Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Behind the Scenes at CNBC with Becky Quick

Episode Date: January 9, 2022

Having her family move around to different states wasn't fun for Becky Quick when she was a kid, but it made transitions later in life less frightening. She shares how she started working at her college newspaper before she even started classes, helped launch The Wall Street Journal's first website, and was initially reluctant to move to CNBC. Becky also discusses: - Early (and humorous) struggles in the transition from print journalism to TV - The importance of having fun on the set - Her unexpected introduction to Warren Buffett - Why she loves the business world You can (and should) follow her on Twitter @BeckyQuick. Host: Chris Hill Guest: Becky Quick Engineer: Dan Boyd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

listen can you hear that yeah that's the sound of money doing business tens of thousands of fintech and finance professionals cutting deals and courting investors so come and meet them live and in person this october at money 2020 the place where money does business search money 2020 usa to find out more i never had any practice reading a teleprompter before they put me on live never the first time i ever read a teleprompter was live on television and i was terrible i'm chris hill and that was cnbc host becky quick having interviewed her a bunch of times on this show over the past decade i had a theory about her career but i wanted to find out more

about Becky's path to the anchor desk. Before the pandemic, I went to New York City to talk with her in person. She had just completed three hours of co-hosting Squawk Box and met me in a conference room just off the set. We talked about her start at the Wall Street Journal, her move to CNBC, and how she got to know Warren Buffett by talking with him on a 12-hour flight to China. Becky was born in Indiana, the oldest of four kids. Her dad was a geologist and geophysicist, and his work took the family from Indiana to Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma, and eventually New Jersey. She was the editor of her high school newspaper, and her interest in media stayed with her when she went to college.

So when you get to Rutgers, do you jump right into the school newspaper? Yes. I actually started at the newspaper before I even started classes. And that was not my choice. That was my mother kind of pushing me again as the oldest, like, hey, you need to do more of this, you need to do more of that. How does that work? We went upstairs to the student unit at Rutgers, and there was a credit union

on the top floor. And she said, oh, you need a bank. someplace that you can put things together. Cause of course this was before like Apple pay and all these things that you have on your phones. So I said, okay, sure. We went upstairs and around the corner was the newspaper office. And my mom said, you should really go in there. And I was shy and I didn't want to. And I said, no, I don't want to go. She said, just go in and give them your name. You don't have to do anything. So I said, okay, went, gave them my name. There were a few people in the newsroom, even though it was the end of the summer. And there was a really

smart, um, assignment editor or news editor at the time. His name was Joe Woeful and he didn't let me out without assigning me a story, which I had no interest in taking. But he said, go write the story about the Raritan River Festival. We need a preview of it. So I went home, back to my parents' house, and I just agonized over how to put together a story and a lead. I didn't know what I was doing. Ended up going in, writing the story, which was terrible, I'm sure. But I went into the newspaper office and typed it up on the computer and was sneaking out the door and had no intention of ever coming back because I was terrified by the place. And he caught me on my out the door and said hey now you have to write the review you have to go to the festival and

write the review of it so oh gosh so I had to go get over to the stupid Raritan River Festival and I was such a novice I didn't know how to get around town my mom actually came and picked me up and drove me over um because again it's my mother like pushing me as the oldest to go do all these things um I went back into the office to write my review story which I had written at home all I was literally doing was typing it and getting out of dodge and again it was a it was a thursday it was the first thursday at classes and um somebody looked around and said you know what we forgot to assign a friday focus which was a big one-page article on fridays they said who here's a freshman and i raised my hand and they said you write a full-page story about the first

days on the banks what it's like to be here i thought what and they said we need 30 inches and so i wrote everything i could think of and it was about 24 or 25 inches they're like that's okay we'll just put your name really big to fill up the rest of the space nice so now on friday the next day my article came out it was a full page in the daily targum the newspaper at rutgers and it had my name in you know like 36 point size just to fill up all the space that i couldn't fill with my words and then i was hooked you know like wow everybody on campus saw my name and that was like so cool and i spent the rest of my four years at the targum offices and i was gonna say And despite the baptism by fire, clearly you were interested in it.

Yeah, you know, I loved it, but I was, I don't know if it's something all kids have or if it's something that is more prone to women or if it was just, I don't know. I didn't have a lot of confidence and I was nervous. And I, you know, you see that with a lot of youngsters. And I, you know, I see it in my kids at times too. And it's that push, you know, and I really credit my mom for that. kind of pushing me and forcing me to do some of those things that I didn't want to do. And again, Joe Wolfel, who didn't let me out the door. And then when I was assignment editor later that year, I took his trick and you never let somebody walk in that you don't assign them a

story. Never let somebody sit in and sneak back out because they'll probably never come back. And, you know, when you're just looking for free writers, you're looking for anything. That's a really great employment technique. And it's, you know, I watched him do that and kind of tried to take it with my other things. Never let somebody walk out the door empty-handed. Always have a transaction where you have to get back together. And that was the great thing about the targetment. It wasn't just the writing and the reporting. It was also learning about being an employee, being a manager, and working together with people.

It was really great team building. What did you study? What did I study? Poly-sci and communications as a double major with English as a minor. And what was the plan from there? You get a poly-sci degree and then it's like you move down to D.C.? Well, actually, I did my internships in Washington, D.C. in the summers after my after my freshman year, I went back to India and I worked for the prosecutor's office. Then after my sophomore and my junior years, I went down and I worked for Pete Vesklosky, who was the congressman from Indiana and for the first congressional district there.

I loved it. It was so exciting because it was all these young people running around and they would give them massive amounts of responsibility and authority and pretty big amounts of money that they were working with for the legislation they were working on. And the first summer I was there, I was really just writing responses to constituents, answering phones, giving tours of the Capitol. But the second summer that I went back, they actually let me work on some of the syndicated exclusivity laws. It was called syndex laws, but it was for cable rights. And it was important to people like Pete Vosklosky, who, you know, had Northwest Indiana as his district, but all the television stations were Chicago. So the only news that would ever make it on would be Chicago news and the stuff that he was trying to do with the Indiana National Lakeshore, which just became the latest national park. But back then he was trying to promote the Indiana National Lakeshore and the dunes and really build that up and give it protections. And every time he did anything, he couldn't get it on the airwaves.

So he said, go out and help me find other co-sponsors for a bill that will force the cable company to carry the South Bend stations, you know, some of the local stations. So people in my district know what's really happening in their local homes. It's not just for promoting what he was doing, but it was just to make sure that you actually know what was happening in your hometown so you didn't get sucked up into the big city in the next state. And, you know, I sat there and I thought, how can you actually find that? And I just looked at a map and said, OK, it's going to happen anywhere where you have a district that's in another state right outside of a big city and went and found all of those districts and went and found those congresspeople. And we got on board and they, you know, we actually got to go work with the lawyers there and help write some of the legislation. I was totally hooked. They give you a massive budget and all that stuff. And you can be at the time, I think I was, I wasn't even old enough to drink. Cause I remember trying to sneak into some

of the bars, but you know, 20, 19 years old. And then if you come back as a legislative assistant, you could be 22 and they're giving you a budget for $50 million and saying, go and run, run with this. And I thought that's the only place on the planet that that can happen. So I graduated with the poli sci degree, figured I'd go back down to Washington. I spent that first summer after graduation. I didn't really have a plan. I worked for my dad, who had his own business, and I remember just hating it. I love my father, but... The geology bug didn't catch on? No, I was not the geologist, and he needed somebody to help organize the papers. And

I remember falling asleep on my desk one day, and he came back in and was so mad at me. Like, what are you doing sleeping on the job? I was just lost because I didn't really have a plan for what to do next. And I went to a wedding, met a woman who I had done for my senior thesis. I wrote the only journalism class I took was this like 400 level journalism class where I wrote a thesis on sexism in the newsroom. And I talked to all kinds of reporters and editors from New York media. And I had met a woman from the Wall Street Journal. And she just said, after when I ran into her again at this wedding, she said, yeah, you know, I've got a news associate position opening up at the journal. Do you want to come? I said, what's that? She's like, you know, you basically

staple papers, make copies, do what we say. I said, sure, I'll go and I'll do that for a year. And then I'll even go back down to Washington. And again, you got into the journal and there were so many brilliant people there. You could throw a paperweight in any direction and hit a Pulitzer Prize winner. And it was a great, a great place with a sense of family where people were very generous with their time and their knowledge and learned a lot and kept getting different jobs there and never left until i came to cnbc how long are you stapling papers together before someone figures out that you've been working at this school newspaper for four years and actually have the ability to write and report actually my my boss who hired me at the

time karen miller princero fantastic boss um she let me start doing other things even as i was doing that we worked i was on the overseas copy desk at that point and we worked uh sunday through Thursday week, but the journal works Monday through Friday. So she would let me do other things. And if I wanted to come in on Fridays, she, she actually pushed me to some of these other places where they'd let me fill in on some of the beats. Like if the commodities reporter was out or the advertising reporter was out, they'd let me fill in for them while they were out. She'd let me do that on Fridays. And then eventually she'd say, okay, you can take her for a week and go to spot news and do some things like that. And so it was really, you know, she was

a fantastic mentor and she was the one who pushed me. And, um, well, you know, if you're willing to work six days a week and jump around and do some of these other things. Journal was a great place to be. I didn't think I'd ever actually be a reporter. I remember having more than 100 bylines at one point, but not being a reporter and getting really discouraged and thinking it was never going to happen. And what I did find with every job along the way is if you stick with that job for maybe six months or a year longer than you think you can possibly take it, you know, that's when the next thing would open up. And it's probably just that I've never had a plan. I've never been real organized. So I was never I never knew what to quit for. But that's totally what paid off for

me was sticking around longer than you thought that you could possibly take it. So you're at the journal in the mid-90s when the internet basically is born and starts to become an actual thing. Is it safe to assume that in part because of your age at the time, and by that I just mean that you were someone under the age of 30, that people looked at you and said, oh, well, she probably understands this. Because I remember talking with older people at the time and they really struggled to understand what the internet was and why it was anything other than like just a computer toy um i didn't know that much about the internet in fact i got my first email address when i went to the journal not in college um but yeah being

young and being low on the totem pole definitely helped in fact i helped launch wsj.com because nobody else wanted to do it right it was like they were the junk jobs that like the serious journalists there weren't going to tackle uh but this internet thing is a fad give it to her right give it to give it to these like young kids who are coming in here just because we want nothing to do with it and and they were probably right because at the time like what we were doing was kind of monkey work um i came over from the overseas copy dust so they said okay you can be the international news editor for wsj.com which sounds great but literally we were like monkeys we would take we would take the stories that the overseas editions were running and we would

recode it i learned html which is basically like the dumbest language of all time you can code anybody can learn it in about an hour and a half you learn html and you're basically like recoding the stories that have already been edited and written and are finished products and we were code monkeys turning it into an html story and trying to figure out how to make the hyperlinks work so that when they actually launched it that day with the reporters coming in i remember telling the managing editor of wall street journal europe or something at that time like don't click on this button because the link doesn't work. And you've got a hundred reporters sitting in front of you. Like, don't click on these because we haven't figured out how to make this stuff work.

But yeah, it wasn't that I knew anything about the internet. It was just, I was so not senior. What brings you to CNBC? Well, CNBC and the journal had a partnership and I, you know, I'd done a bunch of different jobs after wsj.com. I actually was a print reporter covering the internet because of my experience that I got as a monkey coder. and then i covered retail for the journal um for the print journal and then we had this partnership with cnbc and um they were just throwing reporters on air because they didn't really know who would be any good at it who wanted to do it and they would just say okay uh cnbc called they want you to go stand in the corner over there by the by the camera that they hooked up by the logo

do a live hit yeah just go do a live hit and we all stunk like imagine a bunch of print reporters and you just take and throw them in front of the camera. We all stunk. None of us looked like TV reporters. I mean, at that point, I wore jeans in the office every day. I had never worn liquid eyeliner. I didn't wash my hair every day. You know, like you're there with your hair up in a clip

and they say, go do it. And it's like, okay, maybe I can find some lipstick and try and do this. But I covered retail at that point. And it was the fall. And so retail was a big story for CNBC because you were in the heavy shopping season going through the fall into the winter.

They put me on a whole bunch. I guess somebody thought it was a good idea to put me on a little more. And I think it was just because I was in the beat that, again, was getting so much play at that point, retail. So you get hired as a reporter first? You know, I wasn't sure that I'd want to go. So I said, we can try it out. They were going to send me over for six weeks.

And I remember asking at the time, like, don't clean my desk out, save my job. Let's go see if this works, because I might really stink at it. That turned into about three months. And finally, they're like, OK, you've got to make a decision, because we can't keep your job open any longer. and I ended up staying and that was 2001 what's I'm sure there are a lot of adjustments going from print to TV is there one that stands out above others I literally had one suit when I started working at CNBC and they did not have a wardrobe with department in those days so it was

like holy cow I went to Ann Taylor and bought a bunch of shirts that I could hopefully get away with and a few skirts to match it up with I didn't make a lot of money at that point so I was like oh my gosh, how can I do this on my budget? And I remember in the early days, Judy Chung, Carl Quintanilla's wife, was my producer for a while, was trying to teach me the ropes of television. And I would go and work on my script and I'd call everybody, you know, that was general assignment. So they had to assign me a story in the morning. I'd be working very diligently, typing up my script and calling sources till like five minutes before the hit. And I remember Judy yanking me out of my chair, being like, you have to go into makeup.

You cannot just roll out. And I was so worried about my script and so not worried about that aspect of it. You have to remember it's a visual medium. And it's not selling out as much as it's you don't want to be a distraction. You don't want people to be focusing on you instead of what you're saying and what the story is. And that took a little adjustment. And that was different. When do you go from your reporting on CNBC to your anchoring?

Oh, that's a good question. I think I did general assignment for a while. Then they made me the Wall Street Beat reporter. And that was in time for Dick Grasso with the New York Stock Exchange. And I remember I spent one summer kind of hanging out outside the New York Stock Exchange, standing on an Apple box, you know, with a hit every hour about what was the latest in the New York Stock Exchange with that. And then after that, sometime not too long after that, I'm messing up the years. There was a show called Bullseye that launched. And that was a primetime show with Dylan Rattigan. And they would put me on the set with Dylan Rattigan. And that started to be like an every night thing so that we could just go back and forth. He was the anchor, but I was sitting on the set with him through the whole show. And that's when they relaunched Squawk Box.

And no, then they decided I would be a reporter on the set of Squawk Box. That's what it was. And that was just before Squawk Box's 10th anniversary, because I remember celebrating that on the set with Mark Haynes. So I did that for about a year and then they relaunched Squawk Box. And that's when it was Joe Kernan and Carl Quintanilla and I. We talked about adjustments print to television. What's the adjustment like to hosting a live television show that starts at six in the

morning? I guess the emphasis on six in the morning there, right? Yeah, that was the other thing, because Squawk Bucks had been at seven o'clock to that point. So I'd been doing the 7 a.m. shift for a while, but switching to 6 a.m. when you have to be up and in makeup and read in is a really different scenario. At that point, we were still in Inglewood Cliff, so I didn't have to get up quite as early as I do now, because now I'm commuting into Times Square in Manhattan every day. And that was still pretty early. I think I was still getting up at about 4.15 then. And that was a huge adjustment for me because as a print reporter, I was coming into work.

I was supposed to be there by 10, and there were a lot of days I wasn't there on time. And you weren't worried about your wardrobe, and some days you weren't washing your hair. Right, right. So it was a little bit of a mess. I had been a night owl in college where I'd be up all night because you put in the paper to bed then. um it was a huge adjustment but now i'm a complete morning person at this point um i i don't think well at night i go to sleep early my whole body's clock has changed as a result of doing this but yeah like going on and and being a host at that point was funny too i remember joe kernan and i

would sit and look and laugh because you know instead of just being the kids on the side who are kind of like hey just chiming in from time to time with things now we're supposed to be reading all of these things like the intros and things and there's definitely an anchor voice that you have to use and when you're trying to develop that anchor voice you feel like a complete moron like you just sound like an idiot joe and i would sit and laugh and we would we still do this sometimes like okay really try and sell this one coming up and today on squawk box you cannot oversell it you sound like you're shouting you sound like you're singing and it still sounds better than when you're just reading normally on things so you like just imagine like pick up a

newspaper today and read it out loud. You sound like an idiot when you try and sell it. So we, we definitely would giggle through like, okay, now you try and sell this one. Let's see who sounds like a bigger jerk. And inevitably the person who went overboard the most would sound the best. Um, so there was that. Um, and then, you know, the good thing is, is we just have fun on set. Um, and that makes it a lot easier than, you know, I never had any practice reading a teleprompter before they put me on live. Never. The first time I ever read a teleprompter was live on television and i was terrible and and thankfully cnbc was like experimenting at that point and nobody was paying much attention but i literally tripped over the words to the point

where i went blah and i stuck out my tongue on air and said start over and made them rewind the prompter and i did all of that on live television and so it was good to be in a place where they were definitely um look i think cnbc emphasized on wanting smart people and wanting people who knew the stories and they didn't care as much about the polish and i was definitely a beneficiary of not needing to know what the heck I was doing. And you can definitely watch that all play out. And I really give CNBC management, Mark Hoffman, credit for that.

He wants people who can talk through the stories and get it. And the content is way more important than any of the flash. And I think that's important for our viewers too because they can find somebody who doesn't know the story or who doesn't know what they're talking about

a mile away. What they want is intelligent conversation. And CNBC has always been true to that. For anyone who's ever seen the movie Broadcast News, among the great things in that movie, I think for anyone interested in media, that's the first exposure we all got to reading off a teleprompter. The scene where William Hurt is sitting down with Albert Brooks and is basically coaching him through and the whole punch one thought in every story, punch one, you know, that sort of thing. and the whole thing with your eyes shifting that i would like that i still remember sitting in the theater and thinking oh that's how that works like oh that oh they're reading off of that oh and just sit on your coat make your sit up and sit on your coat so it doesn't

make you look hunched um how'd you meet warren buffett oh the first time i actually met him was uh let's see judy dobrinsky who had come from the New York Times, was the managing editor at CNBC. And we were running around. I think she's the one who sent me, if I'm remembering this correctly. It was the opening of the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas. And my producer Lacey and I were going out for that. And they said, oh, on your way back, stop in Omaha for the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway. And honestly, I didn't know really what Berkshire Hathaway was that much at that point. I knew of it, but I didn't know really what I was getting myself in for with a shareholder meeting. Um, so we stop and I, you know, I haven't slept

because we stayed up all night for the opening of the win. We literally haven't slept my flight from there. I remember it was a Southwest flight and we didn't get onto the end. So I got the, the last row where the seat doesn't recline. And I fell asleep on the guy next to me. It was like drooling on his shoulder when we woke up and landed in Omaha. So we were working on no sleep been not nearly enough preparation. And at that point, he would give all the television reporters who showed up five minutes of time on that Saturday to ask whatever questions you could. So I was really excited, like my five minutes with Moore and Buffett, I'm never going to see him again. And went great, said hello, took a picture for my dad. And I didn't see him again

for several years. So it was not a huge surprise. But then at one point, I reached out to him and we were talking and I'd heard he was going to China and I'd just gone to China with Boone Pickens the year before. And, you know, when he mentioned in the conversation, we kind of got around to China. I said, oh, yeah, can I come with you? He's so nice and was so caught off guard that I don't think he thought of a polite way to say no fast enough. So he said, OK. And then I thought, oh my gosh, what do I talk to Warren Buffett about for 12 hours on this plane ride? Because he was going over with a bunch of guys from the Nebraska Furniture Mart. So it was all of them on the plane. We were hanging out. So wait, it's you, Warren Buffett and furniture

executives. The Nebraska Furniture Mart. Yeah. You better come up with stuff to talk about because then it's going to be 12 hours of furniture. Well, you know, they, they were actually really great, but Warren reads all of these newspapers. And so he's got a thought on every single story in the news and the good thing was we were able to just kind of chat through and he makes he he makes you so comfortable and he's a normal person and doesn't make you feel stupid so it was a great conversation and that's kind of where um where everything started and uh then we started having him on pretty frequently and i look i he wants to be remembered as a teacher and i think the reason he comes on cnbc so frequently is that he sees it as the platform that he can reach the most

students. When he comes on, the very first show he did, the Ask Warren show, was this idea where after he wrote his annual shareholders letter, he wanted people to be able to get a chance to ask him a question. So we did a three hour show of Warren Buffett, nothing but, and viewers could write in their questions. At that point, email was still the primary way that people were reaching out. So a lot of people emailed in and we got a huge turnout for that show. It was something like three or 400 in the demo, or in the households showing up for that. It was a big deal. And we got a massive amount, thousands and thousands of people who wrote in wanting to get a chance to ask their question. And it kind of evolved from that. I know there's going to come a day when he's no

longer around. And I dread that day because for a while now, he's been the unofficial reassurer in chief when it comes to the u.s economy and i don't know who's going to be next in that role because it's it's a role that i don't even know if we had that before before buffett came along and it and now that we have it now that we have this person out there who's just sort of like okay whether it's you know 2008 2009 and and the great recession and And, you know, he was this calming force. And I really don't know who comes next. You know, I think there are always going to be larger than life business leaders who can stand up and try and reassure people and speak just beyond their own company.

I mean, you think of somebody like Jamie Dimon, who to some extent has delved in on those things. you think of people who are able to look beyond the nitty-gritty of what it means directly for their company and look beyond the what it means for this quarter's earnings what the broader implications are and i have to say i've seen a lot of business leaders who have stepped up recently and who have done a pretty good job of laying out you go to the business roundtable and every time i'm there you can talk to a handful of ceos many of them from dow component companies who will say here's what's important. Here's what matters for the longer term. It's issues that they are trying to remind Washington about, too, that just as a great CEO shouldn't be looking just at this

quarter's results, a great politician should not be looking just as what this means for until the next time I run. You have to have longer term conversations about policy. You have to have goals that transcend just your term. And I think there are always going to be people who stand up and do just that. I don't know who that person is going to be. I agree that he has been that person. But I do have confidence that there will be people who continue up to stand up and say, this is what is really happening. This is what's right, whether it helps me or doesn't help me. And this is what we need America's politicians to be thinking about, too. Here's my working theory about Becky

quick's employment life um because it's better to be lucky than good i mean isn't that true for everyone it's better to be lucky than good um so you love working for the student newspaper but you don't think you're going to go into journalism you fall in love with what you're able to do down in washington dc but you don't go into politics um you don't think of yourself as being on TV and that's where you end up. And the through line for your post-college life has been business. And my theory is whether you realize it or not, you love the world of business because I can't imagine you've had the career that you've had particularly over the past 10 years where other people haven't come to you and said, Hey, would you like to go do this? Would you like to

leave Squawk Box and come do this other thing. You're too good at what you do for that not to be the case. And I have to believe that one of the things that keeps you hosting Squawk Box is you love this world. Chris, you're absolutely right. I do love this world. I have had opportunities that have come and I've passed on it. And it's been two issues. For a long time, it was that I've got four kids at home too, and I can do this job and still be a mom, which is really important to me um but it's the older i've gotten the more i realize that i really do love business and the idea of you know just talking about casual headlines and not really delving into stuff is not all that appealing because it's not all that

stimulating um just from the things i like and intellectually what i'm into um and i think that's probably the case with everybody. The further you go down a road, you never imagine yourself being a specialist in anything, or at least a lot of people don't. I never did. Kind of wind up in these things by accident, but you don't stay in them if you don't have a lot of interest in it. And the more you do it, the longer you do it, the more it becomes a part of who you are. So that's probably true. I mean, I wouldn't say never to anything, but I do love following the story. And I do think that business really gives you a license to get into just about anything in life because you're following the money and you're following what drives people. And that takes

you so many different directions. And I'm not really interested in reporting on the latest fire or some smaller issue, but I love politics and I love business, but business has been the place that I feel like I know so much about now. And it's hard to walk away from something that you feel like you've built up an expertise in. But is it safe to assume that if National Geographic comes to you and says, we want you to host a series touring national parks in America? No, that is not safe because I love the national parks too. That's another obsession of my husband and I. That's what I'm saying. They're like, we know you love the parks. We want you to host the series. You get to go to all the parks. No? I might do that. Yeah. If National Geographic

is listening, yes, please come call me. You can catch Becky Quick every weekday morning on CNBC starting at 6 a.m. Eastern. And if you follow her on Twitter, you get a lot of tweets about business and occasionally some gorgeous photos of national parks. That's all for today, but coming up later this week, we'll have more on personal finance, portfolio allocation, real estate investing, and a lot more. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. you