Enron, every mention

#85 Bethany McLean: Crafting a Narrative Jun 9, 2020 · 48 mentions

• ▶ 1:24 Shane Parrish In this in-depth interview, we talk about the role of journalism in society, the investigative process, Enron, what happens in the wake of exposure, the ways we're rational and emotional, and so much more.
• ▶ 1:56 Shane Parrish Can you talk to me a little bit about how you hit on Enron as a fraud while you were working for Fortune? 12 times in the scene
• ▶ 4:43 Bethany McLean I think there was a lot of willful blindness and a lack of understanding of how Enron made its money. 9 times in the scene
• ▶ 7:39 Bethany McLean So Enron, for instance, there were a lot of people, very smart hedge fund managers, who were short the stock for years leading up to its collapse. 4 times in the scene
• ▶ 10:21 Bethany McLean Back in the day when I wrote about Enron, even other journalists said to me, well, you took a tip from a short seller.
• ▶ 11:52 Bethany McLean And if I had ended up at Enron, would I have been a whistleblower, or would I have been a believer?
• ▶ 12:44 Shane Parrish Talk to me about the differences between Valiant and Enron. 8 times in the scene
• ▶ 15:09 Bethany McLean I still struggle to figure that out, because that is actually a remarkable difference from, from Enron, in that with Enron, when you got to what was commonly considered the smart money, people either weren't invested in Enron, or they were… 4 times in the scene
• ▶ 24:09 Bethany McLean So I, I think about that a lot because when I started working on the book about Enron with my coauthor, Peter Alkind, I had this very simplistic belief that if bad things happen, then bad people did those bad things deliberately. 2 times in the scene
• ▶ 31:41 Bethany McLean I think about that with Enron broadband, which as I mentioned earlier, really was Netflix ahead of its time.
• ▶ 35:17 Bethany McLean That would seem to be perfect, but 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…
• ▶ 41:42 Bethany McLean That was Enron and it was the financial crisis.
• ▶ 1:05:21 Bethany McLean So I remember when I worked on the Enron book years ago, Peter Elkind, who is my co-author, is one of the best investigative reporters out there, and he, particularly at that time, was far more experienced than I was.
• ▶ 1:13:49 Shane Parrish That's really interesting, especially given the diversity of the stories that you've covered from Enron to fracking to the housing situation.
• ▶ 1:15:50 Bethany McLean I mean, it's almost pathological in some, in some ways, although maybe it's a good thing in that I've never had the temptation when I hear something really interesting going on in the world, whether it's Enron is a fraud, or these subprime…