about a very complicated problem and the simple minded person that I am, I would've spit it back to him in one sentence and the next morning he'd call me and say, how did you say that again last night? I don't wanna write that down. And then he would find him using the things that I would say back to him in, in conversations with people and so on. And so when he, many people were urging him to run for district attorney last year, he asked me if I would run his campaign. And so I was the campaign director. He also had a campaign manager and we ran a campaign that we were very proud of. We did not win. The mayor's, uh, self-appointed district attorney won. The first thing Brook Jenkins did when she was named the acting district attorney placing Chase Boud in San Francisco was fire. The lawyers who were investigating the mayor of San Francisco, mayor of San Francisco's investigation ended on that date. And she has been a loyal supporter of the mayor of San Francisco ever since. And the city is really struggling still. I dunno if Joe's gonna run again the city Sure, sure. Could use someone like Joe Ado Verese, who really could solve really quickly a lot of the problems facing the city with a different approach and the support of the police department and the rest of the city. As a journalist, that's another thing, right? As a journalist, the way I grew up, you couldn't get involved in politics at all. The second you were involved in politics in any way you were done, your career was over. And, um, the rules are different in journalism now, but I, Joe needed my help. San Francisco needed my help, said that we failed cuz in our campaign, cuz San Francisco still needs Joe's help. But if Joe needs me again, I'm there. Let well,
Speaker 1:Let's talk about that. That's where I was go. I was gonna go the, the future of journalism.
Speaker 2:He also bought me dinner last week on his birthday. It, his mom bought me dinner, so I got, I I kind of owe<laugh>.
Speaker 1:So you, you owe, it must have been a heck of a dinner if you owe running his campaign again for one day. It's
Speaker 2:Cori.
Speaker 1:Um,
Speaker 2:I mean it was Cori. That's a, that's a pretty penny.
Speaker 1:That is a final. I the one, one of my favorites. Um, your take on the future of journalism, I'm curious, I have said, and will continue to say, and I don't think this makes me unique, that as, because journalism is struggling, we're struggling as a society and perhaps vice versa. What is your take on the future of journalism? Are you still optimistic? Can it get out of this, this spiral that's in and everything's changed. Print is dead. Social media is, you know, to your point, 256 characters is where you get your business done. Do you have optimism towards the industry itself?
Speaker 2:Well, people want information more than ever and people are consuming information more than ever. So I think a big part of the problem is the mediums in which, well, I think, let me restate that. The big problem in journalism is not people's lack of interest in information. You know, the biggest problem in journalism is that we've seen a collapse of the traditional methods of delivering journalism for a small handful of reasons. And so nothing has quite replaced all of the things that we consumed, right? We've had a lot of the in magazines, right? You'll have a, a sidebar which will have like a quick listicle or short bit of information next to a feature in a magazine, in a vanity fair or Entertainment Weekly or whatever you read, whatever. Does that entertainment weekly even exist anymore? Uh, we'd have that slam magazine. We'd have, we'd have a, we'd have a one page story with a great picture in three paragraphs and we'd have an eight page story that would tell a, a story with 5,000 words. Um, I think that the long form journalism, uh, in kind of medium form journalism, right? Hundreds of newspapers have gone outta business in the last 15 years, right? Business sections in newspapers that still exist don't exist and reprint by, by buy, sell, sell, sell stories. They don't tell the stories of local business that would help us understand our community. I think that the changing medium, going to Instagram, going to TikTok, going to Twitter and going away from newspapers and going away from magazines, journalists haven't adapted yet. But because there's such interest in information, because there's such massive media consumption, I think that journalists will become interested in finding new ways to tell their stories and, and, and embrace those new platforms. It's one of the things I'm doing with this Drilldown podcast. It's why I'm doing podcasts. I think that audio offers a chance to, you know, you are physically in someone's body when you're telling them a story with audio, right? That's, that's twisted and true. You're in their head. But with those, with with with your AirPods in your head, you're, you are so close to that listener. You can connect with them so intimately and really share information in depth. I think short podcasts are boring long, you know, 20 minutes podcast. They, you know, to me the kind of ideal length of a podcast is, is of a commute, right? A 35 minute podcast is about the average American commute and kind of perfect for those Americans still commuting. There's, there's a great opportunity to, uh, to tell stories in audio that have the depth that we once saw in print and, and why not? It's just a different medium. I, I look going way back since you've done my whole career, my whole resume, right? In the music industry, what I saw in the music industry is the music industry struggled not with the music. They struggled with the medium. And when music went from vinyl to cassette, and I'm throwing out the a track era cassette to cd, the music industry really struggled with this stuff. When forget CDD is streaming, remember the nap store year? The convulsions the industry has gone through is because the industry was built around the distribution of the music, not the music itself. And they saw the thing of value that they had was the ability to sell, to ship and sell vinyl or to, or, or to put the, the stuff, the music you would've already paid for making the recordings of, of of, I don't know, led Zeppelin or Hank Williams or whatever and put that into a new format and then stop signing new artists. Cause people were spending money on the records that they used to have the now CDs. And so the music industry goes through this convulsion of not signing new act. Cause they don't have to cuz they're making money with the discs that they, the music that they already cut. You know, those convulsions around medium are around media are not about the what you're actually making and what you're, how you're, how you're distributing it. So I see the, the same thing, you know, in my career I've gone from magazines to this new thing called the web back to magazines to television from television to audio on radio, from radio to podcasts. In the midst of a lot of that we've done a lot of social media with Instagram and Twitter and, and a little bit of TikTok and so on. So, and a lot of stuff online in different formats, even Facebook and things. So the changing of how people get the news shouldn't change the stories that we tell. It does change the way we have to tell those stories. You can't take a radio show and make a podcast out of that. These were arguments I used to have with my old boss at Bloomberg over and over and over again. He's at one point my boss told me people shouldn't listen to podcasts, they should listen to the radio. Well
Speaker 1:Then that, that takes the choice<laugh> out of, out of their, uh, their hands or their ears as it were. They have to do it on your time. He's
Speaker 2:Not in radio or podcasts or anything else anymore.<laugh>
Speaker 1:Well, in both the cases of music and journalism, you know, law, unintended consequences, tech is what disrupted them. Tech is what disrupts everything. At the end of the day. It can it still be a source for good?
Speaker 2:Can technology be a source for good? Yeah, of course it can. Any human endeavor can be used for good and it's hard to use a human endeavor for evil. People are naturally good. People want to make good things. People want to do good things by other people. Technology absolutely enables that. It enables other crap too. But the arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
Speaker 1:Wow. I did not expect you to be, uh, less cynical than me. But you, but you are. Um, alright, last question. Uh, I ask everybody this question. It, it's a choice between two places you've lived New York or San Francisco?
Speaker 2:I don't have to choose.
Speaker 1:I know you're in San Francisco. I live
Speaker 2:In both, well, I don't, I don't live in New York City anymore. I'm in San Francisco and then I'm in in New York in the summers, but further east. And uh, it's kind of the perfect combination.
Speaker 1:How So
Speaker 2:Well, bay Area is wonderful. The Bay Area is beautiful. The Bay Area has everything I want, including my friends and family and my community, and I have the same when I get back out East.
Speaker 1:Corey Johnson, thanks so much for being on the show today. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:I'd like to thank you all for listening today, and once again, a big thank you to Cory Johnson for joining us for this edition of The Pressing Matters podcast. Join us next month when we chat with another member of B2B Techs, top 200 Media and Influencers. Now, if you've got feedback on today's podcast or if you'd like to learn more about Big Valley Marketing and how we identified the B2B tech top 200, be sure to drop me an email@dreybigvalley.co. That's D r E double d y BigValley, all one word.co. No m. You can also email the whole team at pressing matters big valley.co. Thanks again, and as always, think big.
