Bethany McLean
Contributing Editor, Vanity Fair. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Bethany McLean gained national prominence after writing the 2001 Fortune article questioning Enron's financials and co-authoring The Smartest Guys in the Room. She focuses on corporate malfeasance and economic crises, having also co-authored All the Devils Are Here and The Big Fail.
2shows
2appearances
51statements
8resolved
7supported
0contradicted
88%fully supported
Everything Bethany McLean said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
McLean: Lloyd Blankfein Told FT He Did Not Consider Himself Well-Off
“The Financial Times did a really good interview with Lloyd Blankfein, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. It was a couple of months ago, maybe a month ago, and Blankfein said in that interview that he didn't consider himself particularly well off.”
McLean: Wealth Accumulation Beyond Basic Needs Serves Ego, Not Utility
“Money over a certain point, if it's your goal, is for sure not in service of material goods or making your life nicer. It's just about comparing your balance to those of other people so you can feel bigger than they are, and so that's what I mean by greed in t…”
McLean: Many visionaries lie to keep investors funding their dreams
“Because a lot of visionaries from Thomas Edison through have lied at various points in time and have said things that weren't true in order to keep their employees and their investors believing in them so they can keep getting the money to fund their dreams.”
McLean: Inevitable corporate frauds are the price society pays for world-changing ambition
“And I think that's the inevitable frauds and blow ups are the price we pay. And I think it's good to have these big, grand, ambitious plans. Life would be really boring if you didn't have that. And I think reflexive cynicism about this sort of thing is just as…”
McLean: Hyped digital media models like BuzzFeed and Vice failed to work
“Most of the new business models that have come along and been hyped for a period of time have proven not to work any better than the old business models, whether it was Vice or BuzzFeed or what Vox or whatever else has come along that people have said, this is…”
Bethany McLean: Good journalism is transparency and honesty, not infallibility
“I don't think it's necessarily getting it right, because I think really provocative stories may prove to be wrong. I think it's transparency and intellectual honesty, so being clear about what the facts are and where things are coming from, so that people can …”
McLean: Viable renewables will push oil into secular decline and trigger bankruptcies
“And it may bounce up and down, but it goes into secular decline. And then that means bankruptcies of fossil fuel companies, and I don't think we're being thoughtful about then what those companies obligations are for cleanup afterwards.”
McLean: Shifting to renewables will dramatically upend global geopolitics
“I have no idea other than that it's going to upend everything. If a nation's wealth and standing in the world is no longer dictated by geology, but rather by the innovation of its people, and which is renewables, how does that change geopolitics? I mean, drama…”
McLean: E-commerce fads prove that conventional business wisdom frequently fails
“And so I think I would reiterate the importance of thinking for yourself and the importance of not believing the fad of the moment. Oh, another one, right? That we're all going to buy everything online from now on in and retail is dead. And that turned out not…”
McLean: The vaccine industry is unattractive to Wall Street without government support
“The vaccine business is not one that is attractive to modern Wall Street for a whole host of reasons that we go through. And it needs government cooperation to get the manufacturing scaled up.”
McLean: Enron investors ignored business fundamentals to chase 20% earnings growth
“So many people who were investors in the company Couldn't answer the basic question, how does this company make money? They just wanted the 20% earnings growth that would spit out the bottom line, and the stock price jump that would happen when the company met…”
McLean: Skepticism in Business Stays Within Small Circles
“In the business world, you can't, because skepticism about business tends to travel in a very small circle. Companies won't speak ill of their competitors, at least not, not publicly, or very rarely will they. Employees can't speak publicly without being fired…”
McLean: The business world is emotional and biased toward belief
“There's this idea that the business world is hard and cold and rational, and it's not, it's incredibly emotional. And everybody is biased toward belief because most people stand to make money. If a stock goes up”
McLean: Journalists criticized her for taking tips from Enron short sellers
“Back in the day when I wrote about Enron, even other journalists said to me, well, you took a tip from a short seller. How, how could you do that?”
McLean: As an Enron employee, I probably would have been a believer
“And if I had ended up at Enron, would I have been a whistleblower, or would I have been a believer? And I like to think the former, but I suspect the truth is probably the latter”
McLean: Valeant's wrongdoing was drug price hikes, not hidden accounting
“The ways in which they were different, I don't think the substance of the Valiant story was accounting misrepresentation the way it was with Enron. You could actually see pretty clearly that what Valiant was doing with its numbers. There were a lot more of Enr…”
McLean: Unlike Enron, Valeant attracted smart money like Sequoia and Bill Ackman
“With Enron, when you got to what was commonly considered the smart money, people either weren't invested in Enron, or they were short. And it was largely long-only funds and index funds, and what we think of in terrible terms, but the dumb money that was inves…”
McLean: Inspiring a Grand Vision Makes CEOs Blind to Failure
“It's very hard to be the leader of a company, I would think, if you yourself aren't a believer, and aren't biased toward belief, because you need, as the CEO or the leader, to be able to inspire other people, right, with your grand vision. And so how, if you'r…”
McLean: Enron's top 200 employees extracted $1 billion in options before bankruptcy
“There was this great number, and I'm gonna get it wrong, but it was from the Joint Committee on Taxation, which investigated Enron after the collapse, and they calculated that the top 200 employees of Enron got a billion dollars from exercising stock options i…”
McLean: Public Investment Banks Took Greater Risks Than Private Partnerships
“When investment banks were private partnerships where people had their own fortunes and their own financial well-being on the line, you saw very different behavior than you did in the years leading up to the financial crisis where they were playing with other …”
McLean: Local newsrooms lost nearly 50% of employees over the past decade
“Local newsrooms have lost, what, almost 50% of their employees over the last decade.”
McLean: Investors succumb to charismatic founder worship over evaluating business profitability
“And I think we're particularly guilty of that today because the lure of the founder is, is so strong. And so there's this idea that the right charismatic person can build anything. And so I People latch on to that. We all want to find that person we can believ…”
McLean: Former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling preferred hiring 'people with spikes'
“Jeff Skilling used to say that he liked people with spikes, and what he meant by that was that he didn't like well-rounded, genial, average people. He liked people with a really exceptional characteristic that defined them, and that may come at the expense of …”
McLean: Intimidating executive cults of personality undermine collaborative workplace cultures
“So I think people tend to see this intellectual charisma or the ability to intimidate others around you into belief as a good thing, because we all follow that kind of blindly, but I think that's probably not a good thing, at least if you believe that a collab…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Bethany's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Contributing Editor, Vanity Fair | 1 | 45 | 88% 7/8 | full record on the Knowledge Project → |
 MASTERS OF SCALELEDGER | Contributing Editor, Vanity Fair | 1 | 6 | — | full record on Masters of Scale → |