Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for Politically Ecclectics. I'm Ravi Gupta, and we have an exciting guest today. Somebody I've known about since I was in high school, and my dad lost a whole bunch of money on Enron. Bethany McLean wrote this book called The Smartest Guys in the Room, and she was involved in the documentary about it. For those of you young folk out there, like my co-host, Ricky, who I guess was born after Enron, which is crazy.

You should check out her book. about it. For those of you young folk out there, like my co-host, Ricky, who I guess was born

after Enron, which is crazy. You should check out her book because it's the definitive history

on that collapse. And she's been writing ever since. She is a writer for Vanity Fair. And what

brings her today to this podcast is this book called The Big Fail, what the pandemic revealed about who America protects and who it leaves behind,

was she co-wrote with Joe Nocera.

Bethany, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me on.

Well, okay, before we get into any of this,

how does it feel as somebody who wrote about Enron to be paraded every year

with one example, like, you know, whether it's FTX or WeWork or, you know, like, it just seems like everywhere I turn, even companies that don't collapse. Like, I just read that book about Ray Dalio, right? Like, it just seems like there's one case after another of these really flawed companies that seem to be

collapsing on themselves. Do you feel like people learned a lesson from the smartest guys in the

room? Well, no. But it's really interesting because I think Enron is such a big deal and still

stands out in our cultural consciousness because it actually was the first time in a long time. You'd had a bankruptcy of a major American company, and it was the biggest one

for a brief moment in time. And it was this moment when everything we've been taught about the

market that it always went up, that you could put your retirement savings in it, the big companies

were safe, was suddenly proven wrong. And in the decades since then,

it's just been proven wrong over and over again, such that Enron, as you said, no longer seems

unique. It seems like the canary in the coal mine. And that worries me, right? You would like to

look back and say, oh, my goodness, this thing called Enron, can you imagine a major corporate

American company turned out to be something of a scam?

Wow. Imagine those dark days. And instead, now we feel like they're happening all the time.

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