YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Hunt

lines on the record: 128
first: 2026-01-09
most recent: 2026-01-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“There were three, I think, big changes that happened to make the role of narrative overwhelming as it is today. Whereas before, it's always been there. To your point, it's always been there. Today, it's overwhelming. And I think it's not just the success that First Central Bankers and then CEOs. I mean, Wall Street's the greatest copying machine. Wall Street copies what works.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, for sure. That's just your narrative, man. You know, the big Lebowski, you know, that's the, and it's not that a story is a lie. It's that the story is constructed for effect. It's not, and it's presented to you as if this is my true and inner thoughts. The construction of the intentionality behind these stories is phenomenal. Bineoff, for example, created the metrics by which he wanted Salesforce to be judged. Not metrics of profitability, but metrics of what he called pro forma net revenue growth, whatever the hell that means, right? Because if you can construct the story, Can construct it in a way that, yes, I can beat and raise pretty much every quarter.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Until you found out. There are a lot of stories that get told that are not True, right? And I think even today, people think of this word narrative. They have a pejorative sense to it. It's like, oh, really?”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're in a great storyteller. Great storyteller. What all of those companies have in common is that they're great storytellers, and those are trillion dollar companies today, right? What I would say to you is that you don't. Remember or hear about the companies that did not have CEOs who are great storytellers”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even though they're an industrial, this was they wanted to tell a story that they should be seen as and get the multiple of a financial. That's what GE was all about in those years leading up to the GFC. My poster child for this is Mark Benioff. Salesforce because he's probably you often see this with people who come out of sales like like Mark did. It”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I remember vividly when GE was coming to our shop. What they wanted was a financial multiple. So they were making, they wanted”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And assigning the Faka, you're going to speak this day, you're going to speak that day. That's when all this started. It was an intentional effort. And again, this is something that politicians have known forever, right? Politicians craft the message and use their words. So I knew the tools to try to understand this. But what I wasn't prepared for was how, and neither was Bernanke, was how powerful this would become to the point where today it's not just central bankers using their words as their main policy toolkit, but as every CEO now, you go on this network or one of the other networks. What makes for a good CEO is can you tell the story? Can you tell the narrative of your company to get a multiple? Because a multiple is a narrative. A multiple is a story. Long stories”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“During the financial crisis. So it was a concerted effort. Bernanke yelling to this is when they also started going putting all the Fed governors on a common calendar.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To shape market behavior. And he said, that worked better than we had any hope that it could. And that's where we are now”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Change the market, to change market behavior. This is what I mean about making a conscious effort to tell a story. It's not that it was necessarily lying, but they were using their words and choosing their words for effect.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. General liked to me. What Bernike said when he's leaving his terms of office, he said, look. We had two toolkits. One was traditional stuff, interest rates down to zero. At the time, we didn't know we could have negative interest rates. So, you know, that's where we were. Second were the balance sheet operations, large-scale asset purchases, QE. Quantitative eas You know, QE1 was great, did what we hoped it would do. QE2. Operation Twist QE3. This is Bernanke saying, mind you. He says, Actually, I think that might have been a little counterproductive He said, but we had another Tool And that was our communication policy that was forward guidance. That we started using our words not to communicate to the market what we actually felt. We started using our words and coordinating our words”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that those were specific actions took. But even if you People often say things when they're leaving office. So Bernanke's last speech is valedictory address.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and this is where I'm going about the role of forward guidance in Jim Bianco's point about Because what the Fed did. Wasn't just Its policies around interest rates, you know, they took them to zero and that's where we stayed.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did not catch the recovery. Absolutely did not. The recovery was interesting, right? You're right. There was a V, but there were starts and stops to it. The big move up from the bottom in late March going into April, it's like, all right, that actually we caught a little bit of that and that made sense. There was a second leg to the rally.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, amazing. Now, I will tell you, and we can come back to this, the real question you should ask is that given what we believed, why weren't we up 40%? That's actually a question you can ask.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I co founded a long, short fund inside of a larger asset manager going back in 05. And 05, 06, 07, we did well like everyone else did well. And then in 08, we did great.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Starting in 2009 and the recovery that we had out of 2009. And in particular, when Ben Bernike and the Federal Reserve moved towards a very Explicit effort to use their words to impact markets.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To that, but it's all the math has not changed in 35 years since I started working with network math around unstructured data. I mean, we didn't call it natural language processing back then, and we didn't call it large language modeling. But that's exactly what we were doing.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To focus, I'll say more of a focus in political science than in economics with words. Economics is almost seen as a sideline, right? It's somehow lesser than the numbers I was kind of early on was applying the same Techniques that we have for understanding matrices and structured data, but apply it to unstructured data, which full circle. This is at the heart of all of the generative AI and the AI that we have today.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's part of where I'm going, right? So there's a transition in all of All of the sciences, honestly, but certainly the social sciences where, yes, you start with numbers, structured numbers, right? Price over time, things you can calculate and measure as those numbers. But what was clear immediately in politics, and I think has become increasingly clear in the world of investing, is that it's not just the numbers that you get on your Bloomberg terminal. It's also the words and the stories and the narratives that are told to us. Politicians have known this forever, right? So the story of politics is the story of people suggesting laws or policies and then having to present it in a way that gets them elected or keeps them in power or whatever that is. So there's always been”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People in our business who want to try to apply math to data. And there are some real pitfalls and some real intellectual capital I think that you can. Achieve within academia that you can then bring in and apply to the investment world.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think about kind of who's been an influence on you in your life at a very influential undergrad professor in political science. And then I had a very influential graduate advisor again. They don't call it political science up at Harvard. They call it government or something like that. But it's political science. And the reason I say they were influential is that they really. Got me focused on the science side of political science. That science side Yes, it's kind of some of the typical terrible stuff you see in all social sciences, like economics, where you've got to learn how to deal with structured data. And there was a lot to learn It's worth talking about because I see the same mistakes being made over and over again.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, and I am a real one because that was my field for a while. And it's a real field and it's a real thing. But it's been so trivialized when. Some talking head will come on. Well, let's look at the game theory of this, and you just want to just, you know, shoot yourself when somebody does this.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Starting from academia and then getting into Our business of investing. I think it was the best thing that could have happened for me for when I got into it, which was kind of later in life, right? You know, after I left academia finally to start a software company. After we sold that software company, a buddy of mine, I think this happens a lot, a buddy of, you know, you have a buddy who's pretty.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A devastating question Boy, that gets old after a while, Barry. I got to tell you. Yeah, it really does. I loved the teaching. I loved the research because, like I say, nobody tells you what to work on. But the church of academia. The actual institution of academia. A, it's for the birds even back when I was doing it. I think it's gotten significantly worse”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because there's nothing at stake. And that is actually true. That's actually true. And so you learn. Survival techniques and that kind of jungle where nothing is really at stake, at least monetarily, because the The goal of any sort of academia conference or presentation is to appear smart. It's not to actually be smart. You're not actually listening to a presentation to listen to it. What you learn to do is you're listening to the presentation. Whole time you're trying to calculate your head what's the most devastating question I can ask.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love playing games and solving problems. I have a similar issue about working for other people, which Fortunately, academia solves that to a large degree. I mean, you are working on your own stuff. You follow your own intellectual bliss in a way that I've really never rediscovered. The problem with academia, of course, is... Know it's very, very low stakes, it doesn't pay. That's why.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a little more than a way station, but I bet this will be familiar for a lot of your listeners. I always had an entrepreneurial bug. I started my first company when I was in grad school, started another one when I was a professor. And as I know you know a lot of your listeners, viewers know, it is a bug. It's not a feature. Yes, for sure. You can't help yourself”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source