YouSaid · the spoken record

Liz Hoffman

lines on the record: 125
first: 2023-07-28
most recent: 2023-07-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There is this 80 20 rule in journalism people talk about, which is that 80% of tips come from 20% of sources. These are like professional sources who know what the deal is. But I will tell you. That long tail is really long, and you get really interesting stuff if you're willing to spend some time on it.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you can be both, that's great. And I look, I think you put yourself in a position to get lucky. But I don't know. My one piece of advice, I guess, be asked if always take the meeting. You literally never know.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People have been talking about the death of journalism for a long time, and it's extremely true in local journalism, which is where I really kind of wanted to go. I wanted to apply to newspapers in Boulder and Topeka. And I was right at the sort of the start of the end for them. This was 2008. You know, Facebook and Craigslist were just killing their ad business. And they hadn't totally been hollowed out yet, but they were getting there. I don't know what there will always be demand for smart people to make sense of an incredibly complicated world. Just sort of be agnostic about where that is. You know, again, my first, I've had four jobs basically in journalism. One was, again, at a parenting magazine in the Midwest, at a legal trade publication in New York at the Wall Street Journal, and then a thing that didn't exist a year ago. So, you know, you pick up skills at every one of them.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which I really loved. Another former colleague, Eric Schwartzel, wrote this great book called Red Carpet about Hollywood in China. And soft power and business and commerce, that's fantastic. And again, he's going to think I'm just buttering him up, but my boss, Ben, had a great book come out a couple weeks ago. Really fortuitously time, but about this era of viral digital media that is just now completely come crashing to an end. I thought that was a great idea. What's the name of Ben? It's called Traffic.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, all those are great. And then there's a new generation of them that I've really loved that friends and colleagues and competitors of mine have written. Trip Mickle had a great book come out last year about Apple. He was my colleague at the Wall Street Journal. What's the name of the name?”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's funny. If you get the audiobook, which I recorded, I did it that week between Christmas and New Year's because it takes a couple of days and I have a full-time job. And I had COVID, and so you can kind of hear it. But actually, I reread barbarians at the gate and Den of Thieves, like those old, really great yarns.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wrote the kind of book that I like to read, really. You know, I had COVID actually for the first time around Christmas of last year, and I reread. It's funny.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am perhaps disappointingly like I read a lot of non, I read almost exclusively nonfiction. I read a lot of business nonfiction. I'm like, I can't escape my job in my free time, I guess.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's sort of unique in that way, I think. And learned a lot from him about how to handle really sensitive stuff and a little bit of black magic that goes on in certain beats. So I really learned a lot from him. My boss after that was Marie Baudet, who's totally different kind of editor, never really was a beat reporter in the traditional sense, but had incredibly good instincts about stories and really great judgment and encouraged me to be more authoritative and ambitious in the stories that I was telling. And I've only been working for him for less than a year, but I've learned a lot from Ben Smith, who's our editor-in-chief, and is really, I think, trying to build a new kind of journalism. And we're having a lot of fun doing it.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, when I first joined the Wall Street Journal, I sat right behind Dana Simaluka, who was then the deputy M&A editor, has now been the M&A editor for a long time. And he was the first person who really taught me about kind of the dark art of some kinds of journalism and just really learned how to MA is a funny beat because most stories are basically one fact, but that fact absolutely has to be right.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I'm actually surprised at how little pandemic media there was. Not a lot of movies have come out. There was one with like Anne Hathaway and what's the name that was kind of interesting, but I actually think we just haven't really grappled with it as a culture.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's delightful in charge. He's delightful. They were all delightful. No, there was something, there's some, and I'm not a culture reporter and a culture reporter, I would say it better, but there was something like some weird earnest monoculture that was kind of simmering during a lot of the pandemic that I miss a little bit, actually.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How delightful was that? How delightful. And it's one of those things that now you look at it and you're like, God, it feels saccharin and sort of cheesy. Not really corporate sponsored and all. But at the time, it was like really genuinely moving.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I loved it. I'm not a reality television person at all, but got sucked into Love Is Blind because it was so insane and everyone was talking about it. These things kind of became...”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like if the Americans was a rom-com, so I enjoyed it. But one thing that I did genuinely love about the pandemic, and obviously with all the caveats around that that belong there, one thing that I genuinely loved about some of the darkest days of the pandemic were just the way these things become cultural phenomenons, like something would just hit. So Tiger King, just like all anyone was talking about.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I get flagship and it's great. I'll also sign you up for business before we leave. So I actually tragically have less time for television than I used to. But I'm obviously watching Succession. I just watched the diplomat on Netflix.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I about a year ago quit my job at the Wall Street Journal and joined a startup, so I know this sounds terrible. I don't have that. Do you know what? It's called Semaphore. You can sign up to semaphore.com.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How dare you try to do anything that doesn't have to do with running your business day to day, which is what a lot of the sort of pandemic leadership involved.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I think they kind of frankly wish they hadn't because really put themselves squarely in what I would now kind of call the culture wars, right?”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You hit it something that I think is true, and I might take it in a different direction. But you see, this huge vacuum of public sector leadership coming out of Washington at a time that it was badly needed, my takeaway from that is actually that CEOs kind of stepped in. And I think so, part of the reason that...”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, and like maybe someone at the Fed doesn't get reappointed, but that's such an arcane political, like just like a different discussion. There's less at stake there. Clearly, they were late, I would say probably by two meetings, maybe three to six months, depending on how you do it. They should have started in the fall of 20.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. And I would say probably the reason that Congress overdid it is that they are electable, right? People like getting checks. Nobody.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just is taking longer than we expected. I think that's right, but I think you saw a diverging playbook, which is, if anything, I'm the fiscal side, they overdid it. And on the monetary side, they underdid it.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Second thing is they were masks, they were way behind the curve on inflation on the way out. No doubt about it. Really thought it would be temporary and it wasn't. And by the way, they weren't.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could not get interest rates up, which meant that they didn't have a lot of wiggle room to your point. You know, crisis hits, first thing you do obviously is lower interest rates. And they did, and that's fine, but it would have been a lot better if they were starting, say where we are today at four or five and going to one or two. And the second thing”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there's two places where you can be fairly critical of the Fed. One was before all of this, which is they had a really hard time turning off the tap in the 2010s.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because again, there's so much like grimness baked into these decisions because the concern was that we were going to be standing up field hospitals and you don't have electricity. So you have to find things that run on battery packs or pneumatic power. I mean, just really dark stuff. Really, really interesting. Contingency planning here was brutal.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They dump everything they have on the table and say, What can we build with this? And so they used, I think, the fan blower from the truck. They used DeWalt power tool batteries.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they, I think they used, it was the fan belt from like a Ford F 150. They called it Project Apollo. Because you remember that scene Apollo 13.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't have masks. And so they made these kind of like hoods like respirator that actually just cleaned that face shields also. Yeah, exactly. And so.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it was the right thing to do, and I think they deserve a lot of credit for it. I mean, ultimately. Not a ton of respirators. It turns out that they're very complicated to make, but they made these, if you remember, one of the real concerns was that healthcare workers themselves were getting sick.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. And the fact that it ended up on the private sector to solve it is insane. But that's where it was. And Ford is a company that bleeds Americana, right? They made bombers during World War II. They made iron lungs for polio patients. And it's a little bit, I think, this sort of faded corporate titan trying to reinsert itself in the national narrative is a little bit of that.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It helps to know people the right position. But also, I think it was the right move for obviously a strong important company and was waylaid by this. But the other story that you're talking about is this is a company. And again, I understand now that people will roll their eyes. But at the time, there was a real deal. And there was a real earnest.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to be in investment grade to have your bonds be eligible for this facility that the treasury is standing up. And in Ford had lost it. And Jim Hackett, who spent a lot of time in Washington, I think he was on the board of fifth, third for a while, so like, knows pretty well connected in finance, calls Larry Fink at BlackRock and says, who's doing the bond buying for the government? He says, listen, I don't want to put you in a weird spot. I'm not trying to be inappropriate. But like Ford is the kind of, we're acting the way that you guys want companies to act. Like we're not a lane. We got a union contract. We're trying to be responsible. We're trying to be thoughtful. But when we come out on the back of this, like, do you want a thriving industrial heartland sector or not? And very quietly, there's a change made to that program, which is that if you had been investment grade, I think back in pre-pandemic, your bonds are eligible. And on the back of that Ford launches the largest junk bond offering in history, massively oversubscribed and ends up at, I think, eight.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, you know, I think this story of Ford that I tell is sort of in two pieces. One is that, which is they almost failed of all the companies that I looked at, I think they came the closest. And ultimately were saved by a pretty interesting bit of diplomacy, which is that you remember in the spring of 2020, and we talked a little bit earlier about the government's response, which is that they did in about six weeks when it took them six or nine months to do an 08, just stand up a lot of these backstop facilities, figure out where the pain is, what they should buy, what they should put a floor under. And they start to buy corporate bonds, which is a pretty dramatic step to take. And that's really governments picking winners and losers, which is very un-American.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so Ford had had a tough couple of years. They'd come into the pandemic incredibly leveraged. Huge amounts of debt. They lose their investment grade credit rating pretty early on. Got to cut their dividend. I mean, there's a company that is in mortal trouble because every piece of its supply chain and its business doesn't work, right? You can't have people making cars. And even if they wanted to, the idea that they would go into a dealership and sit in a car that someone else had just test driven, right? Yeah, you got to remember, like, it wasn't going to work. And then they had this whole huge finance business that is just massively at the mercy of credit markets and rates that was really highwire act.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“CO4 is this guy named Jim Hackett. And he was hired just a couple years before the pandemic. It's kind of an odd choice and actually is a little bit of an odd duck. Like really was running one of the biggest office furniture companies in the world before that. Really cerebral, really thoughtful, uh, kind of wonky, a little hard to follow for the kind of like go left, go right crew that are, you know, the engineers that work in a place like Ford.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, can you imagine that so the travel hell that we went through in 2021, 22, can you imagine how much worse that would have been if you'd had hundreds of thousands of people kicked off of payrolls? They lose their training, right? This is an incredibly regulated industry. At the same time that a lot of airlines were modernizing their fleets, so having to retrain pilots on new planes. I mean, it just would have been a disaster. And by the way, like you fire them, the government pays for them anyway on unemployment, which is less efficient”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You cannot fly. We are shutting down your business, which is a wild thing to do in a capitalist society. And so look, ultimately, I did an accounting of this recently for Semaphore, and the bill comes to something like $62 billion out the door, of which less than a third is designed to be repaid. And that's sort of the math. There's some interest rates, some more, and skidding out there that are somehow still underwater three years later should tell you something about the markets.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, you can have a company that is 100% cash, but like that CEO won't have a job for very long because some investor is going to come in saying, what are you doing? There's an optimal capital structure. But there's not an optimal capital structure for a pandemic. And so look, and especially if the government is saying it's not just the market telling you we don't want to fly, it's the government in a lot of cases saying”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They had escaped that boom and bust cycle. So plenty of arrogance coming into this, plenty of people have rightly pointed out that they spent something like 96% of their free cash flow on stock buybacks. Totally. But like had they spent 80% that wouldn't have saved them either.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it is a, and actually, I think the first time we meet an airline CEO in the book, it's Ed Bastion from Delta, and he's at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January of 2020, giving a keynote, which is a weird place for an airline CEO to be. This is a gadget show, right? And he's talking about, you know, the seat back entertainment should be a streaming platform, right? They're going to have this bionic software that shows you your itinerary when you look at a screen. I mean, really like next level stuff. And I tell that story as a reminder that like airlines are an incredibly capital intensive business that involve flying really expensive hunks of metal around and every like 10 to 15 years something bad happens. And they had forgotten that. I think that industry had really”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Plains are national resources. We need to have them, and we decided that we'd rather have the private sector manage them than the government for, I don't know, customer service reasons. I don't know.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Parse right time. Partly good lobbying, but fundamentally airlines and actually banks too, which is why those tend to be the industries that we have to bail out every so often, are national resources in private hands.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The spigot was open too wide for too long. That last round of stimulus aid in April of 21? Pretty clearly unnecessary, both from a household wealth perspective and actually just the other day I did a story looking back at the airline aid and very clearly that last round of aid totally unnecessary. The first one, very clearly necessary and well done. You could argue about the second one, which is at the end of 2020.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't do anything, right? Yeah, look, I mean, there were plenty of great books written about the Trump White House and two Washington Post reporters wrote a great book about the health response itself, Charlie Reed. Looking at sort of the world that I know, just the economic side, I think did a really good job with a couple of important caveats, the first one of which”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I don't think this is a partisan or political statement, but the White House did not cover themselves in glory here. And neither did the CDC, which by, you know, in its nature is not an overly political organization, right? Just the science was bad. And I don't think it was certainly not a conspiracy.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Genuine friend. It was obviously important at the moment, and I felt that way, which is unusual. And I kind of wanted to try to bring people back to that moment that now sort of seems sort of saccharine and stupid that we bang pots out of windows. And, you know.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. And so this was like an understaffed financial regulatory apparatus run by someone pretty unknown that I'm not sure the street specifically had a ton of confidence in. And I think really nailed it. So there's two pieces to this, right? There's the fiscal, the stimulus side, which is Congress. And look, nothing brings people together like a crisis. They are, you know, this, that's the other thing too, is that I tried to kind of get back in the book. You got to remember early pandemic became this terrible, toxic sludge and groundhogs day forever, but it didn't start that way. It started out as kind of a unifying, weirdly earnest moment of like.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The economic side, I think the government did quite well. Actually, thinking in sort of an under sung hero on all this is Steven Minuchin. I think really deserves a lot of credit. And frankly, before the pandemic, when he became Treasury Secretary, he had obviously worked on Wall Street to come out of Goldman Sachs. He'd ask people that there was like super high confidence that he was going to make his mark. And, you know, a lot of jobs in Treasury remained unfilled. I mean, the administration was very chaotic. Very slow to fill.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source